THE REAL WORLD 379 



heuristic power and cross-fixing arise by "chance." Given the odds 

 against the overwhelming successes actually achieved, I hold that 

 this denial does demand something "more miraculous" than the 

 achievement I claim for science. 



INTELLIGIBILITY 



Always ours will be a characteristically human science, but the sig- 

 nificance of this banality is too often vastly overinflated. For, of 

 course, the human sense of rationality that looms so large in science 

 is not at all the immutable absolute Kant thought it. Even quite re- 

 cently Dingle writes of "Reason, being independent of experience, 

 . . ." and doughtily maintains that ". . . we are certain of the laws of 

 thought simply because our imagination of alternatives to them is 

 stillborn." As a matter of record, we have in the last century or so in- 

 vented and used non-Euclidean geometries, noncommutative alge- 

 bras, and multivalued logics our remoter ancestors would have held 

 to violate "the laws of thought." Today the quantum mechanicians 

 among us conceive and credit what amateurs still find irrationalities, 

 and what a century or so ago might well have been quite literally 

 inconceivable. The history of science thus approves the judgment of 

 Condorcet, who dwelt on the inestimable perfectability of human 

 reason. 



If today the human sense of rationality demands atomistic ex- 

 planations of qualitative change, this too is something learned from 

 experience, for the ancient and medieval sense of rationality imposed 

 no such demand. If today we adopt certain "laws of thought" they 

 are, as Bronowski observes, in some part discoveries about the na- 

 ture of a world that can so be thought about. 



The world makes sense all right; it makes common sense. . . . But 

 common sense is not what we put into the world. It is what we find 

 there. 



If then ours is human science, because dependent on the human 

 sense of rationality, it is not for that a science incapable of supplying 

 some significant representation of a cosmos that shapes our ration- 

 ality—through processes of physical and conceptual evolution Sher- 

 rington remarks as still very actively in progress. 



Our world we recognize today as a world in making, and ourselves as 

 a part of it likewise in the course of making. . . . the human mind is 



