Scientific truth is characterized by its exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of remaining on a plane of secondary problems, leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. Of this renunciation it makes its essential virtue, and for it, if for nought else, it deserves praise.
Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop. If the physicist detains at the point where his method ends, the hand with which he delineates the facts, the human being behind each physicist prolongs the line thus begun and carries it on to its termination, as an eye beholding an arch in ruins will of itself complete the missing airy curve.
It is the task of physics to ascertain for each fact occurring here and now its principle, that is to say the preceding fact that causes it. But this principle in its turn has a principle, and so on down to a first original principle. The physicist refrains from searching for first principles, and he does well. But, as I said, the man lodged in each physicist does not resign himself.
Whether he likes it or not, his mind is drawn towards the last enigmatic cause of the universe. And it is natural that it should be thus. For living means dealing with the world, turning to it, acting in it, being occupied with it.
That is why man is practically unable, for psychological reasons, to do without all-around knowledge of the world, without an integral idea of the universe.
Crude or refined, with our consent or without it, such a trans-scientific picture of the world will settle in the mind of each of us, ruling our lives more effectively than scientific truth.
The past century, resorting to all but force, tried to restrict the human mind within the limits set to exactness. Its violent effort to turn its back on last problems is called agnosticism. But such endeavor seems neither fair nor sensible. That science is incapable of solving in its own way those fundamental questions is no sufficient reason for slighting them, as did the fox with the high-hung grapes, or for calling them myths and urging us to drop them altogether.
How can we live turning a deaf ear to the last dramatic questions?
Where does the world come from, and whither is it going?
Which is the supreme power of the cosmos, what the essential meaning of life?
We cannot breathe confined to a realm of secondary and intermediate themes. We need a comprehensive perspective, foreground and background, not a maimed scenery, a horizon stripped of the lure of infinite distances. Without the aid of the cardinal points we are liable to lose our bearings. The assurance that we have found no means of answering last questions is no valid excuse for callousness towards them. The more deeply should we feel, down to the roots of our being, their pressure and their sting.
Whose hunger has ever been stilled with the knowledge that he could not eat?
Insoluble though they be, these problems will never cease to loom on the vault of night, stirring us with their starry twinkle--the stars, according to Heine, are night's restless golden thoughts.
North and South help us to orient us despite their being not precisely cities to which one can buy a railroad ticket.
We are given no escape from last questions. In one fashion or another they are in us, whether we like it or not. Scientific truth is exact, but it is incomplete and penultimate and of necessity embedded in another ultimate, though inexact, truth which I see no objection in calling myth. Scientific truth floats in a medium of mythology; but science taken as a whole, is it not also a myth, the admirable myth of modern Europe?
-Ortega y Gasset
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