It Is A Mistake To

This Is The Concentration Camp And Crematorium At Auschwitz. This Is Where People Were Turned Into Numbers. Into This Pond Were Flushed The Ashes Of Some Four Million People. And That Was Not Done By Gas. It Was Done By Arrogance. It Was Done By Dogma. It Was Done By Ignorance. When People Believe That They Have Absolute Knowledge, With No Test In Reality, This Is How They Behave.

All Those Formal Systems, In Mathematics And Physics And The Philosophy Of Science, Which Claim To Give Foundations For Certain Truth Are Surely Mistaken. I Am Tempted To Say That We Do Not Look For Truth, But For Knowledge. But I Dislike This Form Of Words, For Two Reasons. First Of All, We Do Look For Truth, However We Define It, It Is What We Find That Is Knowledge. And Second, What We Fail To Find Is Not Truth, But Certainty; The Nature Of Truth Is Exactly The Knowledge That We Do Find.

Progress Is The Exploration Of Our Own Error. Evolution Is A Consolidation Of What Have Always Begun As Errors. And Errors Are Of Two Kinds: Errors That Turn Out To Be True And Errors That Turn Out To Be False (which Are Most Of Them). But They Both Have The Same Character Of Being An Imaginative Speculation. I Say All This Because I Want Very Much To Talk About The Human Side Of Discovery And Progress, And It Seems To Me Terribly Important To Say This In An Age In Which Most Non-scientists Are Feeling A Kind Of Loss Of Nerve.

Science Is The Acceptance Of What Works And The Rejection Of What Does Not. That Needs More Courage Than We Might Think.

There Must Be Something Unique About Man Because Otherwise, Evidently, The Ducks Would Be Lecturing About Konrad Lorenz, And The Rats Would Be Writing Papers About B. F. Skinner.