It seemed at times that the men singing the Christmas carols made me cry. I expected the women to sing, it seemed natural, but for the men to join in, men of all ages, and to do it with such stout hearts, that seemed especially reassuring and wonderful. I cried every year. It was that and the purity of the soprano who sang ‘O Holy Night,’ and ‘What is This?’ Of course I joined in the singing myself. Nonetheless, it made me ponder on a third dimension which science has added to modern war. It has created war nerves and the war of nerves. I am not thinking about the technical conditions for a war of nerves: the camera person and the radio and the massed display strength. I am thinking of the climate in which this stage lightening flickers and is made to seem real. The last eighty years have given us a frightening show of these mental states. There is a division in the mind of each of us, that has become plain, between the being and the brute; and the rift can be opened, the being submerged, with a cynical simplicity, with the meanest tools of envy and frustration, which in my boyhood would have been thought inconceivable in a civilized society. I shall come back to this cleavage in our minds, for it is much more than an item in a list of war crimes. However, it is an item. It helps create the conditions for disaster. And I think that science has contributed to it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Science; the fact that most people are impressed by it but ignorant and helpless—all this seems to me to have contributed to the division in our minds. And scientists cannot escape the responsibility for this. They have enjoyed acting the mysterious stranger, the powerful voice without emotion, the expert and the god. They have failed to make themselves comfortable in the talk of people in the street; no one taught them the knack, of course, but they were not keen to learn. And now they find the distance which they enjoyed has turned to distrust, and the awe has turned to fear; and people who are by no means fools really believe that we should be better off without science. These are the indictments which scientists cannot escape. Of course, they are often badly phrased, so that scientists can side-step them with generalities about the common responsibility, and who voted the credits for atomic research anyway; which are perfectly just, but not at all relevant. That is not the heart of the matter; and the people in queues and pubs are humbly groping for the heart. They are not good at saying things and they do not give model answers to interviewers. However, when we say “We have forgotten what is right,” what is in their minds is perfectly true. Science and society are out of joint. Science has given to no one in particular a power which no one in particular knows how to use. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Why do not scientists invent something sensible? Wives say it every time they stub their toe on the waste bin, and husbands say it whenever a fuse blows. Why is it the business of no one in particular to stop fitting science for death and to begin fitting it into our lives? We will agree that warlike science is no more than a by-product of a warlike society. Science has merely provided the means, for good or for bad; and society has seized it for bad. However, what are we going to do about it? The first thing to do, it seems to me, is to treat this as a scientific question: by which I mean as a practical and sensible questions, which deserves a factual approach and a reasoned answer. Now that I have apologized on behalf of scientists, and this on a scale which some of them will certainly think too ample, let us cut out what usually happens to the argument at this point, the rush of recriminations. The scientists are conscious of their mistakes; and I do not want to discuss the mistakes of non-scientists—although they have made a great many—except those which we all must begin to make good. I have said that a scientific answer must be practical as well as sensible. This really rules out at once the panaceas which also tend to run the argument into a blind alley at this stage; the panaceas which say summarily “Get rid of them.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Naturally, it does not seem to me to be sensible to get rid of scientists; but in any case, it plainly is not practical. And whatever we do with our own scientists, it very plainly is not practical to get rid of the scientists of rival nations; because if there existed the conditions for agreement among nations on this far-reaching scheme, then the conditions for war would already have disappeared. If there existed the conditions for international agreement, say to suspend all scientific research, or to abandon warlike research, or in any other way to forgo science as an instrument of nationalism—if such agreement could be reached, then they would already have disappeared. So, however we might sigh for Samuel Butler’s panacea in Erewhon, simply to give up al machines, there is no point in talking about it. I believe it would be a disaster for humankind the coming of the Dark Ages. However, there is no point in arguing this. It just is not practical, nationally or internationally. There are no panaceas at all; and we had better face that. There is nothing that we can do overnight, in a week or a month, which can straighten by a laying on of hands the ancient distortion of society. Do not let us fancy that any one of us out of the blue will concoct that stirring letter to The Times which will change the black mood of history—and the instruction to diplomats. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Putting scientist in the Cabinet will not do that, and women in the War Office (Department of Defense) will not, now will bishops in the Privy Council. There are no panaceas. We are the heirs to a tradition which has left science and society out of step. The being in the street is right: we have never learned to handle such things. Nothing will do but that we learn. However, learning is not done in a year. Our ultimate survival is in our own hands. Our survival while we are learning is a much chancier thing. We had better be realistic about that. Meanwhile we had better settle down to work for our ultimate survival; and we had better start now. We have seen that the diagnosis has turned out to be not very difficult. Science and our social habits are out of step. And the cure is no deeper either. We must learn to match them. And there is no way of learning this unless we learn to understand both. Of the two, of course, the one which is strange is science. I have already blamed the scientists for that. One has been the preacher of our age, timid, thwarted, anxious to be asked to help; and with a secret ambition to play the Grey Eminence. Through years of childhood poverty one dreamed of this. Scientific skill was a blue door beckoning to one, which would open into the society of dignitaries of the state. However, the private motives of scientists are not the trend of science. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The trend of science is made by the needs of society: navigation before the eighteenth century, manufacture thereafter; and in our age I believe the liberation of personality. Whatever the part which scientists like to act, or for that matter which painters like to dress, science shares the aims of our society just as art does. The difficulties only of language. To grow familiar with the large ideas of science calls for patience and an effort of attention; and I hope I have shown that it repays them. For nearly three hundred years, these ideas have been applied to technical needs; and they have made our World anew, triumphantly, from top to toe. Our shoes are tanned and stitched, our clothes are spun and dyed and woven, we are lighted and carried and doctored by means which were unknow to neat Mr. Pope at Twickenham in 1740. We may not think that is much to put against the eighty thousand dead in Hiroshima, Japan, or we may. We may not think it recompenses us for the absence of any Mr. Pope from Twickenham today; we may even hold it responsible. It is certainly not a spiritual achievement. However, it has not yet tried to be. It has applied its ideas monotonously to shoe-leather and bicycle bells. And it has made a superb job of them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Compare its record in its own field with that of any other ideas of the same age: Burke’s ideas of the imagination, or Bentham’s on government, or Adam Smith on political economy. If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have created something, then certainly it is the ideas of science. We may think that all that science has created is comfort; and it certainly has done that—the very word “comfortable” in the modern sense dates from the Industrial Revolution. However, we always stopped to think what science has done not to our mode of living but to our life? We talk about research for death, the treat of war and the number of civilians who get killed. However, have we always weighed this against the increase in out own life span? Let us do a small sum. The number of people killed in Great Britain in six years of war by German bomb, flying bombs, and V2’s was sixty thousand. They were an average lot of people, which means that on an average they lost half their expectation of life. Quite an easy long division shows that the effect of this in our population of fifty million people shorten the average span of life by less than one tenth of one percent. This is considerably less than a fortnight. Put this on the side. And on the credit side, we know that in the last hundred and sixty years the average span of life in California has increased by forty years. That is this the price of science, take it or leave it—a fortnight for forty years. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

