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Title: Daedalus; or, Science and the future
Author: Haldane, J. B. S.
Language: English
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* * * * *
DAEDALUS
SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES
DAEDALUS, +OR SCIENCE AND THE
FUTURE+
By J. B. S. Haldane
ICARUS, +OR THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE+
By Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.
THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST, +OR MAN AND HIS THREE FACES+
By F. G. Crookshank, M.C., F.R.C.P.
WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES
By Prof. A. M. Low
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
DAEDALUS
Science and the Future
A PAPER READ TO THE HERETICS, CAMBRIDGE
ON FEBRUARY 4TH, 1923.
BY
J. B. S. HALDANE
_Sir William Dunn Reader in Bio-chemistry
Cambridge University_
[Illustration: logo]
+NEW YORK+
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
+681 FIFTH AVENUE+
Copyright, 1924
By E. P. Dutton & Company
_All Rights Reserved_
First Printing, April, 1924
Second Printing, May, 1924
Third Printing, August, 1924
Fourth Printing, October, 1924
Fifth Printing, December, 1924
Sixth Printing, December, 1924
Seventh Printing, April, 1925
Eighth Printing, June, 1925
Ninth Printing, June, 1925
Printed in the United States of America
INTRODUCTION
I have slightly expanded certain parts of this paper since reading
it. It has therefore probably lost any unity which it may once have
possessed. It will be criticized for its undue and unpleasant emphasis
on certain topics. This is necessary if people are to be induced to
think about them, and it is the whole business of a university teacher
to induce people to think.
DAEDALUS
OR
SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE
As I sit down to write these pages I can see before me two scenes from
my experience of the late war. The first is a glimpse of a forgotten
battle of 1915. It has a curious suggestion of a rather bad cinema
film. Through a blur of dust and fumes there appear, quite suddenly,
great black and yellow masses of smoke which seem to be tearing up
the surface of the earth and disintegrating the works of man with an
almost visible hatred. These form the chief parts of the picture, but
somewhere in the middle distance one can see a few irrelevant looking
human figures, and soon there are fewer. It is hard to believe that
these are the protagonists in the battle. One would rather choose those
huge substantive oily black masses which are so much more conspicuous,
and suppose that the men are in reality their servants, and playing an
inglorious, subordinate, and fatal part in the combat. It is possible,
after all, that this view is correct.
Had I been privileged to watch a battle three years later, the general
aspect would have been very similar, but there would have been fewer
men and more shell-bursts. There would probably, however, have been
one very significant addition. The men would have been running, with
mad terror in their eyes, from gigantic steel slugs, which were
deliberately, relentlessly, and successfully pursuing them.
The other picture is of three Europeans in India looking at a great new
star in the milky way. These were apparently all of the guests at a
large dance who were interested in such matters. Amongst those who were
at all competent to form views as to the origin of this cosmoclastic
explosion, the most popular theory attributed it to a collision between
two stars, or a star and a nebula. There seem, however, to be at least
two possible alternatives to this hypothesis. Perhaps it was the last
judgment of some inhabited world, perhaps a too successful experiment
in induced radio-activity on the part of some of the dwellers there.
And perhaps also these two hypotheses are identical, and what we were
watching that evening was the detonation of a world on which too many
men came out to look at the stars when they should have been dancing.
These two scenes suggest, very briefly, a part of the case against
science. Has mankind released from the womb of matter a Demogorgon
which is already beginning to turn against him, and may at any
moment hurl him into the bottomless void? Or is Samuel Butler’s even
more horrible vision correct, in which man becomes a mere parasite
of machinery, an appendage to the reproductive system of huge and
complicated engines which will successively usurp his activities,
and end by ousting him from the mastery of this planet? Is the
machine-minder engaged on repetition-work the goal and ideal to which
humanity is tending? Perhaps a survey of the present trend of science
may throw some light on these questions.
But first we may consider for a moment, the question of whether there
is any hope of stopping the progress of scientific research. It is
after all a very recent form of human activity, and a sufficiently
universal protest of mankind would be able to arrest it even now.
In the middle ages public opinion made it so dangerous as to be
practically impossible, and I am inclined to suspect that Mr.
Chesterton, for example, would not be averse to a repetition of this
state of things. The late M. Joseph Reinach, an able and not wholly
illiberal thinker, publicly advocated it.
I think, however, that so long as our present economic and national
systems continue, scientific research has little to fear. Capitalism,
though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will
always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs
for its table. And competitive nationalism, even if war is wholly or
largely prevented, will hardly forego the national advantages accruing
from scientific research.
If we look at the other most probable alternative the prospect is
little more hopeful. In this country the labour party alone among
political organizations includes the fostering of research in its
official programme. Indeed as far as biological research is concerned
labour may prove a better master than capitalism, and there can be
little doubt that it would be equally friendly to physical and chemical
research if these came to lead immediately to shortened hours rather
than to unemployment. In particular there is perhaps reason to think
that that form of sentimentalism which hampers medical research in this
country by legislation would be less likely to flourish in a robust
and selfish labour party of the Australian type than in parties whose
members enjoy the leisure which seems necessary to the development of
such emotional luxuries.
It is of course possible that civilisation may collapse throughout the
world as it has done in parts of Russia, and science with it, but such
an event would in all probability, only postpone the problem for a few
thousand years. And even in Russia we must not forget that first-rate
scientific research is still being carried on.
The possibility has been suggested--I do not know how seriously--that
the progress of science may cease through lack of new problems for
investigation. Mr. Chesterton in _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_,
a book written fifteen years or so ago, prophesied that hansom-cabs
would still be in existence a hundred years hence owing to a cessation
of invention. Within six years there was a hansom-cab in a museum, and
now that romantic but tardy vehicle is a memory like the trireme, the
velocipede, and the 1907 Voisin biplane. I do not suggest that Mr.
Chesterton be dragged--a heavier Hector--behind the last hansom-cab,
but I do contend that, in so far as he claims to be a prophet rather
than the voice of one crying in the wilderness, he may be regarded as
negligible for the purpose of our discussion. I shall try shortly to
show how far from complete are any branches of science at the present
time.
But first a word on Mr. H. G. Wells might not be out of place. The very
mention of the future suggests him. There are two points which I wish
to make about Mr. Wells. In the first place, considered as a serious
prophet, as opposed to a fantastic romancer, he is singularly modest.
