Appeal to Reason

THE INTELLIGENT INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY--P. W. Bridgman--Macmillan ($2.50). RETREAT FROM REASON--Lancelot T. Hogben--Random House ($1). By the centenary of his birth (1938), predicted Historian Henry Adams, science would have built "a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder." But in 1938 science's millennium is still to seek. Shuddering harder than ever, many a modern now says science is a phoney.

This attitude annoys scientists. Science, say they, is doing all right; the fault lies with statesmen, teachers, economists, philosophers, writers who have not caught up to science. On behalf of these irate scientists Stuart Chase spoke out in The Tyranny of Words (TIME, Jan. 24), blamed the world's ills on the fact that people live by nonscientific words and principles.

Last week The Intelligent Individual and Society and Retreat from Reason continued the counterattack. The more tentative of the two authors, tousled, 55-year-old Percy Williams Bridgman, famed Harvard physicist, admits that people are harder to understand than physics. In time, however, he thinks that man's complex make-up can be plotted and simplified, provided men take over the physicist's skeptical (but not cynical) attitude toward things-in-general. His major discovery, after 300 pages of considering man's odd behavior, is that people are mentally lazy.

More aggressive, wittier and compact is 42-year-old Lancelot Hogben (Mathematics for the Million), an English biologist who calls himself a "scientific humanist" and is a kind of English version of iconoclastic Thorstein Veblen. Writers and statesmen he attacks for their ignorance of science, scientists for their ignorance of social matters. In addition he attacks Marxists, liberals, classical scholarship, "sentimental internationalists," theology, economists, and educators who permit children to study what they like rather than what is good for them (science). On the constructive side, he advocates biotechnology as a way to make nations self-sufficient, thermodynamics as a way to find out what people need to eat, psychology as a way to find out what they need to think, a nice balance of skepticism and action to find out the dictators.

Both books achieve one purpose: the reader, having finished them, emerges into a world that seems slightly more cockeyed than before. To name the winner in this scientific free-for-all would be like trying to decide who wins the early-morning arguments in which all the disputers are brilliant and all drunk.

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