Scientists tend to be ... Utopian in temperament--to believe in the possibility in principle, perhaps even in fact, of a different... and altogether better world. The great days of Utopian thinking were the days when voyages of discovery on the earth's surface had the same significance as space travel has today. The old Utopias--New Atlantis, Christianopolis and the City of the Sun--were faraway contemporary societies, but the Utopias men dream of today lie in the distant future or on a planet of a distant faraway sun. Arcadian thinking looks not forward nor far away but backward to a golden age that could yet return. Arcadia is a world of innocence not yet corrupted by ambition and inquiry, a world of pious acquiescence in the established order of things, without strife and without ambition--a world of "truth and honest living." Milton, whom I quote, saw it as the purpose of education "to repair the ruins of our first parents," to return to the happy innocence of the world before the Fall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won't do. It's an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theor...y can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in.... Fear a...nd resentment of what is new is really a lament for the memories of our childhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freudian psychoanalytical theory is a mythology that answers pretty well to Levi-Strauss's descriptions. It brings some kind of or...der into incoherence; it, too, hangs together, makes sense, leaves no loose ends, and is never (but never) at a loss for explanation. In a state of bewilderment it may therefore bring comfort and relief.... give its subject a new and deeper understanding of his own condition and of the nature of his relationship to his fellow men. A mythical structure will be built up around him which makes sense and is believable-in, regardless of whether or not it is true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »