On the Role of Insight in the Study of Mankind

The transformation of scientific thought of the last ten years has been characterized by a greater recognition that the scientist does not form his image of the world passively, like a photographic plate. The scientist has come to see that the nature of his own activity can never be ignored. Something of himself enters into the picture he gives us of that world. However, if we look more closely at this “operational” attitude, we must admit that it is a very impersonal, generalized, indeed fictitious scientist, whose activities have been scrutinized so carefully. What I mean is that the “scientist” who appears in current discussions of scientific philosophy, is a bloodless metaphysical engine, hardly to be recognized as human. Doubtless this delimitation of the scope of the scientist's self-criticism was the necessary first stage in the working out of the skepticism of the new physics. But I hope to show it is just the other side of him,—that is—the scientist when he is not conscious of performing any professional operations, that is of most interest to us in asking why the sciences of psychology and sociology are, in a deeply human sense, so consistently disappointing.

What follows here may be regarded, in the first place, as a further injection of the lessons of relativity and quantum physics into the study of mankind. You may, if you wish, call this “relativistic psychology and sociology”. However I have been careful not to use this pretentious expression as my title. The chief lessons of such an attempt are very old stuff. None the less it is old stuff on which the scientific movement has conveniently turned its back.

Classical physical science had for its ideal and goal a unified, impersonal, mathematical machine that could be operated by anyone with the requisite “training”, no matter what his personal make-up. And despite the doubt thrown on this program by the new physics, such an ideal still persists in the modern chastened attitude of the scientist.