An Introduction to the History of Science

by Walter Libby

For Arnold's contemporary Nietzsche, the German exponent of Aristocracy, the expansion of education entailed its diminution. For him ancient Greece was the only home of culture, and such culture was not for all comers. The rights of genius are not to be democratized; not the education of the masses, but rather the education of a few picked men must be the aim. The one purpose which education should most zealously strive to achieve is the suppression of all ridiculous claims to independent judgment, and the inculcation upon young men of obedience to the scepter of genius. The scientific man and the cultured man belong to two different spheres which, though coming together at times in the same individual, are never fully reconciled.

In order to appreciate the full perverseness, from the democratic standpoint, of Nietzsche's view of culture, it is necessary to glance at his political ideals as explained by one of his sponsors. Nietzsche repudiates the usual conception of morality, which he calls slave-morality, in favor of a morality of masters. The former according to him encourages the deterioration of humanity; the latter promotes advancement. He favors a true aristocracy as the best means of producing a race of supermen. "Instead of advocating 'equal and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' for which there is at present such an outcry (a régime which necessarily elevates fools and knaves, and lowers the honest and intelligent), Nietzsche advocates simple justice—to individuals and families according to their merits, according to their worth to society; not equal rights, therefore, but unequal rights, and inequality in advantages generally, approximately proportionate to deserts; consequently, therefore, a genuinely superior ruling class at one end of the social scale, and an actually inferior ruled class, with slaves at its basis, at the opposite social extreme."

Since it is the view of this aristocratic philosopher that science is the ally of democracy—a view that every chapter of the history of science serves to demonstrate—it is of interest to review his opinion of the character of the scientist. For Nietzsche the scientist is not a heroic superman, but a commonplace type of man, with commonplace virtues. He lacks domination, authority, self-sufficiency; he is rather in need of recognition from others and is characterized by the self-distrust innate in all dependent men and gregarious animals. He is industrious, patiently adaptable to rank and file, equable and moderate in capacity and requirement. He has a natural feeling for people like himself, and for that which they require: A fair competence and the green meadow without which there is no rest from labor. The scientist shows no rapture for exalted views; in fact, with an instinct for mediocrity, he is envious and strives for the destruction of the exceptional man.

A training in natural science tends to make one objective. But the objective man, in Nietzsche's opinion, distrusts his own personality and regards it as something to be set aside as accidental, and a detriment to calm judgment. The temperamental philosopher thinks the scientist serene, but that his serenity springs not from lack of trouble, but from incapacity to grasp and deal with his own private grief. His is merely disinterested knowledge, according to Nietzsche. The scientist is emotionally impoverished. His love is constrained, and his hatred artificial; he is less interesting to women than the warrior. "His mirroring and externally self-polished soul no longer knows how to affirm, no longer how to deny; he does not command; neither does he destroy." As we see in the case of Leibnitz, the scientist contemns scarcely anything (Je ne méprise presque rien). The scientist is an instrument, but not a goal; he is something of a slave, nothing in himself—presque rien! There is in the scientist nothing bold, powerful, self-centered, that wants to be master. He is for the most part a man without content and definite outline, a selfless man.

This educational product, which the builders of modern aristocracy reject, and describe after their fashion, we accept as the ally of the masses of the people, and we term it democratic culture.

The objective man, at the same time, may find even in the vehement pages of Nietzsche warnings and criticisms which the friends of democracy should not disregard. Extreme, almost insane, as his doctrine undoubtedly is, it may have value as a corrective influence, an antidote for other extreme views. It serves to remind us that democracy may be misled by feelings in themselves noble, and may, by grasping what seems good, miss what is best. For example, there are in the United States about three hundred thousand persons, defective or subnormal mentally; there is a smaller number of persons exceptionally gifted mentally. It is a poor form of social service that would exhaust the resources of science and philanthropy to care for the former without making any special provision for the latter. Genius is too great an asset to be wasted or misapplied. All culture would have suffered if Newton had been held, in his early life, to exacting administrative work; or if Darwin had devoted his years to alleviating the conditions of the miners of Peru whose misery touched him so profoundly; or if Pasteur had been taken from the laboratory and pure science to make a country doctor. Nor can democracy rest satisfied with any substitute for culture which would disregard what is great in literature, in art, and in philosophy, or which would ignore history, and the languages and civilizations of the past, as if culture had its beginning yesterday.

