56
PARTISAN REVIEW
Let us tum to the causal imputations contained
in
the criti·
cism under consideration. Almost no argument is required to
show that if the growth of science may validly be held responsible
for the ills of modem society, then the fact that men marry may
no less validly be declared the cause of the evils of divorce. For
surely, divorce would be impossible unless men first married,
just as our present social distresses would not exist unless the
advance of scientific knowledge had first made possible our present
institutional structures. But to convert marriage into the cause of
divorce, and the advance of secular knowledge into the cause of
social ills, is to convert the
context
in which problems arise into
an
agent
responsible for our inability to master them. As well
argue that in order to eliminate the evils of divorce men must
stop getting married, as recommend the de-secularization of mod–
em society as a solution for its difficulties; in either case the
conversion of context into cause is an unintelligent performance.
The development of science has brought with it new opportunities
for the exercise of human energies, and has helped set the stage
for the emergence of new problems. How many of these problems
have remained unsolved because vested interests and the cake of
custom have prevented the application to them of the methods
of controlled inquiry which the natural sciences use so successfully,
it is difficult to judge. But in any event, the indictment of scientific
intelligence as solely responsible for our present difficulties not
only involves an arbitrary selection of one factor from a complex
of others distinguishable in the social scene; it arbitrarily rejects
the one instrument from which a resolution of these difficulties
may reasonably be expected.
Consider, finally, the charge that science "cannot determine
values," and that therefore the apprehension of the elements of a
good life must be obtained through some form of emotional ex·
perience. Now whatever be one's view as to the nature of values–
whether they are regarded as relative or absolute, dependent on
human preferences or not-it must be admitted that a science
(such as astronomy) which does not concern itself with values and
which does not contain value-terms in its vocabulary, is incompe·
tent to establish value judgments. The thesis that
some
sciences
cannot determine values is thus trivially true. On the other hand,
