No More Learning

Santayana--"malicious" in
regard to the world of science and common sense. It is only so that we
can account for the complacency with which philosophers have accepted
the inconsistency of their doctrines with all the common and
scientific facts which seem best established and most worthy of
belief.

The logic of mysticism shows, as is natural, the defects which are
inherent in anything malicious. The impulse to logic, not felt while
the mystic mood is dominant, reasserts itself as the mood fades, but
with a desire to retain the vanishing insight, or at least to prove
that it _was_ insight, and that what seems to contradict it is
illusion. The logic which thus arises is not quite disinterested or
candid, and is inspired by a certain hatred of the daily world to
which it is to be applied. Such an attitude naturally does not tend to
the best results. Everyone knows that to read an author simply in
order to refute him is not the way to understand him; and to read the
book of Nature with a conviction that it is all illusion is just as
unlikely to lead to understanding. If our logic is to find the common
world intelligible, it must not be hostile, but must be inspired by a
genuine acceptance such as is not usually to be found among
metaphysicians.


III. TIME

The unreality of time is a cardinal doctrine of many metaphysical
systems, often nominally based, as already by Parmenides, upon logical
arguments, but originally derived, at any rate in the founders of new
systems, from the certainty which is born in the moment of mystic
insight. As a Persian Sufi poet says:

"Past and future are what veil God from our sight.
Burn up both of them with fire! How long
Wilt thou be partitioned by these segments as a reed? "[5]

The belief that what is ultimately real must be immutable is a very
common one: it gave rise to the metaphysical notion of substance, and
finds, even now, a wholly illegitimate satisfaction in such scientific
doctrines as the conservation of energy and mass.

It is difficult to disentangle the truth and the error in this view.
The arguments for the contention that time is unreal and that the
world of sense is illusory must, I think, be regarded as fallacious.
Nevertheless there is some sense--easier to feel than to state--in
which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of
reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the
present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential
to philosophic thought. The importance of time is rather practical
than theoretical, rather in relation to our desires than in relation
to truth. A truer image of the world, I think, is obtained by
picturing things as entering into the stream of time from an eternal
world outside, than from a view which regards time as the devouring
tyrant of all that is. Both in thought and in feeling, even though
time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of
wisdom.

That this is the case may be seen at once by asking ourselves why our
feelings towards the past are so different from our feelings towards
the future. The reason for this difference is wholly practical: our
wishes can affect the future but not the past, the future is to some
extent subject to our power, while the past is unalterably fixed. But
every future will some day be past: if we see the past truly now, it
must, when it was still future, have been just what we now see it to
be, and what is now future must be just what we shall see it to be
when it has become past. The felt difference of quality between past
and future, therefore, is not an intrinsic difference, but only a
difference in relation to us: to impartial contemplation, it ceases to
exist. And impartiality of contemplation is, in the intellectual
sphere, that very same virtue of disinterestedness which, in the
sphere of action, appears as justice and unselfishness. Whoever wishes
to see the world truly, to rise in thought above the tyranny of
practical desires, must learn to overcome the difference of attitude
towards past and future, and to survey the whole stream of time in one
comprehensive vision.

The kind of way in which, as it seems to me, time ought not to enter
into our theoretic philosophical thought, may be illustrated by the
philosophy which has become associated with the idea of evolution, and
which is exemplified by Nietzsche, pragmatism, and Bergson. This
philosophy, on the basis of the development which has led from the
lowest forms of life up to man, sees in _progress_ the fundamental law
of the universe, and thus admits the difference between _earlier_ and
_later_ into the very citadel of its contemplative outlook. With its
past and future history of the world, conjectural as it is, I do not
wish to quarrel. But I think that, in the intoxication of a quick
success, much that is required for a true understanding of the
universe has been forgotten. Something of Hellenism, something, too,
of Oriental resignation, must be combined with its hurrying Western
self-assertion before it can emerge from the ardour of youth into the
mature wisdom of manhood. In spite of its appeals to science, the true
scientific philosophy, I think, is something more arduous and more
aloof, appealing to less mundane hopes, and requiring a severer
discipline for its successful practice.

Darwin's _Origin of Species_ persuaded the world that the difference
between different species of animals and plants is not the fixed
immutable difference that it appears to be. The doctrine of natural
kinds, which had rendered classification easy and definite, which was
enshrined in the Aristotelian tradition, and protected by its supposed
necessity for orthodox dogma, was suddenly swept away for ever out of
the biological world. The difference between man and the lower
animals, which to our human conceit appears enormous, was shown to be
a gradual achievement, involving intermediate being who could not with
certainty be placed either within or without the human family. The sun
and the planets had already been shown by Laplace to be very probably
derived from a primitive more or less undifferentiated nebula. Thus
the old fixed landmarks became wavering and indistinct, and all sharp
outlines were blurred. Things and species lost their boundaries, and
none could say where they began or where they ended.

But if human conceit was staggered for a moment by its kinship with
the ape, it soon found a way to reassert itself, and that way is the
"philosophy" of evolution. A process which led from the amoeba to Man
appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress--though
whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known. Hence
the cycle of changes which science had shown to be the probable
history of the past was welcomed as revealing a law of development
towards good in the universe--an evolution or unfolding of an idea
slowly embodying itself in the actual. But such a view, though it
might satisfy Spencer and those whom we may call Hegelian
evolutionists, could not be accepted as adequate by the more
whole-hearted votaries of change. An ideal to which the world
continuously approaches is, to these minds, too dead and static to be
inspiring. Not only the aspiration, but the ideal too, must change and
develop with the course of evolution: there must be no fixed goal, but
a continual fashioning of fresh needs by the impulse which is life and
which alone gives unity to the process.