In 1902, for example, in a book called “Anticipations,” he gave it as
his personal opinion that by 1950 there would be heavier than air
flying machines capable of practical use in war. That, said he, was his
own view, though he was well aware that it would excite considerable
ridicule. _I propose in this paper to make no prophecies rasher than
the above._
The second and more important point is that he is a generation
behind the time. When his scientific ideas were formed, flying and
radiotelegraphy, for example, were scientific problems, and the centre
of scientific interest still lay in physics and chemistry. Now these
are commercial problems, and I believe that the centre of scientific
interest lies in biology. A generation hence it may be elsewhere, and
the views expressed in this paper will appear as modest, conservative,
and unimaginative as do many of those of Mr. Wells to-day.
I will only touch very briefly on the future of physics, as the
subject is inevitably technical. At present physical theory is in a
state of profound suspense. This is primarily due to Einstein--the
greatest Jew since Jesus. I have no doubt that Einstein’s name will
still be remembered and revered when Lloyd George, Foch, and William
Hohenzollern share with Charlie Chaplin that ineluctable oblivion which
awaits the uncreative mind. I trust that I may be excused if I trespass
from the strict subject of my theme to add my quota to the rather
numerous misstatements of Einstein’s views which have appeared during
the last few years.
Ever since the time of Berkeley it has been customary for the majority
of metaphysicians to proclaim the ideality of Time, of Space, or
of both. But they soon made it clear that in spite of this, time
would continue to wait for no man, and space to separate lovers.
The only practical consequence that they generally drew was that
their own ethical and political views were somehow inherent in the
structure of the universe. The experimental proof or disproof of such
deductions is difficult, and--if the late war may be regarded as an
experimental disproof of certain of Hegel’s political tenets--costly
and unsatisfactory.
Einstein, so far from deducing a new decalogue, has contented himself
with deducing the consequences to space and time themselves of their
ideality. These are mostly too small to be measurable, but some, such
as the deflection of light by the sun’s gravitational field, are
susceptible of verification, and have been verified. The majority of
scientific men are now being constrained by the evidence of these
experiments to adopt a very extreme form of Kantian idealism. The
Kantian _Ding-an-sich_ is an eternal four-dimensional manifold,
which we perceive as space and time, but what we regard as space and
what as time is more or less fortuitous.
It is perhaps interesting to speculate on the practical consequences
of Einstein’s discovery. I do not doubt that he will be believed. A
prophet who can give signs in the heavens is always believed. No one
ever seriously questioned Newton’s theory after the return of Halley’s
comet. Einstein has told us that space, time, and matter are shadows
of the fifth dimension, and the heavens have declared his glory. In
consequence Kantian idealism will become the basal working hypothesis
of the physicist and finally of all educated men, just as materialism
did after Newton’s day. We may not call ourselves materialists, but
we do interpret the activities of the moon, the Thames, influenza,
and aeroplanes in terms of matter. Our ancestors did not, nor, in
all probability, will our descendants. The materialism (whether
conscious or subconscious does not very much matter) of the last
few generations has led to various results of practical importance,
such as sanitation, Marxian socialism, and the right of an accused
person to give evidence on his or her own behalf. The reign of Kantian
idealism as the basal working hypothesis, first of physics, and then
of every-day life, will in all probability last for some centuries. At
the end of that time a similar step in advance will be taken. Einstein
showed that experience cannot be interpreted in terms of space and
time. This was a well-known fact, but so long as space and time did not
break down in their own special sphere, that of explaining the facts
of motion, physicists continued to believe in them, or at any rate,
what was much more important, to think in terms of them for practical
purposes.
A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade
and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter have destroyed
geometry. The basic metaphysical working hypothesis of science and
practical life will then, I think, be something like Bergsonian
activism. I do not for one moment suggest that this or any other
metaphysical system has any claims whatever to finality.
Meanwhile we are in for a few centuries during which many practical
activities will probably be conducted on a basis, not of materialism,
but of Kantian idealism. How will this affect our manners, morals and
politics? Frankly I do not know, though I think the effect will be as
great as that of Newton’s work, which created most of the intellectual
forces of the 18th century. The Condorcets, Benthams, and Marxs of
the future will I think be as ruthlessly critical of the metaphysics
and ethics of their times as were their predecessors, but not quite
so sure of their own; they will lack a certain heaviness of touch
which we may note in Utilitarianism and Socialism. They will recognise
that perhaps in ethics as in physics, there are so to speak fourth
and fifth dimensions that show themselves by effects which, like
the perturbations of the planet Mercury, are hard to detect even in
one generation, but yet perhaps in the course of ages are quite as
important as the three-dimensional phenomena.
If the quantum hypothesis is generally adopted even more radical
alterations in our thinking will be necessary. But I feel it premature
even to suggest their direction in the present unsatisfactory state
of quantum mechanics. It may be that as Poincare (the other Poincare)
suggested we shall be forced to conceive of all change as occurring in
a series of clicks, and all space as consisting of discrete points.
However this may be it is safe to say that a better knowledge of
the properties of radiation will permit us to produce it in a more
satisfactory manner than is at present possible. Almost all our
present sources of light are hot bodies, 95% of whose radiation is
invisible. To light a lamp as a source of light is about as wasteful
of energy as to burn down one’s house to roast one’s pork. It is a
fairly safe prophecy that in 50 years light will cost about a fiftieth
of its present price, and there will be no more night in our cities.
The alternation of day and night is a check on the freedom of human
activity which must go the way of other spatial and temporal checks. In
the long run I think that all that applied physics can do for us is to
abolish these checks. It enables us to possess more, travel more, and
communicate more. I shall not attempt to predict in detail the future
developments of transport and communication. They are only limited by
the velocity of light. We are working towards a condition when any two
persons on earth will be able to be completely present to one another
in not more than 1-24 of a second. We shall never reach it, but that is
the limit which we shall approach indefinitely.
Developments in this direction are tending to bring mankind more and
more together, to render life more and more complex, artificial, and
rich in possibilities--to increase indefinitely man’s powers for good
and evil.
But there are two prerequisites for all progress of this kind, namely
continuous supplies of human and mechanical power. As industries become
more and more closely interwoven, so that a dislocation of any one will
paralyse a dozen others (and that is the position towards which we are
rapidly moving), the ideal of the leaders of industry, under no matter
what economic system, will be directed less and less to the indefinite
increase of production in the intervals between such dislocations,
and more and more to stable and regular production, even at the cost
of reduction of profits and output while the industry is proceeding
normally. It is quite possible that capitalism itself may demand that
the control of certain key industries be handed over completely to the
workers in those industries, simply in order to reduce the number of
sporadic strikes in them. And as industrial progress continues an ever
larger number--perhaps the majority--of industries will become key
industries. The solution may be entirely different--we may well see
a return to feudalism. But the probability is that the problem will
be solved. This view may seem optimistic, but it is more likely than
the alternative thesis which may be briefly stated as follows: “_No
human society will ever succeed in producing a stable organization
in which the majority of the population is employed otherwise than in
agriculture, animal-rearing, hunting or fishing._” It took some
thousands of years to produce the stable agricultural society which
forms the basis of European life and whose morals we are too apt to
regard as eternal truths. It should take a shorter time to evolve a
stable industrial society. The people that do so will inherit the
earth. In sum, I believe that the progress of science will ultimately
make industrial injustice as self-destructive as it is now making
international injustice.
