Finally, we come again to the fatal and fundamental defect of this as of other "explanations"; it is an explanation "within the system," and therefore unphilosophical in so far as it fails to explain the facts through their ultimate or deepest reasons.

A large part of Loeb's book is devoted to a description of the author's remarkable experiments in artificial parthenogenesis, and an attempt to show that they offer a complete explanation. Sir William Tilden, one of the greatest living authorities on organic chemistry, tells us that "too much has been made of the curious observations of J. Loeb and others"; and he definitely states that when we consider "the propagation of the animal races by the sexual process ... there can be no fear of contradiction in the statement that in the whole range of physical and chemical phenomena there is no ground for even a suggestion of an explanation." Behind this pronouncement of an expert, one might well shelter oneself; but the question under consideration merits a little further treatment. The reproduction of kind, though usually a bi-sexual process, may, however, normally in rare cases be uni-sexual, and this process is known as Parthenogenesis. Even in human beings certain tumours of the sex-glands, known as teratomata, very rare in women and even rarer, if ever existent, in men, have been claimed as examples of attempts at parthenogenesis, and so far no better explanation is available.

Now Loeb and others have succeeded in certain forms—even in a vertebrate like the frog—in inducing development in unimpregnated ova. The evidence for all these things is still slender; but we will content ourselves with noting that point and passing on to the consideration of the phenomena and the claims put forward in connection with them. We find the task of unravelling the writer's meaning rendered more difficult by a certain confusion in his use of terms, since fertilisation, i.e. syngamy—the union of the different sex products—seems to be confused with segmentation, i.e. germination; and this confusion is accentuated by the claim that "the main effect of the spermatozoon in inducing the development of the egg consists in an alteration in the surface of the latter which is apparently of the nature of a cytolysis of the cortical layer. Anything that causes this alteration without endangering the rest of the egg may induce its development." When the spermatozoon enters the ovum it causes some alteration in the surface membrane of the latter which, amongst other things, prevents the entrance of further spermatozoa. Loeb thinks that in causing this alteration it sets up the segmentation of the ovum. That there is a close connection between the two events seems undoubted; that they are in relation of cause and effect seems likely. It is quite evident that an artificial stimulus can in certain cases set up segmentation, but never can it cause the fertilisation of the ovum. It may very likely produce the same change in the membrane that is caused by the entrance of the spermatozoon under normal circumstances—membrane formation may be necessarily coincident with the liberation in the egg of some zymose which arises from a pre-existent zymogen. But we are still some way off any assurance that the main object of the spermatozoon in inducing the development of the egg is this surface alteration. It may be the initial effect; very probably it is; but since the main function of the spermatozoon must be the introduction of germplasm from the male parent, it is too much for anyone to ask us to believe that its main function is concerned with surface alteration.

Loeb argues that the change in the surface membrane is of a chemical character, and that no doubt may be correct; but even if we allow him every scientific fact, or surmise, he is still, as in the other cases with which we have dealt, miles away from any real explanation. He is still inside his chemico-physical explanation to begin with; and, even within that, he still leaves us anxious for the explanation of a number of points—for example, as to the nature of the chemical process which accompanies, or is the cause of, segmentation. We in no way press these questions; for similar demands could be made in so many cases; we only indicate that they are there. What we do press is this—that when an authority comes forward to assure us that all the processes of life, including man's highest as well as his lowest attributes, can be explained on chemico-physical lines, we are entitled to ask for a more cogent proof of it than the demonstration, however complete, of the germination of an egg, caused by artificial stimulus and not by the ordinary method of syngamy, even though that germination may lead to the production of a perfect adult form. We are entitled to ask him to make clear to us not only what is happening within his system, but—which is far more important—what that system is, and how it came into existence. We are entitled to ask why the artificial stimulus, or the entry of the spermatozoon, produces the effects which it is claimed to produce instead of any one of some score of other effects which it might conceivably have produced. Above all we are entitled to ask why there are any effects, or even why there is any ovum or any spermatozoon or curious physiological investigator, to give the artificial stimulus. Until some light is thrown upon these things we are still within the system, or merely hovering round its confines, and are far away from any final or philosophical explanation such as would satisfy the mind of the man who wants to get a real and not a partial knowledge of the things around him.

We may now turn to the question of Vitalism. It was long the regnant theory; then temporarily the Cinderella of biology; it is now returning to its early position, though still denied by those of the older school of thought who cannot imagine the kitchen wench of yesterday the ruler of to-day. One of the objections to Vitalism is that this explanation of living things is thought by ignorant writers to be so inextricably mixed up with theological considerations as to furnish a case of stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae. That is, of course, absurd; but it creates an undoubted bias against the theory. Hence it is the fashion amongst its opponents to write of it as "mystical" or, as Loeb does, as "supernatural," probably the most illogical term that could possibly be used. What is Vitalism? It is the theory that there is some other element—call it entelechy with Driesch, or call it what you like—in living things than those elements known to chemistry and physics. If it is not there, cadit quaestio; if it is there it is not "supernatural." It might with reason be called "super-mechanical," or "super-chemical," or "super-physical"; but if it is in Nature, as it is held to be, it is not "supernatural" in any true sense of that word—no dictionary confines the term "Nature" to the operations of chemistry and physics.

A good deal of the misconception existing on this point comes from pure ignorance of philosophy, a subject with which writers of this school seldom have even a nodding acquaintance. "The idea of a quasi-superhuman intelligence presiding over the forces of the living is met with in the field of regeneration." Echoes of the Cartesian idea of the soul seem to ring in this statement; but it could not have been written by anyone who had mastered the Aristotelian or the Scholastic explanation of matter and form. But let us take this question of Regeneration; the power which all living things have, in some measure, though in very different measure, of reconstructing themselves when injured. It has been dealt with in a masterly manner by Driesch; and we may at once say that we do not think that Loeb has in any way contraverted his argument, nor even entered the first line of defence of that which is built up around what he calls by the somewhat forbidding name of "Harmonious-Equipotential System."

Let us take one particular example, a very remarkable one, which has been cited by both writers—Wolff's experiment on the lens of the eye. The lens is just behind the pupil or central aperture in the iris or coloured ring at the front of the eye, and behind the cornea which is to the eye what a watch-glass is to a watch. If the lens of the eye be removed from a newt, as it is from human beings in the operation for cataract, the animal will grow another one. How does it do it? In certain cases a tiny fragment of the lens has been left behind after the operation, and the new one grows from that. This is sufficiently wonderful, but by no means so wonderful as what happens in other cases in which the entire lens has been removed and the new lens grows from the outer pigmented layer of the margin of the iris. To the unbiological reader one source of origin will not seem more wonderful than the other, but there is really a vast distinction between them. At an early stage in the development of the embryo, the cells composing it become divisible into three layers. It is even possible, as Loeb maintains, that this differentiation is present in the unsegmented ovum, in which case the facts to be detailed become still more remarkable and significant. These layers are known as epi-, meso-, and hypo-blast; and from each one of them arise certain portions of the body, and certain portions only. It would be as remarkable to a biologist to find these layers not breeding true as it would to a fowl-fancier to discover that the eggs of his Buff Orpingtons were producing young turkeys or ducks. Now the lens is an epiblastic structure, and the iris is mesoblastic. Hence the wonder with which we are filled when we find the iris growing a lens. Loeb attempts to explain this in the first instance by telling us that the cells of the iris cannot grow and develop as long as they are pigmented; that the operation wounds the iris, allows pigment to escape, and thus permits of proliferation. We may accept this, and yet ask why it takes on a form of growth familiar to us only in connection with epiblast? The reply is: "Young cells when put into the optic cup always become transparent, no matter what their origin; it looks as if this were due to a chemical influence, exercised by the optic cup or by the liquid it contains.

"Lewis has shown that when the optic cup is transplanted into any other place under the epithelium of a larva of a frog the epithelium will always grow into the cup where the latter comes in contact with the epithelium; and that the ingrowing part will always become transparent." A most remarkable and interesting experiment; it has this very important limitation—that it is always epithelium with which it has to do, whereas in Wolff's experiment the regeneration takes place from mesoblastic tissue. The cause of the transparency may be a chemical reaction—it depends a good deal upon our definition of that phrase. Is protoplasm a chemical compound? Some have considered it so, and spoken of its marvellously complicated molecule. Of course it is made up of carbon, hydrogen, and other substances within the domain of chemistry. But is it, therefore, merely a chemical compound? The reply involves the whole riddle of Vitalism. The author would say that it, as well as all the living things to which it belongs, is purely and solely a chemical compound; and he must take the consequences of his belief. One of these consequences, from which doubtless he would not shrink, would be that a super-chemist (so to speak) could write him and his experiments and his book down in a series of chemical formulae—a consequence which takes a good deal of believing. But it also involves him in a belief in the rigidity of chemical reactions; and we are entitled to ask for an explanation of the identical behaviour of the chemical reaction in connection with epiblastic and mesoblastic cells—both pure chemical compounds ex hypothesi and, as far as we can tell from their normal behaviour, widely differing from one another. The optic cup, or its contained fluid, is one chemical compound; epithelium is another; mesoblast is a third. We want an explanation of the identical behaviour of the first with either of the two latter; and this should be borne in mind—that the reaction is not a mere matter of "clearing" of a tissue as the histologist would clear his section by oil-of-cloves or other reagent, but of the construction of a different type of cell—epithelial, not connective tissue.

It certainly follows that there must be some superior, at least widely different, agency at work than one of a purely chemical character—something which transcends chemical operations. This is precisely what the Vitalist claims. No one will fail to award praise to any attempts to explain the phenomena of Nature, whether within or without any system. Loeb's book sets out to do a great deal more—to explain what it does not explain—the Organism as a Whole, and thus to give a philosophical explanation of man. It even claims to afford hints for a rule for his life, at least so we gather from the Preface, where, alluding to "that group of freethinkers, including d'Alembert, Diderot, Holbach and Voltaire," the author tells us that they "first dared to follow the consequences of a mechanistic science—incomplete as it then was—to the rules of human conduct, and thereby laid the foundation of that spirit of tolerance, justice, and gentleness which was the hope of our civilisation until it was buried under the wave of homicidal emotion which has swept through the world." On which it is surely reasonable to ask how a chemical reaction can learn so to alter itself as to exhibit "tolerance, justice, and gentleness," attributes which it had not previously possessed? Such claims of this and other writers, who would find in the laws of Nature as formulated to-day (forgetful that their formulae may to-morrow be cast into the furnace) a rule of life as well as a full explanation of the cosmos, resemble in their lack of base an inverted pyramid.



IV. SCIENCE IN "BONDAGE"

Amongst the numerous taunts which are cast at the Catholic Church there is none more frequently employed, nor, it may be added, more generally believed, nor more injurious to her reputation amongst outsiders—even with her own less-instructed children themselves at times—than the allegation which declares that where the Church has full sway, science cannot flourish, can scarcely in fact exist, and that the Church will only permit men of science to study and to teach as and while she permits.

To give but one example of this attitude towards the Church, readers may be reminded that Huxley[23] called the Catholic Church "the vigorous enemy of the highest life of mankind," and rejoiced that evolution, "in addition to its truth, has the great merit of being in a position of irreconcilable antagonism to it." An utterly incorrect, even ignorant statement, by the way—but let that pass. The same writer, in a number of places, in season and out of season, as we may fairly say,[24] proclaims his wholly erroneous view that there is "a necessary antagonism between science and Roman Catholic doctrine." We need not labour this point. It is sufficiently obvious, nor does it need any catena of authorities to establish the fact, that outside the Church, and even, as we have hinted above, amongst the less-instructed of her own children, there is a prevalent idea that the allegation with which this paper proposes to deal is a true bill.

Those who give credit to the allegation must of course ignore certain very patent facts which are, it will be allowed, a little difficult to get over. They must commence by ignoring the historical fact that the greater number—almost all indeed—of the older Universities, places specially intended to foster and increase knowledge and research, owe their origin to Papal bulls. They must ignore the fact that vast numbers of scientific researches, often of fundamental importance, especially perhaps in the subjects of anatomy and physiology, emanated from learned men attached to seats of learning in Rome, and this during the Middle Ages, and that the learned men who were their authors quite frequently held official positions in the Papal Court. They must finally ignore the fact that a large number of the most distinguished scientific workers and discoverers in the past were also devout children of the Catholic Church. Stensen, "the Father of Geology" and a great anatomical discoverer as well, was a bishop; Mendel, whose name is so often heard nowadays in biological controversies, was an abbot. And what about Galvani, Volta, Pasteur, Schwann (the originator of the Cell Theory), van Beneden, Johannes Mueller, admitted by Huxley to be "the greatest anatomist and physiologist among my contemporaries"?[25] What about Kircher, Spallanzani, Secchi, de Lapparent, to take the names of persons of different historical periods, and connected with different subjects, yet all united in the bond of the Faith? To point to these men—and a host of other names might be cited—is to overthrow at once and finally the edifice of falsehood reared by enemies of the Church, who, before erecting it, might reasonably have been asked to look to the security of their foundations.

Still there is the edifice, and as every edifice must rest on some kind of foundation or another, even if that foundation be nothing but sand, it may be useful and interesting to inquire, as I now propose to do, what foundation there is—if in fact there is any—for this particular allegation.

We might commence by interrogating the persons who make it. The probability is that the reply which would at once be drawn from most of them would amount to this: "Everybody knows it to be true." If the interrogated person is amongst those less imperfectly informed we shall probably be referred to Huxley or to some other writer. Or we may even find ourselves confronted with that greater knowledge—or less inspissated ignorance—which babbles about Galileo, the Inquisition, the Index, and the imprimatur.

Galileo and his case we shall consider later on, for he and it are really germane to the question with which we are dealing. The Inquisition has really nothing to do with the matter. The Index we also reserve for a later part of this essay. With the imprimatur we may now deal, since there is no doubt that there is a genuine misunderstanding on this subject on the part of some people who are misled perhaps through ignorance of Latin and quite certainly through ignorance of what the whole matter amounts to. Let us begin by reminding ourselves that, though the unchanging Church is now, so far as I am aware, the only body which issues an imprimatur, there were other instances of the exercise of such a privilege even in recent or comparatively recent days. There were Royal licences to print with which we need not concern ourselves. But, what is important, there was a time when the scientific authority of the day assumed the right of issuing an imprimatur. I take the first book which occurs to me, Tyson's Anatomie of a Pygmie, and for the sake of those who are not acquainted with it, I may add that this book is not only the foundation-stone of Comparative Anatomy, but also, through its appendix A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs, and Sphinges of the Ancients, the foundation-stone of all folk-lore study. On the page fronting the title of this work the following appears:

17 Die Maij, 1699.

Imprimatur Liber cui Titulus, Orang-Outang sive Homo Sylvestris, etc. Authore Edvardo Tyson, M.D., R.S.S.

John Hoskins, V.P.R.S.

What does this mean? In the first place it shows, what all instructed persons know, that the Royal Society did then exercise the privilege of giving an imprimatur at any rate to books written by its own Fellows. It cannot be supposed that such imprimatur guaranteed the accuracy of all the statements made by Tyson, for we may feel sure that John Hoskins was quite unable to give any such assurance. We must assume that it meant that there was nothing in the book which would reflect discredit upon the Society of which Tyson was a Fellow and from which the imprimatur was obtained.

However this may be, the sway over its Fellows' publications was exercised, and indeed very excellent arguments might be adduced for the reassumption of such a sway even to-day.[26]

Though the imprimatur in question has fallen into desuetude, it is, as we all know, the commonest of things for the introductions to works of science to occupy some often considerable part of their space with acknowledgments of assistance given by learned friends who have read the manuscript or the proofs and made suggestions with the object of improving the book or adding to its accuracy. Any person who has written a book can feel nothing but gratitude towards those who have helped him to avoid the errors and slips to which even the most careful are subject.

So that such acknowledgments of assistance have come to be almost what the lawyers call "common form." What they really amount to is a proclamation on the part of the author that he has done his best to ensure that his book is free from mistakes. Now the imprimatur really amounts to the same thing, for it is, of course, confined to books or parts of books where theology or philosophy trenching upon theology is concerned. Thus a book may deal largely, perhaps mainly, with scientific points, yet necessarily include allusions to theological dogmas. The imprimatur to such a book would relate solely and entirely to the theological parts, just as the advice of an architectural authority on a point connected with that subject in a work in which it was mentioned only in an incidental manner, would refer to that point, and to nothing else. Perhaps it should be added, that no author is obliged to obtain an imprimatur any more than he is compelled to seek advice on any other point in connection with his book. "Nihil Obstat," says the skilled referee: "I see no reason to suppose that there is anything in all this which contravenes theological principles." To which the authority appealed to adds "imprimatur:" "Then by all means let it be printed." The procedure is no doubt somewhat more stately and formal than the modern system of acknowledgments, yet in actual practice there is but little to differentiate the two methods of ensuring, so far as is possible, that the work is free from mistakes. That neither the assistance of friends nor the imprimatur of authorities is infallible is proved by the facts that mistakes do creep into works of science, however carefully examined, and that more than one book with an imprimatur has, none the less, found its way on to the Index. Before leaving this branch of the subject one cannot refrain from calling attention to another point. How often in advertisements of books do we not see quotations from reviews in authoritative journals—a medical work from the Lancet, a physical or chemical from Nature? Frequently too we see "Mr. So-and-So, the well-known authority on the subject, says of this book, etc., etc." What are all these authoritative commendations but an imprimatur up to date?

