Darwin

I

Independently of his actual scientific work and discoveries, Darwin is in so many respects one of the finest types of the scientific spirit, that it seems natural to conclude a study of him with a summary of the most important elements of that spirit, its admirable and broadly valuable qualities and its limitations, as illustrated in Darwin himself and in others as compared with him.

The basis and fundamental motive of the scientific spirit is simply and naturally curiosity, the endless and often merely wayward desire to know and to find out facts, of all sorts. When the mind begins to shake itself clear of the immediate, engrossing pressure of mere subsistence, its first impulse is to learn something about the surrounding universe and about itself. And this impulse is not solely for utility, for the immense practical advantage which such knowledge evidently brings with it. There is the instinct of occupation and distraction, the effort to escape ennui and idleness and to fill one’s thoughts with outward diversity that they may not be dragged and weighed down by one’s own particular cares and troubles. There is the instinct of emulation, the desire to excel others in knowledge, if one cannot in wealth, or in success of practical achievement.

These are the motives of the collector, and in a sense the scientist is a collector of facts, as others collect coins, or stamps, or china, or old furniture. The impelling motives of curiosity and excellence are much the same. There are people who gather and assort clippings from the newspapers, for the mere collecting instinct of it, gather them on all sorts of subjects, with the scientist’s obscure impulse to accumulate knowledge even if they do not use it.

We are too apt to associate science exclusively with the study of nature, and in this way the thought of the scientific spirit is altogether too much restricted. Its real field is as vast as that of human interests, and scientific methods and scientific purposes apply as much to philology, to history, to religion, to the general movements of human society, as to the curious consideration of animals and plants and stones and chemical elements.

But if mere curiosity is to become truly scientific, it must be broadened and deepened into research. That is, the simple collection of facts must be systematized by a definite object and method. The mere garnering of one fact and another here and there, though it often has its great and singular charm, is apt to degenerate into aimlessness and futility. It must be guided and solidified by the sense of working toward some particular conclusion which will give all the facts coherence and significance. In other words, the relation of the facts must be studied, as well as the facts themselves, they must be coördinated and subordinated, till their real depth of meaning is revealed. How nicely does Darwin indicate the proportionate connection between theory and observation in the following passage: ‘Let theory guide your observations, but till your reputation is well established, be sparing in publishing theory. It makes persons doubt your observations.’[127]

Two of the supreme elements of research are completeness and correctness. It is true that final completeness can rarely be obtained in this world, but the important thing is to aim at it, to leave no stone unturned, no nook unsearched, to gather every possible fact from every possible source, before one allows oneself to deduce positive conclusions, or conclusions that even approach positiveness. And besides the completeness, one should test one’s position from every aspect, to insure its being, so far as possible, correct. No one but the trained scientific thinker appreciates thoroughly the vast possibility of error, or is sufficiently aware how apt error is to intrude its subtle and treacherous working into the most careful investigations and the most logically buttressed theories. In one of his immensely suggestive casual phrases Darwin remarks, ‘The history of error is quite unimportant.’[128] This may be true enough as regards the abstract progress of science, but assuredly the history of error is of the highest interest to the curious student of the human mind.

But neither curiosity nor even the ardor of research will go very far, unless backed up by a habit of enormous and persistent industry. It is not the showy spurts that count, the bursts of application for a few weeks or months. It is the long, assiduous unbroken labor, such as thousands of scientists are giving in hundreds of laboratories, without prospect of distinction, without hope of immediate reward, simply from pure love of the work itself. And this toil is expended not only on the practical inventions, which are expected to produce comparatively quick and often astonishing commercial results, but on pure science, abstract investigation of speculative problems, which even if solved, will not change the practical conditions of life in the slightest degree. Although Darwin sometimes questioned the wisdom of spending so many years on his petty barnacles, he knew that the work was immensely valuable to him in the pure discipline of labor. At any rate it taught him a profound and sincere respect for those who were doing such work steadily, cheerfully, unendingly, without looking to anything else whatever: ‘He would never allow a depreciatory remark to pass unchallenged on the poorest class of scientific workers, provided that their work was honest, and good of its kind.’[129]

There are times when labor is attractive, when you feel like it and like nothing else, and are ready to plunge into it with a furious zeal. There are other times when you are dispirited and discouraged, when the labor seems worthless and the effort impossible, or when you have a sheer desire to drop it altogether and go play. Sir Walter Scott, one of the great workers of the world, tells us that if any one set him a task to do, even agreeable in itself, the result immediately was an unbounded desire to do something else. The real spirit of industry shows in sticking through these periods of discouragement and distraction, and the worker who accomplishes is he who does not heed them. It is one of the striking things about Darwin that he kept up work all his life in this spirit, in spite of all limitations and obstacles, and as a pure amateur in the best sense of the word. It is true that he himself points out what a benefit it was to him not to be professionally tied to any duties: ‘If I had any regular duties, like you and Hooker, I should do nothing in science.’[130] But it is also true that few men with plenty of money, with plenty of temptation to amusement of every sort, would have stuck to their chosen work with the ardor and also the long, persistent system, which Darwin kept up to the end.

