On Looking Beneath the Surface of Things
by Sir James Darling
THE RÖNTGEN ORATION TO THE COLLEGE OF RADIOLOGISTS OF AUSTRALASIA, MELBOURNE, 17 NOVEMBER 1954
Published in The Education of a Civilized Man A Selection of Speeches and Sermons by James Ralph Darling, 1962.
I can only start by saying that I am quite overwhelmed by the honour you have done me in inviting one so ill-equipped to deliver this oration. The only roughly similar occasion in which I have felt almost equally out of place was when I was invited on one occasion to open an agricultural show. Had I known when I accepted the position of headmaster that occasions such as these were concealed in the future, I might, I think, have been even more hesitant than I was about promotion. Having been asked, however, and having accepted, I can only promise to do my best, and hope that you will not expect too much of one as unaccustomed as I am to the dignity of public orations.
The peculiar difficulty of making an oration on such an occasion and to such an audience is that, being particularly ignorant upon the subjects which to all of you are as clear as the alphabet, one is forced by this into the difficulty of finding any subject at all upon which to address you. I must apologize, therefore, for the banality of the title which has been chosen, not so much because it was a pun upon your profession, but because in its vagueness it will cover a multitude of sins. Worse still, as I directed my thoughts upon these lines, I have found that I have in fact got something which I very much want to say but which, I find, owing to defects in my mental capacity, in my education, and in my subsequent reading, I am quite incapable of saying adequately. If, in the end, I can leave you with a question to be answered, but have put it with sufficient cogency to make you want to answer it, I shall have achieved more than at this stage I think probable.
Professor Röntgen, (Wilhelm Konrad Röntgen [1845-1923]: discovered the ‘X’, or Röntgen, ray, 1895, at Würtzburg, where he was Professor of Physics; Nobel Prize for Physics, 1901) in whose honour this oration is named, must be one of the greatest benefactors of mankind as well as one of the greatest scientific originators in history. That he was a scientist and a German, and that he made his great discovery as late as the end of the nineteenth century, is well known to you all, as is also the fact that he realised, almost immediately after he made the discovery, some of the possibilities that were contained in it. You know also that this important discovery created an almost immediate public interest. There followed all the misinterpretation and exaggeration which such publicity throws in the face of the scientist whose only desire is to pursue uninterrupted the new developments made possible by his discovery. It has long been a question whether the existence of a free press is compatible with democratic institutions, and sometimes one is tempted to ask whether the existence of the daily press is compatible with any thinking at all. Certainly poor Professor Röntgen suffered from the superficiality and futility of the comments made upon his work, and needed all the acclamation of his fellow scientists to compensate for his undesired popular reputation. It is, I suppose, almost impossible for the Press to accept the fact that some people prefer to make their own statements to their own chosen audience in their own way.
From these beginnings, however, came the science which most of you practise and which has served so well the cause of medicine. But the common misinterpretations of what Professor Röntgen’s rays could do in looking below the surface of our outward appearance may present to us the opportunity not only for some moralizing upon the use that man makes of the advances of human knowledge, but also for trying to understand what is indeed thus gained in looking beneath the surface. I shall, at least in this audience, arouse no opposition when I point out that what matters is not the fact of being able to see what is otherwise hidden but, on the contrary, what there is to be seen, how what is seen is interpreted, and, thirdly, what can be done about it when it has been seen. There is also, perhaps, the problem, even in your walk of life, arising from two other factors: how far, even with the most modern equipment, you really do see beneath the surface, or, to put it another way, what various surfaces there are on which the eye can rest before one sees right through and sees anything; and, secondly, whether what one sees by this kind of penetration is really penetration of the truth or merely penetration of a phenomenon which is only part of the truth. I could, I suppose, put these questions in a more concrete form and make them more understandable, but, in doing so, I should risk trespassing in a field altogether outside my ken, when all that I am intending to do is to make an introduction to a problem far less specialized. The doctor today has within his control a weapon, your weapon, which shows him much more of the truth than his predecessors of a hundred years ago could hope to know; but it is still only an observed truth which your rays reveal, and the additional evidence which is available to him in his diagnosis and is a preliminary to his cure, while it is obviously of great assistance to him, still depends upon a capacity for interpretation which may even be made more difficult by the extent of the knowledge acquired, and may in some cases make correct diagnosis more difficult. Such concentration of the mind, moreover, on the things that are seen and temporal may divert him from those other, possibly more important, factors of the diagnosis which have to be apprehended rather than seen. An American professor the other day, in a discussion with me, made a most apposite remark: ‘Those,’ he said, ‘may be the facts, but they are not the truth’—for Truth with a capital T cannot be put in a bottle as a specimen; yet it is that kind of inquiry which is the need not less of the medical profession than of other ordinary people today. This truth is something which we both observe and apprehend, and observation without apprehension is valueless, perhaps more dangerous even than apprehension without observation.
