The result of all this has been that notwithstanding the talk about energy and atoms, Science has sadly to confess that it can still give no valid meaning to the word temperature: the unknown thing is still unknown, the independent existence round the corner still escapes us. By the very effort to arrive at something independent of human sensation, Science has, in a roundabout way, arrived at an absurdity. When the man said he was cold, his statement—deplorably vague as it certainly was—had some meaning; he was describing his feelings, or possibly he had seen some snow or some ice on the road; but when, in the endeavour to leave out the human and to say something absolute, Science declared that the temperature was thirty degrees, it committed itself to a remark which possibly was exact in form, but to which it has never given and never can give any definite meaning.[30]
Similarly with other generalities of Science: the "law" of the Conservation of Energy, the "law" of the Survival of the Fittest—the more you think about them the less possible is it to give any really intelligible sense to them. The very word Fittest really begs the question which is under consideration, and the whole Conservation law is merely an attenuation of the already much attenuated "law" of Gravitation. The Chemical Elements themselves are nothing but the projection on the external world of concepts consisting of three or four attributes each: they are not more real, but very much less real than the individual objects which they are supposed to account for; and their "elementary" character is merely fictional. It probably is in fact as absurd to speak of pure carbon or pure gold, as of a pure monkey or a pure dog. There are no such things, except as they may be arrived at by arbitrary definition and the method of ignorance.
In the search for exactness, then, Science has been continually led on to discard the human and personal elements in phenomena, in the hope of finding some residuum as it were behind them which should not be personal and human but absolute and invariable. And the tendency has been (hitherto) in all the sciences to get rid of such terms as blue, red, light, heavy, hot, cold, concord, discord, health, vitality, right, wrong, etc., and to rely on any less human elements discoverable in each case; as for instance in Sound, to deal less and less with the judgments and sensations of the ear, and to rely more and more on measurements of lengths of strings, numbers of vibrations, etc. Each science has been (as far as possible) reduced to its lowest terms. Ethics has been made a question of utility and inherited experience. Political Economy has been exhausted of all conceptions of justice between man and man, of charity, affection, and the instinct of solidarity; and has been founded on its lowest discoverable factor, namely self-interest. Biology has been denuded of the force of personality in plants, animals, and men; the "self" here has been set aside, and the attempt made to reduce the science to a question of chemical and cellular affinities, protoplasm, and the laws of osmose. Chemical affinities, again, and all the wonderful phenomena of Physics are emptied down into a flight of atoms; and the flight of atoms (and of astronomic orbs as well) is reduced to the laws of dynamics—which the student sitting in his chamber may write down on a piece of paper. Thus the idea, formulated by Comte, of a great scale of sciences arising from the simplest to the most complex, has tacitly underlain modern scientific work. It—Science—has sought to "explain" each stage by reference to a lower stage—"blueness" by vibrations, and vibrations by flying atoms—the human always by the sub-human. Going out from humanity dissatisfied, it has wandered through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, through the regions of Chemistry and Physics, into that of Mechanics. "Here at last, in Mechanics, is something outside humanity, something exact in itself, something substantial," it has said. "Let us build again on this as on a foundation, and in time we shall find out what humanity is." This I say has been the dream of Modern Science; yet the fallacy of it is obvious. We have not got outside the human, but only to the outermost verge of it. Mass and motion, which in this process are taken to be real entities and the first progenitors of all phenomena, are simply the last abstractions of sensible experience, and our emptiest concepts. The material explanation of the universe is simply an attempt to account for phenomena by those attributes which appear to us to be common to them all—which is, as said before, like accounting for men by their boots:—it may be possible to get an exact formula this way, but its contents have little or no meaning.
The whole process of Science and the Comtian classification of its branches—regarded thus as an attempt to explain Man by Mechanics—is a huge vicious circle. It professes to start with something simple, exact, and invariable, and from this point to mount step by step till it comes to Man himself; but indeed it starts with Man. It plants itself on sensations low down (mass, motion, etc.), and endeavours by means of them to explain sensations high up, which reminds one of nothing so much as that process vulgarly described as "climbing up a ladder to comb your hair." In truth Science has never left the great world, or cosmos, of Man, nor ever really found a locus standi without it; but during the last two or three centuries it has gone in this direction, outwards, continually. Leaving the central basis and facts of humanity as too vast and unmanageable, and also as apparently variable from man to man and therefore affording no certain consent to work upon, it has wandered gradually outwards, seeking something of more definite and universal application Discarding thus one by one the interior phases of sensation—as the sense of personal relationship, the sense of justice, duty, fitness in things or what-not (as too uncertain, or perhaps developed to an unequal degree in different persons, embryonic in one and matured in another), drifting past the more specialised bodily senses, of colour, sound, taste, smell, etc., as for similar reasons unavailable—Science at last in the primitive consciousness of muscular contraction and its abstraction "mass" or "matter" comes to a pause. Here in this last sense, common probably to man and the lowest animals, it finds its widest, most universal ground—its farthest limit from the Centre. It has reached the outermost shell, as it were, of the great Man-cosmos.
Even this shell is partially human; it is not entirely osseous, and so far not entirely exact and invariable; but Science can go no farther—and there, for the present, it may remain!
Some day perhaps, when all this showy vesture of scientific theory (which has this peculiarity that only the learned can see it) has been quasi-completed, and Humanity is expected to walk solemnly forth in its new garment for all the world to admire—as in Anderssen's story of the Emperor's New Clothes—some little child standing on a door-step will cry out: "But he has got nothing on at all," and amid some confusion it will be seen that the child is right.
NOTE
"I fear I have very imperfectly succeeded in expressing my strong conviction that, before a rigorous logical scrutiny, the Reign of Law will prove to be an unverified hypothesis, the Uniformity of Nature an ambiguous expression, the certainty of our scientific inferences to a great extent a delusion." (Stanley Jevons, Principles of Science, p. ix.)