1 McDougall left Harvard for Duke in 1927. He died in 1938.
XIX. SCIENCE
Hypothesis
From the Baltimore Evening Sun, April 6, 1931
IN the sciences hypothesis always precedes law, which is to say, there is always a lot of tall guessing before a new fact is established. The guessers are often quite as important as the factfinders; in truth, it would not be difficult to argue that they are more important. New facts are seldom plucked from the clear sky; they have to be approached and smelled out by a process of trial and error, in which bold and shrewd guessing is an integral part. The Greeks were adepts at such guessing, and the scientists of the world have been following the leads they opened for more than two thousand years. Unluckily, the supply of Greek guesses is now running out, and so science begins to show a lack of imagination. What is needed is a new supply of guessers. Mathematical physics has produced a pretty good one in the person of Dr. Einstein, but some of the other sciences seem to have none, and suffer badly from that lack—for example, physiology. It has been piling up facts for more than a century past, but the meaning of most of them remains occult. If it could develop a Class A guesser he would soon be one of its magnificoes, and of a rank comparable to that of Du Bois-Reymond, Johannes Müller, Lavoisier, Malpighi or Harvey.
Darwin
From the same, April 6, 1931
THE TROUBLE with human progress is that it tends to go too fast—that is, too fast for the great majority of comfortable and incurious men. Its agents are always in a hurry, and so become unpopular. If Darwin had printed “The Origin of Species” as a serial running twenty or thirty years he might have found himself, at the end of it, a member of the House of Lords or even Archbishop of Canterbury. But he disgorged it in one stupendous and appalling dose, and in consequence he alarmed millions, including many of his fellow scientists, and got an evil name. To this day, though all of the soundest (and thus most revolutionary) of his ideas have become platitudes, he continues to be thought of much as Simon Legree, Thomas Paine and John Wilkes Booth are thought of. To name a new public-school after him would cause almost as grave a scandal as to name it after Lillian Russell. In at least two-thirds of the American States one of the easiest ways to get into public office is to denounce him as a scoundrel. But by the year 2030, I daresay, what remains of his dootrine, if anything, will be accepted as complacently as the Copernican cosmography is now accepted. His offense was simply that he was too precipitate.
Caveat Against Science
From the American Mercury, Sept., 1927, pp. 126–27.
A review of SCIENCE: THE FALSE MESSIAH, by C. E. Ayres;
Indianapolis, 1927
MR. AYRES, formerly a member of the staff of the New Republic, has served his time as a professor of philosophy, and, like any other metaphysician in a machine age, is full of vague fevers and shooting pains. In the present volume he endeavors gallantly to reduce them to a series of these, with supporting syllogisms, but though he enjoy the gift of utterance and is, in fact, extraordinarily articulate for a philosopher, his argument remains, nevertheless, somewhat inchoate. What I gather from it chiefly is the sad thought that science, after all, cannot teach us how to live. It accumulates immense pyramids of facts, but the facts turn out, on examination, to be meaningless. What if the astronomers discover that the temperature at the core of a certain star is 750,000 degrees Centigrade? What if the electron reveals itself as a speck of vacuum performing a witless and eternal dance? What if epinephrin is synthesized, and even Gordon gin? What if a distinguished movie actor is found to be a perfect specimen of Eoanthropus dawsoni? What if someone proves that a straight line is no longer the shortest distance between two points? All the really important human problems remain unsolved. Nothing in any of the triumphs of science will help a man to determine whether, having $50 to invest, he will do better to put it in the missionary box or buy some worthy girl a set of necking tools. Mr. Ayres, it appears, long ago gave up any hope of light from the purely physical sciences: chemistry, physics, pathology, physiology, zoölogy, chiropractic, golf, etc. But psychology still lured him, and he began to investigate it—just in time to see the behaviorists turn Man into a teetotum, not unlike the electron. There remained anthropology, but now even anthropology runs to graphs and tables of statistics, laws and more laws, all impersonal, all devoid of metaphysical content, all extremely mortifying to a philosopher.
Mr. Ayres seems to have a fear that the end is not yet—that science, having turned its back upon the moral order of the world, will one day return to put it down, maybe by force—that is, that we are facing scientific tyranny almost as bad as the old theological tyranny or the current political tyranny. “When science has become supreme,” he says, in the last sentence of his book, “any attempt to rectify its formulæ will be persecuted as heresy. “But here, I believe, he is simply judging science in terms of the crimes of philosophy. There is not the slightest sign that science, in itself, has any such malign ambition. Its aim is simply to establish the facts. It has no more interest in the moral significance of those facts than it has in the moral significance of a streptococcus. It must be amoral by its very nature: the minute it begins separating facts into the two categories of good ones and bad ones it ceases to be science and becomes a mere nuisance, like theology. Nevertheless, there is a certain uncomfortable reason in Mr. Ayres’s fears. Science itself will never send him to the stake, but the quacks who hang about its flanks may one day try to do so. Such quacks are already numerous, and they tend to disguise themselves as scientists, and to be accepted by the world in that character. I point, for example, to the so-called hygienists, and especially to those who are also public jobholders. Theoretically and by their own representation, these singularly cocksure men are scientists; actually they are simply moralists, and of the same lineage as Prohibition agents. The body of exact facts lying under their pretensions is of very modest dimensions, and so far as I am aware not one of those facts was unearthed by their own efforts. They are to pathology as astrologers are to astronomy. It is certainly by no mere coincidence that they are the only claimants to scientific authority in the whole modern world who make any demand that the police enforce their decrees.
