Jacob Bronowski - Science and human values (1956)

33 Sourced Quotes

View all Jacob Bronowski Quotes
Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

Jacob Bronowski
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Jacob Bronowski
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. That is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast on nature.

Jacob Bronowski
Nature is more subtle, more deeply intertwined and more strangely integrated than any of our pictures of her — than any of our errors. It is not merely that our pictures are not full enough; each of our pictures in the end turns out to be so basically mistaken that the marvel is that it worked at all.

Jacob Bronowski
I set out to show that there exists single creative activity, which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.

Jacob Bronowski
There is a social injunction implied in the positivist and analyst methods. This social axiom is that
We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.

Jacob Bronowski
The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations — more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or the artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is not a mechanism but a human progress, and not a set of findings but the search for them.

Jacob Bronowski
The world today is made, it is powered by science; and for any man to abdicate an interest in science is to walk with open eyes towards slavery.

Jacob Bronowski
Science is the creation of concepts and their exploration in the facts. It has no other test of the concept than its empirical truth to fact.

Jacob Bronowski
The progress of science is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity to what had seemed unlike.

Jacob Bronowski
By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority...

Jacob Bronowski
Truth in science is like Everest, an ordering of the facts.

Jacob Bronowski
Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.

Jacob Bronowski
The values of science derive neither from the virtues of its members, nor from the finger-wagging codes of conduct by which every profession reminds itself to be good. They have grown out of the practice of science, because they are the inescapable conditions for its practice.

Jacob Bronowski
There never was a great scientist who did not make bold guesses, and there never was a bold man whose guesses were not sometimes wild.

Jacob Bronowski
Whether our work is art or science or the daily work of society, it is only the form in which we explore our experience which is different.

Jacob Bronowski
The society of scientists must be a democracy. It can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect; between independence from the view of others, and tolerance from them.

Jacob Bronowski
When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,-or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge's phrase, for unity in variety.

Jacob Bronowski
We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experience, because he himself re-creates them.

Jacob Bronowski
Mass, time, magnetic moment, the unconscious: we have grown up with these symbolic concepts, so that we are startled to be told that man had once to create them for himself. He had indeed, and he has: for mass is not an intuition in the muscle, and time is not bought ready-made at the watchmaker's.

Jacob Bronowski
In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness.

Jacob Bronowski
No fact in the world is instant, infinitesimal and ultimate, a single mark. There are, I hold, no atomic facts. In the language of science, every fact is a field — a crisscross of implications, those that lead to it and those that lead from it. … We condense the laws around concepts. Science takes its coherence, its intellectual and imaginative strength together, from the concepts at which its laws cross, like knots in a mesh.

Jacob Bronowski
Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.

Jacob Bronowski
The symbol and the metaphor are as necessary to science as to poetry.

Jacob Bronowski
Science has nothing to be ashamed of, even in the ruins of Nagasaki.

Jacob Bronowski
The force that makes the winter grow
Its feathered hexagons of snow,
and drives the bee to match at home
Their calculated honeycomb,
Is abacus and rose combined. An icy sweetness fills my mind,
A sense that under thing and wing
Lies, taut yet living, coiled, the spring.

Jacob Bronowski
The values by which we are to survive are not rules for just and unjust conduct, but are those deeper illuminations in whose light justice and injustice, good and evil, means and ends are seen in fearful sharpness of outline.

Jacob Bronowski
The problem of values arises only when men try to fit together their need to be social animals with their need to be free men. There is no problem, and there are no values, until men want to do both. If an anarchist wants only freedom, whatever the cost, he will prefer the jungle of man at war with man. And if a tyrant wants only social order, he will create the totalitarian state.

Jacob Bronowski
Positivists and analysts alike believe that the words is and ought belong to different worlds, so that sentences which are constructed with is usually have verifiable meaning, but sentences constructed with ought never have. This is because Ludwig Wittgenstein's unit, and Bertrand Russell's unit, is one man; all British empiricist philosophy is individualist. And it is of course clear that if the only criterion of true and false which a man accepts is that man's, then he has no base for social agreement. The question of how man ought to behave is a social question, which always involves several people; and if he accepts no evidence and no judgment except his own, he has no tools with which to frame an answer.

Jacob Bronowski