For patience is as necessary to the true scientist as industry. When you think you are getting new facts, discoveries that will startle the world and perhaps affect the practical living of millions, there is a natural impulse to proclaim them, there is haste, eagerness, the desire for reward, for recognition, for material success. Or, there is the fear of anticipation, that some one else may be working on the same lines, and get in before you, and all your glory will be taken away. These considerations must be banished altogether. The slow, deliberate processes of nature must be accepted and awaited. If it takes years to develop the experiments that will, or that even may, lead to the desired results, then you must accept the years, unhurrying, unworrying, with the assurance that the work will be done in the end and that it makes no difference to the world or to the future, whether it is done by you or by another.

And with the patience goes caution, the determination not to state results until you have confirmed them, not to overstate or give them forms that are misleading. In practical life, the necessity of acting at once often makes caution a dangerous luxury, and those who hesitate and debate too long are apt to arrive too late or not at all. A certain amount of chance and hazard must be taken and accepted. But the beauty of these larger intellectual realms of scientific thought is that you can wait calmly till all doubt and error are eliminated. The lesson of moderation is hard to learn. The best and the most careful never feel that they have learned it thoroughly: ‘The subject has begun to interest me to an extraordinary degree,’ says Darwin; ‘but I must try not to fall into my common error of being too speculative. But a drunkard might as well say he would drink a little and not too much.’[131] And elsewhere, after years had weighted his work with the teachings of experience, he sums up what seems to him one of the supreme needs of science, if not the supreme need: ‘Forgive me for suggesting one caution; as Demosthenes said, “Action, action, action,” was the soul of eloquence, so is caution almost the soul of science.’[132]

Also, when you are testing so widely and carefully, and making sure of your foothold before every step you take, you come to realize the vast possibilities of different points of view. The one thing that the true scientist dreads is fixity, positiveness. Nature is forever mobile and flexible, and those who would follow nature and study her and interpret her must welcome and imitate her flexibility. They must be at all times ready to recognize the different aspects and phases of the same fact or group of facts, and willing to accept different conclusions with the changing and shifting light in which the facts are viewed. As Professor Whitehead puts it, admirably: ‘Science is even more changeable than theology. No man of science could subscribe without qualification to Galileo’s beliefs, or to Newton’s beliefs, or to all his own scientific beliefs of ten years ago.’[133] As I read in an excellent article in a field of scientific research very different from Darwin’s, that of philology and the emendation of classical texts: ‘In emending these passages we should adopt Pasteur’s method of investigation—exhaust every combination which it is possible for the mind of man to conceive.’[134]

This impartiality, this breadth of view, this readiness to consider, if not to accept, all conjectures and all theories, is comparatively easy, when one is indifferent. If the motive of one’s investigation is mere curiosity, and one has no doctrine to establish, no thesis to defend, open-mindedness is facile and natural. But the scientific man instinctively forms theories, and when once a theory is formed, there comes the human impulse to maintain it, and to consider only those arguments and even those facts that will bear one out. As we have seen, it is here almost more than anywhere that Darwin’s example is of abiding value. No man could be more attached to a theory than he was to his. Yet he was determined, so far as human nature is capable of it, to keep his mind open and not to let his preconceptions color his observation or his reasoning. Huxley’s statement of the matter is indisputably correct when he speaks of Darwin’s ‘sagacity, his untiring search after the knowledge of fact, his readiness always to give up a preconceived opinion to that which was demonstrably true.’[135] And Darwin, in another of his simple, striking phrases, condenses all that open-mindedness means, and the difficulty of it and the rarity (italics mine): ‘If you argue about the non-acceptance of Natural Selection, it seems to me a very striking fact that the Newtonian theory of gravitation, which seems to every one now so certain and plain, was rejected by a man so extraordinarily able as Leibnitz. The truth will not penetrate a preoccupied mind.’[136]

