Your Nature and Mine: A Fresh Approach

I

WHEN you step on the starter of your car in the morning you may be worrying about how you are going to touch the boss for a raise, or what you are going to give the Smiths for dinner. The engine turns over and over — and over. Gradually that well-known sick feeling creeps over you. You look at the gas gauge. O.K. You climb out, raise the hood, gaze at the mechanism with an air of wisdom, close the hood, and try again. Then you scratch your head. Your neighbor strolls over exuding superiority. He tries his favorite cures without success, then offers the customary ‘There must be something wrong,’ and barely escapes with his life. There must be something wrong. That’s the point. Personify your engine in as many uncomplimentary phrases as you like, you never seriously entertain the idea that it has stopped working without cause. Can you imagine the garage mechanic reporting: ‘There’s nothing wrong with the car, ma’am; it just won’t run’?

One of our commonest misapprehensions is that all elements of knowledge come through sense organs. That would be like saying that flour plus water plus yeast equals bread. In cooking we have to do something with our ingredients. In gaining knowledge we have to do something with the raw material of sensation. What we do is think, and what we think with is the mind. The effect of this thinking is profound. If our knowledge of nature is limited by human sense equipment, it is also limited by the human mind. This limitation is far more subtle than the other. But it carries us to the same conclusion. Nature is a product of ourselves, of our minds as well as of our sense organs.

Return to your futile and increasingly frantic efforts to start your car. Something must be wrong. The engine is an object in your environment, and you think your environment as a place in which nothing occurs without cause. A few years ago a physicist in Vienna reported that certain minute particles of nature were acting arbitrarily. The announcement created a stir for some time, but the more men thought about it the less walling they were to accept it. The later verdict was that these particles only seemed to be acting arbitrarily. The difficulty was one of method, not of metaphysics. The cause was there if ways and means to detect it could be devised.

A professor of philosophy used to ask us what thoughts would cross our minds if the chandelier in the centre of the room should suddenly begin to expand like a balloon. To put the same problem even more dramatically, suppose you and I were walking in the woods and came upon a stream that seemed to be running uphill rather than down. Notice that ‘seemed to be.’ ‘Illusion’ would be our first reaction. We should rub our eyes and look again. If the brook still seemed to be misbehaving we should pinch ourselves smartly. Not awakening in our beds, we should commence a careful objective study of the extraordinary situation. All of these actions involve the assumption of a cause for the experience. Is it in our eyes? In the atmospheric conditions? Are we dreaming? If the brook is really running uphill, if the chandelier is really expanding, the next question is ‘Why?’ This is the way our minds work.

Man has a peculiar interest in nature, and the ways in which he thinks about it reflect this interest. His concern with nature began in attempts to discover causes of desirable events such as good crops and the accurate shooting of bows and arrows. To-day we are repairing digestive organs and inventing poison gases, but the problem is the same. Desiring comfort and security, we want to control nature. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis pictured a foundation the purpose of which was ‘the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlargement of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.’ He caught the essence of our study of nature, and the reason why cause and effect are so significant. But it is demonstrable that, wherever we read causal connections, the only elements which we actually experience are the contiguity of two events and the priority of one of them. Suppose we were, like some scholars, a species absorbed in the past solely for its own sake. We might have spoken of a relation of ‘priiguity’ or ‘contigority’ and dismissed it as unimportant. We might have been a race of mystics interested not in controlling nature but in excelling in another, say the moral, sphere.

We think of nature as acting according to law. You will find it both strenuous and fruitless to try to think of a lawless environment. Alice journeyed in what was a wonderland, not because it had no laws, but rather because its laws were fascinatingly different from ours. Sometimes you had to run like lightning to stay in a given spot: that was the law of standing still. Sometimes you cried and felt pain, then suddenly pricked your finger and were well again: that was the law of time. A Cheshire cat could leave its smile behind when it vanished: that was the law of the smile of a certain species of Wonderland cat. The Mad Hatter always got the clean place at his tea party.

But, you will object, we think a lawobeying environment because we live in one. Maybe so. If we do, we can never know it. No one has ever perceived a law; seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted one. Once we thought nature animated by countless gods. Then we got the idea of mechanical laws in which the future came exclusively out of the past. More recently we have played with the idea of laws which regard the future as well as the past. Someone once said that Chaos was unthinkable. It is at least humanly unthinkable, for it is characteristic of human thinking to establish connexities.

When we speak of war as being lawless we mean that it does not obey the laws to which we are accustomed, never that it obeys no laws. When we speak of the lawlessness of a roulette wheel we mean only that we are unable to detect connections which we assume to be there. One of the cleverest stunts in advertising is to hang in a store window a coffeepot which shall seem to pour coffee endlessly and without replenishment. People gather around. But they have too much common sense to marvel at a miracle. They are trying to discover how the coffee gets back into the pot.

II

The relativity of human thinking is more difficult to picture than the relativity of human sensation. It is easy to imagine a sensitive being equipped with sense organs different from our own. This we did in a previous article. But can we imagine a being equipped with a different kind of mind? Only remotely, for our imaginative projection will be a product of our own thinking! We are caught in a trap. Some years ago, when the question of inhabitants on Mars was livelier than at present, a number of projects for communication with Martians were suggested. Some recommended that we cover a section of desert with an immense triangle. If the Martians had minds like our own they might reply by constructing a huge circle. Or we might send flashes — four and three, and then seven. If they responded with another arithmetic equation we should have something as a basis for intelligible communication. But if they had minds totally different, a thing conceivable to us only in the abstract, the problem of communication would be hopeless. Why should ours be the only possible type of mental organization?

Perhaps an illustration will make this clear. I have just been examining a collection of Chinese bronze mirrors, most of the designs on which are divided into four parts, signifying the four corners of the earth. Why four corners? Why the four winds of heaven? Why north, south, east, and west? The human mind is in a human body, and the human body is bilateral and has a front and a back. If we had evolved from starfish we might have spoken of the five corners of the earth and the five winds of heaven. Can you imagine what our maps and charts would have looked like? Latitude and longitude are not marked on the earth; they are marked on maps, and maps are symbolic creations of human minds. There are innumerable differences of kind in the symbols by which we might think our world.

And what about differences of degree? There is a man in Boston whose job it is to check adding machines. He is a mathematical wizard. Write down columns of figures as long and as imposing as you wish and he will tell you the sum when you are putting the tail on the last digit. He knows things about numbers to which the rest of us are blind, because he can see a series of interconnections too abstract for us. Suppose we had all been born with minds like Einstein’s. ‘Elementary, my dear Newton,’ we might say. Imagine a mind which would be to Einstein’s what his is to ours. We might learn the calculus of four dimensions in grade school. What should we learn in college? And, on the other hand, if we were a race of dolts capable of only the simplest of abstractions, our master minds might with great effort explore the multiplication table up to twelve times twelve. It is just like playing chess. Most of us see only a few pieces at once; some see several moves ahead; and a few see the conclusion almost in the opening.

One of the comforting things about our environment is that it does not contradict itself. If you call on Mrs. Jones she may be both at home and not ‘at home,’ but only because the phrase is taken in two different meanings. What kind of plans can a hostess make if the Smiths are both coining to dinner and not coming to dinner? Are you coming or not? Did you do this or did you not? Which way will you go, this or that? We should be driven to distraction if our world were self-contradictory. Equally difficult would be a world in which we could not use the expression, ‘Either . . . or.’ Either you were traveling at fifty miles an hour before the accident, or you were not. There is no middle ground. True, you were traveling fifty miles an hour relative to the ground, and you were traveling much faster relative to the car you hit, but this is true only because you have changed your system of reference. The curious fact here is that these laws, Noncontradiction and Excluded Middle, are laws of thought. We say that we live in a rational world, but it is rational because we think it as such.

One of the logician’s most fascinating nightmares consists in trying to imagine a system of thought such as the celebrated man from Mars might use. Suppose the Martian had different and contradictory systems of thought. He might employ one on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the other on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday — and perhaps have a third and very special one reserved for use on Sundays. Of course many of us humans employ one set of propositions in church and another at the office, but we describe such thinking as illogical. Suppose that all of the Martian propositions could be divided into two groups, like odd and even numbers. Suppose that basic to the Martian way of thinking was the postulate that if two propositions are true any third one is true. It sounds insane to us because we can understand only with human minds and hence must employ our own logic in the process.

The early Greeks believed that objects in nature shed from themselves continuously copies or images, and that we had knowledge of our environment when these images were received by the eye and conducted along the nerves to the brain. Now we speak in terms of electrical impulses traveling from sense organ to brain. The change implied in the function which the mind performs is extraordinary. If we could station a Lilliputian observer somewhere along the nerve between the eye and the brain, he would report only electrical currents passing his post of observation. If you are crossing the street and have to jump hastily from the path of an automobile, there is nothing he would observe which could be interpreted as ‘Automobile. Look out!’ We do not know what does happen to make us jump aside, but we do know that ‘Automobile’ and ‘Look out!’ are not perceived by the eye. The mind does something to the raw material of sensation, and the product of what it does is the thing we call nature.

III

We are just beginning to appreciate the importance of what the mind does. Alexis Carrel in Man, the Unknown points out that there are at least two important yet different ways of studying nature, according to the concepts of the inert and of the living. ‘We do not find in the universe the clearness and accuracy of our thought. We attempt, therefore, to abstract from the complexity of phenomena some simple systems whose components bear to one another certain relations susceptible of being described mathematically. . . . The slow progress of knowledge of the human being, as compared with the splendid ascension of physics, astronomy, chemistry, and mechanics, is due to our ancestors’ lack of leisure, to the complexity of the subject, and to the structure of our mind.' (The italics are mine.)

In short, we know nature as we do chiefly because our minds handle certain types of ideas more easily than others. We are happy when we can measure with a ruler, weigh on scales, or count. Not realizing that this is a result of a characteristic of our minds rather than of nature, we have been led to serious misconceptions.

And of these the most serious is that which recommends the exact sciences as more fundamental than the biological ones. Physicist, chemist, and astronomer were first in the field, and now that we are beginning to investigate the science of life they are insisting that life is basically physiochemical. If the biologist had been first in the field we should have thought of the nonliving as a special case of the living. With us it is ‘Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.’ But we might have advanced along a path of sophisticated animism, molecules and atoms being fundamentally organic, death rather than life being considered the more extraordinary. ‘Corpuscles to corpuscles and cells to cells.’ It is amazing how docilely biologists have accepted this doctrine. Wells and Huxley write a Science of Life and exert every effort to describe only in terms of blind causes. Biochemists seek the link between the living and the nonliving. Biologists are uncomfortable when they cannot give measurements and figures. All are afraid of being unscientific. Dr. Carrel is accused of betraying science. He may be putting things too strongly when he says that the enormous advance gained by the sciences of inanimate matter over those of living things is one of the greatest catastrophes ever suffered by humanity. But that the science of life, involving the development of an entirely new set of intellectual concepts, is still in its infancy is not unlikely. When one has read his book it is difficult to deny that modern civilization shows a dangerous disregard of the biological nature of man.

Imagine the reverse situation. Imagine that the human mind had taken more readily to a study of life than to a study of the nonliving. Suppose our first scientists had been biologists and that they had had at their back several centuries of solid achievements before man began to study the inert. Can you not picture the struggle which chemistry and physics might have had for recognition? Can you not imagine the books which would be written to show that chemistry and physics can be reduced to biology? Would there not be a host of chemicobiologists attempting to establish the link between the two? Can you not imagine the physicist shunning mechanistic principles and trying to see his data in terms of the teleological? Of course you cannot. Your mind does not work in that way. But such might have been the case, nevertheless. The exact sciences study a unit smaller than the biologist’s unit. But it docs not follow from this that the unit cell must be obedient only to the physicist’s type of law. The physicist’s unit is smaller because of the simple fact that we can measure and count long after we are unable to examine internal structure.

One of the things we have never wondered enough about is the rôle which arithmetic plays in science. The old Pythagoreans waxed mystical on this question. Everything had a number. Male was three, female two; and marriage five! We are mystical about this, too. Did you ever stop to ask why the force of gravity should vary inversely as exactly the square of the distance between two bodies? Why not inversely as the 2.0000983 power of the distance? It is said that Kepler was encouraged to the development of his three famous laws by the conviction that a creating God would have created things neatly. Not many scientists to-clay are impelled by such devotion to God’s kindness, yet their thinking is not so different. They assume that nature can be expressed in numbers. Why should this be? We know that numbers are the product of the mind, that they are not in nature.

We were taught in school that the sun rather than the earth is the centre of the solar system. Our children will be taught that space is curved rather than straight. So far, so good. But when the schoolmaster looks wise and says that Copernicus was right and Ptolemy wrong, that Newton’s system is untrue and Einstein’s true, then look out. It is not a matter of truth and error; it is a matter of convenience. When you are building a house it is highly inconvenient to think of it as moving around the sun. The sun rises in the east, you say, and you put your bedrooms on the east side so that the sun will stream in of a morning. When you are fooling around with our little solar system it is convenient to take the sun as a centre. And when you go farther out into space you may employ some other centre or none at all. When measuring your living room you do not think of yourself as measuring an arc. When measuring the distance of a remote star you do. The system accepted by science changes with every significant increase in the data at our disposal. ‘Nature’ is the name we give to the most convenient systematization we can make at the moment.

There are times when we can anticipate the advance of science by examining, not nature, but the mind and its contribution. It was no accident that the Greek atomists hit upon the quantitative atom and anticipated laboratory scientists by two thousand years. And it was no more an accident that Leibniz saw the fundamental difficulty in believing nature to be spatial. Our own century gives what is in some ways the most dramatic example of all. Of the modifications which modern physics has undergone, the introduction of spacetime is probably the most important.

We usually think of space-time as a product of laboratory research. Of course it was. But few realize that it was at almost exactly the same time, and without reference to laboratory data, developed by a metaphysician. Einstein studied the data, and found a new way of organizing them. Alexander, by a sheer analysis of concepts given by the mind, arrived at the same conclusion. Science proceeds along a path certain aspects of which thinking men can survey in advance by regarding the contribution to the process made by the mind. The curious but unavoidable conclusion is that the scientist’s development of nature is as much a description of himself as it is of his environment; that if he were quite different in ways which we cannot even imagine because we can never get outside of our minds, his nature would be different. Change either the quantity or the quality of the mind’s powers and nature changes.

IV

Why our persistent belief in a nature independent of us? We can argue at length the fact that we can know only as much of nature as our particular sense organs allow us to perceive, and we can demonstrate that we shall organize sense impressions according to strictly human concepts; yet we shall certainly continue to think of nature as independent. Why? Because that is the way we think it: that, is what nature is. Of course we could think nature as a series of almost completely independent events, but such a system would be useless. We should never get our car started. We could, and some do, think nature as completely determined by its future. That also has its impractical aspects.

But there are ways in which we cannot think nature. For one, we cannot think of nature as having an ultimate origin. The problem of creation, natural or supernatural, can give you a thumping good headache if you will let it. Something coming out of nothing, that is what it means. We can mouth the words, we can nod our heads wisely, we can think we imagine it. Select any physical object, say the chair on which you are sitting. Can you think of it as coming suddenly or gradually into existence out of the void? You cannot, because what you mean by ‘physical object’ is something which cannot do this. Perhaps you take refuge in God’s power. If you do, God becomes a refuge for ignorance, as Spinoza pointed out. Similarly, you cannot think of nature as being made up of ultimate units. No matter how small the unit or how simple its function, you cannot think it as either indivisible or unanalyzable. The unscratchable atom was blasted. If there is any limit in this direction it is due only to the relative magnitude of the observer and the crudeness of his instruments. But this is a limitation in ourselves, not a limit in nature.

All that we have been saying can be summarized in two theses. The first is that we can never separate ourselves from our sense organs. The second is that we can never separate ourselves from our minds. Our knowledge of nature will always be limited in these two ways, and hence can only be nature-as-known-by-human-beings. Science has for many centuries emphasized the independence and objectivity of nature, and this it was compelled to do if it was to perform its unique and significant function. The scientist realizes this. The rest of us are deeply indebted to him. But our age has misunderstood him. Half our advertisements show gray-haired men in laboratory coats gazing into microscopes, or holding test tubes up to the light. We have burdened the scientist with responsibilities which he is the first to refuse. We have tried to employ his concepts in dealing with the creative spirit, and with moral problems. The scientist specializes on one aspect of reality. He seeks those principles according to which human sense organs and minds best work in solving practical problems. In doing so he constructs nature.

Reality in and for itself, independent of the human being who is endeavoring to understand it and dissociated from human problems, will always be a mystery. The problem of manipulating our environment is only one. Problems of conduct and of value are quite different. They require other concepts and other laws.

In the Middle Ages man took all of his problems to the Church, from child care to plagues. To-day we take all of our problems to the laboratory. The one attitude is as ill-considered as the other. To-day we are willing to think exclusively in terms of nature. We understand that God is the creation of man rather than man the creation of God. But we have not yet understood that nature, also, is our nature, and to be understood as such. We have misinterpreted the scientist, taking his knowledge as an absolute rather than a relative thing. We shall have conferred a favor on him as well as on ourselves when we give more time to understanding him and accepting his laws, not as the laws of reality, but as the laws by which human beings can know one major part of it.