Man or Matter | Page 4

sources from which science drew its conception of nature. Accordingly
I left the Hochschule for a course in mathematics and physics at a
university, though without abandoning my original idea of preparing
for a career in the field of electrical engineering. It was with this in
mind that I later chose for my Ph.D. thesis a piece of experimental
research on the uses of high-frequency electric currents.
During my subsequent years of stuffy, however, I found myself no
nearer an answer to the problem that haunted me. All that I experienced,
in scientific work as in life generally, merely gave it an even sharper
edge. Everywhere I saw an abyss widening between human knowing
and human action. How often was I not bitterly disillusioned by the
behaviour of men for whose ability to think through the most
complicated scientific questions I had the utmost admiration!
On all sides I found this same bewildering gulf between scientific
achievement and the way men conducted their own lives and

influenced the lives of others. I was forced to the conclusion that
human thinking, at any rate in its modern form, was either powerless to
govern human actions, or at least unable to direct them towards right
ends. In fact, where scientific thinking had done most to change the
practical relations of human life, as in the mechanization of economic
production, conditions had arisen which made it more difficult, not less,
for men to live in a way worthy of man. At a time when humanity was
equipped as never before to investigate the order of the universe, and
had achieved triumphs of design in mechanical constructions, human
life was falling into ever wilder chaos. Why was this?
The fact that most of my contemporaries were apparently quite
unaware of the problem that stirred me so deeply could not weaken my
sense of its reality. This slumber of so many souls in face of the vital
questions of modern life seemed to me merely a further symptom of the
sickness of our age. Nor could I think much better of those who, more
sensitive to the contradictions in and around them, sought refuge in art
or religion. The catastrophe of the war had shown me that this
departmentalizing of life, which at one time I had myself considered a
sort of ideal, was quite inconsistent with the needs of to-day. To make
use of art or religion as a refuge was a sign of their increasing
separation from the rest of human culture. It implied a cleavage
between the different spheres of society which ruled out any genuine
solution of social problems.
I knew from history that religion and art had once exercised a function
which is to-day reserved for science, for they had given guidance in
even the most practical activities of human society. And in so doing
they had enhanced the quality of human living, whereas the influence
of science has had just the opposite effect. This power of guidance,
however, they had long since lost, and in view of this fact I came to the
conclusion that salvation must be looked for in the first place from
science. Here, in the thinking and knowing of man, was the root of
modern troubles; here must come a drastic revision, and here, if
possible, a completely new direction must be found.
Such views certainly flew in the face of the universal modern

conviction that the present mode of knowledge, with whose help so
much insight into the natural world has been won, is the only one
possible, given once for all to man in a form never to be changed. But
is there any need, I asked myself, to cling to this purely static notion of
man's capacity for gaining knowledge? Among the greatest
achievements of modern science, does not the conception of evolution
take a foremost place? And does not this teach us that the condition of a
living organism at any time is the result of the one preceding it, and
that the transition implies a corresponding functional enhancement?
But if we have once recognized this as an established truth, why should
we apply it to organisms at every stage of development except
the .highest, namely the human, where the organic form reveals and
serves the self-conscious spirit?
Putting the question thus, I was led inevitably to a conclusion which
science itself had failed to draw from its idea of evolution. Whatever
the driving factor in evolution may be, it is clear that in the kingdoms
of nature leading up to man this factor has always worked on the
evolving organisms from outside. The moment we come to man
himself, however, and see how evolution has flowered in his power of
conscious thought, we have to reckon with a fundamental change.
Once a