It is an uncommon pleasure that results from the reading of old science books, such as you may obtain for a dollar or two from your local library’s out-of-circulation stacks. He who would edify himself and further his appreciation of the natural world could do little better than to start here, in this realm of almost forgotten texts wherein the treasures of centuries have been accumulated. The reasons for this are twofold, I think, apart from it being far easier on the purse than a more conventional education. In the first place, the authorities of the past possessed a broader outlook than we are accustomed to find in today’s luminaries. Although highly adept at brain-work, they lived as more modest men tend to do, rooted in a moral sturdiness that knows not to take too seriously the many mysteries of life. They were far less averse to artistic sentiment as well, and attention was given to literary style in even their more technical expositions. Charm and humor waft up from these ancient writings and, mingling agreeably with the must from the books themselves, perforce evince a trustworthy element of earthiness. The soul feels itself guided down hidden forest paths to those springs where fair Wisdom quenches the thirst of weary pilgrims. In contrast to the sharp peroxide rinses of today, these older books did not strive to bleach out perceived errors, but to gently water the native seeds of understanding. As a result, they are imbued with that special quality shared by all sublime things, that they uplift us whether we mean to be uplifted or not.

In the second place (and this being especially germane to the matter under consideration), a book read outside of its own time, after its primary significance has passed, serves to free us from the tyranny of the present age. When once our charity has grown sufficiently large such that we realize that, while setting forth a very different set of conclusions, these past authors nonetheless speak to us with the same legitimacy of today’s researchers, we are enabled thereby to recall a primordial fact which many a modern scientist has well-nigh forgotten: the changeable character of that which is “known.”

Now, it goes without saying that the body of accepted scientific knowledge changes over time. Most often, this is attributed to a sort of linear progression, a continuous expansion of the field brought about by accreting new knowledge onto old; or, by the occasional synthesis that makes of many disparate elements a new and comprehensive picture. According to this scheme, any discrepancies between past knowledge and present knowledge must be accounted for by one of two methods. In the first case, one is simply right and the other wrong. Either the past was in a state of error which the present has corrected, or the past was a golden age of learnedness from which the present has fallen away. This approach has the virtue of simplicity; but it presents us with the dilemma of belonging, by sheer accident of birth, to either the condition of unearned perfection or that of irremediable ignorance. Whichever one it is, the justification for the pursuit of further knowledge breaks down, the enterprise having ipso facto been rendered fruitless by the inalterability of the situation.

In the second case, every attempt is made to redeem the discrepancies of yore by taking pity on them. Here, the theological doctrine of universalism is practiced with respect to our forebears, and past knowledge is seen to be an incomplete expression of some final revelation which present knowledge may or may not have attained. No one is really entirely wrong, but everyone does the best he can under the circumstances. This scenario has the advantage of eliminating the dilemma of the extremes, but it also makes a mockery out of that quest for certainty with which the pursuit of knowledge is principally concerned. The possibility of critical self-reflection is denied wherever it is asserted that partial truths are all that can be obtained. The result is the refusal to accept the legitimacy of any finite truth, and it points the way to nihilism; that is to say, to the pragmatism of degenerate solutions.

Here it stands, then: our current methods of reckoning up the merits of past versus present knowledge are defective inasmuch as they admit of only two possible outcomes, neither one of which is acceptable. We may feel safe in concluding that, in this historically minded age of ours, the changeable nature of that study which was supposed to elucidate for us the permanent architecture of the universe is perhaps the central philosophic problem. It cannot help but be admitted now that our core assumptions about the ways that knowledge is acquired and expanded must be wrong. The present work, by way of both its content and its method, will bring to light a superior approach; therefore, let us waste no time with preparatory explanations, and return instead at once to the subject of old books.

