Drift and Mastery

16. Fact and Fancy

16 Fact and Fancy Most people still feel that there is something inhuman about the scientific attitude. They think at once of a world grown over-precise, of love regulated by galvanometers and sphygmographs, of table talk abolished because nutrition is confined to capsules prepared in a laboratory, of babies brought up in incubators. Instead of desire, statistical abstracts; a chilly, measured, weighed, and labelled existence. There is a famous cartoon of Max Beerbohm 's in which H. G. Wells is depicted "conjuring up the darling future." A spectacled mother holds in her arm a spectacled infant, mostly head like a pollywog, while she dangles before it a pair of geometrical dividers. Mr. Chesterton's nightmare of a future in which jolly beer and jolly dirt and jolly superstition shall have disappeared is merely a somewhat violently literary expression of what the average man feels. Science as it cernes through the newspapers announces that kissing is unhygienic and that love is a form of lunacy. Science is the occupation of absent-minded professors, of difficult and unsociable persons, wise enough, no doubt, but not altogether in their right minds. And then, of course, when wireless telegraphy is perfected, science becomes an omnipotent magic, wonderful or fearful, infinite in its power, but always something above and beyond the ordinary thoughts of men. So the suggestion that Twentieth Century democracy is bound up with the progress of the scientific spirit will make many people think of Organized charity, all cold and iced, In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ. 158 FACT AND FANCY There is a basis for these fears. Scientists have often been very arrogant, unnecessarily sure of themselves, and only too glad to pooh-pooh what they couldn't fit into some theory. This was especially true of those who grew up in the controversies of the nineteenth century. There was a kind of malicious fun in telling a devout man that thought depended on phosphor and that his magnificent visions were merely an excitation of the cortex. Of course, far-seeing men like Huxley protested that the sensation of red had not been destroyed because light-waves had been measured. Yet there were plenty of scientific bigots who would have liked to annihilate what they could not weigh. Certainly it is true that the general effect of science at first was to create impatience with the emotional life. Many proud possessors of the Spencerian mind devoted their glowing youth to a study of those bleak books which used to pass for scientific manuals. They regarded religion with scorn and art with condescension, and sometimes they nerved themselves up to admire beauty as one of the necessary weaknesses of an otherwise reasonable man. Truth for them was as neat as a checkerboard, and they made you feel like the man from Corinth who asked a Spartan "whether the trees grew square in his country." It always surprises one of these hard-headed people to be told that he lives in a world, which has a fantastic resemblance to a cubist painting. For the rationalist's vision expresses his own love of form, while it distorts the object. Now in a thinker who pretends to be dealing with actual events this is a dangerous delusion. He will come to believe that square things, sharply defined things, very tangible things, are somehow more genuine than elusive and changing ones. It's a short step from this to denying the existence of anything which is not easily defined. But note what he has done: seduced by a method of thought, the rigorous, classifying method where each color is all one tone, he has come to regard his method as more important than the blendings and interweavings of reality. Like any dreamer he gives up the search for truth in order to coddle himself in his simple, private universe. The hardness of such a rationalist is on the surface only: at bottom there is a weakness which clings to stiff and solid frames of thought because the subtlety of life is distressing. It is a great deal easier, for example, to talk of Labor and Capital 159 FACT AND FANCY than to keep in mind all the different kinds of workers or how they shade off into capitalists. It is immensely difficult to think about the actual complexity in the relations of men, and that is why eager and active people...