ENDS AND MEANS
mistakes is not spectacular or immediate. In many cases,
indeed, the makers of the mistake are not even aware that
they are being punished; for the punishment takes the
form not of a deprivation of a good which they already
possess, but of the withholding of a good which they
might have come to possess if they had not made the
mistake. Consider, by way of example, that once very
common over-simplification of the facts which consists in
making God responsible for all imperfectly understood
phenomena. Secondary causes are ignored and everything
is referred back to the creator. No more wholesale re-
duction of diversity to identity is possible; and yet its
effect is not immediately perceptible. Those who make
the mistake of thinking in terms of a first cause are fated
never to become men of science. But as they do not
know what science is, they are not aware that they are
losing anything.
To refer phenomena back to a first cause has ceased to
be fashionable, at any rate in the West. The identities to
which we try to reduce the complicated diversities around
us are of a different order. For example, when we discuss
society or individual human beings, we no longer make
our over-simplifications in terms of the will of God, but
of such entities as economics, or sex, or the inferiority
complex. Excessive simplifications! But here again the
penalty for making them is not immediate or obvious.
Our punishment consists in our inability to realize our
ideals, to escape from the social and psychological slough
in which we wallow. We shall never deal effectively with
our human problems until we follow the example of natural
scientists and temper our longing for rational simplification
by the recognition in things and events of a certain residue
or irrationality, diversity and specificity. We shall never
succeed in changing our age of iron into an age qf gold
until we give up our ambition to find a single cause for
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