10.8.10

Alodus Huxley

Pragmatically [scientists] are justified in acting in this odd and extremely arbitrary way; for by concentrating exclusively on the measurable aspects of such elements of experience as can be explained in terms of a causal system they have been able to achieve a great and increasing control over the energies of nature. But power is not the same thing as insight and, as a representation of reality, the scientific picture of the world is inadequate for the simple reason that science does not even profess to deal with experiences as a whole but only with certain aspects of it in certain contexts. All this is quite clearly understood by the more philosophically minded men of science. But some scientists...tend to accept the world picture implicit in the theories of science as a complete and exhaustive account of reality; then tend to regard those aspects of experince which scientists leave out of account, because they are incompetent to deal with them, as being somehow less real than the aspects which science has arbitrarily chose to abstract from out of the infinitely rich totally of given acts.

-Adolous Huxley (1946, page 35-36 of Science Liberty and Peace)

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