For a number of years Langley had published in his Smithsonian Reports the revolutionary papers that foretold the overthrow of nineteenth-century dogma, and among the first was the famous address of Sir William Crookes on psychical research, followed by a series of papers on Roentgen and Curie, which had steadily driven the scientific lawgivers of Unity into the open; but Karl Pearson was the first to pen them up for slaughter in the schools. The phrase is not stronger than that with which the Grammar of Science challenged the fight: “Anything more hopelessly illogical than the statements with regard to Force and Matter current in elementary textbooks of science, it is difficult to imagine,” opened Mr. Pearson, and the responsible author of the “elementary textbook,” as he went on to explain, was Lord Kelvin himself. Pearson shut out of science everything which the nineteenth century had brought into it. He told his scholars that they must put up with a fraction of the universe, and a very small fraction at that—the circle reached by the senses, where sequence could be taken for granted—much as the deep-sea fish takes for granted the circle of light which he generates. “Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.” The assertion, as a broad truth, left one’s mind in some doubt of its bearing, for order and beauty seemed to be associated also in the mind of a crystal, if one’s senses were to be admitted as judge; but the historian had no interest in the universal truth of Pearson’s or Kelvin’s or Newton’s laws; he sought only their relative drift or direction, and Pearson went on to say that these conceptions must stop: “Into the chaos beyond sense-impressions we cannot scientifically project them.” We cannot even infer them: “In the chaos behind sensations, in the ‘beyond’ of sense-impressions, we cannot infer necessity, order or routine, for these are concepts formed by the mind of man on this side of sense-impressions”; but we must infer chaos: “Briefly chaos is all that science can logically assert of the supersensuous.” The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimate chaos. In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous; but since Bacon and Newton, English thought had gone on impatiently protesting that no one must try to know the unknowable at the same time that everyone went on thinking about it. The result was as chaotic as kinetic gas; but with the thought a historian had nothing to do. He sought only its direction. For himself he knew, that, in spite of all the Englishmen that ever lived, he would be forced to enter supersensual chaos if he meant to find out what became of British science—or indeed of any other science. From Pythagoras to Herbert Spencer, everyone had done it, although commonly science had explored an ocean which it preferred to regard as Unity or a Universe, and called Order. Even Hegel, who taught that every notion included its own negation, used the negation only to reach a “larger synthesis,” till he reached the universal which thinks itself, contradiction and all. The Church alone had constantly protested that anarchy was not order, that Satan was not God, that pantheism was worse than atheism, and that Unity could not be proved as a contradiction. Karl Pearson seemed to agree with the Church, but everyone else, including Newton, Darwin and Clerk Maxwell, had sailed gaily into the supersensual, calling it:—
“One God, one Law, one Element,
And one far-off, divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.”
Suddenly, in 1900, science raised its head and denied.
Yet, perhaps, after all, the change had not been so sudden as it seemed. Real and actual, it certainly was, and every newspaper betrayed it, but sequence could scarcely be denied by one who had watched its steady approach, thinking the change far more interesting to history than the thought. When he reflected about it, he recalled that the flow of tide had shown itself at least twenty years before; that it had become marked as early as 1893; and that the man of science must have been sleepy indeed who did not jump from his chair like a scared dog when, in 1898, Mme. Curie threw on his desk the metaphysical bomb she called radium. There remained no hole to hide in. Even metaphysics swept back over science with the green water of the deep-sea ocean and no one could longer hope to bar out the unknowable, for the unknowable was known.
The fact was admitted that the uniformitarians of one’s youth had wound about their universe a tangle of contradictions meant only for
