Drift
I
No thinking man to-day needs arguments to persuade him that our civilization is insecure, and that the nations are drifting rudderless. As L. P. Jacks has said, the literature of ‘Where the devil are we?’ is enormous, and cumbers our periodicals. It is, however, pretty obvious where we are; it seems to me high time to put the preliminary question, ‘How the devil did we get here?’ If we can arrive at some faint inkling of an explanation of our involuntary and desperate wanderings, we shall then at least have a better chance of guessing some way out of this catastrophic maze.
How came we here? It is plainly the business of the historians to answer that question. And behold, here they come flocking by the hundred, each with his learned monograph or ponderous tome, each with his contribution to a reasonable and scientific solution of the great problem, — ‘ Economic Causes of the War,’ ‘Political Causes,’ treatises on Pan-Germanism, on the Kaiser as a religious mystic, and so on, — until we realize that the war was absolutely inevitable, that all intelligent, men, including historians, had known for forty years that it was inevitable, and that we live, not perhaps in the best of all possible worlds, but at any rate in a world which could not conceivably have been different from what it is.
Now, this consciousness that we and our civilization are adrift remains, even after we have read the historians, unimpaired; indeed, it amounts to a conviction. It is, so to speak, a residue; it is what is left over of doubt and of groping after everything has been made clear to us. The mere statement of the paradox shows that something is wrong. Can it be that the historians are, after all, inadequate? It will be hard, especially for historians, to admit any such unorthodox criticism. But what else can we say of guides who abandon us in the midst of the wilderness?
We have good reason to be out of patience with the historians. Have we not been told that historia docet ? The only purpose of writing history is that it may serve as the continuing memory of mankind; that it may supplement the petty experiences of each individual until he contains within himself the soul of the race; that it may exalt the will and enable the wisdom.of each generation to leave the world a little better than they found it. If, therefore, history teaches that progress is automatic, and that the present is the inevitable result of the past, history fails to serve its purpose. It certainly supplies no incentive to undertake the moulding of the future, nor any guidance in that task. What is just as serious, it has not supplied us with a genuine explanation of the past. In this connection, it is very easy for us to forget now what fools we were three years ago.
Let me quote a few words from an address made by Lord Bryce as President of the International Congress of Historical Studies, on April 3, 1913. ‘The world,’ he said, ‘is becoming one in an altogether new sense. . . . More than four centuries ago the discovery of America marked the first step in the process by which the European races have now gained dominion over nearly the whole earth. ... As the earth has been narrowed through the new forces science has placed at our disposal . . . the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought, in each of its regions, become more closely interwoven.
. . . World History is tending to become One History.’
And a little over a year later, it became plain that the altogether new sense in which the world was becoming one was an altogether unpleasant sense. Every phrase which Lord Bryce used seems to have been dictated to him by some sardonic devil: the new unity, the emphasis upon the dominion which we have gained over the whole earth but not, alas, over our own souls, and the new forces which science has placed at our disposal, in order that we may employ high explosives to destroy each other on land, in order that we may assassinate under the sea, and that we may defile the air with Zeppelins. The historians have indeed been blind leaders of the blind; let us not blame them overmuch, but let us not trust them at all.
If we cannot learn from the historians, we may perhaps learn from their mistakes. Chief among these is the dogma which I have called Automatic Progress. Automatic Progress is a ‘racer’ with a peculiar pedigree; he is by Optimism, out of Evolution. He also has the peculiar habit of attempting to win his races by stuffing himself with all the oats he could reach — a habit which proves to be somewhat of a handicap. Intoxicated by the heady wine of natural science, the historians of human affairs have attempted to introduce the reign of law into their interpretations of human society and politics.
And yet the appalling truth, which is obvious now that we have been sobered by the war, is that the ‘laws’ of human nature are not comparable to the laws of science. There is no orderly evolution toward an end, there is no Automatic Progress; in the place of these figments of a sick imagination and of scientific vanity, we may and must recognize the truth which has been thrust upon us, the truth of Change. The one thing certain is that the world is always changing, and that it may change for the worse as well as for the better. We have no guarantee; and if we can only bring ourselves to admit humbly that we have none, I believe we shall be within measurable distance of discovering how we came to be where we are.
