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SCIENCE

FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 1918

CONTENTS

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THE VALUE AND SERVICE OF ZOOLOGICAL SCIENCE1

SPIRITUAL VALUES

THE material values of science are often heralded, while its spiritual values pass unnoticed. Leaving all tangible values unemphasized, we shall here contend that the intangible values of science in general and of zoology in particular are the more significant. These we may characterize as "spiritual," using the term over against "material" and without further implication. Thus, if we speak of man's spiritual yearnings in contrast with his material needs, we may not have a clear idea of what this phrase implies, but we recognize in this contrast the existence of something the opposite of material. That which constitutes "the spirit of the man" is too illusive for definition, yet it is a thing we recognize as existent and in such a sense the word spiritual is used.

In the present world crisis there are none who decry the material values of science. Our very national existence depends upon them. But there are many who raise the question whether science on its spiritual side is not a failure, whether the war is not science gone mad; and we scientists need to consider what is the source of this undercurrent of criticism which sets against the freedom of science. In the eyes of the man in the street, science represents only material accomplishment and even among the educated such a belief is not uncommon. We men of science do not believe this. Why should others? Perhaps we are to blame

1 Symposium before the American Society of Zoologists, Minneapolis, December 29, 1917.

for not having taken the public sufficiently into our confidence. If it is our belief that science has emancipated the spirit of man by freeing it from ignorance and superstition, and in so doing has brought advantages in excess of the material comforts which are the more obvious fruits of scientific progress, it is time we laid more emphasis upon these intangible values. For by these we live and work, rather than by the desires of a sordid materialism.

1. MATERIAL COMFORT AND SPIRITUAL

PROGRESS

Betterment of his material surroundings reaches beyond man's physical comfort; for such betterment enables him to fix his attention upon "that which is not bread." We reach the heights now and then from the flood of difficulties which surrounds us; and there may be all the more satisfaction in this, when we do so in spite of adverse conditions, when we will not be wholly fettered by mere circumstance. Yet for sustained achievement in nation or individual there must be relief from an oppressive struggle for existence. What H. G. Wells has termed "this misery of boots" must be overcome before we can realize our spiritual desires. Those who have lived as the favored members of society may prate of their superiority over material things; but one suspects that a sojourn in a New York tenement or a Pittsburgh slum would convince any one of

us that he owes much of what he has accomplished to the stability of his material foundations, and to the absence of acute pressure in matters of food and shelter. Some of us call ourselves poor, comparatively speaking; but we have frequent relief from toil and much of our toil has al

2 Wells, H. G., "This Misery of Boots," Ball Publishing Co., Boston, 1908.

ways been self-imposed. On the other hand, conditions that are too easy are not conducive to spiritual progress; for we are not yet far enough removed from the state of nature, under which we took origin, to react favorably in the absence of stimulation. The proposal to fill men's stomachs as a stimulus to their morals is worth considering, even though history and experience show that the hardest thing for man or nation to thrive upon is material prosperity. A fair degree of prosperity is indispensable, though excess may prove disastrous.

Now one of the things science has done is to establish our prosperity. In civilized lands, we can be sure of enough for the entire population to eat and of enough to wear. The problem is no longer how to produce the necessities of life so much as how to distribute them. In matters of production we are far ahead of our power to effect a just distribution. The socialists are right in their contention, that if we would deal fairly in distribution no man would be obliged to work more than four or five hours a day and that each could devote the remaining time to his spiritual interests, that under such a system many of our social problems would disappear. Our first claim for science, as having spiritual value, is, therefore, its establishment of the material foundations upon which spiritual advancement rests. While this value

should not be minimized, since it lies at the basis of civilized life, it is easy to cite other values not so immediately allied to things material.

2. SCIENCE AND IMAGINATION We often hear it said that, since science has destroyed the mystery of the universe, nothing remains for imagination. This statement has, I think, no basis in fact, and

arises from the failure to appreciate what science has done. Instead of restricting our imagination science has so enlarged our horizon that we may take a bolder flight. To the mind of primitive man and to the savage who survives in this state until our own times, nature appeared a thing of caprice rather than of order. The world was one of spirits, good or evil, who must always be considered, with whom man must make his peace. The day as well as the night was peopled with beings who ruled in the absence of any definite sequence of events and safety could be found only by submission to their caprice or propitiation of it. Under these conditions imagination had full play. But who in our generation would choose this brand of imagination? When man first observed the changeless motion of the stars "without haste, with out rest," and gained an inkling that the same orderly sequence might apply to all natural phenomena, the opportunity for imagination was not lost. It was placed on a higher, plane. The inhabitants of Europe, who once imagined Hell or the "Islands of the Blest" to lie beyond the Atlantic, have lost many fields in which the imagination of medieval man found exercise; but what a vista has been opened. Consider the sweep of the evolutionary conception through time and space. Or consider man as the victor over nature, notwithstanding those laws which are inexorable for other living things. No other species is known to have spread itself so widely over the earth and to have so changed its environment to suit its needs. Herein lies the difference between man and the rest of the animal world. Wherever else an animal has been subjected to a new environment, the result has been death or the evolution of a new type suited to meet the changed conditions. But man has taken himself and his domesticated plants

and animals into surroundings to which neither he nor they are properly adapted; and instead of paying the penalty inevitable in a state of nature, has survived and the creatures under his care have survived with him. Where nature would say "Die!" man has said, "I will live!"; and he has succeeded in this because he forces from his environment the readjustments necessary for his well-being. Not always is this possible. The path is not trod with ease, but it is being steadily pursued. In his essay entitled "Nature's Insurgent Son," Lankester3 thus compares man to an insurgent gone so far in his rebellion that there is no return; for capitulation can mean only death. The rebel must continue on his course until the end is won, if he is

to find safety. He can not now return to the dominion of nature, he must succeed by controlling his surroundings, and knowledge of how to do this is more vital to him than aught else.

Again, take the poetry in modern invention. For it is there in plenty when you know how to find it, as Kipling has done time and again, but nowhere better than in his verses on "The Deep-sea Cables."

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar

Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.

There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,

Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world-here on the tieribs of earth

Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat

Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirthFor a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;

3 Lankester, E. R., "The Kingdom of Man," Holt and Co., 1907.

Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the

last of the sun.

Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,

And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!''

Is there not food for imagination in the phenomenon of the wireless message? A few years ago I spent a summer at the Puget Sound Marine Station. On a hill behind us was a wireless establishment to which we sometimes tramped for a chat with the operators. One day we were told with pride they had just picked up a communication from Key West, the longest distance from which that station had ever received a message. We below the hill had known nothing of this. "Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth" had passed over our heads on the wings of the air, and the telling of their passage was a revelation of things in the universe of which man knoweth naught, but which are not unknowable. To my mind we have gained more with the advance of science than we have lost; and imagination need not go unfed, when out of the fog, the night and the distance, as though from another world, comes that which signals "Save our Ship," to listening ears a thousand miles away on sea and shore.

3. SCIENCE AND ESTHETIC APPRECIATION Esthetic appreciation may seem as distant from science as are the poles from one another. Yet if we analyze the case, our esthetic response becomes, when stripped of what is non-essential, an intellectual rather than a sensual pleasure. The "good, the beautiful and the true," as we see it, is largely that to which we are accustomed, whether it be a brand of perfume, a style in skirts or a scientific theory. Also its cost, as Professor Veblin' shows, is an in▲ Veblin, T., "The Theory of the Leisure Class,'' Macmillan Co., 1912.

fluential factor. Personally, I hold to the faith that there are such things as the beautiful and the ugly, that it is not all a matter of that to which one is accustomed, only I often doubt whether any of us know what's what. Within the purely intellectual realm, however, we are on safer since more common ground. For example, the satisfaction one has in the demonstrated theorem or in the chain of evidence when the last link is forged, is an esthetic satisfaction. There is the same feeling of completeness as in beholding the creation of artist or sculptor from which nothing could be taken away or nothing added without marring its perfection. Say that we appreciate such things merely because our minds run in certain channels. The fact remains that our minds so run, and that as long as human minds continue to be what they are we may expect them to follow similar courses. Stories are told of great minds completing their scientific discoveries in a state bordering on religious exhaltation, but many of us have felt the same thrill even though the work were not our own. The writer remembers how when a student he was taken by the "Mosquitomalaria Theory," as it was then called; and at a later date the esthetic appreciation with which he contemplated the apparent explanation of Mendelian segregation and of the determination of sex in terms of the behavior of chromosomes. In

spite of uncertainties and the need for further investigation, one felt himself gazing at a picture near enough completion to show what it might become-a sequence so wonderfully ordered as to call forth an esthetic fervor. To many of us, therefore, scientific thinking and the contemplation of the theories of science present an esthetic appeal of the first order..

4. SCIENCE AND FAIR JUDGMENT

A further aspect of science, having spiritual value, is the habit of fairmindedness induced by scientific reasoning. If scientific thinking is but a way of looking at things, the essential element of which is the formation of impersonal judgments the reasoning in a way to reduce the personal equation to a minimum; if in this respect alone does the knowledge of science differ from that of everyday life, science may perform an important service by helping us to impersonal judgments in other lines.

To illustrate concretely, a teacher of theological students, desirous of imparting information regarding the origin of man, might find an effective approach through geology. There is little to arouse prejudice in the study of weathering, erosion, deposition and glaciation. When, however, these lessons have been learned, with their inevitable inference regarding the lapse of time, one finds an easy passage to the problems of organic evolution and thence to the question of man's origin. The same methods of reasoning are used throughout; only, in the last case, there is much to excite prejudice and this prejudice might be aroused by attacking the problem of man without preliminaries. So great is the similarity in the scientific method, wherever used, that the viewpoint obtained in an impersonal subject like geography, astronomy, or geology can be taken over bodily to allied fields. And the interpretation of phenomena remote from personal interest induces a dispassionateness which is a good point of departure for a journey into debatable territory.

The whole theory of evolution may be cited in further illustration. If this be presented as an interpretation of the facts of nature, to be accepted or rejected on the same basis as one would the earth's spheric

ity or the Copernican theory of the solar system, it is easy to show that the cases are parallel, when viewed impersonally and as scientific problems. Once into the subject, one passes insensibly to the problems of society, which are at bottom evolutionary problems. Poverty and crime, eugenics and euthenics, the organization of the state, and the rights of the individual are debatable in no such simple terms as comparative anatomy and embryology, paleontology or ecology; and because of this are subjects for prejudiced controversy rather than open-minded discussion. Take the case of poverty. How can a man with the scientific temper regard this as a question to be decided wholly in terms of the convenience or profit of landlord or employer of labor? The biologist might be influenced by his preconceptions of heredity and environment, but in so far as he shut his eyes to the evidence and failed to consider all the factors involved, he would be false to his scientific spirit.

Human beings suffer much from emotionalism in public matters. We shall doubtless continue to be guided by our hearts rather than our heads, but it is to be hoped we may come to use better judgment. In public affairs, it is particularly important that we think things out. At the beginning of all clear thinking in these matters are the facts of science, and the method of science is needed at every turn. If the question is upon religious revivals of the old-fashioned sort, we need to know, with such degree of scientific accuracy as is possible, the history of these movements in the past, and their psychological aspects in the present, before we can determine. relative values. Now that democracy is spreading, we need, as never before, to correlate facts and weigh evidence in the dispassionate manner which is the ideal of

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