Science for Democratic Action Vol. 4 No. 4
According to an ancient tradition passed on from Egypt to Greece,
a God inimical to men's repose was the inventor of the sciences. What, then, must the Egyptians themselves, among whom the sciences were born, have thought of them! It is that they saw near at hand the sources that had brought them forth. Indeed, whether one consults the annals of the world, or supplements uncertain chronicles with philosophical inquiries, one will not find an origin of human knowledge that corresponds to the idea one would like to hold regarding it. Astronomy was born of superstition; Eloquence of ambition, hatred, flattery, lying; Geometry of avarice; Physics of a vain curiosity; all of them, even Ethics, of human pride. The Sciences and the Arts thus owe their birth to our vices; we should be less in doubt regarding their advantages if they owed it to our virtues.
The wise man does not run after fortune;
but he is not insensitive to glory; and when he sees it so badly distributed, his virtue, which a little emulation would have animated and turned to the advantage of society, languishes and dies in misery and oblivion. This is what, in the long run, the preference for the agreeable over the useful talents must everywhere bring about, and what experience has only all too fully confirmed since the revival of the sciences and arts. We have Physicists, Geometricians, Chemists, Astronomers, Poets, Musicians, Painters; we no longer have citizens; or, if we still have some, dispersed in our abandoned rural areas, they waste away indigent and despised. Such is the condition to which those who give us bread and our children milk are reduced, and such are the sentiments they get from us.
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
Comments to Outreach Coordinator, Pat Ortmeyer: ieer@ieer.org
Takoma Park, Maryland, USA
Revised March 21, 1996