Chapter 5 SCIENCE WOULD BE SPECIALISTIC.

But, secondly, there is the scientist's ideal of specialism, which is at once not less earnestly cherished and not less strikingly at constant war with itself.

What specialism for science means is known at least in a general way to everybody, and that an objective science must be made up of numberless independent inquiries needs only mention, since the objective world, if really innocent of all personal or subjective relations, is necessarily manifold and discrete, being made up of a number of wholly separate details, and being approachable in every one of its parts from a number of wholly separate standpoints. The objective world apart from a subject is like a workshop without a workman-a collection of unused and so unconnected tools and materials each one of which may have an infinite number of uses; and the objective scientist views it very much as a stranger, perhaps a savage-may I be forgiven that mark-might view the lifeless shop, seeing now this thing, now that, but never the living unity of all the things. So, to repeat, as soon as the self or subject is removed and the world is turned objective, all things and all views of things must fall apart, and science as the observation of such a world can be only "special." Not so clear, however, or at least not so commonly appreciated, is the peculiar fallacy and contradiction of specialism to which attention is asked here. Once more is science to be seen as in a sense standing in its own light, since it cannot be at once special and directly and literally true and adequate.

To begin with, specialism makes vision, the mind's vision as well as the sensuous vision, dim or distorted. It may even be said to induce a species of blindness or, as virtually the same thing, to create in consciousness curious fancies, strange perversions of reality, seen not with the natural eye at all, but with the imagination, always so ingenious and so original, and one might almost add so hypnotic, in its power of suggestion over the senses. In ways and for reasons neither unknown nor unappreciated by most men, specialism even closes one's eyes and makes one dream. It makes the specialist among physicians see his special ailment in every disorder, and every disorder in his special ailment, and this so truly that merely to consult him may be to fall his victim. True, he may never be, perhaps can never be, wholly wrong, and his transgressions, conscious or unconscious, have often helped discovery, but nevertheless his situation, not to say that of his patient, is full of humour, and always among other troubles he is under the error of partiality or one-sidedness. And in science generally the specialist always does and always must dream. His dreams may be waking dreams, but he is always transgressing his own proper bounds without ever clearly comprehending that he has transgressed. Nor, be it admitted, can this necessity of dreaming be a wholly unmixed evil to science. However unfavourably it may reflect on the final, literal validity of any special science, it only shows nature, or reality, preserving her unity against the attempted violence of specialism. It shows that in spite of the specialist being all eyes for his own peculiar object, the mind that is within him and that is above all else-such, apparently, is the nature of mind-responsible not exclusively to the special and sensuous, but to the all-inclusive and essential, and is therefore bound to conserve for experience the interests of an indivisible universe in every particular thing, leads him, devotee that he is, patiently repeating his sacred syllable, into most wonderful visions. For the sake of inclusiveness and reality his mind projects his would-be special consciousness into regions of strange subtlety and marvellous logical construction; as Oriental priest or Occidental scientist he is a specialist, yet not without a mind, or a real, ever-present world, which refuses to be special, and as he dreams he comes to see, yet knows not that he sees, the whole universe. A seeing blindness, then, is this specialism; a monomania too, but, of course, conventional and respectable.

Mathematics and physics and chemistry and biology and psychology, not to say also the social sciences, all depend upon the far-seeing mystical visions of the mind, if not of the eye, upon the subtle, logical constructions which their would-be scientific specialism, their desire to know all things narrowly, forces upon them. Each one may be special, but each as it gains precision and as it becomes truly an account of the facts, under the guidance of an exacting mind that at any cost must present the whole to consciousness, conserves within itself the common universe of them all by developing under what is called the "scientific imagination" all sorts of indirections, disguises, abstractions, logical constructions for the things and view-points of the others. Each to be veracious has no choice but to be also voracious, and when, for example, a physical scientist insists on seeing his world only physically, while in reality it is of course, to say no more, a world of chemical process also, and even of vital and mental character, he is sooner or later constrained to admit to his thinking what above were called abstractions or logical constructions, but what also pass under the name of "working hypotheses." These are formally true to his physical standpoint, but any outsider in order to explain why they are hypotheses that work must call them compensating or conserving conceptions-in short, logical constructions that are, or that in part involve, substitutes for the neglected points of view, being, as it were, the secret agents of a universe refusing to be divided. To characterize them in just one more way, a science's working hypotheses, results as they are of science's blind but brilliant dreaming, many or all of them, are doors in the panelling by which the other sciences are quietly admitted to a room seemingly tightly closed to all comers. Every science, and this the more as it becomes scientific, must entertain all the others, however unwittingly. Tennyson's "flower in the crannied wall," so often plucked, is nothing in all-inclusiveness when compared with a well-developed special science. No science, physical or psychical, biological or social, ever does or ever can live to itself alone. It may will to, but it does not and it cannot. All the others live with it and for it-nay, they all live in it.

