Gallio

We have seen that the philosophy that regards man as a meaningless accident in an alien universe receives no support from modern physics. The true ground of that philosophy is now, as it always has been, the apparently meaningless misery that forms part of life. It is not by mistaking matter for an ultimate reality or by pondering on the fact that laws of nature exist that we can conclude that man is of no cosmic significance. That conclusion can be reached logically only on the basis of arbitrary assumptions. But the conclusion is not, in fact, reached in that way: it is reached through feeling. And it cannot be transcended by a logical process, but only in virtue of a mystic experience.

The old materialistic outlook, although it no longer has any scientific justification, is still active in many branches of science. It has made popular certain types of explanation and is the cause of the direction pursued by certain researches. In particular it has led to a great deal of useless or misleading work being done in the attempt to reduce qualitative to quantitative differences.

A good deal of what passes for scientific work amongst eugenists and psychologists consists of attempts to match things which are qualitatively different. This is the favourite procedure of that kind of psycho-analysis which reduces everything to sex. Discrimination is fatiguing; also, it makes appeal to sensibilities which many earnest “scientific workers” do not possess. It is much easier to make measurements than to know exactly what you are measuring.

To give up the ideal of measurability would be equivalent, to many people, to abandoning “science” altogether. “Science is measurement”, we are informed. This ideal is borrowed from physics, the science whose aim it is to give mathematical descriptions of phenomena. But we may have branches of knowledge that may fairly be called science although they are not mathematical. We may find it necessary to use concepts that cannot be mathematically defined. It may not be mere lack of knowledge which prevents biology, for instance, from being a mathematical science. It may be impossible in the nature of things ever to give the equation to a chicken. But the bias towards measurability is very strong and has led to measurements being made, particularly in psychology, where we really have no clear idea at all as to what is being measured. When, for instance, Professor Karl Pearson compares fraternal resemblances in such things as stature and arm-length with fraternal resemblances in intelligence and conscientiousness, what exactly is he doing? A great deal of what is called experimental psychology impresses one as being nothing but the application of an inappropriate technique by exceptionally innocent and unworldly “scientists”. The methods found so successful in physics are applied to everything under the sun. It is pretty obvious that this is not due to some mystic, Pythagorean conviction that number is the principle of all things, but merely to mental inertia. Many “intelligence tests” and many of the statistical results obtained by the eugenists impress the ordinary person as being laughably superficial. In their eagerness to “measure” something our researcher seem to lose their ordinary common sense, whereas their subject really requires the subtlety and sympathy of a very good novelist. It is amazing the number of dull, unimaginative people who find a congenial life work in prosecuting researches in pseudo-science. The ordinary public, unfortunately, does not discriminate between one kind of science and another, with the result that the contempt they rightly feel for some so-called men of science is apt to be extended to all scientific men. Thus Mr G. K. Chesterton, having heard that some “scientists” explain the shape of a church spire as symbolical of phallic worship, begins to doubt the whole Royal Society. It must be remembered that in science real insight and imagination are as rare as in any other human activity. In the clear-cut sciences, such as physics and chemistry, where the right way of attacking problems is known and where an elaborate technique has been built up, there is plenty of room for valuable routine work. All the difficult preliminary work of getting right conceptions and principles has been done. The routine worker can measure the electric capacities of different condensers because the difficult notion of electric capacity has been made clear by his masters. But the routine worker in psychology who measures “intelligence” is not doing anything definite at all. His subject is not yet ripe for the application of such exact methods. In this way the prestige of physics has exerted a harmful influence on the study of psychology. It is true that some experimental psychologists are becoming aware of the fact that they do not always know what they are measuring. There are controversies as to what a given set of measurements has measured, and some measurements seem to be undertaken on the off-chance that a meaning will some day be found for them. It is not suggested that all experimental psychology is of this kind, but it is certainly true that many psychological papers, complete with correlation coefficients and “curves” of all kinds, wear an air of precision to which they have no real claim.

