THE ACADEMY CELEBRATION IN BERLIN.
THERE have been few recent celebrations more interesting than that of the Bicentenary of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin. This great institution was founded mainly through the energy of Leibnitz at a time when Prussia was poor, when German culture was almost non-existent, and when Germany itself was, like Italy, a "geographical expression." Even a century after, Goethe lamented that Germany, though she bad then produced Leasing, Kant, Schiller, Herder, and himself, had no great national culture like France. Conceive, then, what Prussia was at a time when Leibnitz preferred to write in French and Latin to writing in a semi-barbaric tongue
hardly known to of the scholars or literary men of Europe. It cannot be said that the Prussian Academy has aided the cause of a national German culture as the French Academy helped to create a great French culture. The genius of the Germans, more individualistic, like our own, does not work that way. Leasing had to break away violently from all traditional routine and strike out a path for him- self ; pioneer in what is now a very powerful literature. But it may fairly be said that the Berlin Academy has in its growth marked the progress of German thought, and measured the expansion of German culture. It has done this too without centralising German intellectual life, which is as keen to-day in Leipzig, Munich, and Dresden as it is in the capital,—a healthier state of things, we think, than that which draws all talent to London or Paris.
The speech of the Kaiser at this celebration was a very happy one. With a few exceptions, such as Alexander, Ptolemy, Charlemagne, Alfred, Monarchs have not devoted much time or energy to the promotion of national culture, 'either in literature, art, or science. We do not, of course, include such civic rulers as the Medici, who gave a stimulus to art which lasted for generations. Alexander befriended and aided Aristotle, Ptolemy was devoted to astronomy, Charlemagne surrounded himself with the few learned men of his age, Alfred helped to initiate an English litera- ture. In nearer times Louis XIV. gave a stately patronage to the classic literature of the Grand Siecle, and Napoleon seems to have taken a very genuine interest in French science. But, speaking generally, Kings have allowed national culture to take care of itself. The German Kaiser, however, like his predecessor Frederick the Great, appears to take the national culture, like so many other branches of national activity, under his wing. And assuredly, if we may judge by this brief speech, he has a true and living concep-
tiofi of the limits which exist in the service of science to man- kind. Science, dealing with phenomena which can be handled, seen, tasted, analysed, tends always on one side to materialism, and so is fatal to the ideal and imaginative side of life. In the third quarter of the present century science, tinder the lead of }nickel and Mo]eschott, and in a less degree of Darwin and Huxley, led up to a purely mechanical concep- tion of the world and an agnostic view of the Ultimate spiritual reality. We are recovering in some degree from this ten- dency, but no one can say that science is yet an aid to faith.
Yet there can be no doubt that, as the Kaiser reminded his distinguished audience, the founder of the Prussian Academy, Leibnitz, believed and hoped that through science might be promoted the honour of God and the welfare of mankind. Modern science has certainly thought much of the welfare of mankind from two points of view : it has been ardent in its desire that truth should be promoted, and it has been eager to aid in adding to the comforts and material progress of the world. But has it, on the whole, led men, in the well-known words of the Scottish Catechism, to " glorify God " ? It has been boldly said that the heavens do not proclaim the glory of God, but of Newton and Laplace; and the naturalistic exponents of science have said that in searching the universe they find no God, thus, like Lucretius, "denying divinely the divine." Modern science, on the whole, then, brings its votaries to a very different conclusion from that of Leibnitz, with his universe of living monads moved by a "pre-established harmony," and thus tending to fulfil a great divine purpose. We have, it is true, gone through our monad theory, but it was a merely mechanical one, and science, we are now told, has arrived at a theory of " energetics," in which true substance is lost, and in which mere impersonal force, reckless of the individual, devoid of any rational " telos," is the one sole being. If the words of Goethe, quoted by the Kaiser, that the whole of human history is really one great conflict between unbelief and faith ; between the conventional view that the real is only that which manifests itself for the moment in objects of touch and sight, and the view that "the things which are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal,"—if this conception is true, are we to say, in view of the development of science and its materialistic theory of life, that the conflict is approaching its end, and that man will settle calmly down, as the agnostic supposes, into an attitude of sombre but moderately comfortable scepticism, taking the world as he finds it, and, like Autolycns, ignoring any thought of the world to come ? If that is the outcome of the age-long attempt to read the earth's painful riddle, then Leibnitz founded his Academy under a wrong apprehension, and Goethe's conception of science was a delusion. All such institutions as academies tend, as even their best friends acknowledge, to stereotype prevailing views, and if scientific men agree on a materialistic interpretation of life, and that interpretation is fixed and crystallised, it is plain that the education of Christendom might speedily produce, under State administration, a generation of atheists, or at least of sceptics.
But there are two forces making against this result, and leading rather to that view of Leibnitz embodied in the words quoted by the Kaiser. First, the actual experience of life renders not only atheism but agnosticism a permanent impossibility. You cannot interpret the facts of life in those meagre terms. In the supreme moments of life, in the exaltation of discovery, in the joy of a new truth, in the deepest bliss and the deepest sorrow, in the presence of the cosmic forces, in the happiness of a pure friendship, unbelief is disarmed, and we feel, as Words- worth says, that " we are greater than we know." Phenomenal science is powerless against these surging human thoughts and emotions, which transcend phenomena, and so cannot be explained in terms of material science. But these noble instincts of human nature are reinforced by philosophy, and whatever else we may say of the history of philosophy, with its rising and falling creeds, this at any rate we may say, that that history bears emphatic witness against the possi- bility of life being interpreted in physical terms. It is the task of philosophy to criticise the assumptions of science, and in doing so it has found that its primary assumption of a world in which the physically apparent is the ultimately valid is for ever impossible. Science—i.e., physical science —will be an increasing source of power and well-being to mankind on one condition, that she be kept rigidly to her sphere, and that her powers and conclusions be set forth subject to the suzerainty of that ultimate criticism of life which is what we mean by philosophy. We see with satis- faction this readjustment now emerging from the receding tide of scientific arrogance; and consequently we expect a return to that temper and spirit which characterised Leibnitz and Goethe as it did Socrates and Plato.
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