Newton, Monster and Saint
From the end of the seventeenth century onward the scene becomes too crowded for a systematic inquiry into individual motivations; however, I have said enough to suggest the basic pattern -- and though the character of the times changed, that pattern remained essentially the same.
Look at Newton, for instance: he has been idolized and his character bowdlerized to such an extent (above all in the Victorian standard biography by Brewster) that the phenomenal mixture of monster and saint out of which it was compounded was all but lost from sight. On the one hand he was deeply religious and believed -- with Kepler and Bishop Usher -- that the world had been created in 404 B.C.; that the convenient design of the solar system -- for instance, all planetary orbits lying in a single plane -- was proof of the existence of God, who not only created the universe but also kept it in order by correcting from time to time the irregularities which crept into the heavenly motions -- and by preventing the universe from collapsing altogether under the pressure of gravity. On the other hand, he fulminated at any criticism of his work, whether justified or not, displayed symptoms of persecution mania, and in his priority fight with Leibniz over the invention of the calculus he used the perfidious means of carefully drafting in his own hand the findings, in his own favour, of the 'impartial' committee set up by the Royal society. To quote M. Hoskin:
No one supposes that the committee set up by the Royal Society of which Newton had then been president for several years, was impartial. But we can only realize the extent of Newton's share in its conclusions when we examine a much-corrected draft summary of what were to be the findings of the committee. The draft is written in Newton's own hand, and it is fascinating to watch Newton debating with himself whether the committee ought to say 'We are satisfied that he [Newton] had invented the method of fluxions before' 1669, or whether it would sound better if they said 'We find that he invented the method of fluxions before' 1669; or deciding that to say 'We are satisfied that Mr. Newton was the first author of this method' was too terse, and that several more lines of explanation ought to be inserted before the conclusion 'for which reason we reckon Mr. Newton the first inventor'. [13]
Here is pettiness on a heroic scale -- combined with a heroic vision of the universe worked out in minute detail: in other words, the mixture as before.
The Mysticism of Franklin
As we move on into the eighteenth century the towering genius of Benjamin Franklin sticks out of it like his lightning rod. Printer, journalist, pamphleteer, politician, wire-puller, diplomat, and statesman; pioneer of electricity, founder of the physics of liquid surfaces, discoverer of the properties of marsh gas, designer of the "chevaux de frise" which halted the advance of the British fleet on the Delaware, inventor of bifocal spectacles and of improved fireplaces, advocate of watertight bulkheads on ships and of chinmey-shafts for the ventilation in mines -- the list could be continued. And yet this 'first civilized American', as one of his biographers called him [14], for all his incomparable clarity of thought and lucidity of style, had formed his metaphysical outlook at the age of sixteen when he read a book by Tryon, a member of the group of British Pythagoreans. The members of this sect were chiefly known for their vegetarianism because, like the ancient Brotherhood, they believed in the transmigration of souls and wished to avoid the risk of feasting on some reincarnation of a human being. Franklin became a convert to vegetarianism and believed in transmigration to the end of his life. At the age of twenty-two he composed a Pythagorean epitaph for himself; at the age of eighty-four, the year of his death, he ordered that it should appear, unchanged, on his tomb. It reads:
The Body Of BENJAMIN FRANKLIN Printer (Like the Cover of an Old Book Its Contents Torn Out And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding) Lies Here, Food for Worms. But the Work Shall Not Be Lost For It Will (As He Believed) Appear Once More In a New and More Elegant Edition Revised and Corrected By The Author
His conviction that souls are immortal, that they cannot be destroyed and are merely transformed in their migrations led him, by way of analogy, to one of the first clear formulations of the law of the conservation of matter. The following quotations will make the connection clear:
The power of man relative to matter seems limited to the dividing it, or mixing the various kinds of it, or changing its form and appearance by differing compositions of it, but does not extend to the making or creating of new maker, or annihilating the old.
This was written when he was seventy-eight. The following was written one year later:
I say that when I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of water wasted, I cannot suspect the annihilation of souls, or believe that He will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready made that now exist, and put Himself to the continual trouble of maklng new ones. Thus finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall; in some shape or other, always exist.
The argument seems to indicate that what one might call the principle of the 'conservation of souls' was derived from that of the 'conservation of matter'. But in fact it was the other way round. As Kepler had transformed the Holy Trinity into the trinity of Sun -- Force -- Planets, so in Franklin's case, too, a mystical conviction gave birth, by analogy, to a scientific theory. And could there be a more charming combination of man's vanity with his transcendental aspirations than to pray for a 'more elegant, revised, and corrected edition' of one's proud and humble self?
