Man In The Modern World

MAN IN THE MODERN WORLD

witch-doctoring with preventive medicine, or number-mysticism with
higher mathematics. Because our thinking still contains elements
from both, it and we are confused.

This is not the view of the previous contributors to this series. In
different ways they have maintained that the two systems of thought
are not mutually exclusive but complementary. Though they all
admit that the scientific or relativist approach is adequate and indeed
essential so far as it goes, they agree in asserting that it cannot go all
the way-—that it is necessarily partial and needs to be supplemented
by some elements derived from the alternative way of thinking.
Professor Sperry says that we must supplement science with moral
universal. Professor Maritain frankly finds the only chance of re-
generation in a philosophy based on Christian theology. Professor
Montague, more vaguely, postulates a tendency toward ideal good
operating in nature—an omnipresent but not omnipotent I luly Spirit,
strongly reminiscent of Matthew Arnold's "something, not ourselves,
which makes for righteousness." Professor Montague eulls this a god,
without the capital letter. Professor 1 locking is more definite: for
him the truth of science needs to be supplemented by another truth:
that the world "has its own unity in a living purpose: it is the truth of
the existence of God."

To me, this mixing of two totally different kinds of thinking can
only lead to confusion. When men assert that the scientific approach
is incomplete, it is because they have not been willing to iollow it to its
final conclusion, or because they are mistaking an early stage in its
growth for full development.
Science inevitably began by trying its hand on the simpler phe-
nomena of nature. Its first triumphs were in meehanics, 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 elementary 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. Evolution, the central fact of biology, 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. What Newton was
for mechanics and physics, and Darwin for biology, Freud was for
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