Passing from the imprimatur to a closer consideration of our subject, it is above all things necessary to take the advice of Samuel Johnson and clear our minds of cant. Every person in this world—save perhaps a Robinson Crusoe on an otherwise uninhabited island, and he only because of his solitary condition—is in bondage more or less to others; that is to say, has his freedom more or less interfered with. That this interference is in the interests of the community and so, in the last analysis, in the interests of the person interfered with himself, in no way weakens the argument; it is rather a potent adjuvant to it. However much I may dislike him and however anxious I may be to injure him, I may not go out and set fire to my neighbour's house nor to his rick-yard, unless I am prepared to risk the serious legal penalties which will be my lot if I am detected in the act. I may not, if I am a small and active boy, make a slide in the public street in frosty weather, unless I am prepared—as the small boy usually is—to run the gauntlet of the police. In a thousand ways my freedom, or what I call my freedom, is interfered with: it is the price which I pay for being one item of a social organism and for being in turn protected against others, who, in virtue of that protection, are in their turn deprived of what they might call their liberty.

No one can have failed to observe that this interference with personal liberty becomes greater day by day. It is a tendency of modern governments, based presumably upon increased experience, to increase these protective regulations. Thus we have laws against adulteration of food, against the placing of buildings concerned with obnoxious trades in positions where people will be inconvenienced by them. We make persons suffering from infectious diseases isolate themselves, and if they cannot do this at home, we make them go to the fever hospital. Further, we insist upon the doctor, whose position resembles that of a confessor, breaking his obligation of professional secrecy and informing the authorities as to the illness of his patient. We interfere with the liberty of men and women to work as long as they like or to make their children labour for excessive hours. We insist upon dangerous machinery being fenced in. In a thousand ways we—the State—interfere with the liberty of our fellows. Finally, when the needs of the community are most pressing we interfere most with the freedom of the subject. Thus, in these islands, we were recently living under a Defence of the Realm Act—with which no reasonable person quarrelled. Yet it forbad many things not only harmless in themselves but habitually permitted in times of peace. We were subject to penalties if we showed lighted windows: they must be shuttered or provided with heavy curtains. We might not travel in railway carriages at night with the blinds undrawn. The papers might not publish, nor we say in public, things which in time of peace would go unnoticed. There were a host of other matters to which allusion need not be made. Enough has been said to show that the State has and exerts the right to control the actions of those who belong to it, and that in time of stress it can and does very greatly intensify that control and does so without arousing any real or widespread discontent. Of course we all grumble, but then everybody, except its own members, always does more or less grumble at anything done by any government: that is the ordinary state of affairs. But at any rate we submit ourselves, more or less gracefully, to this restraint because we persuade ourselves or are persuaded that it is for the good of the State and thus for the good of ourselves, both as private individuals and as members of the State.

And many of us, at any rate, comfort ourselves with the thought that a great many of the regulations which appear to be most tyrannical and most to interfere with the natural liberty of mankind are devised not with that end in view but with the righteous intention of protecting those weaker members of the body who are unable to protect themselves. If the State does not stand by such members and offer itself as their shield and support, it has no claim to our obedience, no real right to exist, and so we put up with the inconvenience, should such arise, on account of the protection given to the weaker members and often extended to those who would by no means feel pleased if they heard themselves thus described.

Let us substitute the Church for the State and let us remember that there are times when she is at closer grips with the powers of evil than may be the case at other times. The parallel is surely sufficiently close.

So far as earthly laws can control one, no one is obliged to be a member of the Catholic Church nor a citizen of the British Empire. I can, if I choose, emigrate to America, in process of time naturalise myself there and join the Christian Science organisation or any other body to which I find myself attracted. But as long as I remain a Catholic and a British citizen I must submit myself to the restrictions imposed by the bodies with which I have elected to connect myself. We arrive at the conclusion then that the ordinary citizen, even if he never adverts to the fact, is in reality controlled and his liberty limited in all sorts of directions.

Now the scientific man, in his own work, is subject to all sorts of limitations, apart altogether from the limitations to which, as an ordinary member of the State, he has to submit himself.

He is restricted by science: he is not completely free but is bound by knowledge—the knowledge which he or others have acquired.

To say he is limited by it is not to say that he is imprisoned by it or in bondage to it. "One does not lose one's intellectual liberty when one learns mathematics," says the late Monsignor Benson in one of his letters, "though one certainly loses the liberty of doing sums wrong or doing them by laborious methods!"

Before setting out upon any research, the careful man of science sets himself to study "the literature of the subject" as he calls it. He delves into all sorts of out-of-the-way periodicals to ascertain what such a man has written upon such a point. All this he does in order that he may avoid doing a piece of work over again unnecessarily: unnecessarily, for it maybe actually necessary to repeat it, if it is of very great importance and if it has not been repeated and verified by other observers. Further, he delves into this literature because it is thus that he hopes to avoid the many blind alleys which branch off from every path of research, delude their explorer with vain hopes and finally bring him face to face with a blank wall. In a word the inquirer consults his authorities and when he finds them worthy of reliance, he limits his freedom by paying attention to them. He does not say: "How am I held in bondage by this assertion that the earth goes round the sun," but accepting that fact, he rejects such of his conclusions as are obviously irreconcilable with it. Surely this is plain common sense and the man who acted otherwise would be setting himself a quite impossible task. It is the weakness of the "heuristic method" that it sets its pupils to find out things which many abler men have spent years in investigating. The man who sets out to make a research, without first ascertaining what others have done in that direction, proposes to accumulate in himself the abilities and the life-work of all previous generations of labourers in that corner of the scientific vineyard.

There is a somewhat amusing and certainly interesting instance of this which will bear quotation. The late Mr. Grant Allen, who knew something of quite a number of subjects though perhaps not very much about any of them, devoted most of his time and energies (outside his stories, some of which are quite entertaining) to not always very accurate essays in natural history. One day, however, his evil genius prompted him to write and, worse still, to publish a book entitled Force and Energy: A Theory of Dynamics, in which he purported to deal with a matter of which he knew far less even than he did about animated nature. Mark the inevitable result! A copy of the book was forwarded to the journal Nature, and sent by its editor to be dealt with by the competent hands of Sir Oliver (then Professor) Lodge.[27]

This is how that eminent authority dealt with it. "There exists a certain class of mind," he commences, "allied perhaps to the Greek sophist variety, to which ignorance of a subject offers no sufficient obstacle to the composition of a treatise upon it." It may be rash to suggest that this type of mind is well developed in philosophers of the Spencerian school, though it would be possible to adduce some evidence in support of such a suggestion. "In the volume before us," he continues, "Mr. Grant Allen sets to work to reconstruct the fundamental science of dynamics, an edifice which, since the time of Galileo and Newton, has been standing on what has seemed a fairly secure and substantial basis, but which he seems to think it is now time to demolish in order to make room for a newly excogitated theory. The attempt is audacious and the result—what might have been expected. The performance lends itself indeed to the most scathing criticism; blunders and misstatements abound on nearly every page, and the whole thing is simply an emanation of mental fog." It would occupy too much space to reproduce this criticism with any fullness, but one or two points exceedingly germane to our subject can hardly go without notice. Alluding to a certain question, which seems to have greatly bothered Mr. Allen and likewise Mr. Clodd, who, it would appear, was associated with him in this performance, the reviewer says: "The puzzle was solved completely long ago, in the clearest possible manner, and the 'Principia' is the witness to it; but it is still felt to be a difficulty by beginners, and I suppose there is no offence in applying this harmless epithet to both Mr. Grant Allen and Mr. Clodd, so far as the truths of dynamics and physics are concerned." One last quotation: "The thing which strikes one most forcibly about the physics of these paper philosophers is the extraordinary contempt which, if they are consistent, they must or ought to feel for men of science. If Newton, Lagrange, Gauss, and Thompson, to say nothing of smaller men, have muddled away their brains in concocting a scheme of dynamics wherein the very definitions are all wrong; if they have arrived at a law of conservation of energy without knowing what the word energy means, or how to define it; if they have to be set right by an amateur who has devoted a few weeks or months to the subject and acquired a rude smattering of some of its terms, 'what intolerable fools they must all be!'" Such is the result of asserting one's freedom by escaping the limitations of knowledge! We see what happens when a person sets out to deal with science untrammelled by any considerations as to what others have thought and established. The necessary result is that he plunges headforemost into all or most of the errors which were pitfalls to the first labourers in the field. Or, again, he painfully and uselessly pursues the blind alleys which they had wandered in, and from which a perusal of their works would have warned off later comers.