Suppose we search for an example. Do you know a man who acts as if he had a lien upon the future? Then you know that he does not pay attention to the art and business of living, and that he spends his existence, not in making things happen, but in having things happen to him. The world is for him a sort of perpetual Coney Island railway, whereon he sometimes glides along smoothly, and sometimes suffers a disastrous tumble. After which, if he is a good historian, he will pick himself up and proceed to demonstrate that the machinery made it inevitable that he should tumble.
Only, in the case of this war, there are millions who will remain where they fell.
Our faith in Automatic Progress is therefore partly responsible for our present situation. It was this faith that lulled to sleep the peoples of Great Britain and of France while Germany made ready. Germany, I hasten to say, did not believe in Automatic Progress; but let us first attempt to analyze the faith of the other nations who did so believe. Why were we so blind before the event? It is not a complete answer to say that we were fools, or to damn our historians and politicians for having misled us. All our literature up to 1914 is crammed with expressions similar to that which I have quoted from Lord Bryce. They sound like the laughter of an infant just before the priest tosses him to Moloch. Here is another such utterance, from a very brilliant little book called The Living Past : ‘Even as this is being written the growing unity shows itself effectively in overcoming the most dangerous crisis of recent times, the Balkan difficulty of 1913. It is by such wise and patient action that the Western “Concert” comes into being, and will increasingly assert itself — strong, far-seeing, and united for the common weal.’
Upon the truth of these utterances the guns are thundering their adequate commentary. The delusion was, however, universal — always excepting Germany; and the source of the delusion is, I believe, to be found in two ideas which have held the greater portion of the western world in their grip for more than a century. The first is our idea of the function of the state; the second is our idea of the function of science. So long as we adhere to these ideas, so long are we doomed to drift.
II
All political and social discussions are cluttered with a mass of abstractions. We talk of liberty and rights, of laissez-faire and of state interference, of democracy and capital and labor. It would, of course, be idiotic to attempt to banish abstractions; but there is no valid reason why we should employ them as blinders, and it is possible to describe our idea of the function of the state in fairly simple terms, in terms of our action. We act as if the state were a corporation whose business it was to insure us against the interruption of our business. So long as our own private business prospers, we do not pay as much attention to the state as we do to the weather reports. When our private business does not prosper, we are vexed with the government. If a sufficient number of citizens are vexed, we overthrow the government — that is to say, we do nothing whatever to alter the government; we merely change the list of office-holders in the governmental corporation. We, as individuals, pay taxes to the corporation; the corporation in return for the taxes is supposed to guarantee our individual lives and our individual happiness. The transaction is commercial. And therefore in practice we regard it as proper to get something for nothing; and the business of making a ‘profit’ at the expense of the government becomes a part of every large industry conducted by the citizens of that government. Those who are at least fairly prosperous are inclined to ‘dodge’ their taxes. Consult your own conscience: do you not feel that you have done your whole duty by the government when you have voted and paid your taxes? How much time do you spend thinking about the government? Let us take a favorable case and suppose that you spend five or six hours a day in thinking, as distinguished from the performance of routine tasks: how great a proportion of that time do you devote to the problems of the government? One hour? Ten minutes? Perhaps.
Our political actions, therefore, as well as our whole political system, make manifest the unpleasant truth that the idea which controls our actions and upon which the system is built is the idea of t he Social Contract, of government as an insurance corporation; and the theory of the Social Contract was spawned by the brain of Thomas Hobbes, the great atheist, coward, and logician, about three hundred years ago. Hobbes’s idea was that government is the club which all of us agree to put in the hands of one large strong man, in order that he may protect us against each other, and also against foreign aggression. His idea was based upon the utterly false notion that primitive society was invariably engaged in civil war, except in so far as government, which is to say the Social Contract, intervened. Profoundly false as the theory was, it was popularized by the genius of Locke and of Rousseau, and speedily became dominant. It is par excellence the breeder of revolutions. Of course, if the government is under contract with you to protect your life, liberty, and happiness, and nevertheless fails so to do, the contract is void; and it is your duty to install another government. Thus the theory engenders fatally the very civil warfare which Hobbes said government was designed to avert. We rebelled against. Great Britain, with the noble battle-cry, derived from the Social Contract, ‘No taxation without representation.’