Yet in actual practice, what are these working hypotheses that work because they are compensating conceptions or doors in the panelling? No veracity without unrestrained voracity is interesting as a formula, but how verify it? Verification, or illustration, is now imperative. Illustration, however, is very difficult for a reason which the scientists now on trial must allow me to mention. The scientists know too much about the sciences, or at least of them, while I know too little. Still, as too much knowledge is often the source of obscurity, and so only a form of ignorance, my situation is not altogether hopeless. Thus, while it is true that the scientists are likely to insist, even in the face of a mind bound to preserve the unity of an indivisible universe in all the varied studies and conclusions of science, that physics is only physics and chemistry only chemistry and biology only biology and psychology only psychology, and while also all illustrations must come from the field of their special studies, and may therefore only set them more firmly in the wilful blindness of their specialism, still the principle of a conserving mind, or an eternally conserved truth or an indivisible reality, is a disturbing influence which they cannot evade. Then, too, I am forgetting and allowing them to forget a very important fact in scientific work to-day. In these times the running together or merging of different sciences, as if through something of the nature of a chemical reaction, is a very familiar phenomenon. It is as familiar, although not so loudly heralded, as that of the railroads and industrial companies; and it has been taking place with such persistence and confidence as actually to suggest a natural affinity, each of the sciences involved having the rich experience of discovering itself already in the others. This fact, then, must make illustration less difficult, since, in a way that must appeal to the scientist as no merely theoretical considerations can, it proves or goes very far toward proving what is to be illustrated. Moreover, specific illustration is hardly necessary in the sphere of the different physical sciences, or again, in that of the social or the psychological sciences, for within each one of these groups the affinity but just now referred to has been very clearly exemplified, as in the interesting case of physics, chemistry, and mathematics, which nowadays are one science, not three, and which can be held apart only on methodological grounds, not metaphysically. Illustration, accordingly, appears, after all, to be needed only for the specialism that separates the physical and the psychical sciences.

Physiological psychology and physically experimental psychology, both of them suggestive of nothing less incongruous than seething ice, are sure to come to mind at once; but also there is a mathematical psychology, comparable with a developmental mechanics and biometrics in biology, and hardly a single field of science, however apparently distant and alien in nature and interest, has not contributed something to psychology or to epistemology, the general science of knowledge. But now it is likely to be objected by some one that just because sciences, whether in clearly related or in widely separated fields, are useful to each other, just because they can serve, as they do, in the r?le of methods of each other, they are not necessarily in any real and natural affinity. May not their association be purely one of utility, involving no surrender of special individuality and requiring in any case only temporary relationship? The question is absurd. Any means that really serves an end must have something in common with the end it serves; and, again, an end that really sanctions a means, whatever the means be, must itself be, at least potentially, which is after all to say essentially, in and of the means employed. Different sciences, then, even physics and psychology, or natural science and theology, cannot be even temporarily methods of each other without partaking in some way, under some disguise or other, through some peculiarity in their conceptions or in the relations of their conceptions, of each other's subject-matter.

