The Scientific Outlook — Chapter-by-Chapter Outline

Author: Bertrand Russell First published: 1931 (George Allen & Unwin, London; W. W. Norton, New York) Edition covered: Routledge Classics, 2009 (ISBN 9780415474627), 240 pp., with a Preface by David Papineau. This edition reprints the second-edition text (Allen & Unwin, 1949), which Russell reissued with a short "Prefatory Note to the Second Edition" (correcting topical allusions) and no changes to structure. The book opens with an unnumbered Introduction, followed by 17 numbered chapters in three parts — Part I "Scientific Knowledge" (chapters 1–5), Part II "Scientific Technique" (chapters 6–11), Part III "The Scientific Society" (chapters 12–17) — closing with Notes and an Index. The 1931 first edition has the identical part and chapter structure. Chapter titles verified against the Routledge table of contents and the full text of an Allen & Unwin reprint scanned at the Internet Archive.

Central thesis

Russell's book is a study of what science is, what it does to the world, and what it cannot do. He defines science as knowledge — "the kind, namely, which seeks general laws connecting a number of particular facts" — but argues that in modern life the aspect of science as knowledge is being thrust into the background by the aspect of science as the power of manipulating nature. Science as the pursuit of truth is the equal, but not the superior, of art; science as a technique has a practical importance to which art cannot aspire. Because technique makes possible, and even necessary, new forms of human society, the book proceeds in three movements corresponding to its three parts: the nature and scope of scientific knowledge; the increased power of manipulation derived from scientific technique; and the changes in social life and traditional institutions that the new forms of organization will produce.

The argument is double-edged. Science is the only genuine general knowledge we have, and its technique has already done more to relieve poverty and disease than any other force in history. But science itself supplies no ends: it is essentially power-thought, and power is indifferent to the use made of it. A scientific civilization will be good only if increase in knowledge is accompanied by increase in wisdom, which Russell defines as "a right conception of the ends of life." The book's most famous move is to extrapolate what a society would look like if scientific technique ruled unchecked — an oligarchic world State built by "manipulative" idealists, with scientific government, planned breeding, and engineered docility — and then to ask whether such a society is compatible with the values that make life worth living.

Can a civilization founded on science survive, and if it can, will it be a civilization in which human beings can still find delight, love, and joy — or only power?

Part I — Scientific Knowledge

Chapter 1 — Examples of Scientific Method

Central question

What does scientific method look like in the hands of its four greatest practitioners, and why did it take so long to come into the world?

Main argument

The essence of the method. Scientific method "consists in observing such facts as will enable the observer to discover general laws governing facts of the kind in question." The first man who said "fire burns" was employing it, if he allowed himself to be burnt several times; what technique adds is a careful choice of significant facts and ways of arriving at laws other than by mere generalization. "Unsupported bodies in air fall" is a generalization refuted by balloons and butterflies; the theory of falling bodies explains why certain exceptional bodies do not fall. Russell notes that the scientific attitude is "in some degree unnatural to man": most opinions are wish-fulfilments, and even eminent men of science explode into dogmatism on party politics and theology. A community impregnated with science is one in which the experts arrive at their opinions scientifically — the ordinary citizen necessarily relies on authority, which is why expert judgment warps under strong passion (the sadism of medical men on childbirth anaesthetics; the tergiversations of craniologists on women's brains).

Galileo. Scientific method in its completeness arrives with Galileo (1564–1642) and, to a lesser degree, Kepler. The Greeks were deductive rather than inductive — geometry was their great achievement, and manual experiment seemed vulgar — though Aristarchus of Samos had already held the heliocentric view (which gave Copernicus courage to revive it), Eratosthenes measured the earth at 250,000 stadia, and Archimedes' On Floating Bodies was the most nearly scientific of Greek works. The Arabs were more experimental but sought detached facts rather than general principles. Russell recounts Galileo's provocations: the Leaning Tower of Pisa demonstration of the law of falling bodies against the Aristotelian professors, who "maintained that their eyes must have deceived them"; the refusal of the professors to look through his telescope at Jupiter's moons; the dredging machine of Giovanni dei Medici. The trial of 1632 — the Dialogue with the Pope's words placed in the mouth of Simplicius, the sentence of the Inquisition, the abjuration — is reproduced at length, and Russell adds that the famous "Eppur si muove" is a myth. The Galileo–Inquisition conflict is "a conflict between the spirit of induction and the spirit of deduction": deduction from a sacred Book, whether the text be Aristotle's or the Scriptures, is the method of jurists, Christians, Mohammedans, and Communists. Galileo "is, therefore, the father of modern times"; Russell insists against sociologists that intelligence matters — if a hundred seventeenth-century men had been killed in infancy, the modern world would not exist.

Newton. Born in the year Galileo died, Newton received universal applause where Galileo suffered persecution. The Principia "proceeds in the grand Greek manner," yet its spirit differs: the law of gravitation is "not supposed to be self-evident, but is arrived at inductively from Kepler's laws." From observation of particular facts, induction arrives at a general law; from the law, deduction infers further particular facts — "this is still the ideal of physics." The law reigned for over two hundred years, isolated and mysterious, until Einstein's general theory of relativity fitted gravitation into geometry, showing that "no permanent achievement" is possible in science: "no one doubts that the correction will, in its turn, have to be corrected."

Darwin. Darwin illustrates the non-mathematical sciences. Russell's point is not that Darwin was right in detail — natural selection is "less in favour amongst biologists than it used to be," heredity was transformed by Mendel, and he had no theory of the origin of variations — but that his work substituted "general laws based on evidence for fairy-tales embodying a fantasy of wish-fulfilment": the immutability of species, the ideal cat laid up in Heaven. The horse once had toes; early birds were scarcely distinguishable from reptiles. The theological problem of the soul in monkeys (and, step by step, in protozoa) is treated as a self-inflicted difficulty. "The objective evidence... may be of the slightest, but our wishes produce an almost irresistible tendency to believe. Scientific method sweeps aside our wishes."

Pavlov. Each advance of science meets a resistance analogous to Galileo's, and the most obstinate defence is of the soul. Russell gives Pavlov the place of honour as the man who made psychology scientific: the bulk of his work "consisted merely of observing when dogs' mouths water, and how much" — the model of the significant fact that is intrinsically trivial. The unconditioned reflex (food in the mouth causes salivation) is modified by experience into the conditioned reflex (a signal that habitually precedes food produces the same response): "this law... is the basis of learning... of habit, and of practically everything in behaviour that is due to experience." Russell retells the circle-versus-ellipse experiment in which a dog, driven past its power of discrimination, breaks down into neurosis — "I am afraid a similar procedure is habitual in schools, and accounts for the apparent stupidity of many of the scholars." Pavlov regards sleep as general inhibition, accepts the four Hippocratic temperaments, is a behaviourist about animals though he concedes introspective psychology to man, and in metaphysics holds that "the mind, the soul, and matter" are all one. Russell praises his refusal of statuesque systematization: modern science advances too fast for Principias. Pavlov's achievement: "that of subjecting to scientific law what has hitherto been called voluntary behaviour."

Key ideas

• Scientific method = observation of significant facts plus inference to general laws; both stages are essential and both admit of almost indefinite refinement.
• The Greek genius was deductive; science as experiment was a modern, and socially difficult, invention.
• Newton's work is the ideal of scientific method: induction up to a law, deduction down to particulars — with the caveat that even this law was superseded by Einstein.
• Darwin's lasting contribution is methodological: replacing wish-fulfilling fairy-tales with evidence-based general laws, whatever the fate of natural selection.
• Pavlov's conditioned reflex brings voluntary behaviour under law, making psychology continuous with physiology.
• Facts that are intellectually illuminating are often intrinsically trivial — the saliva of dogs, not the high dramas of introspection.
• The history of science is a history of resistance, each retreat of the traditionalists ("the friends of ignorance") marking the advance of method.

Key takeaway

Scientific method enters the world fully formed with Galileo and consists throughout in letting significant facts, not wishes or authorities, decide general laws — a discipline that remains unnatural to man and is still confined to a minority of his opinions.

Chapter 2 — Characteristics of Scientific Method

Central question

What, precisely, is the structure of scientific method, and how far has any science realized it?

Main argument

The three stages. To arrive at a scientific law: first observe the significant facts; second arrive at a hypothesis which, if true, would account for them; third deduce consequences that can be tested by observation. If the consequences are verified, the hypothesis is provisionally accepted. No facts and no hypotheses are isolated; they exist within the general body of knowledge, and "a fact, in science, is not a mere fact, but an instance." Science's ultimate ideal is a hierarchy of propositions: particular facts at the base, the most general law at the top, connected by induction going up and deduction coming down. Only physics has come near this ideal — and Russell shows how Galileo's law of falling bodies and Kepler's three laws were swallowed by Newton's law of gravitation, which was in turn swallowed by Einstein's, which "placed the law of gravitation in the most unexpected company": it became a law of geometry, kin to Pythagoras' theorem, which "every schoolboy learns the proof of... but only those who read Einstein learn the disproof" (Lobachevsky, 1829, had shown geometry is empirical).

The significant fact and the experiment. The significant fact illustrates one law in isolation: in a vacuum a feather and a lump of lead fall equally fast; the resistance of the air is superadded. Experiment artificially simplifies circumstances so that a single law becomes observable. The accidental discovery of radioactivity — Becquerel's unexposed plates photographing uranium in a dark cupboard — is offered as another illustration of the significant fact.

Approximation. "All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation." Every careful measurement is given with its probable error. Russell draws the moral: "subjective certainty is inversely proportional to objective certainty" — theologians and politicians, unlike physicists, never state the probable error of their opinions. A change in science (Newton to Einstein) does not overthrow what was done; it replaces it with something slightly more accurate, as a rough measurement of a man's height as "about 6 feet" survives a more exact one. The idea of successive approximations is the scientific answer to the taunt that science keeps changing.

Quantity and induction. Measurement strengthens induction — a prediction to five significant figures that is verified can hardly be an accident (Bohr's atom was a necessary stage but is "already virtually abandoned," because men cannot frame sufficiently abstract hypotheses and imagination intrudes on logic). But a law may be scientific without being quantitative: Pavlov's laws cannot be given quantitative precision. The logical core of induction is doubtful; "induction by simple enumeration" (all cats have tails, until the Manx cat) is a very dangerous form of argument. Good induction accounts for facts that would be antecedently improbable — a man whose dice always throw double sixes is probably not lucky. The deeper difficulty is postponed to the next chapter.

Analysis. Scientific method assumes any concrete occurrence is the resultant of a number of causes that can be isolated and recombined — the moon's orbit is calculable from the separate attractions of earth and sun. This principle is practically indispensable and approximately true, though modern physics (Dirac's quantum mechanics) shows it is not a general property of the universe.

Key ideas

• The method has three stages: significant observation, hypothesis, deduction of testable consequences.
• Science is a hierarchy of laws; induction ascends, deduction descends; physics alone approximates the ideal.
• The significant fact is one that illustrates a law in isolation; experiment exists to manufacture such circumstances.
• Approximation and probable error are of the essence: certainty of statement varies inversely with grounds for it.
• Quantitative precision is an advantage where possible but not a condition of being scientific.
• Induction rests on antecedent improbability of the facts explained, and on nothing more secure.
• Analysis — isolating and recombining causes — is a working assumption, not a law of nature.

