The way the world is going

I have before me as I write a very momentous book. It is entitled “Conditioned Reflexes,” and it is by Professor Pavloff, of Petrograd. It is not an easy book to read but it is not an impossible one, and when one has read, marked, and learnt, one finds—I find—that one has at least attained the broad beginnings of a clear conception of the working of that riddle within us which is perpetually asking us riddles, the convoluted grey matter of the brain. The book is translated by Dr. Anrep of Cambridge and it is published by the Oxford University Press with the assistance of the Royal Society.

Quite apart from its subject this book is a very reassuring book for those whose hopes for the future of mankind are bound up with the steadfast growth of scientific knowledge. It gives in broad outline the substance of nearly twenty-five years of wonderfully imagined and marvellously conducted research. That research was carried on in a city that changed its name twice, from St. Petersburg to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Leningrad; it saw flood, famine, war, and revolutions; there was a great shortage of medicaments and scientific apparatus, and one winter the whole city was well-nigh frozen to death through want of fuel and people went out after midnight to steal the wood blocks out of the roadway for their stoves, but the work went on. It is true there appears a gap in the number of publications cited from between the years 1917–1920, but this was due largely to the interruption of the paper supply in these years. The deficiency was more than made up by the reports of results that came out in the subsequent years when the tide of paper flowed again.

There is something vastly heroic in this persistence and something profoundly significant in the respectful cessation of political violence in the precincts of the Institute of Experimental Medicine.

It happened that when I was in Russia in 1920 I visited Professor Pavloff and saw something of his work. I remember that the corners of his study were piled high with potatoes and turnips he had grown in a patch of earth outside his laboratory, and dug up and brought in. He remarked casually that that was how he took his exercise nowadays, and that was all the notice he gave to the immense political and social stresses of the world about him. He went on to talk about the more permanent realities with which he was dealing and took me through the ingenious building in which he and his little band of assistants were conducting their researches. I saw the dogs on which he was working. They did not seem to be in the slightest degree uncomfortable; they wagged their tails, and he patted their heads. He explained as much of his methods and ideas as he thought my unspecialized mind could grasp.

He was a brownish-faced, gentle-mannered man, with brown eyes and a general cast of countenance that reminded me of portraits I had seen of the late Lord Kelvin. He showed a lively interest in the explorations he was conducting, and he did his best to make his points clear to me, without any attempt to astonish me by any sudden strangeness of statement or epigrammatic gymnastics. He was pleased, I think, to get some one from outer Europe again asking him questions. He spoke of the work of other people and particularly of Sherrington without any note of rivalry or attempt to caricature; he spoke of them as collaborators and collateral explorers in this great work of illuminating some of the obscurest niches of the world of reality. Never in a moment in his talk did he seem aware of anything besides his subject, and least of all was he aware of himself. He seemed in another world from any thoughts of personal competition. He embarked upon no praises of Sherrington. Merely he spoke with respect and interest of his work. To have raised the question of whether he thought Sherrington or himself the greater or more remarkable would have been like letting a drop of ink or mud fall into a glass of clear wine.

My sense of the man’s simple greatness returns to me as I read this skilful patient piecing together of fact and inference and question, doubt, experiment and conclusion for the third of a lifetime, which supplies the matter of this book. And as I read I am reminded of a vehement outbreak I recently provoked in another great man I know, a man for whom I have an admiration and affection at least as strong as I have for Professor Pavloff, though my admiration is of an entirely different quality, George Bernard Shaw. I recall that Professor Pavloff is one of the greatest of vivisectors—“these scoundrels” Shaw called them—and that according to Shaw it is his habit to boil babies alive and see what happens. Queer that one fine man should write so of another! In that screaming, wildly foolish denunciation of vivisection to which I refer, Shaw, just to give his readers an idea of what vivisection meant, described one of the villains as chopping off the paws of a dog one after the other to observe its behaviour, and as being quite surprised to find that after his fourth operation there were no more paws. And suchlike platform stuff.

