Nations In Their Great Ages Have Not

The Problem Of Values Arises Only When Men Try To Fit Together Their Need To Be Social Animals With Their Need To Be Free Men. There Is No Problem, And There Are No Values, Until Men Want To Do Both. If An Anarchist Wants Only Freedom, Whatever The Cost, He Will Prefer The Jungle Of Man At War With Man. And If A Tyrant Wants Only Social Order, He Will Create The Totalitarian State.

The Hand Is The Cutting Edge Of The Mind.

We Receive Experience From Nature In A Series Of Messages. From These Messages We Extract A Content Of Information: That Is, We Decode The Messages In Some Way. And From This Code Of Information We Then Make A Basic Vocabulary Of Concepts And A Basic Grammar Of Laws, Which Jointly Describe The Inner Organization That Nature Translates Into The Happenings And The Appearances We Meet.

One Aim Of Physical Sciences Had Been To Give An Exact Picture The Material World. One Achievement Of Physics In The Twentieth Century Has Been To Prove That That Aim Is Unattainable.

Progress Is The Exploration Of Our Own Error. Evolution Is A Consolidation Of What Have Always Begun As Errors. And Errors Are Of Two Kinds: Errors That Turn Out To Be True And Errors That Turn Out To Be False (which Are Most Of Them). But They Both Have The Same Character Of Being An Imaginative Speculation. I Say All This Because I Want Very Much To Talk About The Human Side Of Discovery And Progress, And It Seems To Me Terribly Important To Say This In An Age In Which Most Non-scientists Are Feeling A Kind Of Loss Of Nerve.