J. B. S. Haldane

“ Mustard gas kills one man for every forty it puts out of action; shells kill one for every three; but their god who compromised with high explosives has not yet found time to adapt himself to chemical warfare. ”

“ It took some thousands of years to produce the stable agricultural society which forms the basis of European life and whose morals we are too apt to regard as eternal truths. It should take a shorter time to evolve a stable industrial society. The people that do so will inherit the earth. In sum, I believe that the progress of science will ultimately make industrial injustice as self-destructive as it is now making international injustice.
As for the supplies of mechanical power, it is axiomatic that the exhaustion of our coal and oil-fields is a matter of centuries only. ”

“ For, after all, our greatest weapon in chemical warfare is not gas, but education, and education of all classes. By education I mean a process which puts people in general in touch with the thought of the abler minds of their own and past times, whether in literature or art, in science, mathematics, or music. ”

“ And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art. Personally I believe that we may have good hopes of both. The capitalist’s idea of art in industry at present tends to limit itself to painting green and white stripes on the front of his factories in certain cases. ”

“ They can all, I think, be abused, but none perhaps is always evil; and many, like mustard gas, when we have got over our first not very rational objection to them, turn out to be, on the whole, good. If it is right for me to fight my enemy with a sword, it is right for me to fight him with mustard gas: if the one is wrong, so is the other. But I have no sympathy whatever for Mr. Facing-both-ways [83] when he says that, though he is prepared on occasion to fight, he will not use these nasty new-fangled weapons. ”

“ With the above facts in your minds I would ask you to excuse what at first sight might appear improbable or indecent in any speculations which appear below, and to dismiss from your minds the belief that biology will consist merely in physical and chemical discoveries as applied to men, animals and plants. ”

“ Of course, if we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation. ”

“ An artist must understand his subject matter. At present not a single competent poet and very few painters and etchers outside the Glasgow School understand industrial life, and I believe that there is only one architect of any real originality who understands the possibilities of ferro-concrete. I do not know his name, but he produced in Soissons before the war a market-place with the dignity and daring of an ancient Egyptian temple. If I knew that he had been entrusted with the rebuilding of Soissons, I could not regret its destruction. ”

“ A few of my hearers hold the view that, while war in itself is a noble occupation, the use of poisonous gas is an innovation as cruel as it is unsoldierly. The majority are probably pacifists in the sense that they prefer almost any peace to almost any war, support the League of Nations or other devices for the prevention of international strife, and look askance at preparations for [3] future warfare, more particularly for future chemical warfare. ”

“ Capitalism, though it may not always give the scientific worker a living wage, will always protect him, as being one of the geese which produce golden eggs for its table. And competitive nationalism, even if war is wholly or largely prevented, will hardly forego the national advantages accruing from scientific research.
If we look at the other most probable alternative the prospect is little more hopeful. In this country the labour party alone among political organizations includes the fostering of research in its official programme. ”

“ We cannot make apparatus small enough to disintegrate or fuse atomic nuclei, any more than we can make it large enough to reach to the moon. We can only bombard them with particles of which perhaps one in a million hit, which is like firing keys at a safe-door from a machine-gun a mile away in an attempt to open it. We do occasionally open it, but the process is very uneconomical. It may be asked why we cannot bring our machine-gun nearer, or improve our aim. To do this we should require to construct apparatus on the same infinitesimal scale as the structure of the chemical atom. ”

“ A prophet who can give signs in the heavens is always believed. No one ever seriously [Pg 14] questioned Newton’s theory after the return of Halley’s comet. Einstein has told us that space, time, and matter are shadows of the fifth dimension, and the heavens have declared his glory. In consequence Kantian idealism will become the basal working hypothesis of the physicist and finally of all educated men, just as materialism did after Newton’s day. We may not call ourselves materialists, but we do interpret the activities of the moon, the Thames, influenza, and aeroplanes in terms of matter. ”

“ We do not know what type of scientific knowledge will be needed: we can be certain that some type will be. The British are a tired people: they like to rest “in breathless quiet after all their ills,” and to pin their faith to the promises of leaders whose eyes are fixed on the past. ”

“ There is just a hope, though I fear little more, that a large-scale production of perfume may form the basis of a re-education of our rather rudimentary sense of smell, but the most interesting possibilities of chemical invention are very clearly in biological chemistry, and for the following reasons.
Desirable substances fall on the whole into two classes. The first are desirable on account of their physical or chemical properties, for example iron, wood or glass, which we use as a part of systems such as fires, houses, or razors, which procure us certain benefits. ”

“ Apparently [72] it took five months for the British Army to realize that gas-poisoning did not necessarily mean poisoning through the stomach.
If, then, in future wars we are to avoid gross mismanagement in high places, and panic and stupidity among the masses, it is essential that everyone should learn a little elementary science, that politicians and soldiers should not be proud of their ignorance of it, that ordinary men and women should not be ashamed or afraid of knowing something of the working of their own bodies. ”

“ But if every physical and chemical invention is a blasphemy, every biological invention is a perversion. There is hardly one which, on first being brought to the notice of an observer from any nation which had not previously heard of their existence, would not appear to him as indecent and unnatural. ”

“ We are, perhaps, inclined to underestimate the potentialities of town-bombing with high explosive and incendiary bombs. In London, for example, there were never too many big fires started at any given time for the fire-brigades to deal with. An attack by ten or twenty times as many aeroplanes as ever bombed London simultaneously might well ring round a given area fairly completely with wrecked streets or burning houses, in which case most of the buildings and a good proportion of the inhabitants would perish. ”

