It is easy to see how this concept was adopted by Karl Marx and made concrete by both the Nazis and the Communists in the twentieth century. Perhaps that is not Hegel’s fault; is a man responsible for the things that other people do with his ideas, and in his name?
Speaking of the twentieth century, let us continue our world-historical game. Someday, ages and ages hence, historians will look back on our time and say that while the nineteenth century was the German century, the twentieth century was—what? The American century? The Russian? It is a good question.
And what about the twenty-first? Will we have to wait till 2015 to decide? Or perhaps 2115?
chapter ten
Critics and Seers
As though obedient to Hegel’s metaphysical views, the Napoleonic wars finally ended in 1815, and for a time people began to hope that the years of warfare—an entire generation’s worth, from 1789 to 1815—would somehow or other teach the world about the folly of war, about its inability to solve any problems or answer any questions. They were wrong, but no one could see this at the time, as they couldn’t see it a hundred years later, in 19l5, or in two hundred—that is, today. Or am I wrong? Have we learned the lesson yet?
Nevertheless, as Europe entered the nineteenth century, there was hope, excitement, a sense of newness. In science, for example, although as usual there were many who didn’t want to accept what scientists like Darwin were beginning to learn. In politics, economics, social arrangements, although, again, the new ideas promulgated by men like Marx and J.S. Mill tended to be accepted only by the few, whereas the many were uncomfortable with the changes that were foreseen. There were vocal critics, too, in prose as well as verse, although the verse sometimes sounded like prose and vice versa. And there were novelists like Dickens, great storytellers who were also—intentionally—social critics. This self-consciousness in art was also new.
Finally, two very great poets came on the American scene and responded to the first total war in very different ways and words. They knew the conflict threatened to tear America asunder despite the thrilling words of the man who, more than anyone, wanted to keep it whole. They were poets who also knew that even in peace there is always the threat and, in a way, the promise of death. This is what poets have always known. Do we love them for that? I don’t know, but we need them all the same.
CLAUDE BERNARD
1813–1878
Introduction to the Study of
Experimental Medicine
The life of Claude Bernard was happy. Born in 1813, a poor, shy child, he was able to acquire only a minimal education. Apprenticed to an apothecary, he offended him by spending his free time writing plays. He managed to enter medical school but was far from the best student. However, much to their credit, two eminent French medical scientists recognized the genius of the gruff, ill-tempered young man and furthered his career. By the end of his life Bernard was one of the two most famous scientists in France—the other was Pasteur—and he received the first state funeral ever accorded a French scientist.
A redoubtable experimenter, he made important discoveries concerning the role of the pancreas in digestion, the function of the liver, and the regulation of the blood supply by the vasomotor nerves. (He ended up suffering, and dying, from illnesses involving all these organs.) His claim to literary fame was a short book he wrote when he was fifty.
The book was intended to be a major treatise on experimental medicine, but Bernard never wrote much more than the introduction to this work. That does not matter; the Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine is brilliant and interesting. More, in this case, might have turned out to be less.
Research in medicine up to about the sixteenth century had been guided by an understanding of Aristotle’s methods that was perhaps mistaken. Experiments, so-called, were confirmatory only; the real work of the experimenter was supposed to be done in his head, in the logical search for principles from which conclusions could then be deduced. This was the so-called deductive method, and it led nowhere.
The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reversed the procedure. The experimenter must, it was said, have no preconceived notions. He must merely observe nature and from his observations form conclusions about principles. This was the so-called inductive method, and by itself it too led nowhere.
Claude Bernard was the first philosopher of science to recognize that the most effective experimental method of research involves a combination of the two procedures—a combination so subtle and so complex that we are still trying to understand it more than a century later. The experimenter, Bernard said, must have some notion in his head of what he is looking for. But he must also be able to observe freely, unprejudiced by his prior assumptions. He must be prepared to change his mind if necessary and ready, too, to discard all of his hard-won principles if the facts controvert them.
This method is discussed with great clarity in the Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine. But the book, despite its small size—only eighty or so pages—also makes other important points, involving the intricate relations between physiology, the study of living organisms, on the one hand, and the sciences of physics and chemistry, the study of inert substances, on the other. This relationship, too, has been the subject of intense study and speculation since Bernard’s death in Paris in 1878.
The most interesting part of Bernard’s Introduction deals with what he called the milieu interieur, for which the phrase “internal environment” is a poor translation. The living organism, Bernard recognized, lives as it were in two different worlds. There is the outside world, the environment per se, which the entire organism confronts and attempts to deal with and control. But there is also an inner world, invisible to the eye, of which the organism itself is often largely unaware. This world is an enormously complicated system of physical, chemical, and biochemical interrelationships, among organs and parts of organs that together make up a whole living thing. The continued peaceful operations of this interior system are essential to the life of a living being; in fact, they almost are its life. Bernard was the first to see this, and again we have been struggling for more than a century to further his ideas and insights.
The Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine is not at all hard to read; no scientist ever possessed a more lucid style than Claude Bernard and his ideas, as I have pointed out, are strikingly modern. But he will always be, or seem to be, “modern” because he got at some very fundamental truths about life and about medicine. And truth is always modern.