We have tried to describe the unique historical situation in which scientific practice and metaphysical conviction were closely coupled. Galileo and those who came after him raised the same problems as the medieval builders but broke away from their empirical knowledge to assert, with the help of God, the simplicity of the world and the universality of the language the experimental method postulated and deciphered.
In this way, the basic myth underlying modern science can be seen as a product of the peculiar complex which, at the close
of the Middle Ages, set up conditions of resonance and re
ciprocal amplification among economic, political, social, re
ligious, philosophic, and technical factors. However, the rapid decomposition of this complex left classical science stranded and isolated in a transformed culture.
Classical science was born in a culture dominated by the alliance between man, situated midway between the divine order and the natural order, and God, the rational and intelligi
ble legislator, the sovereign architect we have conceived in our own image. It has outlived this moment of cultural consonance that entitled philosophers and theologians to engage in science and that entitled scientists to decipher and express opinions on the divine wisdom and power at work in creation. With the support of religion and philosophy, scientists had come to be
lieve their enterprise was self-sufficient, that it exhausted the possibilities of a rational approach to natural phenomena. The relationship between scientific description and natural phi
losophy did not, in this sense, have to be justified. It could be seen as self-evident that science and philosophy were con
vergent and that science was discovering the principles of an authentic natural philosophy. But, oddly enough, the self
sufficiency experienced by scientists was to outlive the departure
of the medieval God and the withdrawal of the epistemological
guarantee offered by theology. The originally bold bet had be
come the triumphant science of the eighteenth century, 26 the
science that discovered the laws governing the motion of celes
tial and earthly bodies, a science that df\lembert and Euler incorporated into a complete and consistent system and whose history was defined by Lagrange as a logical achieve
ment tending toward perfection. It was the science honored by the Academies founded by absolute monarchs such as Louis XIV, Frederick II, and Catherine the Great,27 the science that made Newton a national hero. In other words, it was a suc
cessful science, convinced that it had proved that nature is transparent. "Je n 'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese" was Laplace's reply to Napoleon, who had asked him God's place in his world system.
The dualist implications of modern science were to survive as well as its claims. For the science of Laplace which, in many respects, is still the classical conception of science to
day, a description is objective to the extent to which the ob
server is excluded and the description itself is made from a point lying de jure outside the world, that is, from the divine viewpoint to which the human soul, created as it was in God's image, had access at the beginning. Thus classical science still aims at discovering the unique truth about the world, the one language that will decipher the whole of nature-today we would speak of the fundamental level of description from · which everything in existence can be deduced.
On this essential point let us cite Einstein, who has trans
lated into modern terms precisely what we may call the basic myth underlying modern science:
What place does the theoretical physicist's picture of the
world occupy among all these possible pictures? It de
mands the highest possible standard of rigorous precision in the description of relations, such as only the use of mathematical language can give. In regard to his subject matter, on the other hand, the physicist has to limit him
self very severely: he must content himself with describ
ing the most simple events which can be brought within the domain of our experience; all events of a more com
plex order are beyond the power of the human intellect to reconstruct with the subtle accuracy and logical perfec
tion which the theoretical physicist demands. Supreme
purity, clarity, and certainty at the cost of completeness.
53 THE TRIUMPH OF REASON
But what can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature thoroughly, while one leaves every
thing subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone?
Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe?
In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon what
soever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capac
ity of the human intellect. The physicist's renunciation of
completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle. 2s
For some time there were those who persisted in the illusion that attraction in the form in which it is expressed in the law of gravitation would justify attributing an intrinsic animation to nature and that if it were generalized it would explain the ori
gins of increasingly specific forms of activity, including even the interactions that compose human society. But this hope was rapidly crushed, at least partly as a consequence of the demands created by the political, economic, and institutional setting where science developed. We shall not examine this aspect of the problem, important though it is. Our point here is to emphasize that this very failure seemed to establish the consistency of the classical view and to prove that what had once been an inspiring conviction was a sad truth. In fact, the only interpretation apparently capable of rivaling this inter
pretation of science was henceforth the positivistic refusal of the very project of understanding the world . For example, Ernst Mach, the influential philosopher-scientist whose ideas had a great impact on the young Einstein, defined the task of scientific knowledge as arranging experience in as economical an order as possible. Science has no other meaningful goal than the simplest and most economical abstract expression of facts:
Here we have a clue which strips science of all its mys
tery, and shows us what its power really is. With respect
to specific results it yields us nothing that we could not reach in a sufficiently long time without methods . . ..
Just as a single human being, restricted wholly to the fruits of his own labor, could never amass a fortune, but on the contrary the accumulation of the labor of many men in the hands of one is the foundation of wealth and power, so, also, no knowledge worthy of the name can be gathered up in a single human mind limited to the span of a human life and gifted only with finite powers, except by the most exquisite economy of thought and by the careful amassment of the economically ordered experience of thousands of co-workers. 29
Thus science is useful because it leads to economy of thought. There may be some element of truth in such a state
ment, but does it tell the whole story? How far we have come from Newton, Leibniz, and the other founders of Western sci
ence, whose ambition was to provide an intelligible frame to the physical universe! Here science leads to interesting rules of action, but no more.
This brings us back to our starting point, to the idea that it is classical science, considered for a certain period of time as the very symbol of cultural unity, and not science as such that led to the cultural crisis we have described. Scientists found themselves reduced to a blind oscillation between the thunder
ings of .. scientific myth" and the silence of "scientific serious
ness," between affirming the absolute and global nature of scientific truth and retreating into a conception of scientific theory as a pragmatic recipe for effective intervention in natu
ral processes.
As we have already stated, we subscribe to the view that classical science has now reached its limit. One aspect of this transformation is the discovery of the limitations of classical concepts that imply that a knowledge of the world "as it is"
was possible. The omniscient beings, Laplace's or Maxwell's demon, or Einstein's God, beings that play such an important role in scientific reasoning, embody the kinds of extrapolation physicists thought they were allowed to make . As random
ness, complexity, and irreversibility enter into physics as ob
jects of positive knowledge , we are moving away from this rather naive assumption of a direct connection between our
55 THE TRIUMPH OF REASON
description of the world and the world itself. Objectivity in theoretical physics takes on a more subtle meaning.
This evolution was forced upon us by unexpected supple
mental discoveries that have shown that the existence of uni
versal constants, such as the velocity of light, limit our power to manipulate nature. (We shall discuss this unexpected situa
tion in Chapter VII.) As a result, physicists had to introduce new mathematical tools that make the relation between percep
tion and interpretation more complex. Whatever reality may mean, it always corresponds to an active intellectual construc
tion. The descriptions presented by science can no longer be disentangled from our questioning activity and therefore can no longer be attributed to some omniscient being.
On the eve of the Newtonian synthesis, John Donne la
mented the passing of the Aristotelian cosmos destroyed by Copernicus:
And new Philosophy calls all in doubt, The Element of fire is quite put out,
The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent, When in the Planets and the Firmament, They seek so many new, then they see that this Is crumbled out again to his Atomies
'Tis all in Pieces, all coherence gone.JO
The scattered bricks and stones of our present culture seem, as in Donne's time, capable of being rebuilt into a new "co
herence. " Classical science, the mythical science of a simple, passive world, belongs to the past, killed not by philosophical criticism or empiricist resignation but by the internal develop
ment of science itself.