The Scientific Spirit

...Indeed, even when men do not view science simply as the evil creator of instruments of mass restruction, but acknowledge the tangible benefits so frequently the consequences of basic research, they often have a deep-seated suspicion of the intellectual temper essential to the life of science...

...Nevertheless, as his second chapter seeks to establish, scientific imagination must be controlled by subjecting the logical consequences of the scientist's ideas to the test of observation and experiment...

...Bronowski supplies no such instruction, though it is only fair to add that it has not been his intention to do so...

...For example, scientific discovery does indeed require the exercise of great powers of imagination, as do the arts and literature...

...Dr...

...But it is at least misleading to claim, as he does, that "truth is no different in science and the arts...

...In the first of his three chapters, Dr...

...Bronowski's book is to exhibit science as a powerful agent in the moral education of mankind...

...Chief among these values are: independence and originality in thought and observation, freedom to differ from accepted beliefs, and a vigorous tolerance for dissenting views based on respect for other men's judgments...

...To be sure, scientific research is today heavily subsidized by public moneys...

...Bronowski's judgment, science is to be prized not primarily for its contributions to men's control over the physical and biological potentialities of nature, but for the values, derived from its own method, which have enabled those who are members of the scientific community to form "a living, stable and incorruptible society...

...Bronowski drives home with the help of several happy illustrations from poetry as well as from the history of science...

...Bronowski sets out to show that science is not a bag of special tricks or an industrious but unimaginative grubbing into facts...

...Massacre is prevented by the scientist's ethic, and the poet's, and every creator's: That the end for which we work exists and is judged only by the means which we use to reach it...

...But as often happens, it is usually far easier to formulate what is desirable than to indicate how one is to bell the cat...

...He has high qualifications for this task...

...And because we know how gunpowder works, we sigh for the days before atomic bombs...

...Nevertheless, the conception of science as a great liberalizing activity, one of whose most precious fruits is the progressive emancipation of the human mind from ancestral ignorance and blind custom, is not the idea that wins the votes for the current public underwriting of scientific inquiry...

...Nor is it a habit that is readily practiced even by great scientists when they turn from the fields of their special competence to other subjects...

...But massacre is not prevented by sticking to gunpowder...

...But such fault finding would be largely besides the point, since the main burden of Dr...

...In his third chapter, finally, Dr...

...This is the human sum of the values of science...

...In Dr...

...Nor would it be difficult, moreover, to find fault with details in his argument, where he has permitted an enthusiasm for the vision that absorbs him to be less than accurate in his analysis...

...His present hook is an eloquent and often moving essay, born out of reflections and emotions stimulated by the sight of the wasted city of Nagasaki late in 1945...

...Bronowski argues vigorously that the testing of ideas by their consequences in experience is as imperative in moral questions as it is in natural science...

...He is director of research of the National Coal Board in England...

...On this fundamental matter what he has to say is substantially sound...

...This temper is a singular combination of insatiable curiosity concerning the mechanisms of nature whether animate or inanimate, a passionate devotion to truth, a tireless persistence in seeking it, a receptivity to fresh ideas, and an uncompromising critical attitude toward claims that truth has been discovered...

...It is this habit of testing and correcting ideas that he regards as distinctive of our civilization, and that in his judgment differentiates the later from the dominant temper of medieval and oriental thought...

...Science is a search for unity in what at first blush appears to he unrelated diversity...

...Neither the alleged self-evidence of ideas nor their plausibility nor faith in them supplies a warrant for ideas...

...and Dr...

...Again, it is hard to see in his account of logical empiricism anything but a gratuitous criticism of this philosophy of science, when he asserts this philosophy to be so steeped in the invidualistic traditions of British empiricism that it ignores completely the role played in establishing scientific hypotheses by an entire society of investigators...

...hut he also writes attractively, and is the author of several books on literature as well as science, among them William Blake: A Man Without a Mask and The Common Sense of Science...

...and he takes issue with those thinkers who, in their anxiety to eliminate obscurantist notions from science, would in effect reject all theories that involve imaginative constructions going far beyond anything directly observable...

...It is his answer to the challenge which that sight presented to him to make evident the implications of modern science for human weal, and to exhibit the intellectual and moral prerequisites for a flourishing science...

...His book deserves to be placed into the hands of teachers of science, as well as of those who are contemplating a scientific career...

...On the other hand, the indispensability of such controls for scientific speculation does not mean, as he carefully points out, that scientific concepts are simply compact summaries of what is observable...

...Bronowski's fine book expresses noble ideas in a noble way...

...Bronowski's little book is another such attempt, and is to be welcomed as an excellent addition to the literature of this genre...

...Accordingly, he believes that the technological products of science threaten us because we are trying to use those products without being informed by the spirit of science: "We are hag-ridden by the power of nature which we should command because we think its command needs less devotion and understanding than its discovery...

...Bronowski attempts to show that the values often thought to be basic to Western civilization are themselves the outgrowths of, and the prerequisites for, the practice of scientific inquiry...

...However, the hidden likenesses science is after can be discovered only through the exercise of a creative imagination not unlike the imagination required in great literature and great art, a point Dr...

...the Thirty Years' War is proof of that...

...It is, therefore, not difficult to understand why the scientific temper is not domiciled throughout society, or why its extension to matters outside conventially limited areas is viewed with something less than enthusiasm by so many men...

...Certainly such a criticism is not born out by reading either Ernst Mach, one of the founders of this philosophy, or most of his more recent followers...

...It cannot be said, however, that tire intellectual habits and the moral values which sustain the scientific enterprise are widely understood or have been absorbed into the social fabric...

...The scientific community is thus a democracy of men "seeking the truth together with dignity and humanity," and no tenet in the unwritten but universally bonding code of this republic is more fundamental than the principle that "there is no distinction between means and ends...

...Reviewed by Ernest Nagel Professor of philosophy, Columbia University Modern science is perhaps the most prolific single source of contemporary social change...

...Distinguished scientists have repeatedly tried to convey to lay readers a sense of the intellectual adventure and the moral commitments inherent in the pursuit of science...

...It is not a quality of mind that is easily acquired, and is a product of the discipline that the institutional organization of the scientific fraternity imposes on its members...