20 SCIENTIST 



but this is more a statement about people than about paint- 

 ing. We shall have more to say about some possible rela- 

 tionships between science and value problems in a later 

 chapter. 



A more surprising corollary of the nature of science 

 as currently understood is that it has relatively little, per- 

 haps nothing at all, to say about cause and effect. Indeed, 

 science has progressed faster and become more useful the 

 less it has paid attention to ideas about cause and effect. 



The force of this perhaps surprising statement is best 

 seen when we consider Aristotle's idea of final cause. It 

 will be recalled that Aristotle felt that in some sense the 

 oak tree was the cause of the acorn's growth and de- 

 velopment. This concept rather obviously involves the 

 additional idea that what we ordinarily call a purpose 

 can also be a cause. The notion has a certain sort of ex- 

 planatory value and is still used today in certain circum- 

 stances which do not call for a high degree of intellectual 

 rigor. If a child asks why he has to eat, we tell him that 

 he should do so in order to become a healthy man. We 

 may even tell him that he has hands so he can put food 

 into his mouth and a stomach so he can digest his food. 

 In some cultures and in some periods of history, the very 

 existence of domestic animals has been explained in the 

 same way — for the purpose of contributing to man's wel- 

 fare. All this seems so natural that it is extremely difficult 

 to say what is wrong with it. I shall not even attempt to 

 demonstrate in any logical way that the use of final causes 

 or purposes as an explanatory device is wrong. Such dis- 

 cussions can easily be found in most standard works of 

 philosophy, but they are not easy to understand. I shall 

 merely content myself with asserting that science made 

 much more rapid progress after it abandoned any con- 

 sideration of purpose or final cause. There are several 



