Knowledge Without Understanding

I

THE time in which we are living is unique in the history of the world. Of course, in some sense or other all times are unique, but the peculiar property of the present age, which makes it stand out from all others in the contemplation of philosophically-minded persons, is that for the first time the bulk of the population of civilized countries consists of educated people. I do not deny that the education is often little more than embryonic, but the characteristic of an embryo is that it grows. 1 do not deny that modern education often takes the form of the little learning proverbially damned as dangerous, but for that very reason, if for no other, it is a fact to be faced with the utmost seriousness.

The man in the street — at least in democratic countries like America and England — is no longer a part of the ‘hard-headed British (or American) working classes’ at election times, and a numskull obviously incapable of forming wise judgments when the election is over: he belongs to a body of men and women who listen with pleasure and eager anticipation to protracted series of radio talks on subjects demanding careful thought — men and women who are no longer channels through which knowledge flows, or even receptacles in which it is stored, but intelligent agents, capable of grinding it down and transmuting it into wisdom. In order to sell one’s books it may still be necessary to appeal chiefly to the emotions, but it is no longer the lowest form of emotionalism that responds, and the bait may be the subtlest of recent thought instead of romantic love-fiction; it is the marriage of geometry and mechanics rather than that of the beggar-maid and the prince that draws the cheering crowd. More than ever before we find a desire to know what the best minds are thinking, and a capacity to form independent judgment when the knowledge is obtained. And the irony of the situation is that no sooner does this state of things come into existence than knowledge of all kinds begins to assume the cloak of absurdity.

If there is one word that more aptly than another describes modern intellectual activity in its widest generality, that word is ’unintelligibility.’ In physics the name of relativity is notorious: if one claims to understand it he is looked at askance, and his subsequent statements are regarded with suspicion. Yet even relativity shrinks before the spectre of the quantum theory, in which a particle and a wave are the same thing and we are at last, as one physicist put it, ‘firmly grounded on the principle of uncertainty.’ Men shake their heads and turn, perhaps, to logic — the subject which, as I learned in my youth, had not changed since the time of Aristotle and could elicit an instinctive appreciation from every rational human being. But what has happened here? The unchangeable has at last changed, and the new logic, having donned the mantle of philosophy, is in full retreat before physics into the realm of the incomprehensible, as though it feared usurpation of the crown which philosophy has always seemed to regard as its prerogative. One of the leaders of modern logical thought, Mr. Wittgenstein, who has given rise (involuntarily, it seems) to what is perhaps the most vigorous of modern philosophical schools, — that of logical positivism, — concludes his fundamental treatise on the essence of the rational with these words: ‘My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands them finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them.’ Or, as Mr. Bertrand Russell expresses it in his explanatory preface, ‘the things that have to be said in leading the reader to understand Mr. Wittgenstein’s theory are all of them things which that theory itself condemns as meaningless.‘

Literature, then: surely here is something communicable! ‘My first counsel,’ says Mr. Harold Nicolson, the well-known English critic, in a defense of present-day literature, ‘to those who wish to approach modern writing is, from the outset, to divest themselves of all preconceived notions of clarity or comprehension . . . the modern reader should be prepared for gaps in communication, and should accept as incomprehensible those allusions on the part of the author which he may not be even expected to understand.’ This is frank enough; but perhaps he has gone too far. Mr. James Joyce seems to be more accommodating; he gives us hope, though it may be of the deferred quality. ‘The demand that I make of my reader,’ he told Mr. Max Eastman in an interview, ‘is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works’; and it is only afterward that we realize that he has not promised understanding, even then.

We turn to art. Here is Mr. Harold Nicolson again, saying temperately what some have urged with impassioned emphasis: ‘Few modern pictures can, or wish to, answer the question: “ What is that meant to be?” The modern artist tries merely to convey the effect produced upon his own sensibilities by certain combinations of light and shade, by certain adjustments of volume or color. He is not concerned with rendering these effects intelligible to the public, still less is he concerned with telling the public a story which they wall recognize and understand.’

