CHAPTER XIII

SCIENCE AND SUPERSTITION--HUXLEY

When the ancient Humanist, Protagoras, said, “Man is the measure of all things,” he probably did not mean that all things may be measured by man, for in his following sentence he is sceptical of our knowledge of many things. He meant rather that all our measurements are human. This independence of supernaturalism was not always characteristic of educated minds of antiquity, but it is one of the distinguishing features of the educational tradition which we have derived from Greece and Rome. Thus Aristotle would establish ethics in the life of reason. This same naturalistic bias also inspires those early attempts at science which were broken off under the influence of Christianity.

The Renaissance was accompanied by a re-awakened interest in nature, and in human nature as part of nature as a whole. The trend toward naturalism is seen in art, in the resumption of scientific research and experimentation, and in the effort to supplant scholastic theology by the study of human letters. To Da Vinci, for instance, science, art, and letters were but the varied aspects of the same cultural awakening. But for the greater number of those who felt the influence of the Renaissance, science and letters became quite separate interests. The new learning of the Humanists was almost exclusively a literary scholarship. Erasmus and his followers had very little interest in natural science. They found in classic literature a body of mature wisdom ready to hand. Science on the contrary, was obliged to begin _de novo_, and slowly construct its instruments of thought, building, gradually a new system of knowledge. The brunt of the conflict with scholastic education fell upon the humanists. The real renaissance of science did not take place until the seventeenth century.

Meanwhile the Reformation had caused a revival of religious interest, and in Protestant countries like England, and later America, the influence of religion upon higher learning remained powerful. It permitted the classical tradition to survive in letter rather than in spirit. The naturalistic implications of the classics were ignored; commentators whenever possible read into the texts the conventional beliefs and sentiments of Protestantism. Humanism became “traditional education,” a new scholasticism, formal and innocuous, a mark of intellectual respectability, a “refining” influence, an embroidery of familiar quotation in the speech of parsons and country squires.

Successive generations of grown-up schoolboys in Gothic halls, laboriously translated, over and over again, hackneyed passages from a literature that in the fifteenth century had been carried about like the fire of Prometheus, kindling defiance to Heaven all over Europe. Often men could think of no better reason for the study of the ancient classics than that in the tedium and monotony of language drill there was a “discipline” which was good for the soul. The student’s attention was centered upon the niceties of construction and upon the task of memorizing rules of grammar and a vocabulary, all stuffed into his head in the most artificial manner conceivable. He was not likely to be puzzled over the discovery that there might be something spiritually irreconcilable between Lucretius and the Thirty Nine Articles, or between the dialectic of Socrates and the Westminster confession of faith.

There is a world of difference between this _denatured_ Humanism and that of Erasmus or Montaigne. That this traditional education made for polish and good breeding cannot be denied. Neither, I think, can it be denied that there was something sterile and illiberal in Protestant-classical education. It is significant that both the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the progress of science in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries took place chiefly outside the established universities and sometimes in spite of their opposition.

I do not see how the situation could well have been otherwise. In the first place the older Humanists themselves dealt the naturalism of the ancients and such of it as was again coming to life a severe blow when they championed letters and remained indifferent to science. In the second place, the Reformation quite side-tracked the revival of learning, superseded it, and took over into its own service only so much of it as it found congenial to its religious interests. It was a mass movement, an attempt at a restatement of Christianity in terms of the philosophy of the common man, a philosophy to which the questioning, enlightened common sense and worldly wisdom of a Montaigne, a Voltaire or a Hume is never very congenial. Santayana says, “The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot do without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

“Of this homely philosophy the tender cuticle is religious belief; really the least vital and most arbitrary part of human opinion, the outer ring, as it were, of the fortifications of prejudice, but for that very reason the most jealously defended; since it is on being attacked there, at the least defensible point, that rage and alarm at being attacked at all are first aroused in the citadel. People are not naturally sceptics, wondering if a single one of their intellectual habits can be reasonably preserved; they are dogmatists angrily confident of maintaining them all. Integral minds, pupils of a single coherent tradition, regard their religion, whatever it may be, as certain, as sublime, and as the only rational basis of morality and policy. Yet in fact religious belief is terribly precarious, partly because it is arbitrary, so that in the next tribe or in the next century it will wear quite a different form; and partly because, when genuine, it is spontaneous and continually remodelled, like poetry, in the heart that gives it birth. A man of the world soon learns to discredit established religions on account of their variety and absurdity, although he may good-naturedly continue to conform to his own; and a mystic before long begins fervently to condemn current dogmas, on account of his own different inspiration. Without philosophical criticism, therefore, mere experience and good sense suggest that all positive religions are false, or at least (which is enough for my present purpose) that they are all fantastic and insecure.”

Speaking of the Reformation and its relation to science, Whitehead says, “We cannot look upon it as introducing a new principle into human life.” Perhaps he is inclined to over-emphasize the assertions of the Reformers that they were only restoring what had been forgotten. But he says, “It is quite otherwise with the rise of modern science. In every way it contrasts with the contemporary religious movement. The Reformation was a popular uprising and for a century and a half drenched Europe in blood. The beginnings of the scientific movement were confined to a minority among the intellectual élite.”

It is doubtless because the Humanists remained relatively indifferent to science, that its early struggles with theology were comparatively