When we contemplate our world, whether it be the world of contemporary thought, the world of art, the world of medicine, the world of education, the world of politics, or the world of social studies, which the University of Cambridge calls so delightfully the Ecology of Human Beings, we must all be struck by the need for such penetration of understanding. We all, of course, practise assiduously some kind of profession or occupation, but there are moments, I imagine, when all of us who are thus actively engaged desire passionately time, time in which to re-examine the purpose and the meaning of what we are doing. As some woman said to me once about life, ‘If it would only stop for six months to enable us to catch up with it’: to enable us, she meant, I think, to try to understand it, to take bearings anew, to estimate with some accuracy where we are, and to set a course in the direction in which we want to go. Would you think me very rude if I suggested that perhaps the medical profession is as much in need of such a period of repose as any other, including my own? If such a need exists, as I am sure that it does, though there seems no possibility for the majority of us that the need will ever be satisfied, a second fact becomes apparent—that we are, most of us, extraordinarily badly equipped to seize the opportunity even if it were presented. In those times of history in which life gave men an opportunity to think and to contemplate, the capacity for thinking and contemplating was developed, and, as such thinking was the regular exercise of educated men, education was directed to develop in them a capacity for this kind of thinking. In our hurried age there is a danger that by lack of use the capacity will atrophy, and it is possibly this atrophy of even the desire to think deeply about anything which is the worst characteristic of the whole affair. Faced as he is by the impossibility of approaching a full understanding of even a small branch of human knowledge, it is not surprising that the student of today has allowed himself so to specialize that he forgets the need for understanding the relationships between things, let alone their ultimate meaning. If the student falls into such error, what can be expected of the ordinary man? If the world is too difficult for the scholar to understand, it is by so much the more incomprehensible to the rest of us. Vaguely disquieted by a lack of perceptible purpose in life, and convinced that he can make no sense of it even if he tries, modern man chooses the method of escape by preoccupation with all kinds of frivolous interests. Even more or less intelligent people like you and me prefer the relaxation of golf and bridge and detective novels to the satisfaction which at one time we would have sought in conversation, serious reading, or religious exercises, and that kind of frivolous preoccupation, inoffensive and not essentially vicious, continues the process of desensitizing our minds, just when the needs of the moment demand more than they ever have done the most acute sensitivity. Sensibility, which, we are told, the course of evolution demonstrates as the true equivalent of life, should always be the educator’s objective: or, again, as the same author, Canon Raven, says, the future lies not with the predatory and the immune but with the sensitive who live dangerously. (Charles E. Raven, Science, Religion, and the Future [1943], p.103.) It should be the prime object of education, whether at the level on which I am engaged or in the specialized advanced education with which the medical faculty is concerned, to develop this sensitivity. I need not, surely, elaborate the great importance of this in clinical teaching, nor the obvious fact that there are two kinds of insensitivity, the pachydermatous and the frivolous. The sensitive mind is neither: not, that is to say, like the rhinoceros, which is so hidebound by prejudice or conviction that it cannot be penetrated by any new idea; nor yet, on the other hand, so occupied by surface agitation that it ‘heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it’—and, when the sun is up, it is scorched, and because it has no root it withers away. (Matthew 13.20; Mark 4.6.) Of the two, perhaps the second is more common and more dangerous. But the truly sensitive mind is both susceptible and penetrating: it is open to new ideas, and it seeks truth at the bottom of the well. It is the development of this sort of mind which it should be the object of the educational process to cultivate. I doubt whether we are being very successful.
While I do not want to involve you in the technical details of school timetables and curicula, some reference to them is necessary in order to explain why, even with the best intentions in the world, a headmaster finds it so difficult to do what he knows to be right. A school timetable is an operation in various dimensions, and the making of one may be compared not so much to a jig-saw puzzle as to a rather complex game of patience. There are a fixed number of periods in the week, and a certain number of boys who must be divided for reasons of economy into a reasonable number of forms. The number and capacity of masters are also limited, and they cannot, any of them, be in two places at the same time. On the opposite side, the subjects which one would like to teach—indeed, without which education must be incomplete—are multifarious, if not infinite, and the peculiar vocational desires of the pupils equally so. To add to the difficulty, a well-meaning, if misguided, university and other examining bodies, impressed by experience with a grave distrust of schools and schoolmasters, and obsessed with the desire to teach only students of a much higher general standard than can in fact be produced from the available field, endeavour to ensure by the unsuitable weapon of the examination that at least the students have been taught in the way which they—if, that is, they can ever achieve enough agreement amongst themselves to be called ‘they’—think right. To this challenge the schoolmaster and his pupil respond by the use of every possible device to elude the vigilance and deceive the intelligence of the examiner, and so trick him into passing the candidate. This first hurdle surmounted, the student proceeds to the next by the same methods. But Education is not a series of hurdles, and the tendency to regard it as such forbids any chance of efficacy, except by chance as a side-line, in achieving the main objective, which we have postulated as the training of the sensitive and penetrating mind. For this can only be achieved in freedom and as a result of much more leisure in the classroom than the present necessary syllabus can possibly allow; and, of course, it demands teachers themselves possessed of the intellectual quality which they wish to develop in their pupils. Its success in the main depends not so much upon the subjects taught as upon the way in which it is possible to teach them; but, broadly speaking, I am prepared to argue that it does involve the preserving for as long as possible of a reasonable balance between the mathematical and the humane subjects, and I even believe, in defiance of educational experts, that the learning of some foreign language is necessary if a man is to learn how to think in words, as most of us need to do.
It is a serious fact that, to a large extent, the learning of languages is rapidly being extinguished in this State for those who are preceeding to any of the scientific, medical, engineering, and architectural courses. The solution, I hasten to add, is not to make a language again compulsory for matriculation, but so to free the candidates from excessive demands elsewhere that the school has some opportunity of fitting in the teaching of those subjects which it believes a necessary part of a liberal education. We are wrestling, at the moment anyhow, with a system which does in fact drive mathematical and scientific specialization right down into the middle school, and which has the quite unintended result, also, of encouraging boys to try to escape from all subjects which demand theoretical thinking. The young naturally prefer the concrete and the practical, and perhaps the Australian young even more than their counterparts in England. They prefer examples to principles and facts to ideas; they prefer learning to thinking. It is the duty of any self-respecting school somehow to wean them into the more adult appreciation of the opposite attitude. For in all education principles are more important than examples, ideas than facts, and you cannot train the sensitive and penetrating mind except by exercising it in that direction.
