248
PARTISAN REVIEW
whose psychic constitutions approximate those of the former
to
a dangerous
degree. Meanwhile, the voices that speak the wisdom of the latter seem to be
growing ever fainter.
There is a well known joke that may help clarify the point: One dark
night a policeman comes upon a drunk. The man is on his knees, obviously
searching for something under a lamppost. He tells tht' officer that he is
looking for his keys which he says he lost" over there," pointing out into the
darkness. The policeman asks him why, if he lost the keys over there, is he
looking for them under the streetlight. The drunk answers, "because the
light is so much better here ." That is the way science proceeds too.
It
is
important
to
recognize this fact.
It
is irrelevant and useless
to
blame science for
it. Indeed, what is sought can be found only where there is illumination.
Sometimes one even finds a new source of light in the circle within which one
is searching. Two things matter: the size of the circle qflight that is the uni–
verse ofone's inquiry, and the spirit of one's inquiry. The latter must include
an acute awareness that there is an outer darkness, and that there are sources of
illumination of which one as yet knows very little.
Science can proceed in no other way but to simplify reality. The first step
in its process of simplification is abstraction. And this means leaving out of
account all those empirical data which do not fit the particular conceptual
framework within which science at the moment happens
to
be working,
which, in other words, are not illuminated by the light of the particular lamp
under which science happens to be looking for keys. Adlous Huxley remarked
on this matter in
Science , Liberty and Peace,
with considerable clarity:
Pragmatically [scientists] are justified in acting in this odd and extremely
arbitrary way; for by concentrating exclusively on the measurable aspects
of such elements of experience as can be explained in terms of a causal
system they have been able to achieve a great and ever increasing control
over the energies of nature. But power is not the same thing as insight
and, as a representation of reality, the scientific picture of the world is
inadequate, for the simple reason that science does not even profess ro
deal with experience as a whole, but only with certain aspects of it in
certain contexts. All this is quite clearly understood by the more philo–
sophically minded men of science. But unfortunately some scientists,
fP.any technicians , and most consumers of gadgets have lacked the time
and the inclination to examine the philosophical foundations and back–
ground of the sciences. Consequently they tend
to
accept the world
picture implicit in the theories of science as a complete and exhaustive
account of reality : they tend to regard those aspects of experience which
scientists leave out of account, because they are incompetent to deal with
them , as being somehow less real than the aspects which science has
arbitrarily chosen to abstract from out of the infinitely rich totality of
given facts.