But there is no reason why Mr. Ayres should permit these hygienists to alarm him. Their present high puissance is not due to the fact that science is running amok, but to the fact that science is still impotent. If it had the authority that he sees in his unpleasant visions, and the moral fervor that he seems to think must go therewith, it would be hanging hygienists today. But I don’t believe that it would actually hang them, even if it had the power. To science, a hygienist is simply a natural phenomenon, like a philosopher or a Congressman; all three stand upon an equal footing in its sight. Their moral passion is no more to be put down by force than is a bishop’s passion to cultivate the rich; it is simply something to be studied calmly, as the habits of the crayfish are studied. Is that study sterile? Of course it is—to the sort of man to whom it is sterile. That sort of man is not content with facts; he also craves advice. It is the business of philosophers to give him that advice. Functioning as theologians, as publicists, as metaphysicians and what not, they have been doing so for five or six thousand years. No doubt it has done him a lot of good.
But there are also men who do not crave such advice. Those are the men to whom science is a reality. They believe that there is something intrinsically agreeable about learning something not hitherto known. They get the same stimulation out of widening their knowledge that the customer of the theologians and metaphysicians gets out of being instructed in his duties toward God, the Armenians, his brother-in-law, and the memory of Woodrow Wilson. It is a form of effort that is relatively new in the world, and hence it is not mentioned in the sacred books. No known church teaches that a man could get into Heaven by discovering the hypothetical element lying between molybdenum and ruthenium, or by determining the exact value of π. More, no man could hope to be elected Pres
ident for doing it, or even to membership in the Elks, or the American Academy of Arts and Letters, or the Actors’ Equity. Nevertheless, as I say, there are men who are interested in such achievements, and esteem their fruits. They constitute a very small minority of the human race. They alone are concerned with science, or have any understanding of its peculiar values. It is as impossible to imagine them engaging in the tyranny that Mr. Ayres fears as it is to imagine the rest of mankind comprehending their attitude—or escaping tyranny at other hands.
The Eternal Conundrum
From the American Mercury, Feb., 1931, pp. 252–54.
A review of The Mysterious Universe, by Sir James Jeans;
New York, 1930
WHEN I was a boy it was commonly taught that all astronomers, soon or late, went crazy. In this theory there was probably no truth, but it was based nevertheless on a sound observation, to wit, that the astronomers of that day, more than any other men of science, ran to daring speculations about the nature and goal of the universe, and the purpose behind it. Their successors still do so, and it is no wonder, for their business brings them far closer than any other scientists ever come to the fundamental mysteries of creation.
Contrast that business, for example, with the daily work of a biologist. The phenomena that a biologist has to do with nearly all lie within narrow limits of space and time, and the questions that he asks himself about them are almost always answerable in ways consonant with everyday experience. When he has explained this one in terms of surface tension, that one in terms of osmosis, and a third one in terms of Mendel’s law, he has pretty well satisfied his professional curiosity, and that of his customers. All the materials of his trade are to be found in his own small corner of the visible universe, and the actions and reactions that he observes going on among them all seem perfectly logical, and follow natural laws that are not hard to comprehend.
Even life itself, considered biologically, is not very mysterious. No biologist, so far, has ever set it going in inert matter, but there is nothing in its apparent nature, as revealed by investigation and experiment, which forbids the hope of setting it going at some time hereafter. Thus biologists seldom give any time to speculating about the ultimate constitution of matter, or about the origin of the universe, or about the motives, if any, behind the natural laws that they observe and record. Most of them care little for such exercises, and it is rare to find one who shows any leaning toward mystical ways of thought. They are, as a class, a hard-headed and matter-of-fact lot. When one chances to be born with a mystical taint, he usually forsakes biology at the first opportunity, and, like Alfred Russel Wallace, William James and Hans Driesch, gives himself over to frank metaphysics.