Finally, among these more impersonal elements of the scientific spirit, a high place should be accorded to the quality of being ready to admit one’s ignorance. In this age of universal ignorance, most people who think are more or less aware of their deficiency, but as we are naturally more appreciative of our own lack than of that of others, the first impulse is a desperate effort to conceal it. Perhaps of all states of mind one of the most hostile to the scientific spirit and most incompatible with it, is pedantry, and one of the most essential elements of pedantry is precisely this disposition to conceal one’s ignorance, to make the most determined attempt to hide from others the fact that we are as helpless and as groping and as uncertain as they are. This is apt to be the vice of the teaching profession, though so many teachers are gloriously exempt from it. The pedagogue is inclined to think, I believe quite wrongly, that if he once lets his scholars see that there is anything he does not know, they will lose confidence in him forever, whereas nothing establishes their confidence so much as to appreciate his willingness to enter into their difficulties and to admit that the difficulties are human and his own.

At any rate, the true man of science begins by admitting the vastness of the regions that he has not entered and can never enter, the illimitable fields of knowledge that he has not the time or the training to explore. And no man was ever more notable in this admission than Darwin. There is the general recognition of the limits of human knowledge and human capacity for knowledge: ‘The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man’s ignorance.’[137] There is the recognition of the hardening of the mental arteries, so to speak, by which our flexibility is so greatly impaired and against which we cannot guard enough: ‘nearly all men past a moderate age, either in actual years or in mind, are, I am fully convinced, incapable of looking at facts under a new point of view.’[138] Further, there is not only the sense of general intellectual impotence, but the admission that, even in one’s own special line, there is much that one must necessarily miss, much that must, if not invalidate one’s conclusions, at least render them dubious and incline one to the extremest modesty in asserting them. No doubt the peculiar nature of Darwin’s work, which obliged him to touch upon all sorts of very different scientific fields, accentuated this modesty of attitude, but no one can question that it was inborn: ‘There are so many valid and weighty arguments against my notions, that you, or any one, if you wish, on the other side, will easily persuade yourself that I am wholly in error, and no doubt I am in part in error, perhaps wholly so, though I cannot see the blindness of my ways.’[139] When one goes after the truth in that spirit, one is much more likely to find it, and at any rate to teach the world valuable lessons, whether one finds it or not.

II

Now to consider the more personal qualities of the scientific spirit, that is those that affect human relations. Naturally it is not pretended that all scientific men have these personal qualities, any more than the qualities already indicated. Men of science are human like the rest of us, and eminently liable to the weaknesses that the rest of us have. Sometimes even they seem more liable, perhaps because the impersonality of their occupation makes the personal weaknesses stand out. But such weaknesses are obviously not a result of the scientific spirit, but obtain in spite of it, and its higher tendency should be to diminish or restrain them.

It is interesting, in this personal and human connection, to see how the scientific qualities develop into virtues to some extent akin to the Christian ideal. For example, the recognition and admission of ignorance, on which we have been insisting, must carry with it, should carry with it, the eminently Christian virtue of humility. When you are oppressively aware how little you know, how far your information is from being adequate and your conclusions from being final, it is impossible to maintain a spirit of arrogance or self-assertion. You turn to others for their agreement and support, in the tone of Goethe’s remark that he felt immensely strengthened in a conclusion if he found that even one other human being agreed with him. Or, as Darwin puts it: ‘Though I, of course, believe in the truth of my own doctrine, I suspect that no belief is vivid until shared by others.’[140] The truly scientific worker should be ready to defer to the opinion of his fellow-workers and instantly to surrender his own when convinced that theirs is based upon wider observation or more valid arguments.

Closely connected with humility is tolerance, and this virtue also flows from the admission of ignorance almost as a necessity. If you appreciate your limitations and that your knowledge is as incomplete as your deductions are hazardous, you will be at all times ready to recognize that others may be right and you may be wrong, and you will have a gentle forbearance toward even what appear to be their errors. ‘True science necessarily carries tolerance with it,’ says Voltaire.[141]

To be sure, the mention of Voltaire in connection with tolerance rather makes one smile, for if he fought for tolerance as for other things, he fought hard and bitterly, and he was always fighting for something. And in general it may well be urged that the history of scientific thought shows anything but tolerance and gentleness. Indeed it sometimes seems as if scientists were a peculiarly waspish and petulant generation, apt to fly out, and to fly at, with what to the ordinary mind hardly appears sufficient excuse. Darwin himself appreciates this unfortunate tendency, and frequently deplores it: ‘How strange, funny, and disgraceful that nearly all ... our great men are in quarrels in couplets.’[142]

But here again, it is human nature, in its inborn weakness and self-satisfaction, that does the quarreling, and the scientific spirit, taken in itself, certainly tends to quiet and lenify. In one of his very latest letters Darwin wrote: ‘You have shown how a man may differ from another in the most decided manner, and yet express his difference with the most perfect courtesy. Not a few English and German naturalists might learn a useful lesson from your example; for the coarse language often used by scientific men towards each other does no good and only degrades science.’[143] But it is difficult for humanity to learn, and when it is learned to remember, the profound truth expressed in the saying of Edmond Scherer in regard to tolerance: ‘The fundamental dogma of intolerance is that there are dogmas, that of tolerance is that there are only opinions.’

