"The antiphilosophical scientists"
“But the case of pragmatism is only one particular case of a larger problem. In the last analysis, we have to consider the way in which philosophy has been challenged, not by science but by a masked metaphysics of science. Julian Huxley is convinced that philosophical and religious assertions are nonsense or useless hypotheses. And so they are for him, it is true. Philosophers can understand the biological contributions of Julian Huxley, and recognize the truth of biology as well as the truth of philosophy and religion, but I dare say Julian Huxley does not understand our books and so feels firmly justified in denying philosophy all admittance to the field of knowledge. But philosophy is able to return the challenge. It indicts the very method of the antiphilosophical scientists as inconsistent with their own scientific method, and indeed rather naïve. For they criticize philosophy and religion in the name of science, which by their own confession has no knowledge or criteria regarding such matters, and which might pass judgment on them only on condition that it become philosophy. These men are in the same position as an automobile driver who would insist that planes are worthless, because he knows how to drive and because to fly is not to drive.
“To live in a state of doubt is a highly civilized attitude as regards the infinite potentialities and future constructions of science in its deciphering of phenomena. But to live in a state of doubt as regards, not phenomena, but the ultimate realities the knowledge of which is a natural possibility, privilege, and duty for human intelligence, is to live more miserably than animals, which at least tend with instinctive and buoyant certitude toward the ends of their ephemeral life.
“It is a great misfortune that both a civilization and education suffer from a cleavage between the ideal that constitutes their reason for living and acting, and that implies things in which they do not believe, and the reality according to which they live and act but which denies the ideal that justifies them. All modern democracies have suffered from such a cleavage. The task and mission of youth is to solve the problem at their own risk, to reunite real and ideal and make thought and action as one.”
~Jacques Maritain: Education at the Crossroads.