In the processes of education, then, there is scope for considerable reform, and in spite of our many failings we do try to combat the worst effects of the present situation. We cannot, however, go very far, for much of the trouble is inherent in the present stage of the world’s knowledge. A multiplicity of new facts in every field has tended to obscure all sight of principle, and the advances of knowledge upon all its frontiers have almost made excessive specialization imperative. This is true not only in learning but even in such trivialities as sport, so that in almost every human activity the necessary concentration upon the development of even the twigs upon the branches has resulted in our losing sight of the tree, let alone the wood of which the tree is part. If one wants to take part in everything, one is tempted to believe that, unless one is a Sedgman or a Landy, it is not worth doing so at all; and, if one is, one is tempted to forget everything else, or at least to get everything out of perspective. If it is part of the art of living to see life clearly and to see it whole, this age of specialization makes living a very difficult art. I am tempted to suggest that this is so in your profession even more than it is in mine, where it takes the form chiefly of competition between specialist masters for the undivided attention of pupils, without a proper regard for the balance which should be preserved.
It is, of course, no new problem, though it seems today to be becoming more and more acute. Ever since man first began to study natural phenomena, he has been obsessed by the difficulty of making general sense of all the individual discoveries which he made. Like a fond landscape-gardener, who loves too well each individual tree and shrub, he seeks in vain for the pattern which he planned.
It was the ancient Greek philosophers who were first obsessed by this perplexity. They sought, and men since have sought continuously, for some single binding principle from which it might be said that all else sprang. Heraclitus found it in Fire, Pythagoras in the science of Numbers, Socrates in Reason, and Plato, coming near to monotheism, while he remained nominally a worshipper of the ancient gods, in the idea of the Good and the Beautiful.
It may have been more difficult for them, or less difficult, but at least they kept on trying, for their minds could not rest unless they did. But in those days science was in its infancy and the content of human knowledge could be held within the boundaries of one head. That is no longer so, and it is hard for specialists in different branches even to understand the language spoken by each other, far less the modes of their thought.
The difficulty is accentuated by the modern, or rather the recent, divorce between theological and scientific thinking. I qualify ‘modern’ in order to draw attention to the inescapable fact that societies must, as far as I can see, be dominated by those who are already out-of-date. This is not unrelieved tragedy, as will be readily recognized by anyone who has contemplated seriously the unrestrained ideology of Robespierre or Lenin at work; but it is in some respects unfortunate. There can be very few headmasters who are not regarded by their best young masters as unenlightened and reactionary: and so we are, as we think, for excellent reasons, which the young cannot be expected to understand. Perhaps you, in your profession, accept with better grace the wisdom of your elders. It is in some respects a pity if you do, for we can only with the greatest difficulty, and with the gift of free time for reading and thought, which it is very hard to seize, escape from the modes of thought which we adopted when our minds were ‘young and gay’. Lord Raglan, you will remember, having fought the French when he was young, still persisted forty years later in calling all enemies Frenchies, even when in the Crimean War they were, in fact, his allies (Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why [Constable, 1953], p.162). But, of course, we do have wisdom of a sort, the wisdom of experience, the wisdom of a greater tolerance, and perhaps of a wider vision, as well as the wisdom which can come just from the fact of being nearer death, something different from being merely further from birth. There should be—I speak with feeling—some system of payment devised for the older amongst us, which would take us out of active responsibility and daily strain and yet, having given us the leisure to think while we still want to, give us also some opportunities of influence. They do it in the best businesses, where there seems to be money to spare for all; but it is not so easy in the professions.
But that is a digression. My real point is that many of us grew up and tasted the Pierian fount at a time when the divorce between Religion and Science was an accepted fact. There were scientists who remained religious, and even theologians who dabbled in science, but there was still the kind of mental strain which disturbed the soul of Darwin or Huxley. The two intellectual activities had to be kept in separate compartments: a man who was accustomed in his scientific studies to apply certain rules and principles was convinced that he had to throw them away when he approached the study of Theology, the truths of which he was told that he could only accept by Faith. In the results, at least the lower ranks of thinkers divided themselves into two classes: those who, like myself, found Science almost an excrescence, a technical achievement, perhaps, for those whose minds were made that way, but something which had little bearing upon the real life of the mind; and those who, like, I imagine, a good many of you, threw away Religion because it wouldn’t fit in with the truths which you discovered by the scientific method. In this fabric of mental habit, formed when we were at the university, most of us remain—and fail to notice that the world of thought has left us behind.
