hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a multitude you are increasing the multitude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is your application of scientific method that is causing it to change!
What Ph?drus observed on a personal level was a phenomenon, profoundly characteristic of the history of science, which has been swept under the carpet for years. The predicted results of scientific enquiry and the actual results of scientific enquiry are diametrically opposed here, and no one seems to pay too much attention to the fact. The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos, the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what Ph?drus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory work years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today. Scientifically produced antiscience… chaos.
It’s possible now to look back a little and see why it’s important to talk about this person in relation to everything that’s been said before concerning the division between classic and romantic realities and the irreconcilability of the two. Unlike the multitude of romantics who are disturbed about the chaotic changes science and technology force upon the human spirit, Ph?drus, with his scientifically trained classic mind, was able to do more than just wring his hands with dismay, or run away, or condemn the whole situation broadside without offering any solutions.
As I’ve said, he did in the end offer a number of solutions, but the problem was so deep and so formidable and complex that no one really understood the gravity of what he was resolving, and so failed to understand or misunderstood what he said.
The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is… emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come.
I’ve a vision of an angry continuing social crisis that no one really understands the depth of, let alone has solutions to. I see people like John and Sylvia living lost and alienated from the whole rational structure of civilized life, looking for solutions outside that structure, but finding none that are really satisfactory for long. And then I’ve a vision of Ph?drus and his lone isolated abstractions in the laboratory… actually concerned with the same crisis but starting from another point, moving in the opposite direction… and what I’m trying to do here is put it all together. It’s so big… that’s why I seem to wander sometimes.
No one that Ph?drus talked to seemed really concerned about this phenomenon that so baffled him. They seemed to say, “We know scientific method is valid, so why ask about it?”
Ph?drus didn’t understand this attitude, didn’t know what to do about it, and because he wasn’t a student of science for personal or utilitarian reasons, it just stopped him completely. It was as if he were contemplating that serene mountain landscape Einstein had described, and suddenly between the mountains had appeared a fissure, a gap of pure nothing. And slowly, and agonizingly, to explain this gap, he had to admit that the mountains, which had seemed built for eternity, might possibly be something else — perhaps just figments of his own imagination. It stopped him.
And so Ph?drus, who at the age of fifteen had finished his freshman year of science, was at the age of seventeen expelled from the University for failing grades. Immaturity and inattention to studies were given as official causes.
There was nothing anyone could have done about it; either to prevent it or correct it. The University couldn’t have kept him on without abandoning standards completely.
In a stunned state Ph?drus began a long series of lateral drifts that led him into a far orbit of the mind, but he eventually returned along a route we are now following, to the doors of the University itself. Tomorrow I’ll try to start on that route.
At Laurel, in sight of the mountains at last, we stop for the night. The evening breeze is cool now. It comes down off the snow. Although the sun must have disappeared behind the mountains an hour ago, there’s still good light in the sky from behind the range.
Sylvia and John and Chris and I walk up the long main street in the gathering dusk and feel the presence of the mountains even though we talk about other things. I feel happy to be here, and still a little sad to be here too. Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive.
11
I wake up wondering if we’re near mountains because of memory or because of something in the air. We’re in a beautiful old wooden room of a hotel. The sun is shining on the dark wood through the window shade, but even with the shade drawn I can sense that we’re near mountains. There’s mountain air in this room. It’s cool and moist and almost fragrant. One deep breath makes me ready for the next one and then the next one and with each deep breath I feel a little readier until I jump out of bed and pull up the shade and let all that sunlight in… brilliant, cool, bright, sharp and clear.
An urge grows to go over and push Chris up and down to bounce him awake to see all this, but out of kindness, or respect maybe, he is allowed to sleep a while longer, and so with razor and soap I go to a common washroom at the other end of a long corridor of the same dark wood, floorboards creaking all the way. In the washroom the hot water is steaming and perking in the pipes, too hot at first for shaving, but fine after I mix it with cold water.
Through the window beyond the mirror I see there is a porch out in back, and when done go out and stand on it. It’s at a level with the tops of the trees surrounding the hotel which seem to respond to this morning air the same way I do. The branches and leaves move with each light breeze as if it were expected, were what had been waited for all this time.
Chris is soon up and Sylvia comes out of her room saying she and John have already eaten breakfast and he is out walking somewhere, but she will go with Chris and me and walk down with us to breakfast
We are in love with everything this morning and talk about good things all the way down a sunlit morning street to a restaurant. The eggs and hot cakes and coffee are from heaven. Sylvia and Chris talk intimately about his school and friends and personal things, while I listen and gaze through the large restaurant window at the storefront across the road. So different now from that lonely night in South Dakota. Beyond those buildings are mountains and snowfields.
Sylvia says John has talked to someone in town about another route to Bozeman, south through Yellowstone Park.
“South?” I say. “You mean Red Lodge?”
“I guess so.”
A memory comes to me of snowfields in June. “That road goes way up above the timberline.”
“Is that bad?” Sylvia asks.
“It’ll be cold.” In the middle of the snowfields in my mind appear the cycles and us riding on them. “But just tremendous.”
We meet John again and it’s settled. Soon, beyond a railroad underpass, we are on a twisting blacktop through fields toward the mountains up ahead. This
