1.10. PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS FROM THESE CONSIDERATIONS.
Now what is the practical outcome of all these criticisms of the human
mind? Does it follow that thought is futile and discussion vain? By no
means. Rather these considerations lead us toward mutual understanding.
They clear up the deadlocks that come from the hard and fast use of
terms, they establish mutual charity as an intellectual necessity. The
common way of speech and thought which the old system of logic has
simply systematized, is too glib and too presumptuous of certainty. We
must needs use language, but we must use it always with the thought in
our minds of its unreal exactness, its actual habitual deflection from
fact. All propositions are approximations to an elusive truth, and we
employ them as the mathematician studies the circle by supposing it to
be a polygon of a very great number of sides.
We must make use of terms and sometimes of provisional terms. But we
must guard against such terms and the mental danger of excessive
intension they carry with them. The child takes a stick and says it is a
sword and does not forget, he takes a shadow under the bed and says it
is a bear and he half forgets. The man takes a set of emotions and says
it is a God, and he gets excited and propagandist and does forget; he is
involved in disputes and confusions with the old gods of wood and stone,
and presently he is making his God a Great White Throne and fitting him
up with a mystical family.
Essentially we have to train our minds to think anew, if we are to think
beyond the purposes for which the mind seems to have been evolved. We
have to disabuse ourselves from the superstition of the binding nature
of definitions and the exactness of logic. We have to cure ourselves of
the natural tricks of common thought and argument. You know the way of
it, how effective and foolish it is; the quotation of the exact
statement of which every jot and tittle must be maintained, the
challenge to be consistent, the deadlock between your terms and mine.
More and more as I grow older and more settled in my views am I bored by
common argument, bored not because I am ceasing to be interested in the
things argued about, but because I see more and more clearly the
futility of the methods pursued.
How then are we to think and argue and what truth may we attain? Is not
the method of the scientific investigator a valid one, and is there not
truth to the world of fact in scientific laws? Decidedly there is. And
the continual revision and testing against fact that these laws get is
constantly approximating them more and more nearly to a trustworthy
statement of fact. Nevertheless they are never true in that dogmatic
degree in which they seem true to the unphilosophical student of
science. Accepting as I do the validity of nearly all the general
propositions of modern science, I have constantly to bear in mind that
about them too clings the error of excessive claims to precision.
The man trained solely in science falls easily into a superstitious
attitude; he is overdone with classification. He believes in the
possibility of exact knowledge everywhere. What is not exact he declares
is not knowledge. He believes in specialists and experts in all fields.
I dispute this universal range of possible scientific precision. There
is, I allege, a not too clearly recognised order in the sciences which
forms the gist of my case against this scientific pretension. There is a
gradation in the importance of the individual instance as one passes
from mechanics and physics and chemistry through the biological sciences
to economics and sociology, a gradation whose correlations and
implications have not yet received adequate recognition, and which does
profoundly affect the method of study and research in each science.
Let me repeat in slightly altered terms some of the points raised in the
preceding sections. I have doubted and denied that there are identically
similar objective experiences; I consider all objective beings as
individual and unique. It is now understood that conceivably only in the
subjective world, and in theory and the imagination, do we deal with
identically similar units, and with absolutely commensurable quantities.
In the real world it is reasonable to suppose we deal at most with
PRACTICALLY similar units and PRACTICALLY commensurable quantities. But
there is a strong bias, a sort of labour-saving bias, in the normal
human mind, to ignore this, and not only to speak but to think of a
thousand bricks or a thousand sheep or a thousand Chinamen as though
they were all absolutely true to sample. If it is brought before a
thinker for a moment that in any special case this is not so, he slips
back to the old attitude as soon as his attention is withdrawn. This
type of error has, for instance, caught many of the race of chemists,
and ATOMS and IONS and so forth of the same species are tacitly assumed
to be similar to one another.
Be it noted that, so far as the practical results of chemistry and
physics go, it scarcely matters which assumption we adopt, the number of
units is so great, the individual difference so drowned and lost. For
purposes of enquiry and discussion the incorrect one is infinitely more
convenient.
But this ceases to be true directly we emerge from the region of
chemistry and physics. In the biological sciences of the eighteenth
century, common-sense struggled hard to ignore individuality in shells
and plants and animals. There was an attempt to eliminate the more
conspicuous departures as abnormalities, as sports, nature's weak
moments; and it was only with the establishment of Darwin's great
generalizations that the hard and fast classificatory system broke down
and individuality came to its own. Yet there had always been a clearly
felt difference between the conclusions of the biological sciences and
those dealing with lifeless substance, in the relative vagueness, the
insubordinate looseness and inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist
accumulated facts and multiplied names, but he did not go triumphantly
from generalization to generalization after the fashion of the chemist
or physicist. It is easy to see, therefore, how it came about that the
inorganic sciences were regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. It was
scarcely suspected that the biological sciences might perhaps after all
be TRUER than the experimental, in spite of the difference in practical
value in favour of the latter. It was, and is by the great majority of
people to this day, supposed to be the latter that are invincibly true;
and the former are regarded as a more complex set of problems merely,
with obliquities and refractions that presently will be explained away.
