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MESSAGE TO ITALIAN SOCIETY FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE ·357
impossible to bave a conscious, positive attitude toward life.
It is the very essence of our striving for understanding that,
on the one hand, it attempts to encompass the great and complex
variety of man's experience, and that on the other, it looks for
simplicity and economy in the basic assumptions. The belief
that these two objectives can exist side by side is, in view of the
primitive state of our scientific knowledge, a matter of faith.
Without such faith I could not have a strong and unshakable
conviction about the independent value of knowledge.
This, in a sense, religious attitude of a man engaged in scien·
tific work bas some influence upon his whole personality. For
apart from the knowledge which is offered by accumulated ex·
perience and from the rules of logical thinking, there exists in
principle for the man in science no authority whose decisions
and statements could have in themselves a claim to "Truth."
This leads to the paradoxical situation that a person who devotes
all his strength to objective matters will develop, from a
social point of view, into an extreme individualist who, at least
in principle, has faith in nothing but his own judgment. It
is quite possible to assert that intellectual individualism and
scientific eras emerged simultaneously in history and have remained
inseparable ever since.
Someone may suggest that the man of science as sketched in
these sentences is no more than an abstraction which actually
does not exist in !:Pis world, not unlike the homo oeconomicus
of classical economics. However, it seems to me that science as
we know it today could not have emerged and could not have
remained alive if many individuals, during many centuries,
would not have come very close to the ideal.
Of course, not everybody who has learned to use tools and
methods which, directly or indirectly, appear to be "scientific"
is to me a man of science. I refer only to those individuals in
whom scientific mentality is truly alive.
What, then, is the position of today's man of science as a
member of society? He obviously is rather proud of the fact
that the work of scientists has helped to change radically the
economic life of men by almost completely eliminating muscular
work. He is distressed by the fact that the results of his