NEW FAlLURE OF NERVE
5
as merely a method of confirming what we
already
know in a
dim but sure way by other modes of experience.
If
the methods
of scientific inquiry do not yield this confirmation, they are
held to be at fault; some other way must be found of vali–
dating and communicating primal wisdom. Others maintain
that scientific method can give us only partial truths which
become less partial not by subjecting them to more careful
scrutiny but by incorporating them into a theological or meta–
physical system whose cardinal principles are true but not testable
by any method known to science. Still others openly declare it to
be axiomatic that every experience, every feeling and emotion,
directly reports a truth that cannot be warranted, and does not
need to be warranted, by experiment or inference.
These, bluntly put, are gateways to intellectual and moral
irresponsibility. They lay down roads to a happy land ,where we
can gratify our wishes without risking a veto by stubborn fact.
But of the view that every mode of experience gives direct authentic
knowledge, it would be more accurate to say that it carries us far
beyond the gateways. For in effect it is a defense of obscurantism.
It starts from the assumption that
every
experience gives us an
authentic report of the objective world instead of material for
judgment. It makes our viscera an organ of knowledge. It
justifies violent prejudice in its claims that if only we feel deeply
enough about anything, the feeling declares some truth about
the object which provokes it. This "truth" is regarded as possess–
ing the same legitimacy as the considered judgment that finds no
evidence for the feeling and uncovers its root in a personal aberra–
tion. After all is it not the case that every heresy-hunting bigot
and hallucinated fanatic is convinced that there is a truth in the
feelings, visions, and passions that run riot within him? Hitler
is not the only one for whom questions of evidence are incidental
or impertinent where his feelings are concerned.
If
the voice of
feeling cannot be mistaken, differences would be invitations to
battle, the ravings of an insane mind could legitimately claim to
be prophecies of things to come. It is not only as a defense against
the marginally sane that we need the safeguards of critical scien–
tific method. Every vested interest in social life, every inequitable
privilege, every "truth" promulgated as a national, class or racial
truth, likewise denies the competence of scientific inquiry to evalu–
ate its claims.
