topics: |  science | history | essays | anthology

Francis Bacon : The Sphinx (1609)

Analogy of the Sphinx as science, which lays riddles for the common man.
She sits on high from where a vast expanse can be seen, and traps man at
every step.  Her riddle is eventually answered by Oedipus, who was lame from
some disease, and is slain and her body taken to Thebes on an ass.

[It is Worth noting] that the Sphinx was subdued by a lame man with club
feet; for men generally proceed too fast and in too great a hurry to the
solution of the Sphinx's riddles; whence it follows that the Sphinx has the
better of them, and instead of obtaining the sovereignty by works and
effects, they only distract and worry their minds with disputations.

"At last gleams of light have come," Darwin wrote in 1844 to a friend, "and 1
am almost convinced (quite contrary to the opinion I started with) that
species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable."

	- Letter by Darwin, 1855, after ten years of painstaking observation,
	and 14 years before he published the O of S.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been
originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that,
whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being evolved.   - concluding sentence of O of S

   The phrase "by the creator," in the final sentence of the selection chosen
   here, did not appear in the first edition of Origin of Species. It was
   added to the second edition to conciliate angry clerics. Darwin later
   wrote, "I have long since regretted that I truckled to public opinion and
   used the Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant 'appeared'
   by some wholly unknown process."

Gardner's intro to William James:
If physicists reduce all existence to a finite number of particles or
waves, one can always ask, "Why those particles?' or "Why those waves?'
There necessarily must remain a basic substratum-a "dark abyss," as
Santayana once described it, "before which intelligence must be silent for
fear of going mad." It is the Unknowable of Spencer, the Noumena of Kant,
   the transcendent "Wholly Other" world of Plato and Christianity and all
   the great religions, It is the Tao that cannot be seen or heard or named
   because if it could be seen or heard or named it would not be Tao.

[Re: "the problem of being" - the existentialist meditation] on the absurdity
   of being. Jean Paul Sartre's remarkable novel Nausea is one long monolog
   of a man obsessed with this absurdity. He stares at his hand, at his
   reflection in a mirror, at the gnarled root of a chestnut tree, until he
   is overcome by nausea-a sickening awareness of the soft, sticky, bloated,
   obscene, all-pervading jelly of existence.

On Ortega y Gasset

The title Of Ortega Y. Gasset's best known work, The Revolt of the Masses, %
suggests that it might be a Marxian exhortation to the proletariat to shake
off their chains. It is nothing of the sort. The book is a searing indictment
of the increasing power of the common man in twentieth century industrial
society. True democracy, Ortega maintains, flourishes only when citizens of
widely differing views are willing to delegate responsibilities of government
to a superior minority. Today we see it everywhere degenerating into a
"hyper-democracy" in which the average man himself insists upon holding the
reins. Since this "mass man," whether rich or poor, hates everyone unlike
himself, he tries to stamp his mediocrity and vulgarity upon everyone. He may
do it quietly, through a variety of pressure groups, or violently by a
Communist or Fascist revolution. In either case the result is the same: a
homogenized society of identical, other-directed, middle class blanks.

This critique of western culture is of course far from new... but in Ortega's
book, first published in 1930, it found a crackling, jabbing expression that
made the book a profoundly disturbing one.

At the time of his death, Josr Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was Spain's most
distinguished philosopher and man of letters. When civil war broke out in
1936, Ortega, then professor of philosophy at the University of Madrid and
one of the intellectual bulwarks of the Republican government, left Spain as
a voluntary exile and did not return until 1945.

Contents

FRANCIS BACON : 	 The Sphinx (1609)
CHARLES DARWIN : 	 Recapitulation and Conclusion (1859)
JOHN DEWEY : 		 The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy (1909)
STEPHEN JAY GOULD : 	 Nonmoral Nature (1982)
WILLIAM JAMES : 	 The Problem of Being (1911)
HAVELOCK ELLIS : 	 What Makes a Woman Beautiful (1905)
JEAN HENRI FABRE : 	 The Sacred Beetle (1918)
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON : The Logic of Elfland (1908)
CARL SAGAN : 		 Can We Know The Universe?
     	   		 Reflections on a Grain of Salt ( 1979) :
JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH : 	 The Colloid and the Crystal (1950)
JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET : 	 The Barbarism of "Specialization" (1932)
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY :  	 Science and Culture (1893)
JOHN BURROUGHS :	 Science and Literature (1889)
ISAAC ASIMOV : 		 Science and Beauty (1983)
ERNEST NAGEL : 		 Automation (1955)
JONATHAN NORTON LEONARD : Other-Worldly Life (1953)
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER :  Physics in the Contemporary World (1955)
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD : Religion and Science (1925)
JOHN DOS PASSOS : 	 Proteus (1930)
JULIAN HUXLEY : 	 An Essay on Bird-Mind (1923)
ARTHUR STANLEY EDDINGTON : The Decline of Determinism ( 1934 )
ALDOUS HUXLEY : 	 Science in the Brave New World (1932)
RACHEL CARSON : 	 The Sunless Sea (1951)
MAURICE MAETERLINCK : 	 The Nuptial Flight (1901)
H. G. WELLS : 		 The New Source of Energy (1914)
      	    		 Science and Ultimate Truth (1931)
LAURA FERMI : 		 Success (1954)
SAMUEL GOUDSMIT : 	 The Gestapo in Science (1947)
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON : Pan's Pipes (1876)
SIGMUND FREUD : 	 Dreams of the Death of Beloved Persons ( 1900)
BERTRAND RUSSELL : 	 The Science to Save Us from Science (1950)
		 	 The Greatness of Albert Einstein (1955)
ALBERT EINSTEIN : 	 E = mc2 (1946)
LEWIS THOMAS : 		 Seven Wonders (1983)