In this chapter we have considered democracy and democratic culture from the standpoint of three writers on education, a Greek aristocrat, a German advocate of the domination of the classes over the masses, and an Oxford professor, all by training and temperament more or less hostile critics. A more direct procedure might have been employed to establish the claim of science to afford a basis of intellectual and social homogeneity. A brilliant literary man of the present day considers that places in the first ranks of literature are reserved for the doctrinally heterodox. None of the great writers of Europe, he asserts, have been the adherents of the traditional faith. (He makes an exception in favor of Racine: but this is a needless concession, for Racine owed his early education to the Port Royalists, became alienated from them and wrote under the inspiration of the idea of the moral sufficiency of worldly honor; then, after an experience that shook his faith in his own code, he returned to the early religious influences in his life and composed his Esther and Athalie.) But, unlike literature, the study of science is not exclusive. In the front ranks of science stand the devout Roman Catholic Pasteur, the Anglican Darwin, the Unitarian Priestley, the Calvinist Faraday, the Quakers Dalton, Young, and Lister, Huxley the Agnostic, and Aristotle the pagan biologist. Science has no Test Acts.

That the cultivation of the sciences tends to promote a type of culture that is democratic rather than aristocratic, sympathetic rather than austere, inclusive rather than exclusive, is further witnessed by the fact that the tradesman and artisan, as well as the dissenter, play a large part in their development. We have seen that Pasteur was the son of a tanner, Priestley of a cloth-maker, Dalton of a weaver, Lambert of a tailor, Kant of a saddler, Watt of a shipbuilder, Smith of a farmer. John Ray was, like Faraday, the son of a blacksmith. Joule was a brewer. Davy, Scheele, Dumas, Balard, Liebig, Wöhler, and a number of other distinguished chemists, were apothecaries' apprentices. Franklin was a printer. At the same time other ranks of society are represented in the history of science by Boyle, Cavendish, Lavoisier. The physicians and the sons of physicians have borne a particularly honorable part in the advancement of physical as well as mental science. The instinctive craving for power, the will to dominate, of which Nietzsche was the lyricist, was in these men subdued to patience, industry, and philanthropy. The beneficent effect of their activities on the health and general welfare of the masses of the people bears witness to the sanity and worth of the culture that prompted these activities.

As was stated at the outset of this chapter, education is the oversight and guidance of the development of the immature with certain ethical and social ends in view. The material of instruction, the method of instruction, and the type of educational institution, will vary with the hereditary endowment, age, and probable social destiny of the child. In a democratic country likely to become more, rather than less, democratic, those subjects will naturally be taught which have vital connection with the people's welfare and progress in civilization. At the same time the method of instruction will be less dogmatic and more inclined (under a free than under an absolute government) to evoke the child's powers of individual judgment; arbitrary discipline must yield gradually to self-discipline. The changes here indicated as desirable are already well under way in America. As regards types of educational institution, it is significant that America about the middle of the eighteenth century introduced the Miltonic, nonconformist Academy, with its science curriculum, in place of the traditional Latin grammar school. Later the American high school, institutions of which type now have over a million pupils, and teach science by the heuristic laboratory method, became the popular form of secondary school. It is, likewise, not without social significance that the Kindergarten was suppressed in Prussia after the revolt of the people in the middle of the nineteenth century, and that it found a more congenial home in a democratic country. Its educational ideal of developing self-activity without losing sight of the need of social adaptation finds its corollary in systematic teaching of the sciences in relation both to the daily work and to their historical and cultural antecedents.