The Fundamentalism of Faraday
The nineteenth-century landscape is crowded with giants; I shall briefly comment on four of them. In the physical sciences Faraday and Maxwell are probably the greatest: Einstein, who ought to know, has put them on a par with Galileo and Newton; and Crowther, who wrote short biographies of both, makes the fine distinction of calling Faraday 'the greatest physicist of the nineteenth century' and Maxwell 'the greatest theoretical physicist of the nineteenth century'. To these let me add, from the biological sciences, Darwin and Pasteur, to make up a foursome.
Faraday, whom Tyndall described as 'the great mad child', was the most inhuman character of the four: the son of a sectarian blacksmith, self-taught, with a passionate temperament which was denied all human outlets except religion and science. This was probably the cause of the protracted episode of mental disorder, comparable to Newton's, which began when he was forty-nine. Characteristic of the coyness of science historians is the Encyclopaedia Britannica's reference to Faraday's clinical insanity: 'In 1841 he found that he required rest, and it was not till 1845 that he entered on his second great period of research.'
At thirty, shortly after his marriage -- which remained childless -- Faraday joined an extreme fundamentalist, ascetic sect, the 'Sandemanians', to which his father and his young wife belonged, and whose services he had attended since infancy. The Sandemanians considered practically every human activity as a sin -- including even the Victorian virtue of saving money; they washed each other's feet, intermarried, and refused to proselytize; on one occasion they suspended Faraday's membership because he had to dine, by royal command, with the Queen at Windsor, and thus had to miss the congregation's Sunday service. It took many years before he was forgiven and re-elected an EIder of the sect.
In his later years Faraday withdrew almost completely from social contacts, refusing even the presidency of the Royal Academy because of its too worldly disposition. The inhuman self-denials imposed by his creed made Faraday canalize his ferocious vitality into the pursuit of science, which he regarded as the only other permissible form of divine worship.
The Metaphysics of Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell was of an altogether different, balanced, and happy disposition. In his case, too, religious belief became a spur to scientific activity, but in more subtle ways. He was a double-faced giant: he completed the classical edifice of the Newtonian universe, but he also inaugurated the era of what one might call the 'surrealistic' physics of the twentieth century.
As Kepler had embraced the Copernican system 'for phys
ical or if you prefer, metaphysical reasons', so Maxwell confessed that the theories of his later period were formed 'in that hidden and dimmer region where Thought weds Fact. Does not the way to it pass through the very den of the metaphysician, strewed with the remains of former explorers and abhorred by every man of science?'
The metaphysician in Maxwell had by that time long outgrown the crude materialism of mid-nineteeath-century science, and its equally crude forms of Christianity. Maxwell's religions beliefs were conceived in symbolic, almost abstract, terms; they compared to Faraday's fundamentalist creed as his abstract equations of the electro-magnetic field compare with the lines of force which to Faraday were 'as real as matter'. The connection between Maxwell's religions and scientific views is indeed just as intimate as in the case of Franklin or Kepler. I have mentioned before how, once he had arrived at his twenty general equations, Maxwell kicked away the scaffolding from under him -- the physical model of vortices in the ether -- and thus inaugurated the post-Newtonian era in physics, with its renunciation of all models and representations in terms of sensory experience.
There is a characteristic passage in one of his letters to his wife:
'I can always have you with me in my mind -- why should we not have our Lord always before us in our minds. . . . If we had seen Him in the flesh we should not have known Him any better, perhaps not so well.' In another letter to his wife, he says that he had been re-reading Ephesians VI. This is not a very inspiring chapter, dealing with relations between parents and children, masters and servants; yet Maxwell comments: 'Here is more about family relations. There are things which have meanings so deep that if we follow on to know them we shall be led into great mysteries of divinity. If we reverence them, we shall even see beyond their first aspect a spiritual meaning. For God speaks to us more plainly in these bonds of our life than in anything that we can understand.'
J. G. Crowther -- who, as an adherent of the Marxist philosophy of history can hardly be accused of mystic inclinations -- remarks on this curious passage: 'Here Maxwell accepts material relationships with the belief that acquaintance with them will lead to spiritual understanding. He proceeds from the contemplation of material relationships to spiritual truth, from the model of the electro-magnetic field to the equations. The influence of the New Testament is seen also in his interpretation of self-sacrifice. During the last years of his life, his wife was an invalid. He nursed her personally with the most assiduous care. At one period he did not sleep in a bed for three weeks, though he delivered his lectures and superintended the laboratory as usual. The modernity of Maxwell's science, and the antiquity of his sociology and religion appear incongruous. But it may be noted that though his views on sociology and religion were antique, they were superior to those of nearly all his scientific contemporaries. He at least thought about these problems, and if he was unable to find modern answers to them, he learned enough of them to avoid the intellectual philistinism of his time.'
It was the time when Berthelot proclaimed: 'The world today has no longer any mystery for us'; when Haeckel had solved all his Welträtsel and A. R. Wallace, in his book on The Wonderful Century, declared that the nineteenth century had produced 'twenty-four fundamental advances, as against only fifteen for all the rest of recorded history'. The Philistines everywhere were 'dizzy with success' -- to quote once more Stalin's famous phrase of 1932, when factories and power dams were going up at great speed while some seven million peasants were dying of starvation. It had indeed been a wonderful century for natural philosophy, but at its end moral philosophy had reached one of its lowest ebbs in history -- and Maxwell was well aware of this. He was aware of the limitations of a rigidly deterministic outlook; it was he who, in his revolutionary treatment of the dynamics of gases, replaced mechanical causation by a statistical approach based on the theory of probability -- a decisive step towards quantum physics and the principle of indeterminism. Moreover, he was fully aware of the far-reaching implications of this approach, not only for physics but also for philosophy: 'It is probable that important results will be obtained by the application of this the statistical method, which is as yet little known and is not familiar to our minds. If the actual history of Science had been different, and if the scientific doctrines most familiar to us had been those which must be expressed in this way, it is possible that we might have considered the existence of a certain kind of contingency a self-evident truth, and treated the doctrine of philosophical necessity as a mere sophism.' [15]
Already at the age of twenty-four he had realized the limitations of materialist philosophy: 'The only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.' [16] Twenty years later, at the height of his fame, he gave full rein to his hobby, satirical verse, to ridicule the shallow materialism of the Philistines. The occasion was the famous presidential address by John Tyndall to the British Association meeting in Belfast. Tyndall, a generous soul but a narrow-minded philosopher, attacked the 'theologians' and extolled the virtues of the brave new materialist creed. Maxwell's satire is still valid today:
In the very beginning of science, the parsons, who managed things then, Being handy with hammer and chisel, made gods in the likeness of men; Till Commerce arose, and at length some men of exceptional power Supplanted both demons and gods by the atoms, which last to this hour. From nothing comes nothing, they told us, nought happens by chance but by fate; There is nothing but atoms and void, all else is mere whims out of date! Then why should a man curry favour with beings who cannot exist, To compass some petty promotion in nebulous kingdoms of mist? . . . First, then, let us honour the atom, so lively, so wise, and so small; The atomists next let us praise, Epicurus, Lucretius, and all; Let us danm with faint praise Bishop Butler, in whom many atoms combined To form that remarkable structure, it pleased him to call -- his mind.
In another poem he wrote:
. . . While down the stream of Evolution We drift, expecting no solution But that of the survival of the fittest. Till, in the twilight of the gods, When earth and sun are frozen clods, When, all its energy degraded, Matter to aether shall have faded; We, that is, all the work we've done, As waves in aether, shall for ever run In ever-widening spheres through heavens beyond the sun.
And thus in the nineteenth century's most advanced scientific mind we meet once again, in a sublimated and rarified form, the ancient belief in the indestructibility of the numinous.
The Atheism of Darwin
Dr. Robert Darwin was an atheist who chose for his son Charles the career of a country clergyman -- simply because this seemed to be the most gentlemanly occupation for a youth so obviously devoid of any particular ambition and intellectual excellence. Charles himself fully agreed with this choice. As a student at Cambridge he had read Pearson on the Creeds, and had come to the conclusion that he did not 'in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible'. [17] Even during the voyage of the Beagle he amused the officers by his naïve orthodoxy, and he was deeply shocked when one of his shipmates expressed doubts concerning the biblical account of the Flood. Such a rigid fundamentalist belief could not be reconciled with speculations about the origin of species; his loss of faith coincided with his conversion to the evolutionary theory. For a while he fought a rearguard action against his doubts by day-dreaming about the discovery of old manuscript texts which would confirm the historical truth of the Gospels; but this did not help much. In the months following his return from the voyage the new theory was born and his faith in religion was dead.
Darwin's arguments against religion were as crude and literal-minded as his belief had been: 'the miracles were not credible to any sane man'; the Old Testament gave a 'manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc. [18] He took strong exception to the 'damnable doctrine' that non-believers, 'and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends', will be everlastingly punished. As for Hinduism or
Buddhism, and the persistence of religious aspirations throughout human history, he explained them -- in an oddly Lamarckian argument -- as the result of 'inherited experience'.
Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation of a belief in God on the minds of children by producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains, not as yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.
Before the great turning point in his life, 'the nuclear discovery' of his theory, he had not only been an orthodox believer, but at least on one occasion, in the grandeur of the Brazilian forest, he had also felt that quasi-mystical, 'deep inward experience' that there must be more in man than 'the mere breath of his body.' [19] But after the turning point such experiences did not recur -- and he himself wondered sometimes whether he was not like a man who had become colour-blind. At the same decisive period, when he was about thirty, Darwin suffered, in his own words, a 'curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes'. An attempt to re-read Shakespeare bored him 'to the point of physical nausea'. [20] He preferred popular novels of the sentimental kind -- so long as they had a happy ending. In his autobiography he complained: