Views and Opinions

by Ouida

Again Playfair traces the defeat of France in 1870 to the inferiority of her university teaching, and gives the opinion of the Institut de France as his authority. It seems a singularly illogical and unphilosophical decision for such an august body to have given forth publicly. The causes of the defeat of France stretch farther back and have deeper roots than can be accounted for by the omission of the state to create more professors and laboratories. The whole teachings of history show that all states, after reaching their perihelion, gradually decline and sink into an inferior place amongst the nations. The day of France, as of England, is already past its noon. Neither will ever be what they have been. Neither will ever again give law to Europe as they gave it once. But so many causes, some near, some remote, have all contributed to bring about a decline which is as inevitable to nations as to individuals, that it is surely most unphilosophic to contend that such decay could have been averted by the creation of some hundred or thousand more professors of natural or other science. It may be excusable for such a professor to consider such professorships the one universal panacea for all ills; but it is not an opinion in which those who know France best and most intimately would be inclined to coincide. They would conclude that, on the contrary, she has too many professors already; that the grace, and wit, and courtesy, and wisdom and chivalry have gone out of her since she was ruled from the desks of the school-master, the physiologist and the notary, and that the whole system of French colleges is calculated to emasculate and injure the character of the schoolboy before he goes up for his baccalaureate.

The German invasion of France was supported by all which science could do, yet most military judges are agreed that unless the carelessness of her foe had afforded her a fortnight’s preparation, Germany would have been hopelessly beaten on her own territory; whilst, look at the campaign how we may, it cannot stand a moment’s comparison with the Eastern marches of Alexander, or the conquests of Roman generals. With none of the resources of modern warfare, these great conquerors carried fire and sword through the whole of the regions known to them, from the sands of Africa to the ice-plains of the Baltic. What is there in modern war, which can compare with the campaigns of Hannibal, the amazing victories of Julius Cæsar, the deeds of the young Pompeiins, the story of every Legion? In the English endeavour to rescue Gordon, with every aid which modern science can invent, and assisted by every facility which modern modes of transit lend to the transport of multitudes, an army was despatched from Great Britain with orders to reach a city on the Nile. The errand was too difficult to be accomplished; the generals returned with their mission unfulfilled; the country received them with honour. This is the height to which the assistance of modern science has brought the would-be Cæsars of the age.

What child’s play would this expedition to Khartoum have seemed to Scipio Africanus or to Lucius Sylla! Yet all the ‘resources of science’ did not save the modern expedition from failure, and, in the face of Europe and Asia, it retreated in ignominy before the barbaric and untrained followers of a half-mad prophet, after an enormous expenditure of stores and treasure, and a perfectly useless waste of human life!

War has been almost incessant since the empire of science, but it has been characterised neither by magnanimity nor true triumph. Europe, armed to the teeth, is like a muzzled pack of blood-hounds; every nation lives in terror of the others; to such a pass has scientific warfare brought the world. The multiplication of engines of destruction is one of the chief occupations and boasts of a scientific age, and it can claim a melancholy pre-eminence in the discovery of the means to inflict the most agonising of all wounds through the medium of conical bullets and shells of nitro-glycerine. To have added unspeakable horror to death, and to have placed the power of secret and wholesale assassination in the hands of ignorant and envious men, is one of the chief benefits which this Egeria has brought to her eager pupil. And when her worshippers laud her to the skies, as does the president of the Aberdeen meeting, their silence on this side of her teaching is at once significant and ominous.

Playfair is obviously afraid that the Humanities will always obtain, in England at least, a larger place in public teaching and in public subsidies than pure science will be able to do. I wish his fear may be justified. My own fears are on the other side. Science offers prizes to the prurient curiosities and the nascent cruelties of youth with which literature can never compete. To study all the mysteries of sex in anatomy, and to indulge the power of a Nero in little when watching the agonies of a scientifically-tortured or poisoned dog, are enjoyments appealing to instincts in the frame of the school-boy, with which not even the most indecent passage in his Greek or Latin authors can ever pretend to measure attraction. The professors of science need have no fear as to the potency of the charm which their curriculum will exercise over the juvenile mind. Teaching which offers at once the penetration into corporeal secrets and the power of torture over animals, possesses a fascination for the minds of youth which it will never lose, because its appeals are addressed to those coarsest and crudest impulses which are strongest of all in the child and in the adolescent.

What science is preparing for the future of man, in thus putting the scalpel and the injecting-needle into the hands of children, is a darker and wider question. One thing is certain, that in the future, as in the streets and temples of Ancient Rome, there will be no altar to Pity.

The acknowledged doctrine of the professors of ‘research,’ that all knowledge is valuable because it is, or appears to be, knowledge, and that all ways and methods of obtaining it are justified and sanctified, bears so curious a likeness to the self-worship of the Papal dominion and of the Spanish Inquisition, that we see, with a sense of despair, how bigotry and despotism in some form or another are fated to reappear so long as human life shall last.

It is significant of the political immorality and readiness to tyrannise over others in the pursuit of their aims, which characterise the scientific classes, that they are willing to admire and support any government, however despotic, which is willing in return to endow their scholarships and erect their laboratories. They are inclined to surrender all political liberty, if by so doing they can obtain a ruler who will build them a number of new colleges, with every new instrument ready to their hands for animal torture and physiological or chemical experiment.

A Lorenzo di Medici, devoted exclusively to the sciences instead of to the arts, would be their ideal sovereign. Public liberties might perish under him as they should; he would give science her free scope, her desired endowments, her million living victims; he would be even too enlightened to refuse her human subjects for the physiological laboratory.

This curious willingness of the pursuers of science to join hands with tyranny, so long as tyranny helps themselves, is the darkest menace of the world’s future. In time to come it may assume dimensions and aspects which are undreamed of now. The demand of biologists and chemists to be provided for out of the funds of the state, is a demand which has never been made by literature or art, and would not be tolerated from them. The exorbitant sums insisted on for the establishment of laboratories and professorships, rob science of that character of disinterested devotion which alone would make it worthy of esteem. ‘Give me a thousand or fifteen hundred a year,’ says the physiologist to the state; ‘give me money-grants also for experiments which I may spend at my good option and for which I need return no account, and leave me to cut up dogs and cats and horses at leisure. In return I will give you some new facts about internal hydrocephalus or the length of time a new poison takes to kill a guinea-pig.’ The agreement may, or may not, be worth the state’s entering into with the physiologist, but in any case the physiologist cannot deny that he makes a good income out of his science, and cannot pretend to any disinterested or philanthropic selection of it. The moment that any man accepts a salary for intellectual work, he must submit to resign all claim to purely intellectual devotion to it. The claims of scientists to be paid and provided for out of national funds has many equivocal aspects, and will have many unwholesome results; whilst the rapacity and insistence with which they are put forward are as unbecoming as they are undisguised. The high priests of modern science are not likely to shed tears like the Greek philosopher Isocrates because they are compelled to take money. On the contrary, they clamour loudly for their maintenance by their nation, with a cupidity which has happily never disgraced either literature or art.