Quite obviously it is a most unsatisfactory condition, creating, as it does, on the one hand a division between two kinds of thinker, and on the other a dichotomy in our minds, which is either disquieting if we are conscious of it, or damnable if we are not. Add this dichotomy to the problems created by the multiplicity of specialization, and it will be seen how difficult it is for modern man to see life clearly and to see it whole. (Cf. Matthew Arnold, Sonnet to a Friend: ‘Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.’)
But the Greeks must be right. The scientist can no more deny or devaluate the truths of spiritual experience than the theologian can neglect the truths of science: and the two truths must be reconcilable, and it must be of importance to each of us that they should be reconciled. Fortunately, there lies between the two extremes and stretches over the gulf of division a bridge—or would you prefer to call it a rainbow? (for a rainbow combines in it something of both worlds)—the bridge of the arts: music, painting, poetry, those strange emanations of the evolutionary process.
In two admirable essays (Towards a Christian Æsthetic and Creative Mind), published in a book entitled Unpopular Opinions, Miss Dorothy Sayers endeavours to explain the function of the artist of any kind in society. ‘A poet,’ she writes, ‘is a man who not only suffers “the impact of external events”, but experiences them;’(Unpopular Opinions [1946], p.39. Miss Sayers’ own quotation comes from T. S. Eliot’s play, The Family Reunion [‘You are all people To whom nothing has happened, at most a continual impact Of external events…’]) and later she adds: ‘The recognition of the truth that we get in the artist’s work comes to us as a revelation of new truth.…It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering—and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.’ (Ibid., p.40.) For truth is there to be revealed, as all scientists know; and the seeing of the truth is a discovery, not an invention. It may well be that it is on the common meeting-ground of art and music and poetry that scientist and theologian may meet to compose their differences.
Certainly it was a poet with a scientific—at least a medical—training, Robert Bridges (1844-1930; O.M.; Poet Laureate from 1913), who first, as far as I know, and as long ago as 1927, and at the end of his long life, tried to produce order out of chaos and to compose, in The Testament of Beauty, both the problem of multiplicity and the problem of dichotomy. They are, in fact, the same problem, for once the dichotomy is composed the multiple forms will fall into order around the central idea. I do not know how much impressed the scientists were with this work, but I do know that one theologian at least of high standing, the late Archbishop Temple, to whom the book was submitted in proof, hailed it as one of the greatest works in the English language. (In a paper on Bridges, first read c. 1931, Dr Darling speaks of the dedication of The Testament of Beauty [a work which ‘may well be counted the most considerable poem since The Prelude, or even before that; a work that can be compared at least with the De Rerum Natura]: ‘As Poet Laureate he wished to dedicate the poem to the King, but, fearing that it was not completely orthodox and that His Majesty might become involved in unpleasant controversy about it, he wrote to the Lord Chancellor for permission. The Royal Household were alarmed and, with the poet’s consent, chose a third person who should be agreeable to both parties, namely the Archbishop of York, who, when he had read the Testament, pronounced upon its sufficient orthodoxy and wrote humbly congratulating the poet upon his achievement. I have seen the letter which Robert Bridges, at the age of eighty-five, wrote in his own firm hand most humbly thanking His Grace for his services in the matter and for the kind nature if his congratulations, “which” he ends, “I shall strive further to justify.” Could anything more vividly show the astonishing vigour of the old man that this determination that while he lived he would work, though in fact he was to live but one year longer.’) I wish that I had left myself some time to use this great poem at length. As it is, I can only quote, away from its context, a short extract which, with the magnificent climax, seems to me to sum up the main argument.
