9. EAST AND WEST IN THE HISTORY OF 

 SCIENCE 



When one speaks of the history of science most people think of 

 experimental and mathematical knowledge as we know it now, 

 with its inexhaustible harvest of applications; they think of what 

 we would call "modern science/' the development of which was 

 hardly started before the seventeenth century. This is of course 

 justifiable in some respects, yet he who was acquainted only with 

 that part of the story would have a very misleading idea of the 

 whole evolution. It is as if he knew a man only in his maturity 

 and was not aware that such maturity was made possible only 

 by the long years of childhood and adolescence. 



The comparison of mankind with a single man helps us to 

 understand both. Let us make use of it. What would you think 

 of a biography which began, let us say, at a time when the hero 

 was thirty, was married and already had children, and was 

 well started on his work? Would not such a biography be very 

 disappointing? For we would want to know how he got started, 

 whom he had married, how he became interested in his chosen 

 work and gradually devoted all of his thought and energy to it. 

 For exactly the same reasons a history of science beginning only 

 in the sixteenth or seventeenth century is not only incomplete but 

 fundamentally wrong. This is even more true in the case of man- 

 kind than in that of a single man, because in the latter case we 

 can at least imagine various possibilities. If we have read many 

 biographies of men of science we have in our minds a sort of 

 composite picture of their youth which may serve as a first ap- 

 proximation. But in the case of mankind it is simply impossible 

 to imagine the history of the four or five millennia of recorded 

 experience which preceded the advent of modern science. 



It is unfortunately true that many scientists lack a cultural back- 



131 



