What does naturalism take away from us?
It leads, of course, to a somewhat dead view of things. In its extreme forms it takes the view that we live in a gigantic and mechanical universe, a meaningless machinery of planets and suns, in which man has accidentally appeared as a minute speck of life, negligible and ephemeral. Stressing the third term alone, this view is true enough. It means that if man is to improve his life, he must only deal with the external, visible world. There is nothing ‘real’ save what man can reach through his senses. So man should invent and build new machinery and amass as many facts as possible about the visible world and set about to ‘conquer nature’.
This standpoint turns man outwards. It makes him see his field of activities as only outside himself. It makes him think that by discovering some fresh facts about the material universe he will be able to assuage his own sorrow and pain. There is today a very remarkable turning outwards of mankind, connected with scientific developments, and an increasingly diffused expectancy that new discoveries and inventions will solve m an’s problems. The attitude of scientific materialism, which especially characterised the later part of the nineteenth century, has reached the masses, it has also reached the East.
Mankind now sees the solution of its difficulties lying in something outside itself. And with this attitude there inevitably goes the belief in mass organisations of peoples, and a corresponding loss of the inner sense of existence, the effacement of individual differences, and a gradual obliteration of all the rich diversity of custom and local distinction which belongs to normal life. The world becomes smaller and smaller as it becomes more and more uniform. People lose the power of any separate wisdom. In place of it, they imitate each other increasingly. And it is just this that makes possible mass organisation. Hand-in-hand with this goes the linking up of the world by rapid transit and wireless communication, so that the entire world abnormally responds to a single local stimulus.
And above all this hovers the strange chimera, that seems to shimmer in the imagination of all humanity today, the phantasy th at science will discover some secret, some solution, that will rid the earth of its brutality and injustice and restore the Golden Age. This idea, that we can discover fin a l solutions to the difficulties of life, and that mankind as a whole can reach ‘truth ’ at some future date, ignores the fact that every person born into the world is a new starting-point. Every person must discover for himself all that has been discovered before. Every person must find truth for himself. Apart from this, what can we see today as the result of man’s belief that he can organise life merely by scientific knowledge?
From 'Living Time and the Integration of Life by Maurice Nicoll'.