ENDS AND MEANS
gious teaching. Hamlet contains no abstract reasoning
concerning quantity or number and no experimental reason
concerning evidence; nor does the Hammerklavier Sonata,
nor Donatello's David, nor the Tao Te Chingy nor The
Folio-wing of Christ. Commit them therefore to the flames:
for they can contain-nothing but sophistry and illusion.
We are living how, not in the delicious intoxication
induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather
grisly morning-after, when it has become apparent that
what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve
the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated
ends. In this condition of apprehensive sobriety we are
able to see that the contents of literature, art, music—even
in some measure of divinity and school metaphysics—are
not sophistry and illusion, but simply those elements of
experience which scientists chose to leave out of account,
for the good reason that they had no intellectual methods
for dealing with them. In the arts, in philosophy, in reli-
gion men are trying—doubtless, without complete success
—to describe and explain the non-measurable, purely quali-
tative aspects of reality. Since the time of Galileo, scientists
have admitted, sometimes explicitly, but much more often
by implication, that they are incompetent to discuss such
matters. The scientific picture of the world is what it is
because men of science combine this incompetence with
certain special competences. They have no right to claim
that this product of incompetence and specialization is a
complete picture of reality. As a matter of historical fact,
however,, this claim has constantly been made. The suc-
cessive steps in the process of identifying an arbitrary
abstraction from reality with reality itself have been
described, very fully and lucidly, in Burtt's excellent
Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science; and it is
therefore unnecessary .for me to develop the theme any
further. All that I need add is the fact that, in recent years,
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