The “Bankruptcy of Science” is a term which has become common to European literature since M. Brunetiere first scandalised the naive ingenuous persons who accepted empiricism as a new religion. And, in a large movement of popular opinion, mankind has turned with some indignation and some regret from a method which has proved altogether inadequate to the immense hopes that it once excited amongst its first admirers. The greatness of the disappointment is proportioned to the greatness of the promise. The accusation—in its popular form—is an unfair one. Natural science, as such, makes no claim to remedy human ills; makes no claim, indeed, to exercise any kind of influence upon human life at all. It does not reveal, and it does not profess to reveal, the secret and meaning of the Universe. That is the function of a metaphysic. It does not labour in aid of religion, art, economic equality, or social comfort. It does not labour against them. It leaves them alone. These are outside its province. There is no possibility through investigations in the higher mathematics, of solving the problem of the injustices of human fortune. There is no prospect through examination of the brains of dead animals to discover or disprove the existence of the human soul. There is no promise, by however subtle elaboration of mechanical invention, permanently to better the lot of those poor who in every variation of human society are always living near the margin of what is humanly endurable. Such disabilities are no charge against human reason, concentrated upon investigation of the nature of the material Universe. They are a charge, if charge at all, against the somewhat too sanguine dreamers who asserted that through human reason, in investigation of the nature of the material Universe, mankind would finally achieve secrets which would make them rivals of the older gods. The large hopes and dreams of the Early Victorian time have vanished: never, at least in the immediate future, to return. The science which was to allay all diseases, the commerce which was to abolish war, and weave all nations into one human family, the research which was to establish ethics and religion on a secure and positive foundation, the invention which was to enable all humanity, with a few hours of not disagreeable work every day, to live for the remainder of their time in ease and sunshine—all these have become recognised as remote and fairy visions. One man now produces—by the aid of machinery—what a thousand could but hardly produce a century ago. “Argosies of commerce” post over land and ocean without rest. Not two but two hundred blades of grass grow where one blade grew before. Factories and furnaces, in never-ceasing activity, vomit forth ever more elaborate products, clothing, furniture, houses, implements of brass and steel, by methods which would have excited wonder and worship in earlier, simpler ages. Yet ten millions, disinherited, out of a doubtful forty, shiver through their lives on the verge of hunger: to the bulk of the remainder existence presents no certain joys, either in a guaranteed prosperity or in any serviceable and illuminating purpose of being. Civilisation, in the early twentieth century in England, suffers no illusions as to the control of natural forces, or the exploration of natural secrets furnishing a cure either for the diseases from which it suffers in the body, or the more deep-seated maladies of the soul.
It is making life noisier: is it making life—to the general—a richer, a better thing: existence more worth the living? Once more, here is no charge against invention, against the persistent labours of select and powerful minds to ascertain what knowledge is obtainable by the method of experiment and observation. They might justly reply that it is not in their province to make life a richer and better thing: existence more worth the living. Their function—in so far as it touches human life at all—is to increase the aggregate control of “mind over matter”; to release man from the mere impotent cowering before the brute forces of Chance and Necessity, which can deal with him as a plaything, or overwhelm him, casually and indifferently, without praise and without blame. They have no function to determine what distribution of this increase in human wealth and control will most make for the happiness and development of the human family, or to adjust whatever affirmations they may be able to advance with some certitude to historical religions, moralities, or customary courses of conduct. “The changing conditions of history,” says a great modern philosopher, “touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and redistributions only diversify our opportunities, and open chances to us for new ideals. But with each new ideal that comes into life, the chance for a life based on the old ideal will vanish: and he would needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that the total sum of significance is positively and absolutely greater at any one epoch than at any other of the world.”
