The Umanities in an Age of Science

Many persons today question the meaningfulness of the traditional formulations of some of the basic questions which have been asked in the humanities, and also the validity of the introspective means by which answers have been sought. These challengers often appear to have behind them the great weight of the scientific progress of recent centuries. The basic issue on which the behavioral scientist and the scientific humanist appear to differ so from the poet, the artist, or the religious philosopher has to do with the physical and the spiritual aspects of reality. Predominately, the scientist tends to operate on the implicit assumption that only the physical or sense-perceived world has reality; the poet and the mystic live in both worlds. The behavioral scientist tends to see values as culturally generated and acquired, the poet, as inherent in the structure of things. Questions about the nature of reality are not to be decided by disputation among ourselves, but by conducting such experiments as will enable us to discern what that nature really is. The nature of such experiments and suggestions for the possible resolution of this basic issue form the subject matter of this paper.