With astronomers, and with physicists in general, the case is different. They are constantly colliding with questions which take them beyond the superficial flow of phenomena and into the realm of ultimates. They do a great deal of their work, not on the safe ground where knowledge is abundant and may be arranged in orderly systems, but on the borderline between the known and the unknowable, where every equation is bound to have a couple of x’s in it. Proceeding, say, from the molecule, of which a lot may be learned, to the atom, of which less may be learned, and then to the electron, of which still less may be learned, they presently find themselves confronting shapes and forces of which nothing, it would seem, can be learned. If they were all ideal scientific men they would sit down at this place, and wait patiently for further light. But having gone so far into the unknown, they pant to go further, and it is thus common for them, in the absence of objective facts, to resort to subjective speculations.
If they are thorough materialists, as sometimes happens, they entertain us with pictures of an infinite, irrational and intrinsically incomprehensible universe, running without motive power but otherwise not unlike an immense internal-combustion engine. But if there is any trace of the common Christian heritage in them—and, alas, there often is—they begin to speculate about the nature of the motive power, and soon they are conjuring up a will behind it, and inflicting one more God upon a sweating and distracted world. That God, as usual, follows the pattern of themselves. Dr. Robert A. Millikan’s is an elderly Unitarian born in Morrison, III., who took his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1895, got the Nobel Prize in 1923, and is a member of the Valley Hunt Club of Pasadena, Calif. Dr. A. S. Eddington’s is a Quaker imperfectly denaturized at Cambridge and now a don there. By the same token, Sir James Jeans’s is a mathematician.
This Jeans God shows rather more plausibility than the others, and is much more refined. He lacks both the hearty, beefy bucolicity of Millikan’s Middle Western Corn-God and the sickly chlorosis of Eddington’s gaseous Quaker. He neither belches nor swoons. His tastes and habits of mind, as described by His creator, correspond very aptly with the way the universe seems to be run. If a human mathematician ran it, it would be, in fact, pretty much what it is now. In particular, positing a mathematical God disposes neatly of certain difficulties that have long badgered physicists. This is no place to describe them in detail: suffice it to say that they involve a number of apparent irregularities in the flow of phenomena—a number of unaccountable variations in what has been regarded as natural law. Sometimes, it appears, electrons do not jump according to a regular system, but irregularly, like grasshoppers in a meadow. Again, light does not move in a straight line, but along some sort of curve. Yet again, time has a variable value, according to the place and the observer. Such aberations are hard to fit into a strictly mechanical universe, but they slip very smoothly into one operated on a mathematical plan, for mathematics, as everyone knows, does not confine itself to immutable phenomena, but also takes an interest in the wavering and fickle kind. A whole, and very important branch of the science is devoted to mere probabilities, and there are others, much used by statisticians, which try to get a certain rough order into downright chaos. It is Sir James’s idea that many of the apparently unruly and intractable phenomena which now puzzle physicists (and especially astronomers) may be brought to something approaching coherence by thinking of them in mathematical terms. So he suggests that the whole universe may be no more than a prodigious exercise in some sort of calculus, and that God may be, not the engineer that many scientists have hitherto imagined, but a mathematician.
It is a charming conceit, and Sir James develops it with great skill and address. He is one of the most competent writers on physics now extant, with a really extraordinary gift for making the most difficult of scientific concepts understandable. Even the Einstein speculations about space and time, in his hands, take on a kind of clarity. Nevertheless, I can only report that, in the present case, he leaves at least one very friendly reader quite unconvinced. The “loose-jointedness” that he discovers in the universe by no means “destroys the case for absolutely strict causation.” All it really brings us to is an uneasy realization that our present stock of knowledge is far from complete. Not only are there plain gaps in it; there are also parts of it that are obviously dubious. I believe that fully four-fifths of what cocksure physicists now tell us about the nature and behavior of electrons will be laughed at on some near tomorrow, and that most of the phenomena which now seem to be lawless and hence inexplicable will be reduced to law and order at the same time. All we really know is that we do not yet know what this law is. Physicists, as a class, are far too eager to make mysteries. Facing the dark, they are always seeing things. If chemists were similarly given to fanciful and mystical guessing, they would have hatched a quantum theory forty years ago to account for the variations that they observed in atomic weights. But they kept on plugging away in their laboratories without calling in either mathematicians or theologians to aid them, and eventually they discovered the isotopes, and what had been chaos was reduced to the most exact sort of order.
The same thing, no doubt, will happen in the domain of physics, once the physicists forget that they were once baptized, and begin to apply themselves honestly to the problems of their business. They
have, in late years, made a great deal of progress, though it has been accompanied by a considerable quackery. Some of the notions which they now try to foist upon the world, especially in the astronomical realm and about the atom, are obviously nonsensical, and will soon go the way of all unsupported speculations. But there is nothing intrinsically insoluble about the problems they mainly struggle with, and soon or late really competent physicists will arise to solve them. These really competent physicists, I predict, will be too busy in their laboratories to give any time to either metaphysics or theology. Both are eternal enemies of every variety of sound thinking, and no man can monkey with them without losing something of his good judgment.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 38
