Needless to say, this is a pretty difficult proposition. How can we describe for example a mystical experience? What we need is a language that will permit us to speak of such a profoundly personal experience in terms of philosophical concepts, in terms of biochemistry, and in terms of theology. At present these are three totally separate and unconnected vocabularies; our problem is somehow to discover a literary, artistic vocabulary which will make it possible for us to pass without any serious jolt from one point of view to the other, from one universe of discourse to another. When the problem is posed in a specific form such as this, one can see very well that it is excessively difficult. We really do need a poet like Shakespeare—a pontifex maximus—to solve it for us. Meanwhile I shall do my best to go ahead with my limited resources and see what I can do in the way of building bridges.
Let us now change our metaphor from one of engineering to a very expressive metaphor of domesticity and speak about what has been called the ‘celibacy of the intellect’. The trouble with all specialized knowledge is that it is an organized series of celibacies. The different subjects live in their monastic cells, apart from one another, and simply do not intermarry and produce the children that they ought to produce. The problem is to try to arrange marriages between these various subjects, in the hope of producing a valuable progeny. And the celibacy is not only among different aspects of the intellect; it is also a celibacy of the passions, a celibacy of instinct.
This theme of the isolation of the passions is a very characteristic feature of contemporary literature. If you go to see certain plays—for example, by Tennessee Williams, a dramatist of enormous talent, which I greatly admire—one sees an almost complete celibacy of the passions. They exist in a chemically pure state without any connection with the intellect whatsoever. They are living a life entirely of their own. If you were to take these plays as a serious picture of contemporary life, you would certainly be very much deceived, as I was thinking the other day when I saw one of them very well staged in the theatre. The mere fact of putting it on required such a passionate combination of people using their intellect and keeping their will firmly fixed on the subject that it was itself a complete denial of the reality of the view of life in which the passions are divorced from the intellectual and voluntary activities of human beings.
At any rate, what we need to do is to arrange marriages, or rather to bring back into their originally married state, the different departments of knowledge and feeling which have been arbitrarily separated and made to live in their own monastic cells, in isolation. We can parody the Bible and say, ‘That which nature has brought together let no man put asunder’; let not the arbitrary academic division into subjects tear apart the closely knit web of reality and turn it into nonsense.
Yet, here we are up against a very serious problem: any form of higher knowledge requires specialization. We have to specialize in order to penetrate more deeply into certain separate aspects of reality. But if specialization is absolutely necessary, it can be, if carried too far, absolutely fatal. Therefore, we must discover some way of making the best of both worlds—of the highly specialized world of objective observation and intellectual abstraction, and of what may be called the married world of immediate experience, in which nothing can be separated. We are both intellect and passion, our minds have both objective knowledge of the outer world and subjective experience. To discover methods of bringing these separate worlds together, to show the relationship between them, is, I feel, the most important task of modern education.
I would like to quote a very beautiful sentence from a letter written by T. H. Huxley to Charles Kingsley on the occasion of the death of Huxley’s small son, aged four. Kingsley had written a letter of sympathy, and my grandfather wrote back at great length on the whole problem of immortality and the position of the scientist in the modern world. He said,
Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth, which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
One sees here that the scientific process is intrinsically an ethical process, a side to science which is insufficiently stressed at present. The humility of the scientist in the face of fact and observation is a thing of tremendous importance from an ethical point of view. This was seen very clearly as long ago as the time of Francis Bacon, who, though not himself a serious man of science, did lay down a number of general ideas of great significance for the development of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bacon was hostile to scholastic philosophers, and even to Greek philosophers, who presumed to make statements about the universe without taking the trouble to find out what the facts really were. There are a number of remarkable passages in Bacon where he talks about the wickedness of these philosophers.
He speaks of Plato and Aristotle as guilty men. (Bacon’s hostility to Plato and Aristotle was rather unjust. Aristotle, after all, was a very important scientific observer.) There is a famous passage in The Advancement of Learning, for example, where he says the scholastics were like spiders, weaving webs out of their own heads without any consideration of what was going on in the world, and the webs were admirable for the fineness of the thread and the workmanship, but without any substance and without any fruit. In the same way, in the preface to one of his minor books, The History of the Winds, he speaks in a very eloquent and powerful way about the ethical quality of science. He says,
Therefore, if we have any Humility towards the Creator; if we have any Reverence and Esteem of His works; if we have any Charity towards Men or any Desire of relieving their Miseries and Necessities; if we have any Love for natural Truths; any Aversion to Darkness; and any Desire of purifying the Understanding; Mankind are to be most affectionately interested and beseeched to lay aside, at least for a while, their preposterous, fantastick and hypothetical Philosophies (which have led Experience captive, and childishly triumphed over the Works of God;) and now at length condescend, with due Submission and Veneration, to approach and peruse the Volume of the Creation; dwell some time upon it; and, bringing to the work a Mind well purged of Opinions, Idols and false Notions, converse familiarly therein.
This is a splendid passage, and one which should be meditated on, because it is precisely the reluctance to accept preconceived notions and to turn one’s opinion into a thesis rather than a working hypothesis which is the hallmark of a genuine scientist and which constitutes the essential ethical nature of scientific activity.
Bacon felt very strongly that one of the values of science was in its fruits, that it could do a great deal to lessen human want and human suffering. As we know, it certainly can do this. But it can also do other things of which we are painfully aware at the present time. As Bacon was never tired of saying, knowledge without love can be profoundly corrupt and even evil. He blamed philosophers like Plato and Aristotle not only because they lacked the humility to study objective facts and base their reasoning upon those facts, but because they had pursued knowledge purely for the sake of intellectual satisfaction, not with the motive of love or in order to help human beings.
Now the shoe is rather on the other foot: the overweening philosophers of today are members of the scientific school who have forgotten scientific humility. We are all familiar, for example, with the extreme bumptiousness of the early behaviourists. When one reads some of the early writings of J. B. Watson, one is absolutely flabbergasted that anybody who professed to be scientific could have made statements so sweeping and dismissed so cavalierly such enormous areas of human experience. To ‘scientists’ such as these certainly Bacon would have brought the reproach that they were (a) overweening and (b) lacking in the love which alone can make knowledge precious and valuable.
Our problem, then, is somehow to reunite the different aspects of the world as we know it, to recreate the married state with which direct experience makes us familiar. For we are all the time familiar with the fact that the world of concepts and abstractions is balanced by the world of immediate experience, and that the inner experience is there at the same time as the objective description of nature built upon inferences. But what is the philosophical relationship between these two sides of our knowledge, the inner and the outer? I am inclined to think that philosophically minded scientists like Max Planck are right in conceiving that the two worlds, the abstract and the immediate, are simply aspects of the same reality, that the basic Reality is a
