II
There was a time when the world of knowledge and the world of dreams were not separated; when the artist and the scientist, for all practical purposes, saw the “outside world” through the same kind of spectacles.
What we call “science” today was in its primitive state part and parcel of that common stock of knowledge and belief which makes up a community’s literature, or, as Dr. Beattie Crozier would have said, its “Bible.” The departure of science from this main body of literature begins for the Western World, probably, with the death of Plato and the institution of Aristotle’s collections in natural history; and from that point onwards the separate sciences, increasingly isolate themselves from the general body of knowledge, and utilize methods which had been unknown to the earlier philosophers and sages; so that by the time the twentieth century dawns the process of differentiation has been completed, and philosophy, once the compendium of the sciences, has disappeared except as a sort of impalpable, viscous residue.
When Aristotle divided his writing into the exoteric and esoteric groups, into the popular and the scientific, he definitely recognized the existence of two separate branches of literature, two different ways of taking account of the world, two disparate methods of approaching its problems. The first branch was that of the philosophers, the prophets, the poets, and the plain people. Its background was the generality of human experience: its methods were those of discussion and conference: its criteria were those of formal dialectics: its interests were specifically those of the community, and nothing human was foreign to it. With the petrification of Greek thought that followed the collapse of the Alexandrian school, the second branch was slow in coming into its own. As late as the eighteenth century its adherents were called natural philosophers, to distinguish them from the more humane variety; and it is only with the nineteenth century that the subject became universally known as science and its practitioners as scientists.
In the “Phaedrus” Socrates had expressed the humanist outlook of literature by saying: “Trees and fields, you know, cannot teach me anything, but men in the city can.” The shortest way of describing the attitude of science is to say that it resolutely turned its back on men in the city and devoted itself to the trees and fields and stars and the rest of brute nature. If it paid attention to men at all it saw them—if we may abuse an old quotation—as trees walking. Socrates had said: Know thyself. The scientist said: Know the world that lies outside man’s dominion. As science progressed these attitudes became more rigid, unfortunately, and a conflict grew up between literature and science, between the humanities and natural philosophy, which has given both art and science the peculiar twist we shall presently examine.
Now the developments in modern science go back, through the Arabic thinkers, to ancient Greece; but the great advances that have been made date back scarcely three centuries. On the basis of the precise knowledge of physical relations which became available in mathematics, physics, mechanics, and chemistry the startling changes which have been crudely labelled the “industrial revolution” were carried through. If the essential relationship between the world of ideas and the world of action were ever in doubt, the industrial revolution, especially in its later phases, would be a final demonstration; for beneath the ostensible skyscrapers, subways, factories, telephone lines, and sewers of the modern industrial city lie the immaterial foundations of western physical science, laid down stone by stone in the remote, theoretic researches of Boyle, Faraday, Kelvin, Leibniz, and the rest of that great galaxy. With the far reaching effect of the idols of physical science it is hardly necessary to deal. Everyone realizes how dependent the advance in technology has been upon theoretic science, even though the scientist himself, as Kropotkin pointed out, is sometimes slow in admitting the debt of science itself to practical invention. The actual world of machinery is at present, it seems fair to say, a parasite upon this body of knowledge, and it would speedily starve to death if the host were annihilated.
Science has provided the factual data by means of which the industrialist, the inventor, and the engineer have transformed the physical world; and without doubt the physical world has been transformed. Unfortunately, when science has furnished the data its work is at an end: whether one uses the knowledge of chemicals to cure a patient or to poison one’s grandmother is, from the standpoint of science, an extraneous and uninteresting question. So it follows that while science has given us the means of making over the world, the ends to which the world has been made over have had, essentially, nothing to do with science. Accordingly, as I have suggested, the idola of the Country House and Coketown and the National State, which were built up by literature and art, have given the effective direction to these transformations. So far, science has not been used by people who regarded man and his institutions scientifically. The application of the scientific method to man and his institutions has hardly been attempted.
Even when one qualifies this last generalization, its outline remains pretty sharp. The development of what are called the social sciences was dimly outlined in Bacon’s Novum Organon; but it was not till the eighteenth century, with Quesnay and Montesquieu, that the movement gained any real headway, and down to this day a large part of what is called science in Economics, Politics, and Sociology is only disguised literature—work in which the jargon of science is accepted as a substitute for the scientific method of arriving at factual truth, and in which the effort to mold conduct overwhelms the attempt to reach correct conclusions. Indeed, among the economists and sociologists there has been a persistent dribble of discussion as to whether or not their subjects