Key takeaway

Scientific method is a disciplined hierarchy from fact to law and back, governed by approximation and significant observation; its power lies in explaining antecedently improbable facts, and its standing in the admission of probable error.

Chapter 3 — Limitations of Scientific Method

Central question

What can scientific method not do, and where does its apparent knowledge turn out to rest on faith?

Main argument

Knowledge of particulars is presupposed, not scientific. All knowledge is either knowledge of particular facts (the "brute facts" of history and geography — Napoleon, Cape Horn, the passport's entries) or scientific knowledge. Even these brute facts involve unacknowledged inference and authority: few teachers of history could show why Napoleon is not a myth; Todhunter the mathematician objected that Cambridge students need not see experiments, since the results could be vouched for by clergymen of the highest character. The sun itself is an inference — we know only its effects on retina and brain, and the same effect could be produced by a hanging globe of molten metal. "It is characteristic of the advance of science that less and less is found to be datum, and more and more is found to be inference." The limitations fall under three heads.

The doubt as to induction. Every inductive argument reduces to "If this is true, that is true: now that is true, therefore this is true," which is formally fallacious — the argument that because this bread nourishes me, therefore bread is a stone and stones nourishing would be exactly as valid. The laws of statics are unverified for the bridge until the bridge stays up; "no one has hitherto shown any good reason for supposing that this sort of inference is sound." Hume threw doubt upon induction; the philosophers' refutations "passed muster on account of their extreme obscurity." Bergson's metaphysic, which guarantees induction, is pleasant "like cocktails" but has no better claim to be a technique for the pursuit of knowledge. In theory, "induction remains an unsolved problem of logic"; in practice we assume it pragmatically.

Inference to what is not experienced. We never see what we think we see: "seeing Jones" is a succession of coloured patches linked to Jones by a remote, roundabout causal chain — light quanta, sunburn, vitamin D, rods and cones, the optic nerve, an event in the brain. Jones is a convenient hypothesis by which certain sensations are collected into a bundle; "Jones himself, meanwhile, remains wrapped in mystery." The physicist's formulae connect his own sensations; whether hypothetical entities are more than hypothetical "is otiose." We are led to Berkeley's position, that only thoughts exist, and Berkeley saved the universe only by making it God's thoughts, "a wish-fulfilment, not logical thinking." Science started with a large amount of what Santayana calls animal faith — "thought dominated by the principle of the conditioned reflex" — and the physicists have turned traitor: they no longer believe in matter, without supplying any reason to believe in a non-material external world. Whether inference to the unexperienced is ever justified is a question for the logician, and "until an answer is forthcoming... our faith in the external world must be merely animal faith."

The abstractness of physics. Even granting the sun and stars exist, what can be known about them is extraordinarily abstract: the gramophone record and the music share structural properties expressible in abstract terms, though they share nothing obvious to the senses; at best the physical world shares with our sensible world the structure that lets one cause the other. "Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say." The hatred of abstraction mistakes the nature of science: scientific thought "is essentially power-thought," and power is a causal concept — the more irrelevant detail is omitted, the more powerful the thought. The cultivator with concrete knowledge of wheat makes little money; the railway makes more; the stock-exchange manipulator, who knows wheat only as something that goes up or down, makes most and has most power. "The power of using abstractions is the essence of intellect."

Key ideas

• History, geography, and all knowledge of particulars lie outside science; they are presupposed by it and rest ultimately on authority.
• Induction is formally fallacious and remains an unsolved problem of logic; we assume it pragmatically because we cannot help believing it.
• What is experienced is far less than is supposed; the external world is an inference, and inference to the unexperienced has no established justification.
• Science has shrunk the datum and enlarged the inference; physicists no longer believe in matter.
• Physics can know at most the abstract structure of the world — what the gramophone record and the music share.
• Only mathematics can say as little as the physicist means; ordinary language inevitably says too much.
• Science is power-thought: it seeks causal understanding, and abstraction is what gives it power.

Key takeaway

Scientific method is limited by an unproved induction, by inference to an unexperienced world resting on animal faith, and by the extreme abstractness of what physics can genuinely assert — yet these limitations leave its power as a technique untouched.

Chapter 4 — Scientific Metaphysics

Central question

What happens to science as a worldview — a metaphysic — when the scientists themselves lose faith in it?

Main argument

The decay of scientific faith. "Just when the man in the street has begun to believe thoroughly in science, the man in the laboratory has begun to lose his faith." The old philosophy of physics was proud and dictatorial; the new one is "humble and stammering," and its doubts come from the physicists themselves. Eddington's Gifford lectures, The Nature of the Physical World, divide physics into three departments: the classical laws (conservation of energy, gravitation) which, on Eddington's view, boil down to conventions as to measurement — as informative as the law that there are three feet in a yard, and consistent with "the earth goes anyhow it likes"; the statistical laws of large aggregates; and the quantum theory.

Statistics and the second law. The second law of thermodynamics is the supremely important statistical law: the world is continuously growing more disorderly. Eddington's illustrations: shuffled cards never return to their maker's order; an army of monkeys typing might write all the books in the British Museum, but that is more probable than the molecules of air returning to one half of a vessel; ink diffused in water will not recollect itself; "a kettle filled with water put on the fire would freeze instead of boiling" is not impossible, only wildly improbable. Russell's gloss: "this law states... that the universe tends towards democracy, and that when it has achieved that state, it will be incapable of doing anything more." The world is running down; Eddington prefers the drama performed once, ending "in aeons of boredom."

Quantum theory and indeterminacy. In the hands of Heisenberg and Schrödinger, quantum theory is "more disturbing and more revolutionary than the theory of relativity ever was": it throws doubt on the universality of causality — "perhaps atoms have a certain amount of free will" — and the principle of indeterminacy cuts at the root of traditional physics, for "a particle may have position or it may have velocity, but it cannot in any exact sense have both." Eddington uses this nescience to rehabilitate free will and base optimistic conclusions on it. Russell objects: this is the principle "that anything which cannot be proved untrue may be assumed to be true," whose falsehood "is proved by the fortunes of bookmakers." If Eddington is right, physics tells us the universe is running down "and practically nothing else."

The metaphysical creed. If the scientific faith decays, "we must expect the decay of the scientific faith to lead to a recrudescence of pre-scientific superstitions," as astrology followed the decay of Catholic faith. Russell's own metaphysic is short: "I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love." Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, as truly as catalogues and encyclopaedias. The applicability of geometry to the world "has ceased to be a fact about that world, and has become only a tribute to the geometer's cleverness" — Plato and Jeans infer a geometrical God, but the mathematical logician suspects God could not make a world containing many things without exposing it to the geometer. Science as a metaphysic has been undermined by its own success; science as educated common sense "remains triumphant, indeed, more triumphant than ever before." Practical beliefs and metaphysical beliefs must be sharply distinguished: a Mendelian wheat immune to disease, a vitamin discovery, synthetic nitrates — their usefulness is independent of whether the atom is a solar system, a wave of probability, or an infinite rectangle of integers.

Power versus truth. The quasi-religious value of science — the cult of truth, "a hoped-for sun to meet the Heraclitean fire in the soul" — is succumbing to scepticism, and the man of science has become an apologist for the established order: "he approaches the established order apologetically" while the established order showers knighthoods upon him. In the newer sciences, such as psychology, the old ardour persists and the old persecutions continue (Homer Lane, "at once a sage and a saint," deported as an undesirable alien). The age "increasingly substitutes power for the older ideals": "while science as the pursuit of power becomes increasingly triumphant, science as the pursuit of truth is being killed by a scepticism which the skill of the men of science has generated." Scepticism is painful and barren, "but at least it is honest."

Key ideas

• The physicists themselves have destroyed the Newtonian faith; Eddington's own account reduces classical laws to conventions.
• The second law of thermodynamics is only a law of probability: the universe runs down, "tends towards democracy," and will end in uniform boredom.
• Quantum indeterminacy throws doubt on causality but gives no licence for optimism or for free will.
• Russell's metaphysic: the universe is all spots and jumps; order, unity, and continuity are human inventions.
• The mathematical character of physics is a tribute to the mathematician's skill, not a fact about the world.
• The doubts of physics as metaphysic leave the practical uses of science untouched.
• Science as the pursuit of truth is dying of its own scepticism, while science as the pursuit of power thrives.

Key takeaway

As a metaphysic, science has undermined itself into a world of "spots and jumps"; as a technique and common sense it remains triumphant — and in that split, the pursuit of truth gives way to the pursuit of power.

Chapter 5 — Science and Religion

Central question

Do the recent advances of science support religious belief, as eminent physicists and theologians now claim?

Main argument

The claim examined. The public has been led to suppose that physics confirms practically the whole of the Book of Genesis. Russell's answer: the men of science have not said nearly as much as they are thought to have said, and what they said in support of religion was said "not in their cautious, scientific capacity, but rather in their capacity of good citizens, anxious to defend virtue and property" — the first world war and the Russian Revolution made timid men conservative. He then examines four arguments.

Free will from the atom. The older mechanics remain true to a close approximation for large bodies but are not applicable to single atoms, whose behaviour may be partly random; Eddington supposes the mind can decide the brain's atoms to make one or other of their possible transitions, a "trigger action," the volition being uncaused. Russell replies: the Principle of Indeterminacy (Heisenberg, 1927) — the product of the errors in determining position and momentum is constant — "does nothing whatever to show that the course of nature is not determined." As J. E. Turner pointed out, the argument trades on an ambiguity: "every argument that, since some change cannot be 'determined' in the sense of 'ascertained,' it is therefore not 'determined' in the absolutely different sense of 'caused,' is a fallacy of equivocation." Eddington's position is at the mercy of experimental physics, like Descartes' view, which rested on ignorance of the conservation of momentum. "To prove that a given set of phenomena is not subject to laws is essentially and theoretically impossible." Moreover, if nature is capricious, all causal inference fails — we could not know other people, our own past, or God; the person who finds the falsity of causality cheering "usually retains unchallenged all those causal laws which he finds convenient, as, for example, that his food will nourish him and that his bank will honour his cheques."

God as Mathematician. Eddington deduces religion from the fact that atoms do not obey the laws of mathematics; Sir James Jeans (The Mysterious Universe) from the fact that they do — "both these arguments have been accepted with equal enthusiasm by the theologians." Jeans's God is Platonic, "a pure mathematician"; his universe is a four-dimensional soap-bubble blown by a mathematical Deity; his argument reverts to Berkeley — the universe "consists of pure thought, the thought of... a mathematical thinker." Russell's criticism: Jeans confuses pure with applied mathematics. Pure mathematics is about symbols; physics depends throughout on observation. "It seems probable that any world, no matter what, could be brought by a mathematician of sufficient skill within the scope of general laws. If this be so, the mathematical character of modern physics is not a fact about the world, but merely a tribute to the skill of the physicist." (And he notes the oddity of a Deity wanting to give gross external existence to His own thoughts, and why God created a world containing so much muddle-headedness.)