As the mechanical discoveries swing forward there will always be those buoyant persons to whom the newer inventions are most welcome, contrasted with the more conservative elements who ask for quiet, and some position secure from the cyclic disturbances of change. In the next generation, any particular change has become the normal, and excites neither satisfaction nor disgust. So it has been with improved locomotion, with telegraphs and telephones, with all the outward apparatus which has set the unchanged human spirit in a world of marvel and miracle. The most obvious scientific advance which is already visible upon the horizon, is the invention of flying: which may be accepted, almost before these words are in print, as something no longer so astonishing as to excite enthusiasm or foreboding. It may exercise the profoundest influence upon the possibilities of war, of land frontiers, of divisions between contending nations. It has no real power either of infecting with disease a civilisation that is healthy, or of healing a civilisation that is sick and tired. For many years, perhaps, aerial navigation may be the sport and plaything of rich and adventurous spirits, like the first motor cars; creating occasional sensations by circling round St Paul’s Cathedral, or descending unexpectedly in other people’s back gardens. That is the stage when mankind will rejoice in the ingenuity of its inventors, heedless of the tremendous changes which such inventors must ultimately originate. Then the airship will find itself utilised for military purposes, perhaps with startling result. Then for locomotion and the transfer of people and merchandise from place to place above the recognised boundaries of ocean or territory. Finally, it will appear as a normal factor of man’s life, transfiguring the world as much as the steamship or the railway; occupied in the service of the poor as well as of the rich, under private as well as public control. It may eliminate natural boundaries which have exercised a dominant influence upon human life since human life first was. The “precious stone set in a silver sea,” with its moat defensive “against the envy of less happier lands,” may find itself suddenly helpless and vulnerable before armies dropping from the skies. War itself may become impossible or utterly destructive. Protective barriers disappear, and the ingenuities of the construction of a scientific tariff melt into thin air. Man, whether he will or no, is drawn inevitably nearer to man. He must federate, or perish in homicidal mania and blind impulse of hatred and revenge.
On the other hand, quite apart from the question of national rivalries or the old impelling causes of the madness of war, there is the further consideration of the influence of such achievements upon the delicate fabric of the body and soul of mankind. At best, any large accomplishment of flying must mean an increased hustling and speeding up of human life; more hurry, more bustle, more breathlessness, more triumphant supremacy of material things. In all our mechanical ingenuities we have constructed masters for us, rather than servants; being compelled, immediately such ingenuities have found fruit in invention, to adjust our lives to the new conditions which these, and not we ourselves, henceforth dictate and impose. We are compelled, for example, to avail ourselves of the telegraph and the telephone; we are driven to the express train, the motor omnibus, the various expedients which are adapted to acceleration, rather than to happiness. If we do not adjust our lives to such accelerations, we are swept aside or trodden under by the crowds which press behind; like those who fail in the daily leap for the Brooklyn cars at New York, and are swept aside or trodden under almost unheeded. Has all this violence and tumult made life richer, fairer, more desirable for the children of men? Or is man losing in the mere blind effort of acceleration some of those experiences which once transfigured and glorified his little span of days? “Can you really turn a ray of light by magnetism?” shouted Carlyle scornfully. “And if you can, what should I care?” Matthew Arnold complained that the modern Englishman “thinks it the highest pitch of development and civilisation when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell and from Camberwell to Islington, and when railway trains run between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal dismal life at Camberwell to an illiberal dismal life at Islington, and the letters only tell him that such is the life there.” Airships journeying daily from Paris to Pekin might excite exultation in a humanity which has emulated the exploits of Icarus, without exciting, like