Comte and Herbert Spencer certainly seem to me to have taken that much
for granted. Herbert Spencer no doubt talked of the unknown and
unknowable, but not in this sense as an element of inexactness running
through all things. He thought, it seems to me, of the unknown as the
indefinable Beyond of an immediate world that might be quite clearly and
definitely known.
There is a growing body of people which is beginning to hold the
converse view--that counting, classification, measurement, the whole
fabric of mathematics, is subjective and untrue to the world of fact,
and that the uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the
number of units taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness
of generalization increases, because individuality tells for more and
more. Could you take men by the thousand billion, you could generalize
about them as you do about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be
that you would find them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That
concisely is the minority belief, and my belief.
Now what is called the scientific method in the physical sciences rests
upon the ignoring of individualities; and like many mathematical
conventions, its great practical convenience is no proof whatever of its
final truth. Let me admit the enormous value, the wonder of its results
in mechanics, in all the physical sciences, in chemistry, even in
physiology,--but what is its value beyond that? Is the scientific method
of value in biology? The great advances made by Darwin and his school in
biology were not made, it must be remembered, by the scientific method,
as it is generally conceived, at all. His was historical research. He
conducted research into pre-documentary history. He collected
information along the lines indicated by certain interrogations; and the
bulk of his work was the digesting and critical analysis of that. For
documents and monuments he had fossils and anatomical structures and
germinating eggs too innocent to lie. But, on the other hand, he had to
correspond with breeders and travellers of various sorts; classes
entirely analogous, from the point of view of evidence, to the writers
of history and memoirs. I question profoundly whether the word
"science," in current usage anyhow, ever means such patient
disentanglement as Darwin pursued. It means the attainment of something
positive and emphatic in the way of a conclusion, based on amply
repeated experiments capable of infinite repetition, "proved," as they
say, "up to the hilt."
It would be of course possible to dispute whether the word "science"
should convey this quality of certitude, but to most people it certainly
does at the present time. So far as the movements of comets and electric
trams go, there is no doubt practically cock-sure science; and Comte and
Herbert Spencer seem to me to have believed that cock-sure could be
extended to every conceivable finite thing. The fact that Herbert
Spencer called a certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on the
non-individualizing quality of his primary assumptions and of his mental
texture. He believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is an
evolutionary product from an original homogeneity, begotten by folding
and multiplying and dividing and twisting it, and still fundamentally
IT. It seems to me that the general usage is entirely for the limitation
of the word "science" to knowledge and the search after knowledge of a
high degree of precision. And not simply the general usage; "Science is
measurement," Science is "organized commonsense," proud in fact of its
essential error, scornful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms.
Now my contention is that we can arrange the fields of human thought and
interest about the world of fact in a sort of scale. At one end the
number of units is infinite and the methods exact, at the other we have
the human subjects in which there is no exactitude. The science of
society stands at the extreme end of the scale from the molecular
sciences. In these latter there is an infinitude of units; in sociology,
as Comte perceived, there is only one unit. It is true that Herbert
Spencer, in order to get classification somehow, did, as Professor
Durkheim has pointed out, separate human society into societies, and
made believe they competed one with another and died and reproduced just
like animals, and that economists following List have for the purposes
of fiscal controversy discovered economic types; but this is a
transparent device, and one is surprised to find thoughtful and
reputable writers off their guard against such bad analogy. But indeed
it is impossible to isolate complete communities of men, or to trace any
but rude general resemblances between group and group. These alleged
units have as much individuality as pieces of cloud; they come, they go,
they fuse and separate. And we are forced to conclude that not only is
the method of observation, experiment, and verification left far away
down the scale, but that the method of classification under types, which
has served so useful a purpose in the middle group of subjects, the
subjects involving numerous but a finite number of units, has also to be
abandoned in social science. We cannot put Humanity into a museum or dry
it for examination; our one single still living specimen is all history,
all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no
satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing else in the real world
with which to compare it. We have only the remotest ideas of its
"life-cycle" and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its destiny.
This denial of scientific precision is true of all questions of general
human relations and attitude. And in regard to all these matters
affecting our personal motives, our self-control and our devotions, it
is much truer.
From this it is an easy step to the statement that so far as the
clear-cut confident sort of knowledge goes, the sort of knowledge one
gets from a time-table or a text-book of chemistry, or seeks from a
witness in a police court, I am, in relation to religious and moral
questions an agnostic. I do not think any general propositions partaking
largely of the nature of fact can be known about these things. There is
nothing possessing the general validity of fact to be stated or known.