Even when the theory did not cause bloodshed, it assisted in the creation of party warfare, which is civil war without bloodshed. For parties are nothing but corporations, organized and maintained in order that they may take over by legal process the government (the ‘ club ’), and themselves enjoy the privilege and the profits of wielding that club. Hence we speak of the ‘ party in power.’ Hence we drift. For we are actually all of us in the same boat, and yet the helmsman is expected to steer with one eye on the course plotted by the leaders of one half of the passengers, and the other eye on the leaders of the other half of the passengers, who, as he is perfectly aware, are doing their best to wrench the wheel from his control. That is the process we call government! What, in the name of the Great Dead Governments, would anarchy be? It is no wonder that we drift. The only miracle is that we survive at all!
We began by inquiring why it is that modern nations are unhappily engaged in drifting, instead of directing their undoubtedly vast energies toward a better and happier future. We found that the historians are of little use in such an inquiry, because they confine themselves to the delightful task of saying at great length that every result has an adequate cause, and that we are where we are because we were where we were. As we look about us for some clue to the mystery, we find it in our own behavior. Each one of us devotes only an infinitesimal portion of his time to the study of our collective welfare. In obedience to the theory of the Social Contract and to the sublime principle of the division of labor, we have cast that responsibility upon the shoulders of the government, that is to say upon the professional politicians. If ‘our’ party happens to be in power, we try not to damn them; if the other party is in power, we damn them anyhow. When we inquire why it is that the citizens of a great living state can conduct themselves with somewhat less than the amount of intelligence which a vegetable expends in growing, we find that it is because our current governmental systems and practices and ideas are based upon, and have never outgrown, an idea called the Social Contract, an idea which was conceived in error and nourished in egregious folly. It is therefore only natural that a government founded upon such an idea should prove to be unsatisfactory in times of peace, and, in time of war, a disastrous failure.
Hence it is the duty of us all to do our best to uproot the erroneous idea that government is a function which concerns only experts, as well as the idea that government is something really external to each one of us. We play a part in government as truly when we neglect government as when we are so-called politicians. This then is one of the reasons why we drift, and why we still suppose that the government is a sort of insurance company.
III
There is, however, another reason. It is the prestige, the magical power which we have deluded ourselves into believing that science possesses. If you want to make a man neglect his business, all you have to do is to persuade him that some one else is doing his business for him as well as or better than he could do it himself. Is not the cheating trustee a well-known figure? The cheating trustee administers the fortune of an infant in such a way that the trustee gets the fortune and the infant gets nothing. The modern world has persuaded itself that all it has to do is to hand over its fortune to science. Science has accepted the trust; and just now science, with a ‘neutral’ stare, is presenting to us the results — the bombing aeroplane and the Zeppelin which is used to kill babies, the high explosive shells and the Krupp guns, the gasoline-pumps which the Germans employ to spray their enemies with, in order that they may efficiently burn them to death, the submarines, an interminable catalogue of hellish devices. And more than that, we have behind the firing-line the spectacle of a whole nation utilizing every atom of its scientific and industrial organization to destroy human life. It is wicked, it is insane, it is anything you like — and yet it is simply what we have permitted ourselves to do. On second thought, the comparison of science to the cheating trustee is altogether too flattering
— too flattering to us, I mean. No exterior agent has cheated us; it is we who have cheated ourselves.
Again we are confronted by the problem of our motives. Why is it that we have allowed science to run amuck, to be, not a savior but a destroyer ? One of our motives is fine, unselfish, idealistic
— the desire to make the world a better, cleaner, healthier place to live in; the other is the lust for gain, the greed which has exploited the earth by means of scientific industries. In the pursuit of gain, we have not only suffered ourselves to be enslaved by science, which is our tool, but we have done so because we had our attention so concentrated upon the material advantages which we could procure by the use of the tool, that we totally overlooked the disadvantages, both material and spiritual, which result from the misuse of the tool. We talk about our ‘conquest of nature’; but we have been employing a two-edged sword, which cuts as deep into us, into our flesh, as it cuts into nature. The earth does not bleed when it is torn up by a scientific engineer; but we do, when we are torn up. The same scientific principles are involved in both cases; only the motive is different. We cannot control the principles of science, but we can control human action and human motives, if we will. We must put to ourselves the same question as before, when we were discussing government: why is it that we have been so stupid as to allow a mere tool to dominate us? It is not enough to say that our greed blinded us; it is not enough to say that we have modern scientific warfare because we wanted modern scientific factories. Greed accounts for much, but not for all of our folly. Our false idealization of science is responsible for the rest.
I cannot help formulating, at this point, a prayer. I wish that some great lawgiver would appear among us, and enforce with flaming eloquence this new commandment: Let no man among you worship an abstraction. For science is an abstraction, and the worship of science has killed and is killing its millions. It is worth while to investigate the genesis of this delusion; and if we can find out how the worship of science is born, we may be able to kill it before it kills us.
Suppose that a poor and ignorant farming community has settled upon a land of average fertility. They have no doctors, and every once in a while the accumulated filth in the midst of which they live causes them to suffer from a terrible epidemic, which they denominate a ‘visitation of God.’ Crops are uncertain; if they are good, the farmers cry, ‘ God is merciful’; if they are bad, the farmers cry, ‘God is angry with us for our sins.’ They cannot travel, for they have bad roads. The men work all day in the fields; and the women work all day about the house. They make their own clothes, for there are no factories. Their life is at best full of toil; of art there is little or none, unless it be the art of the church, which swallows most of their trifling gains. At worst, their life is one of blind terror and of dreadful suffering, of squalor and of cruelty. And they ascribe every event, whether good or evil, to the will of God.
Into the midst of such a community comes a group of quiet black-coated men, who with incredible rapidity alter and transform the life of these people from top to bottom. They know where to find metals and coal; they erect strange buildings full of strange things which make more cloth in a day than a toiling woman could in her whole life; they build roads and railways; they build sewers and hospitals. Shops spring up, men become rich in a year; and all of a sudden ' God ’ ceases to send pestilence upon the community, no matter how much they sin. What process, I ask you, then goes on in the bewildered mind of this community? These quiet men, who worship a new deity called science, have transformed the world; they it, is who have overruled the elder god who sent disease and squalor and universal poverty and crops good or bad according to his temper; and therefore the mind of the community draws the only conclusion possible to it — that the new deity is a greater god than the god of their fathers. And so the community enshrines science, prostrates itself before science and all its works, and most of all before the visible priests and acolytes of that great god. Who shall presume to teach this community that these scientists are mere men, that their science itself is in reality no god beyond good and evil, but is merely the entirely human achievement of entirely human intelligences, of which the only proper function is to serve as the tool of man?
True, a few warning voices are heard, a Ruskin, a Tolstoï, a poet here and there. But they are ‘sentimental,’ they are ‘impractical,’ whatever those words mean in the vocabulary of hell. It may be worth noticing that the same epithets are now being applied to the Belgians by the Germans. And the result is that the voice of the prophets is drowned by the clamor of the factories and by the shouting of the men who build factories. Yet with the exception of those same sentimental and impractical prophets, no one in the world had brains enough to ask men what was being made in those factories, and for what purpose. If it were not for the bitterness of the tragedy involved, one could do nothing but laugh at a chemist who, though nominally sane, should spend his youth manufacturing quantities of a coarse poison, only to celebrate his arrival at mature years by himself consuming all of the poison he had himself made. He might at least have killed rats with it. But if we should proclaim that he was guilty of a tragic and ridiculous folly, what shall we say of a nation, of a world, which is doing the same thing upon a cosmic scale?
The worship of science is a religious mania, and its fruits are like the fruits of a religious mania. The world is familiar with them. Torture, persecution, bloodshed, indiscriminate assassination, and the sins of the spirit which are far worse than mere murder: pride and intolerance, burning hatred of all those who refuse to do obeisance to the fanatic’s deity, and that last corruption which, seizing upon the soul of the fanatic, makes him see all human truth as one mass of lies, and all lies as truth.
