A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE
In bringing before you this subject of a Rational and Humane Science you will perhaps forgive me if I dwell for a few moments on some points of personal history in relation to it. After reading mathematics for some four years at Cambridge, it happened to me for the next ten years or so to be engaged in the study of the physical sciences, and in lectures on these subjects. Naturally, during the earlier part of this period I accepted the current methods and conclusions without any question. But as time went on I became aware of a certain dissatisfaction; I felt that many of the laws of Science, enounced as universal truths, were of very limited application only, that many of the conclusions, so strongly insisted on, were of quite doubtful validity; and at last this increasing dissatisfaction culminated in a rather violent attack or criticism of Modern Science which I wrote and published about the year 1884.[40]
Now, looking back, at this interval of time, though I admit that my attack was somewhat hasty and crude in detail, I feel that in its main contention it was thoroughly justified, and I do not feel the least inclined to withdraw it.
What was that main contention? It was as follows. Modern Science is an attempt (and no doubt it would accept this definition of itself) to survey and classify the phenomena of the world in the pure dry light of the intellect, uncoloured by feeling; and so far is an effort to separate the intellectual in man from the merely perceptive, the emotional, the moral, and so forth. It was in this very fact that my criticism lay; for I contended that such a separation was in the long run quite impossible.
But before proceeding to defend this position, let me admit at once that this attempt of Modern Science to get rid of human feeling and to look at everything in the dry light of the intellect was in some respects a very grand one. When you consider what the Old-time Science was, with its fancies and prejudices, its dragons pasturing upon the sun and moon in eclipses, its immolations of hundreds of human beings to appease some god of pestilence or earthquake, its panics, its superstitions, and its incapability of regarding anything except from the point of view of that thing's influence on man's own comfort and his little hopes and fears, it was indeed a grand advance to try and see facts, uncoloured and for themselves alone. It was an effort of Man as it were to rise above himself, to which I accord the fullest credit and honour.
And yet, during the time spoken of, it kept growing on me: first, that the attempt was an impossible one; secondly, that the Science so-called was not a true Science; and thirdly, that in its pretence to an intellectual exactitude which it did not really possess, this Modern Science was leading to a narrow-mindedness and a dogmatism as bad as the old.
There is in fact (so I think) a fallacy in the attempt. But how shall I describe it? Our relations to the world may, quite roughly speaking, be divided into three groups—those that are sensuous and perceptional, those that are purely intellectual, and those that are of an emotional and moral order. Take any object of Nature—a bird, for instance. We may look upon the bird as an object of sense-perceptions—its form, its colour, its song, and so forth. Some people attain to extraordinary skill and quickness in this department, recognising in a moment the note or even the flight of a songster. Then again we may look upon the bird from the intellectual side—we may study it in relation to its surroundings—the form of its wings, the length of its leg, the character of its beak, and their adaptation to its habits, to its locality, to its food, and so forth. Thus we may get a whole series of purely intellectual results—relations of the bird to the world in which it lives. This is the special field of the present-day Science. But, again, we may regard the bird in its emotional and moral relations to us. One man at the sight of it may be affected with admiration of its beauty, with tenderness towards it, or sympathy; another may be stimulated to wonder whether he can kill it, or whether it is good to eat! Modern Science is indifferent to what this last set of relations may be; it does not concern itself much with the first; but it takes the middle term, the purely intellectual, and seeks to abstract that from the others, to study the bird, or whatever the object may be, in the one aspect only. But can that really be done? The answer is, of course, No.