Life, in this philosophy, is a continuous stream, in which all
divisions are artificial and unreal. Separate things, beginnings and
endings, are mere convenient fictions: there is only smooth unbroken
transition. The beliefs of to-day may count as true to-day, if they
carry us along the stream; but to-morrow they will be false, and must
be replaced by new beliefs to meet the new situation. All our thinking
consists of convenient fictions, imaginary congealings of the stream:
reality flows on in spite of all our fictions, and though it can be
lived, it cannot be conceived in thought. Somehow, without explicit
statement, the assurance is slipped in that the future, though we
cannot foresee it, will be better than the past or the present: the
reader is like the child which expects a sweet because it has been
told to open its mouth and shut its eyes. Logic, mathematics, physics
disappear in this philosophy, because they are too "static"; what is
real is no impulse and movement towards a goal which, like the
rainbow, recedes as we advance, and makes every place different when
it reaches it from what it appeared to be at a distance.

I do not propose to enter upon a technical examination of this
philosophy. I wish only to maintain that the motives and interests
which inspire it are so exclusively practical, and the problems with
which it deals are so special, that it can hardly be regarded as
touching any of the questions that, to my mind, constitute genuine
philosophy.

The predominant interest of evolutionism is in the question of human
destiny, or at least of the destiny of Life. It is more interested in
morality and happiness than in knowledge for its own sake. It must be
admitted that the same may be said of many other philosophies, and
that a desire for the kind of knowledge which philosophy can give is
very rare. But if philosophy is to attain truth, it is necessary first
and foremost that philosophers should acquire the disinterested
intellectual curiosity which characterises the genuine man of science.
Knowledge concerning the future--which is the kind of knowledge that
must be sought if we are to know about human destiny--is possible
within certain narrow limits. It is impossible to say how much the
limits may be enlarged with the progress of science. But what is
evident is that any proposition about the future belongs by its
subject-matter to some particular science, and is to be ascertained,
if at all, by the methods of that science. Philosophy is not a short
cut to the same kind of results as those of the other sciences: if it
is to be a genuine study, it must have a province of its own, and aim
at results which the other sciences can neither prove nor disprove.

Evolutionism, in basing itself upon the notion of _progress_, which is
change from the worse to the better, allows the notion of time, as it
seems to me, to become its tyrant rather than its servant, and thereby
loses that impartiality of contemplation which is the source of all
that is best in philosophic thought and feeling. Metaphysicians, as we
saw, have frequently denied altogether the reality of time. I do not
wish to do this; I wish only to preserve the mental outlook which
inspired the denial, the attitude which, in thought, regards the past
as having the same reality as the present and the same importance as
the future. "In so far," says Spinoza,[6] "as the mind conceives a
thing according to the dictate of reason, it will be equally affected
whether the idea is that of a future, past, or present thing. " It is
this "conceiving according to the dictate of reason" that I find
lacking in the philosophy which is based on evolution.


IV. GOOD AND EVIL

Mysticism maintains that all evil is illusory, and sometimes maintains
the same view as regards good, but more often holds that all Reality
is good. Both views are to be found in Heraclitus: "Good and ill are
one," he says, but again, "To God all things are fair and good and
right, but men hold some things wrong and some right. " A similar
twofold position is to be found in Spinoza, but he uses the word
"perfection" when he means to speak of the good that is not merely
human. "By reality and perfection I mean the same thing," he says;[7]
but elsewhere we find the definition: "By _good_ I shall mean that
which we certainly know to be useful to us. "[8] Thus perfection
belongs to Reality in its own nature, but goodness is relative to
ourselves and our needs, and disappears in an impartial survey. Some
such distinction, I think, is necessary in order to understand the
ethical outlook of mysticism: there is a lower mundane kind of good
and evil, which divides the world of appearance into what seem to be
conflicting parts; but there is also a higher, mystical kind of good,
which belongs to Reality and is not opposed by any correlative kind of
evil.

It is difficult to give a logically tenable account of this position
without recognising that good and evil are subjective, that what is
good is merely that towards which we have one kind of feeling, and
what is evil is merely that towards which we have another kind of
feeling. In our active life, where we have to exercise choice, and to
prefer this to that of two possible acts, it is necessary to have a
distinction of good and evil, or at least of better and worse. But
this distinction, like everything pertaining to action, belongs to
what mysticism regards as the world of illusion, if only because it is
essentially concerned with time. In our contemplative life, where
action is not called for, it is possible to be impartial, and to
overcome the ethical dualism which action requires. So long as we
remain _merely_ impartial, we may be content to say that both the good
and the evil of action are illusions. But if, as we must do if we have
the mystic vision, we find the whole world worthy of love and worship,
if we see

"The earth, and every common sight. . . .
Apparell'd in celestial light,"

we shall say that there is a higher good than that of action, and that
this higher good belongs to the whole world as it is in reality. In
this way the twofold attitude and the apparent vacillation of
mysticism are explained and justified.

The possibility of this universal love and joy in all that exists is
of supreme importance for the conduct and happiness of life, and gives
inestimable value to the mystic emotion, apart from any creeds which
may be built upon it. But if we are not to be led into false beliefs,
it is necessary to realise exactly _what_ the mystic emotion reveals.
It reveals a possibility of human nature--a possibility of a nobler,
happier, freer life than any that can be otherwise achieved. But it
does not reveal anything about the non-human, or about the nature of
the universe in general. Good and bad, and even the higher good that
mysticism finds everywhere, are the reflections of our own emotions on
other things, not part of the substance of things as they are in
themselves. And therefore an impartial contemplation, freed from all
pre-occupation with Self, will not judge things good or bad, although
it is very easily combined with that feeling of universal love which
leads the mystic to say that the whole world is good.

The philosophy of evolution, through the notion of progress, is bound
up with the ethical dualism of the worse and the better, and is thus
shut out, not only from the kind of survey which discards good and
evil altogether from its view, but also from the mystical belief in
the goodness of everything. In this way the distinction of good and
evil, like time, becomes a tyrant in this philosophy, and introduces
into thought the restless selectiveness of action. Good and evil, like
time, are, it would seem, not general or fundamental in the world of
thought, but late and highly specialised members of the intellectual
hierarchy.

Although, as we saw, mysticism can be interpreted so as to agree with
the view that good and evil are not intellectually fundamental, it
must be admitted that here we are no longer in verbal agreement with
most of the great philosophers and religious teachers of the past. I
believe, however, that the elimination of ethical considerations from
philosophy is both scientifically necessary and--though this may seem
a paradox--an ethical advance. Both these contentions must be briefly
defended.

The hope of satisfaction to our more human desires--the hope of
demonstrating that the world has this or that desirable ethical
characteristic--is not one which, so far as I can see, a scientific
philosophy can do anything whatever to satisfy. The difference between
a good world and a bad one is a difference in the particular
characteristics of the particular things that exist in these worlds:
it is not a sufficiently abstract difference to come within the
province of philosophy. Love and hate, for example, are ethical
opposites, but to philosophy they are closely analogous attitudes
towards objects. The general form and structure of those attitudes
towards objects which constitute mental phenomena is a problem for
philosophy, but the difference between love and hate is not a
difference of form or structure, and therefore belongs rather to the
special science of psychology than to philosophy. Thus the ethical
interests which have often inspired philosophers must remain in the
background: some kind of ethical interest may inspire the whole study,
but none must obtrude in the detail or be expected in the special
results which are sought.

If this view seems at first sight disappointing, we may remind
ourselves that a similar change has been found necessary in all the
other sciences. The physicist or chemist is not now required to prove
the ethical importance of his ions or atoms; the biologist is not
expected to prove the utility of the plants or animals which he
dissects. In pre-scientific ages this was not the case. Astronomy, for
example, was studied because men believed in astrology: it was thought
that the movements of the planets had the most direct and important
bearing upon the lives of human beings. Presumably, when this belief
decayed and the disinterested study of astronomy began, many who had
found astrology absorbingly interesting decided that astronomy had too
little human interest to be worthy of study. Physics, as it appears in
Plato's Timaeus for example, is full of ethical notions: it is an
essential part of its purpose to show that the earth is worthy of
admiration. The modern physicist, on the contrary, though he has no
wish to deny that the earth is admirable, is not concerned, as
physicist, with its ethical attributes: he is merely concerned to find
out facts, not to consider whether they are good or bad. In
psychology, the scientific attitude is even more recent and more
difficult than in the physical sciences: it is natural to consider
that human nature is either good or bad, and to suppose that the
difference between good and bad, so all-important in practice, must be
important in theory also. It is only during the last century that an
ethically neutral psychology has grown up; and here too, ethical
neutrality has been essential to scientific success.

In philosophy, hitherto, ethical neutrality has been seldom sought and
hardly ever achieved. Men have remembered their wishes, and have
judged philosophies in relation to their wishes. Driven from the
particular sciences, the belief that the notions of good and evil must
afford a key to the understanding of the world has sought a refuge in
philosophy. But even from this last refuge, if philosophy is not to
remain a set of pleasing dreams, this belief must be driven forth. It
is a commonplace that happiness is not best achieved by those who
seek it directly; and it would seem that the same is true of the good.
In thought, at any rate, those who forget good and evil and seek only
to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view
the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

We are thus brought back to our seeming paradox, that a philosophy
which does not seek to impose upon the world its own conceptions of
good and evil is not only more likely to achieve truth, but is also
the outcome of a higher ethical standpoint than one which, like
evolutionism and most traditional systems, is perpetually appraising
the universe and seeking to find in it an embodiment of present
ideals. In religion, and in every deeply serious view of the world and
of human destiny, there is an element of submission, a realisation of
the limits of human power, which is somewhat lacking in the modern
world, with its quick material successes and its insolent belief in
the boundless possibilities of progress. "He that loveth his life
shall lose it"; and there is danger lest, through a too confident love
of life, life itself should lose much of what gives it its highest
worth. The submission which religion inculcates in action is
essentially the same in spirit as that which science teaches in
thought; and the ethical neutrality by which its victories have been
achieved is the outcome of that submission.

The good which it concerns us to remember is the good which it lies in
our power to create--the good in our own lives and in our attitude
towards the world. Insistence on belief in an external realisation of
the good is a form of self-assertion, which, while it cannot secure
the external good which it desires, can seriously impair the inward
good which lies within our power, and destroy that reverence towards
fact which constitutes both what is valuable in humility and what is
fruitful in the scientific temper.

Human beings cannot, of course, wholly transcend human nature;
something subjective, if only the interest that determines the
direction of our attention, must remain in all our thought. But
scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human
pursuit, and gives us, therefore, the closest constant and the most
intimate relation with the outer world that it is possible to achieve.
To the primitive mind, everything is either friendly or hostile; but
experience has shown that friendliness and hostility are not the
conceptions by which the world is to be understood. Scientific
philosophy thus represents, though as yet only in a nascent condition,
a higher form of thought than any pre-scientific belief or
imagination, and, like every approach to self-transcendence, it brings
with it a rich reward in increase of scope and breadth and
comprehension. Evolutionism, in spite of its appeals to particular
scientific facts, fails to be a truly scientific philosophy because of
its slavery to time, its ethical preoccupations, and its predominant
interest in our mundane concerns and destiny. A truly scientific
philosophy will be more humble, more piecemeal, more arduous, offering
less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more
indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without
the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary demands.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] All the above quotations are from Burnet's _Early Greek
Philosophy_, (2nd ed. , 1908), pp. 146-156.

