Bronowski_1956 Sciences and Human Values

8/3/2019 Bronowski_1956 Sciences and Human Values

1/48

, -

I

B ooks by J . Bronowsk iScience and

Human Valueshe Face of ViolenceCommonsense of ScienceWilliam Blake: A Man without A MaskThe Poets' Defence

B Y J . B R O N O W S K II

/ (

JULIAN MESSNER , INC . NEW YORK


2/48

Published by Julian Messner, Inc.8 West 40 Street, New York 18

CONTENTSPublished simultaneously in Canada

by The Copp Clark Publishing Co. LimitedCopyright 1956 by J. Bronowski

1 The Creative M ind2 The Hab it o f Truth3 The Sense of Human D ign ity

73363

Printed in the United States of America


3/48

ILLUSTRATIONS

'I

Part 1: Glad Day by W illiam BlakePart 2: Portrait of a Lady with An Ermine

by Leonardo Da VinciPart 3: Old Man Fettered from The First Book of

U rizen by W illiam BlakePage 20: Planetary Orbits Embedded in the Regular

Solids. I llu stra tio n from K e ple r's M y ste riumCosmographicum, 1596

Page 38: The Proportions of the Human Figure AfterVitruvius by Leonardo D a Vinci

JACKET AND HALF-TITLE PAGE DECORATIONS: The Ancient"of Days Striking the First Circle of the Earth byW illia m B lake


4/48

1 TheCreative Mind

'I


5/48

ON a fineNovember day in '945, late in the after-noon, I was landed on an airstrip in Southern Japan.From there a jeep was to take me over the mountainsto join a ship which lay in Nagasaki Harbour. I knewnothing of the country or the distance before us. Wedrove off; dusk fell; the road rose and fell away, thepine woods came down to the road, straggled on andopened again. I did not know that we had left theopen country until unexpectedly I heard the ship'sloudspeakers broadcasting dance music. Then sud-denly I was aware that we were already at the centerof damage in Nagasaki. The shadows behind me werethe skeletons of the Mitsubishi factory buildings,pushed backwards and sideways as if by a giant hand.What I had thought to be broken rocks was a concretepower house with its roof punched in. I could nowmake out the outline of two crumpled gasometers;there was a cold furnace festooned with service pipes;otherwise nothing but cockeyed telegraph poles andloops of wire in a bare waste of ashes. I had blundered

9


6/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUESinto this desolate landscape as instantly as one mightwake among the mountains of the moon. The momentof recognition when I realized that I was already inNagasaki is present to me as I write, as vividly as whenI lived it. I see the warm night and the meaninglessshapes; I can even remember the tune that was com-ing from the ship. It was a dance tune which had beenpopular in 1945, and it was called "Is You Is Or IsYou Ain't l\1a Baby?"

This book, which I have called S cience and H um anValues, was born at that moment. For the moment Ihave recalled was a universal moment what I met was,almost as abruptly, the experience of mankind. On anevening like that evening, some time in 1945, each ofus in his own way learned that his imagination hadbeen dwarfed. \\1e looked up and saw the power ofwhich we had been proud loom over us like the ruinsof Nagasaki.

The power of science for good and for evil hastroubled' other minds than ours. We are not herefumbling with a new dilemma; our subject and ourfears are as old as the tool-making civilizations. Menhave been killed with weapons before now: whathappened at Nagasaki was only more massive (for40~ooowere killed there by a flash which lasted sec-onds) and more ironical (for the bomb exploded overthe main Christian community in Japan). Nothinghappened in 1945 except that we changed the scaleof our indifference to man; and conscience, in revenge,

THE CREATIVE MINDfor an instant became immediate to us. Before thisimmediacy fades in a sequence of televised atomictests, let us acknowledge our subject for what it is:civilization face to face with its own implications.The implications are both the industrial slum whichNagasaki was before it was bombed, and the ashy deso-lation which the bomb made of the slum. And civiliza-tion asks of both ruins: "Is You Is Or Is You Ain'tMa Baby?"

The man whom I imagine to be asking this question,wryly with a sense of shame, is not a scientist; he iscivilized man. It is of course more usual for each mem-ber of civilization to take flight from its consequencesby protesting that others have failed him. Those whoseeducation and perhaps tastes have confined them tothe humanities protest that the scientists alone are toblame, for plainly no mandarin ever made a bomb oran industry. The scientists say, with equal contempt,that the Greek scholars and the earnest explorers ofcave paintings do well to wash their hands of blame;but what in fact are they doing to help direct thesociety whose ills grow more often from inaction thanfrom error?

This absurd division reached its r ed uc tio a d a bs ur-dum, I think, when one of my teachers, G. H. Hardy,justified' his great life work on the ground that it coulddo no one the least harm-or the least good. But

10 11


7/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE CREATIVE MIND

12

which has no business except to be happy. To H. G.Wells this was a dream of heaven-a modern versionof the idle, harp-resounding heaven of other child-hood pieties. But in fact it is the picture of a slavesociety and should make us shiver whenever we heara man of sensibility dismiss science as someone else'sconcern. The world today is made, it is powered byscience; and for any man to abdicate an interest inscience is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.My aim in this book is to show that the parts of

civilization make a whole: to display the links whichgive society its coherence and, more, which give it life.In particular, I want to show the place of science inthe canons of conduct which it has still to perfect.This subject falls into three parts. The first is astudy of the nature of the scientific activity, and withit of all those imaginative acts of understanding whichexercise T he C reative M i nd. After this it is logical toask what is the nature of the truth, as we seek it inscience and in social life and to trace the influencewhich this search for empirical truth has had on con-duct. This influence has prompted me to call thesecond part T he H abit of T ruth. Last I shall study theconditions for the success of science and find in themthe values of man which science would have had toinvent afresh if man had not otherwise known them:the values which make up The S ense of HumanDignity.

This, then, is a high-ranging subject which is not13

Hardy was a mathematician; will humanists really lethim opt out of the conspiracy of scientists? Or arescientists to forgive Hardy because, protest as hemight, most of them learned their indispensablemathematics from his books?

There is no comfort in such bickering. When Shel-ley pictured science as a modern Prometheus whowould wake the world to a wonderful dream of God-win, he was alas too simple. But it is as pointless toread what has happened since as a nightmare. Dreamor nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is,and we have to live it awake. We live in a world whichis penetrated through and through by science andwhich is both whole and real. We cannot turn it intoa game simply by taking sides.

And this make-believe game might cost us what weval ue most: the human content of our lives. Thescholar who disdains science may speak in fun, buthis fun is not quite a laughing matter. To think ofscience as a set of special tricks, to see the scientist asthe manipulator of outlandish skills-this is the rootof the poison mandrake. which flourishes rank in thecomic strips. There is no more threatening and nomore degrading doctrine than the fancy that somehowwe may shelve the responsibility for making the deci-sions of our society by passing it to a few scientistsarmored with a special magic. This is another dream,the dream of H. G. Wells, in which the tall elegantengineers rule, with perfect benevolence, a humanity


8/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUESto be held in the narrow limits of a laboratory. It dis-putes the prejudice of the humanist who takes hisscience sourly and, equally, the petty view which manyscientists take of their own activity and that of others.When men misunderstand their own work, they can-not understand the work of others; so that it is naturalthat these scientists have been indifferent to the arts.They have been content, with the humanists, to thinkscience mechanical and neutral; they could thereforejustify themselves only by the claim that it is practical.By this lame criterion, they have of course found _poetry and music and painting at least unreal andoften meaningless. I challenge all these judgements.

There is a likeness between the creative acts of themind in art and in science. Yet, when a man uses theword science in such a sentence, it may be suspectedthat he does not mean what the headlines mean byscience. Am I about to sidle away to those riddles inthe Theory of Nurnbers which Hardy loved, or to theheady speculations of astrophysicists, in order to makeclaims for abstract science which have no bearing onits daily practice?

I have no such design. My purpose is to talk aboutscience as it is, practical and theoretical. I define sci-ence as the organization of our knowledge in such away that it commands more of the hidden potentialin nature. What I have in mind therefore is both deep

14

THE CREATIVE MINDand matter of fact; it reaches from the kinetic theoryof gases to the telephone and the suspension bridgeand medicated toothpaste. It admits no sharp bound-ary between knowledge and use. There are of coursepeople who like to draw a line between pure and ap-plied science; and oddly, they are often the same peo-ple who find art unreal. To them, the word useful is afinal arbiter, either for or against a work; and they usethis word as if it can mean only what makes a man feelheavier after meals.

There is no sanction for confining the practice ofscience in this or another way. True, science is full ofuseful inventions. And its theories have often beenmade by men whose imagination was directed by theuses to which their age looked. Newton turned nat-urally to astronomy because it was the subject of hisday; and it was so because finding one's way at sea hadlong been a practical preoccupation of the society intowhich he was born. It should be added, mischievously,that astronomy also had some standing because it wasused very practically to cast horoscopes. (Kepler usedit for this purpose; in the Thirty Years' War, he castthe horoscope of Wallenstein which wonderfully toldhis character, and he predicted a universal disaster for1634 which proved to be the murder of Wallenstein.)

In a setting which is more familiar, Faraday workedall his life to link electricity with magnetism becausethis was the glittering problem of his day; and it wasso because his society, like ours, was on the lookout

1 5


9/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUESfor new sources of power. Consider a more modestexample today: the new mathematical methods ofautomatic control, a subject sometimes called cyber-netics, have been developed now because this is a timewhen communication and control have in effect be-come forms of power. These inventions have beendirected by social needs, and they are useful inven-tions; yet it was not their usefulness which dominatedand set light to the minds of those who made them.Neither Newton nor Faraday, nor yet Professor Nor-bert Wiener, spent their time in a scramble for patents.

What a scientist does is compounded of two inter-ests: the interest of his time and his own interest. Inthis his behavior is no different from any other man's.The need of the age gives its shape to scientific prog-ress as a whole. But it is not the need of the age whichgives the individual scientist his sense of pleasure andof adventure and that excitement which keeps himworking late into the night when all the useful typistshave gone home at five o'clock. He is personally in-volved in his work, as the poet is in his and as the artistis in the painting. Paints and painting, too, must havebeen made for useful ends; and language was devel-oped, from whatever beginnings, for practical com-munication. Yet you cannot have a man handle paintsor language or the symbolic concepts of physics, youcannot even have him stain a miscroscope slide, with-out instantly waking in him a pleasure in the very

16

THE CREATIVE MINDlanguage, a sense of exploring his own activity. Thissense lies at the heart of creation.

The sense of personal exploration is as urgent, andas delightful, to the practical scientist as to the theo-retical. Those who think otherwise are confusing whatis practical with what is humdrum. Good humdrumwork without originality is done every day by everyone, theoretical scientists as well as practical, andwriters and painters too, as well as truck drivers andbank clerks. Of course the unoriginal work keeps theworld going; but it is not therefore the monopoly ofpractical men. And neither need the practical man beunoriginal. If he is to break out of what has been donebefore, he must bring to his own tools the same senseof pride and discovery which the poet brings to words.He cannot afford to be less radical in conceiving andless creative in designing a new turbine than a newworld system.

And this is why in turn practical discoveries are notmade only by practical man. As the world's interest hasshifted, since the Industrial Revolution, to the tap-ping of new springs of power, the theoretical scientisthas shifted his interests too. His speculations aboutenergy have been as abstract as once they were aboutastronomy; and they have been profound now as theywere then, because the man loved to think. The Carnotcycle and the dynamo grew equally from this love,and so did nuclear physics and the German V weaponsand Kelvin's interest in low temperatures. Man does

17i


10/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUESnot invent by following either use or tradition; he doesnot 'invent even a new form of communication bycalling a conference of communication engineers.Who invented the television set? In any deep sense, itwas Clerk Maxwell who foresaw the existence of radiowaves, and Heinrich Hertz who proved it, and J . J .Thomson who discovered the electron. This is not saidin order to rob any practical man of the invention, butfrom a sad sense of justice; for neither Maxwell norHertz nor J . J . Thomson would take pride in televisionjust now.

Man masters nature not by force but by under-standing. This is why science has succeeded wheremagic failed: because it has looked for no spell to caston nature. The alchemist and the magician in the Mid-dle Ages thought, and the addict of comic strips isstill encouraged to think, that nature must be mas-tered by a device which outrages her laws. But in fourhundred years since the Scientific Revolution we havelearned that we gain our ends only with the laws ofnature; we control her only by understanding her laws.V\1e cannot even bully nature by any insistence thatour work shall be designed to give power over her.We must be content that power is the by-product ofunderstanding. So the Greeks said that Orpheus playedthe lyre with such sympathy that wild beasts weretamed by the hand on the strings. They did not sug-gest that he got this gift by setting out to be a liontamer.

THE CREATIVE MINDWhat is the insight with which the scientist tries to

see into nature? Can it indeed be called either imag-inative or creative? To the literary man the questionmay seem merely silly. He has been taught that scienceis a large collection of facts; and if this is true, thenthe only seeing which scientists need do is, he sup~poses, seeing the facts. He pictures them, the color-less professionals of science, going off to work in themorning into the universe in a neutral, unexposedstate. They then expose themselves like a photographicplate. And then in the darkroom or laboratory theydevelop the image, so that suddenly and startlingly itappears, printed in capital letters, as a new formulafor atomic energy.

Men who have read Balzac and Zola are not de-ceived by the claims of these writers that they do nomore than record the facts. The readers of ChristopherIsherwood do not take him literally when he writes: "Iam a camera." Yet the same readers solemnly carrywith them from their school days this foolish pictureof the scientist fixing by some mechanical process thefacts of nature. I have had, of all people, a historian tellme that science is a collection of facts, and his voicehad not even the irony of one filing cabinet reprovinganother.

I t seems impossible that this historian had everstudied the beginnings of a scientific discovery. TheScientific Revolution can be held to begin in the year1543 when there was brought to Copernicus, perhaps

19


11/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES

Planetary Orbits Embedded in the Regular Solids.F rom K e ple r's M y ste riu m C o sm og ra ph ic um , 1 5 96

20

THE CREATIVE MINDon his deathbed, the first printed copy of the book hehad written about a dozen years earlier. The thesis ofthis book is that the earth moves around the sun.When did Copernicus go out and record this factwith his camera? What appearance in nature promptedhis outrageous guess? And in what odd sense is thisguess to be called a neutral record of fact?

Less than a hundred years after Copernicus, Keplerpublished (between 1609 and 1619) the three lawswhich describe the paths of the planets. The work ofNewton and with it most of our mechanics springfrom these laws. They have a solid, matter-of-factsound. For example, Kepler says that if one squaresthe year of a planet, one gets a number which is pro-portional to the cube of its average distance from thesun. Does anyone think that such a law is found bytaking enough readings and then squaring and cubingeverything in sight? If he does then, as a scientist, heis doomed to a wasted life; he has as little prospect ofmaking a scientific discovery as an electronic brain has.

It was not this way that Copernicus and Keplerthought, or that scientists think today. Copernicusfound that the orbits of the planets would look sim-pler if they were looked at from the sun and not fromthe earth. But he did not in the first place find this byroutine calculation. His first step was a leap of imagina-tion-to lift himself from the earth, and put himselfwildly, speculatively into the sun. "The earth conceivesfrom the sun," he wrote; and "the sun rules the family

21


12/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE CREATIVE MINDof stars." We catch in his mind an image, the gestureof tbe virile man standing in the sun, with arms out-stretched, overlooking the planets. Perhaps Coper-nicus took the picture from the drawings of the youthwith outstretched arms which the Renaissance teachersput into their books on the proportions of the body.Perhaps he knew Leonardo's drawings of his lovedpupil Salai. I do not know. To me, the gesture ofCopernicus, the shining youth looking outward fromthe sun, is still vivid in a drawing which WilliamBlake about 1800 based on ali these: the drawingwhich is usually called G lad D ay.

Kepler's mind, we know, was filled with just suchfanciful analogies; and we know what they were. Kep-ler wanted to relate the speeds of the planets to themusical intervals. He tried to fit the five regular solidsinto their orbits. None of these likenesses worked, andthey have been forgotten; yet they have been and theyremain the stepping stones of every creative mind.Kepler felt for his laws by way of metaphors, hesearched mystically for likenesses with what he knewin every strange corner of nature. And when amongthese guesses he hit upon his laws, he did not thinkof their numbers as the balancing of a cosmic bankaccount, but as a revelation of the unity in all nature.To us, the analogies by which Kepler listened for themovement of the planets in the music of the spheresare far-fetched; but are they more so than the wild

leap by which Rutherford and Bohr found a model forthe atom in, of all places, the planetary system?

I

22

No scientific theory is a collection of facts. It willnot even do to call a theory true or false in the simplesense in which every fact is either so or not so. TheEpicureans held that matter is made of atoms twothousand years ago and we are now tempted tosay that their theory was true. But if we do so, we con-fuse their notion of matter with our own. John Daltonin 1808 first saw the structure of matter as we do today,and what he took from the ancients was not theirtheory but something richer, their image: the atom.Much of what was in Dalton's mind was as vague asthe Greek notion, and quite as mistaken. But he sud-denly gave life to the new facts of chemistry and theancient theory together, by fusing them to give whatneither had: a coherent picture of how matter is

(/ linked and built up from different kinds of atoms. Theact of fusion is the creative act.

All science is the search for unity in hidden like-nesses. The search may be on a grand scale, as in themodern theories which try to link the fields of gravi-tation and electro-magnetism. But we do not needto be browbeaten by the scale of science. There arediscoveries to be made by snatching a small likenessfrom the air too, if it is bold enough. In 1932 theJapanese physicist Yukawa wrote a paper which can

23


13/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUESstill g ive heart to a young scien tis t. H e took as h isstar tin g po in t the know n fact that w aves o f ligh t cansom etim es behave as if they w ere separate pellets .From th is he reasoned that the fo rces w hich ho ld thenucleus o f an atom together m ight som etim es also b eob served as if they w ere so lid pellets . A schoo lboycan see ho w thin Y uk aw a's an alo gy is , an d his teacherw ould be severe w ith it. Yet Yukaw a w ithout a b lushcalcula ted the m ass o f the pe lle t he expected to see,and w aited . H e w as righ t; h is m eson w as found , anda ran ge o f o ther m eso ns, n either the exis ten ce n or thenature o f w hich had been suspected befo re . The lik e-n ess had b orn e fru it.The scien tis t lo ok s fo r o rder in the appearances o f

n atu re b y explo rin g su ch lik en ess es. F or o rd er d oes n otd isplay itself o f itself; if it can be said to b e there atall, it is n o t there fo r the m ere look ing . There is n ow ay o f po in tin g a finger o r a cam era a t it; o rder m us tb e d isco vered an d, in a deep sen se, it m us t b e created .What w e see, a s w e s ee it, is m ere d is ord er.This po in t has b een put tren chan tly in a fab le by

P ro fes so r K arl Po pper. S uppo se th at so m eo ne w ish edto g iv e h is w h ole life to s cien ce. S uppo se th at h e th ere-fo re sat do wn , pen cil in han d, an d fo r the n ext tw en ty ,th ir ty , fo rty y ea rs r eco rd ed in n ote bo ok a fte r n ote bo okev ery th in g th at h e co uld o bs erv e. H e m ay b e su ppo sedto leave out no th ing: today 's hum idity , the racing re-sults, the level o f co sm ic rad iatio n and the sto ckm ark et prices an d the lo ok o f M ars, all w ould b e there.

