The mind is not capable of embracing Truth in its entirety, but only one of the lesser truths. In relation to other truths of a ‘small order’ it may be either hostile or benevolently open, which is rarely the case. The talk of the ‘whole truth’ is to be forgotten. Either one of its subsets or another, and never more than one at once, is available to us.

Out of the honest pursuit of such narrow but precise knowledge, science was born. Its root is the will to exact definitions of reasonably limited concepts. This is a forgotten truth. Science itself no longer remembers it. Science believes that it was ‘before the hills’ and will be when all other faculties of the human spirit have exhausted themselves and been forgotten. In fact, there was a time when science did not exist; and there was a time when science dwelt within the Church fence and felt no embarrassment therefrom.

What induced it to leave this enclosure? To put it briefly: a passion for the consideration of particular truths and a lack of curiosity for the one Truth — that which occupies religion and philosophy. The scientist either silently accepted the one Truth generally accepted at his time, or just as silently repelled it, and went on to his experientially learnt objects. There was no pride in this (‘I have no need of the hypothesis of God’ came later); on the contrary, there was here a great humility of mind capable of self-restraint and of recognising its smallness. The scientist, I shall not tire of explaining, looked more humble than the theologian, because he deliberately limited the range of his comprehension. And this was, in the words of Scripture, good. However, any straight movement curves over time…

Our epoch has seen a proud science, daring to speak no longer of private truths, but of the ultimate truth. ‘Science has grown up’, a naïve observer might say, ‘and is no longer satisfied with the models of the universe that occupied the scientists of former times. It needs the truth hidden behind all the veils, and it finds it’. This observation is partly true: science has indeed freed itself from the realisation of the conventionality, the insufficiency of all human truths, and has come to believe in the identity of the formula and the universe.

It is difficult to say whether this is the cause of the pride which fills the scientist of the latest times, or whether this aberration of thought is itself produced by pride — the pride of a mind for which ‘the whole universe is seen as if it were a single drop’ (as a certain professor of physics wrote in a poem which, if he had known poetry better than physics, he would have preferred not to publish); but this science is proud and demanding. It speaks of ‘the stern scientific truth which does not depend on the knower’; of man’s insignificance in a universe governed by laws discovered by that man. ‘Science is powerful, therefore it is true’ — science worshippers say this too. ‘The duty of the scientist is in unabashed enquiry, trampling, if need be, upon the human heart and soul’, this they say also.

And the more these words about the ‘intrepidity’, read — inhumanity of science are rumbled about, the more the face of a scientist changes (not for the better) — the more it becomes clear that the brief, but so rapid and fruitful course of scientific thought over several centuries has come to a monstrous contradiction. Namely: science, as it thinks of itself, taken as a social and educating force, is not able to educate exactly that noble, modest and honest type of man (I do not even say: scientist), which stood at its origins.

In brief, in the simplest words, this means that science does not contain in itself any sources of both moral and mental education, and for a long, very long time has been using a human type produced by a completely different force, in a completely different society (just as, I note, as the Bolsheviks in Russia during half of their rule, if not more, used the moral and cultural discipline developed in the Russian people by the rule of the Romanovs). As science freed itself from this ‘old yeast’ and developed a new, independent of the old ‘leaven’, it turned out that it was incapable of self-reproduction and, as far as the masses were concerned, was, roughly speaking, a corrupting force, despite all its great claims.

The lack of educational power of ‘pure science’ is not surprising. Science is the part, and man is the whole. Whole layers of human abilities are not affected by science, are not necessary for success in it, and therefore, as mentioned above, are not reproduced in man by the society in which science wants to be an educator and giver of morality.

In general, it is strange this desire of the scientist not to stay on the ground of narrow and precise truths, but to teach mankind lessons of morality — and not by personal example, which could still be understood, but lessons of abstract morality, that is, new moral rules. Strange — because it hopelessly removes science from the firm and certain ground on which it has endeavoured, in spite of external pressures and the unscrupulousness of individual minds, to stand during the last centuries.

(In order not to sidetrack, I will add briefly that this departure is not without reason. It became inevitable after science moved away from the study of the visible and provable to the invisible and, strictly speaking, unprovable. From a certain limit, the time of ‘scientific truths’, as they were understood back in the 19th century, is over: all we are left with are speculations, hypotheses; a game of the mind, which the facts both confirm and do not confirm. It is not surprising that people of science have lost ground under their feet and no longer distinguish between assertions that are proven and those that are dogmatic).

If we look for a ‘new morality’ scientifically, we can hardly find it, first of all because no idea of norm follows from scientific truths at all. It is possible to derive this idea only from certain speculations (‘the victory of the strongest’; ‘the blind struggle for life’ — this whole series of dogmatic, i. e. unproven assertions)… Let us open Isaiah Berlin (the second apostle of liberal utopia after J. S. Mill).

He bases his entire apologia of empty, leading nowhere ‘negative freedom’ on the fact that the norm (read: truth) is unknowable, and most likely does not exist, hence any goals, ideals, value judgements are meaningless and harmful. ‘There is no unifying supreme principle in man; no higher self that can judge our daily actions’, he says, ‘hence there is no behaviour that should be punished or rewarded’.

If Berlin is right (and ‘scientific thinking’ is on his side), no ‘scientifically based’ morality is possible; after all, the moral law is there to prosecute one behaviour and encourage another. He who does not believe in the norm can offer no morality to humanity.

If Berlin is mistaken, then the claims of science are at least inconsistent with its range of duties and knowledge; in which case we are allowed to look for morality elsewhere, without hoping to get it out of a test tube.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity. Essays on Cullture.

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