[2] _Republic_, 514, translated by Davies and Vaughan.

[3] This section, and also one or two pages in later sections, have
been printed in a course of Lowell lectures _On our knowledge of the
external world_, published by the Open Court Publishing Company. But I
have left them here, as this is the context for which they were
originally written.

[4] _Introduction to Metaphysics_, p. 1.

[5] Whinfield's translation of the _Masnavi_ (Trubner, 1887), p. 34.

[6] _Ethics_, Bk. IV, Prop. LXII.

[7] Ib. , Pt. IV, Df. I.

[8] _Ethics_. Pt. II. Df. VI.




II

THE PLACE OF SCIENCE IN A LIBERAL EDUCATION


I

Science, to the ordinary reader of newspapers, is represented by a
varying selection of sensational triumphs, such as wireless telegraphy
and aeroplanes, radio-activity and the marvels of modern alchemy. It is
not of this aspect of science that I wish to speak. Science, in this
aspect, consists of detached up-to-date fragments, interesting only
until they are replaced by something newer and more up-to-date,
displaying nothing of the systems of patiently constructed knowledge
out of which, almost as a casual incident, have come the practically
useful results which interest the man in the street. The increased
command over the forces of nature which is derived from science is
undoubtedly an amply sufficient reason for encouraging scientific
research, but this reason has been so often urged and is so easily
appreciated that other reasons, to my mind quite as important, are apt
to be overlooked. It is with these other reasons, especially with the
intrinsic value of a scientific habit of mind in forming our outlook
on the world, that I shall be concerned in what follows.

The instance of wireless telegraphy will serve to illustrate the
difference between the two points of view. Almost all the serious
intellectual labour required for the possibility of this invention is
due to three men--Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz. In alternating layers
of experiment and theory these three men built up the modern theory of
electromagnetism, and demonstrated the identity of light with
electromagnetic waves. The system which they discovered is one of
profound intellectual interest, bringing together and unifying an
endless variety of apparently detached phenomena, and displaying a
cumulative mental power which cannot but afford delight to every
generous spirit. The mechanical details which remained to be adjusted
in order to utilise their discoveries for a practical system of
telegraphy demanded, no doubt, very considerable ingenuity, but had
not that broad sweep and that universality which could give them
intrinsic interest as an object of disinterested contemplation.

From the point of view of training the mind, of giving that
well-informed, impersonal outlook which constitutes culture in the
good sense of this much-misused word, it seems to be generally held
indisputable that a literary education is superior to one based on
science. Even the warmest advocates of science are apt to rest their
claims on the contention that culture ought to be sacrificed to
utility. Those men of science who respect culture, when they associate
with men learned in the classics, are apt to admit, not merely
politely, but sincerely, a certain inferiority on their side,
compensated doubtless by the services which science renders to
humanity, but none the less real. And so long as this attitude exists
among men of science, it tends to verify itself: the intrinsically
valuable aspects of science tend to be sacrificed to the merely
useful, and little attempt is made to preserve that leisurely,
systematic survey by which the finer quality of mind is formed and
nourished.

But even if there be, in present fact, any such inferiority as is
supposed in the educational value of science, this is, I believe, not
the fault of science itself, but the fault of the spirit in which
science is taught. If its full possibilities were realised by those
who teach it, I believe that its capacity of producing those habits of
mind which constitute the highest mental excellence would be at least
as great as that of literature, and more particularly of Greek and
Latin literature. In saying this I have no wish whatever to disparage
a classical education. I have not myself enjoyed its benefits, and my
knowledge of Greek and Latin authors is derived almost wholly from
translations. But I am firmly persuaded that the Greeks fully deserve
all the admiration that is bestowed upon them, and that it is a very
great and serious loss to be unacquainted with their writings. It is
not by attacking them, but by drawing attention to neglected
excellences in science, that I wish to conduct my argument.

One defect, however, does seem inherent in a purely classical
education--namely, a too exclusive emphasis on the past. By the study
of what is absolutely ended and can never be renewed, a habit of
criticism towards the present and the future is engendered. The
qualities in which the present excels are qualities to which the study
of the past does not direct attention, and to which, therefore, the
student of Greek civilisation may easily become blind. In what is new
and growing there is apt to be something crude, insolent, even a
little vulgar, which is shocking to the man of sensitive taste;
quivering from the rough contact, he retires to the trim gardens of a
polished past, forgetting that they were reclaimed from the wilderness
by men as rough and earth-soiled as those from whom he shrinks in his
own day. The habit of being unable to recognise merit until it is
dead is too apt to be the result of a purely bookish life, and a
culture based wholly on the past will seldom be able to pierce through
everyday surroundings to the essential splendour of contemporary
things, or to the hope of still greater splendour in the future.

"My eyes saw not the men of old;
And now their age away has rolled.
I weep--to think I shall not see
The heroes of posterity. "

So says the Chinese poet; but such impartiality is rare in the more
pugnacious atmosphere of the West, where the champions of past and
future fight a never-ending battle, instead of combining to seek out
the merits of both.

This consideration, which militates not only against the exclusive
study of the classics, but against every form of culture which has
become static, traditional, and academic, leads inevitably to the
fundamental question: What is the true end of education? But before
attempting to answer this question it will be well to define the sense
in which we are to use the word "education. " For this purpose I shall
distinguish the sense in which I mean to use it from two others, both
perfectly legitimate, the one broader and the other narrower than the
sense in which I mean to use the word.