In view of this fact of mutual participation of nature and idea among the sciences that use each other, I have myself conceived, and in another place have given expression to, what appropriately may be called a physical psychology or epistemology.'[1] This new hybrid science is especially concerned with nothing more nor less than those substitutes, disguises, or indirections, really present in all the physical sciences, for the peculiar nature, for the peculiar sort of unity, intensive instead of extensive or qualitative instead of quantitative, or say also even vital and spiritual instead of physical, which is always associated with mind. In conservation of matter, energy, what you will, in plenitude, in motion as only relative and so as always under a principle of uniformity and constancy or even immobility, in motion too as inclining to vibration, which suggests poise or tension, or to rotation, in which we see rest as well as motion, and finally, not to extend what might be a long list, in the infinity of space and time or of quantity, the physical sciences have hidden entrances for the silent, usually unnoticed admission of what is psychical. But I may seem to be jumping too far, to be presuming too much. Then put the case in this way-not quite so direct, but to the same goal. All of these conceptions, so necessary to a "working" physical science, need very little examination to be seen to be treacherous to the physical standpoint and its peculiar categories. One might as well try to make water unsupported assume definiteness of form as to conceive the conservation of energy or plenitude or the relativity of motion in the character of what is physical, or at least of what is properly and conventionally physical. Being treacherous, then, to the physical science that has conceived them, they are, as was said, doors for what is not physical; hidden doors, perhaps, but certainly doors to be opened at will; and by them mind is bound to enter the physical world and its sciences. To those familiar with the history of philosophy, the speculation of the early Greek thinkers, notably Anaximander, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras, will afford illustration of the physical view running, in spite of itself, into treacherous conceptions, and eventually reaching the discovery of their treachery and with it the idea of mind or Nous.[2]

So for science is the material world, what properly it is often said to be, a sort of dark mirror of man's inner life, of his psychical nature. Physical science as consciousness of the outer material world is not, and has itself shown that it cannot be, merely and exclusively physical. By virtue of its working hypotheses, which are as secret doorways, it is psychical also. Though darkly and indirectly it is our human self-consciousness. Perhaps it is our self-consciousness rendered impersonal or the self seen through the mirror of not-self or through the disguise of what a photographer would call a "negative"; and, if it may be so described, we are reminded of Burns:-

O wad some power the giftie gie us,

To see oursels as others see us!

It wad frae monie a blunder free us,

And foolish notion.

Only the bonnie Robert himself was too much of a specialist in poetry to see that natural science was the very thing he prayed for.

And just as there is thus a physical psychology, so in like manner there is a psychological or epistemological physics, which in its turn is concerned with the indirections, or doors in the panelling, present in all the psychical sciences, for those very physical things quantity and matter. The devil will have his due; even an optimistic theology has to recognize him. And psychology has a sensuous self, the self of the purely sensuous consciousness, which has always involved it in a curious psychical atomism, a projection, in a word, of the physical on the plane of the psychical. Sensationalism, too, as a psychological theory in the history of thought has always been associated with materialism.

With regard, then, to the separation even of the psychical and the physical sciences, which obviously has at its base the distinction between mind and matter, we observe that our principle of affinity and mutual participation still holds. By a sort of projection or reproduction mind and matter both appear, the one openly, the other in disguise, in each kind of science. However unawares, the physical entertains mind; the psychical matter; and specialism, so far as standing for anything more than scientific method, has to withdraw from its last stronghold. The very dreaming of the scientific imagination is its undoing.