As for the supplies of mechanical power, it is axiomatic that the
exhaustion of our coal and oil-fields is a matter of centuries only.
As it has often been assumed that their exhaustion would lead to the
collapse of industrial civilization, I may perhaps be pardoned if I
give some of the reasons which lead me to doubt this proposition.
Water-power is not, I think, a probable substitute, on account of
its small quantity, seasonal fluctuation, and sporadic distribution.
It may perhaps, however, shift the centre of industrial gravity to
well-watered mountainous tracts such as the Himalayan foothills,
British Columbia, and Armenia. Ultimately we shall have to tap those
intermittent but inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and the
sunlight. The problem is simply one of storing their energy in a form
as convenient as coal or petrol. If a windmill in one’s back garden
could produce a hundredweight of coal daily (and it can produce its
equivalent in energy), our coalmines would shut down to-morrow. Even
to-morrow a cheap, foolproof, and durable storage battery may be
invented, which will enable us to transform the intermittent energy of
the wind into continuous electric power.
Personally, I think that four hundred years hence the power question in
England may be solved somewhat as follows: The country will be covered
with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors which in their
turn supply current at a very high voltage to great electric mains. At
suitable distances, there will be great power stations where during
windy weather the surplus power will be used for the electrolytic
decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. These gases will be
liquefied, and stored in vats, vacuum jacketed reservoirs, probably
sunk in the ground. If these reservoirs are sufficiently large, the
loss of liquid due to leakage inwards of heat will not be great; thus
the proportion evaporating daily from a reservoir 100 yards square by
60 feet deep would not be 1-1000 of that lost from a tank measuring
two feet each way. In times of calm, the gases will be recombined in
explosion motors working dynamos which produce electrical energy once
more, or more probably in oxidation cells. Liquid hydrogen is weight
for weight the most efficient known method of storing energy, as it
gives about three times as much heat per pound as petrol. On the
other hand it is very light, and bulk for bulk has only one-third of
the efficiency of petrol. This will not, however, detract from its use
in aeroplanes, where weight is more important than bulk. These huge
reservoirs of liquefied gases will enable wind energy to be stored,
so that it can be expended for industry, transportation, heating, and
lighting, as desired. The initial costs will be very considerable, but
the running expenses less than those of our present system. Among its
more obvious advantages will be the fact that energy will be as cheap
in one part of the country as another, so that industry will be greatly
decentralized; and that no smoke or ash will be produced.
It is on some such lines as these, I think, that the problem will be
solved. It is essentially a practical problem, and the exhaustion of
our coalfields will furnish the necessary stimulus for its solution.
Even now perhaps Italy might achieve economic independence by the
expenditure of a few million pounds upon research on the lines
indicated. I may add in parenthesis that, on thermodynamical grounds
which I can hardly summarize shortly, I do not much believe in the
commercial possibility of induced radio-activity.
Before I turn to the principal part of my subject I should like to
consider very briefly the influence on art and literature of our
gradual conquest of space and time. I think that the blame for the
decay of certain arts rests primarily on the defective education of
the artists. An artist must understand his subject matter. At present
not a single competent poet and very few painters and etchers outside
the Glasgow School understand industrial life, and I believe that
there is only one architect of any real originality who understands
the possibilities of ferro-concrete. I do not know his name, but he
produced in Soissons before the war a market-place with the dignity
and daring of an ancient Egyptian temple. If I knew that he had been
entrusted with the rebuilding of Soissons, I could not regret its
destruction.
Now if we want poets to interpret physical science as Milton and
Shelley did (Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were
at all up-to-date in their chemical knowledge), we must see that our
possible poets are instructed, as their masters were, in science and
economics. I am absolutely convinced that science is vastly more
stimulating to the imagination than are the classics, but the products
of this stimulus do not normally see the light because scientific men
as a class are devoid of any perception of literary form. When they
can express themselves we get a Butler or a Norman Douglas. Not until
our poets are once more drawn from the educated classes (I speak as
a scientist), will they appeal to the average man by showing him the
beauty in his own life as Homer and Virgil appealed to the street
urchins who scrawled their verses on the walls of Pompeii.
And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must
educate our masters, labour and capital, in art. Personally I believe
that we may have good hopes of both. The capitalist’s idea of art in
industry at present tends to limit itself to painting green and white
stripes on the front of his factories in certain cases. This is a
primitive type of decoration, but it has, I think, the root of the
matter in it. Before long someone may discover that frescoes inside a
factory increase the average efficiency of the worker 1.03% and art
will become a commercial proposition once more. Even now it is being
discovered that artistic advertising often pays. Similarly I do not
doubt that labour will come to find that it cannot live by bread (or
shall we say bread and beer) alone. But it can hardly be expected to
make this discovery until it is assured of its supply of bread and beer.
Applied chemistry has introduced into human life no radical novelty
of the importance of the heat-engine or the telegraph. It has vastly
increased the production of various types of substance the most
important being metals. But there were explosives, dyes, and drugs
before chemistry was a science, and its progress along present lines
will mainly alter life in a quantitative manner. Perhaps the biggest
problems before it in metallurgy are the utilization of low-grade iron
ores, and the production of aluminium from clay, which contains up to
24% of that metal. I do not think that even when this is accomplished
aluminium will oust iron and steel as they ousted bronze and flint,
but it and its alloys will certainly take the second, and possibly
the first place as industrial metals. There is just a hope, though I
fear little more, that a large-scale production of perfume may form
the basis of a re-education of our rather rudimentary sense of smell,
but the most interesting possibilities of chemical invention are very
clearly in biological chemistry, and for the following reasons.
Desirable substances fall on the whole into two classes. The first are
desirable on account of their physical or chemical properties, for
example iron, wood or glass, which we use as a part of systems such
as fires, houses, or razors, which procure us certain benefits. The
second are desirable on account of their physiological properties.
Such substances include foods, drinks, tobacco, and drugs. Colours
and scents occupy an intermediate position. The value of this second
class of substances rests on a quite special relationship to the human
organism which depends in the most intimate way on the constitution of
the latter, and has not in general been at all fully explained in terms
of physics and chemistry. For example fires can be made of coal or peat
instead of wood, but no other chemical substance has the same effect as
water or alcohol. So unless a chemical substance has new physiological
properties its production will merely serve to improve or make possible
some appliance whose use lies within the sphere of applied physics.