24

THE CREATIVE MINDH e w ould have com piled the m ost ca refu l reco rd o fn ature tha t has ever b een m ade; an d, dy in g in the ca lm ,certain ty o f a life w ell spen t, he w ould o f co urse leaveh is no tebook s to the Royal Society . W ould the R oyalSociety thank him fo r the treasure o f a lifetim e o fobse rva t ion? Itwo uld n ot. It w ould re fuse to o pen hisn oteb oo ks at a ll, b ecause it w ould k no w w itho ut lo ok - .in g that they con tain on ly a jum ble o f d iso rderly andme an in g le ss i tem s.

S cien ce fin ds o rd er a nd m ean in g in o ur experien ce,and sets about th is in qu ite a d ifferen t w ay . It setsabout it a s New ton did in the sto ry w hich he him selfto ld in h is o ld age, and o f w hich the schoo lbook s g iveo nly a caricatu re. In the y ear 1665, w hen New ton w astw e nty -tw o , th e plag ue b ro ke o ut in s ou th ern E ng lan d,an d the U nivers ity o f C am bridge w as clo sed . N ew to ntherefo re spen t the next eigh teen m on ths at hom e,rem oved from trad itio n al learn ing , at a tim e w hen hew as im patien t fo r know ledge and , in h is ow n phrase:"I w as in the prim e o f m y age fo r inven tio n ." In th iseager, b oy ish m ood, sittin g one day in the garden o fh is w idow ed m other , he saw an apple fall. So far thebook s have the sto ry r igh t; w e th in k w e even know thek ind o f apple; trad itio n has it that it w as a Flow er o fKen t. B ut now they m iss the crux o f the s to ry . Fo rw hat struck the young New ton a t the s igh t w as no tthe thought that the apple m us t b e draw n to the earth

2 5


14/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE CREATIVE MINDby gravity; that conception was older than Newton.What struck him was the conjecture that the sameforce of gravity, which reaches to the top of the tree,might go on reaching out beyond the earth and its air,endlessly into space. Gravity might reach the moon:this was Newton's new thought; and it might be grav-ity which holds the moon in her orbit. There and thenhe calculated what force from the earth would holdthe moon, and compared it with the known force ofgravity at tree height. The forces agreed; Newton sayslaconically: "I found them answer pretty nearly." Yetthey agreed only nearly: the likeness and the approxi-mation go together, for no likeness is exact. In New-ton's sentence modern science is full grown.It grows from a comparison. Ithas seized a likenessbetween two unlike appearances; for the apple in thesummer garden and the grave moon overhead aresurely as unlike in their movements as two things canbe. Newton traced in them two expressions of a singleconcept, gravitation: and the concept (and the unity)are in that sense his free creation. The progress ofscience is the discovery at each step of a new orderwhich gives unity to what had long seemed unlike.Faraday did this when he closed the link betweenelectricity and magnetism. Clerk Maxwell did it whenhe linked both with light. Einstein linked time withspace, mass with energy, and the path of light past thesun with the flight of a bullet; and spent his dyingyears in trying to add to these likenesses another, which

2 6

would find a single imaginative order between theequations of Clerk Maxwell and his own geometry ofgravitation.

When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returnedalways to one deep thought: beauty, he said, is "unityin variety." Science is nothing else than the search todiscover unity in the wild variety of nature-or moreexactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, paint-ing, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase,for unity in variety. Each in its own way looks forlikenesses under the variety of human experience.What is a poetic image but the seizing and the explora-tion of a hidden likeness, in holding together twoparts of a comparison which are to give depth each tothe other? When Romeo finds Juliet in the tomb, andthinks her dead, he uses in his heartbreaking speechthe words:

Death that hath suckt the honey of thy breath.The critic can only haltingly take to pieces the singleshock which this image carries. The young Shakespeareadmired Marlowe, and Marlowe's Faustus had said ofthe ghostly kiss of Helen of Troy that it sucked forthhis soul. But that is a pale image; what Shakespearehas done is to fire it with the single word honey. Deathis a bee at the lips of Juliet, and the bee is an insectthat stings; the sting of death was a commonplacephrase when Shakespeare wrote. The sting is there,under the image; Shakespeare has packed it into the

2 7


15/48

w ord honey ; bu t the very w ord rides pow erfu lly overits ow n underto n es . D eath is a b ee that s tin gs o therpeople, bu t it com es to Julie t as if she w ere a flo wer;th is is the m oving thought under the in stan t im age.T he creativ e m in d spea ks in su ch th ou gh ts.The poe tic im age here is a lso , and acciden ta lly ,

he igh ten ed by the tendern ess w hich tow n dw ellersnow feel fo r coun try w ay s. B ut it n eed no t b e; therea re lik en ess es to co nju re w ith , an d im ag es as po w erfu l,w ith in the m an -m ade w orld . T he po em s o f A lexan derPope belong to th is w orld . T hey are no t coun trified ,and therefo re readers today find them unem otio n aland o ften artificial. Let m e then quo te Pope: here heis in a fo rm al satire face to face, tow ards the end o fh is life , w ith h is ow n gifts . In eigh t lin es he lookspo ignan tly fo rw ard tow ards death and back to thelab orio us y ears w hich m ade him fam ous.

Y ears foll'w ing Y ea rs, steal som ethin g ev'ry d ay,At last they steal us fro m our selves aw ay;I on e o ur F rolicks, one A mu sem ents en d,In one a M istress drops, in one a Friend:Th is subtle T hief of L ife, this pa ltry Tim e,W hat will it leave m e, if it sn atch m y R him e?If ev'ry W heel of that unweary'd M illT ha t tum 'd ten th ousand V erses, now stan ds still.

The hum an m ind had been com pared to w hat theeigh teen th cen tury called a m ill, that is to a m achin e,b efo re; Po pe's o wn ido l B olin gb ro ke had co mpared itto a clo ck w ork . In th es e lin es th e lik en es s g oes d eeper ,

2 8

THE CREATIVE MINDfo r Po pe is th ink in g o f the ten tho usan d V erses w hichhe had tran slated from Hom er: w hat he say s is sadan d just at the sam e tim e, b ecause th is really had b eena mechan ical and at tim es a grind ing task . Yet theclo ck w ork is presen t in th e im ag e to o; w h en th e w h eelsstand still, tim e fo r Pope w ill s tand still fo r ever; w efe el th at w e a lr ea dy h ea r, o ve r th e h orizo n, th e d efia nceo f Faust w hich Goethe had no t y et w ritten -le t theclo ck str ik e and s top, let the hand fall, and tim e be atan en d.


W erd ich zum Augenblicke sagen:V erw eile do ch! du bist so sch on!Dann magst du m ich in Fes se ln s ch lagen,Dann w ill ich gem zugrunde gehn!Dann mag die To tengl ocke s cha ll en ,D ann bist d u deines D ien stes frei,D ie U hr m ag stehn, der Zeiger fallen,E s sei die Zeit fur m ich vorbeil

I have quo ted Po pe an d G oethe b ecause their m eta-pho r here is n o t poetic; it is rather a hand reach ingstraigh t in to experien ce and arrang ing it w ith n ewm ean ing . M etapho rs o f th is k ind need no t alw ay s bew ritten in w ords . The mos t pow erful o f them all iss im ply the presence o f K ing Lear and his Foo l in thehut o f a m an w ho is sham ming m adness, w hile ligh t-n ing rages outs ide. O r le t m e quo te ano ther clash o ftw o conceptio n s o f life , from a m odern poet. In h islater poem s, W . B . Yeats w as troub led by the feelin gtha t in shuttin g h im self up to w rite , he w as m issing

2 9


16/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE CREATIVE MIND

The intellect of man is forced to choosePerfection of the life, or of the work.This problem, whether man fulfills himself in workor in play, is of course more common than Yeatsallowed; and it may be more commonplace. But it isgiven breadth and force by the images in which Yeatspondered it.

Get all the gold and silver that you can,Satisfy ambition, or animateThe trivial days and ram them with the sun,And yet upon these maxims meditate:All women dote upon an idle manAlthough their children need a rich estate;No man has ever lived that had enoughOf children's gratitude or woman's love.