A more definitely materialistic bias is observable in the attempts to explain psychological happenings in terms of physiology. The result is that learned and acute men, caught in the jungle of neurology, painfully fight their way out with some such epoch-making discovery as that one learns a subject more rapidly if one is interested in it. This result, which is supposed to be incompatible with the purely physiological theory of the mind, owes all its difficulty to that in compatibility. Otherwise it is a perfectly obvious fact of experience. If it were not for the prestige achieved by materialism in the Victorian age it is probable that psychology would be very much further advanced than it is. But the side-tracking influence of that philosophy has meant that psychologists have had painfully to discover the obvious. But if materialism, in small doses, delays the recognition of the obvious, it does, when fully developed, deny the obvious. This is what the behaviourists do. They deny that we think or that we can form images in our minds. The only possible answer to this theory is a satire, as when Voltaire answered the theory that in this world everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds by writing Candide. But in this queer modern world behaviourism, instead of being greeted with laughter, is answered carefully and politely, apparently in the spirit in which Monsieur Bergeret shook hands with the vers libriste poet, “for fear of wronging beauty in disguise”. The position of the ordinary man in face of these theories is, nevertheless, a difficult one. Behaviourism may sound to him nonsense, but so does non-Euclidean geometry. His natural reaction would be to class both of them with the theory that the English are descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel. Nevertheless, non-Euclidean geometry is not nonsense. In these circumstances it is probably fortunate that there are people patient enough to prepare careful and reasoned refutations of any whimsy that anybody cares to put forth. The extraordinary predisposition of the learned towards concocting merely silly theories must always be borne in mind. Studious persons often have a very small range of experience of life; they have nothing like so broadly based a sense of probability as the ordinary man of the world possesses, which is why so many of them seem curiously innocent and gullible. The beaming and genial professor expounding his theory often seems curiously like a child playing with toys. The mixture of amusement and respect with which the world watches him is, on the whole, the correct reaction. As long as he is dealing with the incomprehensible one may grant him authority. Nobody dreams of questioning astronomical pronouncements about forthcoming eclipses. But when he is talking about the very stuff of our ordinary experience, as in psychology, we do wrong to accept the obviously absurd for fear that it cannot be as silly as it looks. A great deal of what is called psycho-analysis, for instance, is merely silly. Only people singularly deficient in common-sense and completely lacking in a sense of humour could have invented anything so preposterous. Undoubtedly some pathological states are of sexual origin, but the lengths to which the theory has been carried and the kind of interpretations that are given make the development of psycho-analysis one of the greatest psychological curiosities of our time. Whole-hearted belief in psycho-analysis certainly points to the existence of a complex. As with any other complex, it is defended by arguments to which none except those who are similarly afflicted can attach the slightest validity. The complex is strongly materialistic, not in the sense that everything is reduced to “matter and motion”, but in the sense that the lowest human activities are made explanatory of all the rest. One often finds, associated with a belief in materialism, a desire to deny any form of spiritual excellence. The ostensible motive is simplification, as when material substances are reduced to a small number of chemical elements; but it is usually obvious, from the forced explanations that are attempted, that the real motive is something very different. Much, of course, must be attributed to insensitiveness, as we see when we turn to psycho-analytic explanations of works of art. The extraordinary force of the psycho-analysts’ complex is well shown by the sort of arguments they find convincing. Thus they may profess to show that artistic tastes never exist without suppressed sexual desires. Their way of establishing this fact, which is chiefly by asserting it, is comparatively rational. But they then proceed to the statement that a taste for art is merely a disguised form of sexual desire. They might as well say that it is a disguised form of hunger, since artists are quite as notorious for being hungry as for being erotic, and artistic tastes are never found to exist in a man who takes no nourishment.

Not only much modern psychology, but some other modern sciences such as comparative religion, are prone to a certain fallacy that may be called the fallacy of “explanation by origins”. This kind of explanation has been made popular by the theory of evolution, and the fallacy consists in supposing that to give the historical antecedents of a thing is to give an analysis of that thing. Thus, some authorities suppose that by showing that religion has developed from primitive magic rites, they have thereby proved that religion is nothing but a disguised form of magic. One might as well say that an oak-tree is a disguised form of an acorn, or that a man is a disguised form of an amoeba. But this error is too glaring to be committed by more than a small percentage of our modern “thinkers”. A much more insidious danger is that this type of explanation leads one to under-estimate the complexity of the thing to be explained. There is a tendency to neglect those factors in the final product which cannot be traced in its historical antecedents. This is one form of the widespread error of undue simplification. No human mind can deal exhaustively with concrete facts. Every natural entity, whether it be a flower or a nation, contains far too many factors for thought to grasp it completely. The art of human thinking is to make useful abstractions. Any man is a very complicated creature. All the artists and scientists of the world could not describe him exhaustively. But for the purposes of war every man under a certain military rank was regarded as a physical structure supporting weapons and a stomach on two legs. This abstraction was useful for the purposes for which it was invented. A somewhat different abstraction is required when a man is considered as a voter. When a man is considered as a “hand” or a “worker” it is found that slightly more complicated abstractions are required. In fact, the great fault of economic theory has been that its “economic man” was too simple an abstraction. The economist left out certain factors in his conception of man, with the result that his plans, when applied to real men, do not work. I am suggesting that the sciences which ape physics suffer, amongst other things, from inadequate abstractions. This is not surprising, for there is every reason to suppose that the extraordinary difficulties experienced by physics itself, at the present day, are due to the same cause. An analysis of this position will show us the direction of the probable future development of science and help us to see in what consists the importance of the arts.