Icarus, the wrath of the jealous gods. Of what profit if they be found merely to transfer to Paris an existence which has become intolerable at Pekin, and to Pekin an existence which has become intolerable at Paris? It is a remarkable fact in the history of European development, that all the recent success of scientific and mechanical invention has been accompanied by an ever profounder questioning of the advantage of it all; so that to-day, when we seem on the verge of such discoveries as would have made our ancestors shout for joy in the mere triumph of creative energy, great writers are inquiring, with more bitterness and uncertainty than ever before, whether a verdict of bankruptcy has not been passed upon the whole of this complicated and baffled society. Mr. Wells has exhibited the old potato digger, “a greengrocer by trade, a gardener by disposition,” confronting with a deepening disgust the restlessness of being. “Heaven had planned him for a peaceful world. Unfortunately, Heaven had not planned a peaceful world for him. He lived in a world of obstinate and incessant change.” He is revealed in his little garden; gas-works and electric power stations rising up to heaven beside him, mono-rails running across his head, flocks of balloons and aeroplanes clouding the horizon; everywhere on earth and sky the impression of a hustling, distorted, dissatisfied energy, writhing into fresh forms of grotesque invention. “This here Progress,” is his dull conviction; “it keeps on. You’d hardly think it could keep on.” It is not only Mr. Tom Smallways who is bothered with doubts of an uncertain future. The vision of all poverty and sweat of labour vanishing by the occasional pressing of a button, while mankind lies at ease on the hillside like the Olympian gods, has joined the vision of all disease abolished by scientific ingenuity in the kingdom of the shades. Flying will bring men together, abolish boundaries, multiply the facilities of exchange, increase the wealth of a few. Can it offer satisfaction for one of the necessities of the soul? There will always be those who find a bracing and tonic in the roar and exultation of riotous life, the mingling of the machine with the inspiration of the crowd. There will always be others who will seek satisfaction in quietness and common things—the untroubled horizon, the secure possession of the heart of humanity. Between which two extremes the mass of mankind will go forward, sometimes indifferent, not without courage and patience, towards a life increasing in complexity, and making ever more difficult demands on body and soul.
And as with flying, so with all similar advances in mechanical discovery. Man creates and man consumes; no happier for a provision which merely feeds a restless, hungry impulse towards change. So many houses, so many clothes, so many elaborate meals, so many holidays to-day. The number is doubled to-morrow. The many acquiesce: the few, on the one extreme, accept and rejoice; the few, on the other, push aside the banquet untasted, or spurn the feast with bitter gibe at the futility of it all. “The barrenness and ignobleness of the labourer’s life,” says a modern philosopher, “consists in the fact that it is moved by no ideal inner springs.” But the labourer has no monopoly in such a loss and deficiency. The whole of modern life has the accusation resting upon it, that it is moved by no ideal inner springs. Some find satisfaction in political energies, others in religious ardours; others, again,—in the mere play and triviality of wealth accumulation,—card games, or ingenious children’s diversions carried into the larger universe of human affairs. Pursuit of knowledge claims a tiny “remnant,” with a high intellectual hunger; or enthusiasm for the future of the race, as they see always, luminous and clear on the horizon, the shining of the star of a new dawn. But to the general these “ideal inner springs” are wanting. They feel confused in a world of confusion. Social unrest affects large masses of them whose restlessness finds no clear fruit in action. Literature proclaims a disenchantment. Man wanders unsatisfied in the spacious palaces of his new material splendour. Many, after a rebellion at the time of adolescence, settle down into acceptance; into making the “best of it” in a world hard to understand, but, on the whole, easy to endure. Others still refuse to relinquish the past for the intangible, elusive promises of the future. “Enlightened persons,” wrote Châteaubriand, “cannot understand how a Catholic like myself can persist in sitting in the shadow of what they call ruins. Tell me, for pity’s sake, in the individual and philosophical society which you offer me, where shall I find a family and a God?”
