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The scientific method is as vital for morals as it is for mobile phones, 3 Mar 2009
Each one of the five essays in this collection is still worth reading and, I would venture, more readable than much Victorian prose. It is fitting, given the themes of these essays, that it is Clifford's clear thinking and radical ideas that ring out down the ages, with both the power to shock and to inspire. In the excellent introduction to this edition, Timothy Madigan gives a brief biographical sketch of a thinker who deserves to be more widely known and read, and who died 130 years ago today at the age of 33. At Cambridge, as a sideline to mathematics it seems, Clifford studied Aquinas, and "reveled in supporting Catholic doctrines." Then he felt "the impact of evolutionary theory" and there was no turning back. Not for him the prim separation of religion and science into their own changing rooms, like boys and girls not permitted sight of each other for fear of the consequences. In the first essay on scientific thought he wrote, expansively, that the "subject of science is the human universe..."
The "true meaning of explanation" - the beating heart of scientific progress - is the description of "the unknown and unfamiliar" in terms of "the known and the familiar". This is Dennett's crane at work. We observe "uniformity in the course of events" and "apply past experience to new circumstances". This is the "aim of scientific thought": to gain "information transcending our experience". Religion, too, claims access to such information but its methods rely on skyhooks, which lift you from the known to the unknown and leave you dangling there, alone and as ignorant as when you started. Clifford's definition of the scientific method as "a method of getting knowledge by inference" is both concise and precise and still useful today.
This all sounds terribly abstract, but Clifford illustrates what he means with a peculiar counterexample. "Now suppose that the night before coming down to Brighton you had dreamed of a railway accident... the result of which was that your head was unfortunately cut off, so that you had to put it in your hat-box and take it back home to be mended. There are, I fear, many persons even at this day, who would tell you that after such a dream it was unwise to travel by railway to Brighton. This is a proposal that you should take experience gained while you were asleep... and apply it to guide you when you are awake... in your dealings with a real railway. And yet this proposal is not dictated by scientific thought."
On ethics, the main subject of these essays, Clifford admits that "it is sometimes said that moral questions have been authoritatively settled by other methods; that we ought to accept this decision, and not to question it by any method of scientific inquiry; and that reason should give way to revelation on such matters." He accepts "that science can only deal with what is" and "that art and morals deal with what ought to be" but he points out "that the facts of art and morals are fit subject-matter of science." A description of everything in my house is a statement of fact, but so is a description of my feelings about what I would like in my house. Just as we can draw inferences based on the assumption of uniformity in nature (the books on my shelf will not magically reorder themselves), so too do we assume a uniformity in our feelings and desires (if I watch too much property porn and I'm aspirationally minded, I may begin to want to move house). Otherwise, how would we gossip, or get on with anyone, or even go shopping?
A common complaint even today is, without scripture to guide us, how can we know right from wrong? Clifford exposes this for what it is, an appeal to authority, and if we allow authority to rule over us, the voice of our "natural human conscience must be hushed and schooled, and made to speak the words of a formula." Obedience then becomes our only duty, and we live according to a "lifeless code of rules". In a remarkably prescient and poetic attempt to capture just how it is that we know right from wrong, he says that the "voice of conscience is the voice of our Father Man who is within us; the accumulated instinct of the race is poured into each one of us, and overflows us, as if the ocean were poured into a cup." As for faith, it "is a commitment made in direct opposition to reason, in the very teeth of the evidence" and it is always wrong "to believe on insufficient evidence, or to nourish belief by suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation."
Thinking unscientifically opens the door to superstition or to the nicer-sounding but equally corrosive faith. More insidious and ultimately corrupting, Clifford argues, is the professional class that both holds the door open and prods the masses through it - the priesthood. In "The Ethics of Religion" he responds to one familiar defence of the priesthood - "In the Middle Ages the priests and monks were the sole depositaries of learning" - with the following riposte: "Quite so; a man burns your house to the ground, builds a wretched hovel on the ruins, and then takes credit for whatever shelter there is about the place." Quite so indeed.
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by William James
by Christopher Hitchens
