The Descent of Science

To a piece of wood they say, You are my father; and to a stone, You have begotten me. Yes, they turn their backs to me, never their faces; but when in trouble they invoke, Arise, save us. --Jeremiah 2, 27. I AMONG THE BEINGS KNOWN TO US, the human being is, so far as we are aware, the only one to trouble himself about his origins. Mountains have no more care for such matters than it is in their power to leap like rams. As for the rams, they have perhaps some mute memory of their parents, and some abiding affection for them, yet they clearly lack ambition to retrace the steps of their ovine past. We alone desire to know whence we came. It is true that some among us manifest this desire in an obsession about ethnic origins, for example, but this need not signify that our interest in our predecessors must be a purely parochial affair. While a concern for our past seems to be peculiar to our species, and while it necessarily finds its initial expression in questions about our immediate precursors, origins being what they are, we cannot long wonder about our own without soon having to consider the origins of the whole human race, and of everything else besides. In modern times it has fallen above to natural science to get to the bottom of things, and no one would ever think to accuse it of parochial narrowness. To the contrary, so adept has modern science become at taking the long view, the view sub specie aeternitatis, in Spinoza's memorable phrase, that even when we recall that it too has a past, we usually dismiss it as irrelevant to its purpose. Nevertheless, science as we have come to conceive of it is in many respects as derivative a reality as the things normally subjected to its scrutiny, which suggests that it ought, in seeking to uncover the beginnings of things, also to account for its own peculiar origins. This task is much less straightforward than it may appear. Whatever it is that makes modern science distictively modern--and the lack of agreement among those who have made it their particular concern to investigate the birth indicates just how intricate and obscure is even this much of its history--one can safely say that the remote beginnings of modern natural science antedate modernity. Indeed, they were surely in place long before the dawn of properly scientific inquiry in Greek antiquity. To limit the problem to its barest essentials, it seems that the quest for what is first or ultimate is coeval with human life as such, as is apparent from the mythical accounts of the beginnings available to us from those aboriginal peoples who have survived into modern times. In attaining to a god's eye view of the origins of things, modern natural science would not thereby erase its properly human starting point. To be sure, we can have no direct access to our earliest ancestors: because a human being can only really be known if he decides to let himself be known, and because he lets himself be known principally by speaking his mind (even a human deed cannot be understood until one knows what the human agent thinks he is doing), the furthest reaches of our human past must forever remain somewhat hidden from our gaze. One might therefore be tempted to doubt whether even the most primitive myths that have come down to us are representative of human life at its inception. Upon reflection, however, it is clear that every attempt to speak about the first things, mythical or scientific, ancient and modern, must somehow echo the concerns of the first human beings to walk the earth. Whatever may prove to be the truth about our subhuman antecedents, we could not possibly recognize as one of our kind a creature who gave no thought, because he had no thought to give, to what preceded him in being. Thus could Aristotle assert with his characteristic mixture of self-effacement and self-assurance that all men by nature yearn to be in the know, and that all assume that what is called `wisdom' is concerned with the first causes and principles of being. …