Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects Part 13

Who then shall say that the reform of our system of observances is unimportant? When we see how this system induces fashionable extravagance, with its entailed bankruptcy and ruin--when we mark how greatly it limits the amount of social intercourse among the less wealthy cla.s.ses--when we find that many who most need to be disciplined by mixing with the refined are driven away by it, and led into dangerous and often fatal courses--when we count up the many minor evils it inflicts, the extra work which its costliness entails on all professional and mercantile men, the damage to public taste in dress and decoration by the setting up of its absurdities as standards for imitation, the injury to health indicated in the faces of its devotees at the close of the London season, the mortality of milliners and the like, which its sudden exigencies yearly involve;--and when to all these we add its fatal sin, that it blights, withers up, and kills, that high enjoyment it professedly ministers to--that enjoyment which is a chief end of our hard struggling in life to obtain--shall we not conclude that to reform our system of etiquette and fashion, is an aim yielding to few in urgency?

There needs, then, a protestantism in social usages. Forms that have ceased to facilitate and have become obstructive--whether political, religious, or other--have ever to be swept away; and eventually are so swept away in all cases. Signs are not wanting that some change is at hand. A host of satirists, led on by Thackeray, have been for years engaged in bringing our sham-festivities, and our fashionable follies, into contempt; and in their candid moods, most men laugh at the frivolities with which they and the world in general are deluded.

Ridicule has always been a revolutionary agent. That which is habitually a.s.sailed with sneers and sarcasms cannot long survive. Inst.i.tutions that have lost their roots in men's respect and faith are doomed; and the day of their dissolution is not far off. The time is approaching, then, when our system of social observances must pa.s.s through some crisis, out of which it will come purified and comparatively simple.

How this crisis will be brought about, no one can with any certainty say. Whether by the continuance and increase of individual protests, or whether by the union of many persons for the practice and propagation of some better system, the future alone can decide. The influence of dissentients acting without co-operation, seems, under the present state of things, inadequate. Standing severally alone, and having no well-defined views; frowned on by conformists, and expostulated with even by those who secretly sympathise with them; subject to petty persecutions, and unable to trace any benefit produced by their example; they are apt, one by one, to give up their attempts as hopeless. The young convention-breaker eventually finds that he pays too heavily for his nonconformity. Hating, for example, everything that bears about it any remnant of servility, he determines, in the ardour of his independence, that he will uncover to no one. But what he means simply as a general protest, he finds that ladies interpret into a personal disrespect. Though he sees that, from the days of chivalry downwards, these marks of supreme consideration paid to the other s.e.x have been but a hypocritical counterpart to the actual subjection in which men have held them--a pretended submission to compensate for a real domination; and though he sees that when the true dignity of women is recognised, the mock dignities given to them will be abolished; yet he does not like to be thus misunderstood, and so hesitates in his practice.

In other cases, again, his courage fails him. Such of his unconventionalities as can be attributed only to eccentricity, he has no qualms about: for, on the whole, he feels rather complimented than otherwise in being considered a disregarder of public opinion. But when they are liable to be put down to ignorance, to ill-breeding, or to poverty, he becomes a coward. However clearly the recent innovation of eating some kinds of fish with knife and fork proves the fork-and-bread practice to have had little but caprice for its basis, yet he dares not wholly ignore that practice while fashion partially maintains it. Though he thinks that a silk handkerchief is quite as appropriate for drawing-room use as a white cambric one, he is not altogether at ease in acting out his opinion. Then, too, he begins to perceive that his resistance to prescription brings round disadvantageous results which he had not calculated upon. He had expected that it would save him from a great deal of social intercourse of a frivolous kind--that it would offend the fools, but not the sensible people; and so would serve as a self-acting test by which those worth knowing would be separated from those not worth knowing. But the fools prove to be so greatly in the majority that, by offending them, he closes against himself nearly all the avenues though which the sensible people are to be reached. Thus he finds, that his nonconformity is frequently misinterpreted; that there are but few directions in which he dares to carry it consistently out; that the annoyances and disadvantages which it brings upon him are greater than he antic.i.p.ated; and that the chances of his doing any good are very remote. Hence he gradually loses resolution, and lapses, step by step, into the ordinary routine of observances.

