Chapter I

Since the time when the Whigs of England fastened the specific title of _Pretender_ on the son and grandson of James II, the word has retained in our speech a sinister significance. For us a pretender is one who makes a false claim to a title. But in speaking of the pretensions of science, humanists do not mean precisely this. No humanist would deny that science has a legitimate field of its own when investigating the phenomena of the objective world and attempting to find law and order in the flux of events. Nor would he deny that it has added much to our security and power and has increased our opportunities for a richer life and character.

Science has its legitimate pretensions to power; but false claims are now being advanced on all sides under the shelter of its name, and it is these false claims which the humanist is concerned to expose. While our modern pretenders are unfortunately far greater in number than the two descendants of James, they do fall into two classes. The first includes those men of science who are not content to work in their limited field, but are really metaphysicians who have created a fictitious world of the imagination made out of æthers, electrons, and mathematical symbols, and have confused it in their own and others’ minds with the sensible world of brute fact. This class does comparatively little direct harm, as it merely creates some confusion in the orderly domain of science; but, indirectly, it has given a stimulus and specious authority to the pseudo-scientists. The second class comprises those who are claiming that the phenomena of the subjective world also lie in the field of science and have imposed on the age the pseudo-sciences of psychology and sociology. They would have us believe that all truth is scientific and that the conclusions of self-examination are but guess-work. By mere verbal analogies they have linked the study of man’s intellectual and spiritual nature to the physical world of mechanical matter and motion. It is the false claims of these pseudo-sciences which must be exposed and renounced in order that humanism may come again into its own as the arbiter of character.

As in the Middle Ages canting simulation of goodness, as well as honest virtue, was covered by the word religion, so to-day vague speculation, as well as accurate experimentation, is proclaimed as science. By a curious throw-back we are apparently using the word “science” in the primitive sense of “all knowledge,” as the Greeks used it. And they, in spite of their acumen, had not been able to differentiate between the two equally valid methods of learning by objective experimentation and by personal experience. We have seemingly forgotten that one of the greatest achievements of the Renaissance was to discover this difference of method and to limit “science” strictly to the investigation of objective phenomena. Even Descartes, who attempted to create a purely mechanical world, excluded the processes of thought as something foreign to the scientific method.

It was the biologists of the nineteenth century, intoxicated with the delusion that the magic word evolution was a key to unlock all the mysteries of the universe, who foisted on the world the idea that man is but a complicated physical and chemical machine, and who sought to discredit the dualistic philosophy of the Renaissance physicists. And of all the biologists, Huxley, the militant propagandist, was the one who did the most to degrade humanism into the pseudo-sciences of psychology and sociology. He first correctly emphasised the fact that there is but one scientific method which is best exemplified by the subject of mechanics. But--and in this lies the source of his mischief to clear thinking--_he then defined science as merely organised common sense_. One has only to analyse this definition to discover its speciousness and its confusion of thought. His definition has been almost universally accepted, although it undoes all the lessons taught us by the religious thinkers of the Middle Ages and the scientific experimentalists of the Renaissance; and its effect has been to drive theoretical science back into the hypothetical metaphysics of the Greeks.

It is merely a truism to say that our contact with the objective and subjective worlds is based, directly or indirectly, on our sense-perceptions; and, to be intelligibly transmitted from one person to another, such data must be common to many individuals. Also, it is an inevitable tendency of the mind to organise all facts or to link them together. Thus Huxley really classes all sound knowledge as science. But, since this sound knowledge, according to him, can be attained only by following the method of mechanics, which is the interpretation by the mind of the spatial and temporal relations between sensible bodies, his inference is clear that the phenomena of consciousness, the individual mind, and our social relations, are to be interpreted as problems of matter and motion.

Yet what, actually, is the process of exact science? The answer to this question should show us whether or not the term does have any precise and limited significance, and whether or not fundamental confusion must result from the attempt to make it synonymous with all knowledge.