For other evidence against the integrity and adequacy of specialism, showing how mind defies specialism and conserves its indivisible universe, there are the following simple but certainly interesting facts. All the different sciences, however special and however apparently alien in subject matter, are wont to use the same general methods-as, for example, the laboratory or experimental method or the historical method, the fatal consequences of which to the cause of pure specialism may easily be inferred. History is famous for overcoming differences. The common interest in mathematics must also be mentioned, for mathematics, through its latest developments in danger of turning into a pure logic, is quite independent of all those material differences that separate the different sciences. It is formal and universal, not special; so that the special science that would also be mathematical appears somehow to be at least in aim as universal as it is special. Perhaps mathematics more than anything else has fed the voracity which we have seen veracity to exact. Has it not been the chief agent in the virtual annihilation of the barriers between physics and chemistry? This particular mingling of the special sciences has been mentioned here already, but mathematics is threatening the party-walls of all the other sciences also. Further, what are we to infer from the idea that all sciences seek law? Certainly law is not special as science has seemed to be. Somehow law is not many, but one. Many laws can only be different phases or cases of one law. The very essence of law is to be one and single and all-embracing. To put the case theologically, could any one suppose that God made the laws of chemistry and sociology and psychology as so many separate and independent enactments? On such a supposition he had been a strange God indeed, lacking the very thing, unity of being and character, which men have come to associate with divinity, and what theology demands of God, science, even against its own specialism, must demand of its object. Again, the way in which by implication, when not openly, one science is given to handing over its hardest problems to another is very instructive as well as amusing. Not many years ago I was present at a joint meeting, a good-natured and doubtless honestly ambitious conference of biologists, physiologists, and psychologists, and the addresses then made have often reminded me of one of Thomas Nast's famous cartoons: A closed ring of political grafters, none other than the notorious Tweed and his followers, each pointing to his neighbour and putting on him the responsibility of a very embarrassing situation. "Find the rogue" was the artist's inscription; but with apologies for the association, we can easily change it to "Find the special science." And, lastly, in this list of the simple evidences against an adequate specialism there are the conspicuous analogies other than those of common method or common interest in law, which are always easily traced among the sciences, even the sciences in the opposite camps of matter and mind, of any particular time. Atomism in physics is contemporary with atomism in psychology and with individualism in political philosophy; a monarchical politics with an anthropomorphic, creationalistic theology and an also monarchical physically centred astronomy, whether heliocentric or geocentric; and a Newtonian astronomy, which really makes a law or force instead of an individual body the centre and control of the solar system, with democracy or constitutionalism, and with inductive instead of deductive logic and naturalistic instead of dogmatic theology; so that at no time, whatever the scientist's special interest, whatever his special syllable, can he fail to have at least a formal sympathy with others. Such analogies among the sciences, so often recognized and so absorbingly interesting to the students of the history of thought, if not exactly doors in the panelling, may be said to make the panelled partitions at least translucent if not unsubstantial and transparent.

But the most important fact in illustration of our case against specialism is yet to be considered, and unfortunately it takes us where to some the waters may seem dangerously deep. Not only for reasons already given and emphasized is the special science a misnomer, a contradiction in terms, except in so far as specialism be taken merely as an incident, not without its humour, of scientific method, but also for the same reasons (and chiefly because the truth and reality of the universe are bound to be conserved) every special science must sooner or later develop its doctrines either into direct paradoxes or into tenets that oppose and contradict each other. Thus, as has been shown, specialism in science is itself a paradox, and, as now asserted, every special science assuming precise form and real validity becomes a home of paradoxical or contradictory doctrines. Indeed, these doctrines just through their opposition appear be the most effective agents of that compensation for neglected points of view, or conservation of all points of view, which we are insisting is for ever forced upon the scientific specialist. In the cases of physical epistemology and epistemological physics we have already seen doctrines working to this end. In those cases the real treachery to the avowed standpoints lay in virtual when not open contradiction. And, for the general principles, is it not quite clear that nothing so surely as contradiction in any given point of view, or in the specific doctrines developed under it, can serve the interests of any other points of view? I have heard it said, but by whom originally I do not know, that a paradox or contradiction was only the mind on tiptoe struggling to look over a very high wall.

