Modern Science and Anarchism/Chapter 5
V.
THE AWAKENING IN THE YEARS 1856–1862.
Auguste Comte had failed in his study of human institutions, and above all in his study of the origin of morality. But we must not forget that he wrote his "Positive Philosophy" and "Positive Politics" long before the years 1856–1862, which, as was already remarked, suddenly broadened the horizon of science and rapidly raised the level of the general conceptions of educated men.
The series of epoch-making, fundamental works which appeared in the course of those five or six years, dealing in quite a new way with all the principal branches of knowledge, accomplished so complete a revolution in all our ways of looking at Nature, at life in general, and at the life of human societies, that no similar revolution has ever taken place in the whole history of science in the last twenty centuries.
What the Encyclopaedists had dimly perceived or only foreboded, what a few only of the greatest minds of the first part of the nineteenth century had succeeded in disentangling with so much difficulty, became all of a sudden a matter of general knowledge—a certitude, rich in results. And this new knowledge was won, by the application of the inductive scientific method, with such a fullness and in so comprehensive a form that henceforth every other method of research appeared incomplete, false, and purposeless.
Let us ponder for a moment over these results, the better to be able to appreciate the next attempt at a synthetic philosophy which was made by Herbert Spencer.
In the course of those six years, Grove, Clausius, Helmholtz, Joule, and a whole phalanx of physicists and astronomers—including Kirchhoff, who, by his wonderful discovery of the spectral analysis, enabled us to find out the chemical composition of the stars—broke the spell that forbade till then to men of science the domain of wide generalisations. And in a few years they proved to evidence the unity of the whole inorganic world, including the most distant stars—that is, the most distant suns surrounded by their planets.
Henceforth it became impossible to speak any longer of those mysterious "fluids"—caloric, electric, magnetic—to which physicists had previously resorted for explaining the different physical forces. Now, it was proved to evidence that all the physical phenomena, including light, heat, electricity, and magnetism, are the results of those same mechanical vibrations of the molecules which produce the waves of the sea and the vibrations of a bell or a tuning-fork.
At the same time we learned the means of measuring these invisible vibratory movements of the molecules—to weigh, so to say, their energy—just as we measure the energy of movement of a stone that falls from a certain height, or of a railway train in motion.
It was demonstrated, moreover, always during those memorable years, that the celestial bodies furthest removed from us—even the myriads of suns which we see in the Milky Way—are composed of those same simple bodies, or elements, of which all other bodies on the Earth are composed, and that absolutely the same vibrations of molecules are going on there, with the same physical and chemical results, as on our planet. The movements themselves of the massive celestial bodies which travel through space according to the laws of universal gravitation, are in all probability but the resultant of all these vibrations that are transmitted in all directions for billions and trillions of miles, through the interstellar space of the Universe.
These same caloric and electric vibrations suffice to explain all chemical phenomena. Chemistry is but another chapter of molecular mechanics. And even plant and animal life in its countless manifestations is but an exchange of molecules (or rather atoms in the molecules) in that vast series of unstable, easily decomposed chemical bodies of which the living tissues of all animated beings are built up. Life is but a series of chemical decompositions and recompositions in very complex molecules: a series of fermentations due to chemical, inorganic ferments.
Moreover, during those same years it was discovered (to be proved more fully later on, in 1890–1900) that the life-processes in the living cells of the nervous system also consist of chemical permutations in the molecules of the cells, and that the transmission from one nerve-cell to another of molecular vibrations and of chemical permutations gives us a mechanical explanation of the nervous life in animals and of the transmission of irritations in plants.
The result of all these researches is immense. Owing to them, we can now, without leaving the domain of purely physiological facts, understand how images and impressions are produced in our brain, and engraved on it; how they act upon one another, and how they give rise to conceptions and ideas. We can also understand the so-called "association of ideas"—that is, how new impressions revive the old ones.
An insight is thus gained into the very mechanism of thought.