It is interesting to compare the reality of vivisection as it is given in this book. For the most part the amount of operation performed involved far less temporary suffering for the animals than lies at the door of any “dog-lover” who has the ears of a Belgian griffon docked, and the vast mass of the experiments and observations recorded required as a primary condition that the animals should be altogether calm and comfortable. The distraction of even a slight pain or any alarming or distressful circumstance would have inhibited altogether the delicate responses to stimuli, upon which this great mass of new knowledge has been erected. I know it will outrage the dearest feelings of the anti-vivisector to say this; it is his peculiar delight to gloat upon imagined “tortures,” but this book is available for the judgment of the intelligent reader. One dog Pavloff describes incidentally as jumping into the stand, impatient for what any hearty anti-vivisector would no doubt describe as its “torment.”

But when I set out to write this article I did not intend to touch so definitely as this upon the delicate sensibilities of the anti-vivisectionist, probably the most indefatigable and fiercest of all epistolatory creatures. That issue is a little off my present track. I had in mind the remarkable contrast of these two eminent figures, both in their way commanding my admiration and both in their way very sympathetic to me. I come somewhere between them; in my humbler measure I partake a little of both. I do not know what Pavloff thinks of Shaw, probably about as much as he does of the “proletarian science” of Moscow, but we have Shaw’s ringing “Scoundrel!” for Pavloff properly on record. I have been amusing myself for some minutes with that old game of the One Life-Belt. Probably you know and play that game. You put it as a problem rather after the fashion of the Doctor’s Dilemma; if A. is drowning on one side of a pier, and B. is equally drowning on the other, and you have one life-belt and cannot otherwise help, to which of the two would you throw it? Which would I save, for example, Pavloff or Shaw?

I do not think it would interest the reader to give my private answer. But while I was considering it I was manifestly obliged to ask myself, “What is the good of Shaw?” And what is the good of Shaw? Pavloff is a star which lights the world, shining down a vista hitherto unexplored. Why should I hesitate with my life-belt for one moment?

To begin with the elements so to speak, Shaw writes English extraordinarily well. I feel a sort of benefit of clergy attaches to that alone. Pavloff translated by Anrep is rather clumsy reading and I doubt if that is altogether the fault of Anrep. I doubt if Pavloff is much of a writer. Sometimes I try to write English, and I am always keenly interested in the writing of English, and I am even interested in the writing of stuff about the writing of English, and I know enough of the business to know how beautifully it is done by Shaw. And he walks about writing in a little note-book, avoiding passers-by with remarkable skill, and presently he produces, out of his head and out of his vivid misconceptions about life, shows for the theatre of the brightest, liveliest, freshest quality, so that there is nothing quite like them in the world. “John Bull’s Other Island” and “Androcles and the Lion” and “Saint Joan” float off from reality like vast soap bubbles, reflecting it in vivid patches, curved and brightened, iridescent and delightful. And he talks incessantly, and a larger proportion of that talk is fun of the very best quality than is found in the talk of any one else on record.

Moreover, he has invented a most amusing personal appearance: he is an adept at gravely absurd conduct, and his extraordinary industry in sitting to painters, photographers, and sculptors will fill the museums of the future with entire galleries of his portraits, medals, statues, and busts. All the rest of us will be rare in comparison. The likeness varies with the artist, and it is possible that contrasted series of these representations will be ascribed to different contemporary reputations which have been less sedulous for physical record. It will be incredible that one single man could have sat so persistently. Some will perhaps be attributed to eminent vivisectors otherwise undocumented. So Shaw may even defeat his end of individual assertion and become the general type of our time. But certainly he is the greatest living artist in expression, in self-expression, and he does it so excellently that it seems ungracious to raise the question whether he has ever had anything but himself to express.

But with the life-belt in my hands and Pavloff, so to speak, splashing, it is a question I must raise. What has Shaw added to our arsenal of ideas, to our store of knowledge, to the illumination of the world? Has he been more than a confusing commentary, a gesticulating shadow athwart light not his own? He has been a prominent Socialist. What is there in Socialist thought, what contribution, or correction, or deflection, to which one can attach the initials of G. B. S.?

