SCIENTIFIC OPTIMISM. T HERE is a very fine poem of Matthew
Arnold's entitled "The Future," familiar, doubtless, to most of our readers, in which the poet depicts the voyage of man on the river of time. Arnold had a strong distaste for many aspects of modern civilisation, including the too exclusive dominance of the scientific temper, and as he sees the banks of the river of time crowded more and more with busy masses, the cities in "blacker, incessanter line," he doubts the full beneficence of these modern tendencies, and only at the end ventures to think that some solemn "peace of its own" may fall on the striving world, and that "murmurs and hints of the infinite sea" may bring some assurance of a more blessed future. We have been reminded of this poem in reading this year's Harveian Oration by Sir William Roberts, whose tone is so different. The Oration is conceived in the spirit of the scientific optimist, who recounts the wonderful effects of modern science in transforming civilisation, and who scarcely seems to entertain a doubt that the movement is purely beneficent, and that the civilisation based on it must be enduring. We are not, says Sir William Roberts, any longer threatened with the irruptions of savage hordes, for power has passed absolutely into the bands of the scientific nations. The "Yellow Terror," which the late Mr. Pearson set forth with such original vigour, is no terror at all to the Harveian Orator, who thinks that black and yellow peoples can never "catch up" with Europe and America. The blessings of scientific discovery are landed in a familiar strain. Our chemistry enables us to produce all manner of substances and articles unknown to our ancestors, and to give employ- ment to millions. Physiology and medical progress have improved health and prolonged life. We can travel about and see the world without running the risks of old times. In short, it is scarcely necessary to reproduce the list of benefits which we moderns owe to science, for, as we have said, it is familiar enough. The most interesting speculation which Sir William Roberts suggests is that bearing on the question whether the hurry and bustle of modern life are good things tending to improve the race and to provide, as the Orator puts it, a kind of social antiseptic.
We admit that there is much to be said on both sides of this very urgent and difficult problem. Let us state the optimistic side taken by Sir William Roberts first. Ancient life, he seems to think, perished from mental inanition "arising from deficiency of fresh and varied intellectual pabulum." The ancients, in short, led monotonous lives; they had no "news," and could therefore take no sustained interest in the course of public events. Their civilisation ran to seed, while we, with a telephone all day at our ears con- veying the slightest whisper from every part of the earth, find "veins of interest" multiplied, and enjoy a "vivid, abounding life." It is true that nine-tenths of cultivated people are suffering from nervous complaints almost unknown before our own century, but this very quickening of the nerves means also quickening of the brain ; and so as "the great world spins for ever down the ringing grooves of change," we may expect not only a higher average standard of life and thought, as most observers of modern society have ield, but a long succession of great and original men with minds inspired by the vivifying impulses coming from every point and rousing the intellectual activities as they were never roused before. This, at least, does not seem " unreasonable " to Sir William Roberts, who finds in the "hum and buzz" of modem life "a sure token of the health and strength of the common hive."
We have spoken of this view of modern life, very ably set forth, as scientific optimism. Obviously the man of science is bound to be an optimist, for it is he who, more than any one else, has created modern life, and it goes without saying that he must bless his own handiwork and find it very good. Sir William Roberts is of opinion that art and literature and philosophy, in which the Greeks excelled, afforded no basis for a continuous progressive social life. The ancients, he said, invented, but they had not the scientific temper; they made no effort to unify and co-ordinate knowledge. It is our glory that we have done that, and therefore our civilisation, founded on this achievement, is probably sound and enduring, in which case its results must be bene- ficial. Now, we do not wish to approach this very difficult theme in a dogmatic spirit, for we recognise that there is so much to be said from many points of view ; but we should like to suggest some ideas which have been omitted in the Harveian Oration, and which may tend to render the scientific optimism of that utterance a little less certain than it seems. We would suggest, in the first place, that the phrase "the ancients" is not a simple one covering only one form of civilisation. There was probably much monotony in the life of the Teutonic tribes by the banks of the Elbe or Weser, or in the great Eastern Monarchies where, as Hegel says, only one was free,—the supreme ruler. But can we speak of ancient Greece as devoured by monotony, or even ancient Rome or ancient Palestine? Even in the matter of "news," on which Sir W. Roberts lays such stress, Horace gives us a vivid picture of the Rome of his day, in which absence of news, of impressions from the outside, is certainly not a feature. The Roman Empire had no telephones or railways, it is true ; but its great roads and means of transit were so admirably organised that all events, even on the outposts of the Empire, were speedily known at the capital Besides, the very tribal religions, the seats of local deities, gave to each place a most vivid life of its own which we moderns cannot under- stand. The rivalries of the Greek States, as of the Italian States centuries after, were so intense as to render any prolonged monotony difficult, if not impossible. The dangers of travel, too, while in many ways unpleasant, unquestionably made against monotony, as they also did in the Middle Ages. As regards the activity of the intellect, which modern life is supposed to foster, we have yet to learn that that activity is as great or powerful among ourselves as it was in great sections of the antique world. Freeman says that the average Athenian citizen was an incomparably abler man than the average Member of Parliament ; and if we read the speeches directly addressed to the former, we cannot doubt that this is trim. The intense civic life, we will not say of Athens or Florence, but of Thebes or Argos, of Pisa or Siena, was such as we have no conception of, and which formed in the mind of the average citizen a standard of thinking and acting which would be only possible to a comparative handful in the London of to-day. But even the second-rate cities of earlier times, we may be told, were exceptional; the bulk of the ancient world was steeped in somnolence. And what of the tens of millions in the steppes and forests of the Russia of to-day, or, to come nearer home, of the many thousands of small workers in London attics who are as completely divorced from modern culture and the wider currents of public life, as though they were inhabitants of Timbuctoo ? We can scarcely admit that, because we have railways and newspapers and Greece and Rome had neither, therefore they perished from mental stag- nation, and we shall keep alive for ever by our intellectual activity.
To come still more closely to this difficult problem of the rush and bustle of modern town life and its effect on the mind. Ruskin, in a very characteristic letter to a corre- spondent, takes a quite different view of all this energy, which seems to him to have no adequate rational end, to expend itself with fury, and to arrive nowhere. His chief enemy, he says, all his life long, has been the "industry" of mankind ; and while others have painted the Devil as incarnate wicked- ness, Mr. Ruskin paints him as incarnate "business," and sees numerous hints of him in the City where rest and peace are unknown. What are we to say when confronted by these opposing views ? We may say that rest and meditation tend to goodness without intellect, while bustle tends to intellect without goodness. But this is no solution, for in the long run, we are firmly persuaded that saints are not made out of stupid people. There is no such absolute divorce as Schopenhauer supposed, between goodness and intellect. Mill is on far truer lines when he argues that character and intellect, roughly speaking, go together. What we think is this : There is much truth in the contention of Sir William Roberts that the stress of modern life develops intellect, but it develops it in the mass, in the average man, and it does not develop it in a profound form. What seems most obvious to us in con- sidering the modern world is, first, the growing dearth of the rarer and deeper kind of intellect; and secondly, the pressure brought to bear by the rising, eager, democratic mass on the few finer minds. We do not produce to-day a Kant or a. Spinoza, but clever critics who write about these men, who have read everything, and can give us all the latest views. We have not the deep constructive mind whose operations move in a vast orbit, but we have keen, eager minds which, comet-like, dart into sight, astonish by their lustre, and quickly disappear. This tendency may not last, but that it is the tendency of our society to-day cannot be doubted Men will exhaust themselves in attempts to grow rich or to find out new forms of amusement, but who can afford the leisure to grow wise? The mere craze to be talked about, to live in the glare of public opinion, tends to destroy depth, originality, genuine power, which is always solitary. The dominance of the masses, too, with their necessarily low standard of demands, is irritating to the few, even when they can see it is an inevitable stage in progress. Think of the ideal of life of the average Londoner and of the way in which he renders the working out of this ideal more and more preva- lent, so that he fills our streets with his cries and plasters our walls with his advertisements. This sort of life breeds, un- doubtedly, a certain quickness, but does it really aid intellect ? It keeps men from senile decay, but does it render them healthier, does it give them larger views and higher interests while they live ? Is not a permanent spirit of irritation at constant friction being engendered among men of intellect by the conditions of life which are obviously due to scientific discovery ? We say again that we do not dogmatise ; we merely try to put forward another aide than that taken by Sir W. Roberts. The real truth seems to us that the world is so made that we have to pay a heavy price for everything. The Greeks paid a tremendous price for their ultra-individualism and devotion to art and speculative intellect. We are paying, and shall pay more and more, a very high price for our recognition of the supremacy of science, which, after all, does not cover the whole of human life. We have to do not only with that which is, but with that which ought to be, with art and religion, with the twin ideals of right and beauty ; and life will never be rounded and whole, civilisation will never be secure, until these are co-ordinated with that keen desire to know which is at the root of our scientific conception of society.
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