Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays

by Edward Carpenter

But you will ask (for this is the second point I mentioned some little time back) how people's emotions and feelings come in to colour their scientific conclusions? And the answer is—very simply, namely by directing their choice as to what aspects of the problem they will ignore and what aspects they will envisage; by determining their point of view, in fact. To return to that illustration of several portrait-painters painting the same face; just as each painter is led by his feeling, his sympathies, his general temperament, to select certain points in the face and to pass over others, so each group of scientific men in each generation is led by its sympathies, its idiosyncrasies, to envisage certain aspects of the problems of the day and to ignore others.

The whole history of Science illustrates this. We are all familiar with the way in which the predilections of religious feeling in the time of Copernicus and Galileo retarded the progress of astronomical Science. As long as people believed that a divine drama of redemption had been enacted on this earth alone, they naturally concluded that this earth was the centre of the universe, and refused to look at facts which contradicted their conclusion. When Galileo turned his newly-made telescope on Jupiter and saw it circled by its satellites, he saw in this an image of the Copernican system and of the planets circling round the central Sun; but when he asked others to share his observation and his inference, they would not. "O, my dear Kepler," he writes in a letter to his fellow astronomer, "how I wish we could have one hearty laugh together. Here at Padua is the principal Professor of Philosophy, whom I have repeatedly and urgently requested to look at the moon and planets through my glass; but he pertinaciously refuses to do so. What shouts of laughter we should have at this glorious folly!"

And though we laugh at the folly of those before us, we do the same things ourselves to-day. Take the science of Political Economy. A revolution has taken place in that, almost comparable to the change from the geocentric to the heliocentric view in Astronomy. During the distinctively commercial period of the last 100 years, the leading students of social science, being themselves filled with the spirit of the time, have been fain to look upon the acquisition of private wealth as the one absorbing motive of human nature; and so it has come about that the economists, from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, have founded their science on self-seeking and competition, as the base of their analysis. To-day another series of economists coming to the front—their minds preoccupied with the great facts of Community of life and Co-operation—have discovered that Society is in the main an illustration of these latter principles, and have evolved a quite new phase of the science. It is not that Society has changed so much during this period, as that the altered point of view of the students of Society has caused them simply to fix their attention on a different aspect of the problem and a different range of facts.

I have alluded already to the way in which the prevalent use of Machinery in practical life has affected our mental outlook on the world. It is curious that during this mechanical age of the last 100 years or so, we have not only come to regard Society in a mechanical light, as a concourse of separate individuals bound together by a mere cash-nexus, but have extended the same idea to the universe at large, which we look upon as a concourse of separate atoms, associated together by gravitation, or possibly by mere mutual impact. Yet it is certain that both these views are false, since the individuals who compose Society are not separate from each other; and the theory that the universe, in its ultimate analysis, is composed of a vast number of discrete atoms is simply unthinkable.

When we come to a practical and modern question like Medicine, the influence of the spirit in which it is approached on the course of the science is very easy to see. For if the science of Medicine is approached (as it perhaps mostly is to-day) in a spirit of combined Fear and Self-indulgence—fear for one's own personal safety, combined with a kind of anxiety to continue living in the indulgence of habits known to be unhealthy—if it is approached in this uncomfortable and contradictory state of mind, it is pretty obvious that its course will be similarly uncomfortable: that it will consist for the most part in a search for drugs which shall, without effort on our part, palliate the effects of our misconduct; in the discovery, as in a kind of nightmare, that the air round us is full of billions of microbes; in a terrified study of these messengers of disease, and in a frantic effort to ward them off by inoculations, vaccinations, vivisections, and so forth, without end.

If, on the other hand, the science is approached from quite a different side—from that of the love of Health, and the desire to make life lovely, beautiful and clean; if the student is filled not only with this, but with a great belief in the essential power of Man, and his command in creation, to control not only all these little microbes whose name is Legion, but through his mind all the processes of his body; then it is obvious enough that a whole series of different facts will arise before his eyes and become the subject of his study—facts of sanitation, of the laws of cleanly life, diet, clothing and so forth, methods of control, and the details and practice of the influence of the mental upon the physical part of man—facts quite equally real with the others, equally important, equally numerous perhaps and complex, but forming a totally different range of science.

In conclusion, you begin to see doubtless that I do not believe in a science of mere Formulas, which can be poured from one brain to another like water in a pot. I believe in something more organic to Humanity—which shall combine Sense, Intellect and Soul; which shall include the keenest training of the Senses, the exactest use of the Brain, and the subordination of both of these to the finest and most generous attitude of Man towards Nature.

To come to quite practical aspects, I think that Physical Science, and for that matter Natural History too, ought to be founded on the closest observation and actual intimacy with Nature. It is notorious that in many respects the perceptions, the Nature-intuitions, of savage races far outdo those of civilised man. We have let that side go slack, and too often the man of science when he comes out of his study is a mere baby in the external world. I look back with a kind of shame when I think that I studied the mathematical side of Astronomy for three or four years at Cambridge and absolutely at the time hardly knew one star from another in the sky. But such are the methods of teaching that have been in use. They ought however to be reversed, and practical acquaintance with the facts should come a long way first, and then be succeeded by inductive and deductive reasoning when the difficulties of the subject have forced themselves on the student's mind.

Then in Natural History and Botany I think that we have hitherto not only neglected the perceptive side, but also what may be called the intuitive and emotional aspects. If any one will attend to the subject, I believe they will perceive that there are dormant in the mind the finest intuitions and instincts of relationship to the various animals and plants—intuitions which have played a far more important part in the life of barbaric races than they do to-day.[41] Primitive peoples have a remarkable instinct of the medicinal and dietetic uses of herbs and plants—an instinct which we also find well developed among animals—and I believe that this kind of knowledge would grow largely if, so to speak, it were given a chance. The formal classification of animals and plants—which now forms the main part of these sciences—would then come in simply as an aid and an auxiliary to the more direct and human study.

Again, let us take the science of Physiology. At present this is mainly carried on by means of Dissection or Vivisection. But both these methods are unsatisfactory. Dissection, because it amounts to studying the organisation of a living creature by the examination of its dead carcase; and Vivisection, because it is not only open to a similar objection, but because it necessarily violates the highest relation of man to the animal he is studying. There is, I believe, another method—a method which has been known in the East for centuries, though little regarded in the West—which may perhaps be called the method of Health. It consists in rendering the body, by proper habits of life, pure and healthy, till it becomes, as it were, transparent to the inner eye, and then projecting the consciousness inward so as to become almost as sensible of the structure and function of the various internal organs, as it usually is of the outer surface of the body. Of course this is a process which cannot be effectuated at once, and which may need help and corroboration by external methods of study, but I believe it is one which will lead to considerable results. There is no doubt that many of the Yogis of India attain to great skill in it.