Description
In 1798. William Wordsworth, writing of a dull and unimaginative cloud, said:
A primrose by a river's brim A yellow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more. To some people it may seem that this is the picture of a scientist. Science must limit itself, they may think, to the material aspects of that primrose and nothing more. It must avoid poetry, dismiss beauty. and carefully discipline imagination.
There can be nothing in the primrose except that which can be weighed, measured, and demonstrated. And does that not reduce the world to dusty grayness? Don't you believe it! The methodology of science may be of no use outside a world of numbering and measuring that all can agree on, but even when constrained within those limits, it uncovers wonders and beauty that the undisciplined imagination, unaware of science, could never grasp.
The microscope applied to the primrose petal produces vistas of order and of dainty interrelation- ships the unaided eye cannot see. Chemistry reveals the molecular structure of pigments that no one could otherwise dream of. Turning to the plant that bears the blossom, there are the complex interrelationships of the components of the photosynthetic mechanism that makes it possible for the plant to turn the energy of sunlight into material structure. The whole is more beautiful than anything Wordsworth ever sensed in a primrose, however impassioned it may have made him feel.
And psychology, too, is a science. It deals with matters that must be numbered and measured, but not in as clear-cut a way. All electrons are absolutely alike. What holds for one, holds for all of them from here to the farthest star. All grains of sand are very much alike. All crystals of salt are very much alike. All tennis balls. In many ways, even all automobiles.
ISBN:9780075547471