Man is portrayed (from the beginning of Book II) in the picture of Plato’s two-horsed chariot (Phaedrus: The Dialogues of Plato, ed, B. Jowett [4th ed., 1953], Vol. III, pp.153-5, 160-3.), the charioteer Reason driving the two components of man’s character, the instincts of Selfhood and Breed, or Sex; and the science of conduct, which he calls Ethick, deals with ‘the skill and manage’ (The Testament of Beauty [Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1929], Bk IV, 11. 88-89) of the charioteer. He goes on:
Since all Ethick implyeth a sense of Duty in man, / ’tis first to enquire whence that responsible OUGHT arose; / a call so universal and plain-spoken that some / hav abstracted a special faculty, distinct / from animal bias and underivable, / whereby the creature kenneth the creator’s Will,
. . . . .
that we call Law of Nature,—in its grade the same / with the determin’d habit of electrons, the same / with the determining instinct of unreasoning life, / NECESSITY become conscient in man—whereto / all insubordination is imperfection in kind.(The emphasis [apart from the underlinings] is Dr Darling’s.)
Reality appeareth in forms to man’s thought / as several links interdependent of a chain / that circling returneth upon itself, as doth / the coil’d snake that in art figureth eternity.
From Universal Mind the first-born atoms draw / their function, whose rich chemistry the plants transmute / to make organic life, whereon animals feed / to fashion sight and sense and give service to man, / who sprung from them is conscient in his last degree / of ministry unto God, the Universal Mind, / whither all effect returneth whence it first began.
The Ring in its repose is Unity and Being: / Causation and Existence are the motion thereof. / Thru’out all runneth Duty, and the conscience of it / is thatt creativ faculty of animal mind / that, wakening to self-conscience of all Essences, / closeth the full circle, where the spirit of man / escaping from the bondage of physical Law / re-entereth eternity by the vision of God. (Ibid., Bk IV, 11. 91-96, 107-130.)
This is the idea of Purpose in life, and I am suggesting that it is to the idea of Purpose in all things that we must return, if we are to discover unity in the midst of variety.
I once served under a great headmaster (Sir Frank Fletcher: see Introduction, pp.5-6) whose conversation with assistant masters, at least those who wanted anything, consisted largely of the monosyllable, ‘Why?’ As a response to a conventional ‘Good morning’, it was rather devastating, but as an aid to honesty of thought invaluable. I suggest that the same policy of enquiry might be profitable in a whole lot of activities which we have come to take for granted, together with all the accretion of the years. In the comparatively small problems, not least those of curriculum and syllabus, whether at school or university level, it is high time that there should be some whys and some answers; only so will there be any chance of the required revision and synthesis. In the wider or deeper field of thought, there is no less need.
But, before we return to this binding idea of purpose and function and duty in life, we should perhaps try to understand why the apparent dichotomy between Religion and Science has arisen. It has arisen, according to Canon Raven (a theologian and a biologist), in his two series of Gifford lectures (Natural Religion and Christian Theology: delivered at Edinburgh in 1951 and 1952; published in two volumes, Science and Religion, Experience and Interpretation, Cambridge, 1953), as a result of faults upon both sides.
At a time when, three or four hundred years after the life of Christ, the Roman Empire was breaking up, or indeed possibly earlier, when the life of the Christian convert was arduous and dangerous, the belief grew up that ‘the days were evil’ and the world was bad, and Christianity therefore an escape. ‘With the closing in of the dark ages,’ he writes, ‘faith became a creed, hope an escapism, and love a snare; to contrast the transient with the supernatural, to flee from the world rather than to convert it, and to order this life so as to secure the bliss of heaven became the object of Christian endeavour.’ (Charles E. Raven, Science and Religion, p.48.)
For hundreds of years this kind of thought dominated religion, in spite of St Francis and some mediæval theologians. It received a new lease of life as a result of the influence of Calvin and the Puritants; the idea that salvation lay only in an asceticism which removed men from this world in order to prepare themselves for the next became dominant. To such minds the studies of the scientists and their interest in natural phenomena were ipso facto frivolous. Some religious thinkers have not even now escaped from this contradiction of the first chapter of Genesis, where it is written: ‘And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.’ (Genesis 1.31.)
