Nathan Beacom at The New Atlantis:
Getting toward the truth about the world requires what the philosopher William Whewell termed “consilience,” that is, a “jumping together” of inductions from various fields converging on a single reality.
That single reality is always more abundant than we can anticipate, and the mysteries of the South Pacific show that finding it requires a scientific approach as fulsome as the world it studies: a world of particles and forces, and of story and song. It is a world in which the curiosity that drove Heyerdahl, the love for his people that motivated Hīroa, and the desire to serve that compels Ioannidis are as real as atoms and gravitational fields. A scientific outlook that ignores these things could tell us, in Erwin Schrödinger’s words, a great deal about the physical order, but would be “ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity.”
Scientifically and otherwise, there is something within the human soul that drives us ever on to the receding horizons, that tempts and taunts us with what lies across the waters, with what is not yet known. For some people, those horizons call like a siren, and they cannot be stopped from throwing their bodies among the smashing waves and the rocks in the hope of a further shore. On that shore lie not just formulas and abstractions, but red and blue, bitter and sweet, pain, delight, good and bad. Perhaps beyond the sea there is even something to learn about God and eternity. The only way to find out is to grab the paddle, meet the wave, and give chase to the sun.
From Samuel Johnson’s preface to his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language:
When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, the obscure recesses of northern learning which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labor, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus inquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to inquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by a definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical. But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to look for instruments, when the work calls for execution, and that whatever abilities I had brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one inquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them.