World Invisible; Diogenes

I see a man. With my physical senses I take him in,a solid, three-dimensional object. I note if he is small or large, tall or short; I note whether he is young or old; I note the color of his eyes and his hair; I note whether he is bearded, moustached, or clean-shaven. With my ears I hear his voice and assess its pitch and timber-and so on. But, when I have used my physical senses to the full, how much do I know of the man? I know nothing except some physical facts about his body; but of the real man behind that body-the compound of emotion, thought, experience, memory, and the rest-I know nothing. Diogenes is the pseudonym for a regular contributor to the British weekly, Time & Tide, this article being from the issue of October 6, 1956. [437 ] And now suppose that (without killing the poor fel low, of course) I were able so to operate upon him that 1 could see his brain, his heart, his internal organs. From seeing them, I might learn something of how the machine works. I might see the heart pumping blood through the veins, or watch the operations of the digestive organs and the organs of elimination-but again I should know noth ing of the man himself.

Suppose, further, that I could take segments of his flesh and of his organs and his brain and submit them to micro scopic and chemical analysis.· I might learn a good deal about the materials which go to make up the human body, but I should be as far away as ever from knowing anything about "the invisible man," of whom the body is only one-and that a temporary-manifestation. Yet, knowing this truth about a human being, we do not apply it to the world without, to the physical uni verse. We assume that if we could push the boundaries of knowledge of that universe sufficiently far back, we should find the answer to what Maeterlinck called "The Great Secret." We think that we should find the why and wherefore of things, that we should understand the mean ing of life. The Spirit of Things The thought of earlier ages did not entertain this de~ lusion; it knew that man was more than his physical ap paratus. It thought of him as a spirit of which the body was but the instrument. It saw the universe not as God, [438 ] but as the garment of God. Man was the microcosm, of which the universe was the macrocosm, but they came from the same Hand and it was reasonable to suppose that they were constmcted on similar principles. If there was "an invisible man~> behind the visible man, it was reasonable to.suppose that behind the visible world there was an invisible one.

But since the time of Galileo, modern man has thought less and less in these terms. The whole emphasis of scien tific inquiry has been on probing the material universe. Man has developed instruments of ever-greater precision, telescopes of ever-greater power of penetrating the skies, microscopes which probe ever-deeper into the infinitely little. True it is that he has added immensely to his knowl edge of the material universe. He has pushed far back into time and space the boundaries of the skies, opened up the sub-molecular world, measured, weighed, ana lyzed the different forms of matter. He has broken down the ~~particle" of my boyhood into the atom; he has even broken down the atom to its constituent neutrons and electrons. Nor is it to be denied that much of the knowledge which science has discovered has been of great practical use. The constant probing of the physical body has revo lutionized the art of surgery. The constant analyzing of various forms of matter has made available a vast range of medicines.

We· can do all sorts of things with matter of which our fathers could not have dreamed. The impact of the in[439 ] ventionsmade possible by scientific discovery has changed during my own lifetime the face of civilization -and the pace of change becomes ever swifter. On the other hand, it must be admitted that increased knowledge of the material world has led to awful things and to still more dreadful possibilities. Gunpowder, high explosives, the cultivation of deadly germs for war pur poses, the atom and the hydrogen bomb-these must be set against the many benefits that in a material sense science has brought to the world. If science has made possible more abundant material life, it has also made possible its universal destruction. Basic Questions Sti,ll Unanswered But the essential point is that, with all the answers to all the questions which science has rendered' available, it has not answered the only questions which really matter, for its only concern has been with the external, material world. In my car I can travel fifteen times as fast as Plato -could. Ina plane I can travel perhaps a hundred and fifty times as fast as Aristotle ever did. But the same questions are there at the end of the journey.

In earlier ages men could hear the human voice only within a distance of a few score feet; now I can hear the voices of men from every part of the earth, but they tell me much less of what is to the point than the utterances of the wise of old. I may extend the duration of my life for perhaps a score of years longer than my forefathers could have hoped for-but will it equal theirs in quality? [440 ] Science may plan better cities and houses, but does it help one iota with the mansions of the soul? When an individual man denies that he is more than flesh and blood, when he thinks of himself as being merely a highly developed form of animal life, when he denies the invisible man within, he sets strict bounds to the possibility of his own psychological and spiritual de velopment. The materialist creates his own blind alley. So does a materialistic science. It is reaching the end of that blind alley today. As one bewildered scientist ex pressed it not long since, t:t:We don't know where we are."

EDITOR'S NOTE: Diogenes well emphasizes the dead end of ma terialistic science-the sad fate of the individual who perceives only the external, material world. But that is hardly the end of the trouble, for the attitudes and actions of the materialist also affect others. Anyone unconscious of the Invisible-oblivious to that creativity which is infinitely beyond self-is logically inclined to believe in his own omniscience. Thus self-enthroned, he may dream of a world perfected by casting others in his t:'omnipotent"little image-even to the point of compelling them to act and believe as he does. From such inability or unwillingness to contemplate the Invisible and to admit of reality beyond one's own sensory perceptions, may well stem the growth of authoritarianism. For if a person is aware of the mysteries enshrouding even himself, how could he possibly seek to control or forcibly direct the creative actions of others about whom he knows less?

[441 ] INDEX A Agriculture federal programs of, 271 free market, 304 subsidy. See Subsidy surplus, 304, 306 world trade in, 142 America, constitutional theory of, 56,326 American Federation of Labor, 367 American Tariff League, 137 Anderson, C. W.; fair wages, 398 Andrews, T. Coleman, 210 Army, U. S., definition of democracy, 239 B Banks and banking, 428 Bartering, 27; see also, Trade Berlin, Isaiah, 348 Bien, Bettina; unemployment, 335 Bierly, Ivan R.; revolution, real, 227 Bonds, government, 428 Braden, Spruille; gaining respect, 103 Bread and circuses, 402 Brogan, Co1m; socialized medicine, 296 Browning, Robert, 61 Brustat, August W.; religious education,47 Bryant, William C., 62 Burgess, John W., 58 Burke, Edmund, 64 Business, government in, 183 Byron, George, 61 C Capital. See Income; Investments; Money; Wages Capitalism evolution of, 167 Marxian views of, 343 see also, Free market Carcopino, Jerome,. 402n Chamberlain, John; water resources, 262 Chamberlin, William Henry mistakes of Marx, 340 tax power, 203 Channing, W. E., 62 Chodorov, Frank corruption, case of, 409 humanity·of trade, 27 Civilization, decline of, 203 Clayton Act of 1914, 151 Clergyman's security, 86 Collectivism, 173, 203; see also, Government Colorado River Storage Project, 264 Commandment, stealing and, 386 Commodity, labor as, 150 Communism, 105, 340 Competition and prices, 18; see also, Free market Conservation, water, 262 Constitution, U. S., 56, 326 Consumption. See Production Corruption, 409; see also, Government Cost-plus theory, 19 Creativeness, 437 Credit bank,428 government, 188 inflation and, 200, 428 Curtiss, W. M.