Excerpt from: Advice to a Young Scientist, P.B. Medawar h&r c.1979
author preface includes; young equals old, him equals her.
CH.6 ~Aspects~of~Scientific~Life~and~Manners
~Is~Science~Undervalued?
"The explanation is true, so scientists had best come to terms
with it, resent it though they may. Science does not have a
major bearing on human relationships: on the relationship of
governors to the governed; on ~les~passions~de~l'a^me; nor on
the causes of exaltation or misery and the character and
intensity of aesthetic pleasures.
In his ~Dictionnaire~philosophique, Voltaire said that natural
science "is so little essential for the conduct of life that
philosophers didn't need it; it required centuries to learn a
part of the laws of nature, but a day was enough for a sage to
learn the duties of man. <nature^2 science/humanities>
In his ~Life~of~Milton, Dr. Samuel Johnson, chiding Milton and
Abraham Cowley for entertaining the idea of an academy in which
the scholars themselves should learn astronomy, physics and
chemistry in addition to the common run of school subjects, wrote:
The truth is that the knowledge of external nature and of the sciences
which that knowledge requires or includes, is not the great or the
frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide for action or
conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing, the first
requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong;
the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and with those
examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by events the
reasonableness of opinions.
Prudence and justice are virtues and excellencies of all times and of all
places; we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by
chance.
Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our
speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.
Physical knowledge is of such rare emergence, that one man may know
another half of his life without being able to estimate his skill in
hydrostatics or astronomy; but his moral and prudential character
immediately appears. <paradox of goodness in human ethical nature>
There is no reason why these truths <?> should diminish a
a scientist's self-esteem or lessen his contentment --
even exultation -- at being a scientist. Scientists whose
work is prospering and who find themselves deeply absorbed
in or transported by their research feel quite sorry for those
who do not share the same sense of delight; many artists feel
the same, and it makes them indifferent to -- and is certainly
a fully adequate compensation for -- any respect they think
owed to them by the general public." 33