Let no man among you worship an abstraction. Science cannot save the world, for the plain reason that science is not divine. What has been the real history of the last century, the history which the historians have left unwritten? It has been the history of that community of ignorant farmers, and of the suicidal chemist, writ large. As if the world had swallowed hashish, so did its deep draughts of science make every limitation of human power to vanish before its astounded eyes. It was the age of the machine. The railway and the steamer annihilated distance. Darwin came, and we began to speak of Evolution instead of speaking of God; we discussed and believed in, not the Fall, but the Rise of man. The earth suddenly was revealed to be a storehouse of apparently inexhaustible wealth. Trade was no longer between town and town, but between continent and continent. The sky yielded its secrets. New inventions were poured out in floods, until we were so amazed that we lost the power of wondering at anything.
And it was science which wrought all these miracles, SCIENCE! We had lost faith in almost everything else, to be sure; but had we not gained a new deity of incalculable might? It is no marvel that we transferred our worship to the new god science; and with our worship we coupled all those blind hopes which are the very life of humanity, all our aspirations toward a brighter future, our capacity for sacrifice and for devotion unto death.
Now and then a war fell upon us, but our trust in Automatic Progress had been so thoroughly inculcated by our scientists that we paid little heed. Millions of us were poor, and many even starved in the midst of abundance; but you and I salved our remnants of human feeling by writing a check for charity. Had not science taught us that everything which took place was inevitable? So we bowed our heads to the decree of science, called ourselves humanitarians, and did our best to put ourselves in a position where wc could amply afford to bestow charity upon those who were destined to need charity. Science was to abolish war, and disease, and ignorance, and crime, and poverty, at some time in the future. ‘Leave it. to science,’ wc said; ‘and in the mean time do all you can for your individual self.’
What was worse, most of us took our own advice. We left all the rest to scientific experts: government we turned over to the politicians, law to the lawyers, health to the doctors, science to the scientists, religion to a dwindling body of clergy, and morals to I don’t know what. Literature and the other arts became a means of dissipation, a distraction for an idle hour or for an idle scientist. We raved about cubists and futurists and imagists. And we utterly neglected the common This, therefore, is the danger which menaces the American people: not, as we have vainly imagined, the danger that we might be forced into the war, or that we might be attacked after the
weal, since we were so certain that divine science would shed upon us a collective blessing, just as manna was shed of old upon God’s people. war, but rather our secret idolatry of a god who is at least first cousin to the god of the Germans. We may well be grateful that he is not identically the same; if he were, we should be fighting with the Germans against the Allies, and against humanity. As it is, we are neutral. We cannot repeat too often the truth that there is nothing moral about neutrality. Neutrality means indifference. It does not mean evenhanded justice; for justice takes an active part in the affairs of men, whereas we are decidedly not taking an active part. We are, indeed, making money, but that is for our private pocket. We feel dimly that something has happened to us when our ships are sunk by Germany and when our fellow citizens are killed by Germany; and even while some of us are proclaiming that we ought to ‘ do our bit ’ to bring the intolerable assassins to justice, others of us, though of pure American descent, are saying of our innocent dead, ‘It serves them right! What business had they to be in a place where they could cause us trouble!’
IV
Then came the awakening. Germany, the one country in the world which was above all others fitted, by blood and nurture, by Prussian Kaiser and Prussian discipline and Prussian rapacity, to be the new vessel of the new deity, proclaimed the holy war in the name of science, and signalized her entrance into the militant service of that god by ravishing Belgium, by ravishing the women and children of Belgium and France, by ravishing everything save the soul of Belgium and France. Since the first days, each successive act of Germany has thundered a half-misunderstood warning in the ears of a world which had gone far — who knows how far? — upon the same road toward the same insane and hellish destination, — half-misunderstood, for the precise reason that we were, and still are, ourselves infected with the same maniacal worship of science which has, under a German Kaiser and a German God, utterly destroyed both the reason and the humanity of Germany. Little Belgium has won her immortality by those days and months of heroism. France, the most humane and the most loved of nations, had sometimes set foot on that hateful road, but she was the first when the war came to perceive her own error and to return to that difficult, path over which alone humanity may climb. For England, the lesson has been harder, but she is learning it at great cost.
But the United States? Well, the nice, comfortable world in which we believed has been shattered, and we have been vainly striving to put it together again just as it was. The vast majority of our people have been shocked by what Germany has done. But they have not understood why Germany has acted as she has; they have not explained the sources of her sins, and therefore they have explained away these sins by means of the common historical superficialities, or, failing in that, have simply and speedily forgotten the sins of Germany as fast as Germany committed them. Why, indeed, should we remember them? Do we not find it peculiarly easy to forget our own sins? And just in so far as we Americans, like the Germans, have sinned the sin of greed, just in so far as we too have bowed down before deified science, just in so far as we too have suffered the tools of man to dominate and enslave the spirit of man, so far are the sins of the Germans our own, so far we render ourselves their accomplices. And the extent to which this moral cancer has eaten into our souls is made manifest by our moral insensibility. Our traditions of liberty have been perishing, and in their place we have erected shrines to prosperity, by which we mean greed, and to efficiency, by which we mean science. But these gods are also the gods of the Germans, and therefore we Americans have had for the Germans that involuntary sympathy which proclaims us their fellowworshipers. We should in all humility thank heaven that no Kaiser and no preöminent military caste have taken us over, as they took Germany over, and educated us through military discipline and through scientific discipline to coördinate all our passions and all our powers into the service of a god who is incarnate Germany, a trinity of greed and brutality and science.
The open public German propaganda which has been carried on among us is indeed damnable; but the real peril to American civilization is in our own hearts and minds, in the stealthy corruption of our power to perceive the truth and to know good from evil, in the mental and moral debauchery which is inevitable among men who worship greed and science.
It is not my purpose to propose that we should join the Allies. But I do propose that we should strive to make ourselves spiritually and intellectually fit to join the cause of humanity. And there is one very definite step that we can take in that direction. As worshipers make ablution before they enter a temple, so we must purge ourselves of falsehood and of the idolatry of science. If we fail to accomplish this, we shall continue to drift until we are damned, until our names are written in the records of history as of those who thrust themselves out of the fellowship of nations. The cause of humanity is one in which we can enroll, whether we ‘join the Allies’ or not; and there is literally an infinite amount of work to be done, of the hardest kind of work. For we cannot alter men for the better by a mere fiat; we can only alter men for the better by altering their ideas. Despite Germany and all her science, the human spirit cannot be governed by injunction.
Science, as I have tried to show, is neither god nor devil; science, by itself, has power neither to save nor to destroy. But we are learning at horrible cost the lesson that men armed with science can destroy in a moment human life and happiness and beauty that science can never replace. We are learning that the Germans are the only great modern nation which does not drift, or rather which was not drifting before the war. All the world worshiped science, and that was bad enough. But the Germans were the only people who had gone so far mad as to worship exclusively German science. All the world worshiped prosperity. But the Germans were the only people who believed that all the prosperity should belong to Germany. All the world made treaties, but the Germans were the only people who believed that they were above treaties. The Germans were the only great modern nation which was ruled by an autocracy. This autocracy expended all its cunning and all its force in the effort to accomplish rather an easy miracle, in the effort to make a nation worship itself. The autocracy succeeded. It employed national education and national drill and the FrancoPrussian War; it wove into a compact whole all the idealism and the capacity for obedience and for self-sacrifice. The nation was already drunk with science; and the autocracy drove it insane with patriotism. The miracle was done, and the Germans called themselves the Chosen People.