Oh, irony of fate! the same thing precisely happens when men of scientific eminence indulge in religious dissertations, for of course, though it is not quite so obvious to such writers, the same blunder is quite possible in non-scientific fields of knowledge. I once asked one versed in theology what he thought of the religious articles of a distinguished man, unfamiliar himself with theology, yet, none the less, then splashing freely and to the great admiration of the ignorant, in the theological pool. His reply was that in so far as they were at all constructive, they consisted mostly of exploded heresies of the first century. Is not this precisely what one would have expected a priori? A man commencing to write on science or religion who neglects the work of earlier writers places himself in the position of the first students of the subject and very naturally will make the same mistakes as they made. He refuses to be hampered and biased by knowledge, and the result follows quite inevitably. "A scientist," says Monsignor Benson, "is hampered and biased by knowing the earth goes round the sun." The fact of the matter is that the man of science is not a solitary figure, a chimaera bombinans in vacuo. In whatever direction he looks he is faced by the figures of other workers and he is limited and "hampered" by their work. Nor are these workers all of them in his own area of country, for the biologist, for example, cannot afford to neglect the doings of the chemist; if he does he is bound to find himself led into mistakes. No doubt the scientific man is at times needlessly hampered by theories which he and others at the time take to be fairly well established facts, but which after all turn out to be nothing of the kind. This in no way weakens the argument, but rather by giving an additional reason for caution, strengthens it.

If we carefully consider the matter we shall be unable to come to any other conclusion than that every writer, even of the wildest form of fiction, is in some way and to some extent hampered and limited by knowledge, by facts, by things as they are or as they appear to be. That will be admitted; but it will be urged that the hampering and limiting with which we have been dealing is not merely legitimate but inevitable, whereas the hampering and limiting—should such there be—on the part of the Church is wholly illegitimate and indefensible.

"All that you say is no doubt true," our antagonist will urge, "but you have still to show that your Church has any right or title to interfere in these matters. And even if you can make some sort of case for her interference, you have still to disprove what so many people believe, namely, that the right, real or assumed, has not been arbitrarily used to the damage, or at least to the delay of scientific progress. Chemistry," we may suppose our antagonist continuing, "no doubt has a legitimate right to have its say, even to interfere and that imperatively, where chemical considerations invade the field of biology, for example. But what similar right does religion possess? For instance," he might proceed, "some few years ago a distinguished physiologist, then occupying the Chair of the British Association, invoked the behaviour of certain chemical substances known as colloids in favour of his anti-vitalistic conclusions. At once he was answered by a number of equally eminent chemists that the attitude he had adopted was quite incompatible with facts as known to them; in a word, that chemistry disagreed with his ideas as to colloids. Everybody admitted that the chemists must have the final word on this subject: are you now claiming that religion or theology, or whatever you choose to call it, is also entitled to a say in a matter of that kind?" This supposititious conversation illustrates the confusion which exists in many minds as to the point at issue. One science is entitled to contradict another, just as one scientific man is entitled to contradict another on a question of fact. But on a question of fact a theologian is not entitled—qua theologian—nor would he be expected to claim to be entitled, to contradict a man of science.

It ought to be widely known, though it is not, that the idea that theologians can or wish to intrude—again qua theologians—in scientific disputes as to chemical, biological, or other facts, is a fantastic idea without real foundation save that of the one mistake of the kind made in the case of Galileo and never repeated—a mistake, let us hasten to add, made by a disciplinary authority and—as all parties admit—in no way involving questions of infallibility. To this case we will revert shortly. Meanwhile it may be briefly stated that the claim made by the Church is in connection with some few—some very few—of the theories which men of science build up upon the facts which they have brought to light. Some of these theories do appear to contradict theological dogmas, or at least may seem to simple people to be incompatible with such dogmas, just as the people of his time—Protestants by the way, no less than Catholics—did really think that Galileo's theory conflicted with Holy Writ. In such cases, and in such cases alone, the Church holds that she has at least the right to say that such a theory should not be proclaimed to be true until there is sufficient proof for it to satisfy the scientific world that the point has been demonstrated.

This is really what is meant by the tyranny of the Church; and it may now be useful to consider briefly what can be said for her position. We must begin by looking at the matter from the Church's standpoint. It is a good rule to endeavour to understand your opponent's position before you try to confute him; an excellent rule seldom complied with by anti-Catholic controversialists. Now the Church starts with the proposition that man has an immortal soul destined to eternal happiness or eternal misery, and she proceeds to claim that she has been divinely constituted to help man to enjoy a future of happiness. Of course these are opinions which all do not share, and with the arguments for and against which we cannot here deal. If a man is quite sure that he has no soul and that there is no hereafter there is nothing more to be said than: "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Nothing very much matters in this world except that we should make ourselves as comfortable as we can during the few years we have to spend in it.

Again, there are others who, whilst believing the first doctrine set down above, will have none of the other. With them we enter into no argument here, and only say that to have a guide is better than to have no guide. Catholics, who accept gratefully her guidance, do believe that the Church can help a man to save his soul, and that she is entrusted, to that end, with certain powers. Her duty is to preserve and guard the Christian Revelation—the scheme of doctrine regarding belief and conduct by which Jesus Christ taught that souls were to be saved. She is not an arbitrary ruler. Her office is primarily that of Judge and Interpreter of the deposit of doctrine entrusted to her.

In this she claims to be safeguarded against error, though her infallible utterances would seem incredibly few, if summed up and presented to the more ignorant of her critics. She also claims to derive from her Founder legislative power by which she can make decrees, unmake them or modify and vary them to suit different times and circumstances. She rightfully claims the obedience of her children to this exercise of her authority, but such disciplinary enactments, by their very nature variable and modifiable, do not and cannot come within the province of her infallibility, and admittedly they need not be always perfectly wise or judicious. Such disciplinary utterances, it may be added, at least in the field of which we are treating, indeed in any field, are also incredibly few when due regard is had to the enormous number of cases passing under the Church's observation.

We saw just now that the State exercised a very large jurisdiction for the purpose of protecting the weak who were unable or little able to protect themselves. It is really important to remember, when we are considering the powers of the Church and her exercise of them, that these disciplinary powers are put in operation, not from mere arrogance or an arbitrary love of domination—as too many suppose—but with the primary intention of protecting and helping the weaker members of the flock. If the Church consisted entirely of theological experts a good deal of this exercise of disciplinary power might very likely be regarded as wholly unnecessary. Thus the Church freely concedes not only to priests and theologians, but to other persons adequately instructed in her teaching, full permission to read books which she has placed on her black list or Index—from which, in other words, she has warned off the weaker members of the flock.

The net of Peter, however, as all very well know, contains a very great variety of fish, and—to vary the metaphor—to the fisherman was given charge not only of the sheep—foolish enough, heaven knows!—but also of the still more helpless lambs. Thus it becomes the duty and the privilege of the successors of the fisherman to protect the sheep and the lambs, and not merely to protect them from wild beasts who may try to do harm from without, but quite as much from the wild rams of the flock who are capable of doing a great deal of injury from within. In one of his letters, from which quotation has already been made, the late Monsignor Benson sums up, in homely, but vivid language, the point with which we have just been dealing. "Here are the lambs of Christ's flock," he writes: "Is a stout old ram to upset and confuse them when he needn't ... even though he is right? The flock must be led gently and turned in a great curve. We can't all whip round in an instant. We are tired and discouraged and some of us are exceedingly stupid and obstinate. Very well; then the rams can't be allowed to make brilliant excursions in all directions and upset us all. We shall get there some day, if we are treated patiently. We are Christ's lambs after all."

The protection of the weak: surely, if it be deemed both just and wise on the part of the civil government to protect its subjects by legislation in regard to adulterated goods, contagious diseases, unhealthy workshops and dangerous machinery, why may not the Church safeguard her children, especially her weaker children, the special object of her care and solicitude, from noxious intellectual foods?

It is just here that the question of the Index arises. Put briefly, this is a list of books which are not to be read by Catholics unless they have permission to read them—a permission which, as we have just seen, is never refused when any good reason can be given for the request. I can understand the kind of person who says: "Exactly, locking up the truth; why not let everybody read just what they like?" To which I would reply that every careful parent has an Index Prohibitorius for his household; or ought to have one if he has not. I once knew a woman who allowed her daughter to plunge into Nana and other works of that character as soon as she could summon up enough knowledge of French to fathom their meaning. The daughter grew up and the result has not been encouraging to educationists thinking of proceeding on similar lines. The State also has its Index Prohibitorius and will not permit indecent books nor indecent pictures to be sold. Enough: let us again clear our minds of cant. There is a limit with regard to publications in every decent State and every decent house: it is only a question where the line is drawn. It is obvious that the Church must be permitted at least as much privilege in this matter as is claimed by every respectable father of a family.

We need not pursue the question of the Index any further, but before we leave it let us for a moment turn to another accusation levelled against Catholic men of science by anti-Catholic writers, that of concealing their real opinions on scientific matters, and even of professing views which they do not really hold, out of a craven fear of ecclesiastical denunciations. The attitude which permits of such an accusation is hardly courteous, but, stripped of its verbiage, that is the accusation as it is made. Now, as there are usually at least some smouldering embers of fire where there is smoke, there is just one small item of truth behind all this pother. No Catholic, scientific man or otherwise, who really honours his Faith would desire wilfully to advance theories apparently hostile to its teaching. Further, even if he were convinced of the truth of facts which might appear—it could only be "appear"—to conflict with that teaching, he would, in expounding them, either show how they could be harmonised with his religion, or, if he were wise, would treat his facts from a severely scientific point of view and leave other considerations to the theologians trained in directions almost invariably unexplored by scientific men. Perhaps the memory of old, far-off, unhappy events should not be recalled, but it is pertinent to remark that the troubles in connection with a man whose name once stood for all that was stalwart in Catholicism, did not originate in, nor were they connected with, any of the scientific books and papers of which the late Professor Mivart was the author, but with those theological essays which all his friends must regret that he should ever have written.