And these forty years have been created by applying to daily life, to clothing and bedding, to hygiene and infection, to birth and death, the simple ideas of science—the fundamental ideas I have been talking about: order, cause, and chance. If any ideas have a claim to be called creative, because they have created life, it is the ideas of science. We have not neglected these ideas altogether in our social organization. However, it is a point I have made several times, we have got hopelessly behind with them. The idea of order is now old enough to have reached at least our filing cabinets. The idea of cause and effect has entered our habits, until it has become the new a priori in the making of administrative plans. The difficulty is to dislodge it, now that it is hardening into a scholastic formula. For the idea which has given a new vigor to science in our generation is larger than the machinery of cause and effect. It stipulates no special mechanism between the present and the future. It is content to predict the future, without insisting that the computation must follow the steps of causal law. I have called this idea of chance, because its method is statistical, and because it recognizes that every prediction carries with its own measurable uncertainty. A good prediction is one which defines its area of uncertainty; a bad prediction ignores it. And at the bottom this is no more than the return to the essentially empirical, the experimental nature of science. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Science is a great many things, and I have called them a great many names; but in the end they all return to this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of what does not. That needs more courage than we think. When we have faced our Worldly problems, it needs more courage than we have ever found. This is how society has lost touch with science: because it has hesitated to judge itself by the same impersonal code of what works and what does not. We have clung to Adam Smith and Burke, or have agitated for Plato or Aquinas, through wars and famine, through rising and falling birth-rates, and through libraries of learned argument. And in the end, our eyes have always wandered from the birth-rate to the argument: from the birth-rate to what we have wanted to believe. Here is the crux of what I have been saying. Here is our ultimate hope of saving ourselves from extinction. We must learn to understand that the content of all knowledge is empirical; that its test is whether it works; and we must learn to act on that understanding in the World as well as in the laboratory. This message of science: our ideas must be realistic, flexible, unbigoted—they must be human, they must create their own authority. If any idea have a claim to be called creative, because they have liberated that creative impulse, it is the ideas of science. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