It is little wonder that the scientist, especially the English scientist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who may also have been politically influenced in the same direction, reacted against this attitude of the Puritan theologian. It is unfortunate, perhaps, that at the same time scientific thought, partly in consequence, became dominated by the mathematicians and the physicists—a domination preserved almost to the present day, and further enhanced by the utilitarian philosophers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and by the practical needs of the Industrial Revolution. ‘This belief, with its consequent enhancement of economic and industrial values at the expense of aesthetic and moral, persisted until, with Charles Darwin, man himself was deposed from the position of controller and graded as part of the machine; and by that time mechanism was so securely established that it took two generations for the absurdity of this final step to be recognized.’ (Raven, op. cit., p.134.)
It is only today, or very recently, that the physicist has abandoned his dogmatism, and the biologist begun again to study the living creature with its ecology instead of being content with rather barren classification. Meanwhile a grievous damage has been done. The result of these two kinds of thought has been to produce in our world that dichotomy of which I have spoken, and which lies at the root of our difficulty in seeing life clearly and seeing it whole. We shall not bridge that gulf unless both scientist and theologian are prepared to start towards each other from either side. It is of the greatest importance to all our thinking that they should do so. What, then, is the problem?
We have, then, these two factors which make it impossible for us to see the unity in life—the dichotomy existing between the scientist and the theologian, and the multiplicity of fragmented specialization. Because of these our life has lost coherence and significance and direction.
Far be it from me, who am neither theologian nor scientist, nor even reader, to say what the answer is: and yet, as a plain man engaged practically and every day in a mundane occupation which deals nevertheless with the training of minds and the saving of souls, I should like to be allowed to come back to the possibility that the solution lies quite simply in what is known as the teleological conception of evolution.
Is the binding principle, the solvent idea, to be found in Purpose? Let me take a few very simple examples. When a boy goes wrong, he does so for various superficial reasons; but beneath these reasons lies the basic trouble, usually that he has lost his sense of purpose. Neither success in schoolwork nor in games nor in the hierarchy of school promotion, nor even the estimation of his parents, has value with him, and his sense of responsibility to anything or anyone is lost. Restore that and he will start moving again.
Again, when we criticize contemporary society, it is not its viciousness but its aimlessness which we condemn. The world, the flesh, and the devil, (The Book of Common Prayer: from a petition in the Litany) or, if you like, gambling, women, and drink, those boasted adversaries of man in the first years after he throws off the controls of tutelage, meet their strongest opposition, not necessarily in high ideals or a good upbringing, but much more in a strong purpose, strong interests, the ambition to do well.
There used to be a Chairman of our School Council (William Thomson Manifold [1861-1922], of Purrumbete, Chairman of the School Council during much of the headmastership of the Rev. Dr Francis Earnest Brown [fourth Headmaster, 1912-1929]; with others of his family, a munificent benefactor to Geelong Grammar School; his eldest son, John Manifold [1887-1957], was Chairman of the School Council during much of Dr Darling’s headmastership) who was accustomed, when discussion became heated, to restore his colleagues to the point by the remark: ‘Gentlemen, this is, after all, an educational establishment.’ While there may be some in this audience who view with some doubt the truth of this assertion, or regard it as presumptuous, there are many other fields in which such a recall to fundamental purpose might be profitable: not least, democratic society as a whole. Clearly, one of our main problems vis-à-vis our Communist opponents is that they have at least on their side a clear and definite purpose, from which they derive a coherence and direction almost wholly lacking in the Western world. Consider England before and after Dunkirk and you cannot fail to realize the resolution which such purpose gives. The problem of discovering for our liberal democratic society, with its heritage of laissez-faire, a purpose as clear and compelling as Communism is indubitably one of the greatest needs of our time. Only in the light of such a discovered purpose can we lead Australia into an attitude of mind which is prepared for sacrifice and service. Without it there will be the disintegration of conflicting selfishness, the chaos which comes from individual greed and laziness. Unless we can discover such a purpose, it is not too much to say that we shall not hold this country for long.
