Science Musings Blog

Yesterday's post might seem to be an affirmation of scientism, the belief that the only things that matter are objective and external.

I do assert that science is the best and perhaps only engine of progress -- material, medical, technological, cosmological -- and the only source of reliable knowledge about the world that transcends accidents of birth and upbringing. But I emphatically believe that subjective and internalized reality is where a life is lived.

Among the posthumously published aphorisms of the poet Wallace Stevens is this:

"We never arrive intellectually. But emotionally we arrive constantly (as in poetry, happiness, high mountains, vistas)."

And again he wrote:

"The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us."

But if we are going to internalize a world, let it be insofar as possible real, and not a tissue of dreams or wishful thinking.