For most men, save the scientific workers, science is a mystery in
the hands of initiates, who have become adepts in virtue of following
ritualistic ceremonies from which the profane herd is excluded. They
are fortunate who get as far as a sympathetic appreciation of the
methods which give pattern to the complicated apparatus: methods of
analytic, experimental observation, mathematical formulation and
deduction, constant and elaborate check and test. For most persons,
the reality of the apparatus is found only in its embodiments in
practical affairs, in mechanical devices and in techniques which
touch life as it is lived. For them, electricity is _known_ by means
of the telephones, bells and lights they use, by the generators and
magnetos in the automobiles they drive, by the trolley cars in which
they ride. The physiology and biology they are acquainted with is
that they have learned in taking precautions against germs and from
the physicians they depend upon for health. The science of what might
be supposed to be closest to them, of human nature, was for them an
esoteric mystery until it was applied in advertising, salesmanship and
personnel selection and management, and until, through psychiatry, it
spilled over into life and popular consciousness, through its bearings
upon “nerves,” the morbidities and common forms of crankiness which
make it difficult for persons to get along with one another and with
themselves. Even now, popular psychology is a mass of cant, of slush
and of superstition worthy of the most flourishing days of the medicine
man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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