Chapter 6

Galileo and his case we shall consider later on, for he and it are really germane to the question with which we are dealing. The Inquisition has really nothing to do with the matter. The _Index_ we also reserve for a later part of this essay. With the _imprimatur_ we may now deal, since there is no doubt that there is a genuine misunderstanding on this subject on the part of some people who are misled perhaps through ignorance of Latin and quite certainly through ignorance of what the whole matter amounts to. Let us begin by reminding ourselves that, though the unchanging Church is now, so far as I am aware, the only body which issues an _imprimatur_, there were other instances of the exercise of such a privilege even in recent or comparatively recent days. There were Royal licences to print with which we need not concern ourselves. But, what is important, there was a time when the scientific authority of the day assumed the right of issuing an _imprimatur_. I take the first book which occurs to me, Tyson's _Anatomie of a Pygmie_, and for the sake of those who are not acquainted with it, I may add that this book is not only the foundation-stone of Comparative Anatomy, but also, through its appendix _A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs, and Sphinges of the Ancients_, the foundation-stone of all folk-lore study. On the page fronting the title of this work the following appears:

_17 Die Maij, 1699._

_Imprimatur Liber cui Titulus, Orang-Outang sive Homo Sylvestris, etc. Authore Edvardo Tyson, M.D., R.S.S._

_John Hoskins, V.P.R.S._

What does this mean? In the first place it shows, what all instructed persons know, that the Royal Society did then exercise the privilege of giving an _imprimatur_ at any rate to books written by its own Fellows. It cannot be supposed that such _imprimatur_ guaranteed the accuracy of all the statements made by Tyson, for we may feel sure that John Hoskins was quite unable to give any such assurance. We must assume that it meant that there was nothing in the book which would reflect discredit upon the Society of which Tyson was a Fellow and from which the _imprimatur_ was obtained.

However this may be, the sway over its Fellows' publications was exercised, and indeed very excellent arguments might be adduced for the reassumption of such a sway even to-day.[26]

Though the _imprimatur_ in question has fallen into desuetude, it is, as we all know, the commonest of things for the introductions to works of science to occupy some often considerable part of their space with acknowledgments of assistance given by learned friends who have read the manuscript or the proofs and made suggestions with the object of improving the book or adding to its accuracy. Any person who has written a book can feel nothing but gratitude towards those who have helped him to avoid the errors and slips to which even the most careful are subject.

So that such acknowledgments of assistance have come to be almost what the lawyers call "common form." What they really amount to is a proclamation on the part of the author that he has done his best to ensure that his book is free from mistakes. Now the _imprimatur_ really amounts to the same thing, for it is, of course, confined to books or parts of books where theology or philosophy trenching upon theology is concerned. Thus a book may deal largely, perhaps mainly, with scientific points, yet necessarily include allusions to theological dogmas. The _imprimatur_ to such a book would relate solely and entirely to the theological parts, just as the advice of an architectural authority on a point connected with that subject in a work in which it was mentioned only in an incidental manner, would refer to that point, and to nothing else. Perhaps it should be added, that no author is obliged to obtain an _imprimatur_ any more than he is compelled to seek advice on any other point in connection with his book. "_Nihil Obstat_," says the skilled referee: "I see no reason to suppose that there is anything in all this which contravenes theological principles." To which the authority appealed to adds "_imprimatur_:" "Then by all means let it be printed." The procedure is no doubt somewhat more stately and formal than the modern system of acknowledgments, yet in actual practice there is but little to differentiate the two methods of ensuring, so far as is possible, that the work is free from mistakes. That neither the assistance of friends nor the _imprimatur_ of authorities is infallible is proved by the facts that mistakes do creep into works of science, however carefully examined, and that more than one book with an _imprimatur_ has, none the less, found its way on to the _Index_. Before leaving this branch of the subject one cannot refrain from calling attention to another point. How often in advertisements of books do we not see quotations from reviews in authoritative journals--a medical work from the _Lancet_, a physical or chemical from _Nature_? Frequently too we see "Mr. So-and-So, the well-known authority on the subject, says of this book, etc., etc." What are all these authoritative commendations but an _imprimatur_ up to date?

Passing from the _imprimatur_ to a closer consideration of our subject, it is above all things necessary to take the advice of Samuel Johnson and clear our minds of cant. Every person in this world--save perhaps a Robinson Crusoe on an otherwise uninhabited island, and he only because of his solitary condition--is in bondage more or less to others; that is to say, has his freedom more or less interfered with. That this interference is in the interests of the community and so, in the last analysis, in the interests of the person interfered with himself, in no way weakens the argument; it is rather a potent adjuvant to it. However much I may dislike him and however anxious I may be to injure him, I may not go out and set fire to my neighbour's house nor to his rick-yard, unless I am prepared to risk the serious legal penalties which will be my lot if I am detected in the act. I may not, if I am a small and active boy, make a slide in the public street in frosty weather, unless I am prepared--as the small boy usually is--to run the gauntlet of the police. In a thousand ways my freedom, or what I call my freedom, is interfered with: it is the price which I pay for being one item of a social organism and for being in turn protected against others, who, in virtue of that protection, are in their turn deprived of what they might call their liberty.

No one can have failed to observe that this interference with personal liberty becomes greater day by day. It is a tendency of modern governments, based presumably upon increased experience, to increase these protective regulations. Thus we have laws against adulteration of food, against the placing of buildings concerned with obnoxious trades in positions where people will be inconvenienced by them. We make persons suffering from infectious diseases isolate themselves, and if they cannot do this at home, we make them go to the fever hospital. Further, we insist upon the doctor, whose position resembles that of a confessor, breaking his obligation of professional secrecy and informing the authorities as to the illness of his patient. We interfere with the liberty of men and women to work as long as they like or to make their children labour for excessive hours. We insist upon dangerous machinery being fenced in. In a thousand ways we--the State--interfere with the liberty of our fellows. Finally, when the needs of the community are most pressing we interfere most with the freedom of the subject. Thus, in these islands, we were recently living under a Defence of the Realm Act--with which no reasonable person quarrelled. Yet it forbad many things not only harmless in themselves but habitually permitted in times of peace. We were subject to penalties if we showed lighted windows: they must be shuttered or provided with heavy curtains. We might not travel in railway carriages at night with the blinds undrawn. The papers might not publish, nor we say in public, things which in time of peace would go unnoticed. There were a host of other matters to which allusion need not be made. Enough has been said to show that the State has and exerts the right to control the actions of those who belong to it, and that in time of stress it can and does very greatly intensify that control and does so without arousing any real or widespread discontent. Of course we all grumble, but then everybody, except its own members, always does more or less grumble at anything done by any government: that is the ordinary state of affairs. But at any rate we submit ourselves, more or less gracefully, to this restraint because we persuade ourselves or are persuaded that it is for the good of the State and thus for the good of ourselves, both as private individuals and as members of the State.

And many of us, at any rate, comfort ourselves with the thought that a great many of the regulations which appear to be most tyrannical and most to interfere with the natural liberty of mankind are devised not with that end in view but with the righteous intention of protecting those weaker members of the body who are unable to protect themselves. If the State does not stand by such members and offer itself as their shield and support, it has no claim to our obedience, no real right to exist, and so we put up with the inconvenience, should such arise, on account of the protection given to the weaker members and often extended to those who would by no means feel pleased if they heard themselves thus described.

Let us substitute the Church for the State and let us remember that there are times when she is at closer grips with the powers of evil than may be the case at other times. The parallel is surely sufficiently close.

So far as earthly laws can control one, no one is obliged to be a member of the Catholic Church nor a citizen of the British Empire. I can, if I choose, emigrate to America, in process of time naturalise myself there and join the Christian Science organisation or any other body to which I find myself attracted. But as long as I remain a Catholic and a British citizen I must submit myself to the restrictions imposed by the bodies with which I have elected to connect myself. We arrive at the conclusion then that the ordinary citizen, even if he never adverts to the fact, is in reality controlled and his liberty limited in all sorts of directions.

Now the scientific man, in his own work, is subject to all sorts of limitations, apart altogether from the limitations to which, as an ordinary member of the State, he has to submit himself.

He is restricted by science: he is not completely free but is bound by knowledge--the knowledge which he or others have acquired.

To say he is limited by it is not to say that he is imprisoned by it or in bondage to it. "One does not lose one's intellectual liberty when one learns mathematics," says the late Monsignor Benson in one of his letters, "though one certainly loses the liberty of doing sums wrong or doing them by laborious methods!"

Before setting out upon any research, the careful man of science sets himself to study "the literature of the subject" as he calls it. He delves into all sorts of out-of-the-way periodicals to ascertain what such a man has written upon such a point. All this he does in order that he may avoid doing a piece of work over again unnecessarily: _unnecessarily_, for it maybe actually necessary to repeat it, if it is of very great importance and if it has not been repeated and verified by other observers. Further, he delves into this literature because it is thus that he hopes to avoid the many blind alleys which branch off from every path of research, delude their explorer with vain hopes and finally bring him face to face with a blank wall. In a word the inquirer consults his authorities and when he finds them worthy of reliance, he limits his freedom by paying attention to them. He does not say: "How am I held in bondage by this assertion that the earth goes round the sun," but accepting that fact, he rejects such of his conclusions as are obviously irreconcilable with it. Surely this is plain common sense and the man who acted otherwise would be setting himself a quite impossible task. It is the weakness of the "heuristic method" that it sets its pupils to find out things which many abler men have spent years in investigating. The man who sets out to make a research, without first ascertaining what others have done in that direction, proposes to accumulate in himself the abilities and the life-work of all previous generations of labourers in that corner of the scientific vineyard.

There is a somewhat amusing and certainly interesting instance of this which will bear quotation. The late Mr. Grant Allen, who knew something of quite a number of subjects though perhaps not very much about any of them, devoted most of his time and energies (outside his stories, some of which are quite entertaining) to not always very accurate essays in natural history. One day, however, his evil genius prompted him to write and, worse still, to publish a book entitled _Force and Energy: A Theory of Dynamics_, in which he purported to deal with a matter of which he knew far less even than he did about animated nature. Mark the inevitable result! A copy of the book was forwarded to the journal _Nature_, and sent by its editor to be dealt with by the competent hands of Sir Oliver (then Professor) Lodge.[27]

This is how that eminent authority dealt with it. "There exists a certain class of mind," he commences, "allied perhaps to the Greek sophist variety, to which ignorance of a subject offers no sufficient obstacle to the composition of a treatise upon it." It may be rash to suggest that this type of mind is well developed in philosophers of the Spencerian school, though it would be possible to adduce some evidence in support of such a suggestion. "In the volume before us," he continues, "Mr. Grant Allen sets to work to reconstruct the fundamental science of dynamics, an edifice which, since the time of Galileo and Newton, has been standing on what has seemed a fairly secure and substantial basis, but which he seems to think it is now time to demolish in order to make room for a newly excogitated theory. The attempt is audacious and the result--what might have been expected. The performance lends itself indeed to the most scathing criticism; blunders and misstatements abound on nearly every page, and the whole thing is simply an emanation of mental fog." It would occupy too much space to reproduce this criticism with any fullness, but one or two points exceedingly germane to our subject can hardly go without notice. Alluding to a certain question, which seems to have greatly bothered Mr. Allen and likewise Mr. Clodd, who, it would appear, was associated with him in this performance, the reviewer says: "The puzzle was solved completely long ago, in the clearest possible manner, and the '_Principia_' is the witness to it; but it is still felt to be a difficulty by beginners, and I suppose there is no offence in applying this harmless epithet to both Mr. Grant Allen and Mr. Clodd, so far as the truths of dynamics and physics are concerned." One last quotation: "The thing which strikes one most forcibly about the physics of these paper philosophers is the extraordinary contempt which, if they are consistent, they must or ought to feel for men of science. If Newton, Lagrange, Gauss, and Thompson, to say nothing of smaller men, have muddled away their brains in concocting a scheme of dynamics wherein the very definitions are all wrong; if they have arrived at a law of conservation of energy without knowing what the word energy means, or how to define it; if they have to be set right by an amateur who has devoted a few weeks or months to the subject and acquired a rude smattering of some of its terms, 'what intolerable fools they must all be!'" Such is the result of asserting one's freedom by escaping the limitations of knowledge! We see what happens when a person sets out to deal with science untrammelled by any considerations as to what others have thought and established. The necessary result is that he plunges headforemost into all or most of the errors which were pitfalls to the first labourers in the field. Or, again, he painfully and uselessly pursues the blind alleys which they had wandered in, and from which a perusal of their works would have warned off later comers.

Oh, irony of fate! the same thing precisely happens when men of scientific eminence indulge in religious dissertations, for of course, though it is not quite so obvious to such writers, the same blunder is quite possible in non-scientific fields of knowledge. I once asked one versed in theology what he thought of the religious articles of a distinguished man, unfamiliar himself with theology, yet, none the less, then splashing freely and to the great admiration of the ignorant, in the theological pool. His reply was that in so far as they were at all constructive, they consisted mostly of exploded heresies of the first century. Is not this precisely what one would have expected _a priori_? A man commencing to write on science or religion who neglects the work of earlier writers places himself in the position of the first students of the subject and very naturally will make the same mistakes as they made. He refuses to be hampered and biased by knowledge, and the result follows quite inevitably. "A scientist," says Monsignor Benson, "is hampered and biased by knowing the earth goes round the sun." The fact of the matter is that the man of science is not a solitary figure, a _chimæra bombinans in vacuo_. In whatever direction he looks he is faced by the figures of other workers and he is limited and "hampered" by their work. Nor are these workers all of them in his own area of country, for the biologist, for example, cannot afford to neglect the doings of the chemist; if he does he is bound to find himself led into mistakes. No doubt the scientific man is at times needlessly hampered by theories which he and others at the time take to be fairly well established facts, but which after all turn out to be nothing of the kind. This in no way weakens the argument, but rather by giving an additional reason for caution, strengthens it.

If we carefully consider the matter we shall be unable to come to any other conclusion than that every writer, even of the wildest form of fiction, is in some way and to some extent hampered and limited by knowledge, by facts, by things as they are or as they appear to be. That will be admitted; but it will be urged that the hampering and limiting with which we have been dealing is not merely legitimate but inevitable, whereas the hampering and limiting--should such there be--on the part of the Church is wholly illegitimate and indefensible.

"All that you say is no doubt true," our antagonist will urge, "but you have still to show that your Church has any right or title to interfere in these matters. And even if you can make some sort of case for her interference, you have still to disprove what so many people believe, namely, that the right, real or assumed, has not been arbitrarily used to the damage, or at least to the delay of scientific progress. Chemistry," we may suppose our antagonist continuing, "no doubt has a legitimate right to have its say, even to interfere and that imperatively, where chemical considerations invade the field of biology, for example. But what similar right does religion possess? For instance," he might proceed, "some few years ago a distinguished physiologist, then occupying the Chair of the British Association, invoked the behaviour of certain chemical substances known as colloids in favour of his anti-vitalistic conclusions. At once he was answered by a number of equally eminent chemists that the attitude he had adopted was quite incompatible with facts as known to them; in a word, that chemistry disagreed with his ideas as to colloids. Everybody admitted that the chemists must have the final word on this subject: are you now claiming that religion or theology, or whatever you choose to call it, is also entitled to a say in a matter of that kind?" This supposititious conversation illustrates the confusion which exists in many minds as to the point at issue. One science is entitled to contradict another, just as one scientific man is entitled to contradict another on a question of fact. But on a question of _fact_ a theologian is not entitled--_quâ_ theologian--nor would he be expected to claim to be entitled, to contradict a man of science.

It ought to be widely known, though it is not, that the idea that theologians can or wish to intrude--again _quâ_ theologians--in scientific disputes as to chemical, biological, or other facts, is a fantastic idea without real foundation save that of the one mistake of the kind made in the case of Galileo and never repeated--a mistake, let us hasten to add, made by a disciplinary authority and--as all parties admit--in no way involving questions of infallibility. To this case we will revert shortly. Meanwhile it may be briefly stated that the claim made by the Church is in connection with some few--some very few--of the _theories_ which men of science build up upon the facts which they have brought to light. Some of these theories do appear to contradict theological dogmas, or at least may seem to simple people to be incompatible with such dogmas, just as the people of his time--Protestants by the way, no less than Catholics--did really think that Galileo's theory conflicted with Holy Writ. In such cases, and in such cases alone, the Church holds that she has at least the right to say that such a theory should not be proclaimed to be true until there is sufficient proof for it to satisfy the scientific world that the point has been demonstrated.

This is really what is meant by the tyranny of the Church; and it may now be useful to consider briefly what can be said for her position. We must begin by looking at the matter from the Church's standpoint. It is a good rule to endeavour to understand your opponent's position before you try to confute him; an excellent rule seldom complied with by anti-Catholic controversialists. Now the Church starts with the proposition that man has an immortal soul destined to eternal happiness or eternal misery, and she proceeds to claim that she has been divinely constituted to help man to enjoy a future of happiness. Of course these are opinions which all do not share, and with the arguments for and against which we cannot here deal. If a man is quite sure that he has no soul and that there is no hereafter there is nothing more to be said than: "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." Nothing very much matters in this world except that we should make ourselves as comfortable as we can during the few years we have to spend in it.

Again, there are others who, whilst believing the first doctrine set down above, will have none of the other. With them we enter into no argument here, and only say that to have a guide is better than to have no guide. Catholics, who accept gratefully her guidance, do believe that the Church can help a man to save his soul, and that she is entrusted, to that end, with certain powers. Her duty is to preserve and guard the Christian Revelation--the scheme of doctrine regarding belief and conduct by which Jesus Christ taught that souls were to be saved. She is not an arbitrary ruler. Her office is primarily that of Judge and Interpreter of the deposit of doctrine entrusted to her.