IV Knowledge is Power

AND now, armed with these methods of procedure, we stand face to face with nature. What shall we ask her? Prudens questio dimidium scientiæ: to know what to ask is half of every science.

You must ask for laws,—or, to use a Platonic term, forms. In every process there is matter and there is form: the matter being the seat of the process or operation, and the form its method or law. “Though in nature nothing really exists besides individual bodies, performing pure individual acts, according to a fixed law, yet in philosophy the very law, and the investigation, discovery, and explanation of it, is the foundation as well of knowledge as of operation. And it is this law, with its clauses, that I mean when I speak of Forms.”¹ Not so much what a “thing” is, but how it behaves;—that is the question. And what is more, if you will examine your conception of a “thing,” you will see that it is really a conception of how the “thing” behaves; every What is at last a How. Every “thing” is a machine, whose essence or meaning is to be found not by a mere description of its parts, but by an account of how it operates. “How does it work?” asks the boy before a machine; see to it that you ask the same question of nature.

For observe, if you know how a thing works, you are on the way to managing and controlling it. Indeed, a Form can be defined as those elements in a process which must be known before the process can be controlled. Here we see the meaning of science; it is an effort to discover the laws which must be known in order “that the mind may exercise her power over the nature of things.”² Science is the formulation of control; knowledge is power. The object of science is not merely to know, but to rebuild; every science longs to be an art. The quest for knowledge, then, is not a matter of curiosity, it is a fight for power. We “put nature on the rack and compel her to bear witness” against herself. Where this conception reigns, logic-chopping is out of court. “The end of our new logic is to find not arguments but arts; ... not probable reasons but plans and designs of works; ... to overcome not an adversary in argument but nature in action.”³

But there is logic-chopping in other things than logic. All strife of men with men, of group with group, if it leaves no result beyond the victory and passing supremacy of the individual or group, is logic-chopping. Such victories pass from side to side, and cancel themselves into final nullity. Real achievement is victory, not over other men but with them. “It will not be amiss to distinguish the three kinds, and as it were grades, of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their own power in their native country; which kind is vulgar and degenerate. The second is of those who labor to extend the power of their country and its dominion among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race over the universe, his ambition is without doubt both a more wholesome thing and a more noble than the other two. The empire of man over things depends wholly on the arts and sciences. For we cannot command nature except by obeying her.”⁴