Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays

by Edward Carpenter

Once let that [the human ideal] slip out of the thought, and science is of no more use than the invocations in the Egyptian papiri.—Richard Jefferies.

It would appear then, from the preceding paper, that in some sense a mistake has been made in the method of modern scientific work; not that the vast amount of labour expended in it has been altogether wasted, for in return for this there is a mass of practical results and detailed observations to show; but that in attempting to solve the problem of science by the intellect alone, a radical mistake has been made which could only land us in absurdity, and that this mistake has for the time being also vitiated the results that have been attained. For—in reference to this last point—the divorce of the intellectual from the emotional has caused a great portion of our scientific observations to become merely pedantic and trifling; while it has turned the practical results—as industrial and military machinery, etc.—into engines of evil as often as into engines of good.

Science in searching for a permanently valid and purely intellectual representation of the universe has, as already said, been searching for a thing which does not exist. The very facts of Nature, as we call them, are at least half feeling. If we try to clean the feeling out of a fact and to produce a statement which shall be devoid of the human or sense element, it simply amounts to cleaning the meaning out; and though our resulting statement may be exact it is nugatory and of no value. We might as well try to take the clay out of a brick. It must never be forgotten that the logical processes—important as they are—cannot stand by themselves, have no standing ground of their own. They presuppose assumptions and are the expression of things that are unreasoning, perhaps illogical. The strictest logic is a mere hooking together of links in a chain, and the last link is of no use—you can put no stress on it—unless the first is secured somewhere. The strength of the intellectual chain is no greater than that of the staple from which it hangs—and that is a human feeling The strength of Euclid is no greater than that of the axioms—and they are feelings; they are unreasoning statements of which all that we can say is, "I feel like that." In fact all the propositions of Geometry are nothing but the analysis and elaborate expression, so to speak, of these primary convictions—and the Geometry-structure stands and falls with them. There is no such thing as intellectual truth—that is, I mean, a truth which can be stated as existing apart from feeling. If, for instance, a proposition in Geometry can be really shown to be based on the axioms, it is true, not intellectually or absolutely, but as an expression of my primary Geometrical sense; and if my giving a few pence to a crossing sweeper is based not on a mere impression of duty, or an anxiety to appear charitable, or wish to escape his importunity, but on genuine regard for the man, then it is true, not in any absolute signification, but just as an expression of what it professes to represent—namely my primary sense of humanity. Indeed the truest truth is that which is the expression of the deepest feeling, and if there is an absolute truth it can only be known and expressed by him who has the absolute feeling or Being within himself.

This being so—and the nature of the intellectual processes being, like the links in a chain, transitional—it becomes obvious that the intellectual results may figure as a means but never as an end in themselves. To hang any weight of reliance on them in the latter sense is like the Chinese Trick—described by Marco Polo—of throwing a rope's end up in the air and then climbing up the rope. Hence it appears that our scientific theories are perfectly legitimate, as long as they are formed as a means towards practical applications. In that sense they are transitional; they are formed, not as substantial truths, but merely as links in a chain towards some definite practical result. For this purpose we may form whatever theories are convenient: if we are calculating the strength of bridges, we may adopt what generalisations we like concerning mechanical structure, as long as they give us actual and practical results; if we are predicting eclipses, we may make use of any theory that will do. The theory does not matter, as long as it hauls the practical result after it, just as it does not matter whether your cable is of iron or hemp or silk, as long as you can get your ship into dock with it. In this sense our Modern Science is, I conceive, admirable. For practical results and brief predictions it affords a quantity of useful generalisations—shorthand notes and conventional symbols and pocket summaries of phenomena—which bear about the same relation to the actual world that a map does to the country it is supposed to represent. It cannot be said to have any resemblance to the real thing—but, when you understand the principle on which it is formed, it is exceedingly useful for finding your way about. As long as Science therefore keeps the practical end in view, and starting from sense seeks to return to sense again, its intermediate theorising is perfectly legitimate; but the moment it credits its theory with a positive and authoritative existence, as an actual representation of facts—and endeavours to pass by means of it into unverifiable and abstract regions, as of invisible germs or atoms, or far distances of space, or the remote past or future—it is simply throwing its rope's end into the sky and trying to climb up! That "the wish is father to the thought" is in its wide sense profoundly true. In the individual, feeling precedes thinking—as the body precedes the clothes. In history, the Rousseau precedes the Voltaire. There is, I believe, a physiological parallel; for behind the brain and determining its action stands the great sympathetic nerve—the organ of the emotions. In fact here the brain appears as distinctly transitional. It stands between the nerves of sense on the one hand and the great sympathetic on the other.

Change the feeling in an individual, and his whole method of thinking will be revolutionised; change the axiom or primary sensation in a science, and the whole structure will have to be re-created. The current Political Economy is founded on the axiom of individual greed; but let a new axiomatic emotion spring up (as of justice or fair play instead of unlimited grab), and the base of the science will be altered, and will necessitate a new construction.

So when people argue (on politics, morality, art, etc.) it will generally be found that they differ at the base; they go out, perhaps quite unconsciously, from different axioms and hence they cannot agree. Occasionally of course a strict examination will show that, while agreeing at the base, one of them has made a false step in deduction; in that case his thought does not represent his primary feeling, and when this is pointed out he is forced to alter it. But more often it is found that the difference lies deep down at a point beyond the reach of reason; and they disagree to the end. In this case neither is right and neither is wrong. They simply feel differently; they are different persons.

The Thought then is the expression, the outgrowth, the covering of underlying Feeling. And in the great life of Man as a whole, as in the lesser life of the individual, his continual new birth and inward growth causes his thought-systems also continually to change and be replaced by new ones. Like the bud-sheaths and husks in a growing plant or tree they give form for a time to the life within; then they fall off and are replaced. The husk prepares the bud underneath, which is to throw it off. The thought prepares and protects the feeling underneath, which growing will inevitably reject it; and when a thought has been formed it is already false, i.e., ready to fall.

We are now, then, in a position to come back to the question of a genuine Science, truly so-called.

As there is no invariable and absolute datum on the fringe of Humanity—no definable flying atom on which we can found our reasonings—and as Modern Science, considered as an actual representation of the universe, falls miserably to pieces in consequence—is it possible that we have made a mistake in the direction in which we have sought for our datum; and may it be that we should look for that in the very Centre of Humanity instead of in its remotest circumference? In that direction evidently, if we could penetrate, we should expect to find, not a shadowy intellectual generalisation, but the very opposite of that—an intense immutable feeling or state, an axiomatic condition of Being. Is it possible that here, blazing like a sun (if we could only see it—and the sun is its allegory in the physical world), there exists within us absolutely such a thing—the one fact in the universe, of which all else are shadows, to which everything has relation, and round which, itself unanalysable, all thought circles and all phenomena stand as indirect modes of expression?