In the abolition of poverty by mechanical appliance, in the provision of ethical and moral satisfactions for the human spirit which desires richer gifts than material supremacy, this empirical method would seem hitherto to have failed. They would appear, however, to be on surer ground who prophesy its success in the war against disease. Here at least discovery can have none but beneficial results; and the competition is one of absolute human advantage. Yet the progress of the modern campaign against diseases, distinguished as it has been by triumphs which appear almost miraculous, still suffers resistance which baffle and frustrate its purpose. There appears a kind of unseen antagonist, who will rally in one region forces which have been beaten elsewhere, and is determined never to allow mankind the full fruits of victory. That all diseases will be slain by science, and all slain speedily, was one of the accepted anticipations of the earlier nineteenth century. In the great outburst of a triumphant optimism which inspired the Early Victorian literature, the present, whose discontents were clearly diagnosed, was sharply contrasted with a future where such discontents would be no more. Here, on the solid ground, a new race should arise, whose life, if limited, should be at least secure. On one side, it may be confessed, there are evidences of an almost exultant advance. The surest ground for optimism, for faith in the “beneficent processes of the unseen time,” is provided by examination of how many human scourges have been rendered innocuous within living memory. We have eliminated from Europe the menace of those sweeping cyclones of pestilence, whose terrors brood like a grey cloud over all the brightness of the Middle Ages. One-third of Christendom perished in the few months’ agony of the Black Death. The sound of its lamentation, the madness caused by its apparently irresistible destruction, still remains revealed in those “Dances of Death” which absorbed the later medieval time, and in the literature of protest and despair of a similar age. The Plague still ravages the East, but science has succeeded, and apparently will succeed, in protecting Europe against it. Other malignant fevers we seem on a fair road to stamp out altogether. Smallpox has almost disappeared, under the combined effects of sanitation and vaccination. Diphtheria has lost its terrors since the arrival of the antitoxin treatment. Hydrophobia has become merely a dread memory of the past. Even tuberculosis, the special and terrible scourge of the northern races, is likely to become in the future but as an evil memory of old years. Science again, through the devotion and intelligence of a long roll of volunteers, has boldly sallied out from the limited abodes of men into the wild and shaggy regions of Nature, in the determination to strike its enemy boldly at the centre of its empire. It is not content with mere preventives and prophylactics, dosing men with drugs or covering them with veils and protections. It is setting itself to extirpate the very instruments of the propagation of the disease. Its enemy is the insect. That extraordinary populous and intelligent kingdom might have once attained the supremacy of the world, but for some inexplicable limitations in size which has prevented any of its denizens from challenging the forces of mankind. Michelet has described the kind of horror with which the head of an ant inspired him, as first seen under the microscope; with its vast and complicated eyes, its evidence of incalculable brain power, but with the utter absence of any of those human qualities which are revealed even in the vertebrate animals. Yet those ants can exhibit inexplicable powers of communication, and a social organisation which has been the envy of many a philosopher, as he contrasts it with the chaos of human life. Ants charged with “Boom food,” ant communities of many thousands, all six feet high, might provide a considerable obstacle to the accepted supremacy of mankind. But the insect, however tiny, is becoming more and more to be recognised as one of the enemies of the human race. There is here no possibility of compromise. We can be sentimental over the horse, the cat, the dog. If we are sentimental over the insect, we are lost. “Why should I harm thee, little fly?” was Uncle Toby’s famous inquiry. “Is there not room enough in the world for me and thee?” Science is unhesitatingly pronouncing a grim negative to the question. There is not sufficient room in the world for “me and thee.” This is probably true of the common house-fly, who more and more is coming to be branded as a propagator of disease. It is already accepted of his cousin, the mosquito, against whom the whole of the world is turning with a set purpose of extermination. The alleged unhealthiness of marshes and tropical regions, formerly ascribed to heat and noxious vapours, is now declared to be entirely explicable by the spread of a definite bacterium through the bites of insects. Where the insects are destroyed the white man flourishes. Panama, in the early days of the Canal building, was converted into a visible hell, in which a population rioted and rotted and died, as they rioted and rotted and died in the days of the plague. The Americans to-day have descended there with all scientific resources. They burn the insect, they choke its offspring with oil, they drain the stagnant pools where it can breed, they consume it in clouds of evil-smelling smoke. They are rapidly making Panama a healthier place than New York or Chicago. All down the coast of South America, yellow fever has decimated mankind for centuries. To-day it is well on its way to becoming a thing of the past. Six years ago an international campaign was inaugurated against the Stegomya fasciata, the “white-ribbed mosquito,” which spreads the disease. At Rio Janeiro, Dr. Cruz, “Cruz the mosquito killer,” has practically removed its menace. Repairing choked-up gutters, draining stagnant marshes, fumigating and isolating, scattering oil on the still waters, he is speedily and relentlessly exterminating this enemy of mankind. Yellow fever and malarias will become shortly things of the past, as the warfare, at present of necessity limited to the neighbourhood of the cities, is extended through all the waste places of the world.
