The Rev. J. E. C. Welldon, Head Master of Harrow, has been good enough to write to me as follows:—
I am most willing to let you quote my words, whether what I said before or what I say now. You command my full sympathy in the crusade which you have so nobly declared against cruelty. I say this frankly, although I know that there is some difference between us in regard to the practice of Vivisection. But even if it be necessary that in some cases, and under strict conditions, vivisectional experiments should be made upon animals, I cannot doubt that the use of such experiments tends to exercise a demoralizing influence upon any person who may be called to make them. I hold, therefore, that the educational effect of Vivisection is always injurious. Knowledge is dearly purchased at the cost of tenderness, and I cannot believe that any morally-minded person could desire to familiarize the young with the sight of animal suffering. For my part, I look upon the hardness of heart with which some distinguished physiologists have met the protest raised against Vivisection as one of many signs that materialism means at the last an inversion of the ethical law; i.e., a preference of knowledge to goodness, of mind to spirit, or, in a word, of human things to divine. Surely it is a paradox that they who minimize the specific distinction between man and the animals should be the least tender in their views of animal sufferings, and that Christians who accentuate that distinction should be willing to spare animals pain at the cost of enhancing their own. I conceive it then to be a primary duty of a modern educator, at School or at College, to cultivate in his pupils, by all the means in his power, the sympathetic sentiment towards the animal world.
To turn to a less painful part of our subject.
Science and Art are constantly coupled together in common parlance and in grants of public money; but, if ever incompatibility of temper formed a just ground of divorce, it is surely in their case. When Science—like Poverty—comes in at the door, Art—like Love—flies out at the window. They move in different planes, and touch different parts of human nature. Science appeals to the Intellect, Art to the Emotions; and we are so constituted that our Intellects and Emotions are like buckets in a well. When our Intellects are in the ascendant, our Emotions sink out of sight; when our Emotions rise to the surface, our busy Intellects subside into quiescence. It is only the idolatry of Science which could make intelligent men overlook the fact that she and Art resemble two leashed greyhounds pulling opposite ways, and never running together unless there be some game (shall we surmise an endowment of public money?) in view. The synthetic, reverential, sympathizing spirit of Art is opposed, as the different poles of the magnet, to the analytic, self-asserting, critical spirit of Science. The artist seeks Beauty; finds likenesses; discerns the Ideal through the Real. The man of Science seeks Facts; draws distinctions; strips the Real to the skin and the bones.
A great light of the Scientific Age has been heard to say that when he first visited the Vatican he “sat down before Raphael’s Transfiguration and filled three pages of his note-book with its faults.” It was the most natural thing in the world for him to do! How should a Physicist approve of three figures suspended in the air in defiance of the laws of gravitation? Or what could a Zoölogist say to an angel outrageously combining in his person the wings exclusively belonging to the Order Aves with the arms and legs of Bimana? Worst of all, what must be the feelings of a Physiologist confronted with a bas-relief of a Centaur with two stomachs, or of a Cherub with none?
Poetry is the Art of Arts. If we desire to see what Science can do for it, let us take a typical piece wherein Fancy revels and plays like an Ariel with wreaths of lovely tropes,—say Shelley’s “Sensitive Plant,” for example. We must begin by cutting out all the absurdly unscientific statements; e.g., that the lily of the valley grows pale with passion, that the hyacinth rings peals of music from its bells, and that the narcissus gazes at itself in the stream. Then, in lieu of this folly, we must describe how the garden has been thoroughly drained and scientifically manured with guano and sewage. After this the flowers may be mentioned under their proper classes, as monandria and polyandria, cryptogams and phenogams. Such would be the result of bringing the Scientific Spirit to bear on Poetry. Introduced into the border realm of Fiction, it begins by marring with pedantic illustrations the otherwise artistic work of George Eliot. Pushed further, it furnishes us with medical novels, wherein the leading incident is a surgeon dissecting his aunt. Still a step onward, we reach the brute realism of “A Mummer’s Wife” and “La Joie de Vivre.” The distance between Walter Scott and Zola measures that between Art and Science in Fiction.
To many readers it may appear that the antagonism of Science to Art may be condoned in favor of her high claim to be the guide, not to Beauty, but to Truth. But is it indeed Truth, in the sense which we have hitherto given to that great and sacred word, at which Physical Science is now aiming? Can we think of Truth merely as a vast heap of Facts, piled up into an orderly pyramid of a Science, like one of Timur’s heaps of skulls? To collect a million facts, test them, classify them, raise by induction generalizations concerning them, and hand them down to the next generation to add a few thousand more facts and (probably) to reconstruct the pyramid on a different basis and another plan,—if this be indeed to arrive at “Truth,” modern Science may boast she has touched the goal. Yet in other days Truth was deemed something nobler than this. It was the interests which lay behind and beyond the facts, their possible bearing on man’s deepest yearnings and sublimest hopes, which gave dignity and meaning to the humblest researches into rock and plant, and which glorified such discoveries as Kepler’s till he cried in rapture, “O God, I think thy thoughts after thee!” and Newton’s, till he closed the “Principia” (as Parker said of him) by “bursting into the Infinite and kneeling there.” In our time, however, Science has repeatedly renounced all pretension to throw light in any direction beyond the sequence of physical causes and effects; and by doing so she has, I think, abandoned her claim to be man’s guide to Truth. The Alpine traveller who engages his guides to scale the summit of the Jungfrau, and finds them stop to booze in the Wirthschaft at the bottom, would have no better right to complain than those who fondly expected Science to bring them to God, and are informed that she now never proceeds above the Ascidian. So long as all the rivulets of laws traced by Science flowed freshly onward towards the sea, our souls drank of them with thankfulness. Now that they lose themselves in the sands, they have become mere stagnant pools of knowledge.
We now turn to the influence of the Scientific Spirit on Morals.
Respecting the theory of ethics, the physico-Scientific Spirit has almost necessarily been from the first Utilitarian, not Transcendental. To Mr. Herbert Spencer the world first owed the suggestion that moral intuitions are only results of hereditary experiences. “I believe,” he wrote in 1868 to Mr. Mill, “that the experiences of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding modifications which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition, certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.” Mr. Darwin took up the doctrine at this stage, and in his “Descent of Man” linked on the human conscience to the instincts of the lower animals, from whence he held it to be derived. Similar instincts, he taught, would have grown up in any other animal as well endowed as we are, but those other animals would not necessarily attach their ideas of right and wrong to the same conduct. “If, for instance, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers.” (Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 73.)
These two doctrines—that Conscience is only the “capitalized experience of the human tribe” (as Dr. Martineau has summarized Mr. Spencer) and that there is no such thing as absolute or immutable Morality, but only a convenient Rule for each particular class of intelligent animals—have between them revolutionized theoretic ethics, and deeply imperilled, so far as they are accepted, the existence of human virtue. It is in vain that the plea is often entered on the side of faith that, after all, Darwin only showed how Conscience has been evolved, perhaps by Divine prearrangement, and that we may allow its old authority all the same. He has done much more than this. He has destroyed the possibility of retaining the same reverence for the dictates of conscience. As he himself asks, “Would any of us trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind?... The doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value.” (Life, vol. i. p. 316.) Who, indeed, can attach the same solemn authority to the monitions of the