In the broader sense, education will include not only what we learn
through instruction, but all that we learn through personal
experience--the formation of character through the education of life.
Of this aspect of education, vitally important as it is, I will say
nothing, since its consideration would introduce topics quite foreign
to the question with which we are concerned.

In the narrower sense, education may be confined to instruction, the
imparting of definite information on various subjects, because such
information, in and for itself, is useful in daily life. Elementary
education--reading, writing, and arithmetic--is almost wholly of this
kind. But instruction, necessary as it is, does not _per se_
constitute education in the sense in which I wish to consider it.

Education, in the sense in which I mean it, may be defined as _the
formation, by means of instruction, of certain mental habits and a
certain outlook on life and the world_. It remains to ask ourselves,
what mental habits, and what sort of outlook, can be hoped for as the
result of instruction? When we have answered this question we can
attempt to decide what science has to contribute to the formation of
the habits and outlook which we desire.

Our whole life is built about a certain number--not a very small
number--of primary instincts and impulses. Only what is in some way
connected with these instincts and impulses appears to us desirable or
important; there is no faculty, whether "reason" or "virtue" or
whatever it may be called, that can take our active life and our hopes
and fears outside the region controlled by these first movers of all
desire. Each of them is like a queen-bee, aided by a hive of workers
gathering honey; but when the queen is gone the workers languish and
die, and the cells remain empty of their expected sweetness. So with
each primary impulse in civilised man: it is surrounded and protected
by a busy swarm of attendant derivative desires, which store up in its
service whatever honey the surrounding world affords. But if the
queen-impulse dies, the death-dealing influence, though retarded a
little by habit, spreads slowly through all the subsidiary impulses,
and a whole tract of life becomes inexplicably colourless. What was
formerly full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised no
questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless: with a sense of
disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, and decide, perhaps, that
all is vanity. The search for an outside meaning that can _compel_ an
inner response must always be disappointed: all "meaning" must be at
bottom related to our primary desires, and when they are extinct no
miracle can restore to the world the value which they reflected upon
it.

The purpose of education, therefore, cannot be to create any primary
impulse which is lacking in the uneducated; the purpose can only be to
enlarge the scope of those that human nature provides, by increasing
the number and variety of attendant thoughts, and by showing where the
most permanent satisfaction is to be found. Under the impulse of a
Calvinistic horror of the "natural man," this obvious truth has been
too often misconceived in the training of the young; "nature" has been
falsely regarded as excluding all that is best in what is natural, and
the endeavour to teach virtue has led to the production of stunted and
contorted hypocrites instead of full-grown human beings. From such
mistakes in education a better psychology or a kinder heart is
beginning to preserve the present generation; we need, therefore,
waste no more words on the theory that the purpose of education is to
thwart or eradicate nature.

But although nature must supply the initial force of desire, nature is
not, in the civilised man, the spasmodic, fragmentary, and yet violent
set of impulses that it is in the savage.
Each impulse has its
constitutional ministry of thought and knowledge and reflection,
through which possible conflicts of impulses are foreseen, and
temporary impulses are controlled by the unifying impulse which may be
called wisdom. In this way education destroys the crudity of
instinct, and increases through knowledge the wealth and variety of
the individual's contacts with the outside world, making him no longer
an isolated fighting unit, but a citizen of the universe, embracing
distant countries, remote regions of space, and vast stretches of past
and future within the circle of his interests. It is this simultaneous
softening in the insistence of desire and enlargement of its scope
that is the chief moral end of education.

Closely connected with this moral end is the more purely intellectual
aim of education, the endeavour to make us see and imagine the world
in an objective manner, as far as possible as it is in itself, and not
merely through the distorting medium of personal desire. The complete
attainment of such an objective view is no doubt an ideal,
indefinitely approachable, but not actually and fully realisable.
Education, considered as a process of forming our mental habits and
our outlook on the world, is to be judged successful in proportion as
its outcome approximates to this ideal; in proportion, that is to say,
as it gives us a true view of our place in society, of the relation of
the whole human society to its non-human environment, and of the
nature of the non-human world as it is in itself apart from our
desires and interests. If this standard is admitted, we can return to
the consideration of science, inquiring how far science contributes to
such an aim, and whether it is in any respect superior to its rivals
in educational practice.


II

Two opposite and at first sight conflicting merits belong to science
as against literature and art. The one, which is not inherently
necessary, but is certainly true at the present day, is hopefulness
as to the future of human achievement, and in particular as to the
useful work that may be accomplished by any intelligent student. This
merit and the cheerful outlook which it engenders prevent what might
otherwise be the depressing effect of another aspect of science, to my
mind also a merit, and perhaps its greatest merit--I mean the
irrelevance of human passions and of the whole subjective apparatus
where scientific truth is concerned. Each of these reasons for
preferring the study of science requires some amplification. Let us
begin with the first.

In the study of literature or art our attention is perpetually riveted
upon the past: the men of Greece or of the Renaissance did better than
any men do now; the triumphs of former ages, so far from facilitating
fresh triumphs in our own age, actually increase the difficulty of
fresh triumphs by rendering originality harder of attainment; not only
is artistic achievement not cumulative, but it seems even to depend
upon a certain freshness and _naivete_ of impulse and vision which
civilisation tends to destroy. Hence comes, to those who have been
nourished on the literary and artistic productions of former ages, a
certain peevishness and undue fastidiousness towards the present, from
which there seems no escape except into the deliberate vandalism which
ignores tradition and in the search after originality achieves only
the eccentric. But in such vandalism there is none of the simplicity
and spontaneity out of which great art springs: theory is still the
canker in its core, and insincerity destroys the advantages of a
merely pretended ignorance.