And if the discussion passes from the prevention to the cure, here also the sanguine dream of our fathers might seem in process of realisation. We can treat the tortured human body as Brutus wished to treat the condemned Cæsar—“Carve it as a dish fit for the gods,” and still preserve life and ensure recovery. First in antiseptic, then in aseptic surgery, we have discovered a method of safe operation, under which death would have been inevitable a few years ago. Gambetta perished in early manhood, because the doctors were afraid of an operation from which to-day over ninety per cent. of the patients recover. Opiates and anæsthetics, combined with the agile use of the knife, have eliminated on the one hand an almost inconceivable burden of pain, on the other have rendered possible a tearing and lacerating of the frail physical human body which would have seemed incredible to our predecessors. Nor can any one imagine that we are anywhere but in infancy in this particular progress. If, as eminent physiologists assert, the nerves of pain are distinct from the nerves of sensation or volition, it may be found possible to compound some subtle drug which will blockade these particular channels of communication, and render mankind henceforth completely immune from the pangs of physical suffering.
But then thought turns to the other side of the picture, and is immediately faced with a challenge to its optimism. As soon as one disease is eliminated, another steps into its place to continue the old tragic function of scourging mankind with pity and terror. Science is always discovering new maladies, which baffle its exultant energies. Medical, as distinct from surgical effort, is still largely in the condition of alchemy: stretching blind hands in the darkness towards a secret not yet revealed. A great man of science recently asserted that there were only two medicines whose beneficial effect—in application to specific disorders—could be guaranteed—quinine and mercury; and that the operations of both of them were completely mysterious. We drain our cities, we use our knives and our medicines, we maintain armies of doctors, huge hospitals, and halls of research. And the result is that in the factory centres one-fifth of the children born perish within the year. Consumption, plague, malaria disappear. Their places are readily assumed by cancer, which is steadily increasing; by appendicitis, which had not even a name twenty years ago; by meningitis, which is excited by the ordinary harmless cold in the head. One woman in every twelve dies of cancer, and the cure still remains altogether unknown. The human body in increase of prevention, seems also to lose the power of resistance. Carefully shielded from the rough forces of the world, it falls a prey to injuries born out of the very conditions of safety which it has so laboriously constructed. “He who has ordained all things in measure, number, and weight,” said Mansel, “has also given to the reason of man, as to his life, its boundaries, which it cannot pass.” Some unknown Power seems with these “boundaries” still to defy man’s determination to push them back or fling them down. In ten thousand years mankind has not added a cubit to his stature. The Greek vision of bodily perfection has shown no advance in succeeding time. In the Middle Age, with its outward squalor and frequent pestilences—so operative in men’s minds that to some observers the whole appears as a kind of physical delirium—there are figures of Popes and Emperors taking the field at eighty years of age, and an ineffaceable impression of an enormous physical vitality. It would appear that, at least as far as one can look ahead, uncertainty, sorrow, pain, and longing are to be accepted as companions of the life of men. From these, indeed, have been born men’s highest achievements. Metchnikoff still proclaims unfaltering faith in the triumph of human intelligence, and sees a vision of humanity sustained on a diet of soured milk, to well beyond a normally secure centenarianism. The cry of such might still be the cry of Tithonus—“Release me, and restore me to the ground,” in a desire for the return to the fate of “happy men that have the power to die.” For, however successful we may find ourselves in curing the maladies of the body, such efforts are of little use if there remains unhealed the deeper malady of the soul.