God as Creator. The universe appears to be running down: radio-active elements disintegrate and the second law of thermodynamics says things left to themselves get into a muddle. Tracing the world backwards in time we reach "a state of the world which could not have been preceded by any other" — a winding-up. Russell admits: "there is far more to be said for the view that the universe had a beginning in time at some not infinitely remote period, than there is for any of the other theological conclusions." But a beginning does not imply a Creator: "Creation out of nothing is an occurrence which has not been observed. There is, therefore, no better reason to suppose that the world was caused by a Creator than to suppose that it was uncaused." Nor is comfort available: a bottle of nasty wine is no better for being made in a laboratory; a repeated unpleasant process is not less unpleasant. The intellectual dilemma: if the Creator is amenable to the laws of physics, He too must have been created; if not, no physical causal law can lead to Him. The arguments are not new — Eddington's is Descartes's, Jeans's is Plato-and-Berkeley, the beginning-in-time argument is Kant's, who supplied an equally powerful argument against it.

Evolutionary theology. The old-fashioned materialism of "hard little lumps" was never believed by philosophers after Democritus; "materialism is dead, but... it is more alive than it ever was," because the important question is not the stuff of the world but whether the course of nature is determined by the laws of physics — and "the progress of biology, physiology, and psychology has made it more probable than it ever was before that all natural phenomena are governed by the laws of physics." The purposive evolutionists (Lloyd Morgan's emergent evolution, in which a suitable arrangement of objects has new properties not deducible from the objects singly — the whole school resting on no evidence at all) are refuted by the biology of the day: digestion in chickens is a conditioned reflex, babies' sucking is an unconditioned reflex, Loeb fertilized an ovum without a spermatozoon, embryologists graft eyes of salamander tadpoles and manufacture five-legged newts. Purpose is not needed: "I am quite unable to see why an intelligent Creator should have the purposes which we must attribute to Him if He has really designed all that happens in the world of organic life." If evolution embodies a Divine Plan, then meningitis in children and cancer are planned; "if this is the Divine sense of justice it differs from mine, and I think mine superior... we shall have to reckon Nero a saint in comparison with the Author of that Plan." The apologetic attitude is, in Hogben's words, rooted in "the social temper of the period" after a world war; "compromise to traditional belief became the hall-mark of good citizenship." Russell concludes: the unyielding rationalist "has a better faith and a more unbending optimism than any of the timid seekers after the childish comforts of a less adult age," for "science is in its essence nothing but the systematic pursuit of knowledge, and knowledge, whatever ill-uses bad men may make of it, is in its essence good."

Key ideas

• The scientists' religious pronouncements are made as good citizens, not as scientists; the theologians have extended them sensationally.
• The Principle of Indeterminacy concerns measurement, not causation; atom-caprice is ignorance, not knowledge.
• Jeans's mathematical God confuses pure and applied mathematics; any world could be brought within general laws by a skilful mathematician.
• The world's beginning in time is the one scientific argument with real force, but it licenses no inference to a Creator.
• "Materialism" in the crude sense is dead; the question of physical determinism is more alive than ever.
• Mechanism explains digestion, reproduction, heredity, and embryology without a vital principle or a plan.
• The book's rationalism is defended as the more optimistic and more honest faith.

Key takeaway

None of the current scientific apologies for religion survives examination — the physicists contradict each other and the biologists — and the only conclusion science supports is that the course of nature is governed by physical laws, which is exactly the conclusion the apologists hoped to escape.

Part II — Scientific Technique

Chapter 6 — Beginnings of Scientific Technique

Central question

Where does scientific technique begin, and what distinguishes it from the traditional arts and crafts of all earlier ages?

Main argument

The measure of technique. No sharp line separates scientific technique from traditional crafts. Its essential characteristic is "the utilization of natural forces in ways not evident to the totally uninstructed." Russell measures the gain by the objects of desire — food, offspring, clothing, housing, amusement, glory: King Cyrus had grander clothes and more numerous wives than a modern American billionaire, but not one hundredth as many people knew of Cyrus as know of a Hollywood star; the number of people who now own cars exceeds the number who had enough to eat one hundred and fifty years ago; typhus and plague are ended in scientific nations; the population of England rose from about 5 million in 1700 to about 40 million, and that of European descent to about 725 millions.

The pre-scientific accumulation. The earliest technique is prehistoric: fire, agriculture, domestication of animals (the horse burst upon Western Asia in Sumerian days), writing, the working of metals, roads built for military reasons, gunpowder, the mariner's compass, printing. The protests against machinery are nothing new: Lao-Tze, six centuries before Christ, was "just as eloquent as Ruskin" against roads, bridges, and boats; Rousseau's "return to nature" means, in practice, "return to those conditions to which the writer in question was accustomed in his youth" — taken seriously it would starve some 90 per cent of the population of civilized countries.

The recent acceleration. Science as knowledge advanced through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but did not affect the technique of production until near the end of the eighteenth: "there was less change in methods of work from Ancient Egypt to 1750 than there has been from 1750 to the present day." The slowness of earlier advances let them fit into traditional life; the rapid change of modern times has been aesthetically unfortunate (the poet can write a letter but not a telephone call), though this is not the fault of science but of the changing environment.

Experiment, not tradition. Scientific method is closely connected with the social virtue of impartiality — Piaget argues reasoning develops as "a method of arriving at a social truth upon which all men can agree" — but Russell adds the aspect Piaget ignores: science gives power over the environment, and "it is success in this practical test of power over the environment, or adaptation to it, which has given science its prestige." The Chinese Emperors refrained from persecuting the Jesuits because the Jesuits were right about eclipses when the Chinese astronomers were wrong. The distinction is one of degree: steam in a kettle is on the borderline (James Watt); electricity is definitely scientific; the water-mill is pre-scientific, the turbine is not; human manure believed magical is pre-scientific, natural manures regulated by organic chemistry are scientific, artificial nitrates found by skilful chemists are "definitely and unambiguously scientific." "The most essential characteristic of scientific technique is that it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition."

Key ideas

• Scientific technique = the utilization of natural forces in ways not evident to the uninstructed.
• It multiplies the satisfaction of ordinary desires — health, food, numbers, glory — beyond anything in earlier history.
• Every "return to nature" is a return to the conditions the writer was accustomed to in his youth.
• Technique lagged two centuries behind scientific knowledge, then produced more change than the preceding five millennia.
• The prestige of science rests on its practical power — even the Chinese Emperors spared the Jesuits because they forecast eclipses correctly.
• The line between scientific and traditional technique is a matter of degree; the test is whether the process is evident to untrained observation.

Key takeaway

Scientific technique differs from all earlier craft in proceeding from experiment rather than tradition, and its hallmark is the utilization of forces — like electricity and nitrates — that only deliberate research could reveal.

Chapter 7 — Technique in Inanimate Nature

Central question

What has science done to our inanimate environment, and what has the resulting sense of power done to the modern mind?

Main argument

Machines and electricity. Most machines in the narrow sense involve little science — spinning and weaving merely substitute machinery for fingers; railways and early steam navigation utilized forces "by no means recondite." Electricity is different: "a practical electrician has to develop a new type of common sense, of which the man ignorant of electricity is totally devoid." Electricity, "like a djinn in the Arabian Nights, is a patient servant to anyone who knows the right formula." The history of wireless shows the pattern of applied science: Faraday investigated experimentally, Clerk-Maxwell showed by purely theoretical construction that light consists of electromagnetic waves, Hertz first manufactured them, Marconi made them commercially profitable — and "Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz... never for a moment considered the possibility of any practical application." Almost all great advances have sprung originally from disinterested motives: "a race of men without a disinterested love of knowledge would never have achieved our present scientific technique." Even the problem of flying was solved not by imitating birds but as a by-product of the petrol engine developed for motor-cars.

Raw materials. Industry consumes at an increasing rate substances stored through geological time: oil is limited and the wars for its possession may destroy the civilization that needs it; synthetic rubber will replace the rubber-tree as artificial silk replaces natural silk; the world's forests are being consumed by newspapers. "Industrial technique can never become static and traditional as agricultural technique did in former times"; it must perpetually find new processes and new sources of power. The future may bring the control of climate — a twenty-mile breakwater on the Eastern coast of Canada might transform the climate of New England; irrigation has made Southern California fertile; perhaps the Sahara and the Gobi will yield.

The new mentality. "Modern technique has given man a sense of power which is rapidly altering his whole mentality." The physical environment is no longer accepted but treated as raw material: "It may be that God made the world, but that is no reason why we should not make it over." To the typical modern mind "nothing is interesting on account of what it is, but only on account of what it may be made to become... everything is an instrument," and the instrument is for the making of instruments, "and so on ad infinitum." In psychological terms, "the love of power has thrust aside all the other impulses that make the complete human life": love, parenthood, pleasure, beauty are of less account to the scientific industrialist than manipulation and exploitation. The leaders of big business can "settle who shall starve and who shall become rich, divert the course of rivers, and decree the fall of governments." "All history shows that great power is intoxicating... when this knowledge dawns upon them a new era in human tyranny is to be expected."

Key ideas

• Machinery in the narrow sense is largely unscientific; electricity requires a new kind of common sense that only science provides.
• Pure research precedes application: Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz never foresaw wireless.
• Practical problems (flying) are often solved as by-products of solutions to other problems (the petrol engine).
• Industrial technique consumes terrestrial capital and must be perpetually revolutionary; substitutes and new powers are always needed.
• The physical environment has become raw material; the world is to be made over.
• The love of power thrusts aside love, parenthood, pleasure, and beauty in the typical scientific industrialist.

Key takeaway

Technique in inanimate nature has given man a sense of power that remakes his mentality — everything becomes an instrument, and the love of power displaces every other impulse, pointing toward a new era in human tyranny.

Chapter 8 — Technique in Biology

Central question

What can science do with plants, animals, and food, and where is that power leading?

Main argument

The food supply. The first great changes in food were not agricultural science but the railways and steamships that opened the American Middle West, Canada, the Argentine, and India, removing the menace of famine that hung over all mediaeval countries. Now biology is transforming production itself. The nitrogen cycle is Russell's model case: Lawes and Gilbert's sixty years of experiments at Rothamsted showed most plants cannot fix nitrogen; in 1886 Hellriegel and Wilfarth found the nodules of leguminous plants, with their bacteria, are the essential agents. Until Chilean nitrates, organic waste was the only source; now nitrates are manufactured from the air — an inexhaustible source — and one ton of nitrogen in fertilizers produces enough food for thirty-four people for a year: "£3 spent in producing nitrogen fertilizers will add as much to the world's supply of food as £25 spent in bringing new land under cultivation."

