More Science from an Easy Chair

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

Professor Schäfer expressed the opinion, anticipated and shared by many other investigators, that the progress of chemical experiment renders it probable that further steps, culminating in the successful construction of "living" matter in the laboratory, are not beset by any insurmountable obstacles and will sooner or later be accomplished. There was no "bomb-shell" in this statement, and no excitement as its result among scientific workers nor amongst those who do not neglect to study the writings of the "interpreters" desired by Lord Justice Moulton. There are still some such interpreters carrying on the work of Huxley and of Tyndall, those great interpreters whose writings should be studied and treasured as classics.

The most interesting result of the attempt to treat the discussions at Dundee as a newspaper "sensation," comparable to the reports relating to motor-car bandits or the pronouncements of political factions, has been its complete failure. Serious thinkers of all schools seem to have adjusted themselves to the more modern way of regarding natural processes even when these relate to matters of such age-long interest to mankind as the inception of "living" organisms and of conscious humanity itself. There are fewer now than there were forty years ago who insist on the older barbaric "explanations" of these marvels. Few indeed venture to assert the existence of "spirits"—ghostly essences of various grades and capacities which enter the bodies of living things and escape from them like so much gas when they die.[10] The vegetable soul, the animal soul and the human soul are no longer imagined and described to us as definite "things" supposed to "explain" the complex processes which go on respectively in plants, animals and men.

Seventy years ago the facts which were known as to that changing state of material substances which we describe by the words "hot" and "cold," were held to be "explained" by the existence of a ghostly thing called "caloric," which was believed to enter various bodies and make them hot and then to escape from them and so make them cold. Primitive man multiplied such ways of explaining each and every process going on in the world around him and in himself. Mere words or names lost their first simple signification and acquired permanent association with imaginary spirits, demons, and haunting intangible ghosts, by reference to which our ancestors in their earliest "reasoning" explained to their own satisfaction the strange and sudden events fraught to them with the daily experience of pain or pleasure. The whole world was held by them to be "bewitched," and it was only by slow and painful steps that some knowledge of the persistent order of Nature was obtained, whilst the phantastic imagery which had served in its place, bit by bit disappeared. "Caloric" was a late lingerer, and was only got rid of when what had been so called was shown to be a vibration of particles—a mode or kind of motion—a "state," and not a mysterious fluid existing as a thing in itself.

Just as "caloric" no longer serves and is no longer possible as the supposed "explanation" of the behaviour of bodies in the hot or the cold state, so we no longer require the supposition of "spirits" of one kind or another as "explanations" of the living state of those products of our mother earth which are called plants, animals and men. In neither case do such "spirits" really "explain" the state in question; they are only names for the activity which it was imagined that they served to explain. These states or affections of matter remain as wonderful and important to us as they were before. But by giving up the prehistoric notions about them which have been handed on until the present day we can think of them in a more satisfactory way—a way which avoids the multiplication of unnecessary imaginary agencies and the conception of an intermittent and hesitating Creative Power, and substitutes for it the operation of continuous orderly and preordained forces.

It is true that we can neither ascertain nor imagine either the beginning or the end of the orderly process which we discover in operation to-day. We can trace it back by well-established inference into a remote past, but a beginning of it is not within the possibilities of human thought. We can, with reasonable probability of being correct, foretell the changes and developments which time will bring in many combinations and dispositions which are the manifestations of that process at this moment of time, but we cannot even think of a cessation of that process.

Should we ask, "Why does this process exist?" there is no answer. Nature does not reply; an awful silence meets our inquiry. The reproach is often urged against science—the knowledge of the order of nature—that it does not tell us "why we are here." Man inevitably desires to know why he is here; but "science," as that word is now understood, does not profess or even seek to answer that question, although the false hope has been raised in ignorant minds, sometimes by knavery, sometimes by honest delusion, that it could do so. By knowledge of nature mankind can escape much suffering and gain the highest happiness, but that is all that we can hope for from it. We shall never satisfy our curiosity; we shall never know in the same way as we know the order of nature, why—to what end, for what purpose—that order and not another order exists.

It is very generally supposed that it is the business and profession of science "to explain" things—that is to say, to show how this or that must and does come about in consequence of the operation of the great general properties of matter, known as the "laws" of chemistry and physics. This is true enough, but it is equally the work of science to assert that of many things for which mankind demands "an explanation," there is no explanation. It is further the work and the service of science to destroy and to remove from men's minds the baseless and pretended "explanations" which are no explanations but causes of error, blindness, and suffering.

Science, the destroyer of "explanations," is the purifier of the human mind, its cleanser from the crippling infection of prehistoric error and from domination by the terrifying nightmares of our half-animal ancestry.

Finally, in reference to the very ancient attempt to "explain" life and consciousness by the assertion that they are due to "spirits" which enter the bodies of animals and men, I must caution the reader against supposing that—for those who do not accept the belief that such spirits exist—the gravity and mystery of the manifestations of life and consciousness are in any way lessened. Those who reject the belief in "spirits" do not in consequence reject the ethical and moral doctrines which have too long been rendered "suspect" by the shadow cast over them by ancient superstition. The disappearance of that shadow will reveal friends where enemies were supposed to be entrenched.

At the meeting of the British Association in 1879 I delivered an address on "Degeneration: a Chapter in Darwinism." In the printed version of that address, published in the same year, there are some statements bearing on the matter above discussed which I reproduce here, since I can still make them with conviction.