Any book that seriously attempts to grasp some aspect of reality is necessarily a work of great personal pride; it cannot help but involve the passions of its author. It proceeds as though it were a ritual prayer offered up to the Omniscience who alone has the right to validate it and approve it. For this is the great secret that places the fashionably atheistic science-popularizers of our current era at such a great distance from their intellectually honest brethren, that no meaningful work of science was ever written for mortal eyes alone; it is written as though it were to stand for all eternity. The notion of the genuine seeker is inseparable from that of the virtue of piety. “To seek” means “to seek humbly;” to open up one’s heart and one’s mind before the manifest powers of being. For any responsible author, then, his book’s plan of execution is never irrelevant. He asks only what he imagines to be the most significant questions, and gives only those perfectly transparent answers that can be gotten without the use of semantic trickery. His purity of will, along with his application of sound reason, alone determines the dignity accorded to his work; not the incidental state of knowledge of the era in which he worked.

This, then, is the point of contact between past knowledge, present knowledge, and (presumably) future knowledge; that they are all equal in human dignity, which is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Rather than being related to one another in respect of earlier and later, the thoughts of yesterday and today stand related as do the physician and the attorney: they both specialize in different areas. Distinctions made with respect to time have no real grounding in the domain of thoughts. Undoubtedly, there is a sense in which we can say that scientific knowledge tends to increase over time. However, this should be thought of rather as a refinement of knowledge than as a progression of knowledge. The close connections between science and technology serve to illustrate this point clearly. Nature provides us with a set of physical properties that we can manipulate in an infinite variety of creative ways; and every technological artifact, from the most rudimentary hand-tool to the most complex computer, is simply this: a piece of refined nature. But just as it is not possible to invent for ourselves wholly new natural properties at will, it is also not possible for us to hit upon hitherto unthinkable theoretical formulations. Discoveries in both fields tend to build upon themselves, but neither in the world of inventions nor in the world of thoughts is there to be found anything that was not present in fundamentum from the beginning. Nor need we fear that our knowledge of the world is merely preliminary because somebody else may someday discover more about it than we have. Reality is inexhaustible; there is always more to be discovered about it. Our knowledge is complete because it is our property and we are complete men. We have acquired it diligently through the use of our own time and effort, and therefore it belongs to us as surely as the song belongs to the singer.

All confusion in these matters is born of our misuse of the word “science” to refer to two separate species which really ought to be distinguished. In the first place, a quite dogmatic compilation of accepted statements about the natural world, stored up in the form of treatises and textbooks, and clung to by their adherents as though the were the precepts of some naturalistic religion; in the second place, the living activity engaged in by “scientists,” i.e. the personal struggle to gain both understanding of the world and respect among one’s peers, often lionized in literature and seemingly endowed with a peculiar sort of virtue all its own. It will be readily acknowledged that, of these two species, the latter is itself the prime phenomenon. There would be no science books if there were not first scientists to write them. The confusion, then, is simply the failure to distinguish between the results of scientific activity and the activity itself. It is confusion between the subjects and objects of science; between the map and the cartographer, the road and the surveyor, the building and the architect.

The situation is not helped by the fact that much work is now published within the scientific idiom that does not possess the same existential seriousness or sense of personal duty that high science betokens. There is a growing prevalence in the field of the workaday scientist, of the sort who practices his craft in the manner that a factory worker assembles motors; who is not without a certain pride and professionalism in doing so, but upon whose work per se nothing vital within him depends. The desire to take personal risks in the pursuit of truth cannot overpower the human tendency towards careerism under such circumstances. On the contrary, the sheer mechanical reliability of his output, the ease of his professional compromises, his untroubled ability to pander and please, to dramatize his best- and worst-case scenarios for the sake of effect, all serve to make him the sort of scientist eagerly courted for public commentary, the sort most often published and popularized, and eo ipso¹ the sort most closely connected with the face of science in the lay imagination.