Pest control. Pests are mostly insects and fungi, and the economic stakes are enormous: on average 10 per cent of the world's agricultural produce is destroyed by insects yearly; in 1921 Indian losses to crop and forest pests reached £136,000,000 with a death-roll from insect-borne diseases of about 1,600,000; the maize-stalk borer cost South Africa £2,750,000 in one year. Physico-chemical methods (fumigation) are less interesting than biological methods — introducing the parasites that keep a pest down in its native region but were left behind when transport carried the pest abroad: "big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em." The parasitic wasp Encarsia formosa has reduced the greenhouse white-fly in Hertfordshire to a small fraction of its former population. Fungi are equally harmful: the Imperial Mycological Institute at Kew studies them; Canadian aeroplanes catch the spores of wheat rust to learn how it spreads (black rust destroyed £3,000,000 of wheat in 1916 in the three Prairie Provinces); potato blight caused the Irish famine, "and thence led England to adopt free trade and Boston to ban modern literature." Even the sitka spruce of the aeroplane industry fell victim to an invisible fungus, tracked from British Columbia through the Panama Canal to Prince's Risborough.

Scientific breeding and the end of animals. Artificial selection is ancient but unscientific; Mendelian principles promise deliberate breeding of new varieties. And the role of animals is ending: "animals have been good friends to man throughout his adolescence... but now that man is becoming adult, the part played by animals in relation to man is ending, and their future will be mainly confined to Zoos." Artificial silk threatens the silkworm, synthetic products will replace wool and leather, synthetic beefsteaks will be served except at the tables of millionaires, and even the cod may lose its job once vitamin D is generated by artificial sunlight.

The manufactured future. Vegetable products too will lose their economic value; artificial food is "purely chemical, and there is no reason to regard it as insoluble" — "the fields will fall out of cultivation, and agricultural labourers will be replaced by chemical experts." And then the vista widens: man "will tend more and more to view himself also as a manufactured product... Men will acquire power to alter themselves, and will inevitably use this power. What they will make of the species I do not venture to predict."

Key ideas

• Transport ended famine; chemistry and biology are now ending scarcity of food itself.
• Nitrogen fixation is the model case: bacteria, leguminous nodules, and finally air itself as the inexhaustible source of fertilizer.
• Insect and fungus pests destroy a tenth of the world's produce; biological control by parasites is the most interesting remedy.
• Mendelian breeding will replace haphazard artificial selection.
• Animals are becoming superfluous — friends of man's adolescence, soon confined to Zoos.
• Synthetic food, fibre, and rubber will end the economic value of fields and forests.
• Once man views himself as a manufactured product, he will inevitably use his power to alter the species.

Key takeaway

Biology is giving man the power to manufacture food and life itself — ending famine, dispensing with animals, and pointing toward the deliberate remaking of the human species, with consequences Russell declines to predict.

Chapter 9 — Technique in Physiology

Central question

What can science do with the human body, and where will the physiological power to remake it stop?

Main argument

The living mechanism. A living body considered as a physico-chemical mechanism has remarkable properties: the heart works day and night for seventy years with repairs effected while it is working; "an ordinary healthy man is much less often ill than the best of motor-cars." Three properties stand out: nourishment (the transformation of food into the body), growth (cell division and increasing complexity), and predetermination — the power of a body to restore its previous structure after disturbance, which "embraces reproduction and heredity." There must be differences between human and simian spermatozoa corresponding to the differences between men and monkeys; "a pre-existing complexity is becoming visible" in the growth of the foetus.

Medicine and the balance of ages. Technique in physiology has chiefly meant medicine: the death-rate of England and Wales fell from 22.9 per thousand in 1870 to 13.4 in 1929, while the birth-rate fell from 35.3 to 16.3. The consequences: civilization is ceasing to reproduce itself, and there are fewer young and more old people — which may be good or bad depending on whether one thinks the old wiser or simply out of touch with new forces (and "this may be counteracted by a prolongation of physiological youth").

Reproduction becomes deliberate. In the last fifty years reproduction among white races "has become increasingly deliberate instead of accidental." Prevention of impregnation is the main change; artificial impregnation is possible but little used. If sex could be determined at will, the first effect would be an excess of male births, then a scarcity value on women, then polyandry, then a preponderance of female births, then State bonuses for the deficient sex — "bewildering effects upon emotions and morals."

Embryology and eugenics. The most important application in the long run will be to embryology: medicine has aimed only at health, the perfect functioning of a naturally produced body. Eugenics is the only proposed method of improving the stock, but heredity is not yet subject to human control — acquired characters are not inherited unless they affect the chromosomes, though X-rays on fruit-fly larvae show changes that may be inherited. "Sooner or later, however, probably in Russia, such experiments will be made" on the human embryo. "Would this be too high a price to pay for the discovery of a method by which, within one generation, the whole human race could be rendered intelligent? Perhaps by a suitable choice of chemicals... it may become possible to turn a child into a mathematician, a poet, a biologist, or even a politician." The tendency of scientific technique is that everything is regarded "not as a brute datum, but raw material for the carrying out of some human purpose": "the child, and even the embryo, will come to be viewed more and more in this way." "In this, as in all other forms of scientific power, there are possibilities of good and possibilities of evil. Science alone will not decide which is to prevail."

Key ideas

• The body is a physico-chemical mechanism whose nourishment, growth, and predetermination science is progressively understanding.
• Medicine has halved the death-rate while contraception has halved the birth-rate; the balance of ages is shifting.
• Reproduction has become deliberate — and sex determination would produce bewildering oscillations in the relations of men and women.
• Embryology, not medicine, will be the decisive technique: the embryo itself will become raw material.
• Eugenics will be superseded by direct action on the chromosomes, with X-rays as the first hint.
• The price of such knowledge may include failed experiments "leading to the birth of idiots or monstrosities."
• Science gives the power over the body without deciding whether good or evil will prevail.

Key takeaway

Physiology is turning the human body from a datum into raw material — the embryo included — and the power to remake it, for good or evil, will not be decided by science alone.

Chapter 10 — Technique in Psychology

Central question

How can mental processes be brought under scientific control, and what are the rival techniques for doing so?

Main argument

The failure of the old psychology. Psychology was a branch of philosophy — knowing, willing, and feeling analysed verbally; the textbooks began with an account of the brain "but having given that account, it made no further allusion to it." Wundt's laboratory psychology measured time intervals: "you showed a man a picture of a dog, and said: 'What's that?'" — "strange to say, in spite of the apparatus of measurement, it turned out that there was nothing to do with this valuable information except to forget it." The psychologists were wrong in thinking time intervals the appropriate thing to measure: "this position, as it turned out, is occupied by the saliva of dogs."

The Jesuits as psychologists. The one exception to the rule that psychology never aimed at practical control was the Society of Jesus: "much that the rest of the world has only recently understood was apprehended by Ignatius Loyola." The two tendencies of modern psychology were both exemplified in Jesuit practice — behaviourism for their own training, psycho-analysis for their power over penitents. But Jesuit thinking was power-thinking "in a very crude and direct sense," indifferent to mechanism, an art "analogous to that of the horse-breaker or the lion-tamer," not true science. Progress came from the margins: educational progress from teaching the feeble-minded (who were not to be flogged into intelligence), psychological progress from the insane, which revealed that belief in waking life is caused "in the main" as in dreams and madness: "reason is a cause of disbelief rather than of belief. Animal faith supplies what is positive, and reason only what is negative. Science, speaking broadly, is a tree growing from the soil of animal faith, but clipped by the shears of reason."

The technique of Freud. Psycho-analysis is the discovery of the unconscious desires which inspire belief. Russell's free rendering: fundamental desires, usually unconscious, mould our mental life; where obstacles arise, the means adopted are apt to "operate only in the realm of phantasy and not in that of reality." "Phantasy" is what the patient believes, "reality" what the analyst believes; delusions are opinions that fail to make the necessary social adjustments — the man who thought he was Julius Caesar was mad because one man's Caesar excludes another's, while one man's immortality does not (Russell tells the story of his own visit from the deluded man). Freud himself, when he propounded the pervasiveness of sex, was regarded "with the kind of horror that is inspired by a dangerous lunatic" — if social adjustment were the test of sanity, he was insane until his theories became a source of income, "which is obviously absurd." What survives is that beliefs inspired by purely personal desires are seldom true: the man who gets rich on the Stock Exchange must have impersonal beliefs about the markets. Therapy aims "at substituting impersonal for personal desires as sources of belief"; its most important applications are to education.

The technique of Pavlov, and a synthesis. Behaviourism, based on Pavlov and popularized by Watson, starts from reflexes and conditioning. Russell is persuaded "that there is truth in both": the reflex corresponds roughly to Freud's fundamental desires, conditioning to the search for different outlets. As a technique for acquiring power, behaviourism is superior: it trains animals and drills soldiers, uses the force of habit, and can cause and cure neurasthenia — the child beaten every time it sneezes would build a phantasy world around sneezing. The educator should "behave as a psycho-analyst when he is concerned with matters touching powerful instincts, but as a behaviourist in matters which a child views as emotionally unimportant": affection for parents in the psycho-analytic manner, brushing teeth in the behaviourist manner.

Physiological methods. Beyond mental means and conditioned reflexes lie the methods of the ductless glands and drugs: the curing of cretinism by iodine (in Switzerland all salt is iodized by law), Cannon's work on the glands and the emotions, alcohol and opium — "there is no a priori reason why drugs should not be discovered which have a wholly beneficial effect" — and pre-natal treatment (one eminent philosopher attributes his superiority to an accident on the Simplon before his birth). Education used to begin at eight with the Latin declensions; "now, under the influence of psycho-analysis, it begins at birth," and the important part may become pre-natal, as it already is for fishes and newts. The conclusion: "science has given us, in succession, power over inanimate nature, power over plants and animals, and finally power over human beings. Each power involves its own kind of dangers, and perhaps the dangers involved in power over human beings are the greatest."

Key ideas

• Old psychology was verbal and useless; its measurement imitated physics and measured the wrong things.
• The Jesuits practised a crude power-psychology, anticipating both behaviourism and psycho-analysis.
• Belief is caused like dreams: animal faith supplies the positive, reason only the negative.
• Psycho-analysis substitutes impersonal for personal desires as causes of belief; it is a therapy and a theory of belief.
• Behaviourism and psycho-analysis are complementary: reflexes stand to desires as conditioning stands to the search for outlets.
• Physiology offers the most powerful means — iodine, glands, drugs, pre-natal treatment.
• Science now has power over human beings, and the dangers of that power are the greatest of all.

Key takeaway

Psychology has become a technique for moulding minds — through analysis, conditioning, or drugs — and the newest and greatest power science confers is power over human beings themselves.

Chapter 11 — Technique in Society

Central question

What happens when scientific technique is applied to society — to opinion, education, health, and organization?

Main argument

The scientific tradition in social thought, and its corruption. Malthus's theory of population, and the economics of Adam Smith and Ricardo, are genuinely scientific. But from Malthus came Darwin, and from Darwin came Darwinism in politics, "which has turned out to be far from scientific": the word "fittest" seems to carry ethical implications, so "the nation, race, and class to which a writer belongs must necessarily be the fittest" — hence the Yellow Peril, Australia for the Australians, the superiority of the Nordic race, and the professional classes' discovery that their sons deserve better education at public expense. "There is merely a borrowing of some of the language of science for the purpose of making prejudice seem respectable."