The despair thus arising from an education which suggests no
pre-eminent mental activity except that of artistic creation is wholly
absent from an education which gives the knowledge of scientific
method. The discovery of scientific method, except in pure
mathematics, is a thing of yesterday; speaking broadly, we may say
that it dates from Galileo. Yet already it has transformed the world,
and its success proceeds with ever-accelerating velocity. In science
men have discovered an activity of the very highest value in which
they are no longer, as in art, dependent for progress upon the
appearance of continually greater genius, for in science the
successors stand upon the shoulders of their predecessors; where one
man of supreme genius has invented a method, a thousand lesser men can
apply it. No transcendent ability is required in order to make useful
discoveries in science; the edifice of science needs its masons,
bricklayers, and common labourers as well as its foremen,
master-builders, and architects. In art nothing worth doing can be
done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can
contribute to a supreme achievement.

In science the man of real genius is the man who invents a new method.
The notable discoveries are often made by his successors, who can
apply the method with fresh vigour, unimpaired by the previous labour
of perfecting it; but the mental calibre of the thought required for
their work, however brilliant, is not so great as that required by the
first inventor of the method. There are in science immense numbers of
different methods, appropriate to different classes of problems; but
over and above them all, there is something not easily definable,
which may be called _the_ method of science. It was formerly customary
to identify this with the inductive method, and to associate it with
the name of Bacon. But the true inductive method was not discovered by
Bacon, and the true method of science is something which includes
deduction as much as induction, logic and mathematics as much as
botany and geology. I shall not attempt the difficult task of stating
what the scientific method is, but I will try to indicate the temper
of mind out of which the scientific method grows, which is the second
of the two merits that were mentioned above as belonging to a
scientific education.

The kernel of the scientific outlook is a thing so simple, so obvious,
so seemingly trivial, that the mention of it may almost excite
derision. The kernel of the scientific outlook is the refusal to
regard our own desires, tastes, and interests as affording a key to
the understanding of the world. Stated thus baldly, this may seem no
more than a trite truism. But to remember it consistently in matters
arousing our passionate partisanship is by no means easy, especially
where the available evidence is uncertain and inconclusive. A few
illustrations will make this clear.

Aristotle, I understand, considered that the stars must move in
circles because the circle is the most perfect curve. In the absence
of evidence to the contrary, he allowed himself to decide a question
of fact by an appeal to ? sthetico-moral considerations. In such a case
it is at once obvious to us that this appeal was unjustifiable. We
know now how to ascertain as a fact the way in which the heavenly
bodies move, and we know that they do not move in circles, or even in
accurate ellipses, or in any other kind of simply describable curve.
This may be painful to a certain hankering after simplicity of pattern
in the universe, but we know that in astronomy such feelings are
irrelevant. Easy as this knowledge seems now, we owe it to the courage
and insight of the first inventors of scientific method, and more
especially of Galileo.

We may take as another illustration Malthus's doctrine of population.
This illustration is all the better for the fact that his actual
doctrine is now known to be largely erroneous. It is not his
conclusions that are valuable, but the temper and method of his
inquiry. As everyone knows, it was to him that Darwin owed an
essential part of his theory of natural selection, and this was only
possible because Malthus's outlook was truly scientific. His great
merit lies in considering man not as the object of praise or blame,
but as a part of nature, a thing with a certain characteristic
behaviour from which certain consequences must follow. If the
behaviour is not quite what Malthus supposed, if the consequences are
not quite what he inferred, that may falsify his conclusions, but does
not impair the value of his method. The objections which were made
when his doctrine was new--that it was horrible and depressing, that
people ought not to act as he said they did, and so on--were all such
as implied an unscientific attitude of mind; as against all of them,
his calm determination to treat man as a natural phenomenon marks an
important advance over the reformers of the eighteenth century and the
Revolution.

Under the influence of Darwinism the scientific attitude towards man
has now become fairly common, and is to some people quite natural,
though to most it is still a difficult and artificial intellectual
contortion. There is however, one study which is as yet almost wholly
untouched by the scientific spirit--I mean the study of philosophy.
Philosophers and the public imagine that the scientific spirit must
pervade pages that bristle with allusions to ions, germ-plasms, and
the eyes of shell-fish. But as the devil can quote Scripture, so the
philosopher can quote science. The scientific spirit is not an affair
of quotation, of externally acquired information, any more than
manners are an affair of the etiquette-book. The scientific attitude
of mind involves a sweeping away of all other desires in the interests
of the desire to know--it involves suppression of hopes and fears,
loves and hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we
become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, without
preconceptions, without bias, without any wish except to see it as it
is, and without any belief that what it is must be determined by some
relation, positive or negative, to what we should like it to be, or to
what we can easily imagine it to be.

Now in philosophy this attitude of mind has not as yet been achieved.
A certain self-absorption, not personal, but human, has marked almost
all attempts to conceive the universe as a whole. Mind, or some aspect
of it--thought or will or sentience--has been regarded as the pattern
after which the universe is to be conceived, for no better reason, at
bottom, than that such a universe would not seem strange, and would
give us the cosy feeling that every place is like home. To conceive
the universe as essentially progressive or essentially deteriorating,
for example, is to give to our hopes and fears a cosmic importance
which _may_, of course, be justified, but which we have as yet no
reason to suppose justified. Until we have learnt to think of it in
ethically neutral terms, we have not arrived at a scientific attitude
in philosophy; and until we have arrived at such an attitude, it is
hardly to be hoped that philosophy will achieve any solid results.

