VII Scholasticism in Science

THIS is the voice of the Renaissance, speaking with some method to its music. It is the voice of Erasmus rather than that of Luther; but it is the voice of a larger and less class-bound vision than that which moved the polite encomiast of folly. Such minds as were not lost in the religious turmoil of the time responded to Bacon’s call for a new beginning; a “sense of liberation, ... of new destinies, pulsates in that generation at Bacon’s touch.”¹ Bacon says, and with justice, that he “rang the bell which called the wits together.”² When, in 1660, a group of London savants formed the Royal Society, it was from Bacon that they took their inspiration, and from the “House of Solomon” part of their plan of organization. Diderot and D’Alembert acknowledged the impetus given by their reading of Bacon to the adventurous enterprise which completed and distributed the Encyclopédie despite the prohibition of the king. To-day, after two hundred years of Cartesian futility about mind and body and the problem of knowledge, the Baconian emphasis on the socially-reconstructive function of thought renews its power and appeal. The world returns to Socrates, to Plato, and to Bacon.

But with some measure of wholesome disillusionment. These last two centuries have told us that science, unaided, cannot solve our social problem. We have invented, invented, invented, invented; and with what result? The gap between class and class has so widened during these inventive years that there are now not classes but castes. Social harmony is a matter of brief interludes in a drama more violent than any ever mimicked on the stage. Men trained and accomplished in science, like Prince Kropotkin, abandon it on the score that it has turned its back on the purpose that gave it vitality and worth.³

What is the purpose of science? What do scientists consider to be the purpose of science? The laboratories are crowded with men who have no inkling of any other than a purely material reconstruction as the function of their growing knowledge. Specialization has so divided science that hardly any sense of the whole survives. The ghosts of scholasticism—of a pursuit of knowledge divorced from its social end—hover about the microscopes and test-tubes of the scientific world; and the upshot of it all is that to them who have, more is given. Let Bacon speak here: “There is another great and powerful cause why the sciences have made but little progress, which is this. It is not possible to run a course aright, when the goal itself has not been rightly placed.”⁴ Sciences with obvious social functions have languished through lapse of all sense of direction, all feeling of focus; psychology, for example, is but now reviving under the stimulus of men who dared to “stir the earth a little about the roots of this science,”⁵ because they had perceived its purpose and meaning in the drama of reconstruction. The blunt truth is that unless a scientist is also a philosopher, with some capacity to see things sub specie totius,—unless he can come out of his hole into the open,—he is not fit to direct his own research. “As no perfect discovery can be made upon a flat or level, neither is it possible to discover the more remote and deeper parts of any science, if you stand but upon the level of the same science, and ascend not to a higher science.”⁶ Before it can be of real service to life, science must be enlightened by some discrimination of values, some consideration and fitting together of human ends: without philosophy as its eye piece, science is but the traditional child who has taken apart the traditional watch, with none but the traditional results.

There is more to this indictment. Science has been organized, though very imperfectly, for research; it has been organized hardly at all for social application and control. The notion that science can be used in conserving the vital elements of order and at the same time facilitating experimental and progressive change, is but beginning to walk about. Indeed, the employment and direction of scientific ability in the business of government is still looked upon as a doubtful procedure; to say that the administration of municipal affairs, for example, is to be given over to men trained in the social sciences rather than to men artful in trapping votes with oratorical molasses, is still a venture into the loneliness of heresy. Again let Bacon speak, who was administrator and philosopher in one. “It is wrong to trust the natural body to empirics who commonly have a few receipts whereon they rely, but who know neither the causes of the disease, nor the constitution of patients, nor the danger of accidents, nor the true methods of cure. And so it must needs be dangerous to have the civil body of states managed by empirical statesmen, unless well mixed with others who are grounded in learning. On the contrary it is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.”⁷

Plato over again, you say. Yes; just as “Greek philosophy is the dough with which modern philosophers have baked their bread, kneading it over and over again,”⁸ so this vital doctrine of the application of the best available intelligence to the problem of social order and development must be restated in every generation until at last the world may see its truth and merit exemption from its repetition.