But the rest of the world did not know that the Germans were insane, and so it had not prepared an asylum for them. The rest of the world was partly mad itself, what with the worship of prosperity and of science. France recovered first, and Great Britain is struggling toward sanity. But we of the United States have with appallingly few exceptions continued in our ante-bellum frame of mind. We have not suffered, and our eyes have not been opened. We are still drifting; and our minds are still filled with the old illusions, the old belief in Automalic Progress which has caused us to drift. The first work we have to do is to eradicate these false ideas, and so to regain control of ourselves. Whether peace comes soon or not, this work must go on; else peace will be again, as was the peace of 1871—1914, but a pitiless truce before a still more terrible war. ‘Leagues to Enforce Peace’ and similar schemes are as toy pop-guns to a Ivrupp. We have to alter, not our laws and our treaties, but the very stuff of our mental life, to which our laws are as the froth on a spring of living water.
V
For one thing, the real function of government, like the true character of a man, is made manifest by crises. War is such a crisis; and we may plainly see, both in France and in England, that the ‘ pay your money and the government does the rest’ theory of the Social Contract is wholly abandoned in time of war. The traces of that theory which are left, particularly in England, are not sources of strength and happiness to the nation, but of weakness and of sorrow. The true function of government is to secure a better future for all its people, and the true relation between the government and its people is — to use an old-fashioned analogy — the same as the relation between the family council and the members of the family. The trouble with our present theory is that it does not work. Had France and England displayed before the war a tithe of that solidarity and devotion which is now making them glorious, would Germany have dared to declare war? Unless we can so alter our ideas as well as our political framework in the direction of solidarity and away from our present practice, we shall continue to have in peace but a mockery of real government, and in war, disaster.
For another task, we have science to subdue. That will be a great battle. To win it, we need enthusiasm and hard work and clear thinking. What shall be our plan of attack?
In the first place, you will observe that I have said that we must ‘subdue’ science; I have not said that we ought to annihilate science. To subjugate science, to bring it under the yoke of the human will, to guide it in the service of human justice and human truth — this is not to destroy science, but to prevent it from destroying us. So much for true science. But against false science we must indeed wage a war of extermination. How shall we know the difference between the true and the false? It is hard to distinguish between them, for they both are dressed out in the same language, and they both parade the same airs of ultimate and indefeasible authority. Yet this question can be answered — by another question. How do we know the difference between a man and a machine?
A man is alive, and a machine is not alive. This is the test by which we can distinguish between true and false science. In so far as the world and all that is therein is mechanical, science and scientific method can attain truth; in so far as the world and all that is therein is alive, science and scientific method are invalid, false, foredoomed to eternal failure. Therefore those sciences are justified which deal by scientific method with material, physical, mechanical facts — such sciences for example as chemistry and physics. But how about the sciences which pretend to deal with living beings, and above all with man, who is preëminent among living beings? How about biology, psychology, sociology, philology, politics, economics, history, and their associated multitude of subsidiary sciences?
Let us be bold and tell the truth; they are valid only in so far as living beings are mechanisms, and no further. With regard to man, they are less valid than they are when they deal with any other living being, for man is the least mechanical of animals. And therefore the cataract of volumes and myriads of monographs which have during the last century flooded our universities and our schools, and which have been written upon the hypothesis that man can be entirely explained as a mechanism, are radically false. Therefore there is no science of history, no science of economics, no science of sociology or of psychology, which can either render adequate account of the human past or predict the human future. It is true that we men are partly mechanisms who must eat in order to live; it is true that many of our actions are the product either of instinct or of self-interest. But it is equally true that men have voluntarily starved themselves to death, and it is equally true that even now millions of men are voluntarily devoting themselves to be killed, not out of self-interest, but out of their love for a future in which they themselves will never share.
How far astray we have been led by these false sciences, we do not realize. They have not succeeded in abolishing our souls, but they have incalculably perverted them. How extensive and disastrous is the perversion they cause, we have ample opportunity to see in the case of the Germans. Call to mind the fact that German science has for sixty years been the avowed model on which we Americans have based our instruction, that up to two years ago we openly worshiped German science, and that to-day there are thousands of our best-educated citizens who still believe, as the Germans believe, that science reigns supreme over humanity. This belief we can and we must overcome; and the ideas which are rooted in this belief we must trace out one by one and destroy as we should destroy so much poison.
Let us not suppose that this will be a merely negative task. Truth cannot grow in soil which is choked by lies; and we cannot fulfill our aspirations towards that better future which it is our dream to create, unless we make room for the truth.