He has been a mighty reverberator for Samuel Butler’s self-consoling detraction of Darwin. He has restored the inheritance of acquired characters by proclamation, and he has co-operated with that equally vigorous expressionist, Mr. Belloc, in proclaiming Darwinism—whatever it is—extinct. He has made a free use of the phrase the “Life Force,” but what meaning he attaches to these magic words is unknown. He expands the word Will on the lines of various nineteenth-century German thinkers. He seems to be suggesting at times that man can do anything by merely willing it, but whether that is possible on any dietary or only upon vegetarian nourishment, and whether it can be done without apparatus, is never clear. He has an aversion from sex and children which may be either Butler or temperamental, and he seems to want mankind to try laying parthenogenetic eggs, and coming out of them fully whiskered. I doubt if there will ever be this will to the egg on the part of mankind. And in his wonderful prefaces—as good as the best Dublin-brewed talk they are—he has made a vast jungle of shrewd commentary and dogmatic statements that collectively amount to somewhere in the region of nothing at all. It is interesting to read these prefaces and the rest of his abundant controversial literature, and note how inevitably he slides away from any general question to issues of motive. If he has no visible antagonist, he invents one. Just as he shirked all the issues of vivisection by describing imaginary monsters of stupidity and cruelty, so always he has dressed a punching dummy for every view he has assailed. It is not because he is a dishonest controversialist, but because he is incurably a dramatist, that he does this. The poverty of his abstract thought assures the excellence of his plays.

People call him a thinker. I doubt any consecutive thinking at all. Most intelligent men have their ideas in some sort of grouping and order, even if it is no more than the order of a patchwork quilt, but I do not find even that much coherence in Shaw. His ideas are a jackdaw’s hoard picked up anyhow and piled together anyhow. Knowing my Shaw fairly well, and knowing his surroundings, I think I could trace to some intimate personal influence nearly everything he has ever held. This he got from Samuel Butler, and that from Webb; this he expanded from a chance remark by Haden Guest, and that was loaded into him by one of Mussolini’s sedulous propagandists. The worst element in his mental make-up is a queer readiness to succumb to the poses of excessive virility. His soul goes down before successful force. He exalted the maker of enormous guns in “Man and Superman”; he has rejoiced in the worst claptrap of the Napoleonic legend; now he is striking attitudes of adoration towards the poor, vain, doomed biped who is making Rome horrible and ridiculous to all the world. When it comes to the torture of intelligent men, to vile outrages on old women, to the strangulation of all sane criticism and an orgy of claptrap more dreadful than its attendant cruelties, this vituperative anti-vivisectionist becomes an applauding spectator. So he is welcomed to Italy and fêted in the sunlit streets along which other less fortunate intellectuals have been hurried through the darkness to an ignominious death. What does it matter to him that the shadow of destruction creeps closer and closer to so great a man as Ferrero? What does it matter that the soul of a whole people is dishonoured and bowed and bent? To him it does not matter, because his thought is too trifling to apprehend the threat this triumph of base violence conveys to the whole world of man. He is taken and subdued by posturings that outdo his own, and his political thinking, like his thinking about life and medicine, brings him at last to no better end than a defence of impudent quackery.

Empty he is as few of my contemporaries are empty—yes; but he echoes most sonorously in his own cathedral-like emptiness, and his outward effect is striking and entertaining, not simply to himself, but to us all. He resembles an iridescent film upon the pool of life, and Pavloff, a great stone built in and built upon, and so completely incorporated that his name may have become hardly more than a name, widely forgotten. To the future Shaw will have contributed nothing, and yet he may be harder to forget. We can know what Pavloff knows now if we will do the necessary reading of him, but a hundred years hence industrious students may still be discussing whether Shaw meant this or whether he meant that, or whether he meant anything at all. Unless, that is, still more Shavian Shaws, still emptier, still more resonant and preposterous, have swamped their attention by that time and obliterated him altogether.

Empty and sometimes intensely vexatious, and yet I think that like Belloc he is playing a very necessary rôle in the intellectual world. Scientific men are apt to forget their obligations to the general intelligence of mankind. Though nobody acknowledged the indebtedness, it was Belloc as much as any one who shook up the biologists at the recent meeting of the British Association to tell us less mumblingly than they have done for some time how matters stood with them about Natural Selection, Darwin and the Origin of Man. And while I find reading Shaw is like shooting rapids in sunshine, Pavloff-Anrep, though, as Baedeker puts it, “rewarding,” is very heavy going, a deep dark gorge of thought. I wish men of science would express themselves better. Scientific inquiry takes its workers into remote and lonely places where they do a little lose the faculty of ordinary speech. Our interest in scientific work and sound thinking might fade out altogether if the mental irritation of these expressionists did not keep our attention alive.

And with these few remarks, which I hope may prove helpful, I will hand the life-belt to the reader and repudiate any further responsibility in the matter.

13 November, 1927.