Part 33 (1/2)
Besides the satisfactions of system and clarity which the sciences give, they afford man power and security. ”Knowledge is power,” said Francis Bacon, meaning thereby that to know the connection between causes and effects was to be able to regulate conditions so as to be able to produce desirable effects and eliminate undesirable ones. Even the most disinterested inquiry may eventually produce practical results of a highly important character. ”Science is,” as Bertrand Russell says, ”to the ordinary reader of newspapers, represented by a varying selection of sensational triumphs, such as wireless telegraphy and aeroplanes, radio-activity, etc.” But these practical triumphs in the control of natural resources are often casual incidents of patiently constructed systems of knowledge which were built up without the slightest reference to their fruits in human welfare. Wireless telegraphy, for example, was made possible by the disinterested and abstract inquiry of three men, Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz.
In alternating layers of experiment and theory these three men built up the modern theory of electromagnetism, and demonstrated the ident.i.ty of light with electromagnetic waves. The system which they discovered is one of profound intellectual interest, bringing together and unifying an endless variety of apparently detached phenomena, and displaying a c.u.mulative mental power which cannot but afford delight to every generous spirit. The mechanical details which remained to be adjusted in order to utilize their discoveries for a practical system of telegraphy demanded, no doubt, very considerable ingenuity, but had not that broad sweep and that universality which could give them intrinsic interest as an object of disinterested contemplation.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Mysticism and Logic_, p. 34 (”Science and Culture”).]
SCIENCE AND A WORLD VIEW. One of the values of disinterested science that is of considerable psychological importance is the change in att.i.tude it brings about in man's realization of his place in the universe. Lucretius long ago thought to free men's minds from terror and superst.i.tion by showing them how regular, ordered, and inevitable was the nature of things. The superst.i.tious savage walks in dread among natural phenomena. He lives in a world which he imagines to be governed by capricious and incalculable forces. To a certain extent he can, as we have seen, control these. But he is ill at ease. He is surrounded by vast ambiguous forces, and moves in a trembling ignorance of what will happen next.
To those educated to the scientific point of view, there is a solidity and a.s.surance about the frame of things. Beneath the variability and flux, which they continually perceive, is the changeless law which they have learned to comprehend.
Although they discover that the processes of Nature move on indifferent to the welfare of man, they know, nevertheless, that they are dependable and certain, that they are fixed conditions of life which, to a certain extent, can be controlled, and the incidental goods and ills of which are definitely calculable.
Herac.l.i.tus, the ancient Greek philosopher, noted the eternal flux, yet perceived the steady order beneath, so that he could eventually a.s.sert that all things changed save the law of change. The magnificent regularity of natural processes has been repeatedly remarked by students of science.
THE aeSTHETIC VALUE OF SCIENCE. As pointed out in the chapter on Art, scientific discovery is more than a mere tabulation of facts. It is also a work of the imagination, and gives to the worker in the scientific field precisely the same sense of satisfaction as that experienced by the creative artist.
Of Kelvin his biographer writes:
Like Faraday and the other great masters in science, he was accustomed to let his thoughts become so filled with the facts on which his attention was concentrated that the relations subsisting between the various phenomena gradually dawned upon him, and he _saw_ them, as if by some process of instinctive vision denied to others.
... His imagination was vivid; in his intense enthusiasm, he seemed to be driven rather than to drive himself. The man was lost in his subject, becoming as truly inspired as is the artist in the act of creation.[1]
[Footnote 1: Sylva.n.u.s P. Thompson; _The Life of William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs_, pp. 1125 ff.]
In the working-out of a principle, the systematizing of many facts under a sweeping generalization, the scientist finds a creator's joy. He is giving form and significance to the disordered and chaotic materials of experience. The scientific imagination differs from the artistic imagination simply in that it is controlled with reference to facts. The first flash is subjected to criticism, examination, revision, and testing. But the grand generalizations of science originate in just such an unpredictable original vision. The discovery of the fitting formula which clarifies a ma.s.s of facts. .h.i.therto chaotic and contradictory is very closely akin to the process by which a poet discovers an appropriate epithet or a musician an apposite chord.
But in its products as well as in its processes, scientific investigations have a high aesthetic value. There is symmetry, order, and splendor in the relations which science reveals.
The same formal beauty that appeals to us in a Greek statue or a Beethoven symphony is to be found in the universe, but on a far more magnificent scale. There is, in the first place, the sense of rhythm and regularity:
There comes [to the scientific investigator] a sense of pervading order. Probably this began at the very dawn of human reason--when man first discovered the year with its magnificent object-lesson of regularly recurrent sequences, and it has been growing ever since. Doubtless the early forms that this perception of order took referred to somewhat obvious uniformities; but is there any essential difference between realizing the orderliness of moons and tides, of seasons and migrations, and discovering Bodes's law of the relations of the planets, or Mendeleeff's ”Periodic Law” of the relations of the atomic weights of the chemical elements?[1]
[Footnote 1: Thomson: _Introduction to Science_, p. 174.]
Ever since Newton's day the harmony of the spheres has been a favorite poetic metaphor. The s.p.a.ciousness of the solar system has captivated the imagination, as have the time cycles revealed by the paths of comets and meteors. The universe seems indeed, as revealed by science, to present that quality of aesthetic satisfaction which is always derived from unity in multiplicity. The stars are as innumerable as they are ordered. And it was Lucretius, the poet of naturalism, who was wakened to wonder and admiration at the ceaseless productivity, inventiveness, and fertility of Nature. We find in the revelations of science again the same examples of delicacy and fineness of structure that we admire so much in the fine arts. The brain of an ant, as Darwin said, is perhaps the most marvelous speck of matter in the universe. Again ”the physicists tell us that the behaviour of hydrogen gas makes it necessary to suppose that an atom of it must have a const.i.tution as complex as a constellation, with about eight hundred separate corpuscles.”[2]
[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 176.]
THE DANGER OF ”PURE SCIENCE.” The fascinations of disinterested inquiry are so great that they may lead to a kind of scientific intemperance. The abstracted scientific interest may become so absorbed in the working-out of small details that it becomes over-specialized, narrow, and pedantic. The pure theorist has always been regarded with suspicion by the practical man. His concern over details of flora or fauna, over the precise minutiae of ancient hieroglyphics, seems absurdly trivial in comparison with the central pa.s.sions and central purposes of mankind. There are workers in every department of knowledge who become wrapt up in their specialties, forgetting the forest for the trees. There are men so absorbed in probing the crevices of their own little niche of knowledge that they forget the bearings of their researches.
Especially in time of stress, of war or social unrest, men have felt a certain callousness about the interests of the abstrusely remote scholar. We shall have occasion to note presently that it is in this coldness and emanc.i.p.ation from the pressing demands of the moment that science has produced its most p.r.o.nounced eventual benefits for mankind. But an uncontrolled pa.s.sion for facts and relations may degenerate into a mere play and luxury that may have its fascination for the expert himself, but affords neither sweetness nor light to any one else. One has but to go over the lists of doctors' dissertations published by German universities during the late nineteenth century to find examples of inquiry that seem to afford not the slightest justification in the way of eventual good to mankind.[1]
[Footnote 1: It is only fair to say that literary studies have been marked by more barren and fruitless investigations (purely philological inquiry, for example) than have the physical sciences.]
PRACTICAL OR APPLIED SCIENCE. Thus far we have been considering science chiefly as an activity which satisfies some men as an activity in itself, by the aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual values they derive from it. But a fact at once paradoxical and significant in the history of human progress is that this most impersonal and disinterested of man's activities has been profoundly influential in its practical fruits.
The practical application of the sciences rests on the utilization of the exact formulations of pure science. Through these formulations we can control phenomena by artificially setting up relations of which science has learned the consequences, thus attaining the consequences we desire, and avoiding those we do not.
The _direct_ influence of pure science on practical life is enormous.
The observations of Newton on the relations between a falling stone and the moon, of Galvani on the convulsive movements of frogs' legs in contact with iron and copper, of Darwin on the adaptation of woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, of tree-frogs, and of seeds to their surroundings, of Kirchhoff on certain lines which occur in the spectrum of sunlight, of other investigators on the life-history of bacteria--these and kindred observations have not only revolutionized our conception of the universe, but they have revolutionized or are revolutionizing, our practical life, our means of transit, our social conduct, our treatment of disease.[1]
[Footnote 1: Karl Pearson: _The Grammar of Science_, pp. 35-36.]
Francis Bacon was one of the first to appreciate explicitly the possibilities of the control of nature in the interests of human welfare. He saw the vast possibilities which a careful and comprehensive study of the workings of nature had in the enlargement of human comfort, security, and power. In _The New Atlantis_ he envisages an ideal commonwealth, whose unique and singular inst.i.tution is a House of Solomon, a kind of Carnegie Foundation devoted to inquiry, the fruits of which might be, as they were, exploited in the interests of human happiness: ”The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire to the effecting of all things possible.”[2]
[Footnote 2: _The New Atlantis_.]
Science sometimes appears so remote and alien to the immediate concrete objects which meet and interest us in daily experience that we tend to forget that historically it was out of concrete needs and practical interests that science arose. Geometry, seemingly a clear case of abstract and theoretical science, arose out of the requirements of practical surveying and mensuration among the Egyptians. In the same way botany grew out of herb gathering and gardening.
The application of the exact knowledge gained by the pure sciences, may, if properly directed, immeasurably increase the sum of human welfare. One has but to review briefly the history of invention to appreciate this truth with vividness and detail. The great variety of the ”applied sciences”