THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
instrument of this conquest—is felt to be footloose, aimless, and
in need of re-appraisal.
The modern esteem for science has long been merely assumed,
but now the technological ethos and the kind of engineering
imagination associated with science are more likely to be
frightening and ambiguous than hopeful and progressive. Of
course this is not all there is to 'science/ but it is feared that this
could become all that there is to it. The felt need to reappraise
physical science reflects the need for a new common denominator.
It is the human meaning and the social role of science, its
military and commercial issue, its political significance that are
undergoing confused re-appraisal. Scientific developments of
weaponry may lead to the 'necessity' for world political rearrangements—
but such 'necessity' is not felt to be solvable by physical
science itself.
Much that has passed for 'science' is now felt to be dubious
philosophy; much that is held to be 'real science' is often felt to
provide only confused fragments of the realities among which
men live. Men of science, it is widely felt, no longer try to picture
reality as a whole or to present a true outline of human destiny.
Moreover, 'science' seems to many less a creative ethos and a manner
of orientation than a set of Science Machines, operated by
technicians and controlled by economic and military men who
neither embody nor understand science as ethos and orientation.
In the meantime, philosophers who speak in the name of science
often transform it into 'scientism,' making out its experience to be
identical with human experience, and claiming that only by its
method can the problems of life be solved. With all this, many
cultural workmen have come to feel that 'science' is a false and
pretentious Messiah, or at the very least a highly ambiguous
element in modern civilization.
But there are, in C. P. Snow's phrase, 'two cultures': the scientific
and the humanistic. Whether as history or drama, as
biography, poetry or fiction, the essence of the humanistic culture
has been literature. Yet it is now frequently suggested that serious
literature has in many ways become a minor art. If this is so, it
is not merely because of the development of mass publics and