The love of women, the gratitude of children: theimages fix two philosophies as nothing else can. Theyare tools of creative thought, as coherent and as exactas the conceptual images with which science works: astime and space, or as the proton and the neutron.

ness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them twoaspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is theact of creation, in which an original thought is born,and it is the same act in original science and originalart. But it is not therefore the monopoly of the manwho wrote the poem or who made the discovery. Onthe contrary, I believe this view of the creative act tobe right because it alone gives a meaning to the act ofappreciation. The poem or the discovery exists in twomoments of vision: the moment of appreciation asmuch as that of creation; for the appreciator must seethe movement, wake to the echo which was started inthe creation of the work. In the moment of apprecia-tion we live again the moment when the creator sawand held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes usaback and persuades us together, when we find ajuxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing,when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we donot merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enactthe creative act, and we ourselves make the discoveryagain. At bottom, there is no unifying likeness thereuntil we too have seized it, we too have made it forourselves.

How slipshod by comparison is the notion thateither art or science sets out to copy nature. If the taskof the painter were to copy for men what they see,the critic could make only a single judgement: eitherthat the copy is right or that it is wrong. And if sciencewere a copy of fact, then every theory would be either

31

the active pleasures of life; and yet it seemed to himcertain that the man who lives for these pleasures willleave no lasting work behind him. He said this at timesvery simply, too:

The discoveries of science, the works of art areexplorations-more, are explosions, of a hidden like-

3


17/48


2 TheHabit of T ruth

right or wrong, and would be so forever. There wouldbe nothing left for us to say but this is so or is not so .No one who has read a page by a good critic or a specu-lative scientist can ever again think that this barrenchoice of yes or no is all that the mind offers.

Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection,labeled: "Do not touch." There are no appearances tobe photographed, no experiences to be copied, inwhich we do not take part. We re-make nature by theact of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. Andthe great poem and the deep theorem are new to everyreader, and yet are his own experiences, because hehimself re-creates them. They are the marks of unityin variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes thisfor itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.


18/48

I N The C reative M ind I set out to show that thereexists a single creative activity, which is displayed alikein the arts and in the sciences. It is wrong to think ofscience as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrongto think of the arts as remote and private fancies.What makes each human, what makes them universalis the stamp of the creative mind.

I found the act of creation to lie in the discovery ofa hidden likeness. The scientist or the artist takes twofacts or experiences which are separate; he finds inthem a likeness which had not been seen before; andhe creates a unity by showing the likeness.

The act of creation is therefore original; but it doesnot stop with its originator. The work of art or ofscience is universal because each of us re-creates it.We are moved by the poem, we follow the theorembecause in them we discover again and seize the like-ness which their creator first seized. The act of appre-ciation re-enacts the act of creation; and we are (eachof us) actors, we are interpreters of it.

3 5


19/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE HABIT OF TRUTHMy examples were drawn from physics and from

poetry, because these happen to be the works of manwhich I know best. But what is great in these is com-mon to all great works. In the museum at Cracowthere is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci called "Por-trait of a Lady with an Ermine": it shows a girl hold-ing a stoat in her arms. The girl was probably a mistressof Ludovico Sforza, the usurper of Milan, at whosecourt Leonardo lived from about 1482 to 1499, amidthe violence and intrigue which all his life drew himand repelled him together. The stoat was an emblemof Ludovico Sforza, and is probably also a pun on thegirl's name. And in a sense the whole picture is a pun,if I may borrow for the word the tragic intensity whichColeridge found in the puns of Shakespeare. Leonardohas matched the stoat in the girl. In the skull underthe long brow, in the lucid. eyes, in the stately, brutal,beautiful and stupid head of the girl, he has re-discov-ered the animal nature; and done so without malice,almost as a matter of fact. The very carriage of thegirl and the stoat, the gesture of the hand and theclaw, explore the character with the anatomy. As welook, the emblematic likeness springs as freshly in ourminds as it did in Leonardo's when he looked at thegirl and asked her to turn her head. "The Lady withthe Ermine" is as much a research into man andanimal, and a creation of unity, as is Darwin's Origino f Species.

So much may be granted; and yet where is it tostop? The creative act is alike in art and in science;but it cannot be identical in the two; there must be adifference as well as a likeness. For example, the artistin his creation surely has open to him a dimension offreedom which is closed to the scientist. I have in-sisted that the scientist does not merely record thefacts, but he must conform to the facts. The sanctionof truth is an exact boundary which encloses him, in away in which it does not constrain the poet or thepainter. Shakespeare can make Romeo say thingsabout the look of Juliet which, although they are re-vealing, are certainly not true in fact.o she doth teach the Torches to burne bright.But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?I t is the East, and Juliet is the Sunne.

And Shakespeare himself is aware that these state-ments differ from those made by exact observers. Forhe exploits the difference deliberately for a new po-etic effect in the sonnet which begins, tartly:

My }'1istres eyes are-nothing like the Sunne.This takes its point and pungency from being un-poetic. Shakespeare designedly in this sonnet plays thefinicking scientist straight-faced-

Currall is [atre more red, then her lips red,If snow be white, why then her brests are dun

37


20/48


The Proportions of the Human Figure AfterVitruvius by Leonardo Da Vinci

THE HABIT OF TRUTH-in order to say at last, overwhelmingly, that even inplain fact his love is unbounded. No doubt Shake-speare would have been willing to argue in other placesthat the poetic image can be called true: the parableof the Prodigal Son is true in some sense, and so isthe pursuit of Orestes, and the imagery of R omeo andJuliet itself. But the sonnet proves that Shakespearedid not think this meaning of truth to be the same asthat which he met in Holinshed's Chronicles andWilliam Gilbert's De Magne te , and which now dogsthe writer of a thesis on electronic networks.

We cannot shirk the historic question, What istruth? On the contrary: the civilization we take pridein took a new strength on the day the question wasasked. It took its greatest strength later from Renais-sance men like Leonardo, in whom truth to fact be-came a passion. The sanction of experienced fact asa face of truth is a profound subject, and the main-spring which has moved our civilization since theRenaissance.

Those who have gone out to climb in the Himalayashave brought back, besides the dubious tracks ofAbominable Snowmen, a more revealing model oftruth. It is contained in the story which they tell oftheir first sight of some inaccessible and rarely seenmountain. The western climbers, at home with com-pass and map projection, can match this view of the

39


21/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUESm oun tain w ith ano ther v iew seen years ago . B ut tothe n ative clim bers w ith them , each face is a separatepictu re and puzzle. They m ay know ano ther face o fthe m oun tain , and th is face to o , b etter than thestranger; and yet they have no w ay o f fittin g the tw ofaces to geth er . E ric S hipto n d escrib es th is d iv is io n inthe acco un t o f h is reco nn aissan ce fo r the n ew ro ute toEverest, o n w hich the later ascen t in 1953 wa s b as ed .H ere is Shipton m oving up to a v iew o f Everes t fromthe south w hich is n ew to h im , but w hich his lead ingS herpa , A ng tark ay , h ad k no w n in ch ild ho od .

THE HABIT OF TRUTHthe shape o f a peak here and o f ano ther there. Theparts b eg in to fit to gethe r; the puzzled m an 's m indbegin s to bu ild a m ap; and sudden ly the pieces a resnug , the m ap w ill tum around , and the tw o faceso f the m oun tain are bo th Everest. O ther expeditio n sin o ther places have to ld o f the de ligh t o f the nativeclim b er s a t s uch a re co gn itio n.A ll acts o f reco gn itio n a re o f th is k in d. T he girl m et

on the beach , the m an know n long ago , puzzle us fo ra mom en t and then fall in to place ; the new face fitso n to and en larges the o ld . W e are used to makethese connectio n s in tim e; and lik e the clim bers onEveres t, w e m ake them also in space. If w e did no t,o ur m inds w ould con ta in on ly a clu tter o f iso latedexperien ces. B y m ak ing such connectio n s w e find ino ur experien ce s th e m aps o f th in gs .There is n o o ther ev idence fo r the existen ce o f

th ings. W e see the le ft pro file o f a m an and w e seethe righ t pro file; w e never see them together . W hatare our grounds fo r th in k ing tha t they belong to onem an? W hat are the grounds fo r th in k ing that thereis such a th ing as the one m an at all? B y the canon so f class ical log ic, there a re no grounds: n o one candeduce the m an . W e in fer h im from his pro files asw e in fer that the even ing sta r and the m orn ing s tarare bo th the plan e t Venus : b ecause it m akes tw o ex-perien ces co here, an d experien ce pro ves it to b e co n-s is ten t. Pro files and fu ll face, b ack an d fron t, theparts bu ild a round w ho le, n o t on ly by sigh t bu t by

41

Beyond the village of Pangbochi we left the forest be-hind and entered highland country of heath and coarsegrass. We spent the night of the 26th at Phariche, agrazing village then deserted, and on the morning ofthe 27th we turned into the Lobujya Khola, the valleywhich contains the Khombu Glacier (which flowsfrom the south and south-west side of Everest). Aswe climbed into the valley we saw at its head the lineof the main watershed. I recognised immediately thepeaks and saddles so familiar to us from the Rongbuk(the north) side: Pumori, Lingtren, the Lho La, theNorth Peak and the west shoulder of Everest. It is. curious that Angtarkay, who knew these features aswen as I did from the otherside and had spent manyyears of his boyhood grazing yaks in this valley, hadnever recognised them as the same; nor did he do sonow until I pointed them out to him.

