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thereby frankly confesses that her empirical procedure recognises a non-rational or alogical surd in Nature, an element of the occult, which for ever sets a limit to the use of the deductive method and renders pure a priori science of actuality impossible. Certain physical properties having been empirically ascertained, she can indeed sometimes anticipate by deductive operations the discovery of others; but more ultimately, she can be wise only after the event-after prior observation of specific physical properties such as inertia or elasticity, and specific physical constants. In other words, when she is conscious of her inevitable sense-conditionedness, science is profoundly convinced that the actual world is not purely conceptual: she is usually shocked when metaphysicians have seemed to her to imply such a possibility. The real, in short, for science, is not the rational.

Nevertheless, science has another side to her mind. From the age of Greek natural philosophy to our time, she has been guided, and indeed blessed, by seeking identity behind diversity, and permanence underlying change. Here is the essence of that kind of reason which is science's special mental faculty, and of the rationality which is hoped for in the world as science views it. The word 'explanation,' as used in science, certainly bears more than one meaning. But it seldom means merely the reduction of the unfamiliar to a case of the familiar-which, as in the instance of contactaction, is often occult enough. And it does not seem to mean resolution of the complex into the analytically simple, save as a means to a further end. Scientific explanation or rationalisation would seem to consist essentially in the conceiving as identical at the subterphenomenal level what at the actual or phenomenal level is diverse. As the subter-phenomenal is necessarily the imperceptible, its status may be that of the purely conceptual and non-actual. Here, indeed, schools diverge. The realistically-minded maintain that in ether and electrons we are to see the metaphysically real; the 'descriptionist,' on the other hand, regards such entities as but symbolic fictions or conceptual shorthand, so that Nature does not actually consist of them but behaves as if they were her ultimate constituents. That Nature behaves as if they were real while they are not,

seems incredible to the realist, who asks if 'fiction which makes fact' is not 'fact too'? And assuredly the subatomic science of to-day can present a strong case for its realistic belief. Nevertheless, an explanation may be sufficient without being the only possible; and fiction can perfectly well be valid, or useful, and not merely false; witness the line without breadth. That a theory gives (up to date) an adequate representation, does not necessarily imply that it is true in the realist's sense, or even that it will not be superseded. *

But, not to digress further into an interesting sideissue, and to return to the level at which science is unanimous, we may ascribe to science's rationalism' the first emergence of atomic theory and the resort to the various conservation-principles, to each of which in turn science has come to sit loose. It is further to be observed that whenever science has stumbled on an apparently brute fact such as could not have been anticipated, or deduced from existing theory, she has always wanted to rationalise it, to make it deducible, to replace its contingency by necessity. The emergence of 'quanta' will doubtless cause solicitude of this nature. And here perhaps is to be seen the strongest motivation of molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic theories, by means of which the qualitative diversities and brute habits in things are rationally explained. Science is inspired with the passionate hope that what it cannot to-day see its way thus to rationalise will admit of rationalisation some day that a link will be found-it will certainly be invented-in virtue of which diverse properties will be seen to be identical. It will indeed involve a break in the continuity of the history of physics if, in order to explain anomalies which the future may reveal, it will not be necessary to credit electrons with lesser electrons ' on their backs to bite 'em,' and so account for their abnormal behaviour, But be this as it may, the ideal of science implies that there is nothing new (save configuration) under the sun, and that all epigenesis is preformation. Change has long been regarded as change only in configuration, of matter that is all of one kind.

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* Dr Whitehead, in his work The Concept of Nature,' seems in this sense to be extravagantly realistic (see Prof. Hobson's 'The Domain of Natural Science,' p. 59); as also Mr Ritchie ('Scientific Method,' p. 38).

And science's hope, as distinguished from her creed,* does not stop here. She has exhibited ardour to geometrise matter as well as to kinematicise physics; to eliminate time from her equations, in spite of the fact that our world is irreversible or at least has shown unreversedness up to date; and to identify the relation of cause to effect with the relation of ground to consequence, after the manner of Spinoza. As to the geometrising of matter, we recall Descartes' identification of matter with extension; Lord Kelvin's vortexatom theory of matter, divested of the arbitrary assumptions requisite to get it under way, amounted to the same thing; and recent exploiters of Einsteinism have endeavoured to see all actuality implicit in what they have been pleased to call the structure' of empty space-time.

