Science and a World of Illusions

The late anthropologist Loren Eiseley, in his book The Firmament of Time:

“A scientist writing around the turn of the century remarked that all of the past generations of men have lived and died in a world of illusions.  The unconscious irony in his observation consists in the fact that this man assumed the progress of science to have been so great that a clear vision of the world without illusion was, by his own time, possible.  It is needless to add that he wrote before Einstein, before the spread of Freud’s doctrines, at a time when Mendel was just about to be rediscovered, and before advances in the study of radioactivity had made their impact—of both illumination and confusion—upon this century.

“Certainly science has moved forward.  But when science progresses, it often opens vaster mysteries to our gaze.  Moreover, science frequently discovers that it must abandon or modify what it once believed.  Sometimes it ends by accepting what it has previously scorned.  The simplistic idea that science marches undeviatingly down an ever broadening highway can scarcely be sustained by the historian of ideas.”

Posted from Aswan, Egypt