Music is in similar, though not quite identical, case. In the past it has not claimed to appeal greatly to the intelligence, aiming rather at the emotions. To-day it seems to be accounting for its practice of exciting the least pleasing emotions by producing theories of which we were not previously aware of the need.

Religion, of course, remains as a solace to many, but only so long as it remains true to itself. Long ago it offered a peace which passeth all understanding, not because it was difficult to understand, but because understanding was irrelevant. To-day the interpretations (equally futile, as it seems to me) range from the thirteenthcentury system of Saint Thomas Aquinas — which is not only difficult in itself but is inherently inadequate on account of its inexpressibility in terms of modern thought — to the discovery that, after all, religion is simply mathematics, which no ordinary person can be expected to understand. One eminent English bishop, it is true, does offer the ordinary man a treatise of theorems in non-Euclidean geometry as a contribution to the solution of religious difficulties, and confesses — as though with his wisdom he had lost understanding — that a metaphor which any nineteenth-century churchgoer would have understood perfectly is beyond him.

Look where you will, you find the newly awakened mind no sooner conscious that it is in a world of realities than it becomes conscious also that those realities are beyond its apprehension. It has simply exchanged one dream world for another.

II

Now it is of the first importance to notice that in all these departments of thought we are dealing, not with difficulties which stimulate, but with impossibilities which crush. The new ideas are not merely hard to understand; they are intrinsically beyond the reach of understanding — or, at the best, beyond the reach of understanding without a long and arduous course of special training which only few can undertake.

Furthermore, the doctrines which are preached by the favored few who have more than normal powers are not such as, to the ordinary man, seem reasonable. If they were, he might profitably take the reasoning on trust, and try to think out the full effect of the conclusions on his public and private life. But when the conclusions themselves seem absurd, and he is incapable of checking them, what then? When the witnesses speak in unknown tongues and the judge seems mad, what is the poor jury to do?

When you are told that the mass of the sun is 1½ kilometres; that when you say ‘red is a color’ you are talking nonsense; that the introduction of punctuation marks in the midst of a single word is admirable because it serves to mark ‘the acceleration and hesitation of the rapid, capricious, and melodic line’; that we have too little to eat because we have too much; and that if you try to understand these things you must be endowed with special gifts and spend a lifetime in developing them — how are you going to execute, in calmness and confidence, those simple tasks of controlling the destinies of present and future generations, in your own and other countries of the world, which a democratic constitution has laid upon you?

It will be becoming clear, I hope, that a few hours spent in considering the philosophy underlying modern intellectual movements is not necessarily idle trifling.

But I am going to claim more than this. It seems to me that this problem is the one which, above all others, needs consideration at the present time, because if you have once understood what it is that any group of thinkers is actually doing, you have taken the first and greatest step toward a true appreciation of their thoughts themselves. We must discover what our leaders of thought are doing in thus suddenly and unanimously leading us into this bog of nescience. Not, be it observed, why they are doing it; that, important as it is, is a task for the historian or the psychologist, according to the meaning you attach to the word ‘why.’ What they are doing is a far more important question. The fish (pace the behaviorists) knows very well why it goes to the fly; if it knew what its action was, it would be a wiser and less sad fish.

Now although, in the last resort, all intellectual inquiries have an infinite scope, I think science makes a special demand on our attention at this time. To say that it is the most important inquiry would be to lay oneself open to the suspicion of exalting his own particular interest in a spirit of partisanship. I think, however, that after all allowance has been made for this it remains true that science offers the most promising inroad into the fundamental philosophy of life to which all intellectual interests must lead if they are followed to their source. In the first place, science is the most uniformly successful of human endeavors. In rapidity of progress, it leaves all its rivals far behind. Compared with traditional philosophy, art criticism, theology, and the rest, it has but negligible internal dissensions; scientists put their brains together instead of setting them against one another. It is also more closely wedded to the ordinary affairs of life than any other mental activity — so much so, indeed, that it is quite the fashion among the ignorant to think of science in terms of practical application instead of intellectual adventure, and, only too often, to forget the benefits of such application in condemning the evils: poison gas fills the front of the stage while X-rays recede to the background.

The essentially virile character of science as compared with traditional philosophy is strikingly shown by a recent example. For generations philosophers have discussed, in connection with the problem of idealism versus realism, the proposition that things cannot be known as they are because the act of knowing inevitably modifies them; the phenomenon cannot be identical with the noumenon. In spite of all discussion, however, there remain idealists and realists in very much the same relative strength as ever. Science has ignored this question completely until it has, in its own natural course, come up against the difficulty that it cannot increase the accuracy of measurement of one characteristic of a system without decreasing the accuracy of measurement of another. And what has happened? There has been next to no ‘discussion.’ The impossibility of knowing a system completely as it is, in the current physical terms, has been accepted, and, instead of spending idle controversy on which characteristic it is better to know, the fact of incompatibility has itself been used as a principle by means of which further advances have been made.

I cite this instance not in invidious comparison. Doubtless philosophers can explain why their problems must necessarily be more debatable than those of scientists; but the fact remains that science surmounts its stumblingblocks and turns them to account, while philosophy makes an apparently indefinitely protracted halt, and that fact alone affords a strong reason for choosing science as the most suitable particular through which to seek the common origin of general systematic thought.

III

Now, while all this is true, there is a more immediate and topical reason why the meaning of science demands special inquiry at this moment. I have spoken of the general unintelligibility of modern thought, and hinted at its dangers. Science shares this unintelligibility with the other kinds of thought, but its situation is peculiar mainly because the public interest in science is probably as great as that in all other subjects put together. Its immediate relation to everyday experience and the dramatic character of its recent exploits are doubtless largely responsible for this — but again, causes do not concern us; it is the fact that matters.

The most prominent example is provided by psychology. Every third-rate novelist or playwright is a first-rate psychoanalyst; and where Shakespeare could only leave his audience to surmise why Macbeth could not pronounce ‘Amen’ when he had most need of it, his successor of to-day airily creates a character who not only relieves our anxieties with talk of ‘repressions’ and ‘libidos’ and ‘conflicts’ and ‘conations’ and the rest, but is only too obviously on the spot in anticipation of that very task. It is not merely psychology without tears, it is psychology with shouts of joy; and no one would be so cruel as to ask if it is true psychology, for that would mar the unity of the plot. The only test which could afford any positive knowledge on this point — namely, an inquiry into the degree to which these amateur psychologists have, on the average, surpassed simple, uninitiated folk in composing their married lives — would not, so far as my limited observation goes, yield a result greatly in their favor. But the public does not inquire into that. The jargon is displayed with such an air of authority that its significance and authenticity are taken for granted, and instead of the original mysteriousness and inherent difficulty of psychology we have an illusion of simplicity and mechanical application of rules which is even worse than realized inapprehension.

In physics the situation is in some respects the same, and in others precisely the opposite. Here there is no need to work relativity and the quantum theory into the texture of fiction: modern physics itself takes the place of fiction — if, indeed, it is not itself sometimes fiction in disguise. In this subject, more than in any other, the cry for interpretation has met with a response from men peculiarly gifted in exposition, and the rough places have been made so plain that it is scarcely possible to tread them without slipping. The result, as we all know, is that books of physical theory and speculation rank among ‘best sellers’ — a class of literature formerly occupied exclusively by novels and entered, apparently, on conditions unrelated to their merit.

Superficially, this is not a thing to be deplored, and certainly no one would question the ability of some of the authors, or their competence for the work they have undertaken. But to what does it all lead? The enigmas of modern physics are in no measure explained; they are simply dispelled. The reader is not enlightened; he is drugged. Paradox, instead of being a challenge to thought, becomes a delight to the ear, and whenever the reader feels a question arising in his mind there is always a comfortable assurance ready to preserve him from the dangers of thinking out the answer.

‘But what,’ he may ask, ‘is this electron which you say is both a particle and a wave?’ ‘Ah, you need n’t trouble about that,’ is the reply; ‘we don’t know ourselves: the electron is something unknown doing we don’t know what.’ ‘But what, then, have you discovered? Why do you speak so contemptuously of the old science, which we understood in some measure, and say it is superseded by a great new revelation?’ ‘Because we have found that, at bottom, everything is mathematics.’ ‘ What, then, is mathematics? ’ ‘ Why, my dear fellow, mathematics is the one sole characteristic of the Creator: would you presume to understand that? If you knew mathematics you would know everything; a mathematical formula, and nothing else, expresses the ultimate reality. You yourself are simply a mathematical formula — a mathematical thought in the mind of a perfect Mathematician. Is not that sufficient justification for contempt of a mere system of screws and flywheels which the last century talked about?’ ‘Well, yes, I suppose; but I don’t see how you have found out that everything is mathematics.’ ‘Why, by mathematics, of course; how else, since mathematics is everything? The system of physics is a closed system.’

And so, you see, the reader’s difficulties are deflected one by one until at last he either concludes that he has no brain for that kind of thing, which no doubt would be clear enough if he were not so dull, or else is so delighted that somebody appears to understand it that he forgets all about his own difficulties in admiration of the wonders which science can perform.

This is no travesty. It describes, in fact, a process which I have repeatedly observed to be going on in the minds of men endowed with good intellects and blessed formerly with a healthy desire to understand what was happening in the scientific world. Here are a few published examples. ‘ We are proloundly ignorant,’ writes Sir Herbert Samuel, in an address on ‘Philosophy and the Ordinary Man,’ with regard to the ultimate stuff of the physical universe. . . . If an event is merely something happening to nothing, that does not carry us much further. . . . When we come to the theory offered by relativity we are no better off. For my own part I shall refuse to admit without a struggle that I am nothing more than a pattern of folds or stresses in the space-time continuum. . . . There we stand, then, with regard to these great matters, awaiting with what patience we may fresh discoveries by the pioneers of thought that may open to us territories . . . which we cannot yet enter.’

Here is one, then, admittedly struggling rather hopelessly against conclusions forced on him against his reason, and, instead of trusting his reason to declare them false, faintly trusting the larger hope that his adversaries, when they have conquered him, will lodge him in a comfortable internment camp.

Now let us hear one who has yielded and is being marched off in custody. The mathematicians are among the most trustworthy of intellectual guides,’ writes a doctor of science, L. M. Parsons, in The Universe of Our Experience. ‘Eventually we may have to trust the mathematician alone.’ And after consulting the mathematician he goes on to say that ‘science leaves us free to give such interpretation of the mysterious background of phenomena as we may wish.’ Captivity looks not so bad, then: we can really trust our masters to look after us. And here finally is the proof, from one safely imprisoned. It is far better even than we dared to hope. We are not merely lodged in comfort; we are hypnotized so that we believe we are free. In the Introduction to the reprint, in the well-known ‘Everyman’s Library,’ of Sir Arthur Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World, we read the following: This book is of testamentary importance in the recent emancipation of thought from the shackles of classical science.’ Emancipation for what? The next page tells us. ‘ We pay our money, two shillings in this case, and Eddington, the magician, does the rest.’ In other words, to think is to be shackled; freedom is to pay others to think for you.

I wish these quotations could be regarded as the usual extravagances which accompany a forward movement, but it is only too clear that they cannot. We are faced with a very definite situation — an intellectual atmosphere in which breathing is impossible because some constituents flatly refuse to enter the lungs, while others, entering only too easily, turn out to be anæsthetics. Mr. Joyce demands the reader’s whole life; Sir Arthur Eddington demands half a dollar. And what the reader wants more than ever before, and more than ever before is capable of receiving, is guidance in his own thinking. He can live his own life if Mr. Joyce will tell him, in language which he can understand, whatever will help him in that task. He can think for himself if Sir Arthur will tell him, not what it is impossible to do and know, or what science no longer believes, but in what scientific thought can assist his own thinking. It is just this lack of a medium for the ordinary man, between an impossible effort and no effort at all, between the fate of Sisyphus and the ministrations of Procrustes, that makes it so important to-day to examine the essential character of science itself rather than the particular aspect which it presents at the moment.

IV

I must here digress briefly to say, as emphatically as I can, that no personal considerations of any kind intrude into this article. In speaking as I have done of the great popularizes of physics, I impute no culpable error, still less any unworthy motive. Further, I am not in the least unconscious of the enormous benefits which I, as well as innumerable others, have derived from their books. But I am concerned solely with the results of their actions, not at all with the causes; and while, for reasons already indicated, I believe those results to be in many important points extremely unfortunate, nothing is further from my intention than to blame the authors. It is easy to be wise after the event; it is almost impossible to be wise enough before; and I freely admit that the only reason why I did not myself write the purely expository parts of The Nature of the Physical World, for example, was lack of the necessary knowledge and ability.

My chief aspiration is to be clear; it seems to me less harmful to be clearly wrong than doubtfully right. I accordingly allow no false delicacy of feeling to temper the definiteness of any statement, trusting to this explanation and my happy acquaintanceship with the authors concerned, amounting in some cases to friendship, to prevent misunderstanding. I find no difficulty whatever in mingling the greatest affection and admiration for a man, on both the intellectual and the moral planes, with dislike of his ideas. This, I think, is as it should be, and I ask no different treatment for myself and my ideas. If we cannot maintain this distinction we may as well give up science and take to politics.

Resuming our theme, then, let us ask what sort of behavior we may expect from a people looking for knowledge and desiring to think clearly, when it is on one side faced by complete blankness and on the other charmed by the unexpected delight of being able, with a good conscience, to leave its thinking to others. I am speaking of people in democratic countries, on whose clear thinking ultimately depends the future of their own civilization and that of others. The question is not pleasant. That the state of the public mind does, in fact, oscillate between the above extremes is not difficult to verify; in England, at least, it is only too clearly shown. There is a complete and quite unconscious incompatibility between the attitudes of the ordinary man toward problems which, if they need a different approach at all, need it in just the opposite way to that which we find to be the fact. In matters which he has once learned to call ‘science’ his respect for knowledge is abject; the most obvious nonsense is welcomed with joy and wonder if it is only called ‘mathematics’ or ‘quantum theory.’ On the other hand, in matters of infinitely more difficulty which are not technically ‘science,’the opinions of experts with first-hand knowledge are deemed absurd, or even criminal, if they conflict wit h the emanations of his own ignorance.

He knows exactly how the people of India should be governed, but he calls in a plumber to put a new washer on the kitchen tap. He knows very well whether the Codex Sinaiticus is a forgery or not, but when his electric light fails only the electrician can deal with the blown fuse. He has been writing to The Times, explaining in detailed psychoanalytic terms how we came to expose a portion of our pocket handkerchiefs, but he believes that time and space are identical if only ‘science’ tells him so. He has strong convictions on the employment of men, but he accepts in respectful admiration the scientist’s instructions on how to employ a microscope. He can read statesmen’s motives with precision and certainty, but he dare not read an ammeter.

In such a situation, what is to be done? Surely it is to restore — or, if you like, create — in the public mind the proper degree of confidence in its own judgment, the sense that the problems of government by which it is faced, though extremely difficult and incapable of immediate final solution, are best approached by the free exercise of ordinary human reason, sharpened and nourished on facts by the best minds which our age has produced. The blind acceptance of authority, as well as the supreme assurance of ignorance, must yield to the active operation of a reason conscious equally of its sovereign powers and of their proper limitations. There is no state of mind more easily exploited by the clever demagogue, charlatan though he may be, than that which exists among us at this moment. And the only way that I can see of displacing that state of mind by a rational one is by showing that the achievements of modern thought — in physics in particular — have come not by the magic of a rare and special faculty, but by the exercise of just those very powers of reason which every normal man possesses in some degree, on facts observed by the ordinary human senses.

Such exercise is not easy, but it is normal. The non-specialist cannot hope to understand all the details by which the results have been reached, but he is capable of understanding quite well what those results are, and can judge for himself in what manner and to what degree they bear on his life as a whole. A nation of men and women with free, disciplined minds is a dream, and I am under no illusion that we are going to realize it in the twinkling of an eye, but I hope readers will agree that it is a dream worth realizing.

V

But, if all this is granted, who is to undertake the work of interpreting the intellectual characteristics of the present age in terms generally significant? The answer, I think, is — anyone who can do it. The requirements in the particular field before us now are a considerable knowledge of physics and philosophy, and extreme simplicity and breadth of mind; and it is the last which is most essential and, in the present sophisticated state of thought, most difficult to cultivate. It is fairly obvious that no one man is sufficiently endowed to perform the task once for all. The situation demands contributions from all who have with knowledge meditated on the problem sufficiently to have acquired a consistent, rational outlook.

Two things, however, should be said. A man’s actual achievements in solving detailed problems in physics or philosophy are (except for the limited extent to which they imply understanding of the fundamental principles of the subjects themselves) rather a disqualification than otherwise for our purpose, for they tend to give his mind a bias in the direction of his own special research: it is knowledge, not achievement, that is necessary. We do not go to the holder of racing records to solve the traffic problem for us, and although the idea has been held — and is still held in some quarters — that eminence in science is a guarantee that a man will be a successful member of Parliament, the evidence is strongly against the idea. It would be absurd, of course, to go to the other extreme, and hold a man to be disqualified for taking a broad view because he has achieved success where a narrow one was needed. The mind’s eye, like the body’s, has a large range of accommodation, and there are outstanding examples in America, as well as in England, proving it is sometimes freely used. But it nevertheless remains true that achievement in a subject is a hindrance rather than a help in estimating the true relation of that subject to others. It is the man who, in perpetual detachment, keeps an eternal vigilance on the whole field of his inquiry that sees the content of that field in the best perspective.

The other point is that, since the present situation in philosophical physics is so extremely intricate, the ideally detached man is, humanly speaking, an impossibility. We cannot withdraw far enough from the scene to hold philosophy and physics in equal scrutiny without losing essential details, and it follows that he who would attempt to solve our problem must be in some measure either a philosopher or a physicist. To say that the physicist is the more favorably situated is not to take sides in a quarrel which has no justification for existing. It does not mean that physics is in any sense a more proper study than philosophy: such an idea belongs to the same class of absurdities as the illusions that one’s own country or university or football team is automatically superior to any other.

Physics is not one iota nobler or baser than philosophy, but at the present time the physicist has a better chance of obtaining a sufficient knowledge of philosophy than the philosopher has of obtaining a sufficient knowledge of physics, for the same reason that a seaman acquires land legs more quickly than a landsman acquires sea legs. Modern physics, is, indeed, not unlike a ship, drawing nearer to a goal not yet in sight, but so tossed about by the buffetings of experiment and working hypothesis that the passenger scarcely knows whether he is progressing or drifting. Philosophy, by comparison, is the steady rock on which the lighthouse stands.

The metaphor will bear extension. The slight movement of an earthquake shock destroys the lighthouse, and a new one is built over its wreck; while the far greater displacements of the physical ship in a storm have little influence on its forward course. But that is by the way; the main point is that the physicist can more easily obtain sufficient philosophical knowledge than the philosopher can acquire sufficient physical knowledge.

It is beyond the scope of an article such as this to attempt to solve the problems raised: all that it is possible to do is to direct attention to them. We stand in a perilous position; to realize the peril is the first necessity.