Man or Matter | Page 8

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has been reduced to so simple a scheme of laws - Heisenberg implies -
must therefore not make us forget that these attainments are bought at
the price 'of renouncing the aim of bringing the phenomena of nature to
our thinking in an immediate and living way'.
In the course of his exposition, Heisenberg also speaks of Goethe, in

whose scientific endeavours he perceives a noteworthy attempt to set
scientific understanding upon a path other than that of progressive
self-restriction.
'The renouncing of life and immediacy, which was the premise for the
progress of natural science since Newton, formed the real basis for the
bitter struggle which Goethe waged against the physical optics of
Newton. It would be superficial to dismiss this struggle as unimportant:
there is much significance in one of the most outstanding men directing
all his efforts to fighting against the development of Newtonian optics.'
There is only one thing for which Heisenberg criticizes Goethe: 'If one
should wish to reproach Goethe, it could only be for not going far
enough - that is, for having attacked the views of Newton instead of
declaring that the whole of Newtonian Physics-Optics, Mechanics and
the Law of Gravitation - were from the devil.'
Although the full significance of Heisenberg's remarks on Goethe will
become apparent only at a later stage of our discussion, they have been
quoted here because they form part of the symptom we wish to
characterize. Only this much may be pointed out immediately, that
Goethe - if not in the scientific then indeed in the poetical part of his
writings - did fulfil what Heisenberg rightly feels to have been his true
task.2
We mentioned Heisenberg's speech as a symptom of a certain tendency,
characteristic of the latest phase in science, to survey critically its own
epistemological foundations. A few years previous to Heisenberg's
speech, the need of such a survey found an eloquent advocate in the
late Professor A. N. Whitehead, in his book Science and the Modern
World, where, in view of the contradictory nature of modern physical
theories, he insists that 'if science is not to degenerate into a medley of
ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and enter upon a
thorough criticism of its own foundations'.
Among the scientists who have felt this need, and who have taken pains
to fulfil it, the late Professor A. Eddington obtains an eminent position.
Among his relevant utterances we will quote here the following,
because it contains a concrete statement concerning the field of external

observation which forms the basis for the modern scientific
world-picture. In his Philosophy of Physical Science we find him
stating that 'ideally, all our knowledge of the universe could have been
reached by visual sensation alone - in fact by the simplest form of
visual sensation, colourless and non-stereoscopic'.3 In other words, in
order to obtain scientific cognition of the physical world, man has felt
constrained to surrender the use of all his senses except the sense of
sight, and to limit even the act of seeing to the use of a single,
colour-blind eye.
Let us listen to yet another voice from the ranks of present-day science,
expressing a criticism which is symptomatic of our time. It comes from
the late physiologist, Professor A, Carrel, who, concerning the effect
which scientific research has had on man's life in general, says in his
book, Man the Unknown: 'The sciences of inert matter have led us into
a country that is not ours. ... Man is a stranger in the world he has
created.'
Of these utterances, Eddington's is at the present point of our discussion
of special interest for us; for he outlines in it the precise field of
sense-perception into which science has withdrawn in the course of that
general retreat towards an ever more restricted questioning of nature
which was noted by Heisenberg.
The pertinence of Eddington's statement is shown immediately one
considers what a person would know of the world if his only source of
experience were the sense of sight, still further limited in the way
Eddington describes. Out of everything that the world brings to the
totality of our senses, there remains nothing more than mere
movements, with certain changes of rate, direction, and so on. The
picture of the world received by such an observer is a purely kinematic
one. And this is, indeed, the character of the world-picture of modern
physical science. For in the scientific treatment of natural phenomena
all the qualities brought to us by our other senses, such as colour, tone,
warmth, density and even electricity and magnetism, are reduced to
mere movement-changes.
As a result, modern science is prevented from conceiving any valid

idea of 'force'. In so far as the concept 'force' appears in scientific
considerations, it plays