432 



READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



The other is the scientific method. It subjects the conclusions of reason 

 to the arbitrament of hard fact to build an increasing body of tested knowl- 

 edge. It refuses to ask questions that cannot be answered, and rejects such 

 answers as cannot be provided except by Revelation. It discovers the re- 

 latedness of all things in the universe — of the motion of the moon to the 

 influence of earth and sun, of the nature of the organism to its environment, 

 of human civilization to the conditions under which it is made. The super- 

 natural is in part the region of the natural that has not yet been under- 

 stood, in part an invention of human fantasy, in part the unknowable. Body 

 and soul are not separate entities, but two aspects of one organization, and 

 Man is that portion of the universal world stuff that has evolved until it is 

 capable of rational and purposeful values. His place in the universe is to 

 continue that evolution and to realize those values. 



These two ways of approaching and thinking about the universe are ir- 

 reconcilable — as irreconcilable as is magic with scientific agriculture, witch 

 doctoring with preventive medicine, or number mysticism with higher 

 mathematics. Because our thinking still contains elements from both, it and 

 we are confused. 



To me, this mixing of two totally different kinds of thinking can only 

 lead to confusion. When men assert that the scientific approach is incom- 

 plete, it is because they have not been willing to follow it to its final con- 

 clusion, or because they are mistaking an early stage in its growth for full 

 development. 



Science inevitably began by trying its hand on the simpler phenomena 

 of nature. Its first triumphs were in mechanics, including the spectacular 

 celestial mechanics of Newton. It next proceeded to simple physics, like 

 the gas laws or the decomposition of white light. Chemistry, even elemen- 

 tary chemistry, did not take real shape till a century later. The life sciences 

 developed later than those of lifeless matter, for the sufficing reason that 

 they deal with more complex phenomena. Physiology had to wait on 

 physics and chemistry before it could become scientific. The central fact 

 of biology, evolution, was not established until modern science had been 

 in existence for over two hundred years; the mysteries of heredity did not 

 become clear until well on in the present century. In the same way the 

 science of mind developed later than biological science. 



Scientific method today has reached about as far in its understanding of 

 human mind as it had in the understanding of electricity by the time of 

 Galvan and Ampere. The Faradays and Clerk Maxwells of psychology are 

 still to come; new tools of investigation, we can be sure, are still to be dis- 

 covered before we can penetrate much further, just as the invention of the 

 telescope and calculus were necessary precursors of Newton's great gen- 

 eralizations in mechanics. 



However, even with the progress that science has already made, it is pos- 

 sible to give a reasonably coherent world picture based on the scientific 



