THE IDEAL SCIENTIFIC MAN
Is the scientific man really a distinct kind of man, or is it merely that science is a distinct occupation? To answer the question we must make the elementary distinction between the scientific man and the man who practises science, and when we do that the answer is obvious. There is as certainly the “born” scientific man as there is the born artist. But in saying this we are referring to ideals. Perhaps there has never been a perfect man of science, and perhaps there has never been a perfect artist. But in order to understand the distinction between one kind of man and another it is helpful to construct ideals—extreme cases which may be used as measuring rods. What, then, are the characteristics of the ideal man of science? We may approach the solution by trying to make precise the characteristics which have led us, vaguely, to construct the hierarchy we already possess. We feel, for instance, that Henry Cavendish, that passionless recluse, was a much more “purely scientific” man than, say, Thomas Henry Huxley. If we examine this conviction of ours we make the interesting discovery that it is chiefly for his negative characteristics that we assign this greater purity to Cavendish. Huxley was passionately interested in the questions which concern every good citizen, in politics, in social reform, in religion; he took sides on these questions and fought for his side. Of Cavendish we can only say that it is inconceivable that he would have taken sides on these questions, and very difficult to believe that he was even remotely interested in them. Take another point. Huxley abounded in ordinary human affections. He was a devoted husband, a good father, a faithful friend, a resolute opponent. Cavendish never manifested a vestige of any of these qualities. He had no wife, no children, no friends, and never showed the faintest dislike of anybody. Huxley was a champion of what he thought the truth, and strained every nerve to enable it to prevail. Cavendish, who was one of the greatest investigators, one of the clearest and most subtle minds, in the history of science, kept his discoveries to himself. For years Huxley bore the brunt of the attacks on Darwin’s theory. Cavendish blandly watched the growth in popularity of theories he had privately demonstrated to be wrong, and never stirred a finger to rebut them. And finally, Huxley was a man who suffered his alternations of high spirits and despondency, hope and despair, while Cavendish, from the evidence we have, was imperturbably serene.
Now, the interesting point that emerges from this comparison is that Cavendish, in virtue of his scientific purity, could not have exhibited those qualities which allied Huxley to the ordinary run of men. A man’s characteristics are not disconnected. Cavendish’s cold passion for knowledge required for its gratification qualities of the spirit as well as of the mind. No man was ever more single in his desire to know; no man ever was so little hindered by having other interests to serve; no man, therefore, had a greater measure of the purely scientific spirit. This is the important point for our question; it is comparatively irrelevant that very few men have ever had so great a mind to place at the service of their passion. That his actual scientific standing should be so much greater than Huxley’s is an accident; he would still have been more purely scientific than Huxley had his ability been less than Huxley’s. Cavendish is all of a piece. His very perfection as a recording and measuring instrument tended to deprive him of “personality.” The less personal he was, in fact, the more dispassionately open he could be. Other passions were incompatible with his perfection; they would derange this exquisite instrument. Judgments of good and evil would not have been natural to him. His reaction to anything was exhausted in the act of understanding that thing.
So far as we have gone, it would seem that Nietzsche’s description of what he calls the “objective man” is exactly what we mean by the ideal man of science. “The objective man is in truth a mirror: accustomed to prostration before everything that wants to be known, with such desires only as knowing or ‘reflecting’ implies ...” he will regard such personality as he has, Nietzsche goes on to say, as accidental and arbitrary. He cannot take himself seriously and devote time to himself. His love is constrained, his hate artificial. He is only genuine so far as he can be objective; he is unable to say either “Yea” or “Nay” to life; he is concerned solely to understand, to “reflect.” He says, with Leibniz: “Je ne méprise presque rien.” This description is undoubtedly the result of genuine psychological insight. When we try to disentangle the purely scientific element in a man of science we find that, so far as he is scientific, he approximates to Nietzsche’s objective man. If this, then, is the ideal scientific man, what place does he occupy? Where does he stand in relation to the rest of mankind? According to Nietzsche he is merely an instrument; “he is an instrument, something of a slave, though certainly the sublimest sort of slave, but nothing in himself.” He is no goal, no termination, no complementary man in whom the rest of creation justifies itself. As compared with the true philosopher, the philosopher in Nietzsche’s sense, the man who gives a new direction to life, the ideal man of science is merely the most costly, the most easily tarnished, the most exquisite of instruments.
We need not quarrel with this valuation, but we would point out that there is an omission in it. The scientific man is an instrument, but he is an indispensable instrument. The human race has endured all the different “new directions” given to it by the “true” philosophers of the past without any marked increase in its spiritual stature. The philosopher, however commanding, who would really lead us in any but a circular direction must have knowledge. This knowledge, to be valuable, must be clear and trustworthy; it must be scientific. And if the inspirations and impulses of our leaders should prove to be incompatible with deductions from scientific knowledge, then we may be sure that the Promised Land does not lie their way. The scientific man is merely an instrument. But it is this instrument alone that can show to mankind which, of all the goals it desires, are possible goals, and which, of all the leaders it trusts, are trustworthy leaders. The scientific man is an instrument, but it is by this instrument that those who would use it are first tested. Scientific knowledge is, if you like, as dispassionate and inhuman as is the universe with which it concerns itself—and it can as little be ignored.