Nevertheless the course of development has left us of this age in
a plight. When we say that a subject of science is technically
specialized, or that it is highly “abstract,” what we practically mean
is that it is not conceived in terms of its bearing upon human life.
All _merely_ physical knowledge is technical, couched in a technical
vocabulary communicable only to the few. Even physical knowledge which
does affect human conduct, which does modify what we do and undergo,
is also technical and remote in the degree in which its bearings are
not understood and used. The sunlight, rain, air and soil have always
entered in visible ways into human experience; atoms and molecules and
cells and most other things with which the sciences are occupied affect
us, but not visibly. Because they enter life and modify experience in
imperceptible ways, and their consequences are not realized, speech
about them is technical; communication is by means of peculiar symbols.
One would think, then, that a fundamental and ever-operating aim would
be to translate knowledge of the subject-matter of physical conditions
into terms which are generally understood, into signs denoting human
consequences of services and disservices rendered. For ultimately all
consequences which enter human life depend upon physical conditions;
they can be understood and mastered only as the latter are taken into
account. One would think, then, that any state of affairs which tends
to render the things of the environment unknown and incommunicable by
human beings in terms of their own activities and sufferings would be
deplored as a disaster; that it would be felt to be intolerable, and to
be put up with only as far as it is, at any given time, inevitable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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