Examples of this pseudoscientific chicanery are legion. We refrain from mentioning them here, lest we provoke our potentially friendly readers to early and irreparable disagreement. Much of this is establishment science, and no doubt held in high esteem by many who have not yet had the chance to hear fully our thesis. Suffice it to say that there appears to be lacking an underlying metaphysic of what constitutes a scientific approach to reality. To admit of a concrete answer, a scientific question must be existentially well-framed; that is to say, it must not be asked from a position of theological error. The questioner cannot implicitly deny the uniqueness and dignity of humanity, nor the reality of an uncaused cause as the source and sustaining ground of all existence. Beyond these matters of first philosophy are also many practical considerations. Bizarre or ridiculous subject matter dissipates the integrity required to stand firm in an attitude of sober and humble readiness to receive sublime teachings. The piling up of useless arcana needlessly beclouds the mind and robs it of the joy that ought to attend an increase of wisdom. And just as politics is the art of the possible, science, too, is the art of the knowable, the useful, and the reasonable. Even in the realm of pure abstraction, empty syllogisms do not tell. Ultimately, that which is truth can only be that which satisfies the human person in all his created dimensions. By virtue of our very being, we are drawn erotically toward that which makes sense. Only in the fact that we live do we come to understand the thrust of validity.

True science begins here, with the quest to embrace the living world. Throughout the many wondering ways of thoughts and minds, life remains both the impetus and the criterion of every act of truth-seeking. Once we realize the unity of seeker and sought as the true atom of inquiry, the world of science opens out immensely before us. Science ceases to be confusing and begins to be edifying only when knowledge unites with soulful direction. Unfortunately, our experience today is one of science constantly at war with human dignity; particularly in the life-sciences, which have become little more than a font of divisive social and ethical debate far out of proportion to the services actually rendered to humanity.

I trust that my readers are well versed in current affairs, and that they will already have a general awareness of the sort of issues I have in mind. There will be no need to belabor here the finer points of embryonic stem cell research. We will not wax lyrical about the disfigurements wrought upon the image of humanity by “evolutionary psychology,” nor set forth a line-by-line refutation of some of the more ridiculous claims made by its modern day triumvirate of Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens. Such things can and will be handled elsewhere. I contend that the difficulties which have arisen concerning contemporary life-sciences simply cannot be resolved within the current paradigm. There are (let the reader take note) irreducible logical and epistemological errors within the picture of biology as currently presented. In the remainder of this essay I will propose an alternative paradigm that I believe lies closer to the heart of the matter, and we will discuss some of the unacknowledged problems within biology which I believe it will help to dispel.

Fortunately, the new style of thinking is not far to seek. There is a welter of most ingenious and fruitful speculations about the natural world contained in the annals of Romantic philosophy. Neither a movement nor a school, Romantic philosophy is rather a persistent countercurrent to the mechanizing tendencies of Western thought in general. None of the figures we shall shortly name were conscious of their unity; it is only possible to bracket them together under a single heading negatively (by telling what they were not) and posthumously (that is, after the fact). Nonetheless, we can still identify, in opposition to the line of peerless mechanics that extends from Descartes, through Kant and Newton, to Darwin and the materialists of today, a line of organicists who constantly strove to rescue the pearl of humanity from the all-consuming acid of universal skepticism. Of these we may name Gottfried Leibniz the grandfather, of sorts. Leibniz (1646-1716) possessed an encyclopedic mind that proved itself more than capable in practically every arena. One of his principle interests was Christian ecumenism. The Age of Religious Wars had left Europe pockmarked and exhausted at the time of Leibniz’ birth, and he was driven by a strong desire to ease the situation by finding a version of Christianity that everybody could agree upon. These deep soul-studies on his part, his constant introspections on God, free will, and the providential nature of history, led him into disagreement with the Cartesian philosophy that was then widely popular throughout the continent. Now, the Cartesians held that matter and mind were not merely two different things, but two different kinds of things altogether, which left them with the mystery of how it was possible for the two to influence one another. How, for instance, could an act of will—say, my decision to pick up a stone and throw it through the air—result in the stone actually moving, when the act of will took place in the mind and the stone was a piece of external matter? This seemingly simple, perhaps even slightly disingenuous-sounding question actually drives right to the heart of one of the key metaphysical difficulties that dogs the development of physics up until this very day. You see, the problem is not quite as simple as it sounds. Even in Leibniz’ day thoughtful people were well aware of the relativity of all motion; that is to say, they knew that when an object appears to move relative to another object, it is not possible to say with any certainty to which of them we ought to ascribe the motion and to which the fixity. They also had a good idea of that physical principle which today we call the First Law of Thermodynamics, viz. the fact that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and therefore the total amount of force in any closed system remains a fixed quantity. When we combine these observations with Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which states that for every force that exists there must exist a second force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction, we get the astonishing result that not only the total amount of force in the universe, but also the direction of all forces, can never be changed. What then becomes of my decision to throw the stone? Certainly we may grant that no laws of thermodynamics have been broken; that the quantity of rejected heat from the activity is equal to the amount of energy expended minus the motion imparted to the stone; and that the vector addition of all force pairs in question sum to zero. But my decision has clearly brought about some change in the universe that would not have taken place without it. If I can change neither the quantity nor the direction of physical forces, then my decision must have been configured into the machinery of the universe from the very beginning, in which case it would not have been a “decision” in the first place. Notice, however, that this would violate the dualism between mind and matter asserted by the Cartesians. Even if my decision were entirely deterministic, it must therefore be the result of some causal concatenation of events which finally impinges upon my mind, thus actuating the stone-throw. Mind and matter could not then be separate things, and any way you look at it the Cartesians have a problem. While much sophisticated argumentation was deployed in various attempts to lay the issue to rest, the efforts were never satisfactory. So tortured were some of the explanations that finally both the physical and mental realities in question had disappeared beneath a haze of obfuscation, prompting one wag to close the debate by joking, “No matter, never mind.”

