Marxism and Modern Thought by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Communism; Post-Communism & Socialism, Philosophy, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Political, General
ISBN: 9781136658761
Google: Ur0WnpvmiI8C
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-09-05T11:08:28+00:00

S. I. VAVILOV

THE OLD AND THE NEW PHYSICS

History is the true natural history of man.—K. MARX.

I

ON CERTAIN TASKS OF THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

IT is to be hoped that one day the history of science will itself become a science. The guarantee of this is the growth, plain even in its smallest details, of science and technique and the hundreds of thousands of human beings who are creating the history of science on the earth before our eyes. We cannot neglect this unceasing movement, this powerful manifestation of nature, capable of changing the earth no less radically than earthquakes and floods. To understand this process, means, as always, to master it in many ways and to learn to direct it where necessary. The history of science is a necessary and, perhaps, even a sufficient prerequisite for the planning of science. So sooner or later the history of science must become a science.

Up to the present, however, it has stayed in the cradle of personal characteristics and biographies, of chronological data, and, in many cases, of imperfect documentation. The “scientific” nature of this history is reduced to naïve schemes in which science is removed from its living, changing environment and treated as an autonomous organism, almost as an organism developing with a logical structure. Up to the very present, disputes have not ceased as to whether the history of science is not perhaps unneeded, while circumstances have combined to make it almost impossible for anyone to devote himself fully to the subject. The very subject itself is incomprehensible and strange to the qualified historian, while the learned scientific worker has not time even to “look at” it, and indeed it has become a mark of good form not to look at it, save in cases of disputed priority. In many instances also the scientist does not possess the necessary general historical and philosophical knowledge. It is in this lack of hands to tackle the subject that we find not the least important cause of the unhappy position of the history of science.

We should not be surprised, therefore, if up to now no answer has been made to the chief and absolutely inevitable questions of the connection of science with pre-scientific or extra-scientific knowledge, of the possibility of a scientific form without a concrete content (theology, scholasticism), i.e. of science without concrete knowledge as opposed to knowledge without science. Where is the transition from instinct, conditioned reflex, habit, the knowledge of the savage, to what we call science? How are we to explain such an amazing fact as the lack of any science (even pseudo-science) in old pre-Peter-the-Great Russia? The “history of science”, which has officially existed for thousands of years, is still not able to answer such questions.

Science as a factor in history, as one of the means of influencing the pace and direction of the development of human society, is essentially a new phenomenon, which has practically hardly been in existence more than four centuries. We might say of ancient and

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