Abortive as individual protests thus generally turn out, it may possibly be that nothing effectual will be done until there arises some organised resistance to this invisible despotism, by which our modes and habits are dictated. It may happen, that the government of Manners and Fashion will be rendered less tyrannical, as the political and religious governments have been, by some antagonistic union. Alike in Church and State, men's first emanc.i.p.ations from excess of restriction were achieved by numbers, bound together by a common creed or a common political faith. What remained undone while there were but individual schismatics or rebels, was effected when there came to be many acting in concert. It is tolerably clear that these earliest instalments of freedom could not have been obtained in any other way; for so long as the feeling of personal independence was weak and the rule strong, there could never have been a sufficient number of separate dissentients to produce the desired results. Only in these later times, during which the secular and spiritual controls have been growing less coercive, and the tendency towards individual liberty greater, has it become possible for smaller and smaller sects and parties to fight against established creeds and laws; until now men may safely stand even alone in their antagonism.

The failure of individual nonconformity to customs, as above ill.u.s.trated, suggests that an a.n.a.logous series of changes may have to be gone through in this case also. It is true that the _lex non scripta_ differs from the _lex scripta_ in this, that, being unwritten, it is more readily altered; and that it has, from time to time, been quietly ameliorated. Nevertheless, we shall find that the a.n.a.logy holds substantially good. For in this case, as in the others, the essential revolution is not the subst.i.tuting of any one set of restraints for any other, but the limiting or abolishing the authority which prescribes restraints. Just as the fundamental change inaugurated by the Reformation was not a superseding of one creed by another, but an ignoring of the arbiter who before dictated creeds--just as the fundamental change which Democracy long ago commenced, was not from this particular law to that, but from the despotism of one to the freedom of all; so, the parallel change yet to be wrought out in this supplementary government of which we are treating, is not the replacing of absurd usages by sensible ones, but the dethronement of that secret, irresponsible power which now imposes our usages, and the a.s.sertion of the right of all individuals to choose their own usages. In rules of living, a West-end clique is our Pope; and we are all papists, with but a mere sprinkling of heretics. On all who decisively rebel, comes down the penalty of excommunication, with its long catalogue of disagreeable and, indeed, serious consequences.

The liberty of the subject a.s.serted in our const.i.tution, and ever on the increase, has yet to be wrested from this subtler tyranny. The right of private judgment, which our ancestors wrung from the church, remains to be claimed from this dictator of our habits. Or, as before said, to free us from these idolatries and superst.i.tious conformities, there has still to come a protestanism in social usages. Parallel, therefore, as is the change to be wrought out, it seems not improbable that it may be wrought out in an a.n.a.logous way. That influence which solitary dissentients fail to gain, and that perseverance which they lack, may come into existence when they unite. That persecution which the world now visits upon them from mistaking their nonconformity for ignorance or disrespect, may diminish when it is seen to result from principle. The penalty which exclusion now entails may disappear when they become numerous enough to form visiting circles of their own. And when a successful stand has been made, and the brunt of the opposition has pa.s.sed, that large amount of secret dislike to our observances which now pervades society, may manifest itself with sufficient power to effect the desired emanc.i.p.ation.

Whether such will be the process, time alone can decide. That community of origin, growth, supremacy, and decadence, which we have found among all kinds of government, suggests a community in modes of change also.

On the other hand, Nature often performs substantially similar operations, in ways apparently different. Hence these details can never be foretold.

Meanwhile, let us glance at the conclusions that have been reached. On the one side, government, originally one, and afterwards subdivided for the better fulfilment of its function, must be considered as having ever been, in all its branches--political, religious, and ceremonial--beneficial; and, indeed, absolutely necessary. On the other side, government, under all its forms, must be regarded as subserving a temporary office, made needful by the unfitness of aboriginal humanity for social life; and the successive diminutions of its coerciveness in State, in Church, and in Custom, must be looked upon as steps towards its final disappearance. To complete the conception, there requires to be borne in mind the third fact, that the genesis, the maintenance, and the decline of all governments, however named, are alike brought about by the humanity to be controlled: from which may be drawn the inference that, on the average, restrictions of every kind cannot last much longer than they are wanted, and cannot be destroyed much faster than they ought to be.

Society, in all its developments, undergoes the process of exuviation.