We are certainly very far yet from knowing all that is to be known in this direction. Science only just now frees itself from the metaphysics which strangled it, and only scouts the borderland of this great domain. But a beginning has been made. A solid foundation has already been laid for further research. The ancient division into two separate domains, which the German philosopher Kant endeavoured to establish—the domain of phenomena which we examine "in time and space" (the domain of physics), and the other, which we are able to examine only "in time" (the mental phenomena)—this division has now to disappear, And to the question that was put one day by the materialist Russian physiologist, Professor Syetchenoff: "To which department does psychology belong, and who has to study it?" the answer has already been given: "It belongs to physiology, and it is the physiologist who has to study it, by the physiological method!" In fact, the recent researches of physiologists have already thrown infinitely more light on the mechanism of thought, on the origin of impressions, on their fixation in the memory and their transmission, than all the subtle discussions with which metaphysicians have entertained us for centuries.
Metaphysics is thus beaten now, in the stronghold itself which formerly belonged to it without contest. The domain of psychology, in which it formerly considered itself invincible, has also been invaded by natural sciences and by materialist philosophy, which has caused our knowledge in this branch to increase with a rapidity entirely unknown in former times.
However, among the works that appeared during these five or six years, there was none which exercised so deep an influence аs the "Origin of Species," by Charles Darwin.
Already Buffon in the eighteenth century, and Lamarck in the very first years of the nineteenth, had ventured to maintain that the different species of plants and animals peopling the Earth do not represent immutable forms. They are variable, and vary continually under the influence of their surroundings. The family likeness which we recognise in different species belonging to a particular group is a proof, they said, that these species descended from a common ancestor. Thus, the different kinds of buttercup which we find in our prairies and in our marshes must be the descendants of one and the same ancestral kind—descendants that have grown dissimilar in consequence of a series of changes and adaptations they have been subjected to in the varied circumstances of their existence. Likewise, the present species of wolf, dog, jackal, fox, did not formerly exist; but in their stead there was once a species of animals which in the course of ages gave birth to the several branches representing now the wolves, the dogs, the jackals, and the foxes.
But in the eighteenth century it was dangerous to profess such "heresies." For far less than that the Church had already threatened to prosecute Buffon, and he had been compelled to recant his statements about the geological evolution of the Earth. The Church at that time was still very powerful, and the naturalist who dared to uphold heresies offensive to her was threatened with prison, torture, or the madhouse. That is why the "heretics" spoke with so much prudence all through the first half of the nineteenth century. But now, in the second half of the century, after the revolutions of 1848, Darwin and Wallace could bravely affirm the same heretic teaching, and Darwin had also the courage to add that man, too, was the product of a slow physiological evolution; that he drew his origin from a species of animals which gave birth both to man and the now-living apes and monkeys; that the "immortal mind" and the "moral sense" of man had developed in the same way as the intelligence and the social instincts of a chimpanzee or an ant.
We know what thunderbolts were hurled by the Elders of the Churches at Darwin, and especially at his courageous, learned and intelligent apostle, Huxley, who made most of those Darwinian conclusions which chiefly alarmed the priests of all religions.
The struggle was hot, but the Darwinians emerged victorious, and since then a new science—biology, the science of life in all its manifestations—has grown up under our very eyes. The origin of all species by descent is now an established fact. Some of the clergy themselves accept it, and try to reconcile Evolution with Revelation.
Darwin's work gave at the same time a new key and a new method of investigation for the better understanding of many other groups of phenomena: the life of physical matter, the life of organisms, and the life and evolution of societies. The idea of a continuous development—of a progressive Evolution and a gradual adaptation of beings and societies to new conditions, in proportion as these conditions become modified—this idea found a far wider field to work in than that of merely explaining the origin of new species. When it was applied to the study of Nature in general, as well as to the study of man and his social institutions, it opened up quite new horizons and made it possible to explain some of the most difficult problems in the domain of all branches of knowledge. Taking this principle, so rich in consequences, as a basis, it was possible to reconstruct, not only the history of organisms, but also the history of human institutions.
Biology, in the hands of Herbert Spencer, showed us how all the species of plants and animals inhabiting our globe were able to develop, starting from a few very simple organisms that existed on the earth at the beginning; and Haeckel was able to draw a sketch of a likely genealogical tree of the different classes of animals, man included. This was already a great result; but it also became possible to lay a solid scientific foundation to the history of human customs, beliefs, and institutions—a knowledge the want of which was so much felt by the philosophers of the eighteenth century and called for by Auguste Comte. Now, the history of human societies, institutions and religions can be written from the point of view of adaptive Evolution, without having recourse to the metaphysical formulas of Hegel, and without resorting to "innate ideas," to revelation from above, or to Kant's "substances." We can reconstrue it without appealing to those formulas which were death to the spirit of research, and behind which the same ignorance was always hidden—the same old superstition, the same blind faith disguised under sonorous words.
Aided by the works of naturalists on the one hand, and, on the other, by the works of Henry Maine and his followers, who applied the same inductive method to the study of primitive institutions and to the law codes that originated from them, it was possible during the last thirty years to put the history of human institutions on as firm a basis as the history of the development of any species of plants or animals.
Of course, it would be very unjust to forget the work that was already accomplished as early as the "thirties" of the nineteenth century by the school of Augustin Thierry in France, and that of Maurer and the "Germanists" in Germany, of which Kostomaroff, Byelayeff and so many others were the followers in Russia. The method of evolution had certainly been applied since the Encyclopaedists to the study of customs and institutions, as well as languages. But to obtain correct and really scientific results became possible only since men of science learned to treat the facts of history in the same way as naturalists examine the gradual development of the organs of a plant or that of a new species.
In their own day, the metaphysical formulas no doubt had helped the thinkers to make some approximate generalisations. They helped especially to rouse numbed minds. They stimulated thought by their sometimes poetical indications of the unity of Nature and its never-ceasing life. At a time when reaction was supreme, as it was in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the inductive generalisations of the Encyclopaedists and their English and Scotch predecessors were nearly forgotten, and when it would have needed moral courage to speak of the unity of physical and "spiritual" nature in the face of triumphant mysticism—in those dark days the poetical conceptions of some French thinkers and the nebulous metaphysics of the Germans upheld at least the taste for generalisations.
But the generalisations of that time, being established either by the dialectic method or by means of a half-conscious induction, were on account of that despairingly vague. The first—the dialectic ones—were mostly based on naïve assertions, similar to those made by Greeks in ancient days, when they affirmed that planets must travel through space along circles, because the circle is the most perfect curve. If the naïve character of such assertions and the total absence of proofs did not strike everyone, it was only because it was concealed by the vagueness of the arguments and nebulous reasonings, as well as by an obscure and grotesquely heavy style. As to the second, i.e., those generalisations which had at their origin a semi-conscious induction, they were always built upon a series of extremely limited observations—like the hasty generalisations of Weismann, built upon a very narrow basis of facts, which have caused some stir of late among our biologist contemporaries. The value of the hypothetical generalisations based upon such half-conscious induction was easily exaggerated, and they were represented as indisputable laws, while they were mere guesses, mere suppositions, or embryos of generalisations which needed to be subjected to the most elementary test by facts.
And finally, all these loose generalisations were expressed in a way so abstract and cloudy—as, for instance, the famous "thesis, antithesis, and synthesis" of Hegel—that they left the fullest liberty to draw from them the most arbitrary practical conclusions. In fact, one could deduce from them (this was really done) the revolutionary spirit of Bakunin and the Dresden Revolution, the revolutionary Jacobinism of Marx, and the "Recognition of what exists," which led so many "right wing" Hegelians to make "Peace with reality"—that is to say, to indulge in the glorification of autocracy. I hardly need mention here the economic errors into which the Marxists have lately fallen, owing to their predilection for the dialectic method and economic metaphysics, as against the study of the actual facts of economic life.