Читать книгу The Scientific Spirit of the Age, and Other Pleas and Discussions онлайн

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To many readers it may appear that the antagonism of Science to Art may be condoned in favor of her high claim to be the guide, not to Beauty, but to Truth. But is it indeed Truth, in the sense which we have hitherto given to that great and sacred word, at which Physical Science is now aiming? Can we think of Truth merely as a vast heap of Facts, piled up into an orderly pyramid of a Science, like one of Timur’s heaps of skulls? To collect a million facts, test them, classify them, raise by induction generalizations concerning them, and hand them down to the next generation to add a few thousand more facts and (probably) to reconstruct the pyramid on a different basis and another plan,—if this be indeed to arrive at “Truth,” modern Science may boast she has touched the goal. Yet in other days Truth was deemed something nobler than this. It was the interests which lay behind and beyond the facts, their possible bearing on man’s deepest yearnings and sublimest hopes, which gave dignity and meaning to the humblest researches into rock and plant, and which glorified such discoveries as Kepler’s till he cried in rapture, “O God, I think thy thoughts after thee!” and Newton’s, till he closed the “Principia” (as Parker said of him) by “bursting into the Infinite and kneeling there.” In our time, however, Science has repeatedly renounced all pretension to throw light in any direction beyond the sequence of physical causes and effects; and by doing so she has, I think, abandoned her claim to be man’s guide to Truth. The Alpine traveller who engages his guides to scale the summit of the Jungfrau, and finds them stop to booze in the Wirthschaft at the bottom, would have no better right to complain than those who fondly expected Science to bring them to God, and are informed that she now never proceeds above the Ascidian. So long as all the rivulets of laws traced by Science flowed freshly onward towards the sea, our souls drank of them with thankfulness. Now that they lose themselves in the sands, they have become mere stagnant pools of knowledge.