Eternal Ideas Research Articles

The History of Science and the New Humanism

IN his recent book on “Clothes”, Mr. Eric Gill says that “in our hearts we know science for what it is—the greatest frivolity of history.... If it was not that science enables a lot of people to get rich it would now be what it was before: the amusing hobby of charming old fools.” While this statement is no doubt intended to be deliberately provocative, it unfortunately represents—if only in caricature—the opinion of many otherwise cultured men and women, who have somewhat surprisingly failed to realise that science is as essentially concerned with the philosophic values and the ‘eternal ideas’ as any other department of human intellectual activity. As followers of science, we know that the reproach is entirely unjustifiable, but to refute it is by no means easy. The difficulty lies mainly in the fact that, while the material results of science are immediately obvious, the philosophic framework of science, its methods, its aims, and the rigorous discipline of the laboratory, are scarcely to be comprehended, or even imagined, except by those who have had some considerable personal experience of scientific work. It is, however, clearly of the first importance that, in a world for which science has opened strange new vistas, and upon which she has conferred the power of limitless exploitation of natural resources, misconceptions of the ultimate character of science and misapplications of scientific knowledge should he removed as completely as possible. The History of Science and the New Humanism. By George Sarton. Pp. 178. (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1931.) 2 dollars.

The Torch-Bearers

MR. NOYES has followed up his first volume of “Torch-bearers,” which was reviewed in these columns on May 20,1922, by a second and rather larger book, volume ii., with the sub-title of “The Book of Earth.” It will be remembered that the first volume was inspired by a night spent in the Sierra Madre Mountains when the first trial was made of the new 100-inch telescope, and it treated of the growth of astronomy from Copernicus to Herschel. It was a notable attempt to carry out the destiny predicted for poetry both by Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold in Great Britain, to express the truths of science in the sort of language which had always served mankind as the vehicle of the highest and eternal ideas. We hailed it as such and are glad to think that the three years since its publication have deepened the public appreciation of Mr. Noyes' effort. The second volume will not be found to belie these expectations. It deals with a much more difficult subject from the point of view of poetic presentation, namely, biology, or rather geology as a preface to zoology and evolution as crowning geology. It leaves one in some doubt as to the scope of the third volume which we are promised in the preface to the first. Is the biology to be completed? Heaven, earth and man would seem to be the natural division. Yet in this second volume we are brought down to Huxley at the famous Oxford meeting of the British Association: so what remains for the third, unless it is to be devoted to relativity and the general philosophical change in scientific ideas which has taken place in the twentieth century? The Torch-Bearers. By Alfred Noyes. Vol. 2: The Book of Earth. Pp. vii + 375. (Edinburgh and London: Wm. Blackwood and Sons, 1925.) 7s. 6d. net.