The Symbol And The Metaphor

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.

When Coleridge Tried To Define Beauty, He Returned Always To One Deep Thought; Beauty, He Said, Is Unity In Variety! Science Is Nothing Else Than The Search To Discover Unity In The Wild Variety Of Nature,-or, More Exactly, In The Variety Of Our Experience. Poetry, Painting, The Arts Are The Same Search, In Coleridge's Phrase, For Unity In Variety.

Has There Ever Been A Society Which Has Died Of Dissent? Several Have Died Of Conformity In Our Lifetime.

There Must Be Something Unique About Man Because Otherwise, Evidently, The Ducks Would Be Lecturing About Konrad Lorenz, And The Rats Would Be Writing Papers About B. F. Skinner.

All Science Is The Search For Unity In Hidden Likenesses.