Science and Morals and Other Essays

by Sir Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

So far, everybody whose opinion counts seems to be agreed; but in any plea for an extended and improved teaching of science, certain points ought not to be left out of count. In the first place, science is not the key to all locks; there are many important things—some of the most important things in life—with which it has nothing whatever to do. It will be well to recall Mr. Balfour's words at the opening of the National Physical Laboratory: "Science depends on measurement, and things not measurable are therefore excluded, or tend to be excluded, from its attention. But Life and Beauty and Happiness are not measurable. If there could be a unit of happiness, politics might begin to be scientific." It follows that there are a number of subjects on which the scientific man is just as fit, or as unfit, to express an opinion as any other man. The intense preoccupation which serious scientific studies demand, may render the man who is engaged therein even less competent to express an opinion on alien subjects than one whose attention, less concentrated, has time to range over diverse fields of study. Readers of Darwin's Life will remember his confession that he had lost all taste for music, art, and literature; that he "could not endure to read a line of poetry" and found Shakespeare "so intolerably dull that it nauseated" him; and finally, that his mind seemed "to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts."

Despite this warning as to the limits of science, we have no lack of instances of scientific men posing as authorities on subjects on which they had no real right to be heard, and, what is worse, being accepted as such by the uninstructed crowd. Thus Professor Huxley, who, as some one once said, "made science respectable," was wont to utter pontifical pronouncements on the subject of Home Rule for Ireland. His knowledge of that country was quite rudimentary, and his visits to it had been as few and as brief as if he had been its Sovereign; but that did not prevent him from delivering judgment, nor unfortunately deter many from following that judgment as if it had been inspired. I am not now arguing as to the rights and wrongs of Huxley's view on the matter in question: I have my own opinion on that. What I am urging is that his position, whether as a zoologist or, incidentally, as a great master of the English language, in no way entitled him to express an opinion or rendered him a better authority on such a question than any casual fellow-traveller in a railway carriage might easily be.

This is bad enough; but what is far worse is when scientific experts on the strength of their study of Nature assume the right of uttering judicial pronouncements on moral and sociological questions, judgments some at least of which are subversive of both decency and liberty. Thus we have lately been told that it is "wanton cruelty" to keep a weak or sickly child alive; and the medical man, under a reformed system of medical ethics, is to have leave and licence to put an end to its life in a painless manner. To what enormities and dastardly agreements this might lead need hardly be suggested; and I am quite confident that the members of the honourable profession of physic, to which I am proud to belong, have no desire whatever for such a reform of the law or of their ethics. Then we are told in the same address (Bateson, British Association Addresses in Australia, 1914) that on the whole a decline in the birth-rate is rather a good thing, and that families averaging four children are quite enough to keep the world going comfortably. The date of this address will be noted; and the fact that the war, which was then just beginning, has probably caused its author and has caused everybody else to see the utter futility of such assertions.

However, if we are to rear only four children per marriage, and if we are to give the medical man liberty to weed out the weaklings, it behoves us to see that the children whom we produce are of the best quality. Let us, therefore, hie to the stud-farm, observe its methods and proceed to apply them to the human race. We must definitely prevent feeble-minded persons from propagating their species. Within limits, that is a proposition with which all instructed persons would agree, though few, we imagine, would put their opinions so uncharitably as the lecturer did: "The union of such social vermin we should no more permit than we would allow parasites to breed on our own bodies." But we must go farther than this, and introduce all sorts of restrictions on matrimony, until finally it comes to be a matter to be arranged under rigid laws by a jury of elderly persons—all, we may feel perfectly sure, "cranks" of the first water.

In what milieu are their findings to take effect? It is very important to consider that. The author from whom I have been quoting tells us what we want to know. Man, he tells us, is "a rather long-lived animal, with great powers of enjoyment, if he does not deliberately forgo them." In the past, we are told, "superstitious and mythical ideas of sin have predominantly controlled these powers." We have changed all that now; as the parent in Punch says to the crying child by the seashore, "You've come out to enjoy yourself, and enjoy yourself you shall!" So we are to plunge into the whirlpool of eugenic delights without any fear of that "bugbear of a hell" which another writer congratulates us on getting rid of. We can, it appears, enter upon our eugenic experiment without a single moral scruple to restrain us or a single religious restriction to interfere with us. In this soil is the plant to be grown, and the first weed to be eradicated is that of the right of personal choice of a partner for life, or for such other term as the law under the new régime may require. Jack is to be torn from weeping Jill, and handed over to reluctant Joan, to whom he is personally displeasing and for whom he has not the slightest desire, and handed over because the Breeding Committee think it is likely to prove advantageous for the Coming Race. All that may be possible—or may not—but what then? When you are carrying out Mendelian experiments on peas, you can enclose your flowers in muslin bags and prevent anything interfering with your observations. And in the stud-farm you can keep the occupants shut up.

But what are you going to do with Jack? and with Jill? And still more with Joan? They cannot be permanently isolated, neither are they restrained by any "mythical ideas of sin." They have been educated to the idea that their highest duty is to enjoy themselves. Why should they not do what they like? And consequently, as any reasoning person can see, "The Inevitable" must happen; and where is your experiment and where the Coming Race? It is perfectly useless for doctrinaires to argue, as doctrinaires will, about ethical restraints. Nature has no ethical restraints; and any ethical restraints which man has come from that higher nature of his which he does not share with the lower creation. What those whom the late Mr. Devas so aptly called "after-Christians" always forget is that the humane, the Christian side of life, which they as well as others exhibit, is due to the influence, lingering if you like, of Christianity. They ignore or forget the pit out of which they were digged.

By another Eugenist we are told that willy-nilly every sound, healthy person of either sex must get married or at least betake him or herself to the business of propagating the race. That at least is the essence of his singularly offensive dictum that since the celibacy of the Catholic clergy and of members of Religious Orders deprives the State of a number of presumably excellent parents, "if monastic orders and institutions are to continue, they should be open only to the eugenically unfit."[32] If the religious call is not to be permitted to dispense a man or woman from entering the estate of matrimony, it may be assumed that nothing else, except an unfavourable report from the committee of selection, will do so. And, further, as the one object of all this is to bring super-children into the world, we must also assume that those who fail in this duty will find themselves in peril of the law.

Surely what has been set down shows that whatever scientific reputation the writers in question possess, and it is undeniably great, it has not equipped them, one will not merely say with moral or religious ideas, but with an ordinary knowledge of human nature. It has not equipped them with any conception apparently of political possibilities; and it has left them without any of that saving salt, a sense of humour. Like Huxley, they have started out to give opinions without first having made themselves familiar with the subject on which they were to deliver judgment.

It is perhaps little to be wondered at that the intense preoccupation which the study of science entails should tend to induce those whose attention is constantly fixed on Nature to imagine that from Nature can be drawn not only lessons of physical life but lessons also of conduct. Of course this is quite wrong; for Nature has no moral lesson to teach us. We are told to go to the ant—at least the sluggard is—but for what? To amend his sluggardliness. No one has ever suggested that we should go to Nature to learn to be humble, kindly, unselfish, tolerant, and Christian, in our dealings with others; and for this excellent reason, that none of these things can be learnt from Nature. Science is neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral; and, as we have seen a thousand times in this present war, its kindest gifts to man can be used, and are used, for his cruel destruction. In this war, pre-eminently amongst all wars, we have the application of pure natural principles unameliorated by the influences of Christianity, or of chivalry, Christianity's offspring. As Sir Robert Borden has summed it up, German kultur is an attempt "to impose upon us the law of the jungle."