Exact science, then, is first of all based on the naïve belief in an objective and real world whose events are connected in an orderly and prescribed manner, and occur independently of our thought or will. The phenomena of this objective world appeal to us through our sense-organs by some form of action, which we call energy, and are interpreted by our minds. We speak of this interpretation as observation; but to be scientific we must also select the phenomena to be observed, in order that we may classify their similarities and their dissimilarities. In the course of time, we have found such precision in many of our classifications and such regularity in the past actions of phenomena, that we are able to predict future events. Those predictions, which from past experience we find to have been accurately verified, we formulate as laws. For example, we have observed the actions of so many falling bodies that we have formulated the law of gravitation. It would be an error to say that a body fell, yesterday, because of this law; that event was simply one of the observed facts from which the law was deduced; but it is quite proper to predict that such a body will fall, to-morrow, in accordance with the law of gravitation. To sum up, the scientific method is limited to experimental observation and the formulation of laws; its value lies in the fact that, by its cultivation, we have done much to allay our apprehensions for the future and thus have abated the edge of superstition; and we also have vastly increased our power over our environment, or, in the much misunderstood aphorism of Francis Bacon, we have found science to be valuable for its fruits.

In a general way, we may say that the scientist should follow in his investigations the phenomena of the objective world only until their special forms of energy are absorbed by our nervous system. It is in the province of the humanist to study the phenomena of the subjective world after these stimuli have been translated into emotion and thought.

If a scientific prediction, or law, is to be something more than a vague statement of what will probably occur, we feel the necessity of measuring the quantity of the event; that is, our minds are not satisfied until we are able to express it mathematically. Since the only measurable attributes, concerning which our opinion of more or less is definite, are geometrical lengths, the aim of all science is, and must be, to express its laws in the language of mechanics; for that subject alone deals exclusively with simple, sensible masses and their geometrical relations in space. We have then the paradox that while mathematics is the goal of science, in that it is the ideal method, or language of expression, it is not itself a science since it is concerned with subjective ideas and is not limited by the restrictions of sensible bodies. Modern men of science may rebel against this fact; but even the newer, and more dubious, of the pseudo-sciences are forced to substantiate their claims with the support of factitious mathematical formulæ and tables and to simulate the mechanistic method. The inevitable tendency of science is to investigate all phenomena quantitatively, and to view the whole universe as a vast and measurable machine.

If the phenomena of life are to be classed as an exact science, it is necessary to postulate that the living organism, also, is a machine,--a thing of various material parts, acting on each other by mechanical forces. Such a postulate is pure _fiat_, for we have found no common factors between what we call vital actions and mechanical and physical forces. Biology is, at best, confined to the discovery of qualitative classifications, and the mutual chemical and physical reactions of the organism; and life is so complex and so variable that very few of its phenomena can be predicted with any accuracy. For example, the so-called law of heredity is often cited, but we have made scarcely any progress towards predicting variations in even an immediately succeeding generation. Even if a general law of progressive evolution were granted to have been established, no one could foretell by it the future variations of any species.

If the scientific method is badly strained when applied to even the simplest forms of life, it completely fails when used to elucidate the phenomena of the mind. The fundamental definition of science excludes the processes of consciousness from its field, for it assumes that objective phenomena are to be interpreted by the mind. If we attempt to study the mind objectively, then we come face to face with the absurd paradox of a thing investigating itself by means of I itself. And the gibe cast at the scientific psychologists, that they propose to study the mind by first denying its existence, is only too well founded.

The possibility of a scientific method is based on a rational interpretation of objective phenomena. Psychology, as a science, would be a solemn version of _Alice Through the Looking Glass_ in which real persons are viewed and analysed by their images, or rather by some other intelligence, such as a dog or an inhabitant of Mars. The futility of such a process should be apparent if we recollect that an animal’s mental processes can themselves be estimated and expressed only as a vaguer and more rudimentary sort of human mind.