It may not be waste of time briefly to consider two of the instances commonly brought up as examples when the allegation with which we are dealing is under consideration.

First of all let us consider the case of Gabriel Fallopius, who lived—it is very important to note the date—1523-1562; a Catholic and a churchman. Now it is gravely asserted that Fallopius committed himself to misleading views, views which he knew to be misleading, because he thought that he was thereby serving the interest of the Church. What he said concerned fossils, then beginning to puzzle the scientific world of the day. Confronted with these objects and living, as he did, in an unscientific age, when the seven days of creation were interpreted as periods of twenty-four hours each and the universality of the Noachian deluge was accepted by everybody, it would have been something like a miracle if he had at once fathomed the true meaning of the shark's teeth, elephant's bones, and other fossil remains which came under his notice. His idea was that all these things were mere concretions "generated by fermentation in the spots where they were found," as he very quaintly and even absurdly put it. The accusation, however, is not that Fallopius made a mistake—as many another man has done—but that he deliberately expressed an opinion which he did not hold and did so from religious motives. Of course, this includes the idea that he knew what the real explanation was, for had he not known it, he could not have been guilty of making a false statement. There is no evidence whatever that Fallopius ever had so much as a suspicion of the real explanation, nor, it may be added, had any other man of science for the century which followed his death.

Then there arose another Catholic churchman, Nicolaus Stensen (1631-1686), who, by the way, ended his days as a bishop, who did solve the riddle, giving the answer which we accept to-day as correct, and on whom was conferred by his brethren two hundred years later the title of "The Father of Geology." It is a little difficult to understand how the "unchanging Church" should have welcomed, or at least in no way objected to, Stensen's views when the mere entertainment of them by Fallopius is supposed to have terrified him into silence. But when the story of Fallopius is mistold, as indicated above, it need hardly be said that the story of Stensen is never so much as alluded to.

The real facts of the case are these: Fallopius was one of the most distinguished men of science of his day. Every medical student becomes acquainted with his name because it is attached to two parts of the human body which he first described. He made a mistake about fossils, and that is the plain truth—as we now know, a most absurd mistake, but that is all. As we hinted above, he is very far from being the only scientific man who has made a mistake. Huxley had a very bad fall over Bathybius and was man enough to admit that he was wrong. Curiously enough, what Huxley thought a living thing really was a concretion, just as what Fallopius thought a concretion had been a living thing.

Another extremely curious fact is that another distinguished man of science, who lived three hundred years later than Fallopius and had all the knowledge which had accumulated during that prolific period to assist him, the late Philip Gosse, fell into the same pit as Fallopius. As his son tells us, he wrote a book to prove that when the sudden act of creation took place the world came into existence so constructed as to bear the appearance of a place which had for aeons been inhabited by living things, or, as some of his critics unkindly put it, "that God hid the fossils in the rocks in order to tempt geologists into infidelity." Gosse had the real answer under his eyes which Fallopius had not, for the riddle was unread in the latter's days. Yet Gosse's really unpardonable mistake was attributed to himself alone, and "Plymouth Brethrenism," which was the sect to which he belonged, was not saddled with it, nor have the Brethren been called obscurantists because of it.

Of course there is a second string to the accusation we are dealing with. If the scientific man did really express new and perhaps startling opinions, they would have been much newer and much more startling had he not held himself in for fear of the Church and said only about half of what he might have said. It is the half instead of the whole loaf of the former accusation. Thus, in its notice of Stensen, the current issue of the Encyclopaedia Britannica says: "Cautiously at first, for fear of offending orthodox opinion, but afterwards more boldly, he proclaimed his opinion that these objects (viz. fossils) had once been parts of living animals."

One may feel quite certain that if Stensen had not been a Catholic ecclesiastic this notice would have run—and far more truthfully—"Cautiously at first, until he felt that the facts at his disposal made his position quite secure, and then more boldly, etc. etc."

What in the ordinary man of science is caution, becomes cowardice in the Catholic. We shall find another example of this in the case of Buffon (1707-1788) often cited as that of a man who believed all that Darwin believed and one hundred years before Darwin, and who yet was afraid to say it because of the Church to which he belonged. This mistake is partly due to that lamentable ignorance of Catholic teaching, not to say that lamentable incapacity for clear thinking, on these matters, which afflicts some non-Catholic writers. Let us take an example from an eminently fairly written book, in which, dealing with Buffon, the author says: "I cannot agree with those who think that Buffon was an out-and-out evolutionist, who concealed his opinions for fear of the Church. No doubt he did trim his sails—the palpably insincere Mais non, il est certain par la revelation que tous les animaux ont egalement participe a la grace de la creation, following hard upon the too bold hypothesis of the origin of all species from a single one, is proof of it." Of course it is nothing of the kind, for, whatever Buffon may have meant, and none but himself could tell us, it is perfectly clear that whether creation was mediate (as under transformism considered from a Christian point of view it would be) or immediate, every created thing would participate in the grace of creation, which is just the point which the writer from whom the quotation has been made has missed.

The same writer furnishes us with the real explanation of Buffon's attitude when he says that Buffon was "too sane and matter-of-fact a thinker to go much beyond his facts, and his evolution doctrine remained always tentative." Buffon, like many another man, from St. Augustine down to his own times, considered the transformist explanation of living nature. He saw that it unified and simplified the conceptions of species and that there were certain facts which seemed strongly to support it. But he does not seem to have thought that they were sufficient to establish it and he puts forward his views in the tentative manner which has just been suggested.

The fact is that those who father the accusations with which we have been dealing either do not know, or scrupulously conceal their knowledge, that what they proclaim to be scientific cowardice is really scientific caution, a thing to be lauded and not to be decried.

Let us turn to apply the considerations with which we have been concerned to the case of Galileo, to which generally misunderstood affair we must very briefly allude, since it is the standby of anti-Catholic controversialists. Monsignor Benson, in connection with the quotation recently cited, proclaimed himself "a violent defender of the Cardinals against Galileo." Perhaps no one will be surprised at his attitude, but those who are not familiar with his Life and Letters will certainly be surprised to learn that Huxley, after examining into the question, "arrived at the conclusion that the Pope and the College of Cardinals had rather the best of it."[28]

None the less it is the stock argument. Father Hull, S. J., whose admirable, outspoken, and impartial study of the case[29] should be on everybody's bookshelves, freely admits that the Roman Congregations made a mistake in this matter and thus takes up a less favourable position towards them than even the violently anti-Catholic Huxley.

No one will deny that the action of the Congregation was due to a desire to prevent simple persons from having their faith upset by a theory which seemed at the time to contradict the teaching of the Bible. Remember that it was only a theory and that, when it was put forward, and indeed for many years afterwards, it was not only a theory, but one supported by no sufficient evidence. It was not in fact until many years after Galileo's death that final and convincing evidence as to the accuracy of his views was laid before the scientific world. There can be but little doubt that if Galileo had been content to discuss his theory with other men of science, and not to lay it down as a matter of proved fact—which, as we have seen, it was not—he would never have been condemned. Whilst we may admit, with Father Hull, that a mistake was made in this case, we may urge, with Cardinal Newman, that it is the only case in which such a thing has happened—surely a remarkable fact. It is not for want of opportunities. Father Hull very properly cites various cases where a like difficulty might possibly have arisen, but where, as a matter of fact, it has not. For example, the geographical universality of the Deluge was at one time, and that not so very long ago, believed to be asserted by the Bible; while, on the other hand, geologists seemed to be able to show, and in the event did show, that such a view was scientifically untenable. The attention of theologians having been called to this matter, and a further study made of passages which until then had probably attracted but little notice, and quite certainly had never been considered from the new point of view, it became obvious that the meaning which had been attached to the passages in question was not the necessary meaning, but on the contrary, a strained interpretation of the words. No public fuss having arisen about this particular difficulty, the whole matter was gradually and quietly disposed of. As Father Hull says, "the new view gradually filtered down from learned circles to the man in the street, so that nowadays the partiality of the Deluge is a matter of commonplace knowledge among all educated Christians, and is even taught to the rising generation in elementary schools."

In accordance with the wise provisions of the Encyclical Providentissimus Deus, with which all educated Catholics should make themselves familiar, conflicts have been avoided on this, and on other points, such as the general theory of evolution and the various problems connected with it; the antiquity of man upon the earth and other matters as to which science is still uncertain. Some of these points might seem to conflict with the Bible and the teachings of the Church. As Catholics we can rest assured that the true explanation, whenever it emerges, cannot be opposed to the considered teaching of the Church. What the Church does—and surely it must be clear that from her standpoint she could not do less—is to instruct Catholic men of science not to proclaim as proved facts such modern theories—and there are many of them—as still remain wholly unproved, when these theories are such as might seem to conflict with the teaching of the Church. This is very far from saying that Catholics are forbidden to study such theories.

On the contrary, they are encouraged to do so, and that, need it be said, with the one idea of ascertaining the truth? Men of science, Catholic and otherwise, have, as a mere matter of fact, been time and again encouraged by Popes and other ecclesiastical authorities to go on searching for the truth, never, however, neglecting the wise maxim that all things must be proved. So long as a theory is unproved, it must be candidly admitted that it is a crime against science to proclaim it to be incontrovertible truth, yet this crime is being committed every day. It is really against it that the magisterium of the Church is exercised. The wholesome discipline which she exercises might also be exercised to the great benefit of the ordinary reading public by some central scientific authority, can such be imagined, endowed with the right to say (and in any way likely to be listened to): "Such and such a statement is interesting—even extremely interesting—but so far one must admit that no sufficient proof is forthcoming to establish it as a fact: it ought not, therefore, to be spoken of as other than a theory, nor proclaimed as fact."

Such constraint when rightly regarded is not or would not be a shackling of the human intellect, but a kindly and intelligent guidance of those unable to form a proper conclusion themselves. Such is the idea of the Church in the matter with which we have been dealing.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 23: Darwiniana, p. 147.]

[Footnote 24: See, for example, his Life and Letters, i., 307.]

[Footnote 25: Hume, English Men of Letters Series, p. 135.]

[Footnote 26: Of course, it may be argued, no Fellow need have applied for an imprimatur; he did it ex majori cantela as the lawyers say. This may be so, but the same applies to the ecclesiastical imprimatur.]

[Footnote 27: The review from which the following quotations are made appeared in Nature on January 24, 1889.]

[Footnote 28: Vol. ii., p. 113.]

[Footnote 29: Galileo and His Condemnation, Catholic Truth Society of England.]



V. SCIENCE AND THE WAR

Amongst various important matters now brought to a sharper focus in the public eye, few, if any, require more careful attention than that which is concerned with science, its value, its position, its teachings, and how it should be taught. No one who has followed the domestic difficulties due to our neglect of the warnings of scientific men can fail to see how we have had to suffer because of the lax conduct of those responsible for these things in the past.

Within the first few weeks after the war broke out—to take one example—every medical man was the recipient of a document telling him of the expected shortage in a number of important drugs and suggesting the substitutes which he might employ. It was a timely warning; but it need never have been issued if we had not allowed the manufacture of drugs, and especially those of the so-called "synthetic" group, to drift almost entirely into the hands of the Badische Aniline Fabrik, and kindred firms in Germany. This difficulty, now partly overcome, is one which never would have arisen but for the deaf ear turned to the warnings of the scientific chemists. British pharmaceutical chemists, with one or two exceptions, had been relying upon foreign sources not only for synthetic drugs but actually for the raw materials of many of their preparations—such, for example, as aconite, belladonna, henbane, all of which can be freely grown—which even grow wild—in these islands; even, incredible as it may seem, for foxglove leaves. These things with many others were imported from Germany and Austria. Here again leeway has had to be made up; but it ought never to have been necessary, and now that the war is over steps should be taken to see that it never need be necessary again. The encouragement of British herb-gardens and of scientific experiment therein on the best method of culture for the raw material of our organic medicines must certainly be matters early taken in hand.

The classical example of the mortal injury done to British manufacture by the British manufacturer's former contempt for the scientific man is that of the aniline dyes, which are so closely associated with the synthetic drugs as to form one subject of discussion. Quite early in the war dye-stuffs ran short, and there was no means of replenishing the stock in Britain, nor even in America, these products having formed the staple of a colossal manufacture, with an enormous financial turnover, in Germany.

Let us look at the history of these dyes. The first aniline dye was discovered quite by accident, in 1856, by the late Professor W. H. Perkin. He called it "mauve," from the French word for the mallow, the colour of whose flower it somewhat resembled. In 1862 there was an International Exhibition in London; and those who remembered it and its predecessor of 1851 have declared that the case of aniline dye-stuffs—for by that time quite a number of new pigments had been discovered—excited at the later the same attention as that given to the Koh-i-noor at the earlier. The invention, out of which grew the enormous German business already alluded to, and with which has been associated the discovery and manufacture of the synthetic drugs, was entirely British in its inception and in its early stages. Moreover the raw materials on which it depended, namely, gas-tar products, were to be had in greater abundance in England than anywhere else. Yet, at the time when the war broke out, this industry had been allowed almost entirely to drift into German hands.

How was this? Let an expert reply. It was due, he tells us, to the neglect of "the repeated warnings which have been issued since that time" (viz. 1880, by which date the Germans had succeeded in capturing the trade in question) "in no uncertain voice by Meldola, Green, the Perkins (father and son), and many other English chemists." Further, he continues, two causes have invariably been indicated for the transfer of this industry to Germany—"first the neglect of organic chemistry in the Universities and colleges of this country" (a neglect which has long ceased), "and then the disregard by manufacturers of scientific methods and assistance and total indifference to the practice of research in connection with their processes and products." I remember talking some twenty-five years ago to a highly educated young student of Birmingham who was of German parentage though of English birth. He had just taken the degree of Doctor of Science in London University, and was on the eve of abandoning the adopted country of his parents for a position in the research laboratories of the Badische company, where he would be one among a number of chemists, running into hundreds, all engaged in research on gas-tar products. At that moment the great Birmingham gas-company was employing the services of one trained chemist.

Such was and is the neglect of science by business men. Could it have been otherwise, considering their bringing up? Let me again be reminiscent. I suppose the public school in England (not a Catholic school, for I was then a Protestant) at which I pursued what were described as studies did not in any very marked degree differ from its sister schools throughout the country. How was science encouraged there? One hour per week, exactly one-fifth of the time devoted weekly, not to Greek and Latin (that would have been almost sacrilegious), but to the writing of Greek and Latin prose and alleged Greek and Latin verse—that was the amount of time which was devoted to what was called science. I suppose I had an ingrained vocation for science, for it was the only subject, except English composition, in which I ever felt interest at school. If the vocation had not been there, any interest in the subject must necessarily have been slain once for all in me, as I am sure it was in scores of others, by the way it was taught; for the instruction was confided to the ordinary form-master, who doled out his questions from a text-book perfunctorily used and probably heartily despised by a man brought up on strict classical or mathematical lines. Our manufacturer is brought up in a school of this kind, and it would be a miracle if he emerged from it with any respect for science. Things have changed now, and for the better, as they have at most of the Universities; but we are dealing with the generation of manufacturers of my age who were largely responsible for the neglects now in question. Well, the boy left his school and went to Oxford or Cambridge, neither of which then greatly encouraged science. Its followers were, I believe, known as "Stinks Men." At any rate it is only comparatively recently that we have seen the splendid developments of to-day in those ancient institutions. One relic of the ancient days gives us an illuminating idea of how things used to be, just as a fossil shows us the environment of its day.[30] Trinity College, Dublin, has fine provision for scientific teaching, and a highly competent staff to teach. But in its constitution it shows the attitude towards science which till lately informed the older Universities.

Trinity College has in its Fellowship system one of the most important series of pecuniary rewards perhaps in Europe, of an educational character. A man has only once to pass an examination, admittedly one of great severity and competitive in character, and thenceforward to go on living respectably and doing such duties as are committed to him, to be ensured an excellent and increasing income for life. How great the rewards are will be gathered from the fact that a distinguished occupant of one of these positions some years ago endeavoured—with complete success—to enforce on me the importance of the Fellowship examination by telling me that he had already received over L50,000 in emoluments as a result of his success. He has received a good deal more since, and I hope will continue to be the recipient of this shower of gold for many years to come.[31] No doubt much might be urged for this system, which was for a long time popular in China for the selection of Mandarins, and I am not criticising it here. What I want to emphasise is that the examination for these valuable positions is either classical or mathematical, and there it ends. The greatest biologist in the world would have as much chance of a Fellowship as the ragged urchin in the street unless he could "settle Hoti's business" or elucidate [Greek: P] or do other things of that kind. It is a luminous example of what was—must we say is?—thought of science in certain academic circles. Of course it may be urged—I have actually heard it urged—that nothing is science save that which is treatable by mathematical methods. It was a kind of inverted M. Jourdain who used this argument, a gentleman who imagined himself to have been teaching science during a long life without ever having effected what he supposed to be his object. Then, again, our manufacturer, whose object in life is to make money, is naturally, perhaps even necessarily, affected by the kind of salaries which highly trained and highly eminent men of science receive by way of reward for their work. Few, if any, receive anything like the emoluments attaching to the position of County Court Judge, and I know of only one case in which a Professor's income, to the delight and envy of all the teaching profession, actually, for a few years, soared somewhat near the empyrean of a Puisne Judge's reward.