I have spoken so far largely of the negative aspect of the scientific
spirit, but it is from the positive aspect that its value is derived.
The instinct of constructiveness, which is one of the chief incentives
to artistic creation, can find in scientific systems a satisfaction
more massive than any epic poem. Disinterested curiosity, which is the
source of almost all intellectual effort, finds with astonished
delight that science can unveil secrets which might well have seemed
for ever undiscoverable. The desire for a larger life and wider
interests, for an escape from private circumstances, and even from the
whole recurring human cycle of birth and death, is fulfilled by the
impersonal cosmic outlook of science as by nothing else. To all these
must be added, as contributing to the happiness of the man of science,
the admiration of splendid achievement, and the consciousness of
inestimable utility to the human race. A life devoted to science is
therefore a happy life, and its happiness is derived from the very
best sources that are open to dwellers on this troubled and passionate
planet.




III

A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP[9]


To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the
Creation, saying:

"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow
wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not
given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain
undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured? He
smiled inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be
performed.

"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At
length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the
planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed,
from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid
crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean,
and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest
trees, huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters
breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the
monsters, as the play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of
thought, the knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for
worship. And Man saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world,
that all is struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of
life before Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There is a
hidden purpose, could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for
we must reverence something, and in the visible world there is nothing
worthy of reverence. ' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving
that God intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And
when he followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from
his ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to
forgive him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until
he invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been
appeased. And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that
thereby the future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the
strength that enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible.
And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in
renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which
crashed into Man's sun; and all returned again to nebula.

"'Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will have it performed
again. '"

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is
the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if
anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the
product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were
achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves
and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of
atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling,
can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours
of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday
brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast
death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's
achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe
in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so
nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to
stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm
foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth
be safely built.

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature
as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is
that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular
hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a
child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with
knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works
of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the
parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine,
to criticise, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in
the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in
this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his
outward life.

The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence
before the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he
respects more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before
his gods, without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship.
Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture,
of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating
the jealous gods: surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is
most precious has been freely given, their lust for blood must be
appeased, and more will not be required. The religion of Moloch--as
such creeds may be generically called--is in essence the cringing
submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the
thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence
of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and
receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.

But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world
begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given
to gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though
they feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject
them, still urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the
attitude inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the
divine power and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness
there is no hint. Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own
day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining
that the survivors are necessarily the fittest. But others, not
content with an answer so repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the
position which we have become accustomed to regard as specially
religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact
is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God,
all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should
be.

But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our
judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our
thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the
dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of
non-human Power. When we have realised that Power is largely bad, that
man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a
world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to
us: Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our
God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognised as the creation of
our own conscience?

The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly
our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and
Nietzsche and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the
result of failure to maintain our own ideals against a hostile
universe: it is itself a prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of
our best to Moloch. If strength indeed is to be respected, let us
respect rather the strength of those who refuse that false
"recognition of facts" which fails to recognise that facts are often
bad. Let us admit that, in the world we know, there are many things
that would be better otherwise, and that the ideals to which we do and
must adhere are not realised in the realm of matter. Let us preserve
our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal of perfection which
life does not permit us to attain, though none of these things meet
with the approval of the unconscious universe. If Power is bad, as it
seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In this lies Man's true
freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own
love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the
insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit
perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in
aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty
planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live,
from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith
which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let
us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always
before us.

When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a
spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary
to the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a
hostile universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively
hated, to refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears
to be the duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But
indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be
occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from
which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is
necessary for the wise to overcome. Indignation is a submission of our
thoughts, but not of our desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom
consists is found in the submission of our desires, but not of our
thoughts. From the submission of our desires springs the virtue of
resignation; from the freedom of our thoughts springs the whole world
of art and philosophy, and the vision of beauty by which, at last, we
half reconquer the reluctant world. But the vision of beauty is
possible only to unfettered contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by
the load of eager wishes; and thus Freedom comes only to those who no
longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal
goods that are subject to the mutations of Time.

Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of
evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding
that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted
that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are
yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form
part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced
is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed
passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason
for proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying
our hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.

But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods,
when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To
every man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the
young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the
whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not
credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of
duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for
us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may
nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune
comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away
our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is
not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.

But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by
renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own
ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of
imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of
reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines
and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of
change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of
fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will
shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the
world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs
whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.

Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a
cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered.
The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the
gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the
eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can
the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the
Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose
radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to
gladden the pilgrim's heart.

When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt
both to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognise
that the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes
possible at last so to transform and refashion the unconscious
universe, so to transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a
new image of shining gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the
multiform facts of the world--in the visual shapes of trees and
mountains and clouds, in the events of the life of man, even in the
very omnipotence of Death--the insight of creative idealism can find
the reflection of a beauty which its own thoughts first made. In this
way mind asserts its subtle mastery over the thoughtless forces of
Nature. The more evil the material with which it deals, the more
thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is its achievement in
inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden treasures, the
prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to swell the
pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the proudest, the
most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the very centre
of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest mountain;
from its impregnable watchtowers, his camps and arsenals, his columns
and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life continues,
while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the servile
captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless city
new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy
the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honour to those brave
warriors who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us
the priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by
sacrilegious invaders the home of the unsubdued.

