IV
The scientist is short-sighted and narrow-sighted who walls science in at the boundary of his senses—a mole accounting for phenomena, and leaving out the eye; a Laura Bridgeman accounting for whatever came into her life by her two or three physical senses.
Foolish wise men, not to know that the surest of all proofs is to be looked for in inner experience; that the most real things in the world are made clear not by physical proof, but by life! Darwin reached the point where poetry and music were little to him; yet the world of music and of beauty are more certain than is Mont Blanc or Mount Washington; but there is only one way to know them, and that is to grow the faculties of music and beauty. To the Roman soldiers who may have heard it, how unsubstantial was the Sermon on the Mount; yet its truths of the brotherhood of man, of the fatherhood of God, of meekness, of loving, of justice, of faith in the inner things, outlasted the Roman armies, saw the empire ground to dust, and their speaker, one thousand nine hundred years afterward, by far the most potent personality that ever lived. The mother’s love will outpull gravity, and yet what scientist has chemically analyzed it, or what dissecting-knife has revealed its whereabouts? There are brute women to whom this love is “unthinkable,” “unknowable,” but let them grow the mother-heart, and then they can think it, know it.
Foolish wise men, ye can discern the shadow of things; look up and behold the substance! Rochefort said to Gambetta: “Deafness is not politics.” When will scientists learn that true science must have eyes and ears open to all experience within as well as without.
Once scientists among moles held a congress, and learnedly resolved that they would believe in nothing that could not be submitted for proof to their four senses. One learned mole with bated breath said: “There must be something above our four senses. I one day broke through the crust of the earth and felt strange sensations, and had a glimmering in the rudiments called eyes by our older philosophers.” “Nonsense!” said a grayhead among them. “Let us have no transcendentalism; everything that is must be explained by sound, or by touch, or by smell, or by the taste. All this talk of a great central sun with light, making landscapes and from which all things come, we have no way of proving; and hence to believe it, or to admit it as an element in accounting for things, is unscientific. The scientific method, let us never forget, is to account for all things by the elements which come within the range of our four senses and the reasoning based upon these perceptions.”
So it happens that to this day in the cosmic science accepted among moles the sun has nothing to do with the growth of plants, the formation of coal-beds, and the rotation of the seasons.
How imperfect that history that would content itself with writing a biography of the acorn, and never take into account the oak that comes from the acorn and for which the acorn exists! The oak reveals the acorn; without the oak the acorn is not explicable. How can any one understand the evolution of man and not consider the vastly greater segment of his nature, which is the non-material and spiritual? The scientist believes in the indestructibility of matter. The step is a short one to the belief in the indestructibility of spirit. He believes in substance infinitely extended; the step is not a long one to belief in the personality that is infinitely extended. He believes that in all matter is a “thinking substance.” Is it harder to believe that over and in all things is a thinking spirit?[I] The scientist endows matter with the powers it needs to do all these things, and then says it does all these things.
Yet science, when it comes to know, when it comes to take in all the facts, to go deep enough, and wide enough, and far enough, will be the arbiter. Creed, dogma, authority, must give way to it. Magellan said: “The Church declares the world is flat, but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I had rather believe a shadow than the Church.” That is true only when the Church makes provision for but a part of the truth, and when science is true to itself. The assumptions of science and the assumptions of the Church will have to be corrected by experience, the experience of the whole man.