Leibniz eventually found a solution to the dilemma; not by denying Cartesian dualism, but by affirming it in a radically different way. He came to see that the crux of the matter lay in the decision itself. Once all other possibilities had been considered and rejected it remained only to state that motion, properly defined, could not be something as independent, external, and real as was previously thought. In his own words, it was something dependent not on geometry alone but on metaphysics. Leibniz declared that there must be a decision, i.e. an act of will, behind all motion in the universe. The movement of individual extended bodies is only apparent; what really counts is the style and degree of perfection of the soul which discloses itself in the movement. Human beings, being rational creatures, are far more perfect than the inanimate matter of stones, thus leaving little doubt as to where and with whom the motion originated. “I” threw the stone. It was not merely one step in the blind mechanical process that continued on before and after the event; nor is it equivalent to saying that, from another reference frame, the stone threw me. The very concept of a human being includes the potential to throw stones, while the concept of a stone includes no such potential. The will of brute earth is subordinate, after a fashion, to the will of man.

There is much more to this story, but we cannot do justice to it all in the space of an article. However, if we take this discovery of Leibniz’ as a template for the sort of science we are after, let it be apprehended thus: We refuse to see the physical universe as consisting of laws which depersonalize us. Physical laws exist, to be sure; but they have the character of being made for us not unto us. Like a mountain climber on the face of a cliff who must decide to climb on or to fall to his doom, be we never so much at their mercy, we are yet their masters and free in the face of them. Leibniz teaches us how to think complete thoughts. By introducing living forces into the very heart of physics, he has overcome materialism for all time. Any thought which proceeds from the living and vital center of the thinker and becomes entangled in the material of sensory data will remain there, dead and incomplete. In this case, the data has overpowered man such that he is not free to act upon it. In order to be complete a thought must pass through the data, illuminate it, and return to the living thinker who begat it. By this course man masters his environment, which is the proper order of things. Here we see displayed the two branches of the fundamental axiom of our paradigm: life as both the impetus and the criterion of truth.

