Personality and science

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PERSONALITY AND

Chapter I _ Science As An Achievement Of Personality

HERE is a famous bon mot of M. Clemenceau: "TL tepoincaré knows everything and understands nothing. Briand knows nothing and understands everything.” Without pronouncing judgment upon this epigrammatic appraisal of two distinguished Frenchmen, one may be allowed to say that there is a good deal of difference between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge may lie dead in the mind. It may be the protective covering of an inner ignorance. It may be tossed about in the mind like the objects in an old curiosity shop. Or most baffling of all, it may be brilliantly classified in such a way that there is no suggestion of its ultimate significance. It is not merely a little knowledge that is a dangerous thing. Knowledge whose significance is misinterpreted or misunderstood is most dangerous of all. When men are able to announce boldly indubitable facts, they have an odd way of believing that their own interpretations of these facts show the unquestioned quality of the facts themselves. — Science has been responsible for a good many discredited philosophies. An interpretation which is a

I good tool for the next step in chemistry does not always turn out to be a good principle for the interpretation of the universe. So it turns out that the discovery of the relation of scientific knowledge to the understanding of life is one of the most demanding and urgent tasks confronting the human mind in a scientific age.

The most remarkable fact about science is the scientist. There is, of course, also the body of material with which he deals. No one can deny its significance. Many people become so engrossed with this material that they quite forget the masterful mind which organizes its elements in such fashion that they attain unity and order. We study the sciences quite objectively. So it is natural that physics should seem more important than the physicist, and chemistry should seem more important than the chemist, and that biology should seem more important than the biologist. It is only when we begin to study the history of the physical sciences and the history of the biological sciences that we begin to realize that separately and together they represent the achievement of the clear intelligence of the scientific mind. Without the scientist there would be no science,

We see how important this is when we come to realize that no end of busy workers have been so engrossed with the uniformities which the scientist has discovered in nature, that they have quite forgotten the darting and free moving intelligence of the scientist who does the discovering. And quite often they have built up large generalizations regarding science with the scientist left out. They have come to views of reality which have ignored and then forgotten and then in effect denied the existence of the cool and masterful intelligence of the scientist himself.

A great many people have become seriously discontented in the presence of the mechanical world which has often been presented to them as the last achievement of scientific perception. And sometimes when they have become angry they have attacked science. Then they have gone to other disciplines and through a brilliant metaphysic, or a penetrating theory of knowledge, or a profound theology, they have sought to build themselves into an impregnable position. I have only respect for the massive and sterling work which they have done. But I suspect that there is a more strategic way of dealing with the whole situation. I suspect that the wounds of science may be healed by more science. I believe that when once we have come to view science in the proper perspective with the scientist at the center of the picture, everything will fall into proper pro-_ portions. Indeed, the full meaning of science can only be understood if at every moment the keen and critical intelligence of the scientist’s mind is kept before our attention. A study of the whole scientific adventure will save us from parochial and mechanical views of science. Indeed, the moment we forget the mind of the scientist and try to build a view of reality based only upon the materials with which he deals, we are sure to go wrong. He is an essential part of that reality which we would like to understand. Indeed, but for him the materials would lie about unclassified and ununderstood. It is amazing and indeed glorious to live in a world whose elements can be classified and organized into some sort of intellectual coherence. It is even more amazing, even more glorious to live in a world inhabited by beings who can fathom nature’s secrets and follow to unseen and far-off places the most inaccessible facts and bring them forth triumphantly so that the light of comprehending intelligence falls upon them.

We desire then to inspect the scientist. We desire to learn what kind of assertions we must make about a world which feels the power of his inspecting and critical scrutiny. We desire to see the way in which science has come to be the accomplishment of that most significant individual, the scientist. It is in this fashion that we approach the study of science as an achievement of personality.

Edwin Muir has a clever sentence somewhere in Latitudes to the effect that the use of a system is that it thinks for one. If you accept some neat and well-arranged system of thought you find your mind nicely made up on numerous subjects. The difficulty confronted by the founders of science was just that there was no system. They were not preceded by men who had done their thinking for them. They had to think for themselves. When men first began to deal with experience in such a way that they could rise from experience to knowledge, and when they began to invent instruments for the expression of that knowledge, science was born. If primitive men expressed the number five by a word which meant ‘fa whole hand” and the number ten by words which meant ‘‘both hands,” and the number fifteen by a word which meant ‘‘a whole foot,’ the number twenty by a word which meant the equivalent of “fone Indian,” the number forty by “two Indians” and so on and on, you had an action of the observing and classifying mind which is of the utmost significance. All calculation rests down on such beginnings. They may seem humble. But in such mental action you perceive already the essential difference between a thing and a person. What is to become critical intelligence is right robustly at work in the world in these simple beginnings of counting.

