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Well, I gotcha.
I would like to talk about one other thing, and that is, how do you get new ideas? This is for amusement for the students here, mostly. How do you get new ideas? That you do by analogy, mostly, and in working with analogy you often make very great errors. It’s a great game to try to look at the past, at an unscientific era, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it? So I would like to amuse myself with this game. First, we take witch doctors. The witch doctor says he knows how to cure. There are spirits inside which are trying to get out. You have to blow them out with an egg, and so on. Put a snakeskin on and take quinine from the bark of a tree. The quinine works. He doesn’t know he’s got the wrong theory of what happens. If I’m in the tribe and I’m sick, I go to the witch doctor. He knows more about it than anyone else. But I keep trying to tell him he doesn’t know what he’s doing and that someday when people investigate the thing freely and get free of all his complicated ideas they’ll learn much better ways of doing it. Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course. If you look at all of the complicated ideas that they have developed in an infinitesimal amount of time, if you compare to any other of the sciences how long it takes to get one idea after the other, if you consider all the structures and inventions and complicated things, the ids and the egos, the tensions and the forces, and the pushes and the pulls, I tell you they can’t all be there. It’s too much for one brain or a few brains to have cooked up in such a short time. However, I remind you that if you’re in the tribe, there’s nobody else to go to.
And now I can have some more fun, and this is especially for the students of this university. I thought, among other people, of the Arabian scholars of science during the Middle Ages. They did a little bit of science themselves, yes, but they wrote commentaries on the great men that came before them. They wrote commentaries on commentaries. They described what each other wrote about each other. They just kept writing these commentaries. Writing commentaries is some kind of a disease of the intellect. Tradition is very important. And freedom of new ideas, new possibilities, are disregarded on the grounds that the way it was is better than anything I can do. I have no right to change this or to invent anything or to think of anything. Well, those are your English professors. They are steeped in tradition, and they write commentaries. Of course, they also teach us, some of us, English. That’s where the analogy breaks down.
Now if we continue in the analogy here, we see that if they had a more enlightened view of the world there would be a lot of interesting problems. Maybe, how many parts of speech are there? Shall we invent another part of speech? Ooohhhhh!
Well, then how about the vocabulary? Have we got too many words? No, no. We need them to express ideas. Have we got too few words? No. By some accident, of course, through the history of time, we happened to have developed the perfect combination of words.
Now let me get to a lower level still in this question. And that is, all the time you hear the question, “why can’t Joh
And also, it can be argued, perhaps, if they wish, that it’s a question of style and beauty in the language, and that to make new words and new parts of speech might destroy that. But they ca
One thing else I would leave to them. This does show, of course, that there are great dangers in arguing from analogy. And these dangers should be pointed out. I don’t have time to do that, and so I leave to your English professors the problem of pointing out the errors of reasoning by analogy.
Now there are a number of things, positive things, in which a scientific type of reasoning works, and in which considerable progress has been made, and I’ve been picking out a number of the negative things. I want you to know I appreciate positive things. (I also appreciate that I’m talking too long, so I will mention them only. But it’s out of proportion. I wanted to spend more time.) There are a number of things in which rational people work very hard using methods which are quite sensible. And nobody’s bothered with them, yet.
For instance, people have arranged traffic systems and arranged the way the traffic will work in other cities. Criminal detection is at a pretty high level of knowing how to get evidence, how to judge evidence, how to control your emotions on the evidence, and so on.
We shouldn’t only think of the technological inventions when we consider the progress of man. There are an enormous number of most important non-technological inventions which mustn’t be disregarded. Economic inventions in checks, for example, and banks, things of this nature. International financial arrangements, and so on, are marvelous inventions. And they are absolutely essential and represent a great advance. Systems of accounting, for example. Business accounting is a scientific process—I mean, is not a scientific, maybe, but a rational process. A system of law has been gradually developed. There is a system of laws and juries and judges. And although there are, of course, many faults and flaws, and we must continue to work on them, I have great admiration for that. And also the development of government organizations which have been going on through the years. There are a large number of problems which have been solved in certain countries in ways that we sometimes can understand and sometimes we ca