Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other EssaysCarpenter, Edward
Philosophy
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays
Carpenter, Edward
Civilization; Crime; Evolution; Science
But before proceeding to defend this position, let me admit at once that
this attempt of Modern Science to get rid of human feeling and to look
at everything in the dry light of the intellect was in some respects a
very grand one. When you consider what the Old-time Science was, with
its fancies and prejudices, its dragons pasturing upon the sun and moon
in eclipses, its immolations of hundreds of human beings to appease some
god of pestilence or earthquake, its panics, its superstitions, and its
incapability of regarding anything except from the point of view of that
thing's influence on man's own comfort and his little hopes and fears,
it was indeed a grand advance to try and see _facts_, uncoloured and for
themselves alone. It was an effort of Man as it were to rise above
himself, to which I accord the fullest credit and honour.
And yet, during the time spoken of, it kept growing on me: first, that
the attempt was an impossible one; secondly, that the Science so-called
was not a true Science; and thirdly, that in its pretence to an
intellectual exactitude which it did not really possess, this Modern
Science was leading to a narrow-mindedness and a dogmatism as bad as the
old.
There is in fact (so I think) a fallacy in the attempt. But how shall I
describe it? Our relations to the world may, quite roughly speaking, be
divided into three groups--those that are sensuous and perceptional,
those that are purely intellectual, and those that are of an emotional
and moral order. Take any object of Nature--a bird, for instance. We may
look upon the bird as an object of sense-perceptions--its form, its
colour, its song, and so forth. Some people attain to extraordinary
skill and quickness in this department, recognising in a moment the note
or even the flight of a songster. Then again we may look upon the bird
from the intellectual side--we may study it in relation to its
surroundings--the form of its wings, the length of its leg, the
character of its beak, and their adaptation to its habits, to its
locality, to its food, and so forth. Thus we may get a whole series of
purely intellectual results--relations of the bird to the world in which
it lives. This is the special field of the present-day Science. But,
again, we may regard the bird in its emotional and moral relations to
_us_. One man at the sight of it may be affected with admiration of its
beauty, with tenderness towards it, or sympathy; another may be
stimulated to wonder whether he can kill it, or whether it is good to
eat! Modern Science is indifferent to what this last set of relations
may be; it does not concern itself much with the first; but it takes the
middle term, the purely intellectual, and seeks to abstract that from
the others, to study the bird, or whatever the object may be, in the one
aspect only. But can that really be done? The answer is, of course, No.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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