This is not only a material code. On the contrary, my hope is that it may heal the spiritual cleft which two wars have uncovered. I have seen in my lifetime an abyss open in the human mind: a gulf between the endeavor to be human, and the relish in being brute. The scientist has indeed had a hand in this, and every other specialist too, with one’s prim detachment and one’s oracular airs. However, of course, the large strain which has opened this fault is social. We have made beings live in two halves, a Sunday half and a workday half. We have ordered them to love their neighbor and to turn the other cheek, in a society which has constantly compelled them to shoulder their neighbor aside and to turn their backs. So we have created a savage sense of failure which, as we know now to our cost, can be tapped with an ease which is frightening; and which can thrust up, with explosive force, a symbol to repeat to an unhappy people its most degrading dream. Can science heal that neurotic flaw in us? If science cannot, then nothing can. Let us stop pretending. There is no cure in high moral precepts. We have preached them too long to beings who are forced to live how they can: that makes the strain which they have not been able to bear. We need an ethic which is moral and which works. It is often said that science has destroyed our values and put nothing in their place. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

What has really happened of course is that science has sown in harsh relief the division between our values and our World. We have not begun to let science get into our heads; where then was it supposed to create these values? We have used it as a machine without will, the conjured spirit to the chores. I believe that science can create values: and will create them precisely as literature does, by looking into the human personality; by discovering what divides it and what cements it. That is how great writer have explored human beings, and this whether they themselves as being have been driven by the anguish of Akasha in Anne Rice’s The Queen of the Damned or by the sympathy of Marius in Anne Rice’s Blood and Gold. The insight of science is not different from that of the arts. Science will create values, I believe, and discover virtues, when it looks into being; when it explores what makes one human and not an animal, and what makes one’s societies human and not animal packs. I believe that we can reach this unity in our culture. The nations in their great ages have not been great in art or science, but in art and science. Rembrandt was the contemporary of Huygens and Spinoza. At that very time, Isaac Newton walked with Dryden and Christopher Wren. We know that our is a remarkable age of science with the new 5 G internet. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Science is for us to use to broaden and liberate culture. These are the marks of science: that it is open for all to hear, and all are free to speak their minds in it. They are marks of the World at its best, and the human spirit at its most challenging. One distinguishing characteristic of the encounter is the degree of intensity, or what I would call passion. I am not referring here to the quantity of emotion. I mean a quality of commitment, which may be present in little experiences—such as a brief glance out the window at a tree—that do not necessarily involve any great quantity of emotion. However, these temporally brief experiences may have a considerable significance for the sensitive person, here viewed as the person with the capacity for passion. Students these days have a great deal of talent, but they lack passion and commitment. Interestingly enough, my men students get married early for reasons of security and become dependent on their wives, and often it is only through their wives that I, as their teacher, can draw out their talent. The fact that talent is plentiful but passion is lacking seems to me to be a fundamental facet of the problem of creativity in many fields today, and our ways of approaching creativity by evading the encounter have played directly into this trend. We worship technique—talent—as a way of evading the anxiety of the direct encounter. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

When passion has been obliterated in favor of learning, the present writer can easily foresee one’s fate in an age, in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the boon can easily be perused during an afternoon nap. Agnostic positivism—this doctrine tells us, we have no right to dream dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the Universe, merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our highest interest. We must always wait for sensible evidence for our beliefs; and where such evidence is in accessible we must frame no hypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position in abstracto. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs, to live or languish according to what the unseen World contained, a philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the other would be one’s wisest cue. However, unfortunately, neutrality is not only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because, as the psychologist tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes, and involved conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing is, is continuing to act as if it were not. #RandolpHarris 13 of 19