Within historical time two and only two substances of the second
class have come into universal use in Europe, namely caffeine and
nicotine, which were introduced into this country in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. There are others of immense importance,
such as chloroform and quinine, but their use is not universal. But
coffee, tea, and tobacco, with alcohol, are as much a part of normal
life as food and water. There is no reason to suppose that the list of
such substances is exhausted. During the war Embden[1] the professor
of physiology in Frankfurt University discovered that a dose of about
7 grams of acid sodium phosphate increases a man’s capacity for
prolonged muscular work by about 20%, and probably aids in prolonged
mental work. It can be taken over very lengthy periods. A group of
coal-miners took it for nine months on end with very great effect on
their output. It has no after-effects like those of alcohol, and one
cannot take a serious overdose as it merely acts as a purgative. (They
gave certain Stosstruppen too much!) Thousands of people in Germany
take it habitually. It is possible that it may become as normal a
beverage as coffee or tea. It costs 1/9 per pound, or ⅓d. per dose.
The vast majority of chemical substances with physiological properties
are unsuited for daily use like castor oil, or dangerous like morphine;
probably none are without bad effects in certain cases. Those which
are susceptible of daily use are of the utmost social importance.
Tobacco has slight but definite effects on the character. Coffee-houses
in London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and cafes in
modern Europe were and are civilizing influences of incalculable value.
But these substances are profoundly obnoxious to a certain type of
mind. It would perhaps be fantastic to suggest that Sir Walter Raleigh
owed his death in part to his sovereign’s objection to tobacco. But if
he is not its protomartyr it is at least probable that more men have
died for tobacco smoking at the hands of Sikhs, Senussis, and Wahabis,
whose religions forbid this practice, than died under the Roman empire
for professing Christianity. Should it ever be generally realised that
temperance is a mean we may expect that mankind will ultimately have at
its disposal a vast array of substances like wine, coffee, and tobacco,
whose intelligent use can add to the amenity of life and promote the
expression of man’s higher faculties.
But before that day comes chemistry will be applied to the production
of a still more important group of physiologically active substances,
namely foods. The facts about food are rather curious. Everyone
knows that food is ultimately produced by plants, though we may get
it at second or third hand if we eat animals or their products. But
the average plant turns most of its sugar not into starch which is
digestible, but into cellulose which is not, but forms its woody
skeleton. The hoofed animals have dealt with this problem in their own
way, by turning their bellies into vast hives of bacteria that attack
cellulose, and on whose by-products they live. We have got to do the
same, but outside our bodies. It may be done on chemical lines. Irvine
has obtained a 95% yield of sugar from cellulose, but at a prohibitive
cost. Or we may use micro-organisms, but in any case within the next
century sugar and starch will be about as cheap as sawdust. Many of
our foodstuffs, including the proteins, we shall probably build up
from simpler sources such as coal and atmospheric nitrogen. I should
be inclined to allow 120 years, but not much more, before a completely
satisfactory diet can be produced in this way on a commercial scale.
This will mean that agriculture will become a luxury, and that mankind
will be completely urbanized. Personally I do not regret the probable
disappearance of the agricultural labourer in favour of the factory
worker, who seems to me a higher type of person from most points of
view. Human progress in historical time has been the progress of cities
dragging a reluctant countryside in their wake. Synthetic food will
substitute the flower garden and the factory for the dunghill and the
slaughterhouse, and make the city at last self-sufficient.
_There’s many a strong farmer whose heart would break in two
If he could see the townland that we are riding to.
Boughs have their fruit and blossom at all times of the year,
Rivers are running over with red beer and brown beer,
An old man plays the bagpipes in a golden and silver wood,
Queens, their eyes blue like the ice, are dancing in a crowd._
I should have liked had time allowed to have added my quota to the
speculations which have been made with regard to inter-planetary
communication. Whether this is possible I can form no conjecture; that
it will be attempted I have no doubt whatever.
With regard to the application of biology to human life, the average
prophet appears to content himself with considerable if rather
rudimentary progress in medicine and surgery, some improvements in
domestic plants and animals, and possibly the introduction of a little
eugenics. The eugenic official, a compound, it would appear, of the
policeman, the priest and the procurer, is to hale us off at suitable
intervals to the local temple of Venus Genetrix with a partner chosen,
one gathers, by something of the nature of a glorified medical board.
To this prophecy I should reply that it proceeds from a type of mind as
lacking in originality as in knowledge of human nature. Marriage “by
numbers”, so to speak, was a comparatively novel idea when proposed by
Plato 2,300 years ago, but it has already actually been practised in
various places, notably among the subjects of the Jesuits in Paraguay.
It is moreover likely, as we shall see, that the ends proposed by the
eugenist will be attained in a very different manner.
But before we proceed to prophecy I should like to turn back to the
past and examine very briefly the half dozen or so important biological
inventions which have already been made. By a biological invention I
mean the establishment of a new relationship between man and other
animals or plants, or between different human beings, provided that
such relationship is one which comes primarily under the domain of
biology rather than physics, psychology or ethics. Of the biological
inventions of the past, four were made before the dawn of history. I
refer to the domestication of animals, the domestication of plants,
the domestication of fungi for the production of alcohol, and to a
fourth invention, which I believe was of more ultimate and far-reaching
importance than any of these, since it altered the path of sexual
selection, focussed the attention of man as a lover upon woman’s face
and breasts, and changed our idea of beauty from the steatopygous
Hottentot to the modern European, from the Venus of Brassempouy to the
Venus of Milo. There are certain races which have not yet made this
last invention. And in our own day two more have been made, namely
bactericide and the artificial control of conception.
The first point that we may notice about these inventions is that they
have all had a profound emotional and ethical effect. Of the four
earlier there is not one which has not formed the basis of a religion.
I do not know what strange god will have the hardihood to adopt Charles
Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in the place of Triptolemus and Noah,
but one may remark that it is impossible to keep religion out of any
discussion of the practices which they popularized.
The second point is perhaps harder to express. The chemical or physical
inventor is always a Prometheus. There is no great invention, from
fire to flying, which has not been hailed as an insult to some god.
But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every
biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on
first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which
had not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as
indecent and unnatural.
Consider so simple and time-honoured a process as the milking of a
cow. The milk which should have been an intimate and almost sacramental
bond between mother and child is elicited by the deft fingers of a
milk-maid, and drunk, cooked, or even allowed to rot into cheese. We
have only to imagine ourselves as drinking any of its other secretions,
in order to realise the radical indecency of our relation to the cow.[2]
No less disgusting a priori is the process of corruption which yields
our wine and beer. But in actual fact the processes of milking and of
the making and drinking beer appear to us profoundly natural; they
have even tended to develop a ritual of their own whose infraction
nowadays has a certain air of impropriety. There is something slightly
disgusting in the idea of milking a cow electrically or drinking beer
out of tea-cups. And all this of course applies much more strongly to
the sexual act.
I fancy that the sentimental interest attaching to Prometheus has
unduly distracted our attention from the far more interesting figure
of Daedalus. It is with infinite relief that amidst a welter of heroes
armed with gorgon’s heads or protected by Stygian baptisms the student
of Greek mythology comes across the first modern man. Beginning as a
realistic sculptor (he was the first to produce statues whose feet were
separated) it was natural that he should proceed to the construction of
an image of Aphrodite whose limbs were activated by quicksilver. After
this his interest inevitably turned to biological problems, and it is
safe to say that posterity has never equalled his only recorded success
in experimental genetics. Had the housing and feeding of the Minotaur
been less expensive it is probable that Daedalus would have anticipated
Mendel. But Minos held that a labyrinth and an annual provision of 50
youths and 50 virgins were excessive as an endowment for research, and
in order to escape from his ruthless economies Daedalus was forced
to invent the art of flying. Minos pursued him to Sicily and was
slain there. Save for his valuable invention of glue, little else is
known of Daedalus. But it is most significant that, although he was
responsible for the death of Zeus’ son Minos he was neither smitten
by a thunderbolt, chained to a rock, nor pursued by furies. Still
less did any of the rather numerous visitors to Hades discover him
either in Elysium or Tartarus. We can hardly imagine him as a member
of the throng of shades who besieged Charon’s ferry like sheep at a
gap. He was the first to demonstrate that the scientific worker is not
concerned with gods.
The unconscious mind of the early Greeks, who focussed in this amazing
figure the dim traditions of Minoan science, was presumably aware of
this fact. The most monstrous and unnatural action in all human legend
was unpunished in this world or the next. Even the death of Icarus must
have weighed lightly with a man who had already been banished from
Athens for the murder of his nephew. But if he escaped the vengeance of
the gods he has been exposed to the universal and agelong reprobation
of a humanity to whom biological inventions are abhorrent, with one
very significant exception. Socrates was proud to claim him as an
ancestor.
The biological invention then tends to begin as a perversion and end
as a ritual supported by unquestioned beliefs and prejudices. Even now
surgical cleanliness is developing its rites and its dogmas, which, it
may be remarked, are accepted most religiously by women. With the above
facts in your minds I would ask you to excuse what at first sight might
appear improbable or indecent in any speculations which appear below,
and to dismiss from your minds the belief that biology will consist
merely in physical and chemical discoveries as applied to men, animals
and plants.
I say advisedly “will consist”, for we are at present almost completely
ignorant of biology, a fact which often escapes the notice of
biologists, and renders them too presumptuous in their estimates of
the present position of their science, too modest in their claims for
its future. If for example we take a typical case of applied biology
such as the detection and destruction of the cholera bacillus, we
find a great deal of science involved, but the only purely biological
principle is the very important but not very profound one that some
bacteria kill some men. The really scientific parts of the process
are the optical and chemical methods involved in the magnification,
staining and killing of the bacilli. When on the other hand we come to
immunization to typhoid we find certain purely biological principles
involved which are neither simple nor at all completely understood.
Actually biological theory consists of some ancient but not very
easily stated truths about organisms in general, due largely to
Aristotle, Hippocrates and Harvey, a few great principles such as
those formulated by Darwin, Mayer, Claude Bernard, and Mendel, and a
vast mass of facts about individual organisms and their parts which are
still awaiting adequate generalization.
Darwin’s results are beginning to be appreciated, with alarming effects
on certain types of religion, those of Weismann and Mendel will be
digested in the course of the present century, and are going to affect
political and philosophical theories almost equally profoundly. I
need hardly say that these latter results deal with the question of
reproduction and heredity. We may expect, moreover, as time goes on,
that a series of shocks of the type of Darwinism will be given to
established opinions on all sorts of subjects. One cannot suggest
in detail what these shocks will be, but since the opinions on which
they will impinge are deep-seated and irrational, they will come upon
us and our descendants with the same air of presumption and indecency
with which the view that we are descended from monkeys came to our
grandfathers. But owing to man’s fortunate capacity for thinking in
watertight (or rather idea-tight) compartments, they will probably
not have immediate and disruptive effects upon society any more than
Darwinism had.
Far more profound will be the effect of the practical applications
of biology. I believe that the progress of medicine has had almost,
if not quite, as deep an effect on society in Western Europe as the
industrial revolution. Apart from the important social consequences
which have flowed from the partial substitution of the doctor for the
priest, its net result has been that whereas four hundred years ago
most people died in childhood, they now live on an average, (apart from
the late war), until forty-five. Bad as our urban conditions often are,
there is not a slum in the country which has a third of the infantile
death-rate of the royal family in the middle ages. Largely as a result
of this religion has come to lay less and less stress on a good death,
and more and more on a good life, and its whole outlook has gradually
changed in consequence. Death has receded so far into the background of
our normal thoughts that when we came into somewhat close contact with
it during the war most of us failed completely to take it seriously.
Similarly institutions which were based on short lives have almost
wholly collapsed. For example the English land system postulated that
the landowner should die aged about forty, and be succeeded by his
eldest son, aged about twenty. The son had spent most of his life on
the estate, and had few interests outside it. He managed it at least
as well as anyone else could have done. Nowadays the father dodders on
till about eighty, and is generally incompetent for ten years before
his death. His son succeeds him at the age of fifty or so, by which
time he may be a fairly competent colonel or stockbroker, but cannot
hope to learn the art of managing an estate. In consequence he either
hands it over to an agent who is deprived of initiative and often
corrupt, or runs it unscientifically, gets a low return, and ascribes
to Bolshevism what he should really lay at the door of vaccination.
But to return, if I may use the expression, to the future, I am
going to suggest a few obvious developments which seem probable in
the present state of biological science, without assuming any great
new generalizations of the type of Darwinism. I have the very best
precedents for introducing a myth at this point, so perhaps I may be
excused if I reproduce some extracts from an essay on the influence of
biology on history during the 20th century which will (it is hoped) be
read by a rather stupid undergraduate member of this university to his
supervisor during his first term 150 years hence.
