“Stern daughter of the Voice of God”
and to the prejudices of ancestors just emerging from apehood? It was hard enough heretofore for tempted men to be chaste, sober, honest, unselfish, while passion was clamoring for indulgence or want pining for relief. The basis on which their moral efforts rested needed to be in their minds as firm as the law of the universe itself. What fulcrum will they find henceforth in the sand-heap of hereditary experiences of utility?
Thus the Scientific Spirit has sprung a mine under the deepest foundations of Morality. It may, indeed, be hereafter countermined. I believe that it will be so, and that it will be demonstrated that many of our broadest and deepest moral intuitions can have had no such origin. The universal human expectation of Justice, to which all literature bears testimony, can never have arisen from such infinitesimal experience of actual Justice, or rather such large experience of prevailing injustice, as our ancestors in any period of history can have known. Nor can “the set of our (modern) brains” against the destruction of sickly and deformed infants have come to us from the consolidated experience of past generations, since the “utility” is all on the side of Spartan infanticide. But for the present, and while Darwinism is in the ascendant, the influence of the doctrine of Hereditary Conscience is simply deadly. It is no more possible for a man who holds such a theory to cherish a great moral ambition than for a stream to rise above its source. The lofty ideal of Goodness, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, which have been the mainspring of heroic and saintly lives, must be exchanged at best for a kindly good nature and a mild desire to avoid offence. The man of science may be anxious to abolish vice and crime. They offend his tastes, and distract him from his pursuits; but he has no longing to enthrone in their place a positive virtue, demanding his heart and life’s devotion. He is almost as much disturbed by extreme goodness as by wickedness. Nay, it has been remarked, by a keen and sensitive observer, that the companionship of a really great and entirely blameless man of science invariably proved a “torpedo touch to aspiration.”
An obvious practical result of the present influence of Science on Morals has been the elevation of Bodily Health into the summum bonum, and the consequent accommodation of the standard of right and wrong to that new aim. An immense proportion of the arguments employed in Parliament and elsewhere, when any question touching public health is under discussion, rest on the unexpressed major premise “that any action which in the opinion of experts conduces to the bodily health of the individual or of the community is ipso facto lawful and right.” I cannot here indicate the conclusions to which this principle leads. Much that the Christian conscience now holds to be Vice must be transferred to the category of Virtue; while the medical profession will acquire a Power of the Keys which it is perhaps even less qualified to use than the Successors of St. Peter.
Another threatening evil from the side of Science is the growth of a hard and pitiless temper. From whatsoever cause it arise, it seems certain that, with some noteworthy exceptions, the Scientific Spirit is callous. In the mass of its literature, the expressions of sympathy with civilized or savage, healthy or diseased mankind, or with the races below us, are few and far between. Men and beasts are, in scientific language, alike “specimens” (wretched word!); and, if the men be ill or dying, they become “clinical material.” The light of Science is a “dry” one. She leaves no glamour, no tender mystery anywhere. Nor has she more pity than Nature for the weak who fall in the struggle for existence. There is, indeed, a scientific contempt quite sui generis for the “poor in spirit,” the simple, the devoutly believing,—in short, for all the humble and the weak,—which constitutes of the Scientific Spirit of the Age a kind of Neo-Paganism, the very antithesis of Christianity. I may add that it is no less the antithesis of Theism, which, while abandoning the Apocalyptic side of Christianity, holds (perhaps with added consciousness of its supreme value) to the spiritual part of the old faith, and would build the Religion of the future on Christ’s lessons of love to God and Man, of self-sacrifice and self-consecration.
Prior to experience it might have been confidently expected that the Darwinian doctrine of the descent of Man would have called forth a fresh burst of sympathy towards all races of men and towards the lower animals. Every biologist now knows tenfold better reasons than Saint Francis for calling the birds and beasts “little brothers and sisters.” But, instead of instilling the tenderness of the Saint of Assisi, Science has taught her devotees to regard the world as a scene of universal struggle, wherein the rule must be, “Every one for himself, and no God for any one.”
Ten years ago an eminent American physician remarked to me: “In my country the ardor of scientific research is rapidly overriding the proper benevolent objects of my profession. The cure of disease is becoming quite a secondary consideration to the achievement of a correct diagnosis, to be verified by a successful post mortem.” How true this now holds of the state of things in English hospitals, that remarkable book, “St. Bernard’s,” and its still more important key, “Dying Scientifically,” have just come in time to testify.[[5]] No one who has read these books will deny that the purely Scientific Spirit is (at all events sometimes) a merciless spirit; and that Dr. Draper’s famous boast, so often repeated, that “Science has never subjected any one to physical torture” (Preface to “Conflict,” p. xi), is untrue.
Irreverence appears to be another “note” of the Scientific Spirit. Literature always holds a certain attitude of conservatism. Its kings will never be dethroned. But Science is essentially Jacobin. The one thing certain about a great man of science is that in a few years his theories and books, like French Constitutions, will be laid on the shelf. Like coral insects, the scientists of yesterday, who built the foundations of the science of to-day, are all dead from the moment that their successors have raised over them another inch of the interminable reef. The student of Literature, dealing with human life, cannot forget for a moment the existence of such things as goodness which he must honor, and wickedness which he must abhor. But Physical Science, dealing with unmoral Nature, brings no such lessons to her votaries. There is nothing to revere even in a well-balanced solar system, and nothing to despise in a microbe. Taking this into consideration, it might have been foreseen that the Scientific Spirit of the Age would have been deficient in reverence; and, as a matter of fact, I think it will be conceded that so it is. It is a spirit to which the terms “imperious” and “arrogant” may not unfitly be applied, and sometimes we may add “overbearing,” when a man of science thinks fit to rebuke a theologian for trespassing on his ground after he has been trampling all over the ground of theology. Perhaps the difference between the new “bumptious” Spirit of Science and the old exquisitely modest and reverent tone of Newton and Herschel, Faraday and Lyell, is only due to the causes which distinguish everywhere a Church Triumphant from a Church Militant. But, whatever they may be, it seems clear that it will scarcely be in an age of Science that the prophecy will be fulfilled that “the meek shall inherit the earth.”[[6]]
Among the delicate and beautiful things which Science brushes away from life, I cannot omit to number a certain modesty which has hitherto prevailed among educated people. The decline of decency in England, apparent to every one old enough to recall earlier manners and topics of conversation, is due in great measure, I think, to the scientific (medical) spirit. Who would have thought thirty years ago of seeing young men in public reading-rooms snatching at the Lancet and the British Medical Journal from layers of what ought to be more attractive literature, and poring over hideous diagrams and revolting details of disease and monstrosity? It is perfectly right, no doubt, for these professional journals to deal plainly with these horrors, and with the thrice abominable records of “gynæcology.” But, being so, it follows that it is not proper that they should form the furniture of a reading-table at which young men and young women sit for general—not medical—instruction. Nor is it only in the medical journals that disease-mongering now obtains. The political press has adopted the practice of reporting the details of illness of every eminent man who falls into the hands of the doctors, and affords those gentlemen an opportunity of advertising themselves as his advisers. The last recollection which the present generation will retain of many an illustrious statesman, poet, and soldier, will not be that he died like a hero or a saint, bravely or piously, but that he swallowed such and such a medicine, and, perhaps, was sick in his stomach. Death-beds are desecrated that doctors may be puffed and public inquisitiveness assuaged.
So far does the materialist spirit penetrate into literature that in criticising books and men the most exaggerated importance is attached by numberless writers to the physical conditions and “environments” of the personages with whom they are concerned, till we could almost suppose that—given his ancestry and circumstances—we could scientifically construct the Man, with all his gifts and passions. As if, forsooth, a dozen brothers were alike in character, or even all the kittens in a litter! It is refreshing to read the brisk persiflage on this kind of thing in the Revue des Deux Mondes for March 1. The writer, reviewing Mr. Lecky’s books, states that but little of that splendid historian’s private life has been published, and adds:—