Science and Sensibility
- J. BRONOWSKI [An Abridged Version (S.R)]
Introduction:
This essay S
cience and Sensibility is an extract from the book "The Common-Sense of Science," written by J. Bronowski. Born in 1908 in Poland, he had his early education in Germany. He could hardly speak a few words of English when he set foot on the English soil at the age of 12. But after he started reading Macaulay and Joseph Conrad, and analyzed their styles, he slowly realized a great literature. But because of the disorderly way in which he fell upon masterpieces, he had left behind tracts of neglected literature.
The layman’s Tendency to Ignore Science: Reasons:
The author contends that man in the twentieth century is surrounded by the products of science. But in spite of that a layman usually ignores science as a mysterious stranger. The reason is the verbiage of the scientific jargon, which keeps it camouflaged. According to Bronowski, the need of the hour is to present scientific knowledge shorn of this mumbo-jumbo of technical phraseology. And this exactly is the mission of his life – to make scientific knowledge accessible to the man in the street.
The author compares the layman’s difficulties here to his own boyhood difficulties with literature. The helplessness, which Bronowski faced with writers like Marlowe, Coleridge and H.G.Wells, are the difficulties, which every reader meets with scientists like Napier, Humphrey Davy and Rutherford, who were contemporaries of the three writers.
Science and the arts: Both valued equally as Classics:
Many people tend to believe that science has progressively strangled the arts. But the real scapegoat is not science, but change. Science today is more powerful than in the time of Isaac Newton. But against this, the arts rarely reach the height of his contemporary John Dryden. It is therefore tempting to conclude that science outgrows its older ideas, while great literature remains permanent. But this is a hopeless muddle of concepts. Dryden and Newton each revealed a wholly new set of possibilities in their forms of knowledge. Both are classics in this sense. And neither are classics in any other sense.
The Coexistence of Science and the arts down the Ages:
The belief that science destroys culture, and that the arts have flourished only when the sciences have been neglected, is directly contrary to history because the culture of the West begins in Greece, and in the great age of Greece, art and science penetrated one another more closely than in any modern age. In England we put the golden age into the reign of Queen Elizabeth, an age of commercial, industrial as well as literary invention.
Sixty years after the death of Elizabeth came the age of Restoration literature. One symbol of the age is the founding of the most important scientific society in the world. The meeting, which founded it, opened with a lecture on astronomy by Christopher Wren, the architect. The society was given its name, the Royal Society, and its motto by John Evelyn the diarist. To encourage the use of simple and lucid prose, it appointed a committee, which included the poet John Dryden.
The Effect of Industrial Revolution: Creation of our sensibility:
- J. BRONOWSKI [An Abridged Version (S.R)]
Introduction:
This essay S
cience and Sensibility is an extract from the book "The Common-Sense of Science," written by J. Bronowski. Born in 1908 in Poland, he had his early education in Germany. He could hardly speak a few words of English when he set foot on the English soil at the age of 12. But after he started reading Macaulay and Joseph Conrad, and analyzed their styles, he slowly realized a great literature. But because of the disorderly way in which he fell upon masterpieces, he had left behind tracts of neglected literature.The layman’s Tendency to Ignore Science: Reasons:
The author contends that man in the twentieth century is surrounded by the products of science. But in spite of that a layman usually ignores science as a mysterious stranger. The reason is the verbiage of the scientific jargon, which keeps it camouflaged. According to Bronowski, the need of the hour is to present scientific knowledge shorn of this mumbo-jumbo of technical phraseology. And this exactly is the mission of his life – to make scientific knowledge accessible to the man in the street.
The author compares the layman’s difficulties here to his own boyhood difficulties with literature. The helplessness, which Bronowski faced with writers like Marlowe, Coleridge and H.G.Wells, are the difficulties, which every reader meets with scientists like Napier, Humphrey Davy and Rutherford, who were contemporaries of the three writers.
Science and the arts: Both valued equally as Classics:
Many people tend to believe that science has progressively strangled the arts. But the real scapegoat is not science, but change. Science today is more powerful than in the time of Isaac Newton. But against this, the arts rarely reach the height of his contemporary John Dryden. It is therefore tempting to conclude that science outgrows its older ideas, while great literature remains permanent. But this is a hopeless muddle of concepts. Dryden and Newton each revealed a wholly new set of possibilities in their forms of knowledge. Both are classics in this sense. And neither are classics in any other sense.
The Coexistence of Science and the arts down the Ages:
The belief that science destroys culture, and that the arts have flourished only when the sciences have been neglected, is directly contrary to history because the culture of the West begins in Greece, and in the great age of Greece, art and science penetrated one another more closely than in any modern age. In England we put the golden age into the reign of Queen Elizabeth, an age of commercial, industrial as well as literary invention.
Sixty years after the death of Elizabeth came the age of Restoration literature. One symbol of the age is the founding of the most important scientific society in the world. The meeting, which founded it, opened with a lecture on astronomy by Christopher Wren, the architect. The society was given its name, the Royal Society, and its motto by John Evelyn the diarist. To encourage the use of simple and lucid prose, it appointed a committee, which included the poet John Dryden.
The Effect of Industrial Revolution: Creation of our sensibility:
According to Bronowski, the golden ages of literature were in fact times of greatness when science and the arts went forward hand in hand. But literary critics say that it has come to an end with the advent of the Industrial revolution between 1760 & 1800. Yet these critics date the Romantic revival also during the same period. The Industrial revolution cannot be construed as a kind of death, because it gave our world its structure. And it created in the Romantic poets and the reformers what has remained our sensibility. So today in China, and India and other countries with few machines, life is brutal and laborious, and sensibility is unknown. According to Bronowski, it was the engine, it was the horsepower which created consideration for the horse; and the Industrial Revolution which created our sensibility.
Science changes our values in two ways. It injects new ideas into the familiar culture, subjecting it to technical change, thus recreating our whole sensibility by such subtle shifts.
Concluding observations of the Author:
Science and the arts today are not as discordant as many people think. The difficulties, which we all have in this regard, are a sign of the lack of a broad and general language in our culture. Science and arts shared the same language at the Restoration. They no longer seem to do so today, because they lack the same language. According to Bronowski, it is the business of each of us to try to remake that one universal language which alone can unite art and science, and layman and scientist, in a common understanding.
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Science changes our values in two ways. It injects new ideas into the familiar culture, subjecting it to technical change, thus recreating our whole sensibility by such subtle shifts.
Concluding observations of the Author:
Science and the arts today are not as discordant as many people think. The difficulties, which we all have in this regard, are a sign of the lack of a broad and general language in our culture. Science and arts shared the same language at the Restoration. They no longer seem to do so today, because they lack the same language. According to Bronowski, it is the business of each of us to try to remake that one universal language which alone can unite art and science, and layman and scientist, in a common understanding.
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