If, for instance, I refuse to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and light no fire as if it were still warm. If I doubt that you are worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just as if you were unworthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring my house, I leave it uninsured as much as I believed there were no deed. And so if I must not believe that the World is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing. And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner interests would lead us to believe, that most ridiculous of commands? Is it not sheer folly of strict and rigid doctrines to say that our inner interest can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden World may contain? In other cases divinations based on inner interest have proved prophetic enough. Take science itself! Without an imperious inner demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematic harmonies, we should never have attained to proving that such harmonies are possessed hidden between all the cogs, sprockets, and interstices of the crude natural World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need. Whence such needs come from we do not know: we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes the with Dr. Darwin’s accidental variations. However, the inner need of believing that this World of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of may generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible Universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible Universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic “thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence” is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind. If the study of the uniqueness of the individual does not fit into what we know of science, then so much the worse for that conception of science. It, too, will have to endure re-creation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Phenomenology has a history in American psychological thinking, but on the whole I think it has languished. The European phenomenologists with their excruciatingly careful and laborious demonstrations, can reteach us that the best way of understanding another human being, or at least a way necessary for some purposes, is to get into one’s Weltanschauung and to be able to see one’s World through another’s eyes. Of course such conclusion is rough on any positivistic philosophy of science. The existentialist stress on the ultimate aloneness of the individual is a useful reminder for us, not only to work out further the concepts of decisions, or responsibility, of choice, of self-creation, or autonomy, or identity itself. It also makes more problematic and more fascinating the mystery of communication between alone-ness via, for example, intuition and empathy, love and altruism, identification with others, and homonymy in general. We take these for granted. If we regarded them as miracles to be explained, it would be better. Another preoccupation of existentialist writers can be phrased very simply, I think. It is the dimension of seriousness and profundity of living (or perhaps the tragic sense of life) contrasted with the shallow and superficial life, which is a kind of diminished living, a defense against the ultimate problem of life. This is not just a literary concept. It has a real operational meaning, for instance, in psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

I (and others) have been increasingly impressed with the fact that tragedy can sometimes be therapeutic, and that therapy often seems to work best when people are driven into it by pain. It is when the shallow life does not work that it is questioned and that there occurs a call to fundamentals. Shallowness in psychology does not work either as the existentialists are demonstrating very clearly. He existentialists along with many other groups are helping to teach us about the limits of verbal, analytic, conceptual rationality. They are part of the current call back to raw experience as prior to any concepts or abstractions. This amounts to what I believe to be justified critique of the whole way of thinking in the Western World in the 21st century, including orthodox positivistic science and philosophy, both of which badly need re-examination. Possibly most important of all the changes to be wrought by the phenomenologists and existentialists is an overdue revolution in the theory of science. I should not say “wrought by” but rather “helped along by,” because there are many other forces helping to destroy official philosophy of science or scientism. It is not only the Cartesian split between subject and object that needs to be overcome. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

There are other radical changes made necessary by the inclusion of the psyche and of raw experience in reality, and such a change will affect not only the science of psychology but all other sciences as well, for example, parsimony, simplicity, precision, orderliness, logic, elegance, definition, and so forth, are all the realm of abstraction rather than of experience. I close with the stimulus that has most powerfully affected me in the existentialist literature, namely, the problem of future time in psychology. Not that this, like all the other problems or pushes I have mentioned up to this point, was totally unfamiliar to me nor, I imagine, to any serious student of the theory of personality. We should be sensitized to the necessity of grappling with and systematizing the dynamic role of the future in the presently existing personality, for example, growth and becoming and possibly necessarily point toward the future; so do the concepts of potentiality and hoping, and of wishing and imagining; reduction to the concrete is a loss of future; threat and apprehension point to the future (no future = no neurosis); self-actualization is meaningless without reference to a currently active future; life can be a gestalt in time, and so forth and so on. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

And yet the basic and central importance of this problem of the existentialists has something to teach us. I think it fair to say that no theory of psychology will ever be complete which does not centrally incorporate the concept that beings have a future within one, dynamically active at this present moment. In this sense the future can be treated as a-historical sense. Also we must realize that only the future is in principle unknown and unknowable, which means that all habits, defenses and coping mechanisms are doubtful and ambiguous since they are based on past experience. Only the flexibly creative person can really manage the future, only the one who can face novelty with confidence without fear. I am convinced that much of what we now call psychology is the study of tricks we used to avoid the anxiety of absolute novelty by making believe the future will be like the past. “Remember to learn wisdom in thy youth; yea, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God. Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goes let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever,” reports Alma 37.35-36. Sometimes the literal form of expressions tends to be taken as the whole of the truth and the inner reality is missed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19