"Go and be somethingological directly", Mrs Gradgrind orders her children in Charles Dickens's Hard Times (1854). The children are brought up on their father's strict utilitarian principles - or rather, on Dickens's ferocious satire of them. So they have "a little conchological cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet; and all the specimens were all arranged and labelled", but they have no fairy tales or nursery rhymes - nothing that might encourage fancy or wonder.
Not surprisingly, the children come to bad ends. On her deathbed, Mrs Gradgrind tells her daughter: "There is something- not an Ology at all - that your father has missed, or forgotten."
Science, in Dickens's view, does immense good - moral, social and intellectual - but only when it works hand in hand with imagination and reverence. Dickens being a Protestant Christian, did not see science as a threat to religious faith. On the contrary, he argued, learning the true nature of forces or objects brings us close to their creator. In a speech he gave in 1869 at the Birmingham and Nidland Institude, he speculated that Jesus might have taught scientific truth about the "wonders on every hand", but chose not to because "the people of that time could not bear them".
Dickens's objection in Hard Times was not to science itself, but to the reductionist principle that imposes stultifying order and leaves no room for emotion or imagination. Plenty of Victorian scientific writers would have agreed with him. Michael Faraday, for example, taught that "in the pursuit of physical science, the imagination should be taught to present the subject investigated in all possible, and even in impossible views."
Dickens was appalled by people whose scientific knowledge was not connected to imagination or feelings. As soon as we meet Bradley Headstone, the teacher in Our Mutual Friend(1865), we know that he will prove a villain, because his mind is rule-bound and sterile: "From his earliest childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage...astronomy to the right, political economy to the left - natural history, the physical sciences, figures, music, the lower mathematics and what not, all in their several places." The same tidy-mindedness that incidcates the barrenness of the little Gradgrinds' natural specimens foretells Headstone's descent into criminal insanity.
What excited Dickens most about science was its ability to reveal an unimagined world behind ordinary objects. "The facts of science are at least as full of poetry, as the most poetical fancies", he wrote in an 1848 review of RObert Hunt's The Poetry of Science. By revealing the wonder of everyday things, science compensates us for the beloved but ignorant beliefs it destroys. "When science has freed us from a harmless superstitions" Dickens wrote in the same review, "she offers to our contemplation something better and more beautiful, something which rightly considered, is more elevating to the soul, nobler and more stimulating to the soaring fancy." Dinosaurs, he went on, are really far more impressive than dragons, and coral reefs more so than mermaids.
Accordingly, Dickens championed writers who used science to show the world as spectacular, magical or astonishing. Among his close friends were mathematician, and father of the computer Charles Babbage, and Richer Owen, the comparative anatomist who coined the word dinosaur: Owen was enthralled by Dickens's novels, following them avidly as they came out in installments. Science historian Gowan Dawson has argued that there are strong similarities between Owen's paleontological studies and the way Victorian novel readers tackled serially published novels.
On the same lines of Dickens, many greatest names in the field of physical sciences like that of Pythagoras, Archimedes, Kepler, and more recent Neil's Bohr, Newton, Einstein, Pauli, etc, have time and again hinted on the danger of the reductionism of science.
In our contemporary world similar over simplification raises its ugly head in the way children are taught in schools, workers work in offices, managers and clerks manage the administrative works, engineers work out engineering feats, teachers teach and do research, priests carry out religious practices, doctors treat patients.
Time is ripe, when there is an immediate need for man to step back, and listen to the in-audible, see the invisible, reason out the non-apparent, thereby being fully human. Mankind needs to focus on depth and not breath - on quality, not on quantity - on being, not on having.
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