A Philosophy of Pith-Balls

MY wife and I entered the crowded lecture hall and found seats among the young chemists and engineers, among the inveterate and incorrigible lecture-goers who had come to hear the famous physicist, winner of the Nobel prize, and apostle splendid of science. We had come more in hope than in confidence, eager to obtain an idea of the tenets of modern physics, desiring at least some insight into the meaning of relativity, of the quantum theory, of the latest notions of the atom. But we came with well-justified doubts of our capacity, prepared either to be enlightened or bewildered; we listened to the first words of the lecturer as defendants curious to know our fate, and guarding ourselves against disappointment by a wise skepticism.

During the hour of progressive bafflement which followed, I was able to form one idea which I could take home as a monument of the occasion. From the mathematics and electrical theory which must remain, I am afraid, a sealed and forbidden book to my wife and me, a few clear and homely expressions emerged on which we fastened with delight. The lecturer kept referring to a pith-ball which, under favorable circumstances, illustrated some point in the nature or habits of electricity. Pith-ball! The word fell from his lips with a distinct and pleasing articulation, often preceded by one of those pauses which interrupt the flow of extemporaneous expression. Pith-ball. Pith-ball. With each utterance of the odd syllables, as they slid out inconspicuously in the hurried pronunciation of a sentence, or as they fell more solidly and prominently on the air after a brief hesitation, I felt an increasing sense of approval and gratification.

We think of science, surely, as of a body of ordered reasoning, of generalizations and principles arranged in the abstract and logical beauty of the intellectual realm. True enough, hazardous discovery, inspiration, fumbling in the dark and stumbling into the light, must have their part in the human conduct of science. But the result, the body of knowledge or of serviceable hypothesis itself, must be ideal, mathematical, a serene and reasoned system of formula and equation. Yet here was a scientist, and a lion of his tribe, defining one of his ultimates by recourse to pith-balls and glass rods scraped with cat’s fur! The lesson was unmistakable. Science in the end is but an examination into the casual, vulgar objects which surround the mad impromptu of life. It scrapes them against each other, pries into their oddities, and charts their foolish behavior; and lo, the glittering structure of reason, the pretentious universe which we associate with its name! Not only is music the scraping of horsehair on cat’s gut. Science itself is an association of pith-balls, parasites, coals, gases, and every description of substances which are infinitely casual in origin and thoughtless in conduct, as rudely in contrast in their vulgar and vital existence to the categories of reason as the mechanical means of producing a symphony are in contrast to the sentimental purpose of the composer.

Writers of popular articles on science can usually be depended upon to glorify scientific laws as if they were a system of edicts, a Diocletian code promulgated by some Greater Popular Scientist, which the material world must obey. Vain glory! For scientific laws are but summaries of observed habits among the casual phenomena of the world — pith-balls with the rest. It is the laws which must obey, and not be obeyed. The laws are made by the habits which they express, and not the habits by the laws.

The popular-science writer then goes on to glorify the orderly universe which the laws of science reveal. But order is a human category, not a natural one. A room heaped with broken furniture, neglected and filthy, caked with dust, is as perfect an expression of scientific order as the starry heavens. Every atom in it is presumably distributed as strictly according to law as the most exacting scientist could wish, not to say, as it would probably be more truthful to say, every law is distributed strictly according to its tutelary atoms. But still, my wife and I agree, the room is not orderly.

No, existence is casual, and reason an insecure accompaniment to its impulsive flow. And all the products of existence are rooted in the casualness of their parent. If reason think itself primary, let it remember the pith-ball. Was not the first experiment with electricity performed with a kite string?

Half perceiving the deep secret of life, the poet will bury his senses in one class of natural facts, the clover swarming in the meadows, the mountain and wood in the spontaneous unreason of their beauty; the moralist and lover of the good will beat his breast at the unconcerned brutality of mankind; the scientist will weigh and manipulate and compare the odd variations of the substance of things which are open to his inspection, and on them erect his intricate knowledge of their habits; the satirist, in despair at the aspect of the grotesque which all existence wears, will draw men as hideous caricatures, Yahoos, Lilliputians, or coarse giants, exaggerated and out of plumb. The reasonable man — the whole man — must be saddened or strengthened by each of these views in turn. At least he will see what it is to live on the human scale, and will learn how human is the category of order.