Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/721

Rh Mr. Harris begins his discourse with an excellent presentation of the method of the science of the present day. He recognizes that its tendency is to pass from the mere sensible properties of objects to their relations by saying: "No object can be understood by itself, and even the weather of to-day is found to be conditioned upon antecedent weather. . . . Science sees the acorn in the entire history of the life of the oak. It sees the oak in the entire history of all its species, in whatever climes they grow. . . . We must trace whatever we see through its antecedent forms, and learn its cycles of birth, growth, and decay. . . . We must learn to see each individual thing in the perspective of its history. . . . as a part of a process. . . . The ordinary habit of mind occupies itself with the objects of the senses, and does not seek their unity; . . . the scientific habit of mind chooses its object, and persistently follows its thread of existence through all its changes and relations."

All this is as true as it is well stated, and Mr. Harris, moreover, agrees that this method is coextensive with nature, and is therefore properly characterized as "natural science." But he knows a place where it does not apply and can not reach; a place so far set off from nature that it requires a new method of study, and gives rise to a new kind of science different from the common kind; and this, strange to say, is social science. He says: "Social science deals with man. Man has a natural being as a mere animal, as well as a spiritual being of intellect and will. . . . Man is not only an animal, having bodily wants of food, clothing, and shelter, but he is a spiritual being, existing in opposition to nature. . . . Man as a child or a savage is an incarnate contradiction; his real being is the opposite of his ideal being. His actual condition does not conform to his true nature. His true human nature is reason; his actual condition is irrational, for it is constrained from without, chained by brute necessity, and lashed by the scourges of appetite and passion. There is thus a paradoxical contrast between nature and human nature. . . . As man ascends out of nature in time and space into human nature, he ascends into a realm of his own creation. . . . The natural self must be abdicated in order that the personal self may be realized."

This theory of human nature is not new, but Mr. Harris certainly proposes to make a new use of it. For thousands of years it has been customary to divide man into two natures: a low, gross, corrupt, perishable, animal nature to be reprobated and renounced; and a high, pure, exalted, immortal nature, chained to the brutal part, and at war with it through all the course of our earthly life. This view has long been useful to theologians and moralists, but Mr. Harris is the first to reconstruct modern science on this basis. He would hand over the bestial, vulgar, and vilified part of humanity to "natural science"; and he would erect the upper and nobler portion into a new kind of science by a new method; and, as it is the more exalted portion of man which he "realizes in institutions," the new method becomes that of social science.

Yet, with reference to science, lower and higher are all one, and man is a unity. His higher nature is phenomenal, and in its constitution, mode of acting, as well as in its productions, it is not chaotic, but orderly, and is thus open to investigation like all the other parts of nature. That there is a profound difference between the corporeal and the psychical parts of man involves no such consequences as are here assumed. However deep may be the diversities among the objects of study in nature, the method of science in dealing with them is the same; because science, being the most valid knowing, depends upon the laws of knowing, and not upon the differences among the objects