Perhaps this is not to be wondered at; for Parliament always contains many lawyers, and at the moment, I think, not a single scientific expert, at least among the Commons. This is not really a sordid argument, though it may appear so. The labourer, after all, is worthy of his hire; but in the scientific world it very, very seldom happens that the hire is worthy of the labourer. Even to this day there is plenty of truth in the description of the attitude of Mr. Meagles towards Mr. Doyce as detailed by the author of Little Dorrit. Perhaps that is partly because it is generally the man of business, and not the unhappy man of science, who gains the money produced by scientific discoveries. These are often, if not usually, made by accident, and by a man on the track of something else, on the elucidation of which he is probably so intent that he cannot spare time for side-issues, very likely never even thinks of them. Sir James Dewar discovered the principle of the "Thermos flask" whilst he was working at the exceedingly difficult subject of the liquefaction of air. I hope Sir James had the prescience to patent his discovery, and reap the reward which was due to him; but, if he did, he is one amongst a thousand who never took this trouble and of whom Sic vos non vobis might well be said. When Sabatier had shown the importance of combinations of hydrogen effected by what is known as a catalyst, numerous patents were taken out—by other people, of course—on which were founded very flourishing businesses. Sabatier profited by none of these—so I understand. He received a Nobel prize for his discoveries; but another hath his heritage.

Though science has not received any great encouragement, yet in spite of that—the cynic might say because of that—it has made amazing progress during the past half-century. Mr. Chesterton somewhere notes that "a time may easily come when we shall see the great outburst of science in the Nineteenth Century as something quite as splendid, brief, unique, and ultimately abandoned as the outburst of art at the Renaissance." That, of course, may be so, but as to the outburst there can be no question, nor of its persistence to the present day. That also is surely a curious phenomenon; for, as regards most other things, we seem to be in the trough of the wave, and not merely in these islands but all over the civilised world. In Art, in Music, in Literature, in the Drama, it would be difficult to argue in favour of a pre-eminence, or even of an equality of the present age, comparing it with its predecessors.

Take the politicians of the world; it is perhaps difficult, even foolish, for us who are living with them to prophesy with any approximation of accuracy what the historian of a future day may say about them. He may sum them up as respectable, honest mediocrities trying to do their best under exceptionally difficult circumstances; he may put them lower; he may put them higher; he may differentiate between those of different nations; but there is little doubt that, with the exception of the American President, he will not be able to point to any one of the calibre of Pitt or of Bismarck or of the less severely tried Disraeli or Gladstone.

But just the reverse is the case in science, which has men of the very first rank living, working, and discovering to-day. There are indeed signs that even our Government is cognizant of this. The creation of a Department of Industrial Scientific Research, the provision of a substantial income for the same, the increase of research-grants to learned societies, these and other things show that some attempt will be made to recognise the value of science to the State. Further, the lesson seems to have gone home to some few at least that there is no difference between what have been absurdly called Pure and Applied Science, since so very many "Applied" discoveries—such as the "Thermos"—arose in the course of what certainly would have been described as "Pure" researches.

It is to the public advantage that every educated person should know something about science; nor is this by any means as big or difficult an achievement as some may imagine. It is not necessary to teach any very large number of persons very much about any particular science or group of sciences. What is really important is that people should imbibe some knowledge of scientific methods—of the meaning of science. This can be done from the study of quite a few fundamental propositions of any one science under a good teacher—a first essential. Any person thus educated will, for the remainder of his life, be able at least to understand what is meant by science and the scientific method of approaching a problem. He will not, like an educational troglodyte at a recent Conference, refuse to describe anything as science which is not capable of mathematical treatment, nor allude compendiously to physiological study as "the cutting up of frogs." In a word, he will be an educated man, which can no more be said of one ignorant of science than it can be of one whose mind has never experienced the softening influence of letters.

So far, everybody whose opinion counts seems to be agreed; but in any plea for an extended and improved teaching of science, certain points ought not to be left out of count. In the first place, science is not the key to all locks; there are many important things—some of the most important things in life—with which it has nothing whatever to do. It will be well to recall Mr. Balfour's words at the opening of the National Physical Laboratory: "Science depends on measurement, and things not measurable are therefore excluded, or tend to be excluded, from its attention. But Life and Beauty and Happiness are not measurable. If there could be a unit of happiness, politics might begin to be scientific." It follows that there are a number of subjects on which the scientific man is just as fit, or as unfit, to express an opinion as any other man. The intense preoccupation which serious scientific studies demand, may render the man who is engaged therein even less competent to express an opinion on alien subjects than one whose attention, less concentrated, has time to range over diverse fields of study. Readers of Darwin's Life will remember his confession that he had lost all taste for music, art, and literature; that he "could not endure to read a line of poetry" and found Shakespeare "so intolerably dull that it nauseated" him; and finally, that his mind seemed "to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts."

Despite this warning as to the limits of science, we have no lack of instances of scientific men posing as authorities on subjects on which they had no real right to be heard, and, what is worse, being accepted as such by the uninstructed crowd. Thus Professor Huxley, who, as some one once said, "made science respectable," was wont to utter pontifical pronouncements on the subject of Home Rule for Ireland. His knowledge of that country was quite rudimentary, and his visits to it had been as few and as brief as if he had been its Sovereign; but that did not prevent him from delivering judgment, nor unfortunately deter many from following that judgment as if it had been inspired. I am not now arguing as to the rights and wrongs of Huxley's view on the matter in question: I have my own opinion on that. What I am urging is that his position, whether as a zoologist or, incidentally, as a great master of the English language, in no way entitled him to express an opinion or rendered him a better authority on such a question than any casual fellow-traveller in a railway carriage might easily be.

This is bad enough; but what is far worse is when scientific experts on the strength of their study of Nature assume the right of uttering judicial pronouncements on moral and sociological questions, judgments some at least of which are subversive of both decency and liberty. Thus we have lately been told that it is "wanton cruelty" to keep a weak or sickly child alive; and the medical man, under a reformed system of medical ethics, is to have leave and licence to put an end to its life in a painless manner. To what enormities and dastardly agreements this might lead need hardly be suggested; and I am quite confident that the members of the honourable profession of physic, to which I am proud to belong, have no desire whatever for such a reform of the law or of their ethics. Then we are told in the same address (Bateson, British Association Addresses in Australia, 1914) that on the whole a decline in the birth-rate is rather a good thing, and that families averaging four children are quite enough to keep the world going comfortably. The date of this address will be noted; and the fact that the war, which was then just beginning, has probably caused its author and has caused everybody else to see the utter futility of such assertions.

However, if we are to rear only four children per marriage, and if we are to give the medical man liberty to weed out the weaklings, it behoves us to see that the children whom we produce are of the best quality. Let us, therefore, hie to the stud-farm, observe its methods and proceed to apply them to the human race. We must definitely prevent feeble-minded persons from propagating their species. Within limits, that is a proposition with which all instructed persons would agree, though few, we imagine, would put their opinions so uncharitably as the lecturer did: "The union of such social vermin we should no more permit than we would allow parasites to breed on our own bodies." But we must go farther than this, and introduce all sorts of restrictions on matrimony, until finally it comes to be a matter to be arranged under rigid laws by a jury of elderly persons—all, we may feel perfectly sure, "cranks" of the first water.

In what milieu are their findings to take effect? It is very important to consider that. The author from whom I have been quoting tells us what we want to know. Man, he tells us, is "a rather long-lived animal, with great powers of enjoyment, if he does not deliberately forgo them." In the past, we are told, "superstitious and mythical ideas of sin have predominantly controlled these powers." We have changed all that now; as the parent in Punch says to the crying child by the seashore, "You've come out to enjoy yourself, and enjoy yourself you shall!" So we are to plunge into the whirlpool of eugenic delights without any fear of that "bugbear of a hell" which another writer congratulates us on getting rid of. We can, it appears, enter upon our eugenic experiment without a single moral scruple to restrain us or a single religious restriction to interfere with us. In this soil is the plant to be grown, and the first weed to be eradicated is that of the right of personal choice of a partner for life, or for such other term as the law under the new regime may require. Jack is to be torn from weeping Jill, and handed over to reluctant Joan, to whom he is personally displeasing and for whom he has not the slightest desire, and handed over because the Breeding Committee think it is likely to prove advantageous for the Coming Race. All that may be possible—or may not—but what then? When you are carrying out Mendelian experiments on peas, you can enclose your flowers in muslin bags and prevent anything interfering with your observations. And in the stud-farm you can keep the occupants shut up.

But what are you going to do with Jack? and with Jill? And still more with Joan? They cannot be permanently isolated, neither are they restrained by any "mythical ideas of sin." They have been educated to the idea that their highest duty is to enjoy themselves. Why should they not do what they like? And consequently, as any reasoning person can see, "The Inevitable" must happen; and where is your experiment and where the Coming Race? It is perfectly useless for doctrinaires to argue, as doctrinaires will, about ethical restraints. Nature has no ethical restraints; and any ethical restraints which man has come from that higher nature of his which he does not share with the lower creation. What those whom the late Mr. Devas so aptly called "after-Christians" always forget is that the humane, the Christian side of life, which they as well as others exhibit, is due to the influence, lingering if you like, of Christianity. They ignore or forget the pit out of which they were digged.

By another Eugenist we are told that willy-nilly every sound, healthy person of either sex must get married or at least betake him or herself to the business of propagating the race. That at least is the essence of his singularly offensive dictum that since the celibacy of the Catholic clergy and of members of Religious Orders deprives the State of a number of presumably excellent parents, "if monastic orders and institutions are to continue, they should be open only to the eugenically unfit."[32] If the religious call is not to be permitted to dispense a man or woman from entering the estate of matrimony, it may be assumed that nothing else, except an unfavourable report from the committee of selection, will do so. And, further, as the one object of all this is to bring super-children into the world, we must also assume that those who fail in this duty will find themselves in peril of the law.

Surely what has been set down shows that whatever scientific reputation the writers in question possess, and it is undeniably great, it has not equipped them, one will not merely say with moral or religious ideas, but with an ordinary knowledge of human nature. It has not equipped them with any conception apparently of political possibilities; and it has left them without any of that saving salt, a sense of humour. Like Huxley, they have started out to give opinions without first having made themselves familiar with the subject on which they were to deliver judgment.

It is perhaps little to be wondered at that the intense preoccupation which the study of science entails should tend to induce those whose attention is constantly fixed on Nature to imagine that from Nature can be drawn not only lessons of physical life but lessons also of conduct. Of course this is quite wrong; for Nature has no moral lesson to teach us. We are told to go to the ant—at least the sluggard is—but for what? To amend his sluggardliness. No one has ever suggested that we should go to Nature to learn to be humble, kindly, unselfish, tolerant, and Christian, in our dealings with others; and for this excellent reason, that none of these things can be learnt from Nature. Science is neither moral nor immoral, but non-moral; and, as we have seen a thousand times in this present war, its kindest gifts to man can be used, and are used, for his cruel destruction. In this war, pre-eminently amongst all wars, we have the application of pure natural principles unameliorated by the influences of Christianity, or of chivalry, Christianity's offspring. As Sir Robert Borden has summed it up, German kultur is an attempt "to impose upon us the law of the jungle."

Natural Selection, some would have us believe, is the dominant law of living nature, and all would agree that it is an important law. Let us then, if we are to follow Nature, put it into practice. But Natural Selection means the Survival of the Fittest in the Struggle for Life. It consequently means the Extermination of the Less Fit, a little fact often left out of count. It means in three words "Might is Right," and was not that exactly the proposition by which we were confronted in this war? If Natural Selection be our only guide, let us sink hospital ships, destroy innocent villages and towns, exterminate our weaker opponents in any way that seems best to us. It was all summed up centuries ago by the author of the Book of Wisdom: "Let us oppress the poor just man, and not spare the widow, nor honour the ancient grey hairs of the aged. But let your strength be the law of justice: for that which is feeble is found to be nothing worth." That is Natural Selection in operation in human life when human beings have been stripped of all "mythical ideas of Sin:" not a pretty picture nor a condition of affairs under which we should like long to exist. Some of the other resemblances are less dreadful, but none the less instructive. Let us take the matter of Mimicry. There is a form of protective mimicry whereby the living thing is like unto its surroundings, and thus escapes its enemy. We find it in warfare in the use of khaki dress, in white overalls in snow-time, in other such expedients. But there is also a form of Aggressive Mimicry in which a deadly thing makes itself look like something innocent, as the wolf tried to look in "Little Red Riding Hood." "The Germans were beginning their attack on Haumont. Their front-line skirmishers, to throw us into confusion, had donned caps which were a faint imitation of our own, and also provided themselves with Red Cross brassards" (The Battle of Verdun. H. Dugard). Not to be tedious on this point, which really does not require to be laboured, let me finish with one quotation from a vivid series of war-pictures. Boyd Cable is writing of men in the trenches: "Civilised Man, in his latest art of war, has gone back to be taught one more simple lesson by the beast of the field and the birds of the air; the armed hosts are hushed and stilled by the passing air-machine, exactly as the finches and field-mice of hedgerow and ditch and field are frozen to stillness by the shadow of a hovering hawk, the beat of its passing wing."

No; an existence passed under conditions of this kind and as the normal state of affairs is not an existence to be contemplated with equanimity. We are anxious that science and scientific teaching should be assisted in every possible way. But let us be quite clear that while science has much to teach us and we much to learn from her, there are things as to which she has no message to the world. The Minor Prophets of science are never tired of advising theologians to keep their hands off science. The Major Prophets are too busy to occupy themselves with such polemics. But the theologian is abundantly in his right in saying to the scientific writer "Hands off morals!" for with morality science has nothing to do. Let us at any rate avoid that form of kultur which consists in bending Natural History to the teaching of conduct, uncorrected by any Christian injunctions to soften its barbarities.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 30: Since these lines were written, this state of affairs has come to an end and the first Fellow has been elected for his purely scientific attainments, in the person of the distinguished geologist, Professor Joly, F.R.S.]

[Footnote 31: It was the late distinguished Provost, Sir John Mahaffy, at whose instance the change in the Fellowship system was introduced.]

[Footnote 32: Conklyn, Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men. Princeton University Press, 1915.]



VI. HEREDITY AND "ARRANGEMENT"

Some years ago, when I was delivering a lecture at the Cathedral Hall of Westminster, in the course of the questioning which took place at the termination of the discourse, which was on vitalism, I was asked by one who signed his paper, "So and So, Atheist," "What would you say if you saw a duck come out of a hen's egg?" I recognised at once the idea at the back of the question and appreciated the fact that it had been asked by one who, as some one has said, "called himself an advanced free-thinker, but was really a very ignorant and vulgar person who was suffering from a surfeit of the ideas of certain people cleverer than himself." But, as a full discussion of the matter would have taken at least as long as the lecture which I had just concluded, my reply was that before I attempted to explain it I would wait to see the duck come out of the hen's egg, since no man had as yet witnessed such an event. I do not know whether my atheistical questioner was satisfied or not, but I heard no more of him. But, after all, is it not a marvellous thing that a duck never does come out of a hen's egg? If everything happens by chance, as some would have us believe, why is it that a duck does not occasionally emerge from a hen's egg? Surely this is a miraculum, a thing to be wondered at, yet so common that it goes unnoticed, like many other wonderful things which are also matters of common everyday occurrence, such as the spinning of the earth on its own axis and its course round the sun and through the heavens.

If we pursue this question further we shall begin to remember that creatures more nearly related to one another also "breed true." The hen and the duck are both birds, but they are not so nearly allied to one another as the lion and the tiger, both of which are Felidae, or cats. Yet no one ever expects that a tiger will be born of a lioness, or vice versa. Further, the pug and the greyhound are both of them dogs: the name canis domesticus applies to both, and one would be distinguished from the other in a scientific list as "Var. (i.e. variety) 'pug,'" or "Var. 'greyhound.'" Yet one can imagine the surprise of a breeder if a greyhound was born in his carefully selected and guarded kennel of pugs. In a word, not only species, but varieties do tend to breed true; the child does resemble its parent or parents. No doubt the resemblance is not absolute: there is variation as well as inheritance. Sometimes the variation may be recognised as a feature possessed by a grandparent or even by some collateral relative such as an uncle or great-uncle; sometimes this may not be the case, though the non-recognition of the likeness does not in any way preclude the possibility that the peculiarity may have been also possessed by some other member of the family. But on the whole the offspring does closely resemble its parents; that is to say, not only the species and the variety but the individual "breeds true." "Look like dey are bleedzed to take atter der pa," as Uncle Remus said when he was explaining how the rabbit comes to have a bobtail. Moreover this resemblance is not merely in the great general features. Apart from monstrosities, the children of human beings are human beings; the children of white parents have white skins, those of black progenitors are black. Commonly, though not always by any means, the children of dark-haired parents are themselves dark-haired, and so on. But smaller features are also transmitted, and transmitted too for many generations; for example, the well-known case of the Hapsburg lip, visible in so many portraits of Spanish monarchs and their near relatives, and visible in life to-day. Again, there are families in which the inner part of one eyebrow has the hairs growing upwards instead of in the ordinary way, a feature which is handed on from one generation to another. Even more minute features than this have been known to be transmissible and transmitted, such as a tiny pit in the skin on the ear or on the face. In fact, there is hardly any feature, no matter how small, which may not become a hereditary possession.