“As early as the first decade of the twentieth century we find a
conscious attempt at the application of biology to politics in the
so-called eugenic movement”. A number of earnest persons, having
discovered the existence of biology, attempted to apply it in its then
very crude condition to the production of a race of super-men, and in
certain countries managed to carry a good deal of legislation. They
appear to have managed to prevent the transmission of a good deal of
syphilis, insanity, and the like, and they certainly succeeded in
producing the most violent opposition and hatred amongst the classes
whom they somewhat gratuitously regarded as undesirable parents.
(There was even a rebellion in Nebraska). However, they undoubtedly
prepared public opinion for what was to come, and so far served a
useful purpose. Far more important was the progress in medicine which
practically abolished infectious diseases in those countries which were
prepared to tolerate the requisite amount of state interference in
private life, and finally, after the league’s ordinance of 1958, all
over the world; though owing to Hindu opposition, parts of India were
still quite unhealthy up to 1980 or so.
But from a wider point of view the most important biological work in
the first third of the century was in experimental zoology and botany.
When we consider that in 1912 Morgan had located several Mendelian
factors in the nucleus of Drosophila, and modified its sex-ratio,
while Marmorek had taught a harmless bacillus to kill guinea-pigs, and
finally in 1913 Brachet had grown rabbit embryos in serum for some
days, it is remarkable how little the scientific workers of that time,
and a fortiori the general public, seem to have foreseen the practical
bearing of such results.
As a matter of fact it was not until 1940 that Selkovski invented the
purple alga _Porphyrococcus fixator_ which was to have so great
an effect on the world’s history. In the 50 years before this date the
world’s average wheat yield per hectare had been approximately doubled,
partly by the application of various chemical manures, but most of
all by the results of systematic crossing work with different races;
there was however little prospect of further advance on any of these
lines. _Porphyrococcus_ is an enormously efficient nitrogen-fixer
and will grow in almost any climate where there are water and traces
of potash and phosphates in the soil, obtaining its nitrogen from
the air. It has about the effect in four days that a crop of vetches
would have had in a year. It could not, of course have been produced
in the course of nature, as its immediate ancestors would only grow
in artificial media and could not have survived outside a laboratory.
Wherever nitrogen was the principal limiting factor to plant growth
it doubled the yield of wheat, and quadrupled the value of grass land
for grazing purposes. The enormous fall in food prices and the ruin
of purely agricultural states was of course one of the chief causes
of the disastrous events of 1943 and 1944. The food glut was also
greatly accentuated when in 1942 the Q strain of _Porphyrococcus_
escaped into the sea and multiplied with enormous rapidity. Indeed
for two months the surface of the tropical Atlantic set to a jelly,
with disastrous results to the weather of Europe. When certain of the
plankton organisms developed ferments capable of digesting it the
increase of the fish population of the seas was so great as to make
fish the universal good that it is now, and to render even England
self-supporting in respect of food. So great was the prosperity in
England that in that year the coal-miner’s union entered its first
horse for the Derby (a horse-race which still took place annually at
that time).
It was of course as the result of its invasion by _Porphyrococcus_
that the sea assumed the intense purple colour which seems so natural
to us, but which so distressed the more aesthetically minded of our
great grand-parents who witnessed the change. It is certainly curious
to us to read of the sea as having been green or blue. I need not
detail the work of Ferguson and Rahmatullah who in 1957 produced the
lichen which has bound the drifting sand of the world’s deserts (for it
was merely a continuation of that of Selkovski), nor yet the story of
how the agricultural countries dealt with their unemployment by huge
socialistic windpower schemes.
It was in 1951 that Dupont and Schwarz produced the first ectogenetic
child. As early as 1901 Heape had transferred embryo rabbits from one
female to another, in 1925 Haldane had grown embryonic rats in serum
for ten days, but had failed to carry the process to its conclusion,
and it was not till 1940 that Clark succeeded with the pig, using
Kehlmann’s solution as medium. Dupont and Schwarz obtained a fresh
ovary from a woman who was the victim of an aeroplane accident, and
kept it living in their medium for five years. They obtained several
eggs from it and fertilized them successfully, but the problem of
the nutrition and support of the emo was more difficult, and was
only solved in the fourth year. Now that the technique is fully
developed, we can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in
a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum
each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos
grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the
air. Schwarz never got such good results, but the news of his first
success caused an unprecedented sensation throughout the entire
world, for the birth-rate was already less than the death-rate in most
civilised countries. France was the first country to adopt ectogenesis
officially, and by 1968 was producing 60,000 children annually by this
method. In most countries the opposition was far stronger, and was
intensified by the Papal Bull “Nunquam prius audito”, and the similar
fetwa of the Khalif, both of which appeared in 1960.
As we know ectogenesis is now universal, and in this country less
than 30 per cent of children are now born of woman. The effect on
human psychology and social life of the separation of sexual love and
reproduction which was begun in the 19th century and completed in
the 20th is by no means wholly satisfactory. The old family life had
certainly a good deal to commend it, and although nowadays we bring
on lactation in women by injection of placentin as a routine, and
thus conserve much of what was best in the former instinctive cycle,
we must admit that in certain respects our great grand-parents had the
advantage of us. On the other hand it is generally admitted that the
effects of selection have more than counterbalanced these evils. The
small proportion of men and women who are selected as ancestors for the
next generation are so undoubtedly superior to the average that the
advance in each generation in any single respect, from the increased
output of first-class music to the decreased convictions for theft, is
very startling. Had it not been for ectogenesis there can be little
doubt that civilization would have collapsed within a measurable time
owing to the greater fertility of the less desirable members of the
population in almost all countries.
It is perhaps fortunate that the process of becoming an ectogenetic
mother of the next generation involves an operation which is somewhat
unpleasant, though now no longer disfiguring or dangerous, and
never physiologically injurious, and is therefore an honour but by
no means a pleasure. Had this not been the case, it is perfectly
possible that popular opposition would have proved too strong for
the selectionist movement. As it was the opposition was very fierce,
and characteristically enough this country only adopted its present
rather stringent standard of selection a generation later than Germany,
though it is now perhaps more advanced than any other country in this
respect. The advantages of thorough-going selection, have, however,
proved to be enormous. “The question of the ideal sex-ratio is still a
matter of violent discussion, but the modern reaction towards equality
is certainly strong.”
Our essayist would then perhaps go on to discuss some far more radical
advances made about 1990, but I have only quoted his account of the
earlier applications of biology. The second appears to me to be neither
impossible nor improbable, but it has those features which we saw above
to be characteristic of biological inventions. If reproduction is
once completely separated from sexual love mankind will be free in an
altogether new sense. At present the national character is changing
slowly according to quite unknown laws. The problem of politics is
to find institutions suitable to it. In the future perhaps it may
be possible by selective breeding to change character as quickly as
institutions. I can foresee the election placards of 300 years hence,
if such quaint political methods survive, which is perhaps improbable,
“Vote for Smith and more musicians”, “Vote for O’Leary and more girls”,
or perhaps finally “Vote for Macpherson and a prehensile tail for
your great-grandchildren”. We can already alter animal species to an
enormous extent, and it seems only a question of time before we shall
be able to apply the same principles to our own.
