Freud - Complete Works (772 page)

   Scientific thinking does not
differ in its nature from the normal activity of thought, which all
of us, believers and unbelievers, employ in looking after our
affairs in ordinary life. It has only developed certain features:
it takes an interest in things even if they have no immediate,
tangible use; it is concerned carefully to avoid individual factors
and affective influences; it examines more strictly the
trustworthiness of the sense-perceptions on which it bases its
conclusions; it provides itself with new perceptions which cannot
be obtained by everyday means and it isolates the determinants of
these new experiences in experiments which are deliberately varied.
Its endeavour is to arrive at correspondence with reality - that is
to say, with what exists outside us and independently of us and, as
experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfilment or
disappointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real
external world we call ‘truth’. It remains the aim of
scientific work even if we leave the practical value of that work
out of account. When, therefore, religion asserts that it can take
the place of science, that, because it is beneficent and elevating,
it must also be true, that is in fact an invasion which must be
repulsed in the most general interest. It is asking a great deal of
a person who has learnt to conduct his ordinary affairs in
accordance with the rules of experience and with a regard to
reality, to suggest that he shall hand over the care of what are
precisely his most intimate interests to an agency which claims as
its privilege freedom from the precepts of rational thinking. And
as regards the protection which religion promises its believers, I
think none of us would be so much as prepared to enter a motor-car
if its driver announced that he drove, unperturbed by traffic
regulations, in accordance with the impulses of his soaring
imagination.

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   The prohibition against thought
issued by religion to assist in its self-preservation is also far
from being free from danger either for the individual or for human
society. Analytic experience has taught us that a prohibition like
this, even if it is originally limited to a particular field, tends
to widen out and thereafter to become the cause of severe
inhibitions in the subject’s conduct of life. This result may
be observed, too, in the female sex, following from their being
forbidden to have anything to do with their sexuality even in
thought. Biography is able to point to the damage done by the
religious inhibition of thought in the life stories of nearly all
eminent individuals in the past. On the other hand intellect - or
let us call it by the name that is familiar to us, reason - is
among the powers which we may most expect to exercise a unifying
influence on men - on men who are held together with such
difficulty and whom it is therefore scarcely possible to rule. It
may be imagined how impossible human society would be, merely if
everyone had his own multiplication table and his own private units
of length and weight. Our best hope for the future is that
intellect - the scientific spirit, reason - may in process of time
establish a dictatorship in the mental life of man. The nature of
reason is a guarantee that afterwards it will not fail to give
man’s emotional impulses and what is determined by them the
position they deserve. But the common compulsion exercised by such
a dominance of reason will prove to be the strongest uniting bond
among men and lead the way to further unions. Whatever, like
religion’s prohibition against thought, opposes such a
development, is a danger for the future of mankind.

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   It may then be asked why religion
does not put an end to this dispute which is so hopeless for it by
frankly declaring: ‘It is a fact that I cannot give you what
is commonly called "truth"; if you want that, you must
keep to science. But what I have to offer you is something
incomparably more beautiful, more consoling and more uplifting than
anything you could get from science. And because of that, I say to
you that it is true in another, higher sense.’ It is easy to
find the answer to this. Religion cannot make this admission
because it would involve its forfeiting all its influence on the
mass of mankind. The ordinary man only knows one kind of truth, in
the ordinary sense of the word. He cannot imagine what a higher or
a highest truth may be. Truth seems to him no more capable of
comparative degrees than death; and he cannot join in the leap from
the beautiful to the true. Perhaps you will think as I do that he
is right in this.

   So the struggle is not at an end.
The supporters of the religious
Weltanschauung
act upon the
ancient dictum: the best defence is attack. ‘What’,
they ask, ‘is this science which presumes to disparage our
religion - our religion which has brought salvation and consolation
to millions of people over many thousands of years? What has it
accomplished so far? What can we expect from it in the future? On
its own admission it is incapable of bringing consolation and
exaltation. Let us leave them on one side then, though that is no
light renunciation. But what about its theories? Can it tell us how
the universe came about and what fate lies before it? Can it even
draw us a coherent picture of the universe, or show us where we are
to look for the unexplained phenomena of life or how the forces of
the mind are able to act upon inert matter? If it could do this we
should not refuse it our respect. But none of these, no problem of
this kind, has been solved by it hitherto. It gives us fragments of
alleged discovery, which it cannot bring into harmony with one
another; it collects observations of uniformities in the course of
events which it dignifies with the name of laws and submits to its
risky interpretations. And consider the small degree of certainty
which it attaches to its findings! Everything it teaches is only
provisionally true: what is praised to-day as the highest wisdom
will be rejected to-morrow and replaced by something else, though
once more only tentatively. The latest error is then described as
the truth. And for this truth we are to sacrifice our highest
good!’