These old forms which it successively throws off, have all been once vitally united with it--have severally served as the protective envelopes within which a higher humanity was being evolved. They are cast aside only when they become hindrances--only when some inner and better envelope has been formed; and they bequeath to us all that there was in them good. The periodical abolitions of tyrannical laws have left the administration of justice not only uninjured, but purified. Dead and buried creeds have not carried with them the essential morality they contained, which still exists, uncontaminated by the sloughs of superst.i.tion. And all that there is of justice and kindness and beauty, embodied in our c.u.mbrous forms of etiquette, will live perennially when the forms themselves have been forgotten.

[1] _Westminster Review_, April 1854.

[2] This was written before moustaches and beards had become common.

ON THE GENESIS OF SCIENCE[1]

There has ever prevailed among men a vague notion that scientific knowledge differs in nature from ordinary knowledge. By the Greeks, with whom Mathematics--literally _things learnt_--was alone considered as knowledge proper, the distinction must have been strongly felt; and it has ever since maintained itself in the general mind. Though, considering the contrast between the achievements of science and those of daily unmethodic thinking, it is not surprising that such a distinction has been a.s.sumed; yet it needs but to rise a little above the common point of view, to see that no such distinction can really exist: or that at best, it is but a superficial distinction. The same faculties are employed in both cases; and in both cases their mode of operation is fundamentally the same.

If we say that science is organised knowledge, we are met by the truth that all knowledge is organised in a greater or less degree--that the commonest actions of the household and the field presuppose facts colligated, inferences drawn, results expected; and that the general success of these actions proves the data by which they were guided to have been correctly put together. If, again, we say that science is prevision--is a seeing beforehand--is a knowing in what times, places, combinations, or sequences, specified phenomena will be found; we are yet obliged to confess that the definition includes much that is utterly foreign to science in its ordinary acceptation. For example, a child's knowledge of an apple. This, as far as it goes, consists in previsions.

When a child sees a certain form and colours, it knows that if it puts out its hand it will have certain impressions of resistance, and roundness, and smoothness; and if it bites, a certain taste. And manifestly its general acquaintance with surrounding objects is of like nature--is made up of facts concerning them, so grouped as that any part of a group being perceived, the existence of the other facts included in it is foreseen.

If, once more, we say that science is _exact_ prevision, we still fail to establish the supposed difference. Not only do we find that much of what we call science is not exact, and that some of it, as physiology, can never become exact; but we find further, that many of the previsions const.i.tuting the common stock alike of wise and ignorant, _are_ exact.

That an unsupported body will fall; that a lighted candle will go out when immersed in water; that ice will melt when thrown on the fire--these, and many like predictions relating to the familiar properties of things have as high a degree of accuracy as predictions are capable of. It is true that the results predicated are of a very general character; but it is none the less true that they are rigorously correct as far as they go: and this is all that is requisite to fulfil the definition. There is perfect accordance between the antic.i.p.ated phenomena and the actual ones; and no more than this can be said of the highest achievements of the sciences specially characterised as exact.

Seeing thus that the a.s.sumed distinction between scientific knowledge and common knowledge is not logically justifiable; and yet feeling, as we must, that however impossible it may be to draw a line between them, the two are not practically identical; there arises the question--What is the relationship that exists between them? A partial answer to this question may be drawn from the ill.u.s.trations just given. On reconsidering them, it will be observed that those portions of ordinary knowledge which are identical in character with scientific knowledge, comprehend only such combinations of phenomena as are directly cognisable by the senses, and are of simple, invariable nature. That the smoke from a fire which she is lighting will ascend, and that the fire will presently boil water, are previsions which the servant-girl makes equally well with the most learned physicist; they are equally certain, equally exact with his; but they are previsions concerning phenomena in constant and direct relation--phenomena that follow visibly and immediately after their antecedents--phenomena of which the causation is neither remote nor obscure--phenomena which may be predicted by the simplest possible act of reasoning.

If, now, we pa.s.s to the previsions const.i.tuting what is commonly known as science--that an eclipse of the moon will happen at a specified time; and when a barometer is taken to the top of a mountain of known height, the mercurial column will descend a stated number of inches; that the poles of a galvanic battery immersed in water will give off, the one an inflammable and the other an inflaming gas, in definite ratio--we perceive that the relations involved are not of a kind habitually presented to our senses; that they depend, some of them, upon special combinations of causes; and that in some of them the connection between antecedents and consequents is established only by an elaborate series of inferences. The broad distinction, therefore, between the two orders of knowledge, is not in their nature, but in their remoteness from perception.

If we regard the cases in their most general aspect, we see that the labourer, who, on hearing certain notes in the adjacent hedge, can describe the particular form and colours of the bird making them; and the astronomer, who, having calculated a transit of Venus, can delineate the black spot entering on the sun's disc, as it will appear through the telescope, at a specified hour; do essentially the same thing. Each knows that on fulfilling the requisite conditions, he shall have a preconceived impression--that after a definite series of actions will come a group of sensations of a foreknown kind. The difference, then, is not in the fundamental character of the mental acts; or in the correctness of the previsions accomplished by them; but in the complexity of the processes required to achieve the previsions. Much of our commonest knowledge is, as far as it goes, rigorously precise.

Science does not increase this precision; cannot transcend it. What then does it do? It reduces other knowledge to the same degree of precision.

That certainty which direct perception gives us respecting coexistences and sequences of the simplest and most accessible kind, science gives us respecting coexistences and sequences, complex in their dependencies or inaccessible to immediate observation. In brief, regarded from this point of view, science may be called _an extension of the perceptions by means of reasoning_.

On further considering the matter, however, it will perhaps be felt that this definition does not express the whole fact--that inseparable as science may be from common knowledge, and completely as we may fill up the gap between the simplest previsions of the child and the most recondite ones of the natural philosopher, by interposing a series of previsions in which the complexity of reasoning involved is greater and greater, there is yet a difference between the two beyond that which is here described. And this is true. But the difference is still not such as enables us to draw the a.s.sumed line of demarcation. It is a difference not between common knowledge and scientific knowledge; but between the successive phases of science itself, or knowledge itself--whichever we choose to call it. In its earlier phases science attains only to _certainty_ of foreknowledge; in its later phases it further attains to _completeness_. We begin by discovering _a_ relation: we end by discovering _the_ relation. Our first achievement is to foretell the _kind_ of phenomenon which will occur under specific conditions: our last achievement is to foretell not only the kind but the _amount_. Or, to reduce the proposition to its most definite form--undeveloped science is _qualitative_ prevision: developed science is _quant.i.tative_ prevision.

This will at once be perceived to express the remaining distinction between the lower and the higher stages of positive knowledge. The prediction that a piece of lead will take more force to lift it than a piece of wood of equal size, exhibits certainty, but not completeness, of foresight. The kind of effect in which the one body will exceed the other is foreseen; but not the amount by which it will exceed. There is qualitative prevision only. On the other hand, the prediction that at a stated time two particular planets will be in conjunction; that by means of a lever having arms in a given ratio, a known force will raise just so many pounds; that to decompose a specified quant.i.ty of sulphate of iron by carbonate of soda will require so many grains--these predictions exhibit foreknowledge, not only of the nature of the effects to be produced, but of the magnitude, either of the effects themselves, of the agencies producing them, or of the distance in time or s.p.a.ce at which they will be produced. There is not only qualitative but quant.i.tative prevision.

And this is the unexpressed difference which leads us to consider certain orders of knowledge as especially scientific when contrasted with knowledge in general. Are the phenomena _measurable_? is the test which we unconsciously employ. s.p.a.ce is measurable: hence Geometry.

Force and s.p.a.ce are measureable: hence Statics. Time, force, and s.p.a.ce are measureable: hence Dynamics. The invention of the barometer enabled men to extend the principles of mechanics to the atmosphere; and Aerostatics existed. When a thermometer was devised there arose a science of heat, which was before impossible. Such of our sensations as we have not yet found modes of measuring do not originate sciences. We have no science of smells; nor have we one of tastes. We have a science of the relations of sounds differing in pitch, because we have discovered a way to measure them; but we have no science of sounds in respect to their loudness or their _timbre_, because we have got no measures of loudness and _timbre_.