Advertising as experimental psychology. The most important set of social experiments is the advertisers'. "No test of belief is so searching as the financial one" — the advertiser backs his belief with money. Two consequences follow. First: "in the great majority of mankind any proposition will win acceptance if it is reiterated in such a way as to remain in the memory." Second, their effects are mass effects, data for mass psychology. Russell proposes the experiment: excellent soap A advertised by its chemical composition and testimonials from eminent chemists; abominable soap B advertised as the best, with portraits of Hollywood beauties — "if man is a rational animal, more of A will be sold than of B. Does anyone, in fact, believe that this would be the result?" Politicians understand advertisement; the Churches are beginning to; the Soviet Government and the Communist religion "are those which hitherto have best understood the use of advertisement."

Education as propaganda. Education has two very different purposes: developing the individual and producing convenient citizens. Up to a point they coincide; beyond it they conflict — especially as to credulity. "To those who control publicity, credulity is an advantage, while to the individual a power of critical judgment is likely to be beneficial; consequently the State does not aim at producing a scientific habit of mind, except in a small minority of experts, who are well paid, and therefore, as a rule, supporters of the status quo." Children are taught to believe what they are told; "in this way a conditioned reflex is established, leading to a belief in anything said authoritatively by elderly persons of importance." Loyalty to the State is beneficent against internal anarchy but bad "in so far as it is directed to the perpetuation of international anarchy": no one was shocked when the Northern Irish wished to fight the British Government in the first half of 1914, everyone was shocked when the Southern Irish wished not to fight the Germans in the second half.

The three engines of uniformity. Modern inventions promote uniformity of opinion: the Press (circulation economics make big newspapers defeat small ones — in England, "if Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook desire anything to be known, it will be known"), the radio (a Government monopoly in England — during the General Strike of 1926 the villagers in Russell's remote village heard "It is the Home Secretary who has come to make a statement"), and, most important, the cinema — "the producers of Hollywood are the high-priests of a new religion," teaching that sin is punished and virtue rewarded with wealth, "therefore the cinema plays a useful part in safeguarding the rich from the envy of the poor." Since the pleasures of the poor require vast capital or Governments, defects in the status quo become known only to a small minority; "the Russians, when deprived of vodka by war-time prohibition, made the Russian revolution" — what would Western Europeans do if deprived of their nightly drug from Hollywood?

The better side, and the demand for organization. Public health has improved beyond any doubt: the death-rate fell from 22.9 to 13.4 per thousand and the infant death-rate from 160 to 74 between 1870 and 1929; typhus is unknown, smallpox very rare, tuberculosis usually curable — "these three facts alone represent a contribution to human welfare which outweighs any harm that science may have hitherto done in the way of increasing the horrors of war." The introduction of technique into social affairs is incomplete and haphazard: banking and credit are only beginning to be scientific, and "the barbaric practice of depending upon actual gold is still a cause of much misery"; economic forces demand world-wide organization, "but the forces of nationalism present obstacles." The social effect of scientific technique is, in practically all directions, "to demand an increase both in the size and intensity of organization" — the modern man has ceased to be a separate unit in his most important activities. "In a great many respects national boundaries have become a technical absurdity," yet propaganda strengthens the very nationalism that blocks the organization technique requires.

Key ideas

• Malthus, Smith, and Ricardo were scientific; "social Darwinism" is a borrowing of scientific language to make prejudice respectable.
• Advertising is the great experimental science of belief: repetition wins acceptance, and mass effects are measurable.
• Education serves two masters, the individual and the State; the State prefers credulity to critical judgment.
• The Press, the radio, and the cinema are engines of uniformity — Hollywood is a new religion.
• Public health is science's unanswerable credit: it outweighs, so far, the horrors added to war.
• Technique demands larger and more intense organization; nationalism is the irrational obstacle.
• The Soviet Government is the first state to understand the technique of propaganda fully.

Key takeaway

Applied to society, scientific technique both relieves suffering as nothing else has done and creates the instruments — advertisement, education, Press, radio, cinema — by which opinion is made uniform and nationalism blocks the world-wide organization that technique requires.

Part III — The Scientific Society

Chapter 12 — Artificially Created Societies

Central question

Can societies themselves be deliberately manufactured, and what would a completely artificial society look like?

Main argument

The new thing. The scientific society is "in the main, a thing of the future," though adumbrated in various States today. Its distinguishing mark: it is not a natural growth but "created deliberately with a certain structure in order to fulfill certain purposes." The lawgivers of the past — Zoroaster, Lycurgus, Moses — must have codified pre-existing customs; Mahomet's Arabs changed their habits hardly more than Americans accepted the Volstead Act; the American and French Revolutions created political characteristics only. But technique has so increased the power of governments that "it is becoming possible to create societies as artificial as the steam engine." Such artificial societies will have unintended characteristics — "the unintended characteristics may easily prove more important than those that were foreseen" — but the creation will continue: "the pleasure in planned construction is one of the most powerful motives in men who combine intelligence with energy," and the desire to create "is a form of the love of power."

Three experiments. The century offers three Powers illustrating the possibility: Japan, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany. Japan's Meiji revolution of 1867 was "one of the most remarkable political achievements in all history": to preserve national independence against the West, the reformers imposed education, science, and industrialism by governmental pressure, enlisting the divine person of the Mikado and a reconstructed Shinto religion (called by competent students a new religion) on the side of modern technique — "enlightened technique with unenlightened theology." Science is sceptical as an intellectual force but anti-sceptical as a technical force, and governments are friendly to it "so long as it can be kept from dangerous and subversive speculations"; the scientists, "with some exceptions," are citizens first and servants of truth second. Japan and Nazi Germany were both brought to an end by defeat in war, each showing the nervous strain of sudden change and needing foreign conquest to keep wage-earners acquiescent — "neither system, therefore, had the stability which a legislator would desire."

The Soviet experiment. The Soviet Government's attempt is more ambitious than Japan's: State control of the major factors of production and distribution; education designed to support the official experiment; State religion substituted for traditional beliefs; literature and the Press controlled; the family weakened as a competing loyalty; the whole constructive energy bent to an economic balance. "In every other society of the world there is enormously less central direction." Whether it succeeds or fails, "it will be followed by others which will share its most interesting characteristic, namely, the unitary direction of a whole nation's activities," which was impossible before the technique of propaganda — universal education, newspapers, the cinema, the wireless — and before modern warfare made revolt difficult (aeroplanes and atomic bombs need the support of aeronauts and chemists, whom "any prudent Government will favour"). Government will fall "into the hands of oligarchies, not of birth but of opinion," concealed behind democratic forms where democracy is old; ultimately "some one oligarchy will acquire world dominion."

The world State. "Scientific technique demands organization, and the more it becomes perfected, the larger are the organizations that it demands." An international organization of credit, banking, and production is necessary to the prosperity of all; "it is only in the direction of an organized world State that the human race can develop unless it abandons scientific technique, and it will not do this except as the result of a cataclysm." The gains: security against war, one irresistible fighting machine, propaganda of loyalty to the world State, no waste, no poverty, no booms and slumps — "every man willing to work will be kept in comfort, and every man unwilling to work will be kept in prison." "Almost all that is tragic in human life will be eliminated, and even death will seldom come before old age." Whether men will be happy "in this Paradise I do not know": perhaps biochemistry will make any man happy; perhaps dangerous sports will be organized for the anarchic, play battles in the air with death as the penalty of defeat; there will be a universal language, Esperanto or pidgin-English; the literature of the past will require permits (Hamlet and Othello glorify private murder; boys will not read about pirates); "love themes will be discouraged on the ground that love, being anarchic, is silly, if not wicked. All this will make life very pleasant for the virtuous." "Science increases our power to do both good and harm, and therefore enhances the need for restraining destructive impulses... the splendid criminal must no longer be an ideal." There will be both gain and loss, "and it is not within human power to strike a balance between the two."

Key ideas

• The scientific society is defined by deliberate creation for chosen purposes — as artificial as the steam engine.
• Japan, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia are the century's three experiments in artificial creation.
• Japan grafted Western technique onto Shinto theology; science is welcome to governments as long as it stays technical.
• The Russian experiment shows the unitary direction of a whole nation is now possible; it will be imitated.
• Government will become an oligarchy of opinion, not of birth — concealed democratic forms included.
• Technique demands world-wide organization; only a world State can make scientific civilization stable.
• The world State's merits are security, abundance, and the abolition of tragedy; its costs touch everything human.

Key takeaway

Scientific technique makes the deliberate manufacture of whole societies possible, and since technique demands ever larger organizations, the age of oligarchies of opinion and ultimately of a world State is coming — with gains in security and abundance whose balance against loss no one can strike.

Chapter 13 — The Individual and the Whole

Central question

What becomes of liberty and equality in a society grown so organic that every act affects everyone else?

Main argument

The obsolescence of Mill. The nineteenth century was divided between Liberal political ideas and industrial practice: "it carried out the Liberal ideas of Locke and Rousseau, which were adapted to a society of small peasant proprietors," while inventing the technique "which is leading the twentieth century to destroy liberty and to replace equality by new forms of oligarchy." Mill's principle in On Liberty — that the State may interfere with actions having serious consequences to others but should leave the rest free — "in the modern world... leaves hardly any scope for individual freedom," for "as society becomes more organic, the effects of men upon each other become more and more numerous and important." Freedom of speech and Press is already sacrificed wherever a government has a purpose in peace-time as ardent as other nations' war-purpose — as in Soviet Russia. Two continuing causes guarantee the diminution of liberty: technique makes society more organic, and sociology reveals the causal laws by which one man's acts help or harm another. Any future liberty must be justified "on the ground that that form of liberty is for the good of society as a whole."

The traditional freedoms examined. Investment of capital: railways and buses illustrate that private profit and social utility diverge (the buses do not pay for their permanent way; the buyers of property near Millbank Prison profited from public expenditure when it became the Tate Gallery; advertising brings no return to the community). Housing: the English preference for small houses spreads dreary suburbs, "to the immense detriment of the women and children"; the Rachel Macmillan nursery school found about 90 per cent of its children had rickets on arrival, "and almost all were cured at the end of the first year." Work: young people choose trades blindly, and "it is seldom in the public interest that an antiquated or wasteful technique should be allowed to persist," yet the wage-earner's interest is opposed to the community's — "this is due to the survival of capitalistic principles in a society which has grown so organic that it ought not to tolerate them."

Propagation and population. The right to marry and have as many children as nature decrees "is a right which the scientific society of the future is not likely to tolerate": there is an optimum density of population, and overpopulation injures the whole community. Between nations, birth-rates become weapons: "just as there is at present a quota of national immigrants into the United States, so in future there will be a quota of national immigrants into the world. Children in excess of the licensed figure will presumably be subjected to infanticide. This would be less cruel than the present method, which is to kill them by war or starvation. I am, however, only prophesying a certain future, not advocating it." Quality too will be regulated: sterilization of the mentally defective is already permissible in many American States, and parents who produce a child likely to be defective "are doing a wrong both to the child and to the community."

The two questions about liberty. Whenever curtailment of liberty is suggested, two questions are distinct: would it be in the public interest if wisely carried out, and will it be in the public interest when carried out with ignorance and perversity? Every government believes itself free from both failings, and technique is making governments so strong that they need not consider outside opinion: "for this reason scientific technique is likely to lead to a governmental tyranny which may in time prove disastrous."