I suggest then that biology will probably be applied on lines roughly
resembling the above. There are perhaps equally great possibilities
in the way of the direct improvement of the individual, as we come
to know more of the physiological obstacles to the development of
different faculties. But at present we can only guess at the nature of
these obstacles, and the line of attack suggested in the myth is the
one which seems most obvious to a Darwinian. We already know however
that many of our spiritual faculties can only be manifested if certain
glands, notably the thyroid and sex-glands, are functioning properly,
and that very minute changes in such glands affect the character
greatly. As our knowledge of this subject increases we may be able,
for example, to control our passions by some more direct method than
fasting and flagellation, to stimulate our imagination by some reagent
with less after-effects than alcohol, to deal with perverted instincts
by physiology rather than prison. Conversely there will inevitably
arise possibilities of new vices similar to but even more profound than
those opened up by the pharmacological discoveries of the 19th century.
The recent history of medicine is as follows. Until about 1870
medicine was largely founded on physiology, or, as the Scotch called
it “Institutes of medicine”. Disease was looked at from the point of
view of the patient, as injuries still are. Pasteur’s discovery of the
nature of infectious disease transformed the whole outlook, and made
it possible to abolish one group of diseases. But it also diverted
scientific medicine from its former path, and it is probable that,
were bacteria unknown, though many more people would die of sepsis
and typhoid, we should be better able to cope with kidney disease
and cancer. Certain diseases such as cancer are probably not due to
specific organisms, whilst others such as phthisis are due to forms
which are fairly harmless to the average person, but attack others for
unknown reasons. We are not likely to deal with them effectually on
Pasteur’s lines, we must divert our view from the micro-organism to the
patient. Where the doctor cannot deal with the former he can often keep
the patient alive long enough to be able to do so himself. And here he
has to rely largely on a knowledge of physiology. I do not say that a
physiologist will discover how to prevent cancer. Pasteur started life
as a crystallographer. But whoever does so is likely at least to make
use of physiological data on a large-scale.
The abolition of disease will make death a physiological event like
sleep. A generation that has lived together will die together. I
suspect that man’s desire for a future life is largely due to two
causes, a feeling that most lives are incomplete, and a desire to meet
friends from whom we have parted prematurely. A gentle decline into the
grave at the end of a completed life’s work will largely do away with
the first, and our contemporaries will rarely leave us sorrowing for
long.
Old age is perhaps harder on women than on men. They live longer, but
their life is too often marred by the sudden change which generally
overtakes them between forty and fifty, and sometimes leaves them a
prey to disease, though it may improve their health. This change seems
to be due to a sudden failure of a definite chemical substance produced
by the ovary. When we can isolate and synthesize this body we shall be
able to prolong a woman’s youth, and allow her to age as gradually as
the average man.
Psychology is hardly a science yet. Like biology it has arrived at
certain generalizations of a rather abstract and philosophic character,
but these are still to some extent matters of controversy. And though
a vast number of most important empirical facts are known, only a
few great generalizations from them--such as the existence of the
subconscious mind--have yet been made. But anyone who has seen even a
single example of the power of hypnotism and suggestion must realise
that the face of the world and the possibilities of existence will
be totally altered when we can control their effects and standardize
their application, as has been possible, for example, with drugs which
were once regarded as equally magical. Infinitely greater, of course,
would be the results of the opening up of systematic communication with
spiritual beings in another world, which is claimed as a scientific
possibility. Spiritualism is already Christianity’s most formidable
enemy, and we have no data which allows us to estimate the probable
effect on man of a religion whose dogmas are a matter of experiment,
whose mysteries are prosaic as electric lighting, whose ethics are
based on the observed results in the next world of a good or bad life
in this. Yet that is the prospect before us if spiritualism obtains the
scientific verification which it is now demanding, not perhaps with
great success.
I have only been able, in the time at my disposal, to traverse a very
few of the possible fields of scientific advance. If I have convinced
anyone present that science has still a good deal up her sleeve, and
that of a sufficiently startling character, I shall be amply repaid.
If anything I have said appears to be of a gratuitously disgusting
nature, I would reply that certain phenomena of normal life do seem to
many to be of that nature, and that these phenomena are of the utmost
scientific and practical importance.
I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most
romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems
to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid
the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong
quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning
to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a
few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him
immortal. There is real tragedy in his life, but he knows that he has
a responsibility which he dare not disclaim, and he is urged on, apart
from all utilitarian considerations, by something or someone which he
feels to be higher than himself.
The conservative has but little to fear from the man whose reason
is the servant of his passions, but let him beware of him in whom
reason has become the greatest and most terrible of the passions.
These are the wreckers of outworn empires and civilisations, doubters,
disintegrators, deicides. In the past they have been, in general, men
like Voltaire, Bentham, Thales, Marx, and very possibly the divine
Julius, but I think that Darwin furnishes an example of the same
relentlessness of reason in the field of science. I suspect that as
it becomes clear that at present reason not only has a freer play in
science than elsewhere, but can produce as great effects on the world
through science as through politics, philosophy, or literature, there
will be more Darwins. Such men are interested primarily in truth as
such, but they can hardly be quite uninterested in what will happen
when they throw down their dragon’s teeth into the world.
I do not say that biologists as a general rule try to imagine in any
detail the future applications of their science. The central problems
of life for them may be the relationship between the echinoderms and
brachiopods, and the attempt to live on their salaries. They do not
see themselves as sinister and revolutionary figures. They have no time
to dream. But I suspect that more of them dream than would care to
confess it.
I have given above a very small selection from my dreams. Perhaps they
are bad dreams. It is of course almost hopeless to attempt any very
exact prophecies as to how in detail scientific knowledge is going
to revolutionize human life, but I believe that it will continue to
do so, and even more profoundly than I have suggested. And though
personally I am Victorian enough in my sympathies to hope that after
all family life, for example, may be spared, I can only reiterate that
not one of the practical advances which I have predicted is not already
foreshadowed by recent scientific work. If a chemist or physicist
living at the end of the seventeenth century had been asked to predict
the future application of his science he would doubtless have made many
laughable errors in the best Laputan style, but he would have been
certain that it would somehow be applied, and his faith would have been
justified.
We must regard science then from three points of view. First it is the
free activity of man’s divine faculties of reason and imagination.
