Is It Really That Dark?

A Symposium

by BERNARD IDDINGS BELL

FOR the Atlantic in September Professor W. T. Stace, who teaches philosophy at Princeton University, wrote a fearsome paper. His contention is that modern science has made it impossible for anyone who is intelligent and informed or who, unthinking, takes the color of his mind from those who are his intellectual betters (and therefore the proper directors of the social pattern) to believe that there is meaning and purpose in the universe or in anything or anybody within that universe— that it is overwhelmingly a certainty, realized by the few and subconsciously sensed by the many, that nothing whatever has significance.

He goes on to point out that this new destruction of enlightenment, unavoidable, relentless, makes life hardly worth the living, ensures in all foreseeable probability the destruction of society, dooms man to “sink back into the savagery and brutality from which he came, taking a humble place once more among the lower animals.”Man who has lived and struggled, worked and sacrificed, through the long millennia under a now forever discredited illusion that somehow or other his hope of attaining to spiritual status could be realized must acknowledge that human life is only a tale told by an idiot, all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Is what Dr. Stace says true?

Dr. Stace is correct when he says that science reveals purpose in nothing, not even in science itself; meaning in no one, not even in a scientist. When we submit ourselves to a scientific discipline we soon discover that the universe, which had seemed a beautiful stage for spiritual adventure, appears to be nothing but blind matter-force moving with changeless and relentless and aimless precision. We turn out to be one with the beasts, and the beasts to be physicochemical. Thought turns out to be only nervous reaction to external stimuli; hopes are illusory. Our loves are not at all what they seem to be. Our dreams are evidence of mental maladjustments. Our destiny consists in an arrival at where we began; indeed “arrival" seems an unreal word, since there is no evidence of journey toward any end, only ceaseless minor changes within an inexorable and repetitious pattern.

There is nothing new in this. The truth of it is recognized by reputable theologians and by most philosophers; but it is truth not too well understood by the man in the street, in the pew, even in the laboratory. Most of the folks think that science begets cheerfulness and self-assurance and faith in progress, that it solves man’s basic problems and promises Utopia not long delayed. We should be grateful to Dr. Stace for reminding us that this optimistic notion of science and its possibilities is contrary to fact.

But this undoubtable truth, put with a proper brutality by Dr. Stace, is not the whole truth. He assumes, without any proof and indeed against the evidence furnished by the history of thinking, that only by science does man learn.

Though science does insist that purpose is to be ignored, this is not because purpose is nonexistent or even unimportant, but only because purpose is irrelevant to science. Science is concerned with examination of “the what” and “the how,”with that which can be perceived with the five senses. Purpose, “the why,” never has been, is not now, cannot be, revealed through sensory observation. To ask “why” in a scientific investigation is to confuse the investigation and befuddle the investigator. Science reveals no purpose because science deliberately and necessarily refuses to consider purpose.

The scientist, must, to be sure, because he is a man, go beyond science. As Professor Eddington has said, science cannot satisfy the scientist; “the scientific world of pointer readings would be an impossible world to inhabit. It is a symbolic world and the only thing that could live in it would be a symbol — but I am not a symbol.” When the scientist asks “why” he ceases to act qua scientist. Every scientist does ask “why,” every philosopher, every human being, even Dr. Stace; and if there is recourse by them to nothing more than science, they get no answer to their query and soon arrive precisely where Dr. Stace has arrived, at grim despair.

The trouble is with Dr. Stace’s epistemology, his notion of what knowledge is. He seems to think that knowledge results from reason digesting what is revealed by only one sort of experience, the scientific. He ignores the other empirical disciplines that combine to reveal the purpose which science, because of its considered and unavoidable self-limitation, is unable to reveal. For facts, one goes to science; for meaning, there are other teachers. Dr. Stace would persuade us to ignore these other teachers. He would have us depend to such a sole degree on science that we overlook experiences more subtle than science, more elusive, the interpretative experiences.

The first of the extra-scientific experiences consists of a direct acceptance of that which is — of nature in its intricate variety, an acceptance which should precede analysis and codification. A tree or a mountain or a bird or a fish or an atom of plutonium or the starry heavens should be accepted gladly, humbly, gratefully, before if is approached scientifically. By such acceptance one safeguards against an attempt to reduce nature to the level of sense-bound intelligence.

Such a regard for nature bears much the same relationship to science that poetry bears to literary criticism or that religion bears to theology. One can be a competent analyst of poetry and yet by premature analysis drive a poem out the window. One may be acute in theology without coming within hailing distance of religion. One may be ever so good a scientist and yet not understand nature. A more than scientific approach to nature is indispensable if one would arrive at such a sense of unity with that which is as results in understanding, serenity, peace, freedom. Modern man is becoming less and less adept in making this sort of approach.

The second purpose-revealing experience is creative experience, the experience of the artist, the craftsman. It is an experience possible for anyone; to be an artist means simply to do what is in front of one to do as beautifully as one knows how to do it. We can manipulate mass, color, sound, words, until at least partly they embody insights into order and significance. So clearly can we incarnate such discernments that symbolically we convey those discernments to others, as well as find them intensified within ourselves.

In this sort of thing, too, contemporary man for the most part is but indifferently trained. Despite some small improvement of late, most people nowadays think of the crafts as utilitarian rather than as opportunities for creativity and enlarged understanding, and of the arts as concerned with incidental, almost accidental, enjoyments. They are persuaded also that in respect to the arts all but a very few of us are properly spectators rather than participants. We listen to music rather than make music; we “appreciate” rather than paint or carve or build; we sit in the grandstand rather than play games. By this we are deprived of access to intention. To do anything for the joy of doing it well results in discovery of purpose — purpose in the thing done, purpose in the doer. The artist knows that there is more in heaven and earth than can be perceived with the five senses; he even knows what it is that his artistry reveals, although he rarely can put it into pedestrian prose, much less reduce it to an equation.

There is a third experience, also possible for everyone, which helps toward the realization of purpose. Man can discover other persons, evaluate, appreciate, considerably come to understand them. To describe love and friendship, aversion and enmity, is difficult; but we all know what they art* and how revealing they are. They are only to a small degree dependent upon scientific analysis; they are another sort of thing than sensing nature; they have not much to do with creativity. One learns 1 hrough them mystically, learns by loving or the reverse of loving.

Mystical experience is of two sub-varieties: the first, experience of contingent persons; the second, experience of an ultimate Person. Sometimes humanists are persuaded that the only contact of person with person or persons which is possible or necessary is contact between human beings. The long record of man’s striving to know and understand shows that in this humanists are mistaken. The humanist usually turns out to be either one who shrinks from commerce with the more than human because he finds it too emotionally demanding, or else one who has perceived the inadequacy of things but has not yet discovered that even the finest human companionships are in themselves also unsatisfactory. The humanist rarely stops at humanism, unless his career is cut off by early death. He either goes on from humanism into theism and so finds in God the meaning of things and people, including himself, or else he joins Dr. Stace and his non-mystical friends and shivers in hopelessness. Dr. Stace hates the humanist as thoroughly as he does the theist. Both to his mind are obscurantists and cowards.

In the Middle Ages people discovered purpose chiefly through theistic mysticism; in the Renaissance, for the most part through humanistic mysticism. We twentieth-century people increasingly neglect all mysticism, along with creativity and a glad acceptance of nature, and rely instead too entirely on inductive science, which reveals no purpose. But the purpose is still there, discoverable. The trouble is that we refuse to use the techniques that reveal it.

That science is necessary, admirable, no one in his right mind will deny, or depreciate what it has done and is doing and will do. It has made possible for the masses possessions and freedoms beyond belief. It has devised sanitary arrangements and medical and surgical devices which have doubled the average span of life. It has accelerated communication until all nations live in neighborhood, even if not in peace. More significant still is the knowledge of the cosmos, of the nature of matterforce, which scientists have arrived at.

What is unfortunate about science is that it has developed not only quiet and effective scientists but also highly vocal scientificists who shout that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge which really is knowledge.

Our chief problem is how to rescue modern man from scientificism, to restore a realization that man is meant to be, always is unless self-warped, not only a scientific methodologist but also a poet, a mystic, a lover, an artist, a philosopher who erects the fabric of his thought out of every possible kind of empirical experience. Only if we can persuade man to exercise all his faculties will he again be sane and society secure. We are not helped toward this good end by despairing professors who, having boarded up the windows, cry out that the old light shines no more; who, when there come those who propose opening the shutters, insist that these benefactors are victims of “comforting illusions, within the warm glow of which the more tender-minded intellectuals [seek] to shelter themselves from the icy winds of the universe.”