In the Tigris and Euphrates valleys there were the clear and shining stars upon which the eyes of dim and far-off men gazed night after night. But the flash of a sharp point of distant radiance upon the optics does not necessarily mean either thought or observation. [hat is just the difference as Carlyle remarked centuries later, between Newton and Newton’s dog Diamond. The men in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys did observe. They did classify. They did make a world in the sky with their minds. They traced highways among the stars with their thoughts. They amassed a sound body of information ready for the use of later and more profound investigators. The sight of the stars started something in their minds. Numbers of dumb beasts stood about them as they sent their curious minds out among the stars. [he eyes of the dumb beasts were eyes and nothing more. But the human watchers of | the night skies brought something to the stars which made all the difference. By and by, it was to become the ample achievement of the notable science of astronomy. That power to observe and to classify and to remember is as important as any facts lying hiddens among the stars. The seeds of scientific achievement in their own minds are really the most significant matters which the memory of these ancient star gazers bring to our thought as we look back upon them.

The Valley of the Nile has its own fascinating tale to tell. When the rising river had retreated to its banks, landmarks were washed away in the most disconcerting fashion. What could be done about it? Of course unless you have some sort of restless and growing intelligence in Egypt, nothing can be done about it. But if you have minds which play about all sides of subjects, puzzling and thinking and thinking and puzzling, a good deal may be done about it. And in the Valley of the Nile you did have just such minds. And thus in a practical fashion geometry was born.

So we must think of early men looking at each other’s fingers and reaching the wholly astonishing conclusion that a man might have as many sheep as he had fingers on his hand and at last reaching the dizzy height of thinking of numbers quite apart from the thing numbered. When a man could say two without saying two men or two trees his mind had moved into a new world. So we must think of early night watchers putting the stars and their motions in neat receptacles in their minds and teaching memory to carry unwonted burdens. So we must think of early men watching the receding waters of the Nile and teasing their minds into a new sort of activity until they work out methods for finding the place of vanished landmarks. It is all startling enough. It is as if nature has learned to look at itself, and call itself names, and hide away its knowledge of itself, and darting about in some queer way to become a master of its own forces. Something like this lies at the beginning of science. And this personal fact of the action of intelligence is the matter we must not forget for a moment either at the beginning or during the whole long history of scientific achievement.

II

In his Harvard lectures on the Originality of Greece, Professor S. H. Butcher quoted Democritus as saying ‘‘Rather would I discover the cause of one fact than become the King of the Romans.” ‘The reader of that forceful presentation of significant facts The Legacy of Greece which R. W. Livingstone has edited is prepared for the sense of cultural inheritance which grows upon him as he reads the volume. But unless he has made ample previous investigation he will scarcely be prepared for the place which really must be ascribed to Greece in the development of science. The analysis of the meaning of the activities of the mind in setting forth its experiences in logical relationships was done, and one may almost say done once for all, by great Greeks whose work came to happy consummation in Aristotle. The achievement of the Greeks in mathematics fairly startles us. They were all the while standing back from facts and seeing relationships. ‘‘Greek geometry,” says Professor Butcher, “was... a new thing in the history of the human mind. Geometry, according to Herodotus, was born in Egypt; but it was geometry as an applied science, practical in its aims, and such as was requisite for the acts of building and land surveying. Theoretic geometry the Greeks created for themselves, and so rapid was their advance that by the fifth century B.c. as it would seem, the greater part of what is contained in the elements of Euclid had attained to demonstrative and logical form.’ In logic we see the mind inspecting its own utensils. In mathematics we see the mind inspecting relationships which stand in their own right quite apart from the objects or activities to which they are applied. Mathematics is rationality becoming conscious of its own implications. Logic is related to every scientific discovery. And there is a sense in which you can almost say that the history of mathematics is the history of science. So when the Greeks were dealing with these fundamental matters they were both doing scientific work and making the structure of the sciences possible. And in every stage of this work you see the activity of the perceiving, analyzing, appraising mind. Logic is the mind investigating the nature of proof and analyzing the process of dialectic. Mathematics is the mind perceiving the relationships which are structural in rationality itself. From the beginnings of surveying to the last mathematical calculation of Einstein science has rested upon the mathematical relationships which the appraising mind has discovered. And that sense of cause and that tendency to ask “‘why” so characteristic of Greek intelligence

* Harvard Lectures on The Originality of Greece, p. 103.

lie back of an enormous body of scientific enquiry and the resulting achievement.

