A Comprehensive Universe
For my part, I think we grow terribly bored in the depths of our intellectual caves. In any case it appears to me highly desirable that man should from time to time be able to emerge and breathe fresh air, drink in the sunlight, and admire Nature as a whole, whose splendour far exceeds the narrow confines of his specialist cavern. For it must never be forgotten that Nature is one; as the whole world of physics demonstrates, nothing can be really comprehended by separating it from everything else. The more one tries to concentrate attention on the small details of Nature, the clearer it becomes that it is impossible to describe the minute without paying attention to the gigantic; the very mass of a photon, for example, depends on the radius of the Universe as a whole.I have come out of my cave, then, to look around; and I have looked at the world, and Man in particular, from the angle and along the lines available to me from my physicist's den. I testify that I have seen landscapes which have filled me with wonder, landscapes that were often quite new, never described to me by the biologist, or the psychologist, or the palaeontologist, or the philosopher, or the artist, or the theologian. It is this personal experience of a physicist reflecting upon man that I have tried to describe in the following chapters.
Carrel was very insistent on the need for safeguarding the future of man by carrying out synthetical study alongside the studies of our specialists. His observations on this subject, although written almost a quarter of a century ago, strike such a contemporary note that I cannot forbear to quote them, before going on to develop them in my own way.
"Excessive specialisation by doctors is even more harmful. The patient has been divided into a number of small compartments, and each compartment has its own specialist. From the beginning of his career, the specialist concentrates on the study of a minute portion of the human body and remains so ignorant about the rest of it that he is not even capable of a thorough knowledge of this part. A similar phenomenon occurs among educationalists, priests, economists, and sociologists who have failed to acquire a knowledge of man as a whole before confining themselves to their own particular field. The very eminence of the specialist makes him all the more dangerous....
"To be sure, specialists are necessary. Science could make no progress without them. But before the results of their labours are applied to man, there should be a preliminary synthesis of the scattered data of analysis, and this cannot be achieved simply by getting the specialists together round a table. It cannot be the product of a group: it must be the work of one man. No work of art has ever been produced by a committee of artists; no great discovery has ever been made by a committee of scholars. The synthesis needed to advance our knowledge of ourselves must take place within a single brain.
"Nowadays the data accumulated by specialists are largely unusable because there is no one to co-ordinate this knowledge and look at the human being as a whole. We have a great many research workers in science, but very few real scientists. This strange situation is not due to a paucity of minds capable of making a great intellectual effort.... Among those who have been forced by their universities or scientific institutes to specialise too narrowly, there are certainly some who would be able to grasp a big subject as a whole as well as in its parts. Up till now, the balance has always been in favour of research workers who limit themselves to a narrow field and devote their efforts to exhaustive study of some detail that may often be quite unimportant. An original piece of work on an unimportant subject is valued more highly than the thorough knowledge of a whole science. Heads of universities and their advisers do not seem to understand that there is just as much need for minds that can synthesise as for minds that can analyse. If only people would recognise the superiority of this bent of mind and take steps to encourage its development, specialisation would cease to be so dangerous."
There has been a steady increase in the number of specialists since Alexis Carrel wrote these words, and not much effort seems to have been made to form teams for synthetic study. It is therefore high time to encourage some of the scientists, particularly the younger ones, to come out of their caves and to have a good look round at the whole body of our knowledge. This appears an even more urgent call where the 'discovery' of man is concerned, for this is surely the prime object of all our science. It is quite idle — as Carrel observed — to imagine that that a series of analyses placed side by side could ever automatically provide a valid map of what man really is: some one brain must take a bird's-eye view of all this analysis, for one brain alone would be able to fit all our knowledge into one harmonious whole and produce an acceptable picture of phenomena in their totality.
We shall come back to this essential point and devote considerable space to it in the course of this book, for it is my belief that this difficulty has been responsible for the reluctance of scientists to produce a broad conspectus ranging over a number of scientific disciplines.
If I might express one wish, it would be, in the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that this book might prove to be "a gesture calling forth further gestures". I long for the day when we can all catch the vision of each of these generalisers looking out from the heights of his own particular domain and reflecting upon man as a whole, and as a part of the whole cosmos. For in the final issue the call goes out to all men to help in man's search for himself.
Alexis Carrel's Call for Synthesisers
When I was still a student, I remeber being very impressed by reading Alexis Carrel's l'Homme, cet inconnu [Man, the Unknown — Ed]. This work stressed the importance in all scientific disciplines, of turning attention to man and studying him; for in the last resort, whether one likes it or not, and without adding an anthropocentric bias, man is our first and last concern. All points of view radiate from man; and, as we shall see more clearly later on, Nature herself is but the mirror of man, and gives us more and more information about him as we increase our knowledge of physical laws. Alexis Carrel was a biology specialist; and he too was a man who wished to come out of his cave and look at the world. His angle of vision was that of biology; but his intellectual procedure was much the same.
Need for "Generalisers"
Since Alexis Carrel's time, moreover, it has become clear that it is not so much synthesists as 'generalisers' who are lacking today. The synthesist indeed tries to form a new picture by piecing together the results of analysis. It has, however, to be realised that this procedure is not always possible, for these analyses often consist of pieces belonging not to the same but to different 'puzzles'.
The Problem of Language
The heart of this problem, as we shall see, is language. Take, for example, a biologist. As he studies the problems of memory he is, undoubtedly, interested in knowing all the physicist has to teach him about space-time, since memory calls up into consciousness images of phenomena that are separated in point of space and time. So the biologist finds out all he can about the physicist's space-time, and tries to fit this in with his own knowledge; but generally speaking he is not successful in the attempt. Why is this? It is because the physicist's explanations, when translated into the biologist's language, lose all the meaning they had in the language of the physicist. In other words, it is not enough to bring fields of knowledge together for purposes of comparison by way of synthesis: we must first compare the languages — and, in practice, the methodologies — in use in spheres as diverse as biology and physics. Then it will be not only a question of synthesis, but also of generalisation. The supreme importance of language will become increasingly evident as this book proceeds.
Universal Scope
I have been greatly helped in the production of this book by the numerous discussions in which I have been able to participate during these last few years with men belonging to all the various scientific disciplines. I am thinking not only of the biologists, psychologists, mathematicians, cyberneticians, anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists; I also have in mind the artists and the priests, the educationalists, the industrialists, the economists, the financiers, all of whom gave me considerable help in enlarging my outlook upon man. To all of them I would like to offer my warmest thanks.