Scientific Mythology
René Guénon — The Signs of The Times
When profane science leaves the domain of a mere observation of facts, and tries to get something out of the indefinite accumulation of separate details that is its sole immediate result, it retains as one of its chief characteristics the more or less laborious construction of purely hypothetical theories.
These theories can necessarily never be more than hypothetical, since their starting-point is wholly empirical, for facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory, and their greater or lesser multiplicity has no bearing on the question; besides, such hypotheses are really not inspired by the results of experience to nearly the same extent as by certain preconceived ideas and by some of the predominant tendencies of the modern mentality.
The ever-growing rapidity with which such hypotheses are abandoned in these days and replaced by others is well known, and these continual changes are enough to make all too obvious the lack of solidity of the hypotheses and the impossibility of recognising in them any value so far as real knowledge is concerned; they are also assuming more and more, in the eyes of their authors themselves, a conventional character, and so a quality of unreality, and this may be noted as a symptom of the approach toward final dissolution.
The danger of these illusory theories lies in the influence they are liable to exercise on the ‘public at large’ by virtue of the fact that they call themselves ‘scientific’, for the public takes them quite seriously and blindly accepts them as ‘dogmas’, and that not merely for as long as they last, but more especially when the scientists have already abandoned them, and for a long time afterwards as well. This happens because they persist in elementary teaching and in works of ‘popularization’, in which they are always presented in a ‘simplified’ and resolutely assertive form, and not by any means as mere hypotheses, though that is all they ever were for those who elaborated them.
The use of the word ‘dogma’ a moment ago was deliberate, for it is a question of something that, in accordance with the anti-traditional modern spirit, must oppose and be substituted for religious dogmas; an example like that of the ‘evolutionary’ theories, among others, can leave no doubt on that score.
Thus it comes about that there has grown up in the scientistic mentality a real ‘mythology’ in the pejorative meaning that the word has acquired in current speech. Endless examples could be cited: one of the most striking being the ‘imagery’ of atoms and the many particles of various kinds into which they have lately become dissociated in the most recent physical theories, the result of which of course is that they are no longer in any sense atoms, which literally means ‘indivisibles’.
‘Imagery’ is the right word, because it is no more than imagery in the minds of the physicists; but the ‘public at large’ believes firmly that real ‘entities’ are in question, such as could be seen and touched by anyone whose senses were sufficiently developed or who had at his disposal sufficiently powerful instruments of observation; is not that a ‘mythology’ of a most ingenuous kind? This does not prevent the same public from pouring scorn on the conceptions of the ancients at every opportunity, though of course they do not understand a single word about them.
The popular notions in question assume an extravagant character when they are carried over into a domain other than that to which they were originally intended to be applied, and it is just such borrowings from conceptions belonging essentially to the sensible order which explain the sort of ‘materialization’ of the supra-sensible that is one of the most common characteristics of ‘neo-spiritualism’.
It is useful to observe how far the very people who still admit the supra-sensible and think that they are aware of its action are in reality permeated by materialistic influence: for even if they do not deny all extra-corporeal reality, like the majority of their contemporaries, it is only because they have formed for themselves an idea of it that enables them in some way to assimilate it to the likeness of sensible things, and to do that is certainly scarcely better than to deny it.
Occultism and modern science tend more and more to join up with one another as the ‘disintegration’ proceeds step by step, because both are traveling toward it by their different paths. Tendencies toward ‘solidification’ and toward dissolution, while are apparently opposed in some respects, are nevertheless associated from the very fact that they act simultaneously in such a way as to come to an inevitable end in the final catastrophe.
René Guénon - The Signs of the Times 1945From "Scientific Mythology and Popularization" chapter
