PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY 



have much help to give to the scientific worker and tlie greatest of 

 them is the first.^ 



Political Distortions of Scientific Ideas. 



There is one sense, however, in which the scientific worker should 

 be perpetually on his guard as to the purity of science. Every form of 

 human activity which has elaborated a theoretical structure has had 

 this theoretical structure systematically distorted as part of the ex- 

 ploitation of all ideas in the interests of dominant classes. The history 

 of theology, for example, shows the emphasis laid on pietistic and 

 other-worldly conceptions, an emphasis much to the advantage of 

 those who were doing very well out of this world and were determined 

 to do better. Hence the condemnation of religion as the opium of the 

 people — not a new idea at all, but clearly expressed by Gerrard 

 Winstanley and Richard Overton^ in seventeenth-century England. So 

 also historians of the Roman religion of pre-christian times, such as 

 B. Farrington,^ have elucidated the class elements in the opposition of 

 the Epicureans to the superstitious beliefs and rites cynically imposed 

 by governments of wealthy sceptics. This is indeed quite explicit in 

 Cicero's De Natura Deorum.^ Was not the doctrine of original sin 

 also of use to the governing class? Did it not, by suggesting a 

 fundamental hopelessness regarding the improvement of human 

 society, insinuate that the masses would never learn to rule them- 

 selves ,'' 



So it has been with ideas of a scientific order. Among the oldest 

 of these is the comparison between the social organism and a living 

 biological organism. The social organism was supposed to have also 

 its brain, its belly and its legs. And just as the upper parts of the body, 

 the brain, the organs in the thorax, etc., were supposed to be nobler 

 and more honourable than those in the viscera or limbs, so obviously, 

 it was argued, there must always be some classes of society possessing 

 honours and privileges, while there must always be others deprived 

 of them. The attribution of ethical superiority to some of the organs 

 of the body is so strange an idea in itself that it must surely be regarded 



^ Perhaps the best discussions of the help given to biological thinking by dialectical 

 materialism are in the contributions of H. J. MuUer and J. Schaxel to the Lenin Memorial 

 Volume of the Moscow Academy of Science (1934). 



2 Mans Mortalities 1643. 



^ Modem Quarterly, 1938, 1, 214. 



* English translation, London, 1896. 



113 H 



