Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/869

Rh yield no valid results, and came at length to consider that valid conclusions, being impossible, were undesirable. But, as active thought could not be stopped, it was concluded that the virtue of philosophy consists merely in the mental exercise it involves. And, as philosophy had proved useless as a means of arriving at assured truth, its uselessness was claimed to be a merit. And so utility, or the value of results attained, both in themselves and in their practical service to man, was explicitly repudiated. Alike in old Greece and in modern Germany—from Plato to Hegel—this has been the philosophic teaching, and we have seen the doctrine solemnly promulgated in our own times. Sir William Hamilton, as is well known, opens his lectures on metaphysics and logic with a formal defense of it. He maintains that the pursuit of knowledge by man for any end beyond himself—that is, for any practical benefit, private or public—is nothing less than debasing. It is a degradation of the ideal of scholarship. He says that the attainment of truth is not the proper object of mental activity, but the pleasure of the pursuit of truth. To seek is noble; but to seek successfully—that is, to find the object sought is a calamity, because it ends the gratification of the search. The founder of a modern and influential school of philosophy ransacks antiquity and ranges down all the dark ages after authorities who have held this doctrine, and his case is fully made out.

Now, when this old philosophical notion that truth, for itself and for its uses, is not the proper end of study, is still theoretically maintained in our colleges and universities to be the first law of all liberal education, we need not be surprised at the extent of the ignorant prejudice against science, and that the influence of this prejudice should still be widely manifested. Illustrations of it appear everywhere. We pick up the last number of "Scribner's Monthly," and this is the way it talks to its hundreds of thousands of readers:

We doubt whether what we call literature will ever be indebted to science or what is recognized as "the scientific spirit" for anything good. Science deals with matter, its essence, laws, phenomena. Its tendency is to materialize everything. Life itself is evolved from matter. Its "promises and its potencies" are found in that. The tendencies of science are to count God out of the universe, to deny immortality, and the existence of mind independent of matter, and to believe nothing that can not be demonstrated. Hard material facts are the things with which science deals, and it refuses to have to do with anything else. It refuses to recognize the existence of anything like imagination except in a scientific way. Imagination is a product of molecular action in the brain. Science must necessarily deny to this faculty of the soul any legitimate functions because it can not follow a scientific method, and because it denies the existence of the realm in which it is most at home. Imagination must have an over-world in which to spread its wings, or it can not fly. To bind itself to demonstrable facts and to tie itself to a scientific method would be to commit self-destruction. To circumscribe the horizon of the poetic faculty is to clip its wings, or, rather, to deny it space for action. It is a faculty that demands illimitable space, illimitable time, illimitable freedom of invention, release from bondage to the material and real, and liberty to explore the spiritual and the ideal. Any influence or power which interferes with this liberty in any direction is a foe to poetry and a curse to literature.

Crude and ridiculous as this statement is, it represents a widespread feeling. The fact is that, so long as science sticks to the manipulations of matter, it is let alone; but, when it comes forward with its revelations of the constitution of nature, and asserts that these must in future affect all the higher departments of thought, it is met with denunciation from every school of cultivated ignorance which grew up before scientific knowledge arose. This explains the ill-will of multitudes toward Spencer's system. It represents science in its most obnoxious aspect, in carrying its method into the field of general ideas.