Huston Smith Quote
For all we know, the larger part of the motive for trying to expand science is not self-serving; it is merely mistaken. The idealistic element in it is its desire to achieve in the understanding of man what science has achieved in the understanding of matter. Its mistake is in not seeing that the tools for the one are of strictly limited utility for the other, and that the practice of trying to see man as an object which the tools of science will fit leads first to underrating and then to losing sight of his attributes those tools miss. (The mere titles of B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity and Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man will, in opposite ways, suffice.) If it be asked, But what did the nonscientific approach to man and the world give us? The answer is: Meaning, purpose, and a vision in which everything coheres
For all we know, the larger part of the motive for trying to expand science is not self-serving; it is merely mistaken. The idealistic element in it is its desire to achieve in the understanding of man what science has achieved in the understanding of matter. Its mistake is in not seeing that the tools for the one are of strictly limited utility for the other, and that the practice of trying to see man as an object which the tools of science will fit leads first to underrating and then to losing sight of his attributes those tools miss. (The mere titles of B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity and Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man will, in opposite ways, suffice.) If it be asked, But what did the nonscientific approach to man and the world give us? The answer is: Meaning, purpose, and a vision in which everything coheres
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