From an essay published in 1888.

TO many readers it may appear that the antagonism of science to art may be condoned in favor of her high claim to be the guide, not to beauty, but to truth. But is it indeed truth, in the sense which we have hitherto given to that great and sacred word, at which physical science is now aiming? Can we think of truth merely as a vast heap of facts, piled up into an orderly pyramid of a science, like one of Timur’s heaps of skulls? To collect a million facts, test them, classify them, raise by induction generalizations concerning them, and hand them down to the next generation to add a few thousand more facts and (probably) to reconstruct the pyramid on a different basis and another plan—if this be indeed to arrive at “truth,” modern science may boast she has touched the goal. Yet in other days truth was deemed something nobler than this. It was the interests which lay behind and beyond the facts, their possible bearing on man’s deepest yearnings and sublimest hopes, which gave dignity and meaning to the humblest researches into rock and plant, and which glorified such discoveries as Kepler’s, till he cried in rapture: “O God, I think thy thoughts after thee!” and Newton’s, till he closed the “Principia” (as Parker said of him) by “bursting into the Infinite and kneeling there.” In our time, however, science has repeatedly renounced all pretension to throw light in any direction beyond the sequence of physical causes and effects; and by doing so she has, I think, abandoned her claim to be man’s guide to truth. The Alpine traveler who engages his guides to scale the summit of the Jungfrau, and finds them stop to booze at the Wirthschaft at the bottom, would have no better right to complain than those who fondly expected science to bring them to God, and are told that she now never proceeds above the Ascidian. So long as all the rivulets of laws which science traced flowed freshly onward toward the sea, our souls drank of them with thankfulness. Now that they lose themselves in the sands, they have become mere stagnant pools of knowledge.

  Let us turn to the influence of the scientific spirit on morals.

  Respecting the theory of ethics, the physico-scientific spirit has almost necessarily been from the first utilitarian, not transcendental. To Mr. Herbert Spencer the world first owed the suggestion that moral intuitions are only results of hereditary experiences. “I believe,” he wrote in 1868 to Mr. Mill, “that the experiences of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding modifications which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition, certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.” Mr. Darwin took up the doctrine at this stage, and in his “Descent of Man” linked on the human conscience to the instincts of the lower animals, from whence he holds it to be derived. Similar instincts, he taught, would have grown up in any other animal as well endowed as we are, but those other animals would not necessarily attach their ideas of right and wrong to the same conduct. “If, for instance, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers.”

  These two doctrines—that conscience is only the “capitalized experience of the human tribe” (as Dr. Martineau has summarized Mr. Spencer), and that there is no such thing as absolute or immutable morality, but only a convenient rule for each particular class of intelligent animals—have, between them, revolutionized theoretic ethics, and deeply imperiled, so far as they are accepted, the existence of human virtue. It is in vain that the plea is often entered on the side of faith that, after all, Darwin only showed how conscience has been evolved, possibly by divine prearrangement; and that we may allow its old authority as before. He has done much more than this. He has destroyed, for those who accept his views, the possibility of a rational reverence for the dictates of conscience. As he himself asks: “Would any of us trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind?… The doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which have been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value.” Who, indeed, could attach the same solemn authority to the monitions of the

“Stern Daughter of the Voice of God,”

and to the prejudices of ancestors just emerging from apehood? It was hard enough heretofore for tempted men to be chaste, sober, honest, unselfish, while passion was clamoring for indulgence or want pining for relief. The basis on which their moral efforts rested needed to be in their minds as firm as the law of the universe itself. What fulcrum will they find henceforth in the sand heap of hereditary experiences of utility?

  Thus the scientific spirit has sprung a mine under the deepest foundations of morality. It may, indeed, be hereafter countermined. I believe that it will be so, and that it will be demonstrated that many of our broadest and deepest moral intuitions can have had no such origin. The universal human expectation of justice, to which all literature bears testimony, can never have arisen from such infinitesimal experience of actual justice, or rather such large experience of prevailing injustice, as our ancestors in any period of history can have known. Nor can the “set of our (modern) brains” against the destruction of sickly and deformed infants have come to us from the consolidated experience of past generations, since the “utility” is all on the side of Spartan infanticide. But for the present, and while Darwinism is in the ascendant, the influence of the doctrine of hereditary conscience is simply deadly. It is no more possible for a man who holds such a theory to cherish a great moral ambition than for a stream to rise above its source. The high ideal of goodness, the hunger and thirst after righteousness, which have been the mainspring of heroic and saintly lives, must be exchanged at best for a kindly good-nature and a mild desire to avoid offense. The man of science may be anxious to abolish vice and crime. They offend his tastes and distract him from his pursuits. But he has no longing to enthrone in their place a lofty virtue, demanding his heart and life’s devotion. He is almost as much disturbed by extreme goodness as by wickedness. Nay, it has been remarked by a keen and sensitive observer, that the companionship of a really great and entirely blameless man of science invariably proved a “torpedo touch to aspiration.”…

  Turn we, lastly, to the influences of the scientific spirit on religion. It is hardly too much to affirm that the advance of that spirit has been to individuals and classes the signal for a subsidence of religious faith and religious emotion. Judging from Darwin’s experience as that of a typical man of science, just as such an one becomes an embodiment of the scientific spirit, his religious sentiment flickers and expires like a candle in an airless vault. Speaking of his old feelings of “wonder, admiration, and devotion,” experienced while standing amid the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, he wrote in later years when science had made him all her own: “Now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become color-blind.” Nor did the deadening influences stop at his own soul. As one able reviewer of his Life in the Spectator wrote: “No sane man can deny Darwin’s influence to have been at least contemporaneous with a general decay of belief in the unseen. Darwin’s Theism faded from his mind without disturbance, without perplexity, without pain. These words describe his influence as well as his experience.”

  The causes of the anti-religious tendency of modern science may be found, I believe, first, in the closing up of that “Gate called Beautiful,” through which many souls have been wont to enter the Temple; second, in the diametric opposition of its method to the method of spiritual inquiry; and, third, to the hardness of character frequently produced (as we have already noted) by scientific pursuits. These three causes, I think, sufficiently account for the antagonism between the modern scientific and the religious spirits, quite irrespectively of the bearings of scientific researches and criticisms on the doctrines of either natural or traditional religion. Had science inspired her votaries with religious sentiment, they would have broken their way through the tangle of theological difficulties, and have opened for us a highway of faith at once devout and rational. But of all improbable things to anticipate now in the world is a scientific religious reformation. Lamennais said there was one thing worse than Atheism—namely, indifference whether Atheism be true. The scientific spirit of the age has reached this point. It is contented to be agnostic, not atheistic. It says aloud, “I don’t know”; it mutters to those who care to listen, “I don’t care.”

  The scientific spirit has undoubtedly performed prodigies in the realms of physical discovery. Its inventions have brought enormous contributions to the material well-being of man, and it has widened to a magnificent horizon the intellectual circle of his ideas. Yet, notwithstanding all its splendid achievements, if it foster only the lower mental faculties, while it paralyzes and atrophies the higher; if reverence and sympathy and modesty dwindle in its shadow; if art and poetry shrink at its touch; if morality be undermined and perverted by it; and if religion perish at its approach as a flower vanishes before the frost,—then, I think, we must deny the truth of Sir James Paget’s assertion that “Nothing can advance human prosperity so much as science.” She has given us many precious things, but she takes away things more precious still.