It is the in quis itive stran ger w ho po in ts o ut the m oun -tain s w h ich flan k E veres t. T he S herpa th en reco gn ize s

4


22/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE HABIT OF TRUTHits use then. The human mind has a way of keepingthe cup or the penny in mind. This is the third step:to have a symbol or a name for the whole penny. Forus the thing has a name, and in a sense is the name:the name or symbol remains present, and the mindworks with it, when the thing is absent. By contrast,one of the difficulties which the Sherpas have in see-ing Everest is that the mountain goes by differentnames in different places.

The words true and false have their place at thelatter steps, when the data of the senses have been puttogether to make a thing which is held in the mind.Only then is it meaningful to ask whether what wethink about the thing is true. That is, we can nowdeduce how the thing should behave, and see whetherit does so . If this is really one mountain, we say, thenthe bearing of that landmark should be due east; andwe check it. If this is a penny, then it should be sen-sible to the touch. This is how Macbeth tests thething he is thinking about and seems to see.

the exploration of the touch and the ear, and thestethoscope and the X-ray tube and all our elabora-tions of inference. Watch a child's eyes and fingerstogether discover that the outside and the inside ofa cup hang together. Watch a man who was bornblind and who can now see, re-building the touchedworld by sight; and never again think that the exist-ence of a thing leaps of itself into the mind, immedi-ate and whole. We know the thing only by mappingand joining our experiences of its aspects.

The discovery of things is made in three steps. Atthe first step there are only the separate data of thesenses: we see the head of the penny, we see the tail.It would be mere pomp to use words as profound astrue and false at this simple step. What we see iseither so or is not so . Where no other judgment canbe made, no more subtle words are in place.

At the second step, we put the head and the tailtogether. We see that it makes sense to treat them asone thing. And the thing is the coherence of its parts. .IIIour expenence.

The human mind does not stop there. The animalcan go as far as this: an ape will learn to recognize acup whenever and however he sees it, and will knowwhat to do with it. But all that has been learnedabout apes underlines that they find it hard to thinkabout the cup when it is not in sight, and to imagine

42

Is this a Dagger, which I see before me,The Handle toward my Hand? Come, let me clutchthee-

Macbeth is using the empirical method: the thing isto be tested by its behavior.

Come, let me clutch thee:Ihaue thee not, and yet Iee thee still.Art thou not fatall Vision, sensible

43


23/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE HABIT OF TRUTHTo fe elin g, a s to sight? or art thou butA D agger of the M inde, a false C reation?

"A Dagger of the Minde, a false Creation"; both theword false and the word creation are exact. What thehuman mind makes of the sense data, and thinksabout, is always a created thing. The construction istrue or false by the test of its behavior. We haveconstructed the thing from the data; we now deducehow the thing should behave; and if it does not, thenour construction was false.

ton took this step when, at the center of astronomy,he put a single activity of the universe: the conceptof gravitation.

There is of course no such thing as gravitation sen-sible to the touch. It is neither seen nor heard; and ifit seems to be felt, this now appears to be a quirk ofspace. Yet the concept of gravitation was real andtrue. It was constructed from. the data by the samesteps which fuse two views of Everest into one moun-tain or many conversations into one man. And theconcept is tested as we test the man, by its behavior:it must be in character. Newton was doing this in hisgarden in 1666 when he computed the force whichholds the moon in her orbit; like Macbeth, he wastesting the creation of the mind.

The creation was a concept-a connected set ofconcepts. There was the concept of a universal gravi-tation, reaching beyond the tree tops and the air tothe ends of space. There was the concept of other uni-versal forces in space which try to pull the moon awayas a whirling stone pulls away from its string. Andthere was the concept which put an end to the fourelements of Aristotle: the concept of mass, alike in theapple and the earth and the moon, in all earthly andall heavenly bodies.

All these are real creations: they find a unity inwhat seemed unlike. They are symbols; 'they do notexist without the creation. Solid as it seems, there isno such thing as mass; as Newton ruefully found, it

I have described so far how we think about things.The-view I have put forward also looks beyond things,to the laws and concepts which make up science. Thisis the real reach of this view: that the three steps bywhich man constructs and names a mountain are alsothe steps by which he makes a theory.

Recall the example of the work of Kepler and ofNewton; the steps are there to be re-traced. The firststep is the collection of data: here, astronomical ob-servations. Next comes the creative step which Keplert OOK , which finds an order in the data by exploringlikenesses. Here the order, the unity is the three lawsby which Kepler described the orbit, not of this planetor of that, but simply of a planet.

Kepler's laws, however, put forward no central con-cept; and the third step is to create this concept. New-

44 45


24/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE HABIT OF TRUTHcannot be defined. We experience mass only as thebehavior of bodies, and it is a single concept onlybeca use they behave consistently.

Indeed, the concept of mass is a peculiarly apt exam-ple. For in the physics of Newton, there are two con-cepts of mass, which are distinct. One is the inertialmass of a body-that which must be overcome whenit is thrown. The other is the gravitational mass ofthe same body-that which must be overcome whenit is lifted from the ground. Newton knew, of course,that the inertial mass is equal to the gravitationalmass; but why are they equal, why should they be thesame single mass? This is a question which Einsteinasked; and in order to answer it, he built in 1915 thewhole theory of General Relativity. Only in that theorywere the two faces of mass made one, and made theunity which is the single concept, mass.

This sequence is characteristic of science. It beginswith a set of appearances. It organizes these into laws.And at the center of the laws it finds a knot, a point atwhich several laws cross: a symbol which gives unityto the laws themselves. Mass, time, magnetic moment,the unconscious: we have grown up with these sym-bolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told thatman had once to create them for himself. He had in-deed, and he has; for mass is not an intuition in themuscle, and time is not bought ready-made at thewatchmaker's.

And we test the concept, as we test the thing, by46

its implications. That is, when the concept has beenbuilt up from some experiences, we reason what be-havior in other experiences should logically flowfrom it. If we find this behavior, we go on holdingthe concept as it is. If we do not find the behaviorwhich the concept logically implies, then we must goback and correct it. In this way logic and experimentare locked together in the scientific method, in a con-stant to and fro in which each follows the other.

This view of the scientific method is not shared byall those who have thought about it. There are twoschools of philosophy which are suspicious of con-ceptual thinking and want to replace it wholly by themanipulation of facts. One is that offshoot of theEnglish empiricist tradition which goes through Ber-trand Russell to Wittgenstein and the logical posi-tivists. This school holds that a rigorous description ofall nature can be pieced together, like a gigantic tinker-toy, out of small units of fact, each of which can beseparately verified to be so . The other is the schoolfounded by Ernst Mach in Austria, and led morerecently by Perey Bridgman in America, which holdsthat science is strictly an account of operations andtheir results. This behaviorist school would like todiscard all models of nature, and confine itself alwaysto saying that if we do this, we get a larger measure-ment than if we do that.

47


25/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUEST hes e acco un ts o f s cien ce seem to m e m istak en , o n

tw o co un ts . Firs t, they fly in the face o f the h isto ricale vid en ce . S in ce G re ek tim e s a nd b efo re , lu cid th in ke rsand indeed all m en have used such w ords as space andm ass and ligh t. T hey have no t asked either Russell'so r B ridgm an 's leave, y et w hat they have do ne w ith thew ords b elongs to the glo r ies o f scien ce as w ell asph ilo sophy ; and it is late in the day to fo rb id themt hi s la ng ua ge .And second, bo th schoo ls fly in the face o f the con -

tem po rary ev id en ce. W e ha ve g oo d g ro un ds to b eliev e,from stud ies o f an im als and m en , that th ink ing as w eunders tand it is m ade po ssib le on ly by the use o fn ames o r sym bols . O ther an im als than man havelanguages, in B ridgm an 's sen se; fo r exam ple, b eessign al to one ano ther w here to go in o rder to find nec-tar. B ern ard de M an deville , w ho w ro te The Fable ofthe B ees in a n e ig hte en th -ce ntu ry p ara ble , w o uld h av ethought th is the height o f ratio n al b ehav iour. B ut noac ti v e s c ie n ti s t sees it so , b eca us e h e k no w s th at s cie nceis no t som eth ing w hich in sects o r m achin es can do .W h at m akes it diffe ren t is a creative process , the ex-plo ratio n o f lik en esses; an d th is has sadly tipto ed o uto f the m echan ical w orlds o f the po sitiv is ts and theo peratio nalis ts , an d left th em em pty .The w orld w hich the human m ind know s and ex-

plo res d oes n ot s urv iv e if it is e mptied o f th ou gh t. A ndtho ught do es n ot surv ive w ithout sy mb olic co ncepts .The sym bo l and the metapho r a re as n ecessary to

48

THE HABIT OF TRUTHscien ce as to po etry . W e a re as h elpless to da y to d efin em ass, fundam en tally , as New ton w as . B ut w e do no tth erefo re th in k, an d n eith er d id h e, th at th e equa tio nsw hich con tain m ass as an unknow n are m ere ru les o fthumb. If w e had been con ten t w ith tha t v iew , w esh ou ld n ev er hav e learn ed to tu rn m ass in to en erg y. Info rm ing a concept o f m ass , in speak ing the w ord , w eb egin a pro cess o f experim en t an d correctio n w hich isth e cr ea tiv e s ea rch fo r tru th .