Secondly it is the answer of the few to the demands of the many for
wealth, comfort and victory, for “νόσων τ’ ἀπείρους καὶ μακραίωνας
βίους,” gifts which it will grant only in exchange for peace, security
and stagnation. Finally it is man’s gradual conquest, first of space
and time, then of matter as such, then of his own body and those of
other living beings, and finally the subjugation of the dark and evil
elements in his own soul.
None of these conquests will ever be complete, but all, I believe will
be progressive. The question of what he will do with these powers is
essentially a question for religion and aesthetic. It may be urged that
they are only fit to be placed in the hands of a being who has learned
to control himself, and that man armed with science is like a baby with
a box of matches.
The answer to this contention may, I think, be found in the daily
papers. For scores of centuries idealists had urged that wars must
cease and all the earth be united under one rule. As long as any
other alternative was possible it was persisted in. The events of the
last nine years constituted a reductio ad absurdum of war, but when
we ask who was responsible for this we shall find that it was not the
visionaries but men like Black, Kekule, and Langley, who enlarged man’s
power over nature until he was forced by the inexorable logic of facts
to form the nucleus of an international government.
We have already reacted against the frame of mind that engendered the
league of nations, but we have not reacted at all completely. The
league exists and is working, and in every country on earth there are
many people, and ordinary normal people, who favour the idea in one
form or another of a world-state. I do not suggest that a world-state
will arise from the present league--or for the matter of that from the
third international. I merely observe that there is a widespread and
organized desire for such an institution, and several possible nuclei
for it. It may take another world-war or two to convert the majority.
The prospect of the next world-war has at least this satisfactory
element. In the late war the most rabid nationalists were to be found
well behind the front line. In the next war no one will be behind the
front line. It will be brought home to all whom it may concern that war
is a very dirty business.
No doubt there is a fair chance that the possibility of human
organization on a planetary scale may be rendered impossible by such a
war. If so mankind will probably have to wait for a couple of thousand
years for another opportunity. But to the student of geology such
a period is negligible. It took man 250,000 years to transcend the
hunting pack. It will not take him so long to transcend the nation.
I think then that the tendency of applied science is to magnify
injustices until they become too intolerable to be borne, and the
average man whom all the prophets and poets could not move, turns
at last and extinguishes the evil at its source. Marx’ theory of
industrial evolution is a particular example of this tendency, though
it does not in the least follow that his somewhat artificial solution
of the problem will be adopted.
It is probable that biological progress will prove to be as
incompatible with certain of our social evils as industrial progress
has proved to be with war or certain systems of private ownership.
To take a concrete example it is clear that the second biological
invention considered by my future essayist would be intolerable in
conjunction with our present system of relations between classes and
sexes. Moral progress is so difficult that I think any developments
are to be welcomed which present it as the naked alternative to
destruction, no matter how horrible may be the stimulus which is
necessary before man will take the moral step in question.
To sum up then, science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell
little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing
that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe. So
far from being an isolated phenomenon the late war is only an example
of the disruptive results that we may constantly expect from the
progress of science. The future will be no primrose path. It will have
its own problems. Some will be the secular problems of the past, giant
flowers of evil blossoming at last to their own destruction. Others
will be wholly new. Whether in the end man will survive his accessions
of power we cannot tell. But the problem is no new one. It is the old
paradox of freedom re-enacted with mankind for actor and the earth for
stage. To those who believe in the divinity of that part of man which
aspires after knowledge for its own sake, who are able, in the words of
Boethius:
“te cernere finis,
“Principium, vector, dux, semita, terminus idem”.
the prospect will appear most hopeful. But it is only hopeful if
mankind can adjust its morality to its powers. If we can succeed in
this, then science holds in her hands one at least of the keys to the
thorny and arduous path of moral progress, then:
“Per cruciamina leti,
“Via panditur ardua justis,
“Et ad astra doloribus itur”.
That is possibly a correct large-scale view, but it is only for short
periods that one can take views of history sufficiently broad to render
the fate of one’s own generation irrelevant. The scientific worker
is brought up with the moral values of his neighbours. He is perhaps
fortunate if he does not realize that it is his destiny to turn good
into evil. The moral and physical (though not the intellectual) virtues
are means between two extremes. They are essentially quantitative. It
follows that an alteration in the scale of human power will render
actions bad which were formerly good. Our increased knowledge of
hygiene has transformed resignation and inaction in face of epidemic
disease from a religious virtue to a justly punishable offence. We have
improved our armaments, and patriotism, which was once a flame upon
the altar, has become a world-devouring conflagration.
The time has gone by when a Huxley could believe that while science
might indeed remould traditional mythology, traditional morals were
impregnable and sacrosanct to it. We must learn not to take traditional
morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of
religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral
tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.
There does not seem to be any particular reason why a religion should
not arise with an ethic as fluid as Hindu mythology, but it has not
yet arisen. Christianity has probably the most flexible morals of
any religion, because Jesus left no code of law behind him like Moses
or Muhammad, and his moral precepts are so different from those of
ordinary life that no society has ever made any serious attempt to
carry them out, such as was possible in the case of Israel and Islam.
But every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some
kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have
always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left
for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions. This is
no doubt an argument for Christianity as against other religions, but
not as against none at all, or as against a religion which will frankly
admit that its mythology and morals are provisional. That is the only
sort of religion that would satisfy the scientific mind, and it is very
doubtful whether it could properly be called a religion at all.
No doubt many people hope that such a religion may develop from
christianity. The human intellect is feeble, and there are times when
it does not assert the infinity of its claims. But even then:
“Though in black jest it bows and nods”
* * * * *
“I know it is roaring at the gods
Waiting the last eclipse.”
The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the
lonely figure of Daedalus as he becomes conscious of his ghastly
mission, and proud of it.
“Black is his robe from top to toe,
His flesh is white and warm below,
All through his silent veins flow free
Hunger and thirst and venery,
But in his eyes a still small flame
Like the first cell from which he came
Burns round and luminous, as he rides
Singing my song of deicides.”
FOOTNOTES
[Footnote 1: Embden, Grafe, and Schmitz. _Zeitschrift für
physiologische Chemie_, Vol. 113, p. 67, 1921.]
[Footnote 2: The Hindus have recognized the special and physiological
relation of man to the cow by making the latter animal holy. A good
Hindu would no more kill a cow than his foster-mother. But the holiness
of the cow has unfortunately extended to all its products, and the
extensive use of cowdung in Indian religious ceremonies is disgusting
to the average European. The latter however, is insensitive to the
equally loathsome injunctions of the Catholic Church with regard to
human marriage. It would perhaps be better if both marriage and milking
could be secularized.]
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