Equality and the experts. Equality fares no better: technique involves "a great apparatus of experts and officials." Vital questions (currency and credit — William Jennings Bryan could make currency an electoral issue, but no electorate can decide it) are so technical that "experts must inevitably acquire a considerable measure of control"; the American railway system's superiority over the English will be imposed "not as a result of a democratic demand, but by government officials." "The scientific society will be just as oligarchic under socialism or communism as under capitalism." The world of the future will contain a governing class, "probably not hereditary, but more analogous to the government of the Catholic Church," which will interfere more and more — "it may be assumed that their purposes will be excellent, and their conduct honourable... but it cannot, I think, be assumed that they will abstain from the exercise of power merely on the ground that individual initiative is a good thing, or on the ground that an oligarchy is unlikely to consider the true interests of its slaves."

Key ideas

• Mill's defence of liberty collapses as society becomes organic: few acts are now "mainly confined to oneself."
• Sociology teaches the causal laws connecting men; technique makes society more organic — both shrink liberty.
• Private profit and social utility diverge in investment, housing, and work; the scientific society would not tolerate the divergence.
• Population quantity and quality will be publicly regulated; Russell explicitly prophesies, not advocates, licensed births and infanticide.
• Liberty and equality are nineteenth-century dreams; experts and officials unavoidably hold power.
• Governmental tyranny is the likely destination of scientific technique.

Key takeaway

In a society grown organic, no traditional freedom survives justification except as service to the whole, and technique hands real power to experts and officials — pointing to a governmental tyranny that may prove disastrous.

Chapter 14 — Scientific Government

Central question

What would a government be like that could reliably produce its intended results, and could such a government be stable?

Main argument

The definition. A government is scientific "in proportion as it can produce intended results: the greater the number of results that it can both intend and produce, the more scientific it is." It is not a matter of scientists in office — Laplace was in Napoleon's government and was dismissed as incompetent. The American Constitution was scientific in safeguarding private property, unscientific in the indirect election of the Presidency; the governments that made the first world war were unscientific, since they all fell in the course of it — with one exception: "Serbia, which was completely scientific, as the result of the War was exactly what was intended by the Serbian government."

The manipulative idealist. The abolition of poverty is technically possible but not psychologically possible; the diminution of disease has fewer obstacles; eugenics may become practical politics. The men who will do these things are the manipulative idealists: the dreamer (William Morris dreaming of News from Nowhere) and the manipulator (Lenin, who "found no satisfaction until he could clothe his ideas in a garment of reality") — "it is the manipulative type of idealist who will create the scientific society. Of such men, in our own day, Lenin is the archetype." For such men, Russia since the Revolution offered more scope than any other country at any other time, and "I fully expect... that men of this sort will have a predominant part to play in moulding the world during the next two hundred years." Russell quotes a Nature leading article (September 6, 1920) arguing that the distinction between pure and applied science has lost meaning, that scientific workers must "accept responsibility for the control of the forces which have been released by their work," and that the League of Nations' expert committees rescued Austria from bankruptcy and settled a million and a half refugees where statesmen had failed.

The new ethic. The obstacles are inertia and habit, vested interest, and hostile idealisms. Christian ethics "emphasizes the importance of the individual soul, and is not prepared to sanction the sacrifice of an innocent man for the sake of some ulterior good to the majority. Christianity, in a word, is unpolitical." The new ethic of scientific technique "will have its eye upon society rather than upon the individual... will be prepared to make individuals suffer for the public good without inventing reasons purporting to show that they deserve to suffer": society is viewed as a whole, and "if it is necessary to amputate a limb we do not consider it necessary to prove first that the limb is wicked." In this sense it will be ruthless "and according to traditional ideas immoral"; the scientific idealists will be organized "into an oligarchy of opinion such as is formed by the Communist Party in the U.S.S.R."

How it will come about. "It is clear that the next world war, if it does not end in a draw, will give world supremacy to either Russia or the United States." The supreme rulers, grown soft and lazy "like the Merovingian Kings," will let their powers be usurped by the experts, who will form the real government of the world — "a close corporation, regulated partly by opinion... but chosen later on by means of examinations, intelligence-tests, and tests of will-power." This society of experts will possess the sole up-to-date armaments, control propaganda and education, teach loyalty to the world government, make nationalism high treason, instil submissiveness into the bulk of the population, and "may invent ingenious ways of concealing its own power, leaving the forms of democracy intact."

Doubts as to stability. The fancy picture may never be realized, for a scientific civilization may be "essentially unstable." War: "recent innovations in the art of war have increased the power of the attack much more than the power of defence," and only the United States or Russia is remote and strong enough to survive the next great war intact. The birth-rate: "the most intelligent classes in the most scientific nations are dying out"; France depends on African troops; if the white population dwindles, Europe will be reduced "to the condition of Haiti," and the Chinese will carry on the scientific civilization until they too acquire a lowered birth-rate. "In this matter, as in the matter of war, scientific civilization will have to become more scientific if it is to escape destruction."

The economic organization. Production will be internationalized and localized — all the world's motor-cars manufactured in Detroit, one place for pins and needles, another for scissors and knives; production undertaken solely in accordance with government orders, ending poverty in the midst of unused plenty. Raw materials — oil, the Transvaal's gold — "ought not to belong to those who, by conquest or diplomacy, have happened to acquire the territory in which they are; they ought to belong to a world authority which would ration them to those who had the most skill in utilizing them"; uranium and thorium "should be retained in the hands of the international authority." Agriculture will be industrialized; "the soil and even the climate will be subject to human control." Every man and woman will be obliged to work, taught a new trade when the old one is obsolete; "for entirely inferior work negroes will be employed wherever possible"; the pleasantest work — that giving most control over the mechanism — will be awarded by intelligence tests. "Nobody will starve... On the other hand, life will be destitute of adventure except for the most highly paid experts." Men have sought security more avidly than anything else; "in such a world they will have it, but I am not quite sure whether they will think it worth the price that they will have paid for it."

Key ideas

• Scientific government means the power to produce intended results — the World War governments failed the test, Serbia passed it.
• The manipulative idealist (Lenin as archetype), not the dreamer, will build the scientific society.
• The scientific ethic sacrifices individuals for the social whole without inventing desert — ruthless by traditional standards.
• World supremacy will fall to Russia or the United States; the experts will inherit the power of soft rulers.
• War and the falling birth-rate make a scientific civilization possibly unstable — it must become more scientific to survive.
• The world State will localize production, ration raw materials, and abolish poverty, waste, and adventure.
• Security is what men have always wanted; whether they will think it worth the price is doubtful.

Key takeaway

A scientific government is one that can intend and produce its results; its coming will bring a world ruled by an oligarchy of expert manipulators with an ethic of social sacrifice — yet war and the dying birth-rate threaten the stability of the whole construction.

Chapter 15 — Education in a Scientific Society

Central question

How would a scientific society educate its rulers and its workers, and what would such an education cost?

Main argument

The two educations. "Education has two purposes: on the one hand to form the mind, on the other hand to train the citizen. The Athenians concentrated on the former, the Spartans on the latter. The Spartans won, but the Athenians were remembered." A scientific society will follow the Jesuit model, providing one education for ordinary men and another for those who are to hold scientific power.

The education of workers. Ordinary men and women "will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented," with contentment the most important. All the researches of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will produce it: diet fixed by the best biochemists, much open air, "no more book-learning than is absolutely necessary," docility imposed "by the methods of the drill-sergeant, or perhaps by the softer methods employed upon Boy Scouts." Children will learn to be "co-operative," that is, "to do exactly what everybody is doing"; initiative will be discouraged, insubordination "scientifically trained out of them" without punishment. Formal lessons will be given by cinema or radio, one teacher addressing all the classes of a country; the local substitute for the school-teacher will be "a lady to keep order."

The education of rulers. The governing-class child is selected before birth, or in the first three years, or at most by six. Eugenics, chemical and thermal treatment of the embryo, and diet aim at the highest ultimate ability; the scientific outlook is instilled from the moment the child can talk; specialization begins at twelve. Physical toughness is cultivated — rolling naked in the snow, fasting for twenty-four hours, running many miles in heat — and from twelve the child organizes younger children, "and will suffer severe censure if groups of such children fail to follow his lead." Every youth is subjected to "a threefold training: in intelligence, in self-command, and in command over others"; failure means "the terrible penalty of degradation to the ranks of common workers." Within the limits of loyalty to the world State and to their order, the rulers are adventurous and argue with their teachers — but they "will not be allowed to question the value of science, or the division of the population into manual workers and experts," nor to "coquette with the idea that perhaps poetry is as valuable as machinery, or love as good a thing as scientific research." A profound sense of public duty is instilled; "but let it not be supposed that they will be prigs."

Research. Research will be highly organized; young people will not choose their problems; "a great deal of scientific knowledge will be concealed from all but a few. There will be arcana reserved for a priestly class of researchers." Research will become more technical than fundamental; "discoveries which upset the official view of fundamentals, if they are made by young men, will incur disfavour"; there will be "an official metaphysic, which will be regarded as intellectually unimportant but politically sacrosanct. In the long run, the rate of scientific progress will diminish, and discovery will be killed by respect for authority."

The brilliant worker's child. A manual worker's child of marked ability faces a hard choice: if he throws in his lot with the rulers he may be promoted; "if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from performing it." In the normal course the governing class will tend to become hereditary, and if embryological improvement is applied to it alone, "the gulf between the two classes as regards native intelligence may become continually wider and wider" — though the rulers will not abolish the workers, since they do not wish to do uninteresting manual work or lose the scope for benevolence.

Key ideas

• Education serves the mind and the citizen; the scientific society chooses the Spartan goal and the Jesuit method.
• Workers are bred and trained to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented.
• Rulers are selected before birth and educated in intelligence, self-command, and command over others.
• Intellectual freedom is real within the order but stops at questioning the value of science or the division of the population.
• Research is organized, secret ("arcana" for a priestly class), and technical rather than fundamental — discovery dies by authority.
• The brilliant child of the workers is promoted or lethally dealt with.
• The two classes will diverge in native intelligence until they are almost different species.

Key takeaway

A scientific society would run two Jesuit-style educations — one manufacturing contented workers, one manufacturing rulers trained in intelligence and command — and the price is that discovery itself is killed by respect for authority.

Chapter 16 — Scientific Reproduction

Central question

If the State regulates the quantity and quality of the population, what happens to parenthood, love, and the human type?

Main argument

Population as State business. "Both the quantity and the quality of the population will be carefully regulated by the State," while sexual intercourse apart from children "will be regarded as a private matter so long as it is not allowed to interfere with work." Statisticians will fix the optimum; the usual rule will be a stationary population. Different grades will be bred differently: manual workers "bred for patience and muscle rather than for brains," governors and experts for intelligence and strength of character — "there will come to be an increasing divergence between the two types, making them in the end almost different species."

Sentiment as an obstacle that will move. Scientific breeding would at present encounter insuperable obstacles from religion and sentiment — it would require, as with domestic animals, "only a small percentage of males for purposes of breeding." "I wish I could think" sentiment will always veto it: "sentiment is quite extraordinarily plastic," and the individualistic religion is likely to be replaced by "a religion of devotion to the State" — "among Russian Communists this has already happened." The discipline required is scarcely more difficult than the celibacy of the Catholic priesthood; where remarkable achievements satisfy men's moral idealism, "the love of power is capable of swallowing up the instinctive life of the affections."

