"Science destroys poetry until the heart bursts into mysticism, and out of science brings poetry again, asserting a wonder and a vague mystery of life and feeling, beneath and beyond all science, and proclaiming the wonderfulness and mystery of that which we seem most familiarly to understand. (Frederick W Robertson, "The Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes", 1852)
"Science will, in all probability, be increasingly impregnated by mysticism." (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "My Universe", 1924)
"To be a scientist - it is not just a different job so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good natural man." (Sinclair Lewis, "Arrowsmith", 1925)
"When science starts to be interpretiveit is more unscientific even than mysticism." (David H Lawrence, Pansies: Poems, 1929)
"Our only way of avoiding the extremes of materialism and mysticism is the never ending endeavor to balance analysis and synthesis." (Niels Bohr, 1968)
"The three attributes of commitment, imagination, and tenacity seem to be the distinguishing marks of greatness in a scientist. A scientist must be as utterly committed to the pursuit of truth as the most dedicated of mystics; he must be as pertinacious in his struggle to advance into uncharted country as the most indomitable pioneers; his imagination must be as vivid and ingenious as a poet’s or a painter’s. Like other men, for success he needs ability and some luck; his imagination may be sterile if he has not a flair for asking the right questions, questions to which nature’s reply is intelligible and significant." (Alfred M Taylor, "Imagination and the Growth of Science", 1970)
"[...] one extreme is the idea of an objective world, pursuing its regular course in space and time, independently of any kind of observing subject; this has been the guiding image from modern science. At the other extreme is the idea of a subject, mystically experiencing the unity of the world and no longer confronted by an object or by any objective world; this has been the guiding image of Asian mysticism. Our thinking moves somewhere in the middle, between these two limiting conceptions; we should maintain the tension resulting from these opposites." (Werner K Heisenberg, "Across the Frontiers", 1974)
"Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots. Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both." (Fritjof Capra, "The Tao of Physics", 1975)
"Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being." (Carl Sagan, "Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark", 1995)
"The mystic is content to bask in the wonder and revel in a mystery that we were not 'meant' to understand. The scientist feels the same wonder but is restless, not content; recognizes the mystery as profound, then adds, 'But we’re working on it.'" (Richard Dawkins, "Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder", 1998)
No comments:
Post a Comment