“ Almost all our present sources of light are hot bodies, 95% of whose radiation is invisible. To light a lamp as a source of light is about as wasteful of energy as to burn down one’s house to roast one’s pork. It is a fairly safe prophecy that in 50 years light will cost about [Pg 19] a fiftieth of its present price, and there will be no more night in our cities. The alternation of day and night is a check on the freedom of human activity which must go the way of other spatial and temporal checks. In the long run I think that all that applied physics can do for us is to abolish these checks. ”

“ I claim, then, that the use of mustard gas in war on the largest possible scale would render it less expensive of life and property, shorter, and more dependent on brains rather than numbers. We are often told the exact opposite, that it will make it more barbarous and indecisive, and lead to the wiping out of the population of whole cities. ”

“ It is quite possible that capitalism itself may demand that the control of certain key industries be handed over completely to the workers in those industries, simply in order to reduce the number of sporadic strikes in them. And as industrial progress continues an ever larger number—perhaps the majority—of industries will become key industries. The solution may be entirely different—we may well see a return to feudalism. But the probability is that the problem will be solved. ”

“ Your method of thinking, doubtless satisfactory when dealing with molecules and atoms, renders you insensible to the difference between right and wrong. And so you devise the means of universal destruction, and [78] sell them into the hands of unrighteous and bloody-minded men.”
I note that the people who make these remarks do not refuse to travel by railway or motor-car, to use electric light, or to read mechanically printed newspapers. Nor do they install a well in their back-gardens to enjoy drinking the richer water of a pre-scientific age, with its interesting and variegated fauna. ”

“ The value of this second class of substances rests on a quite special relationship to the human organism which depends in the most intimate way on the constitution of the latter, and has not in general been at all fully explained in terms of physics and chemistry. For example fires can be made of coal or peat instead of wood, but no other chemical substance has the same effect as water or alcohol. So unless a chemical substance has new physiological properties its production will merely serve to improve or make possible some appliance whose use lies within the sphere of applied physics. ”

“ If one goes to what is, perhaps, the opposite extreme from Russia, one finds the army of the world’s most democratic nation, Australia, commanded by a Jew, Monash, and notes with interest that the Germans regarded the Australian troops as, on the whole, the most formidable, man for man, of all their opponents. ”

“ There does not seem to be any particular reason why a religion should not arise with an ethic as fluid as Hindu mythology, but it has not yet arisen. Christianity has probably the [Pg 91] most flexible morals of any religion, because Jesus left no code of law behind him like Moses or Muhammad, and his moral precepts are so different from those of ordinary life that no society has ever made any serious attempt to carry them out, such as was possible in the case of Israel and Islam. ”

“ We have not yet made a scientific study of the causes of war, and, until we do, may expect more wars. If we are to have more wars, I prefer that my country should be on the winning side. That is why I am speaking on warfare to my fellow-countrymen. ”

“ In the past they have been, in general, men like Voltaire, Bentham, Thales, Marx, and very possibly the divine Julius, but I think that Darwin furnishes an example of the same [Pg 79] relentlessness of reason in the field of science. I suspect that as it becomes clear that at present reason not only has a freer play in science than elsewhere, but can produce as great effects on the world through science as through politics, philosophy, or literature, there will be more Darwins. ”

“ Mustard gas is a very different thing. It was never used to force a decision by breaking the enemy’s lines, but to cause him casualties and deny him the use of ground. For, after a given area has been well sprayed with dichlorethyl sulphide from bursting shells for some time, it is death to occupy it without a mask, and the vapour may blister the skin, while anyone touching the ground will be certain of a very serious blister. Someone placed a drop of the liquid on the chair of the director of the British chemical warfare department. ”

“ It is of course almost hopeless to attempt any very exact prophecies as to how in detail scientific knowledge is going to revolutionize human life, but I believe that it will continue to do so, and even more profoundly than I have suggested. ”

“ An educated man knows enough of science, for example, to be able to distinguish a gas from a smoke, or a Grindell-Matthews from a Marconi, [63] even if he is not thoroughly versed in the kinetic theory of gases or the laws governing radiation through the ether. Educated men are rather rare. It will be worth while giving some examples of how our uneducated politicians and soldiers failed to adjust themselves to the scientific thought of their contemporaries. ”

“ Moral progress is so difficult that I think any developments are to be welcomed which present it as the naked alternative to destruction, no matter how horrible may be the stimulus which is necessary before man will take the moral step in question. ”

“ The reasons why explosives are more likely to be effective than poison on a town are as follows. Houses are far more vulnerable to explosives than earthworks, and do far more damage to their occupants in collapsing, besides being inflammable. And, on the other hand, they contain far more refuges which are nearly gas-proof. A shut room on a first or second floor would be nearly proof against gas released in the neighbourhood if it had not got a lighted fire to drag contaminated air from outside into it. ”

“ The prospect of the next world-war has at least this satisfactory element. In the late war the most rabid nationalists were to be found well behind the front line. In the next war no one will be behind the front line. It will be brought home to all whom it may concern that war is a very dirty business.
No doubt there is a fair chance that [Pg 85] the possibility of human organization on a planetary scale may be rendered impossible by such a war. If so mankind will probably have to wait for a couple of thousand years for another opportunity. ”

“ Wise men observed them and hoped, for example, to increase the probability of success in their own enterprises by beginning them when Jupiter was in the ascendant. These attempts were unsuccessful, though far more valuable to humanity than most of the methods successfully employed for the same purposes, such as fraud, violence and corruption. They led to astronomy, and so to all modern physics. We now know that the only probable way of harnessing the kinetic energy of the heavenly bodies is to employ tidal power to create electric currents. ”