The mechanics. In each generation some 25 per cent of women and 5 per cent of men will be selected as parents; the rest will be sterilized, "which will in no way interfere with their sexual pleasures, but will merely render these pleasures destitute of social importance." Selected women will bear eight or nine children each; artificial impregnation will be preferred, "more in the light of a surgical operation, so that it will be thought not ladylike to have it performed in the natural manner." Gestation will be shortened, the later months passed in an incubator; there will be one father to every five mothers, "and it is quite likely that he would never have even seen the mothers of his children." "The sentiment of paternity would thus disappear completely," and maternal sentiment would have little chance to develop. Among the workers, less elaborate care will be taken, and women may raise their own children; among the governors, "all private sentiments would be viewed with suspicion" — a man and woman ardently devoted to each other "would be regarded as they are at present regarded by moralists when they are not married"; nurses failing to feel special affection would be praised; children showing special affection for a particular adult "would be separated from that adult." The tendency of the scientific manipulator "is to regard all private affections as unfortunate": the Freudians show they are sources of complexes, the administrators that they impede devotion to business, "and the modern ascetic is more thoroughgoing, and condemns all kinds of love equally as mere folly and waste of time."

The psychology of the result. The manual workers may be fairly happy — foolish, frivolous, well-amused, reverent towards the governors. The governors face a worse fate: arduous devotion to the State, friendships broken or monitored by "governmental microphones," all deeper feelings frustrated except devotion to science and the State. "Art or literature could not flourish in such a world." Bored governors may be encouraged to ascend Mount Everest or fly over the South Pole. "In such a world, though there may be pleasure, there will be no joy." The result is "the usual characteristics of vigorous ascetics... harsh and unbending, tending towards cruelty": sadistic impulses will find their outlet in scientific experiment — "the advancement of knowledge will be held to justify much torture of individuals by surgeons, biochemists, and experimental psychologists" — and "as time goes on the amount of added knowledge required to justify a given amount of pain will diminish." "Just as the sun worship of the Aztecs demanded the painful death of thousands of human beings annually, so the new scientific religion will demand its holocausts of sacred victims... In the end such a system must break down either in an orgy of bloodshed or in the rediscovery of joy." Perhaps drugs and new intoxications could drug the population into bearing it — "all these are possibilities in a world governed by knowledge without love, and power without delight. The man drunk with power is destitute of wisdom, and so long as he rules the world, the world will be a place devoid of beauty and of joy."

Key ideas

• The State will regulate both the quantity and the quality of the population; only a fraction will be licensed to breed.
• Sentiment is plastic; a religion of devotion to the State will replace the religion of individual feeling.
• Selected breeding will make the governors and the workers almost different species.
• Paternity will disappear and maternity be reduced to an operation; private affections will be viewed with suspicion.
• Workers may be happy; governors will be ascetic, harsh, and prone to cruelty.
• Sadistic experiment will be justified by the advancement of knowledge, with the amount of justification shrinking.
• The system must break down in an orgy of bloodshed or the rediscovery of joy; knowledge without love is power without delight.

Key takeaway

Scientific reproduction would breed the population like cattle, dissolve parenthood and private affection, and produce an ascetic ruling type whose frustrated cruelty finds outlet in sanctioned experiment — a world of pleasure without joy, "knowledge without love, and power without delight."

Chapter 17 — Science and Values

Central question

If the scientific society is incompatible with love, art, and spontaneous delight, where does science leave the values by which life is worth living?

Main argument

The sketch and its point. The scientific society of the preceding chapters "is, of course, not to be taken altogether as serious prophecy. It is an attempt to depict the world which would result if scientific technique were to rule unchecked." Desirable features are "almost inextricably mingled" with repulsive ones, "because we have been imagining a society developed in accordance with certain ingredients of human nature to the exclusion of all others. As ingredients they are good; as the sole driving force they are likely to be disastrous." The impulse towards scientific construction "is admirable when it does not thwart any of the major impulses that give value to human life," and "when it is allowed to forbid all outlet to everything but itself it becomes a form of cruel tyranny."

Contemplation and manipulation. Science's internal development "may be summed up as the passage from contemplation to manipulation." The love of knowledge springs from a twofold impulse: "we may seek knowledge of an object because we love the object or because we wish to have power over it" — the first gives contemplative knowledge, the second practical. "In the development of science the power impulse has increasingly prevailed over the love impulse," embodied in industrialism, governmental technique, and the philosophies of pragmatism and instrumentalism — "a governmental view of truth." But "the mystic, the lover, and the poet are also seekers after knowledge": in all forms of love "we wish to have knowledge of what is loved, not for purposes of power, but for the ecstasy of contemplation." The impulse of love may be "made the touchstone of any love that is valuable."

The lover turned tyrant. Science began with men "in love with the world" — Heraclitus's "ever-living fire," the Ionian philosophers with their "Titanic passionate intellect." "But step by step, as science has developed, the impulse of love which gave it birth has been increasingly thwarted, while the impulse of power, which was at first a mere camp-follower, has gradually usurped command." Physics has deprived us of colour and sound, light and shade: "the beloved has become a skeleton of rattling bones, cold and dreadful, but perhaps a mere phantasm." "Disappointed as the lover of nature, the man of science is becoming its tyrant," and "as this substitution becomes completed science tends more and more to become sadistic." "Science, which began as the pursuit of truth, is becoming incompatible with veracity," for contemplative science ends in complete scepticism (all belief rests on animal faith; science supplies only disbeliefs), while as technique it gives power "quite independent of its metaphysical validity" — "we can only wield this power by ceasing to ask ourselves metaphysical questions." "Thus it is only in so far as we renounce the world as its lovers that we can conquer it as its technicians. But this division in the soul is fatal to what is best in man"; the power of technique, once the failure of science as metaphysic is realized, "is only obtainable by something analogous to the worship of Satan, that is to say, by the renunciation of love."

What is not to blame, and what is. "It is not knowledge that is the source of these dangers. Knowledge is good and ignorance is evil." Nor is it power in and for itself: "what is dangerous is power wielded for the sake of power, not power wielded for the sake of genuine good." "The leaders of the modern world are drunk with power: the fact that they can do something that no one previously thought it possible to do is to them a sufficient reason for doing it. Power is not one of the ends of life, but merely a means to other ends." The ends of life cannot be legislated by one man for another: they are "those things which he deeply desires, and which if they existed would give him peace," things "which should give delight or joy or ecstasy." The lover, the poet, and the mystic "find a fuller satisfaction than the seeker after power can ever know, since they can rest in the object of their love, whereas the seeker after power must be perpetually engaged in some fresh manipulation if he is not to suffer from a sense of emptiness." "The sphere of values lies outside science, except in so far as science consists in the pursuit of knowledge."

The education of power. "The number of men who determine the character of an age is small": Columbus, Luther, and Charles V; Galileo and Descartes; and in the age that ended about 1930 — Edison, Rockefeller, Lenin, and Sun Yat-sen — "men devoid of culture, contemptuous of the past, self-confident, and ruthless," whom a different education might have leavened with doubt: "given a little doubt their achievement would perhaps have been less in volume, but much greater in value." "Our world has a heritage of culture and beauty, but unfortunately we have been handing on this heritage only to the less active and important members of each generation." The key-positions of power have fallen to "men ignorant of the past... parochial in time." The copy-book maxims of a former age are outworn, but a new set is required: first among them, "It is better to do a little good than much harm." There is "no inherent excellence in rapid locomotion"; to add to the possessions of those who already have too much "is a worthless waste of effort"; "to invent new crimes in order that the police may show skill in preventing them is less admirable." The new powers "can only be wielded safely by those who... have acquired some reverence for human feelings and some tenderness towards the emotions that give colour to the daily existence of men and women." "Knowing and feeling are equally essential ingredients both in the life of the individual and in that of the community... A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value." "Not all wisdom is new, nor is all folly out of date." Man, "having emancipated himself from subjection to nature, is showing something of the defects of slave-turned-master. A new moral outlook is called for in which submission to the powers of nature is replaced by respect for what is best in man... The dangers exist, but they are not inevitable, and hope for the future is at least as rational as fear."

Key ideas

• The picture of the scientific society is an extrapolation of technique ruling unchecked, not a prophecy.
• Science has passed from contemplation to manipulation; the power impulse has usurped the love impulse.
• Power-knowledge is a "governmental view of truth"; love-knowledge seeks the object for ecstasy, not use.
• The lover of nature has become its tyrant; science tends to become sadistic as power-knowledge completes itself.
• The renunciation of love — "something analogous to the worship of Satan" — is the price of wielding power without metaphysical questions.
• Knowledge is good and ignorance evil; the danger is power wielded for the sake of power.
• The ends of life are those things that give peace, delight, joy, or ecstasy; the sphere of values lies outside science.
• The dominant men of the age — Edison, Rockefeller, Lenin — are parochial in time; education must leaven power with the heritage of culture.
• "Not all wisdom is new, nor is all folly out of date"; hope is at least as rational as fear.

Key takeaway

Science gives power, not wisdom: values lie outside science, and a world run by knowledge without love would be destitute of value — yet the dangers are not inevitable, since the remedy is an education that teaches the holders of power what is good.

The book's overall argument

1. Chapter 1 (Examples of Scientific Method) — establishes what scientific method is by exhibiting it in Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Pavlov: significant facts and general laws, won against authority and wish-fulfilment.
2. Chapter 2 (Characteristics of Scientific Method) — formalizes the method: observation, hypothesis, testable deduction; hierarchy of laws; approximation; induction; analysis.
3. Chapter 3 (Limitations of Scientific Method) — shows the method's boundaries: unproved induction, inference to an unexperienced world resting on animal faith, and the abstractness of physics.
4. Chapter 4 (Scientific Metaphysics) — traces the decay of science as a worldview: the physicists' own scepticism leaves a universe "all spots and jumps," while science as common sense and technique remains triumphant.
5. Chapter 5 (Science and Religion) — disposes of the claim that modern physics restores religion, and affirms the rationalist faith: science is the systematic pursuit of knowledge, which is good.
6. Chapter 6 (Beginnings of Scientific Technique) — identifies technique as the utilization of hidden natural forces, proceeding from experiment not tradition, and dating its explosive acceleration from 1750.
7. Chapter 7 (Technique in Inanimate Nature) — shows machines and electricity giving man a sense of power that remakes his mentality: everything becomes an instrument, and the love of power displaces all other impulses.
8. Chapter 8 (Technique in Biology) — shows biology ending famine, controlling pests, breeding new varieties, dispensing with animals, and pointing toward the manufacture of food and of life itself.
9. Chapter 9 (Technique in Physiology) — shows medicine, contraception, and embryology turning the human body into raw material, with the embryo itself becoming an object of manipulation.
10. Chapter 10 (Technique in Psychology) — shows the mind brought under control by psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and physiology, giving science power over human beings.
11. Chapter 11 (Technique in Society) — shows advertising, education, and the mass media making opinion uniform, while public health improves and technique demands ever larger organization.
12. Chapter 12 (Artificially Created Societies) — shows that societies can now be deliberately manufactured (Japan, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia) and argues technique must end in a world State under an oligarchy of opinion.
13. Chapter 13 (The Individual and the Whole) — shows why liberty and equality cannot survive in an organic society: Mill's defence collapses, experts and officials rule, and governmental tyranny threatens.
14. Chapter 14 (Scientific Government) — defines scientific government as the power to produce intended results, sketches the manipulative idealists and expert oligarchy who will wield it, and doubts its stability under war and falling birth-rates.
15. Chapter 15 (Education in a Scientific Society) — depicts the two Jesuit-style educations — contented workers and commanding rulers — and the killing of discovery by authority.
16. Chapter 16 (Scientific Reproduction) — depicts State-regulated breeding that dissolves parenthood and affection, producing an ascetic and cruel ruling type in a world of pleasure without joy.
17. Chapter 17 (Science and Values) — closes the argument: the sketch is an extrapolation, not a prophecy; science has passed from contemplation to manipulation; power without love is the danger; values lie outside science, and hope is at least as rational as fear.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The book is a prophecy of a future totalitarian state.

