III
There is a point up to which each science may well be left to cultivate its field for its own sake, without any regard for the fruits. Mr. Thorstein Veblen, in The Place of Science in Civilization, has well pointed out the way in which science arises out of idle curiosity; and science, studied and advanced for its own sake, is surely one of the great playthings of the race. In this aspect, while science seeks a quite different path to the contemplative life than art takes, its end is the same—the dominant interest is an esthetic one, the joy of pure perception. Science is thus a sort of world in itself, and it is self-sufficient: there is no need for it to make contact with the real world in which we fight and love and earn our daily bread. In its own world, science is no better and no worse than theosophy or astrology or fables about deity.
But the divorce of science from the daily life of the community is not altogether an advantage. If it fosters a wholehearted cultivation of science for its own values, it tends to lose sight of realities without which its values are meaningless. It is hard perhaps to locate the point at which science, divorced from every day realities, ceases to have any social relevance; but it seems to me that such a point exists; and when the sciences remain disparate and unrelated one to the other, they tend to pass over from a public world to the private world of the specialist; and the knowledge which obtains in that world can with difficulty be brought out again to irrigate the common life of the community; or if it is brought out, as bacteriology is brought out in relation to the treatment of disease, it is divorced from a consideration of the total situation in a way that makes so many specialist advances in medicine, for example, the stamping ground for the fanatic.
This loss of contact, I believe, is highly dangerous; for it lessens the effect of scientific discipline upon daily affairs quite as much as a cloistered religion, by erecting impossible sanctions, opens the way for much unalloyed slackness and baseness, and by demanding that Pistol and Falstaff live like Christ prevents these biological rapscallions from achieving so much as the level of Robin Hood. The upshot of this dissociation of science and social life is that superstition takes the place of science among the common run of men, as a more easily apprehended version of reality.
Today the whole corpus of knowledge is in an anarchic state, and it lacks order precisely because it lacks any definite relations to the community which creates it, and for which it, in turn, provides the spectacles through which the world is seen. Against the gains that have come from the increasing specialization of the sciences, we have to set off the losses which the community suffers from the development of crude forms of science, and from quackeries like astrology and spiritualism which succeed in giving a complete account of man’s place in the universe in terms that are fairly intelligible to the lay mind. It seems to me, then, that in the cultivation of the sciences a definite hierarchy of values must be established which shall have some relation to the essential needs of the community. The independence of science from human values is a gross superstition: the desire for order, for security, for esthetically satisfactory patterns—along with the desire for fame or the favor of princes—have all played their parts in the development of science. Though the logic of science may discount the human factor as far as possible in its internal operations, it is because men have placed a certain value upon disinterested intellectual operations that these activities are pursued in modern communities to the exclusion of other interests and claims.
Let us put the problem concretely. A community which cultivates chemical science to the point at which it is able to wipe out a whole city by a few explosions of poisonous gas is in a pretty treacherous situation. If the science that it possesses has not helped to found a eutopia, it has at any rate provided the foundations for a kakotopia, or bad place: in short, for a hell. Indeed scientific knowledge has not merely heightened the possibilities of life in the modern world: it has lowered the depths. When science is not touched by a sense of values it works—as it fairly consistently has worked during the past century—towards a complete dehumanization of the social order. The plea that each of the sciences must be permitted to go its own way without control should be immediately rebutted by pointing out that they obviously need a little guidance when their applications in war and industry are so plainly disastrous.
We must be prepared to recognize that “truths” do not stand together on a high and lofty pedestal: some are important and some are trivial, some are innocent and some are dangerous, and while the pursuit of truth is a good in itself—and complete freedom in that pursuit is a sine qua non of a good social life—certain departments of investigation may need to be offset and corrected by work in other fields. In a modern Western European community, a sociological insight into the causes and conditions of war and peace is a needed corrective to the crudities of applied physical science and without such correction the mere increase of scientific knowledge, of which we boast so vacuously, may be highly inimical to the practice of the good life in the community.