The Sleepwalkers (249 page)

EPILOGUE

Me
thinks there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active
faith.

SIR
THOMAS BROWNE

1.
The Pitfalls of Mental Evolution

WE
are
in
the
habit
of
visualizing
man's
political
and
social
history
as
a
wild
zig-zag
which
alternates
between
progress
and
disaster,
but
the
history
of
science
as
a
steady,
cumulative
process,
represented
by
a
continuously
rising
curve,
where
each
epoch
adds
some
new
item
of
knowledge
to
the
legacy
of
the
past,
making
the
temple
of
science
grow
brick
by
brick
to
ever
greater
height.
Or
alternately,
we
think
in
terms
of
"organic"
growth
from
the
magic-ridden,
myth-addicted
infancy
of
civilization
through
various
stages
of
adolescence,
to
detached,
rational
maturity.

In
fact,
we
have
seen
that
this
progress
was
neither
"continuous"
nor
"organic".
The
philosophy
of
nature
evolved
by
occasional
leaps
and
bounds
alternating
with
delusional
pursuits,
culs-de-sac
,
regressions,
periods
of
blindness
and
amnesia.
The
great
discoveries
which
determined
its
course
were
sometimes
the
unexpected
by-products
of
a
chase
after
quite
different
hares.
At
other
times,
the
process
of
discovery
consisted
merely
in
the
cleaning
away
of
the
rubbish
that
blocked
the
path,
or
in
the
rearranging
of
existing
items
of
knowledge
in
a
different
pattern.
The
mad
clockwork
of
epicycles
was
kept
going
for
two
thousand
years;
and
Europe
knew
less
geometry
in
the
fifteenth
century
than
in
Archimedes'
time.

If
progress
had
been
continuous
and
organic,
all
that
we
know,
for
instance,
about
the
theory
of
numbers,
or
analytical
geometry,
should
have
been
discovered
within
a
few
generations
after
Euclid.
For
this
development
did
not
depend
on
technological
advances
or
the
taming
of
nature:
the
whole
corpus
of
mathematics
is
potentially
there
in
the
ten
billion
neurons
of
the
computing
machine
inside
the
human
skull.
Yet
the
brain
is
supposed
to
have
remained
anatomically
stable
for
something
like
a
hundred
thousand
years.
The
jerky
and
basically
irrational
progress
of
knowledge
is
probably
related
to
the
fact
that
evolution
had
endowed
homo
sapiens
with
an
organ
which
he
was
unable
to
put
to
proper
use.
Neurologists
have
estimated
that
even
at
the
present
stage
we
are
only
using
two
or
three
per
cent
of
the
potentialities
of
its
built-in
"circuits".
The
history
of
discovery
is,
from
this
point
of
view,
one
of
random
penetrations
into
the
uncharted
Arabias
in
the
convolutions
of
the
human
brain.