In the v illage in w hich I live there is a pleasan tdocto r w ho is a little deaf. H e is no t shy about it andhe w ears a hearin g aid . M y y oung daughter has k no wnhim and his aid s ince she w as a baby . W hen at the ageo f tw o she firs t m et ano ther m an w ho w as w earing ahearing aid , she sim ply said : "T hat m an is a docto r."Of course she w as m istak en . Yet if b o th m en had w ornno t hearing aids but stetho scopes , w e should havebeen deligh ted by her generalizatio n . Even then shew ould have had little idea o f w hat a docto r does , andless o f w hat he is . B ut she w ould have been then , andto me she w as even w hile she w as m is tak en , on thepa th to hum an know ledge w hich goes by w ay o f them ak in g an d co rrectin g o f co ncepts .

I should be un jus t if I d id no t gran t that the po si-tiv is t an d o peratio nal scho ols o f ph ilo so ph y h av e h adreason to b e w ary o f the appeal to concepts . Russelland B ridgm an sh ied aw ay from the concept b ecause

49


26/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUESit has a bad record, which still befuddles its use. His-torically, concepts have commonly been set up as ab-solute and inborn notions, like the space and timewhich Kant believed to be ready-made in the mind.The view that our concepts are built up from experi-ence and have constantly to be tested and correctedin experience, is not classical. The classical view hasbeen that concepts are not accessible to empiricaltests. How many people understand, even today, thatthe concepts of science are neither absolute nor ever-lasting? And beyond the field of science, in society,in personality, above all in ethics, how many peoplewill allow the sanction of experienced fact? The com-mon view remains the classical view, that the conceptsof value-justice and honor, dignity and tolerance-have an inwardness which is inaccessible to experience.

The roots of this error go down into the closed logicof the l\1iddle Ages. The characteristic and distin-guished example is the method of St. Thomas Aquinas.The physics which was current for three centuries be-fore the Scientific Revolution derived from Aristotleby way of Arab scholars, and had been formed into asystem by Aquinas. But it did not share the test oftruth of modern physics. Between the years 1256 and12 59 , Aquinas held about 25 0 discussion classes, all onthe subject of truth. Each class lasted two days. Thequestions discussed belong to a world of discoursewhich simply has no common frontier with ours. Theyare such questions as: "Is God's knowledge the cause

5

THE HABIT OF TRUTHof things?" "Is the Book of Life the same as predesti-nation?" "Do angels know the future?"

I do not dismiss these as merely fanciful questions,any more than I regard Tamburlaine and The M ar-riage of H eaven and H ell as fantasies. Yet it is plainthat they have no bearing on matters of truth andfalsehood as we understand them, inductively. Thesedebates are scholastic exercises in absolute logic. Theybegin from concepts which are held to be fixed abso-lutely; they then proceed by deduction; and what isfound in this way is subject to no further test. Thedeductions are true because the first concepts weretrue: that is the scholastic system. It is also the logicof Aristotle. Unhappily, it makes poor physics, forthere the gap between the intuitive and the correctedconcept is gaping.

"

Modem science also began by hankering afterpurely deductive systems. Its first model, of course,was Euclid. One of its historic moments was the con-version of Thomas Hobbes, some time between 1629and 1631.

He was 40 yeares old before he looked on geometry;which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman'Slibrary Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the 47El. libri I.He read the proposition. 'By G-,' sayd he,(He would 'now and then sweare, by way of emphasis)'By G-,' sayd he, 'this is impossible!' So he reads the

5 1


27/48

THE HABIT OF TRUTHonstrate, proved in geometrical order. The book be-gins in the Euclidean manner with eight definitionsand seven axioms. This is a modest apparatus withwhich to attack the universe, for even Euclid's geome-try of the plane needs more than twenty axioms. ButSpinoza tackles it bravely and indeed profoundly, andit is not his fault that after a time we come to feelthat we are standing still. The geometrical system ofethics has exhausted its discoveries. It no longer saysanything new; and worse, it can learn nothing new.

Here is the heart of the difference between the twoways in which we order our lives. Both ways hinge oncentral concepts. In both we reason from the centralconcepts to the consequences which flow from them.But here the two ways divide. In the field of ethics, ofconduct and of values, we think as Aquinas andSpinoza thought: that our concepts must remain un-changeable because they are either inspired or self-evident. In the field of science, four hundred years ofadventure have taught us that the rational method ismore subtle than this, and that concepts are its mostsubtle creations. A hundred and fifty years ago, Gaussand others proved that the axioms of Euclid areneither self-evident nor necessarily exact in our world.Much of physics since then, for instance in relativity,has been the re-making of a more delicate and a moreexciting concept of space. The need to do so hassprung from the facts; and yet, how the new conceptshave outraged our self-evident notions of how a well-

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUESdemonstration of it, which referred him back to sucha proposition; which proposition he read. That referredhim back to another, which he also read. Et sicdeinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convincedof that trueth. This made him in love with geometry.

This account was written by John Aubrey, who wasHobbes' friend. Aubrey of course assumes that every-one knows which is the 47th proposition in the firstbook of Euclid; if we do not, we miss the explosivecharge in the story. For the 47th proposition is thetheorem of Pythagoras about the squares on the sidesof a right-angled triangle-the most famous theoremof antiquity, for which Pythagoras is said to havesacrificed a hundred oxen to the Muses in thanks.Hobbes, in an age which knew the theorems by theirnumbers, at forty did not know the content of this;and when he learned it, it changed his life.

From then on, Hobbes became a pioneer of thedeductive method in science. In his time, his innova-tion was necessary; but soon the movement of scienceleft it behind. For when Hobbes took over the deduc-tive method, he took also Euclid's notion that we knowintuitively what points are, what an angle is, what wemean by parallel. The concepts and the axioms weresupposed to be simply self-evident, in geometry or inthe physical world.

Science has not stopped there since Hobbes, butsuch subjects as ethics have. In Hobbes' lifetime,Spinoza presented his E t hic s, o rd in e g eome tr ic o d em -

5 2 5 3


28/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE HABIT OF TRUTHmannered space ought to behave! Quantum mechanicshas been a constant scandal because it has said thatthe world of the small scale does not behave entirelylike a copy of the man-sized world. Swift in Gulliver'sTravels had remarked something like this back in1726, and it ought no longer to shock us; but ofcourse, Swift was a scandal, too, in his day.

Is it true that the concepts of science and those ofethics and values belong to different worlds? Is theworld of w hat is subject to test, and is the world ofwhat ought to be subject to no test? I do not believeso. Such concepts as justice, humanity and the full lifehave not remained fixed in the last four hundred years,whatever churchmen and philosophers may pretend.In their modern sense, they did not exist when Aquinaswrote; they do not exist now in civilizations which dis-regard the physical fact. And here I do not mean onlythe scientific fact. The tradition of the Renaissance isof a piece, in art and in science, in believing that thephysical world is a source of knowledge. The poet asmuch as the biologist now believes that life speaks tohim through the senses. But this was not always so:Paolo Veronese was reproved by the Inquisition in1573 for putting the real world into a sacred painting.And it is not so everywhere now: the ancient civiliza-tions of the East still reject the senses as a source ofknowledge, and this is as patent in their formal poetryand th eir passionless painting as in their science.

By contrast, the sanction of experienced fact has

changed and shaped all the concepts of men who havefelt the Scientific Revolution. A civilization cannothold its activities apart, or put on science like a suit ofclothes-a workday suit which is not good enough forSunday. The study of perspective in the Renaissancechimes with the rise of sensuous painting. And thedistaste of painters for naturalism for fifty years nowis surely related to the new structure which scientistshave struggled to find in nature in the same time. Acivilization is bound up with one way of experiencinglife. And ours can no more keep its concepts than itswars apart in pigeonholes.

All this is plain once it is seen that science also isa system of concepts: the place of experience is to testand correct the concept. The test is: Will the conceptwork? Does it give an unforced unity to the experienceof men? Does the concept make life orderly, not byedict but in fact?

Men have insisted on carrying this test into thesystems. of society and of conduct. What else costCharles Iis head in 1649? And what brought CharlesII back in 1660, yet at last exiled his family for Dutch-men and Germans? Not the high talk about the divineright of kings, and not the Bill of Rights, but their testin experience. England would have been willing to liveby either concept, as it has been willing to live byNewton or by Einstein: it chose the one which madesociety work of itself, without constraint.

Since then society has evolved a sequence of central54 55


29/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE HABIT OF TRUTHconcepts each of which was at one time thought tomake it work of itself, and each of which has had to becorrected to the next. There was the early eighteenth-century concept of self-interest, in Mandeville andothers; then came enlightened self-interest; then thegreatest happiness of the greatest number; utility; thelabor theory of value; and thence its expression eitherin the welfare state or in the classless society. Menhave never treated anyone of these concepts as thelast, and they do not mean to do so now. What hasdriven them, what drives them is the refusal toacknowledge the concept as either an edict or self-evident. Does this really work, they ask, without force,without corruption and without another arbitrarysuperstructure of laws which do not derive from thecentral concept. Do its consequences fit our experi-ence; do men in such a society live so or not so? Thisis the simple but profound test of fact by which wehave come to judge the large words of the makers ofstates and systems. We see it cogently in the Declara-tion of Independence, which begins in the roundEuclidean manner: We hold these truths to be self-evident," but which takes the justification for its actionat last from a long train of abuses and usurpations":the colonial system had failed to make a workablesociety.

for his high-handed rule in India, he had two griev-ances on his side. One was that the violence and cor-ruption of which he was accused were in any casecommonplace throughout Indian society then. Theother was that some of his accusers (and chieflyBurke) were not free from a corrupt interest in Indianaffairs themselves. Warren Hastings was acquitted,but not on these grounds, for they missed the differ-ence between India then and Europe. Man as man hada different value in the two continents. The Renais-sance had made the difference; and England with herdissenters had been evolving the new value for twohundred years, always by the downright test of makinga stable and self-correcting society. The conduct ofWarren Hastings was to be judged by the same aim,and by no other; the standards of lesser societies ruledby conquerors, the motives of lesser men had no bear-ing on it.