Obviously it is this reduction of the sensible phenomena it represents, to relations of magnitude, which gives to any division of knowledge its especially scientific character. Originally men's knowledge of weights and forces was in the same condition as their knowledge of smells and tastes is now--a knowledge not extending beyond that given by the unaided sensations; and it remained so until weighing instruments and dynamometers were invented. Before there were hour-gla.s.ses and clepsydras, most phenomena could be estimated as to their durations and intervals, with no greater precision than degrees of hardness can be estimated by the fingers. Until a thermometric scale was contrived, men's judgments respecting relative amounts of heat stood on the same footing with their present judgments respecting relative amounts of sound. And as in these initial stages, with no aids to observation, only the roughest comparisons of cases could be made, and only the most marked differences perceived; it is obvious that only the most simple laws of dependence could be ascertained--only those laws which, being uncomplicated with others, and not disturbed in their manifestations, required no niceties of observation to disentangle them. Whence it appears not only that in proportion as knowledge becomes quant.i.tative do its previsions become complete as well as certain, but that until its a.s.sumption of a quant.i.tative character it is necessarily confined to the most elementary relations.

Moreover it is to be remarked that while, on the one hand, we can discover the laws of the greater proportion of phenomena only by investigating them quant.i.tatively; on the other hand we can extend the range of our quant.i.tative previsions only as fast as we detect the laws of the results we predict. For clearly the ability to specify the magnitude of a result inaccessible to direct measurement, implies knowledge of its mode of dependence on something which can be measured--implies that we know the particular fact dealt with to be an instance of some more general fact. Thus the extent to which our quant.i.tative previsions have been carried in any direction, indicates the depth to which our knowledge reaches in that direction. And here, as another aspect of the same fact, we may further observe that as we pa.s.s from qualitative to quant.i.tative prevision, we pa.s.s from inductive science to deductive science. Science while purely inductive is purely qualitative: when inaccurately quant.i.tative it usually consists of part induction, part deduction: and it becomes accurately quant.i.tative only when wholly deductive. We do not mean that the deductive and the quant.i.tative are coextensive; for there is manifestly much deduction that is qualitative only. We mean that all quant.i.tative prevision is reached deductively; and that induction can achieve only qualitative prevision.

Still, however, it must not be supposed that these distinctions enable us to separate ordinary knowledge from science, much as they seem to do so. While they show in what consists the broad contrast between the extreme forms of the two, they yet lead us to recognise their essential ident.i.ty; and once more prove the difference to be one of degree only.

For, on the one hand, the commonest positive knowledge is to some extent quant.i.tative; seeing that the amount of the foreseen result is known within certain wide limits. And, on the other hand, the highest quant.i.tative prevision does not reach the exact truth, but only a very near approximation to it. Without clocks the savage knows that the day is longer in the summer than in the winter; without scales he knows that stone is heavier than flesh: that is, he can foresee respecting certain results that their amounts will exceed these, and be less than those--he knows _about_ what they will be. And, with his most delicate instruments and most elaborate calculations, all that the man of science can do, is to reduce the difference between the foreseen and the actual results to an unimportant quant.i.ty.

Moreover, it must be borne in mind not only that all the sciences are qualitative in their first stages,--not only that some of them, as Chemistry, have but recently reached the quant.i.tative stage--but that the most advanced sciences have attained to their present power of determining quant.i.ties not present to the senses, or not directly measurable, by a slow process of improvement extending through thousands of years. So that science and the knowledge of the uncultured are alike in the nature of their previsions, widely as they differ in range; they possess a common imperfection, though this is immensely greater in the last than in the first; and the transition from the one to the other has been through a series of steps by which the imperfection has been rendered continually less, and the range continually wider.

These facts, that science and the positive knowledge of the uncultured cannot be separated in nature, and that the one is but a perfected and extended form of the other, must necessarily underlie the whole theory of science, its progress, and the relations of its parts to each other.

There must be serious incompleteness in any history of the sciences, which, leaving out of view the first steps of their genesis, commences with them only when they a.s.sume definite forms. There must be grave defects, if not a general untruth, in a philosophy of the sciences considered in their interdependence and development, which neglects the inquiry how they came to be distinct sciences, and how they were severally evolved out of the chaos of primitive ideas.

