Tomorrow’s Miracles
(continued)
"Consider an explorer, casting away, all to often, his greatest securities, even his life, to stride forward into the outer dark, throwing up his star shells to view that which lies in the unknown."L. Ron Hubbard
In short, science has the unhealthy tendency to isolate and expand that isolation, where philosophy tends to reach higher or more general laws. Give a scientist a theory (witness cytology) and he immediately sets out and collects gravitically all the facts pertinent to that one thing. To the scientist is owed the particulars. The scientist inherits the theories and instruments already conceived and smooths out the rough spots. The philosopher is challenged because he does not do this but, as we have remarked, he has no instruments, no tables, no aid of any kind which has reached as far as he has gone forward.
In this manner, science tends to group and then complicate any subject. It is to science that the masses owe their benefits. It is to the philosopher that science owes all its fuel. The citizen, seeing not very far, praises where praise is really due but not wholly due to the point where a scientist can laugh at philosophic ideas, the very things which gave him the material with which to work.
That science does attempt to propagandize its importance to the extent of origination is attested by the commonly heard statement that “Now everything is all invented and if one would desire fame he must specialize.” That word “specialize” is a red flag to any philosopher because it automatically indicates the localizing of knowledge into hideous complexities, which, he knows very well, will be destroyed just as all other complicated structures were ripped down when a new truth was isolated. Now it is indicative of the essential nature of science that it wars ceaselessly within itself in favor of this or that hypothesis as countering another hypothesis. It can be said with truth that the battles of philosophy are fought by science against science. Science comes along with measuring sticks of the already known, takes sides and begins to fire, without once inventing any substitute or new hypothesis of its own and ridiculing any which may be offered. So stubborn is science that it hangs to its achieved tomes like a bulldog. Ptolemy’s weird theory of crystalline spheres was taught concurrently with the revised Copernican System in one of the oldest American universities for many years.
This is no diatribe against science, it is a defense of new theories, new ideas, new concepts and the men who made them. The laughter leveled at the heads of innovators is amusing only if it be remembered that the ideas now in use were once equally ridiculed by science. And one has only to glance back with the perspective of the years to see that science has embraced may things much more weird -- such as a hemisphere on four elephants on a mud turtle on mud, mud, mud. Doubtless, in this instance, there were a hundred libraries filled with tracts to the effect that the mud turtle had green eyes as against the opinion of another that his eyes were purple. Basing this on horizon stars and examining them as reflection, scientists of that day were likely very learned within their sphere of findings.
But there is such a thing as a cumulation of knowledge. By this, most men envision being swamped by facts and books. Libraries crammed to the roof, laboratories humming, men shouting in lecture rooms, men writing vast disclosures on electrons and positrons... But there is no need for alarm. Ten times as much data has been stacked away in the basement where it molds, forgotten, the product of but fifty years ago but now disproved through the scientific acceptance of higher generalizations. Each time a higher generalization is reached, all men shout, “this is the ULTIMATE! Man can go no farther!” But they forget, that in quiet places men are looking all about them, not at one special object but at all objects and so it comes as a shock when a perfectly simple truth which was right under everybody’s nose all the time, was brought to light.