Thus it seems that science's hope, at its extreme or ideal limit, involves repudiation of science's primary conviction that the real is not the rational or purely conceptual. The real is not the rational: but it is rational, science hopes; and even rational without remainder. Thus paradoxes emerge. There would be no science were there no qualitative diversity in the world: there cannot be complete rationality with diversity. A method which, at the ideal limit, implies there is no change, is used to investigate change. And, startlingly enough, the method succeeds. Nature-or part of it— is patient of a method which seems to imply that there is really no Nature at all. What looks like a reductio ad absurdum is actually avoided, apparently, by science's adoption of the judicious compromise provided in Dr Broad's postulate. She works, i.e., whatever she hopes or cries for, with limited diversity, not complete identity. She swallows her rationalistic pride and submits to the leavening of the rational with a saving tincture of the alogical. She withdraws her demand, or stifles her desire, for rigorous deductivism. Were her ideal hope also her practical postulate or her

* M. Emile Meyerson, in his interesting work, 'De l'Explication dans les Sciences,' which discusses this topic at length, and from which some statements are here borrowed, seems insufficiently to have recognised this distinction, by which the situation of science is saved; otherwise what is said here is in complete agreement with the results of his investigation.

dogmatic creed, we should have to say that a selfstultifying principle underlies her notion of rationality: and to recognise that to this absurd rationality we owe our intellectual success, our physical science which is wont to be regarded as the proudest achievement of the human mind. Here the rationalistic man of science should surely see the acme of the pathos which invests the human tragedy or comedy. And in any case our humiliation is to be saved only by an alogical compromise. The modesty which asks for identity in any measure between all and none does not seem to bespeak logical stringency, but rather practical hygiene for preservation of sanity. Perhaps the whole situation would suggest to some, what to others would savour of adding insult to injury, that when reason is regarded as that functioning of the mind which consists essentially in seeing identity and permanence behind the phenomenal, we are but taking too seriously, and are treating as a characteristic of universal reason or of reason-per-se, so to say, the accident that minds of the human type happen to find repose and satisfaction in the static: that in spite of the prima facie truth suggested by all Nature save perhaps the everlasting hills, that all things flow, change is intellectually, because æsthetically, repugnant to us, and occasions unrest till it receives from us 'explanation' in terms of the unchanging. Conceivably, with other orders of beings, say the angels, it is customary to construe identity and permanence in terms of diversity and flux; to look upon statics as the last science rather than as propedeutic to physics; to believe, like Shelley, that 'Naught may endure but mutability.' And they may nevertheless be as rational or reasonable as ourselves, and have as coherent a world-view. There is no accounting for tastes. And if our predominant taste be an accident of our humanity, so that all our knowledge, and particularly that factor in which we are prone to hope may prove axiomatic, is relative to the specific mentality of Homo Sapiens; then our adoration of reason, in the sense in which science is rational, would be a supreme illustration of the truth of Goethe's remark, that man never knows how anthropomorphic

* Meyerson, op. cit.

he is. To say that man is rational, or that the world is rational, in the sense implied in science's quasi-religious faith, would but be to say that human mentality is so constituted (perhaps in virtue of the survival-value of uniformity-beliefs) that the mind of man is ever restless till it abide in contemplation of permanent identities: which rings like the familiar words of Augustine, 'the mind is ever restless till it rests in God.' Science and religion can then once more join hands, and this time voices also:

'Change and decay in all around I see,

O Thou [or That] that changest not, abide with me.'

On this view as to the nature of reason, in the particular sense under consideration, science and religion would seem in their different ways to meet one and the same fundamental human need. And in a different form each supplies to faith, whether the faith that merely knocks or the faith that also prays, an object or objects such as 'no man hath seen at any time,' but by assumption of which experience of a certain sort is in a certain way rationalised.'

Science's rationalism, it is true, is a trend. The trend may most conspicuously be seen in the French school of physicists permanently influenced by Descartes; but it has been explicitly confessed, as a hope, by Hughens, Helmholtz, and other investigators. The ordo essendi, which can only become a known, as opposed to a merely surmised, ordo, after pursuing the ordo cognoscendi, is often invoked to discredit the latter ordo, or to assert its irrelevance. Reason actually presupposes sense; but reason, once having attained to discretion or sophistication, turns round upon the rock whence psychology says it was largely hewn, and rates it for being 'subjective,' or with language to that effect. Reason would at any cost cast out the perceptual from Nature's 'simple framework.' It hopes, indeed, that sense-perception will some day become superfluous to scientific procedure and to scientific knowledge of the sensible.

At the start, reason merely hopes that the conceptual system which it has elaborated will prove valid of the phenomenal, and admits that this can only be ascertained by trying; but it comes eventually to assert, or at least

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