When, therefore, any one asserts the adequacy of the scientific
approach to life, one answer stands ready to our hand: science deals
primarily with facts and their laws, not with their spiritual
interpretations. To put the same truth in another way, science deals
with one specially abstracted aspect of the facts; it drains them of
their qualitative elements and, reducing them to their quantitative
elements, it proceeds to weigh and measure them and state their laws.
It moves in the realm of actualities and not in the realm of values.
One science, for example, takes a gorgeous sunset and reduces it to the
constituent ether waves that cause the colour. What it says about the
sunset is true, but it is not the whole truth. Ask anybody who has
ever seen the sun riding like a golden galleon down the western sea!
Another science takes a boy and reduces him to his Bertillon
measurements and at the top of the statistics writes his name, "John
Smith." That is the truth about John Smith, but it is not the whole
truth. Ask his mother and see! Another science takes our varied and
vibrant mental life and reduces it to its physical basis and states its
laws. That is the truth about our mental life, but it is not the whole
truth. What is more, it is not that part of the truth by which men
really live. For men live by love and joy and hope and faith and
spiritual insight. When these things vanish life is
"a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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