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   I expect, Ladies and Gentlemen,
that, in so far as you yourselves are supporters of the scientific
Weltanschauung
which is attacked in these words, you will
not be too profoundly shaken by this criticism. And here I should
like to recall to you a remark that once went the rounds in
Imperial Austria. The old gentleman once shouted at the Committee
of a parliamentary party that was troublesome to him: ‘This
isn’t ordinary opposition any more! It’s
factious
opposition!’ Similarly, as you will
recognize, the reproaches against science for not having yet solved
the problems of the universe are exaggerated in an unjust and
malicious manner; it has truly not had time enough yet for these
great achievements. Science is very young - a human activity which
developed late. Let us bear in mind, to select only a few dates,
that only some three hundred years have passed since Kepler
discovered the laws of planetary movement, that the life of Newton,
who analysed light into the colours of the spectrum and laid down
the theory of gravitation, ended in 1727 - that is to say, little
more than two hundred years ago - and that Lavoisier discovered
oxygen shortly before the French Revolution. The life of an
individual is very short in comparison with the duration of human
evolution; I may be a very old man to-day, but nevertheless I was
already alive when Darwin published his book on the origin of
species. In the same year as that, 1859, Pierre Curie, the
discoverer of radium, was born. And if you go further back, to the
beginnings of exact science among the Greeks, to Archimedes, to
Aristarchus of Samos (about 250 B.C.) who was the fore-runner of
Copernicus, or even to the first beginnings of astronomy among the
Babylonians, you will only have covered a small fraction of the
length of time which anthropologists require for the evolution of
man from an ape-like ancestral form, and which certainly comprises
more than a hundred thousand years. And we must not forget that the
last century has brought such a wealth of new discoveries, such a
great acceleration of scientific advance that we have every reason
to view the future of science with confidence.

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   We must admit to some extent the
correctness of the other criticisms. The path of science is indeed
slow, hesitating, laborious. This fact cannot be denied or altered.
No wonder the gentlemen in the other camp are dissatisfied. They
are spoilt: revelation gave them an easier time. Progress in
scientific work is just as it is in an analysis. We bring
expectations with us into the work, but they must be forcibly held
back. By observation, now at one point and now at another, we come
upon something new; but to begin with the pieces do not fit
together. We put forward conjectures, we construct hypotheses,
which we withdraw if they are not confirmed, we need much patience
and readiness for any eventuality, we renounce early convictions so
as not to be led by them into overlooking unexpected factors, and
in the end our whole expenditure of effort is rewarded, the
scattered findings fit themselves together, we get an insight into
a whole section of mental events, we have completed our task and
now we are free for the next one. In analysis, however, we have to
do without the assistance afforded to research by experiment.

   Moreover, there is a good deal of
exaggeration in this criticism of science. It is not true that it
staggers blindly from one experiment to another, that it replaces
one error by another. It works as a rule like a sculptor at his
clay model, who tirelessly alters his rough sketch, adds to it and
takes away from it, till he has arrived at what he feels is a
satisfactory degree of resemblance to the object he sees or
imagines. Besides, at least in the older and more mature sciences,
there is even to-day a solid ground-work which is only modified and
improved but no longer demolished. Things are not looking so bad in
the business of science.

   And what, finally, is the aim of
these passionate disparagements of science? In spite of its present
incompleteness and of the difficulties attaching to it, it remains
indispensable to us and nothing can take its place. It is capable
of undreamt-of improvements, whereas the religious
Weltanschauung
is not. This is complete in all essential
respects; if it was a mistake, it must remain one for ever. No
belittlement of science can in any way alter the fact that it is
attempting to take account of our dependence on the real external
world, while religion is an illusion and it derives its strength
from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful
impulses.

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   I am under an obligation to go on
to consider other
Weltanschauungen
which are in opposition
to the scientific one; but I do so unwillingly, for I know that I
am not properly competent to judge them. So you must bear this
proviso in mind in listening to the following remarks, and if your
interest has been aroused you should seek better instruction
elsewhere.

   And here I must first mention the
various systems of philosophy which have ventured to draw a picture
of the universe as it is reflected in the mind of thinkers who were
for the most part turned away from the world. But I have already
attempted to give a general account of the characteristics of
philosophy and I am probably as unqualified as few people have ever
been to form an estimate of the different systems. So I will invite
you to join me in turning to a consideration of two other phenomena
which, particularly in our days, it is impossible to disregard.

   The first of these
Weltanschauungen
is as it were a counterpart to political
anarchism, and is perhaps a derivative of it. There have certainly
been intellectual nihilists of this kind in the past, but just now
the relativity theory of modern physics seems to have gone to their
head. They start out from science, indeed, but they contrive to
force it into self-abrogation, into suicide; they set it the task
of getting itself out of the way by refuting its own claims. One
often has an impression in this connection that this nihilism is
only a temporary attitude which is to be retained until this task
has been performed. Once science has been disposed of, the space
vacated may be filled by some kind of mysticism or, indeed, by the
old religious
Weltanschauung
. According to the anarchist
theory there is no such thing as truth, no assured knowledge of the
external world. What we give out as being scientific truth is only
the product of our own needs as they are bound to find utterance
under changing external conditions: once again, they are illusion.
Fundamentally, we find only what we need and see only what we want
to see. We have no other possibility. Since the criterion of truth
- correspondence with the external world - is absent, it is
entirely a matter of indifference what opinions we adopt. All of
them are equally true and equally false. And no one has a right to
accuse anyone else of error.

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   A person of an epistemological
bent might find it tempting to follow the paths- the sophistries -
by which the anarchists succeed in enticing such conclusions from
science. No doubt we should come upon situations similar to those
derived from the familiar paradox of the Cretan who says that all
Cretans are liars. But I have neither the desire nor the capacity
for going into this more deeply. All I can say is that the
anarchist theory sounds wonderfully superior so long as it relates
to opinions about abstract things: it breaks down with its first
step into practical life. Now the actions of men are governed by
their opinions, their knowledge; and it is the same scientific
spirit that speculates about the structure of atoms or the origin
of man and that plans the construction of a bridge capable of
bearing a load. If what we believe were really a matter of
indifference, if there were no such thing as knowledge
distinguished among our opinions by corresponding to reality, we
might build bridges just as well out of cardboard as out of stone,
we might inject our patients with a decagram of morphine instead of
a centigram, and might use tear-gas as a narcotic instead of ether.
But even the intellectual anarchists would violently repudiate such
practical applications of their theory.