Science and Morals and Other Essays

by Sir Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

Now the scientific man, in his own work, is subject to all sorts of limitations, apart altogether from the limitations to which, as an ordinary member of the State, he has to submit himself.

He is restricted by science: he is not completely free but is bound by knowledge—the knowledge which he or others have acquired.

To say he is limited by it is not to say that he is imprisoned by it or in bondage to it. "One does not lose one's intellectual liberty when one learns mathematics," says the late Monsignor Benson in one of his letters, "though one certainly loses the liberty of doing sums wrong or doing them by laborious methods!"

Before setting out upon any research, the careful man of science sets himself to study "the literature of the subject" as he calls it. He delves into all sorts of out-of-the-way periodicals to ascertain what such a man has written upon such a point. All this he does in order that he may avoid doing a piece of work over again unnecessarily: unnecessarily, for it maybe actually necessary to repeat it, if it is of very great importance and if it has not been repeated and verified by other observers. Further, he delves into this literature because it is thus that he hopes to avoid the many blind alleys which branch off from every path of research, delude their explorer with vain hopes and finally bring him face to face with a blank wall. In a word the inquirer consults his authorities and when he finds them worthy of reliance, he limits his freedom by paying attention to them. He does not say: "How am I held in bondage by this assertion that the earth goes round the sun," but accepting that fact, he rejects such of his conclusions as are obviously irreconcilable with it. Surely this is plain common sense and the man who acted otherwise would be setting himself a quite impossible task. It is the weakness of the "heuristic method" that it sets its pupils to find out things which many abler men have spent years in investigating. The man who sets out to make a research, without first ascertaining what others have done in that direction, proposes to accumulate in himself the abilities and the life-work of all previous generations of labourers in that corner of the scientific vineyard.

There is a somewhat amusing and certainly interesting instance of this which will bear quotation. The late Mr. Grant Allen, who knew something of quite a number of subjects though perhaps not very much about any of them, devoted most of his time and energies (outside his stories, some of which are quite entertaining) to not always very accurate essays in natural history. One day, however, his evil genius prompted him to write and, worse still, to publish a book entitled Force and Energy: A Theory of Dynamics, in which he purported to deal with a matter of which he knew far less even than he did about animated nature. Mark the inevitable result! A copy of the book was forwarded to the journal Nature, and sent by its editor to be dealt with by the competent hands of Sir Oliver (then Professor) Lodge.[27]

This is how that eminent authority dealt with it. "There exists a certain class of mind," he commences, "allied perhaps to the Greek sophist variety, to which ignorance of a subject offers no sufficient obstacle to the composition of a treatise upon it." It may be rash to suggest that this type of mind is well developed in philosophers of the Spencerian school, though it would be possible to adduce some evidence in support of such a suggestion. "In the volume before us," he continues, "Mr. Grant Allen sets to work to reconstruct the fundamental science of dynamics, an edifice which, since the time of Galileo and Newton, has been standing on what has seemed a fairly secure and substantial basis, but which he seems to think it is now time to demolish in order to make room for a newly excogitated theory. The attempt is audacious and the result—what might have been expected. The performance lends itself indeed to the most scathing criticism; blunders and misstatements abound on nearly every page, and the whole thing is simply an emanation of mental fog." It would occupy too much space to reproduce this criticism with any fullness, but one or two points exceedingly germane to our subject can hardly go without notice. Alluding to a certain question, which seems to have greatly bothered Mr. Allen and likewise Mr. Clodd, who, it would appear, was associated with him in this performance, the reviewer says: "The puzzle was solved completely long ago, in the clearest possible manner, and the 'Principia' is the witness to it; but it is still felt to be a difficulty by beginners, and I suppose there is no offence in applying this harmless epithet to both Mr. Grant Allen and Mr. Clodd, so far as the truths of dynamics and physics are concerned." One last quotation: "The thing which strikes one most forcibly about the physics of these paper philosophers is the extraordinary contempt which, if they are consistent, they must or ought to feel for men of science. If Newton, Lagrange, Gauss, and Thompson, to say nothing of smaller men, have muddled away their brains in concocting a scheme of dynamics wherein the very definitions are all wrong; if they have arrived at a law of conservation of energy without knowing what the word energy means, or how to define it; if they have to be set right by an amateur who has devoted a few weeks or months to the subject and acquired a rude smattering of some of its terms, 'what intolerable fools they must all be!'" Such is the result of asserting one's freedom by escaping the limitations of knowledge! We see what happens when a person sets out to deal with science untrammelled by any considerations as to what others have thought and established. The necessary result is that he plunges headforemost into all or most of the errors which were pitfalls to the first labourers in the field. Or, again, he painfully and uselessly pursues the blind alleys which they had wandered in, and from which a perusal of their works would have warned off later comers.

Oh, irony of fate! the same thing precisely happens when men of scientific eminence indulge in religious dissertations, for of course, though it is not quite so obvious to such writers, the same blunder is quite possible in non-scientific fields of knowledge. I once asked one versed in theology what he thought of the religious articles of a distinguished man, unfamiliar himself with theology, yet, none the less, then splashing freely and to the great admiration of the ignorant, in the theological pool. His reply was that in so far as they were at all constructive, they consisted mostly of exploded heresies of the first century. Is not this precisely what one would have expected a priori? A man commencing to write on science or religion who neglects the work of earlier writers places himself in the position of the first students of the subject and very naturally will make the same mistakes as they made. He refuses to be hampered and biased by knowledge, and the result follows quite inevitably. "A scientist," says Monsignor Benson, "is hampered and biased by knowing the earth goes round the sun." The fact of the matter is that the man of science is not a solitary figure, a chimæra bombinans in vacuo. In whatever direction he looks he is faced by the figures of other workers and he is limited and "hampered" by their work. Nor are these workers all of them in his own area of country, for the biologist, for example, cannot afford to neglect the doings of the chemist; if he does he is bound to find himself led into mistakes. No doubt the scientific man is at times needlessly hampered by theories which he and others at the time take to be fairly well established facts, but which after all turn out to be nothing of the kind. This in no way weakens the argument, but rather by giving an additional reason for caution, strengthens it.

If we carefully consider the matter we shall be unable to come to any other conclusion than that every writer, even of the wildest form of fiction, is in some way and to some extent hampered and limited by knowledge, by facts, by things as they are or as they appear to be. That will be admitted; but it will be urged that the hampering and limiting with which we have been dealing is not merely legitimate but inevitable, whereas the hampering and limiting—should such there be—on the part of the Church is wholly illegitimate and indefensible.

"All that you say is no doubt true," our antagonist will urge, "but you have still to show that your Church has any right or title to interfere in these matters. And even if you can make some sort of case for her interference, you have still to disprove what so many people believe, namely, that the right, real or assumed, has not been arbitrarily used to the damage, or at least to the delay of scientific progress. Chemistry," we may suppose our antagonist continuing, "no doubt has a legitimate right to have its say, even to interfere and that imperatively, where chemical considerations invade the field of biology, for example. But what similar right does religion possess? For instance," he might proceed, "some few years ago a distinguished physiologist, then occupying the Chair of the British Association, invoked the behaviour of certain chemical substances known as colloids in favour of his anti-vitalistic conclusions. At once he was answered by a number of equally eminent chemists that the attitude he had adopted was quite incompatible with facts as known to them; in a word, that chemistry disagreed with his ideas as to colloids. Everybody admitted that the chemists must have the final word on this subject: are you now claiming that religion or theology, or whatever you choose to call it, is also entitled to a say in a matter of that kind?" This supposititious conversation illustrates the confusion which exists in many minds as to the point at issue. One science is entitled to contradict another, just as one scientific man is entitled to contradict another on a question of fact. But on a question of fact a theologian is not entitled—quâ theologian—nor would he be expected to claim to be entitled, to contradict a man of science.

It ought to be widely known, though it is not, that the idea that theologians can or wish to intrude—again quâ theologians—in scientific disputes as to chemical, biological, or other facts, is a fantastic idea without real foundation save that of the one mistake of the kind made in the case of Galileo and never repeated—a mistake, let us hasten to add, made by a disciplinary authority and—as all parties admit—in no way involving questions of infallibility. To this case we will revert shortly. Meanwhile it may be briefly stated that the claim made by the Church is in connection with some few—some very few—of the theories which men of science build up upon the facts which they have brought to light. Some of these theories do appear to contradict theological dogmas, or at least may seem to simple people to be incompatible with such dogmas, just as the people of his time—Protestants by the way, no less than Catholics—did really think that Galileo's theory conflicted with Holy Writ. In such cases, and in such cases alone, the Church holds that she has at least the right to say that such a theory should not be proclaimed to be true until there is sufficient proof for it to satisfy the scientific world that the point has been demonstrated.