The point is just this. The special science, because special or partial and because at the same time courting scientific character or validity, that is, conformity with reality, must be relative, formal, abstract, artificial, unreal, but also for exactly the same reason it must contrive to admit to its conceptions other view-points than its own. Its own peculiar view-point is relative, but that it may attain actual validity it is bound to overcome its relativity by admitting, secretly perhaps yet not less truly, other points of view; and paradox or contradiction is the natural door for such admissions, the original view-point being tenacious to the last. Physics says: "I will be physics through thick and thin; I will be physics though the heavens fall and though dreadful paradoxes arise"; and in like manner psychology cries aloud: "I will be psychology though I suffer from a splitting dualism for my pains." Have you, gentle reader, never held and held and held to some particular notion about things, modifying the details perhaps little by little, but always imagining yourself strictly loyal to the old, old view, and then suddenly discovered your consciousness alive with contradictions? If you have, you know, possibly too well, the natural history of every special science, and also you can sympathize deeply with the hen and her cherished chicks that proved ugly ducklings. The special science, I repeat, must be hospitable, however grudgingly, to strangers, though at the expense of becoming thoroughly divided against itself. Such hospitality is an obligation-call it logical if you will, or moral or metaphysical, for the name matters not if it only suggests coercion-which is not less binding upon the scientific spirit than upon the spirit of racial unity, always urgently present in you and me. You and I may be so special or exclusive as to drive strangers from our doors, but an impulse to call them back and give them entertainment always follows-an impulse that is only the necessary reaction of the expulsion. Humanity is indivisible in spite of our asserted exclusiveness, and nature is indivisible, too, in spite of specialism. Partiality of any sort, along any line, in any field, can never long persist without, though often darkly and indirectly, though by the way of bold, unrecognized, or unconfessed paradox, receiving from outside all that it would exclude. I am not merely repeating. At first, we saw only that the scientific imagination brought to the special science as its working hypotheses certain conserving or compensating conceptions; then, that these conceptions involved treachery to the science that harboured them; but now we are face to face with the fact that their complete, their most effective form is the paradox.

Would that I had the ability to write with the penetration and the clearness of statement that the subject should certainly elicit, upon the strange equanimity with which mankind, in science or in practical life, receives and faces a direct negative or an open contradiction. Perhaps the habit of easy division into positive and negative, the ready resort to dichotomy, explains the mystery; perhaps the fact that negation or opposition is and can only be in kind, that there never is or can be any real change or need of change in a mere negation, is at least an important factor in the case; perhaps, again, the very hopelessness of the dualism, which a flat, unequivocal negation plainly involves, is also to the point; but, beyond all peradventure, we do accept the direct negative with a patience, even an indifference, that may greatly assist our natural conservatism, whether of thought or life, but that on being recognized certainly does arouse our wonder. Good and its opposite evil, true and false, real and unreal, unity and plurality, life and death, the indivisible and the divisible, rest and motion, plenum and vacuum, immaterial and material, actuality and illusion, lawfulness and lawlessness: these and so many other opposites are the common stock-in-trade of our living and thinking, and we accept and use them with a complacency that cannot easily be exaggerated. Yet the negative in each and every one of them holds the future of the universe in the palm of its hand. And the special scientist before his inevitable paradoxes is as conservative and as complacent as the rest of us.

But it is one thing to say, or even to reason out cogently and satisfactorily in every way, that the special science, if both persistently special and honestly scientific, must be sooner or later inwardly contradictory and treacherous to itself, and it is quite another thing to show the contradiction in actual cases. The actual cases, however, are more easily found than many are likely to suppose, and at mention they may even seem like forgotten memories, like things which at some time we have noticed but become callous towards. Thus the atom is through and through a self-contradiction, being itself only a part of a divided reality, yet at the same time itself real only because indivisible; and a science harbouring such an atom can hardly be said to be unmixedly physical. The vibration, too, already referred to here as motion in poise or at rest; infinity as one more quantity that is significant because not quantitative; the sensation, a component element of consciousness that cannot possibly be composite; the plenal physical medium, which can be physical only if displaceable by other material things, and so plenal only if not physical, and which has served besides as an immobile yet infinitely elastic basis of motion or its transmission; and, to give just one more instance, in moral and political science the person, a self-existent, actively free being or entity whose every deed as well as whose every thought is responsible to something, being adaptive and therefore social, social with other persons and with nature, and whose every virtue implies dependence and an existence shared with something else: these are all also self-contradictions. And in view of them who must not see how the special sciences are always more than special, ever correcting in ways that may be unappreciated by themselves their partiality of view, ever responsible to the totality of things even while they would observe things only under selected view-points. Such contradictions, once more, show mind loyal to what students of logic are familiar with as the "universe of discourse." Even in science you cannot discourse about anything without at least implicitly discoursing about everything, although in order to do so you must speak in such paradoxes as the atom, the person, the biologist's "vital unit," the vibration, the plenum, and the like indefinitely.

