The Basis For Poetry And

There Are Two Parts To The Human Dilemma. One Is The Belief That The End Justifies The Means. That Push-button Philosophy, That Deliberate Deafness To Suffering, Has Become The Monster In The War Machine. The Other Is The Betrayal Of The Human Spirit: The Assertion Of Dogma That Closes The Mind, And Turns A Nation, A Civilization, Into A Regiment Of Ghosts--obedient Ghosts Or Tortured Ghosts.

Science Is A Tribute To What We Can Know, Although We Are Fallible.

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.

The Painter's Portrait And The Physicist's Explanation Are Both Rooted In Reality, But They Have Been Changed By The Painter Or The Physicist Into Something More Subtly Imagined Than The Photographic Appearance Of Things.

You Will Die But The Carbon Will Not; Its Career Does Not End With You. It Will Return To The Soil, And There A Plant May Take It Up Again In Time, Sending It Once More On A Cycle Of Plant And Animal Life.