The cultures of the East still differ from ours asthey did then. They still belittle man as individualman. Under this runs an indifference to the world ofthe senses, of which the indifference to experiencedfact is one face. Anyone who has worked in the Eastknows how hard it is there to get an answer to a ques-tion of fact. When I had to study the casualties fromthe atomic bomb in Japan at the end of the war, Iwas dogged and perplexed by this difficulty. The manI asked, whatever man one asks, does not really under-stand what one wants to know: or rather, he does not

One example among others points the modern les-son. When Warren Hastings was impeached in 1786

56 57


30/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUESunderstand that one wants to know. He wants to dowhat is fitting, he is not unwilling to be candid, butat bottom he does not know the facts because theyare not his language. These cultures of the East haveremained fixed because they lack the language and thevery habit of fact.To us, the habit of simple truth to experience hasbeen the mover of civilization. The last war showedstarkly what happens to our societies and to us asmen when this habit is broken. The occupation ofFrance forced on the people of France a split in theconduct of each man: a code of truth to his fellows,and a code of deceit to the conquerors. This was ahemic division, more difficult to sustain than we canknow and for which the world has still to thankFrenchmen. Yet those who lived in that division willnever wholly recover from it, and the habits of distrustand withdrawal which it created will long hamstringthe free life of France and of Europe.

This is the grave indictment of every state in whichmen are cautious of speaking out to any man theymeet. The decay of the habit of truth is damaging tothose who must fear to speak. But how much moredestructive, how degrading it is to the loud-mouthedconquerors. The people whom their conquests reallysapped were the Nazis themselves. Picture the stateof German thought when Werner Heisenberg wascriticized by the S.S., and had to ask Himmler to sup-port his scientific standing. Heisenberg had won the

58

THE HABIT OF TRUTHNobel prize at the age of thirty; his principle of un-certainty is one of the two or three deep conceptswhich science has found in this century; and he wastrying to warn Germans that they must not dismisssuch discoveries as relativity because they disliked theauthor. Yet Himmler, who had been a schoolmaster,took months of petty inquiry (someone in his familyknew Heisenberg) before he authorized, of all people,Heydrich to protect Heisenberg. His letter to Hey-drich is a paper monument to what happens to thecreative mind in a society without truth. For Himmlerwrites that he has heard that Heisenberg is goodenough to be earmarked later for his own Academy forWelteislehre. This was an Academy which Himmlerproposed to devote to the conviction which he eithershared with or imposed on his scientific yes-men, thatthe stars are made of ice.

This nonsense of course is like the nonsense thatGermans were taught to credit about the human races.The state of mind, the state of society is of a piece.When we discard the test of fact in what a star is, wediscard it in what a man is. A society holds togetherby the respect which man gives to man; it fails in fact,it falls apart into groups of fear and power, when itsconcept of man is false. We find the drive whichmakes a society stable at last in the search for whatmakes us men. This is a search which never ends: toend it is to freeze the concept of man in a caricaturebeyond correction, as the societies of caste and master-

I

59


31/48

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE HABIT OF TRUTHrace have done. In the knowledge of man as in that ofnature,. the habit of truth to experienced fact will notlet our concepts alone. This is what destroyed theempires of Himmler and of Warren Hastings. WhenHastings stood his trial, William Wilberforce wasrousing England to put an end to the trade in slaves.He had at bottom only one ground: that dark men aremen. A century and more of scientific habit by thenhad made his fellows find that true, and find Hastingsnot so much a tyrant as a cheat.

There have always been two ways of looking fortruth. One is to find concepts which are beyond chal-lenge, because they are held by faith or by authorityor the conviction that they are self-evident. This is themystic submission to truth which the East has chosenand which dominated the axiomatic thought of thescholars of the Middle Ages. So St. Thomas Aquinasholds that faith is a higher guide to truth than knowl-edge is: the master of medieval science puts sciencefirmly into second place.

But long before Aquinas wrote, Peter Abelard hadalready challenged the whole notion that there areconcepts which can only be felt by faith or authority.All truth, even the highest, is accessible to test, saidAbelard: "By doubting we are led to enquire, and byenquiry we perceive the truth." The words might havebeen written fivehundred years later by Descartes and

60

could have been a recipe for the Scientific Revolution.We have the same dissent from authority in the Refor-mation; for in effect what Luther said in 1517 was thatwe may appeal to a demonstrable work of God, theBible, to override any established authority. The Scien-tific Revolution begins when Copernicus put forwardthe bolder proposition that there is another work ofGod to which we may appeal even beyond this: thegreat work of nature. No absolute statement is allowedto be out of reach of the test, that its consequencemust conform to the facts of nature.

The habit of testing and correcting the concept byits consequences in experience has been the springwithin the movement of our civilization ever since. Inscience and in art and in self-knowledge we explore andmove constantly by turning to the world of sense toask, Is this so? This is the habit of truth, always minuteyet always urgent, which for four hundred years hasentered every action of ours; and has made our societyand the value it sets on man, as surely as it has madethe linotype machine and the scout knife and KingLear and the Or ig in o f S p ec ie s and Leonardo's "Ladywith the Ermine."


32/48

3 The Sense ofHuman Dignity


33/48

T H E subject of this book is the evolution of con-temporary values. My theme is that the values whichwe accept today as permanent and often as self-evidenthave grown out of the Renaissance and the ScientificRevolution. The arts and the sciences have changedthe values of the Middle Ages; and this change hasbeen an enrichment, moving towards what makes usmore deeply human.

This theme plainly outrages a widely held view ofwhat science does. If, as many think, science onlycompiles an endless dictionary of facts, then it mustbe neutral (and neuter) as a machine is; it cannot bearon human values. But of course science is not a giantdictionary, any more than literature is; both are servedby, they do not serve, the makers of their dictionaries.T he C rea tiv e M i nd had this strenuous task, to showthat science isa creative activity. In the act of creation,a man brings together two facets of reality and, by dis-covering a likeness between them, suddenly makesthem one. This act is the same in Leonardo, in Keats



34/48

and in Ein s te in . And the specta to r w ho is m oved bythe fin ished w ork o f art o r th e scien tific theo ry re-livesthe sam e d isco very ; his apprecia tion also is a re-creation.Yet w hen it has b een gran ted that science and ar t

b oth find hidden likenesses and o rder in w hat seem edun like , there rem ain s a do ub t. Is there no t th is differ-en ce b etw een th em , th at the lik en esses w hich a scien cefin ds have to co nfo rm to a sanctio n o f fact fro m w hichthe arts are free? M ust n ot scien ce be true?The Habit of Truth ask ed the h is to ric questio n,

W hat is tru th? I set o ut, o f co urse, to dis tin gu ish w hatis true, less fro m w hat is s im ply false (w hich seldompuzzles us) than fro m w hat is illuso ry : the h allucin a-tion 'o f an ill-g rounded o r a d iso rdered b elief. M ym ethod der ived from the traditio n o f pragm atismw hich , s in ce W illiam Jam es advan ced it ab ou t 1890(and Charles Peirce befo re that) , has b een the m osto rig in al p hilo so ph ica l th ou gh t in Am er ica . It too k fo rits m odel o f tru th the reality o f th in gs . H ow do w ecom e to believe that there is such a thin g as Everes t?Fo r w e do no t see the thin g in itself; o nly an aspect o ran effect o f it reaches us . Yet w e recogn ize the th ingas o ne, b ecause th is g ives o rder to its aspects ; the th in gm ak es a un ity o f the differen t effects b y w hich it en terso ur w o rld .I do n o t th ink that truth becom es m ore prim itive if

w e pursue it to s im pler facts . Fo r n o fact in the w orldis in s tan t, in fin ites im al and ultim ate , a s ing le m ark .

66

THE SENSE OF HUMAN DIGNITYThere are , I ho ld , n o atom ic facts ; in the lan guage o fs cien ce , e ve ry fa ct is a field .T ru th in science is lik e Everes t, an o rderin g o f the

facts . W e o rg an ize o ur experien ce in pattern s w hich,fo rm alized, m ake the n etw ork o f scien tific law s. B utscience do es no t s top at the fo rm ulation o f law s; w eno ne o f us do , and n one o f us , in pub lic w ith h is w orko r in pr ivate w ith his co nscien ce, lives b y fo llow in g aschedule o f law s. W e condense the law s aro und con -cepts . S o scien ce tak es its co heren ce , its in tellectualan d im ag in ative s tren gth to geth er, fro m the co nceptsa t w hich its law s cro ss , lik e kn ots in a m esh. Grav ita-tio n, m ass an d en ergy , ev olutio n, en zy mes, th e u nco n-scio us-these are the b o ld creatio n s o f scien ce , thes tron g in vis ib le skele ton on w hich it ar ticulates them ovem en ts o f the w orld .Science is in deed a tru th fu l activ ity . An d w hether

w e loo k at facts , a t th in gs o r at co ncepts , w e cann o td isen tang le tru th from m ean ing-that is , from anin ner o rd er . T ru th therefo re is n ot differen t in scien ceand in the arts ; the facts o f the heart, the b ases o fp er so n ality , a re m e re ly m o re d if ficu lt to c omm u nic ate .T ru th to fact is the sam e hab it in bo th and has thesam e im po rtan ce fo r b oth , because facts are the o nlyraw m ateria l from w hich w e can der ive a change o fm in d. In scien ce , the appeal to fact is th e explo ra tio no f th e co ncept in its lo gical co nsequen ces . In th e arts ,the em otio nal facts fix the lim its o f experien ce w hichcan b e shared in their lan guage.

67

SCIENCE AND HUMAN VALUES THE SENSE OF HUMAN DIGNITY


35/48

I have recalled the apparatus which I have previ-ously set up in order that I may now use it to examinethe values by which we live. Some people think thatthese values are inborn as the sense of sight is, andthey treat any heresy as an affliction which the suffererwould not have contracted had his habits been cleaner.Others accept the notions of value as absolute edictswhich we must indeed learn, and if possible learn tolike, but which we cannot usefully question. Thesepeople are all anxious that we shall behave well andyet that we shall not question how we behave. Becausethey believe that there is no rational foundation forvalues, they fear that an appeal to logic can lead onlyfirst to irreverence and then to hedonism.

I do not share this fear, and I do not need it to sus-tain my sense of values. To me, such a concept as dutyis like the concept of mass. I was not born with a con-cept of mass, and I did not receive it by edict; yet bothmy inborn senses and my education took part in theprocess of elucidating it as it grew out of my experienceand that of others. I do not find it difficult to defendmy concept of mass on these grounds, and I see noreason why I should base the concept of duty as a valueon different grounds.

There is I think another fear that moves people toresist the suggestion that the values by which they liveshould be studied empirically. They grant that thisstudy may indeed reveal what men do in order toprosper; but is this, they ask, what they ought to do?

68

Is it not more often precisely what they ought not todo? Surely, say the righteous, it is the wicked whoflourish, and they flourish because they practice whatis wicked. So that if social science studies, as naturalscience does, what works and what does not, the lawswhich it traces are likely, they fear, to be very unsavory.I doubt whether this dark view will bear the lightof history. Is it really true that the wicked prosper? Inthe convulsions of nations, have tyrannies outlivedtheir meeker rivals? Rome has not survived the Chris-tian martyrs. Machiavelli in The Prince was impressedby the triumphs of the Borgias, and he has impressedus; but were they in fact either successful or enviable?Was the fate of Hitler and Mussolini better? Andeven in the short perspective of our own street, do wereally find that the cheats have the best of it? Or arewe merely yielding to the comforting belief that, be-cause one of our neighbors flourishes, he is ip so fa ct owicked?

There is a grave error in this fear that the study ofsociety must reveal a moral form of Gresham's law,that the bad drives out the good. The error is to sup-pose that the norms of conduct in a society mightremain fixed while the conduct of its memberschanges. This is not so . A society cannot remain law-ful when many members break the laws. In an orderlysociety, an impostor now and again gains an advantage;but he gains it only so long as imposture remains occa-sional-so long, that is, as his own practice does not

69



36/48

d es tro y th e s ocial o rd er. T he co un terfeiter ca n e xplo itthe con fidence o f so cie ty in the value o f m oney on lyso long as he h im self does no t sap th is con fidence.D estro y th is , and Gresham 's law rea lly tak es its re -v en ge; th e so ciety falls a part to s uspicio n an d b arter .

If w e are to s tudy conduct, w e m us t fo llow it inbo th d irectio n s; in to the dutie s o f m en , w hich alon eho ld a society togethe r, and also in to the freedom toact personally w hich the socie ty m us t s till a llow itsm en . The prob lem o f values ar ises on ly w hen m en tryto fit to gether their n eed to b e social an im als w iththeir n eed to b e free m en . There is n o prob lem , andthere are no values , un til m en w an t to db bo th . If ananarch ist w an ts on ly freedom , w hatever the co s t, hew ill prefer the jungle o f m an a t w ar w ith m an . And ifa ty ran t w an ts o n ly social o rder , he w ill create th eto ta l itar ian s tate. H e w ill s in g le out tho se w ho ques~tio n o r d issen t-tho se w hom Plato in the Republicca lled poe ts and in the Law s called m ater ialis ts , andw hom Congress io n al C om mittees m ore s im ply callscien tis ts ; and he w ill have them , as Plato advised ,exiled , o r gleichgeschaltet o r liqu idated o r inves ti-gated.

w h ich d oes n ot ack no w led ge b oth n eed s ca nn ot e vo lv eva lues and indeed canno t allow them . This is true o fa w h olly s ocia l p hilo so ph y s uch a s d ia le ctica l m a te ria l-ism , in w hich the com mun ity lay s dow n how the ind i-v idual m ust act; there is n o room fo r h im to ask h im -self how he ought to act. And it is equally true o f thein div idualis t sy stem s w hich have fo r so me tim e had afo llo w in g in E ng lan d-sy stem s s uch a s lo gical po sitiv -is m a nd its m o de rn d er iv ativ e, a na ly tica l p hilo so ph y.

It is r ele va nt to e xa m in e th es e la st p hilo so ph ie s be-cause they m ake a specia l claim to be scien tific. Intheir reactio n again st the m etaphy sics o f the nine-teen th cen tury , they have retu rn ed to the em pir icis ttrad itio n w hich goes b ack in B ritish philo sophy toThomas Hobbes, to John Locke, and above all toD avid H um e. This is a trad itio n w hich look s fo r them ater ia l and the tes ts o f a philo sophy in the phy s icalw orld ; the ev idence w hich it seek s is , ro ughly , thatw hich a scien tis t seek s, an d it rejects ev iden ce w hich;w ould no t pass m us ter in scien ce. Tho se w ho led ther etu rn to th e e m pir icis t tr ad itio n , fir st B e rtr an d R us se llan d then L udw ig W ittgen stein , w ere in fact train ed insc ien ti f ic d i sc ip l ines .In h is early w ritin g, W ittgen stein held that a sta te -

m en t m akes sen se on ly if it can be tes ted in the physi-ca l w orld . In h is later w ritin g , W ittgen s tein cam e tolook fo r the m ean in g o f a s tatem en t in the w ay inw hich it can be used: the con texts and the in ten tio n sin to w hich it fits . That is , h is early v iew o f tru th w as

71

The concepts o f value are pro found and difficu ltexactly b ecause they do tw o th ings at o nce : they jo inm en in to so cieties , and yet th ey preserve fo r them afreedo m w hich m ak es them s in gle m en . A philo so phy

7



37/48

positivist, and his later view was analytical. Wittgen-stein's followers have now enthroned his later analysisof usage into a philosophical method which oftenseems remote from any universal test, but their aimremains, as it was his, to make our understanding ofthe world tally with the way in which it works in fact.Positivists and analysts alike believe that the wordsis and ought belong to different worlds, so that sen-tences which are constructed with is usually have averifiable meaning, but sentences constructed withought never have. This is because Wittgenstein's unit,and Russell's unit, is one man; all British empiricistphilosophy is individualist. And it is of course clearthat if the only criterion of true and false which a manaccepts is that man's, then he has no base for socialagreement. The question how a man ought to behaveis a social question, which always involves several peo-ple; and if he accepts no evidence and no judgmentexcept his own, he has no tools with which to framean answer.

The issue then is, whether verification can be ac-cepted as a principle if it is assumed to be carried outby one man. This is as factual an issue as that whichfaced physics in 1905. Einstein did not debate in 1905whether space and time may be absolute, in principle;he asked how physicists in fact measure them. So it isirrelevant (and metaphysical) to debate whether veri-fication can be absolute, in principle; the question is,how do men in fact verify a statement? How do they

72

confirm or challenge the assertion, for example, that"the Crab nebula is the dust of a supernova whichexploded in 105+ and it glows because some of it isradioactive carbon which was made in the supernova."

This is a fairly simple speculation, as science goes.The positivist would break it into still simpler pieces,and would then propose to verify each. But it is anillusion, and a fatal illusion, to think that he couldverify them himself. Even in principle, he could notverify the historical part of this statement withoutsearching the records of others and believing them.And in practice, he could not verify the rate of expan-sion of the Crab nebula and the processes whichmight cause it to glow without the help of a sequenceof instrument makers and astronomers and nuclearphysicists, specialists in this and that, each of whomhe must trust and believe. All this knowledge, all ourknowledge, has been built up communally; therewould be no astrophysics, there would be no history,there would not even be language, if man were asolitary animal.

The fallacy which imprisons the positivist and theanalyst is the assumption that he can test what is trueand false unaided. This of course prevents him frommaking any social judgment. Suppose then that wegive up this assumption and acknowledge that, evenin the verification of facts, we need the help of others.What follows?

It follows that we must be able to rely on other73



38/48

people; we must be able to trust their word. That is,it follows that there is a principle which binds societytogether, b

Documents

Bronowski_1956 Sciences and Human Values