Books: Atom-Wise Reverence

THE SCIENCES AND PHILOSOPHY—J. S. Haldane—Doubleday, Doran ($3.75).

Scientists are not usually interested in philosophy or religion. Professional men, they are apt to find their profession exclusively engrossing. But Biologist John Scott Haldane, of Oxford University, is not content to breathe his last in the special atmosphere of his laboratory. He has attained a comprehensive view of life, reached “matured conclusions.” The University of Glasgow invited him to lecture. He did, and this book, ambitious, anti-popular, significant, is the result. In it Biologist Haldane attempts to “bring consistency into the inheritance which has come to me individually in science, philosophy, and religion.”

Mostly in measured language he uproots what seem to him some vulgar errors and takes his final stand with such modern mystics as Astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington and Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead: “The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our life in it any less mysterious.”

Science is always a lap ahead of popular belief. Newton and Darwin are today high priests of truth to the man in the street. Materialism, once a scientific theory, is now the fatalistic creed of thousands. But materialism, says atom-wise, germ-conscious Haldane,”is nothing better than a superstition, on the same level as a belief in witches and devils.”

“[The mechanistic] theory is . . . bankrupt. It has, in fact, ceased to interest physiologists in recent times. . . . One often meets the statement . . . that scientific physiology is progressively revealing the mechanism of life. In the light of actual progress this is quite untrue, and can only be described as claptrap. . . . Science brings us to a point at which we require more than Science.” Biologist Haldane takes philosophy seriously. To him, philosophy is only another word for religion. But orthodox religion will not find much in common with such statements as this: “Belief of any kind in what is supernatural seems to me to imply a faltering in religious faith. . . . Men of science . . . will never accept any belief in supernatural interference. Belief in the self-consistency of the universe is for them equivalent, in ultimate analysis, to belief in the existence of God.” Philosophy (religion) has a very practical importance “in bringing consistency into the relations between different kinds of knowledge.” Philosopher Haldane has no fears for the future of religion, but the influence of the Churches, he thinks, “is certain to dwindle more and more unless supernatural belief is banished from their teaching.”

The Significance. As the branches of science become more complex, their interrelation becomes more evident, the general problems of science more clearly insoluble. In astronomy, physics, biology, lengthy strides have been made in the last 20 years toward the realization that man knows less and less about more and more. Scientists to whom science is more than an enthralling game are consequently ”turning back.” the Pragmatists to Philosophy, the mystics to Religion.

The Author. Biologist John Scott Haldane, 69,* brother of the late Richard Burdon Viscount Haldane (onetime Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain), was born in Edinburgh. He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, Honorary Professor of the University of Birmingham. Outside the academic world, he has studied mining, scientific diving and the fetid depths of factories, has written on respiration, air analysis, ventilation, etc.

*Not to be confused with his son John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, famed biochemist of Cambridge University, twice-wounded onetime member of the Black Watch, who, like his father, observes the subtle linkage between science, philosophy, ethics, religion.