Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2774

Typed pages spontaneously dictated by Heath to Spencer MacCallum, then checked and amended by Heath, reviewing Paul R. Heyl, The Philosophy of a Scientific Man. New York: Vanguard Press, 1933.

May 11, 1956

 

 

The Philosophy of a Scientific Man: by Paul R. Heyl

This book of Paul R. Heyl is truly a wonderful book — the philosophy of a truly scientific man. It begins auspiciously in his foreword with a beautiful tribute to the mind and spirit of the Victorian scientist, John Tyndall, a scientist who was more than a scientist, a philosopher and an artist, and perhaps above all, a very rational mystic.

 

 In the body of the book, Paul Heyl goes far towards proving himself as of the same high and deep versatility. He begins with a beautiful discussion of the place of reason in nature, abounding with apt and beautiful illustration. In his second chapter, he takes up nature in her dual aspect, her purely mechanical and physical and her vital and metaphysical or psychological aspects, the non-vital and insensate versus the living and conscious, the inorganic versus the organic world. He points to a wide gulf here and reviews the dreams of many that rationality and reason is immanent in all and prevails throughout. He asserts that inanimate Nature is wholly conformable to reason; her laws are his mother tongue. Yet later he raises a doubt that there can be any rationality at any level below that of the conscious mind.

 

 In his third chapter, he crystallizes this doubt; he raises what he, like those before him, call the mystery and problem of evil. To this he devotes 63 out of his 175 pages, more than one-third of his book. He treats the mystery of evil with perhaps greater thoroughness and deeper penetration than has ever been done before. He reviews, seemingly, all past arguments for and against a Divinity, both omnipotent and all benevolent, showing how these two aspects of the Deity are incompatible and that all such argument involving the nature of God must leave the searching soul in the wasteland of doubt or the atheistic desert of denial. Yet in closing his long dissertation on evil, he pointedly discloses that there still remains in human nature something transcending all rationality, something idealistic and overpowering to which the human spirit ever cleaves and clings, unquenchably, even more than to life. So it seems there must be some alternative to the soul’s rationalistic dilemma.

 

In his two remaining chapters, four and five, he gives what he calls the first alternative and the second alternative. In the first, he points to the existence of a growing cosmic soul, something that began in the first faint stirrings of life in the steamy inorganic. Until this happened, all nature’s laws were rational and reasonable. But what shall we say now? For here enters the paradox of good and evil, something that will not reconcile itself to the mechanical rationality of the inorganic. It goes on evolving in its dual aspect of light and dark, of good and evil. Yet eventually, it comes to its highest in its human aspect, where it refuses to be wholly creature and becomes, with increasing measure, the master, the creator of the world out of which it has evolved. It develops an intrinsic quality, perhaps an entity, which can be called the Cosmic Soul.

 

 This “first alternative” is most beautifully described, and with such artistry as this review can scarcely more than hint. (He accepts wholeheartedly the deadly doctrine of entropy, but he limits it to the non-living world. In his “cosmic soul,” he anticipates what Erwin Schroedinger characterizes as “negative entropy” in his penetrating and prophetic little volume, What is Life?.) Our present author concludes thus:

 

“It lives and grows. It is beginning to be conscious of its own powers. It is optimistic; it is fearless; it is developing. Let none set metes and bounds for it. It may yet turn the ebbing tide of Nature, and stay the coming of the twilight hour; for Gotterdammerung is ages away, eons away; there is time. It may yet (who knows) as its own nervous system is beginning to do, shake off the limitations of matter only to function more freely and fully. The little soul, now chained to a corpse, may yet redeem itself and possess a controlling soul worthy of its splendid body; for it doth not yet appear what we shall be.”

 

 It seems to this reviewer he had done well, had he ceased as above. It might well have been the last word, susceptible of perhaps endless elaboration but no substantive addition.

 

 But in his “second alternative,” towards a conclusion that seems wholly negative, derived from a wholly negative premise, he definitely denies even the possibility that there can be any rationality in nature save in the conscious mind of man. He asserts that reason “has been developed in ourselves by stress of circumstances.” As though circum­stances were something casual and accidental, not to be taken much into account. He seems insensible to the fact that “stress of circumstances” is nothing less than the total environment, the total cosmos, out of which all that is in man must have been developed and evolved. If there was, as he holds, no rationality in the total cosmic source, whence came, then, the rationality that is so deeply wrought into man, and that man finds certainly, at every level of organization where no life appears, yet is constrained to doubt its dominance throughout the liv­ing world? The present reviewer cannot reconcile the premise of this last chapter with the magnificent power and beauty of what precedes. It leads the author astray from the beauty and glory of the creative Cosmic Soul as manifested in mankind, into the empty desert-land of nothingness as its supremest ideal and goal.

 

 He discounts the religions of the Western world as exotics of Semitic origin with their “emphasis, as an indispensible point, upon the survival of personality, while the Aryan Buddha takes the opposite view. “——-“ At the end lies Nirvana, absorption into which is the ultimate destiny.

“The sunrise comes.

 The dewdrop slips into the shining sea.”

 

 Yet at the very end, he does not quite rest here. “The field of history,” says he, “is bestrewn with scattered bits of human thinking, many of which sparkle attractively, but fall to dust when pressed in the fingers; but others are to be found which will bear handling, and which blend and fit together into one pattern of strange yet simple outline.”

 

________________________

 

/The following dictated words appear on a notepad sheet in pencil in Spencer MacCallum’s hand but are crossed out, so they may or may not be significant./

 

In clinging to survival of personality, he relinquishes as dependent wholly on sentiment (at least he seems to do so, judging from preceding chapters). Then shall we say that in his closing words quoted above, he leaves no room for a more humanly satisfying blend out of the scattered bits of human thinking that do not fall to dust.