Not only a direct consideration of the matter, but all a.n.a.logy, goes to show that in the earlier and simpler stages must be sought the key to all subsequent intricacies. The time was when the anatomy and physiology of the human being were studied by themselves--when the adult man was a.n.a.lysed and the relations of parts and of functions investigated, without reference either to the relations exhibited in the embryo or to the h.o.m.ologous relations existing in other creatures. Now, however, it has become manifest that no true conceptions, no true generalisations, are possible under such conditions. Anatomists and physiologists now find that the real natures of organs and tissues can be ascertained only by tracing their early evolution; and that the affinities between existing genera can be satisfactorily made out only by examining the fossil genera to which they are allied. Well, is it not clear that the like must be true concerning all things that undergo development? Is not science a growth? Has not science, too, its embryology? And must not the neglect of its embryology lead to a misunderstanding of the principles of its evolution and of its existing organisation?

There are _a priori_ reasons, therefore, for doubting the truth of all philosophies of the sciences which tacitly proceed upon the common notion that scientific knowledge and ordinary knowledge are separate; instead of commencing, as they should, by affiliating the one upon the other, and showing how it gradually came to be distinguishable from the other. We may expect to find their generalisations essentially artificial; and we shall not be deceived. Some ill.u.s.trations of this may here be fitly introduced, by way of preliminary to a brief sketch of the genesis of science from the point of view indicated. And we cannot more readily find such ill.u.s.trations than by glancing at a few of the various _cla.s.sifications_ of the sciences that have from time to time been proposed. To consider all of them would take too much s.p.a.ce: we must content ourselves with some of the latest.

Commencing with those which may be soonest disposed of, let us notice first the arrangement propounded by Oken. An abstract of it runs thus:--

Part I. MATHESIS.--_Pneumatogeny_: Primary Art, Primary Consciousness, G.o.d, Primary Rest, Time, Polarity, Motion, Man, s.p.a.ce, Point. Line, Surface, Globe, Rotation.--_Hylogeny_: Gravity, Matter, Ether, Heavenly Bodies, Light, Heat, Fire.

(He explains that MATHESIS is the doctrine of the whole; _Pneumatogeny_ being the doctrine of immaterial totalities, and _Hylogeny_ that of material totalities.)

Part II. ONTOLOGY.--_Cosmogeny_: Rest, Centre, Motion, Line, Planets, Form, Planetary System, Comets.--_Stochiogeny_: Condensation, Simple Matter, Elements, Air, Water, Earth--_Stochiology_: Functions of the Elements, etc., etc.--_Kingdoms of Nature_: Individuals.

(He says in explanation that "ONTOLOGY teaches us the phenomena of matter. The first of these are the heavenly bodies comprehended by _Cosmogeny_. These divide into elements--_Stochiogeny_. The earth element divides into minerals--_Mineralogy_. These unite into one collective body--_Geogeny_. The whole in singulars is the living, or _Organic_, which again divides into plants and animals.

_Biology_, therefore, divides into _Organogeny_, _Phytosophy_, _Zoosophy_.")

FIRST KINGDOM.--MINERALS. _Mineralogy_, _Geology_.

Part III. BIOLOGY.--_Organosophy_, _Phytogeny_, _Phyto-physiology_, _Phytology_, _Zoogeny_, _Physiology_, _Zoology_, _Psychology_.

A glance over this confused scheme shows that it is an attempt to cla.s.sify knowledge, not after the order in which it has been, or may be, built up in the human consciousness; but after an a.s.sumed order of creation. It is a pseudo-scientific cosmogony, akin to those which men have enunciated from the earliest times downwards; and only a little more respectable. As such it will not be thought worthy of much consideration by those who, like ourselves, hold that experience is the sole origin of knowledge. Otherwise, it might have been needful to dwell on the incongruities of the arrangements--to ask how motion can be treated of before s.p.a.ce? how there can be rotation without matter to rotate? how polarity can be dealt with without involving points and lines? But it will serve our present purpose just to point out a few of the extreme absurdities resulting from the doctrine which Oken seems to hold in common with Hegel, that "to philosophise on Nature is to re-think the great thought of Creation." Here is a sample:--

"Mathematics is the universal science; so also is Physio-philosophy, although it is only a part, or rather but a condition of the universe; both are one, or mutually congruent.

"Mathematics is, however, a science of mere forms without substance.

Physio-philosophy is, therefore, _mathematics endowed with substance_."