I’m reading Henry Fairfield Osborn’s Impressions of Great Naturalists (1924). Although the author and table of contents seemed promising, I’m not as enthralled as I had hoped. Yes, the biographic sketches are mostly sketch and a lot of personal memoir, but they lack the coherency and distillation of principle and purpose I expected from a Don of science with Victorian prose. They ramble a bit, and a majority of the chapter on Louis Pasteur is given to expounding on the inherent religious nature and work of great scientists like Pasteur! Mentions of the Ancient Greeks, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and Darwin are less frequent than discussion of Genesis, Christ, St. Augustine, Dante, and one Bishop Boyd-Carpenter. Forshame.
His view is perhaps a typical one of the time, perhaps more typical now: that of the religiously-inclined wanting to have their scientific cake and eat it too. He finds divine handiwork not just in Nature, but in the people who study it and in their creative and productive work. He nominates Pasteur for a new order of sainthood, saying
Louis Pasteur is the greatest benefactor of mankind since the time of Jesus Christ, and as he was inspired by religious sentiment I claim that he should be enrolled among the saints and enshrined in our cathedrals.
While I heartily agree that Pasteur’s work was a turning point in "Man’s Redemption of Man," I think that sub-cataloging him among institutions that hindered thought, knowledge, and human well-being for centuries is an insult at best. To lump Pasteur with countless mystics, ascetics, and death-worshippers (as anyone who elevates and gives primacy to an after-life most assuredly is) on account of his religiosity is a scientific error of the first rate (at the very least).
It is akin to categorizing plants with moths on account of their respective affinities for light. Light does not animate the two kinds of organisms by remotely similar mechanisms, although it may be said to give direction to both. Importantly, significant amounts of light are integral to the life of most plants; the same is not true for moths, which are by and large night-time creatures.
Similarly, the cognitive processes - the thinking methods - employed by Pasteur are fundamentally different from those that give rise to and foster religious ideas. In short, in terms of Pasteur’s science and his faith: you cannot get there from here. The methods of thinking that give rise to concepts like God and heaven and hell and the trinity and miracles - in a word, the anti-cognitive mental process of having faith - can never give rise to the kind of scientific, worldly success that Pasteur is championed for. Similarly, employing rigorous scientific thinking (rational integration and evaluation of evidence, with logic as the primary and final judge) one can never arrive at concepts of God and the like. You can’t get there from here.
While it’s certainly true that there is no shortage of examples from history of great scientists with minor or major elements of religion (or other mysticism) in their lives, the relevant question is not "How much did he believe in God?" but rather, "To what degree did his faith and faith-based concepts fundamentally enable his scientific success, as compared to unbreached use of logic and evidence?"
So, in short, I find it a true pity that Osborn starts out so promisingly in the Foreward with:
There is no joy like the joy of creative work. To my mind all great men are creative, and mong the greatest men are the creative naturalists from Aristotle to Darwin …
and ends so frustratingly contradictorily with this:
From these impressions of the lives of many naturalists we see that the naturalist is animated first of all by the joy of observation, without inital hope or thought of discovery but surely in the end leading to discovery; leading also to creative thought if observation is pursued with a single eye and unfaltering purpose, regardless of all obstacles or dangers and of the greatest impediment of all, namely, interest in self and in self-advancement. (my emphasis)
I could forgive Osborn for this last awful phrase, except that all through the book there is this recurrent theme of selflessness, ego-excision, and sacrifice that is at odds, at root, with the very intellectual characteristics that make his great naturalists great - independence (often physical as well as mental), a hungry intellect, joy in observation, knowledge and discovery of the natural world, a sense of personal efficacy, and an unflinching confidence in Man’s ability to know Nature, and by systematically meddling with it, improve the lot of humanity’s duration on Earth. He favorably quotes a rhapsodizing Shelley:
Happiness
And Science dawn though late upon the earth;
Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame;
Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here,
Reasonand passion case to combat there,
Whilst mind unfettered o’er the earth extends
Its all-subduing energies, and wields
The sceptre of a vast dominion there.
And, in discussing major trends in the mind-body dichotomy over the ages, he writes:
The second movement begins six centuries before Christ in the inquiring mind of the West, which is always characterized by intense curiosity about nature. This movement is the search for natural law. Its rapid progress among the Greeks terminates with the fall of Greece. It is expressed in Cato’s reply to Scipio: "My wisdom consists in the fact that I follow Nature, the best of guides, as I would a God and am loyal to her commands." Man is again perceived as part of nature; in the study of nature man finds intellectual delight; in the laws of nature man finds his physical well-being; man through nature becomes the redeemer of physical man. (pg 123)
Osborn speculates about the Church’s reception of Pasteur’s humanitarian work, had he been born a millenium earlier:
It is interesting to imagine what tributes might have been rendered to Pasteur if he had lived in the period of the early saints of the Church and had won the love of his generation and the reverence of succeeding generations by his might works. It is interesting to surmise what would have been the attitude of the early Church toward such a benefactor of mankind. Our believe today is that Pasteur should stand as a symbol of the profound and intimate relation which must develop between the study of nature and the religious life of man, between our present and future knowledge of nature and the development of our religious conceptions and beliefs.
If the great saints were either of Augustine’s time, or strongly influenced by Augustine’s writings, then it is relevant to note that Augusting explicitly denounced curiosity as "lust of the eyes", and love of wordly beauty as "lust of the senses" in his Confessions. Sciences and the pursuit of knowledge are sinful in the eyes of St. Augustine. How possibly could Pasteur have passed for anything but a craven sinner, wizard or heretic in the first millenium of the Church?
I think Osborn is so taken with both science and his religious beliefs that he only sees the many ways they seem compatible, and neglects to investigate any errors in his knowledge and conflicts in the ideas. What bits I know of Augustine in no way square with Osborn’s depiction of Augustine’s works and philosophy, which are polar opposite to the crusading, efficacious intellects of the 19th century that Osborn cites. And, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Osborn wrongly attributes the Christian maxim of "Love your neighbor as you love yourself" to the Old Testament. I think perhaps he daydreamed through more than one history, religion and philosophy class. In any case, he appears to take his schooling in Kant relatively seriously, (although with unchecked contradictions with Kant’s philosophy thankfully abounding), and boy does it show in his evaluations of people.
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