And tolerance, the mere recognition that others may be right and we wrong, even as to our most cherished theories, when it is enlightened by clearness of intelligence and warmed by sympathy, easily passes, as we have seen with Darwin in an earlier chapter, into that most delightful of all virtues, or more properly that root of all virtues, the power and the instinct of putting ourselves in others’ places, of entering into their lives. It is not quite enough to respect others’ opinions, or even to defer to them. One should go further, and endeavor to understand how they arrive at them, and to do this, one should be ever alive to the vast community of human nature, and the infinite threads and strands that bind together our hearts and the hearts of even those who appear most different from us. It is this power of comprehension, this effort at comprehension, of others’ point of view, which leads to the wonderful gentleness of tone that makes a great part of Darwin’s charm: ‘You are mistaken in thinking that I ever said you were wrong on any point. All that I meant was that on certain points, and these very doubtful points, I was inclined to differ from you.’[144] It is evident that in arguing, in discussing, Darwin always sought to understand his adversary’s position, and in order to do this, to put himself entirely in his adversary’s place.

The nature of science in itself tends to foster and encourage this disposition to enter into the lives of others, because by its abstract character and its larger aims and interests it inclines to reduce as much as possible the elements of self, and of self-interest and self-assertion. Indeed, here again it is curious to see how, when the pursuit of scientific truth rises to its highest intensity and white heat of ardor, it brings about a sort of self-abnegation, which approaches and suggests the mystical self-abandonment of Christian ecstasy. He shall leave all and follow me, says religion. And we have seen something of the same spirit in Darwin’s apparently colder declaration that the man of science should have neither wife nor child, but a heart of stone, and a brain altogether free for the vast, abstract researches which make the whole of his life.

There is indeed something almost religious in the passion with which the true scientist casts aside all personal considerations, often all considerations of comfort and ease and indolent enjoyment, in the absorbing effort to attain the pure truth which he is seeking. With what intensity of delight does one fling an old delusion behind him. As Darwin puts it: ‘To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.’[145] With what rapture does one become aware of the progress of scientific thought: ‘How grand is the onward rush of science; it is enough to console us for the many errors which we have committed, and for our efforts being overlaid and forgotten in the mass of new facts and new views which are daily turning up.’[146]

It is needless to say that thousands of others besides Darwin are infected with this rapture, and to quite the same or an even greater degree. In the dawn of scientific thought we have Lucretius, than whom none was ever more ardent, exulting in his passionate effort to dart the beams of intellectual day through the swirling, smothering mist of error and delusion. Or again, in our own time we have such excitement as is described by Pasteur, so nearly the correlative of Darwin in many ways, when he feels himself to be on the brink of discovery: ‘I was so happy that I was overcome by a nervous trembling that made it impossible for me to bring my vision again to the polarizing apparatus.’[147]

So the pursuit of pure truth, and the giving one’s life to the achievement of it, elevates, and clarifies, and chastens, almost like the pursuit of virtue, and the two tend even to merge in one another, as in Goethe’s noble saying: ‘The real love of truth shows itself in this, that one knows how to find and cherish the good everywhere.’ Or to conclude with another of Darwin’s sentences, all the more impressive for its simplicity and restraint: ‘For myself I would however, take higher ground, for I believe there exists, and I feel within me, an instinct for truth, or knowledge, or discovery, of something the same nature as the instinct of virtue and our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.’[148]