From these noble beginnings Romanticism grew, from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth centuries, into a rather heterogeneous cultural movement wherein the impulse to seek the living truth, while never wholly suppressed, was often perverted. We find here, in art and literature, the tenderest personal confessions alongside the most extravagant indulgences of gross subjective fancy. Nature, a term invested by the Romantics with the sort of infinitely beautiful fractal connotations which Dante had reserved to Divinity alone, became for the leading lights of the period a mystic key to the interpretation of all phenomena; the secret to spiritual transcendence and personal liberation. The natural and the personal: in these two words are contained the essence of the whole affair. The nature-philosophers of the Neo-Kantian school, of which Friedrich Schelling was the most important, began to deliberately break down the barriers between self and world that nearly all foregoing Western philosophy had insisted upon. Fully converted Romantics, such as Hegel and Schopenhauer, saw the entire mental and physical history of the universe as resulting from the tensions of great antagonistic forces groping their way toward ever increasing degrees of self-fulfillment (thus setting the table for Darwinism, the English empiricist version of the same basic idea). The excesses of the movement were never curbed. Hegelianism eventually led to dialectical materialism and Marxism; bloody revolutions and twisted thinking under which the world still suffers. The quiet and sober thinkers were drowned out by the more extreme elements, yet a measure of health and vitality remained throughout. Painters like Casper David Friedrich, Anton Koch, and Joseph Turner produced landscapes of such serene, mysterious, weeping beauty as to steal one’s breath away. So still is the mood invoked thereby that we feel as though we were present at a portentous birth. A storm is gathering, ready to release great floods of ideas and revelations. These paintings, wonderful as they may be, point to something even more sublime. The complete thoughts of Leibniz are returning once again to the thinker, this time bearing with them a rich harvest of melodies and metaphors gleaned from the world of nature; infant thoughts that, once nurtured in the bosom of worthy minds, will mature into that world-embracing science of life we one day hope to achieve.

Without doubt the crowning figure of Romanticism was the great polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), that painter and philosopher, poet and playwright, scientist and politician par excellence. Goethe is remembered today mostly for his literary accomplishments, especially his dramatic reworking of an old Germanic fable about a man who traded his soul to Satan in order to learn the secrets of the universe; his much beloved Faust. Yet he was also a scientific researcher of some eminence, once writing a treatise on optics in which he championed the wave theory of light over against Sir Isaac Newton’s corpuscular theory; a debate in which his ideas eventually proved correct. It is his philosophy of biology that principally concerns us here.

Goethe’s biological theories do not lend themselves to easy systematization. This is by design, for he himself rejected the idea that nature conformed to a system at all. The sensible aspects of living organisms disclose to us a rhythm and a physiognomy, but no mechanism that can be encapsulated by deterministic law. The role of the biological researcher is to learn this rhythm through empathic participation in the life of the subject.

The word “subject” has a special significance here, for Master Goethe, true to the teachings of Leibniz, viewed living things as monads, atoms of creation, whose ultimate inner workings are incapable of being dissected by an outside intelligence. In more modern parlance, this means that a complete description of a living organism could not be given by any finite set of axioms. A phenomenological boundary exists that forever safeguards each monad from the unthinkable fate of becoming the object of another’s total knowledge and control. This boundary is “Goethe’s Black Box.” The imperturbability of the monads, derived indisputably from first principles by Leibniz and the Romantics, rather reduces certain systematic claims to knowledge asserted by contemporary biology, several of which it will now be our pleasure to consider.

Old books: we see at last their utility. The study of history yields no sweeter fruit than the resounding awareness that there is nothing new under the sun. All the factual observations it is possible to make about the world have been made from time immemorial; only the interpretations have changed. Let us take, for example, the basic premise of phylogeny, viz. the notion that all life forms on earth have descended from a common ancestor. The idea has a certain philosophical and aesthetic appeal, and without immediately taking sides concerning its essential truthfulness or falsity, we can admit that it’s the sort of belief permissible for intelligent people to hold. The only problem is that much of the evidence cited in favor of it today can be used to advance theories wholly other and equally consistent. It is a well-known fact that human embryos pass through stages of development wherein they possess, at various times, certain features incompatible with mature human existence but reminiscent of lower forms of life, such as gill-slits and a tail. In fact, the embryos of most vertebrate species are almost indistinguishable from each other at an early stage of their existence, whether the final form ends up being a fish, a chicken, or a man. The medieval Scholastic philosophers were well aware of this, yet they saw it as resulting from the fact that the animal soul must build itself up through successive levels of the Great Chain of Being before reaching that station which destiny allots to it. It was only after the idea of common phylogenetic descent took hold that the unchangeable facts were recast into that famous dictum, “phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.” Nothing could be simpler than to show that the beginnings of evolutionary theory issued not from new data but from new prejudices in favor of common descent. The first classification schemes were simply lists of animals with very little to hold them together. In time a consensus began to emerge that the entire point of biology was to chart the relationships that exist between species and genera, to cobble them together into higher and higher groupings, and to trace out all the branches on the “Tree of Life.” From then on, the very act of discovering and understanding a new species meant primarily the act of incorporating it into the Tree, of finding out what it was descended from and what it was related to. It was never asked whether these relationships existed to be charted in the first place. While perhaps shocking for modern ears to hear, let us state clearly that there is no necessary reason for assuming the principle of common descent. The Thomistic idea that the forms of plants and animals are present as “seeds” (i.e. potentialities) in the inert matter from which they are made fits the available data at least as well. It also has the added benefit dispensing with the need to discover the exact conditions under which life “first appeared.” There is no need for a fortuitous collusion of nucleic acids in the primordial soup if we believe that the soil has an inherent generative quality that continuously gives rise to the phenomenon of living creatures. There is only a difference of degree between the mud puddle and the earthworm, and from there it is but a short step to the elephant. The sophisticated chemistry that takes place within living beings is but an intensified version of the geologic and atmospheric processes that would prevail in their absence. Plants—the archetypes of all life—are elaborate sugar crystals that grow at the intersection of sunlight and soil, onto which the carbon in the air condenses and gels the waters in the loam. There is no distinction between life and non-life because there us no such thing as non-life. The vital principle of matter neither begins nor ends, but surges and diminishes according to its rhythm.

