Darwin

by Gamaliel Bradford

Also, when you are testing so widely and carefully, and making sure of your foothold before every step you take, you come to realize the vast possibilities of different points of view. The one thing that the true scientist dreads is fixity, positiveness. Nature is forever mobile and flexible, and those who would follow nature and study her and interpret her must welcome and imitate her flexibility. They must be at all times ready to recognize the different aspects and phases of the same fact or group of facts, and willing to accept different conclusions with the changing and shifting light in which the facts are viewed. As Professor Whitehead puts it, admirably: ‘Science is even more changeable than theology. No man of science could subscribe without qualification to Galileo’s beliefs, or to Newton’s beliefs, or to all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago.’[133] As I read in an excellent article in a field of scientific research very different from Darwin’s, that of philology and the emendation of classical texts: ‘In emending these passages we should adopt Pasteur’s method of investigation—exhaust every combination which it is possible for the mind of man to conceive.’[134]

This impartiality, this breadth of view, this readiness to consider, if not to accept, all conjectures and all theories, is comparatively easy, when one is indifferent. If the motive of one’s investigation is mere curiosity, and one has no doctrine to establish, no thesis to defend, open-mindedness is facile and natural. But the scientific man instinctively forms theories, and when once a theory is formed, there comes the human impulse to maintain it, and to consider only those arguments and even those facts that will bear one out. As we have seen, it is here almost more than anywhere that Darwin’s example is of abiding value. No man could be more attached to a theory than he was to his. Yet he was determined, so far as human nature is capable of it, to keep his mind open and not to let his preconceptions color his observation or his reasoning. Huxley’s statement of the matter is indisputably correct when he speaks of Darwin’s ‘sagacity, his untiring search after the knowledge of fact, his readiness always to give up a preconceived opinion to that which was demonstrably true.’[135] And Darwin, in another of his simple, striking phrases, condenses all that open-mindedness means, and the difficulty of it and the rarity (italics mine): ‘If you argue about the non-acceptance of Natural Selection, it seems to me a very striking fact that the Newtonian theory of gravitation, which seems to every one now so certain and plain, was rejected by a man so extraordinarily able as Leibnitz. The truth will not penetrate a preoccupied mind.’[136]

Finally, among these more impersonal elements of the scientific spirit, a high place should be accorded to the quality of being ready to admit one’s ignorance. In this age of universal ignorance, most people who think are more or less aware of their deficiency, but as we are naturally more appreciative of our own lack than of that of others, the first impulse is a desperate effort to conceal it. Perhaps of all states of mind one of the most hostile to the scientific spirit and most incompatible with it, is pedantry, and one of the most essential elements of pedantry is precisely this disposition to conceal one’s ignorance, to make the most determined attempt to hide from others the fact that we are as helpless and as groping and as uncertain as they are. This is apt to be the vice of the teaching profession, though so many teachers are gloriously exempt from it. The pedagogue is inclined to think, I believe quite wrongly, that if he once lets his scholars see that there is anything he does not know, they will lose confidence in him forever, whereas nothing establishes their confidence so much as to appreciate his willingness to enter into their difficulties and to admit that the difficulties are human and his own.

At any rate, the true man of science begins by admitting the vastness of the regions that he has not entered and can never enter, the illimitable fields of knowledge that he has not the time or the training to explore. And no man was ever more notable in this admission than Darwin. There is the general recognition of the limits of human knowledge and human capacity for knowledge: ‘The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man’s ignorance.’[137] There is the recognition of the hardening of the mental arteries, so to speak, by which our flexibility is so greatly impaired and against which we cannot guard enough: ‘nearly all men past a moderate age, either in actual years or in mind, are, I am fully convinced, incapable of looking at facts under a new point of view.’[138] Further, there is not only the sense of general intellectual impotence, but the admission that, even in one’s own special line, there is much that one must necessarily miss, much that must, if not invalidate one’s conclusions, at least render them dubious and incline one to the extremest modesty in asserting them. No doubt the peculiar nature of Darwin’s work, which obliged him to touch upon all sorts of very different scientific fields, accentuated this modesty of attitude, but no one can question that it was inborn: ‘There are so many valid and weighty arguments against my notions, that you, or any one, if you wish, on the other side, will easily persuade yourself that I am wholly in error, and no doubt I am in part in error, perhaps wholly so, though I cannot see the blindness of my ways.’[139] When one goes after the truth in that spirit, one is much more likely to find it, and at any rate to teach the world valuable lessons, whether one finds it or not.

II

Now to consider the more personal qualities of the scientific spirit, that is those that affect human relations. Naturally it is not pretended that all scientific men have these personal qualities, any more than the qualities already indicated. Men of science are human like the rest of us, and eminently liable to the weaknesses that the rest of us have. Sometimes even they seem more liable, perhaps because the impersonality of their occupation makes the personal weaknesses stand out. But such weaknesses are obviously not a result of the scientific spirit, but obtain in spite of it, and its higher tendency should be to diminish or restrain them.

It is interesting, in this personal and human connection, to see how the scientific qualities develop into virtues to some extent akin to the Christian ideal. For example, the recognition and admission of ignorance, on which we have been insisting, must carry with it, should carry with it, the eminently Christian virtue of humility. When you are oppressively aware how little you know, how far your information is from being adequate and your conclusions from being final, it is impossible to maintain a spirit of arrogance or self-assertion. You turn to others for their agreement and support, in the tone of Goethe’s remark that he felt immensely strengthened in a conclusion if he found that even one other human being agreed with him. Or, as Darwin puts it: ‘Though I, of course, believe in the truth of my own doctrine, I suspect that no belief is vivid until shared by others.’[140] The truly scientific worker should be ready to defer to the opinion of his fellow-workers and instantly to surrender his own when convinced that theirs is based upon wider observation or more valid arguments.

Closely connected with humility is tolerance, and this virtue also flows from the admission of ignorance almost as a necessity. If you appreciate your limitations and that your knowledge is as incomplete as your deductions are hazardous, you will be at all times ready to recognize that others may be right and you may be wrong, and you will have a gentle forbearance toward even what appear to be their errors. ‘True science necessarily carries tolerance with it,’ says Voltaire.[141]

To be sure, the mention of Voltaire in connection with tolerance rather makes one smile, for if he fought for tolerance as for other things, he fought hard and bitterly, and he was always fighting for something. And in general it may well be urged that the history of scientific thought shows anything but tolerance and gentleness. Indeed it sometimes seems as if scientists were a peculiarly waspish and petulant generation, apt to fly out, and to fly at, with what to the ordinary mind hardly appears sufficient excuse. Darwin himself appreciates this unfortunate tendency, and frequently deplores it: ‘How strange, funny, and disgraceful that nearly all ... our great men are in quarrels in couplets.’[142]

But here again, it is human nature, in its inborn weakness and self-satisfaction, that does the quarreling, and the scientific spirit, taken in itself, certainly tends to quiet and lenify. In one of his very latest letters Darwin wrote: ‘You have shown how a man may differ from another in the most decided manner, and yet express his difference with the most perfect courtesy. Not a few English and German naturalists might learn a useful lesson from your example; for the coarse language often used by scientific men towards each other does no good and only degrades science.’[143] But it is difficult for humanity to learn, and when it is learned to remember, the profound truth expressed in the saying of Edmond Scherer in regard to tolerance: ‘The fundamental dogma of intolerance is that there are dogmas, that of tolerance is that there are only opinions.’