Future of the Mind 
arbitrary. There is such a thing as enlightenment—and its 
counterpart, moral blindness—to things which, once seen, are 
seen as objective. Only the expulsive power of a new percep- 
tion, and not any authoritarian manipulation, can bring about 
a morally viable refinement of conscience. 
Coon: Without people manipulating others you would have 
no set events, and without set events you would have no social 
institutions and there would be complete chaos. So it is not a 
question of whether people can manipulate one another or not, 
but of whether they can do it with the minimum of friction. 
Brock: What Dr. Chisholm said in essence answers a ques- 
tion asked earlier by Bronowski: what is the problem that we 
are trying to tackle? There is no evidence that man has 
deteriorated; there is, however, abundant evidence that he is 
not moving fast enough in relation to the enormous acceleration 
of environmental change today. 
This brings me back to prediction. According to scientific 
method, we have only one acceptable method of predicting, 
and that is to extrapolate from existing knowledge. Earlier 
we agreed that to progress into the future we have to have a 
hypothesis and put it to the test of experiment. Our real prob- 
lem is that we have got to carry out experiments, the answers 
to which will only be evident fifty or sixty years hence, and 
none cf us know how to carry out such experiments. For 
example, food is important as one of the many factors that 
determine our constitution. How should I feed children today 
to give them a sound constitution fifty or sixty years hence, when 
they will be attacked by atherosclerosis and cancer and degen- 
erative diseases? How can I test any hypothesis about how to 
feed children today for that purpose? 
Similarly, Dr. Chisholm has told us that what man needs is a 
new kind of conscience, a new kind of understanding, which will 
be different from the kind we ourselves were given in the first 
five years of our lives, since conscience is largely determined in 
the first five years of life. What we want to know today is: 
what do we teach children today that will give them a better 
conscience when they get into positions of authority fifty or 
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