So it is with everything; but there are two further points, allied closely to each other—first, that in seeking for such purpose it will be necessary to seek below the surface, below the apparent and obvious, to the underlying and fundamental. It is an interesting reflection that the busy bee, that model of moral behaviour, imagines itself to be thriftily and frugally collecting food for its winter store, and that even the commercial apiarist imagines that he keeps bees in order to steal from them and sell their honey. Actually they are both at fault, for the real purpose of the bee is to fertilize my apple blossom so that the fruit will form. In this simple parable there may be thoughts which do lie too deep for tears. (Cf. William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, last line.) How often, I wonder, are we not all confused in our sense of purpose. It is often the incidental good that matters more than the apparent.
Secondly, the discovery of individual purpose in everything is insufficient unless, having applied the criterion to our varied activities, we attempt to correlate what we have found in one embracing purpose. Only so can we come to a better understanding of life, to answer even the all-important question: ‘What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?’ (Psalm 8, v.4; Hebrews 2.6). For to exclude that question from the study of evolution is indeed to play Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark (Sir Walter Scott, The Talisman, introduction)—an exclusion surely as futile as to talk theology and to forget evolution? There must be a complete answer; there must be coherence and sense in the universe; and, until we find it, our thinking is degenerated into disintegration, and our existence fragmented into a rubbish-heap of shreds and patches, with coherence, significance, and growth impossible, our compass-bearings lost, and civilization foundering.
In the study of evolution, it is the scientist’s first duty to deal with the question, How? The theologian is more concerned with Why? But you cannot answer either question fully without answering the other as well. The medical man may say that he is concerned only with the healing of men’s bodies; but, when he says so, he knows that he lies. He is concerned with the restoration of wholeness of life, which is health, and wholeness by definition includes man in all his variety of experience. The priest may say that he is concerned with man’s soul, but in fact that soul is something which grows out of man’s body. You cannot divide man into parts and then, by simple arithmetic, add him up to make a whole. So the theologian—and the scientist—when they study the story which the one calls Creation and the other Evolution, must attempt to see it as a whole, and must from the varying standpoints endeavour to understand it as a whole, its end no less that its beginning. The answer will be found in a proper understanding of what theologians call the Incarnation, for as Bridges says,
…his humanity is God’s Personality / and communion with him is the life of the soul. (Robert Bridges, op, cit., Bk IV, 11. 1392-3.)
‘He is no half-brother to mankind, and therefore of a nature in which humanity can only partially partake; but Elder Brother, blood-brother, the forerunner of our race, the first-fruits of every human creature; not the great Exception but the great Example, who claims no difference either of “substance” or of “nature” from the least of His brethren.’ (I have not been able to trace this quotation. [M.D.C.P]) ‘He became like us,’ says Irenaeus, ‘that we might become like Him.’ (St Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, Bk V, Preface.) ‘He became human,’ says Athanasius, ‘that we might become divine.’ (St Athanasius, On the Incarnation, Sect.54 [The Library of Christian Classics, Vol. III, p.107]. Cf. the Quicunque Vult: ‘one Christ…by taking of the Manhood into God.’)
It is God’s purpose that men should be like Christ: they are whole and healthy only when they are so, and the purpose of evolution is, as Saint Paul says, that ‘we all come in the unity of the faith…unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.’ (Ephesians 4.13.)
This is thatt excelent way whereon if we wil walk / all things shall be added unto us. (Bridges, op. cit., Bk IV, 11. 1426-7.)
This is the solvent of our divisions and the cohesive purpose which can explain and put sense into our multifarious individual activities. This is what we see if we look deeply enough below the surface of things.
…and now with many words / pleasing myself betimes I am fearing lest in the end / I play the tedious orator who maundereth on / for lack of heart to make an end of his nothings. / Wherefor as when a runner who hath run his round / handeth his staff away, and is glad of his rest, / here break I off, knowing the goal was not for me / the while I ran on telling of what cannot be told. (Ibid., 11. 1306-13.)