But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in
more or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life.
In the spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and
in the irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an
overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the
inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange
marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of
sorrow. In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of
temporary desire, all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care
for the little trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the
common life of day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft
illumined by the flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean
on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night
without, a chill blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness
of humanity amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual
soul, which must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command,
against the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its
hopes and fears. Victory, in this struggle with the powers of
darkness, is the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the
true initiation into the overmastering beauty of human existence. From
that awful encounter of the soul with the outer world, renunciation,
wisdom, and charity are born; and with their birth a new life begins.
To take into the inmost shrine of the soul the irresistible forces
whose puppets we seem to be--Death and change, the irrevocableness of
the past, and the powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the
universe from vanity to vanity--to feel these things and know them is
to conquer them.

This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of
its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of
late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall,
still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change
or strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what
was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away,
the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars
in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable;
but to a soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.

The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison
with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and
Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in
himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.
But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their
passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us
free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental
subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To
abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of
temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things--this is
emancipation, and this is the free man's worship. And this liberation
is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by
the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of
Time.

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a
common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always,
shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a
long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured
by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and
where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades
vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent
Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which
their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on
their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give
them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing
courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in
grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of
their need--of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses,
that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are
fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with
ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their
evil have become eternal by the immortality of the past, be it ours to
feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was
the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled in their
hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave
words in which high courage glowed.

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow,
sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of
destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man,
condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass
through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the
blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining
the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that
his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to
preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward
life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a
moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary
but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned
despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Reprinted from the _Independent Review_, December, 1903.




IV

THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS


In regard to every form of human activity it is necessary that the
question should be asked from time to time, What is its purpose and
ideal? In what way does it contribute to the beauty of human
existence? As respects those pursuits which contribute only remotely,
by providing the mechanism of life, it is well to be reminded that not
the mere fact of living is to be desired, but the art of living in the
contemplation of great things. Still more in regard to those
avocations which have no end outside themselves, which are to be
justified, if at all, as actually adding to the sum of the world's
permanent possessions, it is necessary to keep alive a knowledge of
their aims, a clear prefiguring vision of the temple in which creative
imagination is to be embodied.

The fulfilment of this need, in what concerns the studies forming the
material upon which custom has decided to train the youthful mind, is
indeed sadly remote--so remote as to make the mere statement of such a
claim appear preposterous. Great men, fully alive to the beauty of the
contemplations to whose service their lives are devoted, desiring that
others may share in their joys, persuade mankind to impart to the
successive generations the mechanical knowledge without which it is
impossible to cross the threshold. Dry pedants possess themselves of
the privilege of instilling this knowledge: they forget that it is to
serve but as a key to open the doors of the temple; though they spend
their lives on the steps leading up to those sacred doors, they turn
their backs upon the temple so resolutely that its very existence is
forgotten, and the eager youth, who would press forward to be
initiated to its domes and arches, is bidden to turn back and count
the steps.

Mathematics, perhaps more even than the study of Greece and Rome, has
suffered from this oblivion of its due place in civilisation. Although
tradition has decreed that the great bulk of educated men shall know
at least the elements of the subject, the reasons for which the
tradition arose are forgotten, buried beneath a great rubbish-heap of
pedantries and trivialities. To those who inquire as to the purpose of
mathematics, the usual answer will be that it facilitates the making
of machines, the travelling from place to place, and the victory over
foreign nations, whether in war or commerce. If it be objected that
these ends--all of which are of doubtful value--are not furthered by
the merely elementary study imposed upon those who do not become
expert mathematicians, the reply, it is true, will probably be that
mathematics trains the reasoning faculties. Yet the very men who make
this reply are, for the most part, unwilling to abandon the teaching
of definite fallacies, known to be such, and instinctively rejected by
the unsophisticated mind of every intelligent learner. And the
reasoning faculty itself is generally conceived, by those who urge its
cultivation, as merely a means for the avoidance of pitfalls and a
help in the discovery of rules for the guidance of practical life. All
these are undeniably important achievements to the credit of
mathematics; yet it is none of these that entitles mathematics to a
place in every liberal education. Plato, we know, regarded the
contemplation of mathematical truths as worthy of the Deity; and
Plato realised, more perhaps than any other single man, what those
elements are in human life which merit a place in heaven. There is in
mathematics, he says, "something which is _necessary_ and cannot be
set aside . . . and, if I mistake not, of divine necessity; for as to
the human necessities of which the Many talk in this connection,
nothing can be more ridiculous than such an application of the words.
_Cleinias. _ And what are these necessities of knowledge, Stranger,
which are divine and not human? _Athenian. _ Those things without some
use or knowledge of which a man cannot become a God to the world, nor
a spirit, nor yet a hero, nor able earnestly to think and care for
man" (_Laws_, p. 818). [10] Such was Plato's judgment of mathematics;
but the mathematicians do not read Plato, while those who read him
know no mathematics, and regard his opinion upon this question as
merely a curious aberration.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme
beauty--a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without
appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous
trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a
stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true
spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man,
which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in
mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics
deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a
part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind
with ever-renewed encouragement. Real life is, to most men, a long
second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the
possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no
practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying
in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from
which all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even
from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually
created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its
natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can
escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.

So little, however, have mathematicians aimed at beauty, that hardly
anything in their work has had this conscious purpose. Much, owing to
irrepressible instincts, which were better than avowed beliefs, has
been moulded by an unconscious taste; but much also has been spoilt by
false notions of what was fitting. The characteristic excellence of
mathematics is only to be found where the reasoning is rigidly
logical: the rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure
are to architecture. In the most beautiful work, a chain of argument
is presented in which every link is important on its own account, in
which there is an air of ease and lucidity throughout, and the
premises achieve more than would have been thought possible, by means
which appear natural and inevitable.