“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance – that principle is contempt prior to investigation. – Herbert Spencer”

Albert Einstein - "We are seeking for simplest possible scheme of thought that will bind together observed facts."

"If we do not expect unexpected, we will never find it." – Heraclitus

"Human beings, by changing inner attitudes of their minds, can change outer aspects of their lives." - William James

"I feel that if we could be serious for an hour and really fathom, delve into ourselves as much as we can, we should be able to release, not through any action of will, a certain sense of energy that is awake all time, which is beyond thought." – Jiddhu Krishnamurti, Madras, 1961

Heraclitus: "… conceded existence of an over-riding, all-encompassing unity, in which apparently contradictory opposites are all linked to one another, in a single, regular, cohesive system of balanced, harmonious measure and just order."

"They also made it harder for scientific worldview to be received with equanimity by other sectors of culture. Indeed, since reducing impulse undermines fairly huge tracts of experience, people like Wallace, who feel deeply about protecting phenomena they regard as existentially important, frequently conclude that they have no alternative except to embrace spiritualism, and sometimes even to attack scientific worldview itself, if that is only way to protect important spheres of experience that have been ejected from science's confining Eden. In response, scientists and philosophers who feel strongly about liberating potential of a spare, materialistic worldview began to patrol borderlands between high-grade knowledge scientists have of natural systems and low-grade opinions that in view of science's most ardent defenders, dominate other spheres of culture and lead back toward superstitious and authoritarian world of yesteryear. 'Demarcating' science from other, less cognitively worthwhile forms of understanding was already a major feature of Darwin's world. A line beyond which Newtonian paradigm could not apply was drawn at boundary between physics and biology. We have seen how hesitant Darwin was to cross that line and what happened when he did. Twentieth-century people are sometimes prone to congratulate themselves for being above these quaint Victorian battles. They may have less reason to do so, however, than they think, for fact is that throughout our own century, same sort of battles, with emotional overtones no less charged, have been waged at contested line where biology meets psychology, and more generally where natural sciences confront human sciences. Dualisms between spirit and matter, and even between mind and body, may have been pushed to margins of respectable intellectual discourse. But methodological dualisms between what is covered by laws and what is to be 'hermeneutically appropriated' are still very much at center of our cultural, or rather 'two cultural', life. Cognitive psychologists and neurophysiologists are even now busy reducing mind-states to brain-states, while interpretive or humanistic psychologists are proclaiming how meaningless world would be if mind is nothing but brain. Interpretive anthropologists are filled with horror at what would disappear from world if rich cultural practices that seem to give meaning to our lives were to be shown to be little more than extremely sophisticated calculations on part of self-interested genes. Conflicts of this sort would have given Darwin stomachaches almost as bad as ones he endured over earlier demarcation controversies.

The rhetorical pattern of these battles is still depressingly similar, in fact, to Huxley's confrontation with Wilberforce. Hermeneuts ridicule scientists like Hamilton, Dawkins, and Wilson when they suggest that nothing was ever known about social cooperation until biologists discovered kin selection. Reductionists in turn criticize hermeneuts, now transformed largely into 'culturists,' for bringing back ghosts and gods, just as their nineteenth-century predecessors were taxed with being 'vitalists' every time they said something about complexity of development. Humanists identify scientists with an outdated materialist reductionism. Scientists insist that hermeneutical intentionality is little more than disguised religion.