Nor is the scientist the only dreamer of paradoxes among men. Ordinary practical life, as we have seen, teems with paradoxes. But, for purposes of illustration, not to say also of giving greater breadth and depth to the view, a reference to the situation in the religious consciousness will have peculiar value here. A religion that supplements reverence for a personal God, working miracles and caring for the elect, who even nowadays are more or less elect, with belief in a devil, even nowadays more or less personal, is clearly a blood relation to science, and it is besides by no means so unnatural or irrational as is often declared, particularly by the scientists. Its two errors, just because opposed, conserve what is real, and no science can claim more than that. Indeed, a science, notably a special science, like a theology, might well be described as a system of mutually corrective errors, of abstractions that, because abstract, distort the reality of things, but that also because being at difference with each other and eventually falling into contradictory and so counteracting pairs are at least parties to what is real and true. By hook or crook, by the hook of abstraction or the crook of contradiction, every science gets in touch with the universe as a whole, and so even with its errors is a "working" science. The errors of many a religion, by their working together, have not failed to save men.

So we may return to the assertion that in its specialism, as well as in its demand for objective knowledge, science is self-contradictory, and with this conclusion established the exposure of science already offers a very strong case for the doubter. Yet it does this only to the extent and in the sense that contradiction warrants doubt. After all is said, have we been only exposing science? Has attack been our only procedure? Do we not find, as we reflect, that in our exposure there has also been something very near to defence? Or, once more, through the science to which we have taken exception have we not seen a science in which we could believe? In the examination of science's objectivism we saw that technique buried science, but-though we did not say this in so many words-that there might be a resurrection. If fruitful in inventions serviceable to life, science was justified in spite of its cultivated objectivism, and the objectivity itself, besides an aid to accuracy, has further significance as possibly an earnest of wider social relationship, of broader and deeper life. The question of fact, too, if appreciated and so made subordinate to the question of meaning, was even allowed, and science, although at once formally conservative and materially negative and destructive, seemed after all to be the promise, so to speak, of a new dawn for the very things denied. And now in what has been said of the specialism of science, the same turning of the edge of attack is all but manifest. Every special science is narrow and relative-it is in the form of an unreal dream; but reality somehow gives form to the dream, for there are always the compensating conceptions. The contradictions by which the compensation has been effected are, then, interpretable not more as causes of doubting science than as reasons for confidence in it. Thus, to be tedious again, the special science is relative and formal; it is a peculiar system of ingenious abstractions that in so far are also errors; but its formal character includes also contradiction; its errors are so related as to correct and balance each other; so that, even in the face of our necessary scepticism about it, science has been evident to us, as also was the consciousness of ordinary life, as somehow always building better than it knows or than its methods or ideals and doctrines viewed only from without would lead one to expect. Moving in it we have certainly felt the presence of, something, not yet called by name, which is very like a principle or power of validity, preserving the reality of things even in and through the relativity and contradiction under which the things are seen. While the letter of our knowledge, even of our scientific knowledge, must ever have an indeterminate future; while rest or stability, ultimate reality or consistency is quite impossible to it, still its inner, active spirit seems a source of faith that is inviolable, that cannot be shaken. Different quantities, such as four and two, and sixteen and eight, do not make the same sum, much less are they the same digits; but they are in the same ratio, and similarly the truth of science would seem to lie in the ratio, the working together, of the errors of science. Outwardly and materially changing with time and with people, assuming ever new forms and comprising always new doctrines, science nevertheless, as an active force, as a positive resultant, is at least now conceivably always the same and applicable to the same life. Even the Babylonians of an ancient day successfully predicted eclipses, the very errors of their astronomy working together for truth, exactly as the heresies of pagan religion seem to have balanced each other to the preservation and the development of the life which we of the present day and the Christian civilization are pleased to call our own.

Accordingly the science we have to doubt is also manifest to us as at least a possible object of faith. The very causes of our doubt before our very eyes have turned, or are in process of turning, into possible bases of belief, and our confession of doubt as it proceeds is proving ever more worth making. We are trying to be such honest doubters. We are indeed such penitent believers.