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tion of social institutions, they prized the achievements of a secular natural
science, and they sought to establish a decent social order by controlling
and transforming natural goods. But in what way, the reader cannot help
asking, does this set of traits differentiate the last three decades of the
19th century from almost any other comparable period of European his–
tory since approximately the Reformation? And the reader's perplexity is
only heightened when Professor Hayes makes this set of traits responsible
for our present ills. Thus, it is correct to say that a man who never goes
near water stands in no danger of drowning; but to "explain" the fact that
a man drowned by noting that he ventured near water is verbal·jugglery.
Similarly, it is true enough that
if
our present social maladjustments are
consequences of our attempts to control natural and human resources,
then such matters would not now plague us were we not concerned with
them; but to "explain" our material difficulties by our material concerns
i.!
again sheer verbalism.
An
explanation to be worth
a~ything
must be
differentiating: surely not every one who ventures near water drowns, and
surely not all devotion to material concerns leads to social disaster.
Accordingly, this phase of Professor Hayes's thesis explains nothing; in
stating it, he is simply uttering a jeremiad on the sins of modern civil–
ization.
Professor Hayes makes much of the ·"materialistic" and "mechanical"
character of 19th century science as being the handmaiden, if not the
cause, of nationalistic and imperialistic ambitions. He heaps ill-disguised
and well-merited scorn upon the unholy uses to which Darwin's theory of
natural selection were put by social theorists, as well as upon the ridicu–
lous extravaganzas which reputable thinkers and established publicists
acclaimed as the last word of science. Race prejudice, social inequality,
and sheer brutality were stimulated and defended by pseudo-biological
arguments, and this fact must surely be credited to the debit side of the
case for hasty intellectual syntheses and careless popularization. What is
not evident is the conviction, shared by Professor Hayes, that responsi–
bility for this must be born by "materialistic" and "mechanistic" science.
He nowhere explains what he understands by these terms; however, he
does subscribe to the view that recent physics and biology have disproved
the claims of any science which may be so characterized. But in accepting
this view, his credulity has been ':ictimized by recent popularizers of
scientific researches; and he exhibits the same willingness to believe on
little or no evidence what he desires to be the case, which he ridicules so
effectively in 19th century publicists. The point is that recent physics has
not disproved materialism. To be sure, the
science of mechanics
can no
longer be regarded as the universal discipline to which every other inquiry
must in some way
be
reduced; but this conclusion was already evident in
the preceding century with the advent of electro·magnetic theory. On the
other hand, physics and biology are today no less "materialistic" and
"mechanistic" than they were in the 1870's, in the sense that their goal
11till is the discovery of the structures or mechanisms of material bodies