III

It seems to be of interest to consider one or two types of the scientific spirit in lines quite different from Darwin’s. There is Sainte-Beuve, to whom I have referred in earlier chapters. The great French critic was almost exactly contemporary with Darwin, being born in 1803 and dying in 1870. I do not discover that he ever mentions Darwin’s books, though he must have known something of them. In any case, he typifies admirably many of the scientific methods and qualities, the vast curiosity, the research, the labor, the patience, the passion for seeing all sides and allowing for all points of view. Only, he was concerned, not with plants and animals, not with the material, evolutionary world, but with the subtle phases and motives and passions and developments of the human spirit. He studied human life and character with endless curiosity and the results of his study are embodied in the forty volumes of portraits and in the seven solid volumes of the History of the Monastery of Port Royal, one of the most profound and searching investigations of religious psychology that has ever been made. Sainte-Beuve himself liked to compare his work with the researches of the more specific scientists. I have quoted earlier his brief statement: ‘I analyze, I herborize, I am a naturalist of souls.’[149] And elsewhere he puts it more elaborately, ‘It is absolutely as in botany for plants and in zoology for the species of animals. There is a moral natural history, with a method (as yet hardly developed), of the natural families of souls.’[150] And he loved to analyze souls of all sorts, good and bad, strong and weak, happy and unhappy, to analyze them and compare them and classify them, and bring out in them the profound common elements of human nature, under the endless play and diversity of the superficial differences.

It is peculiarly interesting to watch in Sainte-Beuve, as in Darwin, the working and the complication of the scientific spirit with the more personal elements. Sainte-Beuve made much more definite assertion than Darwin did, of sacrificing and effacing the personal life for scientific purposes. The Frenchman boasted that he mingled with all sorts of groups and associated himself with all sorts of causes and experiences, not from devotion to the things themselves, but from pure curiosity and from the passion for analyzing the working of these causes in human minds. He carried this so far that he was often accused of disloyalty to his friends and of espousing causes and then deserting them, and he himself handles the defense of the subjective attitude in such a way as to give some justification for the charge. His life, his thought, his work, were perfectly impersonal, he said, and in consequence he was epigrammatically branded with betraying all truths for the sake of truth.

On the other hand, it is very evident that some personal elements lingered about him much more than he thought or admitted. His early ambition, his undying ambition, was to be a poet. As a poet he failed, at least made no popular or conspicuous success. He saw the ardent contemporaries and close associates of his youth, Hugo, Lamartine, Balzac, Sand, Musset, making great popular reputations, while he was compelled to drag along in comparative shadow; and for all his boasted impersonality, this to a certain extent embittered him. The vast comprehension, the high intellectual impartiality, which distinguish him when he is dealing with the past, fail and shrink in a measure when he discusses contemporary work, and you cannot but feel that he is unconsciously hampered and tormented by a jealousy from which Darwin was wholly and nobly free.

But what marks Sainte-Beuve’s work most of all, as I have elsewhere emphasized, and what distinguishes him from Darwin and many other notable scientists, is the extraordinary concreteness of it. He had of course a vast background of general intellectual training and experience and of conversance with general thought and principles. But with this background always instinctively present, he devoted himself directly to the study of individuals. Only rarely does he deal in the discussion of theories of any sort, and then his handling is apt to be so complex and difficult that you feel him to be out of his element. What fascinates and absorbs him is the endless, close, minute, sympathetic study of individual men and women, and just because he is not hampered by theories, has no ends to attain nor points to prove, the study is endlessly varied, flexible, mobile, adaptable, and profoundly, inexhaustibly human. The incessant, fruitful application of scientific method has never been better exemplified than in Sainte-Beuve’s work.

Or, to take another of the broader types of the scientific spirit, perhaps one of the noblest and most luminous that has ever existed, Goethe. Goethe was a half century older than Sainte-Beuve and Darwin, but he lived well down into their period and the clarity of nineteenth century scientific thinking could find no better example than he. His actual scientific work is far from contemptible, and he to some extent anticipated Darwin as to the possibilities of metamorphosis in the natural world. His speculations on the theory of light, in contradiction to those of Newton, show at least the active and energetic intelligence.

But Goethe’s value to the scientific spirit rests on far broader grounds than any mere detail of scientific research or experiment. No one cultivated or practiced more than he the attitude of vast, unprejudiced curiosity, of eager search and relish for pure truth, independent of all considerations of party, or consequence, or practical bearing. It is this spiritual latitude which Matthew Arnold means when he calls Goethe the greatest poet of his own time and the greatest critic of all times. The free, broad, ample, mobile working of the human intelligence has never found a more lucid exponent than Goethe, and everywhere through his writings there are passages which will help the lover of truth, while the distilled essence of his mental attitude is to be found in the collection of ‘Maximen und Reflexionen,’ which gives the kernel of wisdom without the somewhat otiose Teutonic wrapping of amplification in which Goethe was often inclined to envelop it.

It is in the highest degree curious, remembering the weaknesses of Sainte-Beuve to which I have already alluded, to read all his numerous comments on Goethe, but particularly the following: ‘Goethe understood everything in the universe—everything except perhaps two things, the Christian and the hero. There was a weakness here which belonged to the realm of heart. It seems likely that he considered Leonidas and Pascal, the latter especially, as monstrosities in the order of nature.’[151] And Sainte-Beuve prided himself upon understanding the Christian and the hero both, and it is probable that he did.

The interesting point in Goethe, and also in less degree in Sainte-Beuve, as compared with Darwin, is that the full development of the scientific spirit in both of them did not exercise the same sort of spiritual blight with which Darwin thought that it affected him. No human being ever lived who was more susceptible to beauty than Goethe was, and his passion for pure truth did not prevent his retaining the highest sense of artistic ecstasy through his whole long life. With him and with Sainte-Beuve both, it could hardly be said that thinking came before emotion, for both of them adored the incomparable beauty of form and the rapture that came with it up to the very end.

On the other hand, neither Goethe nor Sainte-Beuve is for a moment to be compared with Darwin in that ineffable sweetness and simple charm which endeared him to all who came into contact with him and which breathe everywhere through his letters and even his more formal scientific works.

One striking feature in Sainte-Beuve is that he recognized fully the absorbing, engrossing nature of the scientific spirit, yet appreciated that the pursuit of knowledge does not necessarily bring happiness. No one has expressed the barren desolation of mortal life with more acrid bitterness than he. Shakespeare tells us that ripeness is all. Sainte-Beuve doubts whether it exists. ‘Ripen?’ he cries. ‘Ripen? We never ripen. We harden in some spots. We rot in others. We ripen never.’[152] Years bring with them—for him—an utter indifference to everything and everybody: ‘I have arrived in life at a complete indifference: provided I do something in the morning, and go somewhere at night, life has nothing more for me.’[153] And again, life is nothing but the pricking of one illusion after another, till one becomes bitterly convinced that no illusion is worth the pains of being pricked. As he sums it up in a vivid figure: ‘Why I no longer care for nature, for the country? Why I no longer care to walk in the little footpath? I know well that the footpath is the same, but there is no longer anything on the other side of the hedge. In old times there was rarely anything, but always there might be something.’[91]

It is true that Sainte-Beuve’s melancholy and disgust are closely connected, as he himself admits, with the gross sexual disorders of his celibate career, and he speaks of ‘the incurable disgust with everything which is peculiar to those who have abused the sources of life.’[92] In his later years he seems to have had no principle of sexual restraint whatever, and to have indulged as freely in indiscriminate commercial amours as did Pepys or Aaron Burr, though he was as much without Burr’s gay oblivion as without Pepys’s touches of remorse. He proclaims as a cynical creed his method of seeking wisdom: ‘Like Solomon and like Epicurus, I have made my way to philosophy through pleasure. It is a better road than traveling thitherward by logic after Hegel’s or Spinoza’s fashion.’[93] And the sum of the philosophy was akin to Solomon’s. ‘Sainte-Beuve said to me,’ records Goncourt, ‘One should make the tour of everything and believe in nothing. There is nothing real but woman.’[94] Solomon would hardly have made the exception. The curious thing is that, with all this abandoned personal license, Sainte-Beuve, in his critical judgments, preserved the most delicate sensibility as to moral excellence in sexual lines, as in all others.

When we turn to Goethe, we find perhaps little more regard for sexual morals than with Sainte-Beuve, but at any rate a temperament far better poised, and to all appearances charged and glorified with luminous serenity. Yet with Goethe also the scientific spirit, even though enriched with the artist’s delight and the artist’s creative power, could not bring happiness in its train. The sorrows and sufferings of Werther might perhaps be accredited to the extravagance of youth. But in extreme old age we hear Goethe proclaiming the emptiness and misery of life in terms almost as bitter and complete as those of Sainte-Beuve or of Anatole France. ‘I will say nothing,’ he said to Eckermann, ‘against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.’[95]

So far as we know, Darwin had no sexual cause of spiritual disturbance, and his scientific pursuits obviously brought him interest and delight. But we have seen how much even Darwin complained that absorption in science stunted and atrophied the higher sides of the spiritual nature. Work was largely a means of forgetting life, and when work failed, Down cemetery became singularly attractive. The pursuit of truth for itself, exciting and engrossing as it may be, would seem to have something abnormal and unwholesome about it and Pascal’s consolation for the reedlike insignificance of man in the thought that he is a ‘thinking reed’ sounds a little chill and comfortless, even with Scherer’s amplification about the glory of ‘the dream that knows itself to be a dream, of thought that thinks itself.’ The final emptiness and futility which at times appear to attach to the profoundest search for truth have never been more grandly stated than in the words with which Sainte-Beuve brings his vast history of Port Royal to a close: ‘I have been and I am only an investigator, a sincere observer, attentive and scrupulous.... I have been after my fashion a man of truth, so far as I have been able to attain it. But how little is the best we can attain! How bounded is our vision and how quickly it reaches its limit! It is like a pale torch lighted for a moment in the midst of an enormous night. And he who most had it at heart to know his subject, who had the keenest desire to grasp it, and the greatest pride in treating it, most feels himself impotent and below his task, on the day when, seeing it almost completed and the result obtained, the intoxication of power fails him, the final exhaustion and the inevitable disgust overwhelm him, and he perceives that he too is but an illusion the most fleeting on the breast of the Illusion which is infinite.’[96]

IV

And of course it is not contended that scientific men in general are unhappy, which would be absurd. On the contrary, it is probable that, with the infinite variety and solace of their pursuits, they are apt to be an unusually contented and cheerful class of men. There is the poignant saying of Voltaire, who was full of the scientific spirit as of most others: ‘Study consoles for everything.’[97] And Montesquieu expresses it more generally: ‘I have never had a sorrow which a half hour of reading would not dissipate,’ and again, with more specific elaboration: ‘The love of study is almost the sole passion that is eternal in us; all the others fail as this miserable machine which sustains them falls more and more into decay.’[98]

Yet for the mass of mankind assuredly the scientific spirit and the pure pursuit of truth are not enough, and the abstract thought of them leaves a void which only persistent, concentrated action can fill up. We are living, moving, acting creatures, and for most of us knowing, thinking, except as a means to living, is inadequate, infertile, and essentially provocative of discontent. As Sterne’s Yorick expresses it, in his homely, pointed fashion: ‘I think the procreation of children as beneficial to the world as the finding out the longitude.’[99] ‘I’ll do and I’ll do and I’ll do,’ cries the witch in ‘Macbeth.’ It is the natural, universal, prevailing cry of humanity, doing, doing, doing, till the end—and then, what? It skills not to inquire.

And there is the further point, that not only too much abstract knowing does not help for doing: it is apt to hinder. Especially, the scientific virtue of the recognition of ignorance is far from being a benefit in practical life. The best of doing, the best of action is undoubtedly instinctive, flows by quick, unapprehended, processes out of the vast subconscious accumulated storehouse of our being. The supreme illustration of this is the achievement of the athlete. Watch the complicated action of the highly skilled baseball-player. A dozen intricate related movements are accomplished with sure, unfailing speed, any one of which would be utterly dislocated and thrown out of adjustment by the slightest attempt to analyze it on the part of the player, who is usually disinclined to such analysis precisely in the proportion of his practical skill.

And the same thing obtains to much the same extent in what might appear to be more intellectual lines of practical action. The soldier, the man of business, the statesman, all require no doubt immense and competent detailed knowledge in their particular professions. But here also too great analysis, a too curious probing of motives and processes and alternatives and possibilities hurts rather than helps. The pure thinker is too often apt to cry out with Goethe’s horror: ‘There is nothing more frightful than active ignorance.’[100] Yet nine tenths of the work of the world is done, sometimes efficiently, sometimes haltingly, but done, by active ignorance, and could not be done otherwise. The thinker, the profound analyst, debates, hesitates, falters, and too often accomplishes nothing.

It may be that, not only in the realm of muscular effort, but in all practical action, the best results are obtained by comparatively instinctive methods. Yet it is evident that deliberate conscious reasoning is an important instrument in the work of the man of affairs. Also, reason, the enchainment of thoughts through elaborate logical processes, is the chief agent of the scientific spirit. In an earlier chapter we have analyzed the dangers and betrayals of reason. But the greatest betrayal of all is when reason turns upon itself and devotes its brilliant, magnificent powers to self-dissection, instead of to accomplishment in the practical world. The extreme illustrations are in such minds as Sénancour, Maine de Biran, Amiel, men naturally equipped for the performance of great things, but in whom the force of genius is paralyzed by the perpetual introspective consideration of the means and methods by which genius operates. As Amiel expresses it: ‘I also feel at times the mad rage for life, the desperate impulse to seize happiness, but much more often a complete prostration and a silent despair. And whence comes this? From doubt of my own reason, of myself, of men, of life, from doubt which enervates the will and destroys the powers, which makes one forget God, forget prayer, forget duty, from unquiet and corrosive doubt, which renders existence impossible, and makes a ghastly mock of hope.’[101]

Perhaps reason offers the most curious of all the antinomies or self-contradictions which arise when one seeks to develop the physical, mental, and moral nature of man, on an evolutionary basis, from the fundamental instinct of self-preservation. A lesser but striking form of this self-contradiction is, for example, the habit of thrift, which is naturally explained as a tendency of self-protection, yet in its sordid extremes may work to destroy life rather than prolong it. Or, again, there are the strange contradictions involved in the social instinct. As one sees it in the insects, or in the gregarious grouping of the lower animals, the self-preservational basis is obvious enough, and with a few wrenches of excusable ingenuity one may put all human affections and devotions on the same foundation. Yet in the end one arrives at the astonishing paradox that the instinct of self-preservation has developed devotion to others so that a man may be willing to lay down his life for his friend, or even for those who are not his friends. But the extreme of all these contradictions, if one accepts the evolutionary development of reason, is that that marvelous instrument should be produced for the preservation of the individual and yet that the final working of it should be to show how utterly insignificant, pitiable, and unworthy of preservation this very individual is.

Another weakness of the scientific spirit, and the curse of its passion for truth, is the difficulty, not to say the impossibility of ever attaining it. In the detail of scientific research this is, perhaps, not an evil, and difficulty is merely a splendid spur and stimulus to ever renewed effort and achievement. But when it comes to profounder and more fundamental matters, the difficulty is more serious, and if it may be justly said that one wearies of everything except to understand, one wearies of the failure to understand more than of anything else. After all, there are but two things that it is really important to know: oneself and God. And it is precisely in regard to these that the impossibility of final knowledge most overwhelms us. In the rugged language of old Ben Jonson: ‘I know no disease of the soul but ignorance; not of the arts and sciences, but of itself.’[102] And a Greek, two thousand years before Ben Jonson, gave vivid utterance to the same sufficiently obvious idea: ‘Many things are obscure to man, but the most obscure of all is his own soul.’[103]

It is precisely in this impossibility of attaining truth in the ultimate things that the Fundamentalists find their justification for the attempt to control the search for it. ‘You tell us,’ they say, ‘that everything must yield to the search for truth. You undermine secure, established morals and traditions in the name of truth. Then truth slips away from you and in the end you can offer us nothing but a shadow and a dream. Accepted convention is at least a solid basis for living. You have nothing solid to offer us, for any purpose, anywhere.’ And the argument would have some validity, if the inborn movements of great nature could ever be stopped by laws or legislatures or Fundamentalists.

But, after all, the value of ignorance, or at least of the knowledge of ignorance, which goes with the scientific spirit, lies in the charming qualities that I have indicated earlier in this chapter, tolerance, patience, humility, gentleness. Only, to produce these qualities, the recognition of ignorance must not be aggressive, combative. Fifty years ago such recognition was erected into a dogmatic religion called Agnosticism, the triumphant, militant assertion that no man knew anything about the fundamental verities and no man could, and this dogmatism was even more exasperating than other dogmatisms, because it purported to be based on an attitude essentially undogmatic. The true, the fruitful, the profitable recognition of ignorance is not dogmatic or assertive at all. It is purely personal, begins and stops with my ignorance only, and lets your ignorance altogether alone. This is peculiarly true and important in the age of ignorance in which we live, the age which has piled up general knowledge with such vast celerity of accumulation that no individual can pretend to grasp more than a very small portion of it. And all we can any of us say is, I do not know. You may know, he may know, especially as he thinks he does, which goes so vastly far, but I, I, I, alas, do not.

Agnosticism is too violent a word for this purely personal and infinitely humble ignorance. Scepticism even is too proud a word, too philosophical a word. Yet scepticism, if used with caution, may perhaps serve, for want of a better. But there is one thing about scepticism too often forgotten. Universal doubt surely carries with it the privilege of universal hope. The professed sceptic is too apt to be critical and cynical, to use his doubt simply to upset the certainties of other people, and to rest always in the darker side of possibility. But if anything may be true, surely the beautiful may be true, the good, the joyous, the lovable, as well as the gloomy and despondent.

And if the privilege of scepticism is hope, the essence of it is questioning and questing. There is a doubt which, in its despair of ultimate truth, is content to trifle, to beguile the misery of life with jest and play and momentary diversion. Or there is the doubt in deeper matters which, as with Darwin, turns to eager, assiduous investigation of the mere, fascinating detail of the external world. But there is also a doubt which lives in passionate, perpetual earnestness and the unfailing, unyielding, indomitable effort to find out God, being assured that without Him the universe, with all its splendor and all its endless evolving glory, is nothing, merely nothing. Such doubt will express itself in words like those of the modern poet: