Illustrations of Universal Progress · Herbert Spencer
III. THE GENESIS OF SCIENCE.
While the "natural system" since developed, carrying out the doctrine of Linnaeus, that "natural orders must be formed by attention not to one or two, but to _all_ the parts of plants," bases its divisions on like peculiarities which are found to be _constantly related_ to the greatest number of other like peculiarities. And similarly in zoology, the successive classifications, from having been originally determined by external and often subordinate characters not indicative of the essential nature, have been gradually more and more determined by those internal and fundamental differences, which have uniform _relations_ to the greatest number of other differences. Nor shall we be surprised at this analogy between the modes of progress of positive science and classification, when we bear in mind that both proceed by making generalizations; that both enable us to make previsions differing only in their precision; and that while the one deals with equal properties and relations, the other deals with properties and relations that approximate towards equality in variable degrees.
Without further argument, it will, we think, be sufficiently clear that the sciences are none of them separately evolved--are none of them independent either logically or historically; but that all of them have, in a greater or less degree, required aid and reciprocated it. Indeed, it needs but to throw aside theses, and contemplate the mixed character of surrounding phenomena, to at once see that these notions of division and succession in the kinds of knowledge are none of them actually true, but are simple scientific fictions: good, if regarded merely as aids to study; bad, if regarded as representing realities in Nature. Consider them critically, and no facts whatever are presented to our senses uncombined with other facts--no facts whatever but are in some degree disguised by accompanying facts: disguised in such a manner that all must be partially understood before any one can be understood. If it be said, as by M. Comte, that gravitating force should be treated of before other forces, seeing that all things are subject to it, it may on like grounds be said that heat should be first dealt with; seeing that thermal forces are everywhere in action; that the ability of any portion of matter to manifest visible gravitative phenomena depends on its state of aggregation, which is determined by heat; that only by the aid of thermology can we explain those apparent exceptions to the gravitating tendency which are presented by steam and smoke, and so establish its universality, and that, indeed, the very existence of the solar system in a solid form is just as much a question of heat as it is one of gravitation.
Take other cases:--All phenomena recognised by the eyes, through which only are the data of exact science ascertainable, are complicated with optical phenomena; and cannot be exhaustively known until optical principles are known. The burning of a candle cannot be explained without involving chemistry, mechanics, thermology. Every wind that blows is determined by influences partly solar, partly lunar, partly hygrometric; and implies considerations of fluid equilibrium and physical geography. The direction, dip, and variations of the magnetic needle, are facts half terrestrial, half celestial--are caused by earthly forces which have cycles of change corresponding with astronomical periods. The flowing of the gulf-stream and the annual migration of icebergs towards the equator, depending as they do on the balancing of the centripetal and centrifugal forces acting on the ocean, involve in their explanation the Earth's rotation and spheroidal form, the laws of hydrostatics, the relative densities of cold and warm water, and the doctrines of evaporation. It is no doubt true, as M. Comte says, that "our position in the solar system, and the motions, form, size, equilibrium of the mass of our world among the planets, must be known before we can understand the phenomena going on at its surface." But, fatally for his hypothesis, it is also true that we must understand a great part of the phenomena going on at its surface before we can know its position, &c., in the solar system. It is not simply that, as we have already shown, those geometrical and mechanical principles by which celestial appearances are explained, were first generalized from terrestrial experiences; but it is that the very obtainment of correct data, on which to base astronomical generalizations, implies advanced terrestrial physics.
Until after optics had made considerable advance, the Copernican system remained but a speculation. A single modern observation on a star has to undergo a careful analysis by the combined aid of various sciences--has to _be digested by the organism of the sciences_; which have severally to assimilate their respective parts of the observation, before the essential fact it contains is available for the further development of astronomy. It has to be corrected not only for nutation of the earth's axis and for precession of the equinoxes, but for aberration and for refraction; and the formation of the tables by which refraction is calculated, presupposes knowledge of the law of decreasing density in the upper atmospheric strata; of the law of decreasing temperature, and the influence of this on the density; and of hygrometric laws as also affecting density. So that, to get materials for further advance, astronomy requires not only the indirect aid of the sciences which have presided over the making of its improved instruments, but the direct aid of an advanced optics, of barology, of thermology, of hygrometry; and if we remember that these delicate observations are in some cases registered electrically, and that they are further corrected for the "personal equation"--the time elapsing between seeing and registering, which varies with different observers--we may even add electricity and psychology. If, then, so apparently simple a thing as ascertaining the position of a star is complicated with so many phenomena, it is clear that this notion of the independence of the sciences, or certain of them, will not hold.
Whether objectively independent or not, they cannot be subjectively so--they cannot have independence as presented to our consciousness; and this is the only kind of independence with which we are concerned. And here, before leaving these illustrations, and especially this last one, let us not omit to notice how clearly they exhibit that increasingly active _consensus_ of the sciences which characterizes their advancing development. Besides finding that in these later times a discovery in one science commonly causes progress in others; besides finding that a great part of the questions with which modern science deals are so mixed as to require the co-operation of many sciences for their solution; we find in this last case that, to make a single good observation in the purest of the natural sciences, requires the combined assistance of half a dozen other sciences.
Perhaps the clearest comprehension of the interconnected growth of the sciences may be obtained by contemplating that of the arts, to which it is strictly analogous, and with which it is inseparably bound up. Most intelligent persons must have been, at one time or other, struck with the vast array of antecedents pre-supposed by one of our processes of manufacture. Let him trace the production of a printed cotton, and consider all that is implied by it. There are the many successive improvements through which the power-looms reached their present perfection; there is the steam-engine that drives them, having its long history from Papin downwards; there are the lathes in which its cylinder was bored, and the string of ancestral lathes from which those lathes proceeded; there is the steam-hammer under which its crank shaft was welded; there are the puddling-furnaces, the blast-furnaces, the coal-mines and the iron-mines needful for producing the raw material; there are the slowly improved appliances by which the factory was built, and lighted, and ventilated; there are the printing engine, and the die house, and the colour laboratory with its stock of materials from all parts of the world, implying cochineal-culture, logwood-cutting, indigo-growing; there are the implements used by the producers of cotton, the gins by which it is cleaned, the elaborate machines by which it is spun: there are the vessels in which cotton is imported, with the building-slips, the rope-yards, the sail-cloth factories, the anchor-forges, needful for making them; and besides all these directly necessary antecedents, each of them involving many others, there are the institutions which have developed the requisite intelligence, the printing and publishing arrangements which have spread the necessary information, the social organization which has rendered possible such a complex co-operation of agencies.
Further analysis would show that the many arts thus concerned in the economical production of a child's frock, have each of them been brought to its present efficiency by slow steps which the other arts have aided; and that from the beginning this reciprocity has been ever on the increase. It needs but on the one hand to consider how utterly impossible it is for the savage, even with ore and coal ready, to produce so simple a thing as an iron hatchet; and then to consider, on the other hand, that it would have been impracticable among ourselves, even a century ago, to raise the tubes of the Britannia bridge from lack of the hydraulic press; to at once see how mutually dependent are the arts, and how all must advance that each may advance. Well, the sciences are involved with each other in just the same manner. They are, in fact, inextricably woven into this same complex web of the arts; and are only conventionally independent of it. Originally the two were one. How to fix the religious festivals; when to sow; how to weigh commodities; and in what manner to measure ground; were the purely practical questions out of which arose astronomy, mechanics, geometry. Since then there has been a perpetual inosculation of the sciences and the arts. Science has been supplying art with truer generalizations and more completely quantitative previsions. Art has been supplying science with better materials, and more perfect instruments. And all along the interdependence has been growing closer, not only between art and science, but among the arts themselves, and among the sciences themselves.
How completely the analogy holds throughout, becomes yet clearer when we recognise the fact that _the sciences are arts to each other_. If, as occurs in almost every case, the fact to be analyzed by any science, has first to be prepared--to be disentangled from disturbing facts by the afore discovered methods of other sciences; the other sciences so used, stand in the position of arts. If, in solving a dynamical problem, a parallelogram is drawn, of which the sides and diagonal represent forces, and by putting magnitudes of extension for magnitudes of force a measurable relation is established between quantities not else to be dealt with; it may be fairly said that geometry plays towards mechanics much the same part that the fire of the founder plays towards the metal he is going to cast. If, in analyzing the phenomena of the coloured rings surrounding the point of contact between two lenses, a Newton ascertains by calculation the amount of certain interposed spaces, far too minute for actual measurement; he employs the science of number for essentially the same purpose as that for which the watchmaker employs tools. If, before writing down his observation on a star, the astronomer has to separate from it all the errors resulting from atmospheric and optical laws, it is manifest that the refraction-tables, and logarithm-books, and formulae, which he successively uses, serve him much as retorts, and filters, and cupels serve the assayer who wishes to separate the pure gold from all accompanying ingredients.
So close, indeed, is the relationship, that it is impossible to say where science begins and art ends. All the instruments of the natural philosopher are the products of art; the adjusting one of them for use is an art; there is art in making an observation with one of them; it requires art properly to treat the facts ascertained; nay, even the employing established generalizations to open the way to new generalizations, may be considered as art. In each of these cases previously organized knowledge becomes the implement by which new knowledge is got at: and whether that previously organized knowledge is embodied in a tangible apparatus or in a formula, matters not in so far as its essential relation to the new knowledge is concerned. If, as no one will deny, art is applied knowledge, then such portion of a scientific investigation as consists of applied knowledge is art. So that we may even say that as soon as any prevision in science passes out of its originally passive state, and is employed for reaching other previsions, it passes from theory into practice--becomes science in action--becomes art. And when we thus see how purely conventional is the ordinary distinction, how impossible it is to make any real separation--when we see not only that science and art were originally one; that the arts have perpetually assisted each other; that there has been a constant reciprocation of aid between the sciences and arts; but that the sciences act as arts to each other, and that the established part of each science becomes an art to the growing part--when we recognize the closeness of these associations, we shall the more clearly perceive that as the connexion of the arts with each other has been ever becoming more intimate; as the help given by sciences to arts and by arts to sciences, has been age by age increasing; so the interdependence of the sciences themselves has been ever growing greater, their mutual relations more involved, their _consensus_ more active.
That which we further found by analysis to form the more specific characteristic of scientific previsions, as contrasted with the previsions of uncultured intelligence--their quantitativeness--we also see to have been the characteristic alike in the initial steps in science, and of all the steps succeeding them. The facts and admissions cited in disproof of the assertion that the sciences follow one another, both logically and historically, in the order of their decreasing generality, have been enforced by the sundry instances we have met with, in which the more general or abstract sciences have been advanced only at the instigation of the more special or concrete--instances serving to show that a more general science as much owes its progress to the presentation of new problems by a more special science, as the more special science owes its progress to the solutions which the more general science is thus led to attempt--instances therefore illustrating the position that scientific advance is as much from the special to the general as from the general to the special.
Quite in harmony with this position we find to be the admissions that the sciences are as branches of one trunk, and that they were at first cultivated simultaneously; and this harmony becomes the more marked on finding, as we have done, not only that the sciences have a common root, but that science in general has a common root with language, classification, reasoning, art; that throughout civilization these have advanced together, acting and reacting upon each other just as the separate sciences have done; and that thus the development of intelligence in all its divisions and subdivisions has conformed to this same law which we have shown that the sciences conform to. From all which we may perceive that the sciences can with no greater propriety be arranged in a succession, than language, classification, reasoning, art, and science, can be arranged in a succession; that, however needful a succession may be for the convenience of books and catalogues, it must be recognized merely as a convention; and that so far from its being the function of a philosophy of the sciences to establish a hierarchy, it is its function to show that the linear arrangements required for literary purposes, have none of them any basis either in Nature or History.
There is one further remark we must not omit--a remark touching the importance of the question that has been discussed. Unfortunately it commonly happens that topics of this abstract nature are slighted as of no practical moment; and, we doubt not, that many will think it of very little consequence what theory respecting the genesis of science may be entertained. But the value of truths is often great, in proportion as their generality is wide. Remote as they seem from practical application, the highest generalizations are not unfrequently the most potent in their effects, in virtue of their influence on all those subordinate generalizations which regulate practice. And it must be so here. Whenever established, a correct theory of the historical development of the sciences must have an immense effect upon education; and, through education, upon civilization. Greatly as we differ from him in other respects, we agree with M. Comte in the belief that, rightly conducted, the education of the individual must have a certain correspondence with the evolution of the race.
No one can contemplate the facts we have cited in illustration of the early stages of science, without recognising the _necessity_ of the processes through which those stages were reached--a necessity which, in respect to the leading truths, may likewise be traced in all after stages. This necessity, originating in the very nature of the phenomena to be analyzed and the faculties to be employed, more or less fully applies to the mind of the child as to that of the savage. We say more or less fully, because the correspondence is not special but general only. Were the _environment_ the same in both cases, the correspondence would be complete. But though the surrounding material out of which science is to be organized, is, in many cases, the same to the juvenile mind and the aboriginal mind, it is not so throughout; as, for instance, in the case of chemistry, the phenomena of which are accessible to the one, but were inaccessible to the other. Hence, in proportion as the environment differs, the course of evolution must differ. After admitting sundry exceptions, however, there remains a substantial parallelism; and, if so, it becomes of great moment to ascertain what really has been the process of scientific evolution. The establishment of an erroneous theory must be disastrous in its educational results; while the establishment of a true one must eventually be fertile in school-reforms and consequent social benefits.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.