Aspects of science

The influence of scientific discoveries on that vaguely defined complex of beliefs and intellectual interests called culture seems, at first sight, to have something paradoxical about it. There can be no question that this influence is very widespread, and there can be as little question that ignorance of scientific discoveries is equally widespread. If our admittedly cultured classes were submitted to such a questionnaire as the workers in Sheffield were recently called upon to answer, we should doubtless find that such questions as Who was Dante? Who was Plato? would act like holes in a dam; but it is to be feared that the questions under the heading Science would evoke the merest trickle of information. And yet many of the questions in other parts of the questionnaire would be answered very differently were it not for those scientific discoveries of which the examinee can give no satisfactory description. The apparent paradox is resolved by remembering that it is only the broadest generalisations of science, and only certain aspects of those, which exert a marked influence on the rest of a man’s beliefs. The varied and highly complicated studies which make up modern astronomy, for instance, can be known, in any real sense, to but a few specialists; the one significant thing, for purposes of general culture, that emerges from these studies, is that the earth is materially insignificant in the universe. We need not mind if so much knowledge and no more percolates through the barriers of a literary education; the damage is done; the rest of the man’s beliefs begin to be profoundly affected. In the papers on geology and biology the majority of cultured people would fail; they would all be amused, however, at the idea that the earth was formed in 4004 B.C. and that man was a special and separate creation. Psychological studies have not yet reached, perhaps, a great and easily understood generalisation, but there is a growing charity vis-à-vis the “criminal classes” and other moral outcasts. Our Victorian parents’ hearty condemnation of everybody they disliked is now just a little more difficult. Such generalisations as we have been mentioning are important to general culture because of what we may call their perspective effect. Their bearing on the rest of a man’s mental furniture is not direct; they put the furniture in a different setting. A change of residence, if the difference between the two houses be sufficiently marked, may well lead to a change of habits, and the furniture which looked quite well in four rooms may seem a little inadequate in forty. Those writers who declare that there is no “real” conflict between science and religion, for instance, may be perfectly good logicians; the point is whether a particular religion looks adequate in the modern universe of science. It is not a question of destroying the furniture; it is whether the contents of a bijou villa adequately furnish Salisbury Plain. The influence of science on philosophy is similarly indirect. Perhaps there is no philosophy which does not still find defenders; our objection to many of these philosophies is not that they are illogical, but that they look so funny.

When we come to study the influence of science on the arts we see that there is yet another way in which science modifies culture. Many of the pleasurable emotions associated with the arts are not unknown to the student of science. The study of such sciences as astronomy, physics or biology awakens emotions not readily distinguishable from those evoked by even the greatest works of art. It is as if the universe with which science deals was itself a work of art; it is, to an increasing number of people, the greatest of all works of art. Such students often acquire a new standard of æsthetic excellence. Darwin’s indifference to poetry in his later years was probably the result, not of the atrophy of a faculty, but of its fuller exercise elsewhere. The young William Thomson, reading at night in the library, and drawing great breaths of rapture over Lagrange’s Mécanique Analytique, was experiencing emotions probably not very different from those of Swinburne when reading Shakespeare. Before such satisfactions become accessible to the ordinary cultured classes more is required than that vague acquaintance with outstanding generalities to which we have referred. In such a science as astronomy the mere results are often sufficiently attractive to rouse pleasurable emotions in the reader, although the actual march of the investigation by which the results were obtained is often of equal interest. At the present day both results and the broad lines of the investigations are in many cases accessible to the ordinary cultured person, with the result that his intellectual interests are added to, or at least find a new field for deployment. A greater number of æsthetic objects people his world, and it may even happen that the new arrivals affect the estimate in which he held the old. He may discover an unsuspected futility in some of his earlier occupations; he may, in fact, change his ideals of culture.

But it is, in truth, impossible to trace precisely the effect on an individual of a new belief or of a new interest. Psychologists have made us aware of the fact that the mind is not only immensely complex, but that the connections between its elements are often of the most unsuspected character. Destruction of an old belief or the grafting of a new interest may issue in results as unlike their cause as the butterfly is unlike the chrysalis. The effect of the impact of science on the old culture cannot be foreseen; it has, however, already produced such changes that the culture of the comparatively near future will probably differ from ours by more than ours differs from that of Babylon.