We are not surprised that as Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson has reminded us, chemistry, mechanics and engineering are absent altogether from Greek activities. But we are likely to be surprised at the extent and importance of the Greek interest and achievement in biology and medicine. Charles Singer, lecturer on the History of Medicine in University College in London, feels that he dares to say “Modern medicine may be truly described as in essence a creation of the Greeks.’ The Greeks, in short, did observe and classify facts in relation to living forms and the human organism. They did set going a great science like medicine upon lines which have proved permanently fruitful. The type of intelligence which appeared in the great cultural achievements of fifth century Athens, was also able to lay the foundations upon which the physical and the biological sciences one day would be able to build. |

When Matthew Arnold died an energetic admirer said ‘There goes our last Greek.’’ But as a matter of fact as long as scientists continue to do their work among us there will still be Greeks walking about in our streets. Sometimes the scientist has lost the

* Article on Medicine by Charles Singer, in The Legacy of Greece (Livingstone), p. 248.

IO

Greek urbanity. But the mental instruments which he simply must use are a gift of Greece.

When Thales set about finding one element whose changing forms would be as manifold as the aspects of life, a notably seminal form of investigating intelligence was at work. ‘“‘Here,” said Thales in effect, ‘is water. When it is cold you have a solid, when it is warm you have a liquid, when it is hot you have a gas. Water is the fundamental element. It takes upon itself the typical and essential forms of existence.’ To be wrong in so potent and promising a way was better than to be right in a smaller fashion. The mind which sought unity in the midst of diversity was already on the highroad to tremendous achievement. When the Eleatics spoke of substance, when Heroclitus spoke of change, when the reconciling Democritus spoke of atoms unchanging themselves but changing in their relations, the type of intelligence which was being developed had the promise of the whole future of science in it.

When Greek thinkers sending forth the rays of their darting minds conceived of evolution before the days when it was possible to put evolution upon a sound inductive basis, already it was clear that science could be thought as well as observation. The Greeks forged weapons which were to be used by science in many a century.

The thing for which we use the word “personality,” came to singular and brilliant expression

II among the Greeks. And when the Greek was most a person of clear and observing intelligence he did most to lay the foundations of science.

Ill

In Professor Irwin Edman’s fascinating book Richard Kane Looks at Life a sentence is quoted from a Japanese poem: “In this edifice of civilization which has taken so many hundred years to build, I drive one golden nail.’’® As one studies the brilliant days in Alexandria beginning with its founding in the fourth century B.c., one sees many of the nails being driven in the structure of a growing knowledge. ‘‘Here for the next seven hundred years Greek science had its chief abiding place. The fame of Alexandria soon outshone and eventually eclipsed that of Athens, while Romans journeyed from Rome —never important in ancient times as a scientific center—to study at Alexandria the healing art, anatomy, mathematical science, geography and astronomy.’’* It was not in vain that Alexander the Great had been taught by Aristotle. Wherever his armies went the spirit of scientific observation was carried. Vast was the knowledge of natural history and of geography which was garnered in while his soldiers marched and fought. This scientific spirit came to

* Page 50.

“Sedgwick and Tyler, A Short History of Science, p. 87. 12 dwell in the city founded by the great conqueror at the mouth of the Nile and bearing his own proud name. Over four hundred thousand volumes were collected in the library of the museum—the largest library of the ancient world. Here men worked and thought and wrote. Here they brought the results of their observation and their thought. Here Euclid made his name synonymous with the development of mathematics. Here Claudius Ptolemaus (Ptolemy) made himself a master of men’s thoughts about astronomy and reigned from his tomb over the minds of living men for over a thousand years. Here Archimedes made principles seem things of magic as he applied them to mechanics.® If mathematics now move dizzily into non-Euclidean regions, these far flights would be impossible without the body of mathematical perception unfolded by Euclid. And if we now smile at the almost endless epicycles with the earth at the center of the system which we associate with Ptolemy, we marvel at the mathematical ingenuity which on this basis worked out computations which did answer to the varied spectacles which confronted the observer of the night sky. Even the mistakes of scientists—and here Ptolemy takes outstanding rank—have tremendous significance ini respect of our understanding the reality which the history of science brings within

> Archimedes studied in Alexandria though most of his life was spent in Syracuse. He represents the Alexandrian tradition.

our ken. The power to make mistakes, the power to make them brilliantly and with commanding intellectual energy, the capacity after centuries of dull acceptance and periods of keen intellectual struggle to find the mistakes and correct them, the capacity to come back to the facts with ever quickened and resilient mind and to pounce upon the truth at last: all these reveal the intelligence of the scientist in disconcerting and significant ways. It is not a rigid and mechanical world in which such feats are possible. The very mistakes of the scientist prove that there is free moving intelligence in the world.