In light of this, what are we to make of heredity, of DNA as the “blueprint of life?” DNA is an organ of protein synthesis; of that much we may be sure. The ordering of the base pairs serves as a template for building up the molecules of living things. However, in what sense can we call this ordering “information?” Can we even delimit that for which we purport to have the blueprint? The idea of heredity was born out of the over-tense mechanistic imperative to assign some comprehensible causal program to the manner in which traits are passed from one generation to the next. Once again, the question of whether the key terms in use actually referred to anything real was never asked. Quite aside from the impossible epistemological problem of determining just what exactly a “trait” is (Is color a trait? If so, what happens to it in that mythical land where all the biologists are blind? How do we know if our senses are comprehensive enough, or possess fine enough gradations, or are properly compartmentalized, to ascertain what is a trait and what isn’t? It would be truly astonishing if every organism on the planet wore its life-script on its surface in a form readily compatible with human abilities. Surely the bats and the dragonflies have a very different perception of the world than we do. A bat, a dragonfly, and a human biologist each behold a fruit fly. The bat sees it as an echolocation, knowing its size and distance by listening to reflected sound with its hypersensitive ears; the dragonfly sees it as a sparkling pixie, taking in the carbon dioxide the fly exhales with its chemically sensitive eyes; the human has transcribed its genome, and believes he knows it. To which chromosome did he assign the gene for radiant carbon dioxide, the dragonfly wonders?), there is not much evidence that aspects peculiar to individuals, as distinguished from the basic outline of the species, are passed down in any sort of systematic fashion whatsoever. Take the case of Cc, the cat². Cc was cloned from a cat named Rainbow in early 2002. Rainbow is calico, docile, and corpulent. Cc is gray, energetic, and skinny. Now, let it be recalled that these two cats have identical DNA. Whatever is responsible for producing variations at the individual level, it certainly cannot be localized in the genome. We may cite other examples along these lines, but of more importance is the underlying philosophical problem: How is it possible to separate abstract information from the physical medium which carries it? Information does not exist unto itself; it is a thought-reality, represented by signs and symbols etched into matter. Information exists only with respect to the mind which will interpret it. But in the case of DNA it is the physical matter, the molecule itself, which affects the outcome, not the information contained on it. Protein manufacture is an analogue process. There is no step in which the DNA must be “read” by an outside intelligence. Life processes, being physical, must be analogue. Only thought can be digital. Thus there is no blueprint contained in DNA or anywhere else. The monads are forever imperturbable. Goethe’s Black Box cannot be defeated any more than Maxwell’s Demon. The Romantic geniuses have revealed to us the true path of mastery. We must always think “outside the box.”


1 Eo ipso: by that very act

2 See this USA Today article for details: http://www.usatoday.com/news/science/2003-01-21-cloned-cats_x.htm