Russell states explicitly that the scientific society "is not to be taken altogether as serious prophecy"; it is "an attempt to depict the world which would result if scientific technique were to rule unchecked." The point is to isolate one ingredient of human nature — the impulse to scientific construction — and show what happens when it is allowed to forbid all outlet to everything but itself.

Misunderstanding: Russell was hostile to science.

The book repeatedly affirms that "science is in its essence nothing but the systematic pursuit of knowledge, and knowledge... is in its essence good," and that science as common sense and technique "remains triumphant, indeed, more triumphant than ever before." What Russell criticizes is power wielded for the sake of power, and scientific technique that crowds out the impulses that give life value.

Misunderstanding: The Scientific Outlook is the inspiration for Huxley's Brave New World.

In his Prefatory Note to the Second Edition Russell records that the material of his last chapters "has been popularized in two widely read books, Huxley's Brave New World and Burnham's Managerial Revolution" — adding that he "does not suggest" his book had any influence on either; the parallels are offered as evidence that his fears "are more than an individual phantasy." Huxley's novel was published the year after this book (1932).

Misunderstanding: Modern physics refutes materialism and supports religion.

The chapter "Science and Religion" argues the opposite: the scientists' religious conclusions contradict one another (Eddington deduces God from atoms not obeying mathematics, Jeans from atoms obeying it), rest on fallacies (the equivocation on "determined," the confusion of pure and applied mathematics), and are offered "in the capacity of good citizens," not of scientists. Meanwhile "materialism" in the sense that matters — the physical determination of the course of nature — is "more alive than it ever was."

Misunderstanding: Russell thinks science gives us no knowledge.

Russell distinguishes sharply between science as metaphysic, which scepticism undermines, and science as knowledge of causal laws, which gives power. "The ultimate metaphysical doubts which we have been considering have no bearing whatever upon the practical uses of science." The book's lesson is not scepticism about science but about the limits of what it can claim — and about what it cannot supply: wisdom.

Misunderstanding: Russell advocates eugenics, population quotas, and infanticide.

He is describing what a scientific society would do, and is careful to say: "I am, however, only prophesying a certain future, not advocating it." The description of State breeding and the lethal chamber is part of the extrapolation whose purpose is to show that scientific technique unchecked is repulsive as well as attractive.

Misunderstanding: The book claims science gives power, so power is bad.

The danger is not power but "power wielded for the sake of power"; power wielded for the sake of genuine good is the whole hope of the book. Russell's own summary of his philosophy of science is that the power impulse must not obtrude on the sphere of values.

Central paradox / key insight

The book's most counterintuitive insight is that science, the greatest instrument of knowledge ever devised, is not a source of wisdom, and that its very success as power undermines its standing as truth. Russell develops this through a triple paradox. First, science gives power, not wisdom: "science increases our power to do both good and harm," and power is indifferent to its uses; a scientific civilization is good only if knowledge is accompanied by wisdom, which "science in itself does not provide." Second, science's success as a metaphysic destroys science's value as a metaphysic: "as a metaphysic it has been undermined by its own success," so that "while science as the pursuit of power becomes increasingly triumphant, science as the pursuit of truth is being killed by a scepticism which the skill of the men of science has generated." Third, the pursuit of truth and the conquest of nature demand opposite attitudes to the world: "it is only in so far as we renounce the world as its lovers that we can conquer it as its technicians," and the power of technique is obtained "by the renunciation of love" — "something analogous to the worship of Satan."

Science is the pursuit of power, not wisdom; the sphere of values lies outside science, and the man drunk with power is destitute of wisdom.

Important concepts

Science as knowledge

"By convention it is knowledge of a certain kind, the kind, namely, which seeks general laws connecting a number of particular facts." Russell contrasts it with art: as the pursuit of truth, science is the equal, not the superior, of art.

Scientific technique

The application of science as power: "the utilization of natural forces in ways not evident to the totally uninstructed," discovered by deliberate research rather than tradition. Its decisive trait: "it proceeds from experiment, not from tradition."

Scientific method

Three stages: observing significant facts, arriving at a hypothesis that would account for them, and deducing testable consequences. Facts in science are "not mere facts, but instances"; the ideal is a hierarchy of laws with induction ascending and deduction descending.

Significant fact

A fact that helps to establish or refute a general law, "frequently quite devoid of intrinsic interest" — the flow of saliva in dogs, the feather and lead in a vacuum, Becquerel's accidentally fogged plates.

Animal faith

Santayana's term, adopted by Russell: belief in the external world and in unexperienced things, "thought dominated by the principle of the conditioned reflex." "Science, speaking broadly, is a tree growing from the soil of animal faith, but clipped by the shears of reason."

Power-thought

"Scientific thought is essentially power-thought — the sort of thought, that is to say, whose purpose, conscious or unconscious, is to give power to its possessor." Science as a causal concept seeks power over its material, which is why abstraction — omitting irrelevant detail — increases power (the cultivator, the railway, the stock-exchange manipulator).

Power-knowledge and love-knowledge

The twofold impulse behind the pursuit of knowledge: "we may seek knowledge of an object because we love the object or because we wish to have power over it." Science has passed "from contemplation to manipulation"; the power impulse, "at first a mere camp-follower, has gradually usurped command."

Conditioned reflex

Pavlov's law: when a stimulus that evokes an unconditioned reflex (salivation at food) is repeatedly accompanied or preceded by another stimulus, that other stimulus alone comes to evoke the response. "The basis of learning... of habit, and of practically everything in behaviour that is due to experience."

Induction

The inference from observed facts to general laws; its logical form — "If this is true, that is true: now that is true, therefore this is true" — is formally fallacious, and after Hume it "remains an unsolved problem of logic," assumed pragmatically. Good induction explains facts that would be antecedently improbable.

Probable error / approximation

"All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation"; every careful measurement is given with its probable error. "Subjective certainty is inversely proportional to objective certainty."

Second law of thermodynamics

The statistical law that the world is continuously growing more disorderly — "the universe tends towards democracy" — making the difference between past and future and implying the world will ultimately "run down."

Principle of Indeterminacy

Heisenberg's principle (1927): "a particle may have position or it may have velocity, but it cannot in any exact sense have both." Russell insists it concerns measurement, not causation — "a fallacy of equivocation" to argue otherwise.

Emergent evolution

Lloyd Morgan's doctrine that a suitable arrangement of objects may have new properties not deducible from the objects singly, which he reads as "a revelation and manifestation of... Divine Purpose." Russell finds no reasons advanced for it, and evidence against it.

Scientific society

A society "which employs the best scientific technique in production, in education, and in propaganda," created deliberately "with a certain structure in order to fulfill certain purposes" — as artificial as the steam engine.

Oligarchy of opinion

The ruling form of the scientific society: "oligarchies, not of birth but of opinion," chosen by examinations, intelligence-tests, and tests of will-power, concealing itself behind democratic forms where necessary.

Wisdom

"A right conception of the ends of life. This is something which science in itself does not provide." The book's whole practical point: increase in knowledge must be accompanied by increase in wisdom if a scientific civilization is to be good.

Power wielded for the sake of power

The specific danger of the scientific age: "the fact that they can do something that no one previously thought it possible to do is to them a sufficient reason for doing it." Contrasted with power wielded "for the sake of genuine good," which is not dangerous.

References and Web Links

Primary book and edition information

• Bertrand Russell. The Scientific Outlook. London: George Allen & Unwin; New York: W. W. Norton, 1931. Second edition (with "Prefatory Note to the Second Edition"), Allen & Unwin, 1949. Reprinted as Routledge Classics, 2009, ISBN 9780415474627, with a Preface by David Papineau.
  • Routledge Classics book page with table of contents
  • Open Library work record (20 editions, first published 1931)
  • Open Library record for the Routledge Classics edition (2009)
  • HathiTrust catalog record for the 1931 edition
  • HathiTrust catalog search for "scientific outlook" Russell (six holdings, 1931–1954)

Full text scans

• Internet Archive scan, W. W. Norton 1931 first edition
• Internet Archive scan, 1962 edition
• Internet Archive scan, Allen & Unwin reprint of the second edition (full OCR text; the source used to verify chapter contents for this outline)

Background and overview

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Bertrand Russell (the SEP entry cites The Scientific Outlook for Russell's view that ordinary language cannot express what physics asserts)
• Wikipedia: Bertrand Russell
• Wikiquote: Bertrand Russell (includes quotations from the chapter "Science and Values")

Works Russell engages with in the book

• Sir Arthur Eddington. The Nature of the Physical World (Gifford Lectures, 1927) — the account of classical laws as conventions, the statistical second law, and the free-will argument that Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 examine.
• Sir James Jeans. The Mysterious Universe (1930) — the "mathematical Deity" and soap-bubble universe criticized in Chapter 5.
• I. P. Pavlov. Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes (trans. W. Horsley Gantt) and Conditioned Reflexes (trans. G. V. Anrep) — the experimental basis of the treatment in Chapters 1 and 10.
• C. Lloyd Morgan. Emergent Evolution (1923) and Life, Mind and Spirit (1926) — the doctrine of emergent evolution discussed in Chapter 5.
• Lancelot Hogben. The Nature of Living Matter (1930) — quoted on the conditioned reflex and on the apologetic temper of the age.
• Jean Piaget. Judgment and Reasoning in the Child (1928) — invoked in Chapter 6 for the social origin of reasoning.

Related context

• Aldous Huxley. Brave New World (1932) — published the year after The Scientific Outlook; Russell's Prefatory Note to the Second Edition notes that his last chapters were "popularized" in Huxley's novel and Burnham's The Managerial Revolution (1941), while disclaiming influence.
  • Wikipedia: Brave New World

Additional chapter summaries and study resources

These are secondary summaries and should be used alongside, rather than instead of, the original book.

• The Routledge Classics edition's Preface by David Papineau and the author's own Introduction supply the most reliable framing; no independent per-chapter study guide was used for this outline, which was reconstructed from the full text of the Allen & Unwin reprint scan above.