THE PROGRAMME
On Lord Gifford’s Conception of “Science”
This is the first time that a biologist has occupied this place; the first time that a biologist is to try to carry out the intentions of the noble and high-minded man to whom this lectureship owes its foundation.
On such an occasion it seems to be not undesirable to inquire what Lord Gifford’s own opinions about natural science may have been, what place in the whole scheme of human knowledge he may have attributed to those branches of it which have become almost the centre of men’s intellectual interest.
And, indeed, on studying Lord Gifford’s bequest with the object of finding in it some reference to the natural sciences, one easily notes that he has assigned to them a very high place compared with the other sciences, at least in one respect: with regard to their methods.
There is a highly interesting passage in his will which leaves no doubt about our question. After having formally declared the foundation of this lectureship “for Promoting, Advancing, Teaching and Diffusing the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of that term,” and after having arranged about the special features of the lectures, he continues: “I wish the lecturers to treat their subject as a strictly natural science, the greatest of all possible sciences, indeed, in one sense, the only science, that of Infinite Being. . . . I wish it considered just as astronomy or chemistry is.”
Of course, it is not possible to understand these words of Lord Gifford’s will in a quite literal sense. If, provisionally, we call “natural theology” the ultimate conclusions which may be drawn from a study of nature in connection with all other results of human sciences, there cannot be any doubt that these conclusions will be of a rather different character from the results obtained in, say, the special field of scientific chemistry. But, nevertheless, there are, I think, two points of contact between the wider and the narrower field of knowledge, and both of them relate to method. Lord Gifford’s own phrase, “Infinite Being,” shows us one of these meeting-points. In opposition to history of any form, natural sciences aim at discovering such truths as are independent of special time and of special space, such truths as are “ideas” in the sense of Plato; and such eternal results, indeed, always stand in close relation to the ultimate results of human knowledge in general. But besides that there is still another feature which may be common both to “natural theology” and to the special natural sciences, and which is most fully developed in the latter: freedom from prepossessions. This, at least, is an ideal of all natural sciences; I may say it is the ideal of them. That it was this feature which Lord Gifford had in view in his comparison becomes clear when we read in his will that the lectures on natural theology are to be delivered “without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous revelation.”
So we might say that both in their logical and their moral methods, natural sciences are to be the prototype of “Natural Theology” in Lord Gifford’s sense.