The Initial Stage, The Act

It Is Wrong And Dangerous To Extol Freedom By Telling People That They Will Certainly Be All Right Once They Are Free. The Most We Can Say Of Democracy Or Freedom Is That They Give Our Personal Abilities A Little More Influence On Our Well-being.

In Point Of Fact, No Conclusive Disproof Of A Theory Can Ever Be Produced; For It Is Always Possible To Say That The Experimental Results Are Not Reliable Or That The Discrepancies Which Are Asserted To Exist Between The Experimental Results And The Theory Are Only Apparent And That They Will Disappear With The Advance Of Our Understanding. If You Insist On Strict Proof (or Strict Disproof) In The Empirical Sciences, You Will Never Benefit From Experience, And Never Learn From It How Wrong You Are.

Science Is Not A System Of Certain, Or -established, Statements; Nor Is It A System Which Steadily Advances Towards A State Of Finality... And Our Guesses Are Guided By The Unscientific, The Metaphysical (though Biologically Explicable) Faith In Laws, In Regularities Which We Can Uncover-discover. Like Bacon, We Might Describe Our Own Contemporary Science-'the Method Of Reasoning Which Men Now Ordinarily Apply To Nature'-as Consisting Of 'anticipations, Rash And Premature' And As 'prejudices'.

The Method Of Science Depends On Our Attempts To Describe The World With Simple Theories: Theories That Are Complex May Become Untestable, Even If They Happen To Be True. Science May Be Described As The Art Of Systematic Over-simplification-the Art Of Discerning What We May With Advantage Omit.

It Is Not Intuitive Ease I Am After, But Rather A Point Of View Which Is Sufficiently Definite To Clear Up Some Difficulties, And To Be Criticized In Rational Terms. (bohr's Complementarity Cannot Be So Criticized, I Fear; It Can Only Be Accepted Or Denounced - Perhaps As Being Ad Hoc, Or As Being Irrational, Or As Being Hopelessly Vague.)