Archimedes gives us dramatic illustrations of the development of science as a personal achievement. Contemplate for a moment Archimedes in the bathtub. The forces of nature are all about him going their own way seeming to be impersonal and almost inscrutable. Archimedes is thinking with puckered brow. How will he discern whether the king’s crown is pure gold? He steps into the bathtub. The water rises and overflows. Suddenly the brow of Archimedes clears. Suppose you put the king’s crown into the water and then see how high the water rises. Suppose you put gold of the same weight into the water and see how high it rises. Suppose you put silver of the same weight into the water and observe its rising again. If the displacement after the king’s crown is immersed is between that of the gold and the silver of the same weight you will have discovered the presence of silver alloy. No wonder Archimedes leaped from the bathtub and rushed forth crying “Eureka! Eureka!’ (I have found it! I have found it!) And so he discovered a culprit’s work and _ so he discovered the law of specific gravity. But think of the exploring intelligence which set sail in a bathtub and made such a discovery. We are interested in the law which Archimedes discovered. And if we are really discerning we are interested quite as much in the mind which made the discovery. When we think of the total reality which experience reveals we must think of laws like that which Archimedes discovered. We must also think of the exploring darting intelligence which makes the discovery.

IV

Philip Guedalla says somewhere that it is always delightful to meet a piece of art that has come to life. A good many people would probably feel that no more than this can come from a study of the Middle Ages. Here we may be told is a happy hunting ground for artists and dreamers. But here the scientist may carry his gun all day without having an opportunity to fire a shot. Indeed, Newton and his contemporaries in the seventeenth century began pretty much where Archimedes had left off in the third century B.c. Not much to take seriously had happened for upwards of two thousand years.

As a matter of fact, of course, the matter is not so simple as such words as these would indicate. Professor Alfred North Whitehead brings us to a sudden stop when he declares in his Lowell Lectures for 1925 on Science and the Modern World, ‘“The faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivation from medieval theology.’’® “The Middle Ages” he says, “formed one long training of the intellect of Western Europe in the sense of order.’’* And probably some readers will be still more surprised at his statement: ‘“Ihe alliance of science with technology, by which learning is kept in contact with irreducible and stubborn facts, owes much to the practical bent of the early Benedictines.’’® All this goes to show that the Middle Ages do not represent a series of blank pages in respect of the history of science. Scholasticism created the mind with the almost dramatic sense of orderly relationships whose assumptions are fundamental for all the work of modern science. It built up that foundation of implicit convictions upon which experimental scientists have continued to work. And it did this work by means of its own fairly microscopic inspection of orderly relation-

® Science and the Modern World, p. 19. " Ibid., p. 17. ® Ibid., p. 22.

ships. The bent toward this sort of thing came largely from Aristotle, and so we find Professor Whitehead saying: “‘Galileo owes more to Aristotle than appears on the surface of his Dialogues, he owes to him his clear head and his analytic mind.’

That intellectual adventure which was based upon the fascinated sense of the endless relationships involved in sound argument filled the Middle Ages with a joy it is hard, for a modern to understand. But it crystallized into those assumptions which we accept without analysis and use without gratitude. And these very assumptions brought to experimental activity make the natural sciences possible. If the medieval period is only a stepmother of the inductive sciences, that stepmother at least trained its charge in a school whose intellectual discipline prepared that charge for his most characteristic achievements. The organization of medieval study in the Trivium and the Quadrivium shows the technique of this training. The Trivium introduced the student to the study of speech (grammar) ; of argument (dialectic); and of persuasion and beautiful speech (rhetoric). The Quadrivium led the student to the calculations dealing directly with numbers (arithmetic) ; the calculations dealing with sound (music) ; the calculations dealing with surfaces and solids (geometry); and the calculations dealing with heavenly bodies (astronomy). The queen of all the sciences (theology) brought one to the supreme cause, and that sense of the ultimate causality got into the very fiber of the thought of Europe. This sense of causality gave a turn to the thought of men as they scrutinized their observations. And so theology in an odd way became the mother of science. But it is not too much to say that the whole process of medieval training was a pedagogue leading Europe toward that scientific accomplishment which as yet lay in the shadows of the future.

When you think of the Middle Ages you are fairly sure to think of Saint Francis. You are not quite sure to think of Roger Bacon. But if Wycliffe is the morning star of the Reformation, Roger Bacon is the morning star of modern science. The thirteenth century saw the activities of both Saint Francis and Roger Bacon. The one set Europe to singing in quite a new fashion. The other set Europe to thinking in quite a new way. Roger Bacon was an Englishman who studied at the then young University of Oxford. He received his doctor’s degree at the University of Paris and himself was a member of the Franciscan order. He spent a good deal of his life in prison or its equivalent. He observed and studied and thought and passed into a new world where he used his scholastically trained mind for activities of which a typical schoolman would never have dreamed. He apprehended the possibilities which lay 18 | in the field of experiment. He knew of a formula for: the composition of gunpowder. He was acquainted with the use of lenses and mirrors of spherical shape. He knew how telescopes and microscopes could be made, if he did not make them. He influenced Columbus by what he said about oceanic distances. He prophesied ships mechanically driven and carriages propelled without horses. In him you see the logic of the Middle Ages beginning to be set to the uses of observation and experiment. And at once you see what tremendous possibilities are emerging.

In this whole period you see intelligence too often turned in upon itself, always brilliantly active, if sometimes active about mental cobwebs, and at last finding objects into which its teeth may bite. When the great days of attacking nature directly come, the mind has been made into a fine instrument ready for its work. Personality stands at the door looking directly at last upon the physical world about it, and so standing it is ready to use the new materials as they could never have been used without the intellectual discipline of the Middle Ages.

V

There is an old melody which sometimes sounds in my ear taking to itself the words with which it is associated in my mind:

Land of beauty and sunlight and song, Though afar from thy bright skies removed Still our fond hearts for thee ever long.

When we think of the Renaissance we are likely to think of this aspect of the life of Italy and of all the new sense of beauty which came to flowering time in the world. And even when we think of Leonardo da Vinci we are likely to remember Walter Pater’s amazing description of his “Mona Lisa”: “All the thoughts and experiences of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Ages with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafhicked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and as Leda, the mother of Helen of Troy, and as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes and lives only .in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands.” All this may well be

Walter Pater, The Renaissance, p. 130. 20 in our minds when we think of Leonardo. But more than all this should be in our minds. For Leonardo was also a scientist. That crystal clear mind of his was a medium through which he looked upon one field after another. He saw the significance of experiment. He saw before their day principles demonstrated by later scientists. In the study of motion his mind went to the heart of questions he considered with singular sharpness of perception. Whén he considered fossils he anticipated judgments reached centuries later. Anatomy and physiology claimed his intimate interest. It is said that had his work been published science would have advanced in one step to the place it reached a century after his time. Here you have a mind which justifies Paul Valéry’s fascinated scrutiny. Here indeed you have “L’ Homme Universal.” And as we think of his scientific activities we see again quick, and clear, and free moving intelligence about the tasks of understanding the forces which move through this amazing world. You begin to feel that the world has waited to be comprehended by men like Leonardo—artist and scientist as well, and far better scientist because of his artistic power.

But the man of the period of the Renaissance who really changed the universe for all of us was Nich-. olas Copernicus. He graduated at Cracow, receiving the doctor’s degree in arts and in medicine as well. He studied at Bologna. He was in Rome and at

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Padua. His uncle was Bishop of Frauenburg. Here he lived a life of devotion to spiritual exercises, to the care of the sick and to that study and contemplation which were to give a new universe to the sons of men. Greatest as an astronomer, he achieved his commanding position not so much by the observation of the planets as by a study of the meaning of the mathematics involved in stellar motion. That the earth was the center around which the whole sweeping series of heavenly bodies moved every twenty-four hours he was less and less able to believe. What if the earth did the rotating? Patiently he worked upon his materials and in 1543, the year of his death, De Revolutionibus Orbium Calestium (The Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs) was published. Here at last was the proof that the sun is central in the solar system. And here once more it is the patient, studious, calculating mind of Copernicus to which we would call very special attention. The subtlest powers of personal criticism and personal intelligence are involved in the work of Copernicus. If the earth lost its proud position of centrality through the work of this daring thinker, the mind of man gained correspondingly in high distinction. For the mind which could put the sun and the planets in their places is a phenomenon of fairly staggering significance. If the earth surrendered to the sun, the whole solar system surrendered to Copernicus.