"You claim," Paul answered airily, "that the psychologists have done so."
"Yes. And you needn't pretend I have no right to make the claim. You scientists, self-styled, let a few doctors—ridiculed by the public and unassisted by you—do the investigating of the consciousness you were applying to electrons and protons. They used your method—the empirical method. They have announced their results steadily for the past half century. You never even looked them over. So now what are you? Big cheeses in the high-tension labs. Mere mice, around the psychological clinics. Hunting in your Bulletin for a way to stop war when, really, you haven't a good kindergarten knowledge of what war is and how it comes about."
"If there were enough psychiatrists, then—we wouldn't have to worry?"
"Be sarcastic!" I said. "All you birds need a good psychiatrist." He winced at that, rather sharply, I thought. But I didn't let up on him. "Guys like you are aware enough to see that perhaps Hitler could have used a psychoanalysis. You are not aware enough to see that any president of any big engineering school could use it, too. Why? Because you think pretty much as he thinks. And neither of you can see that your thinking is largely emotion and only somewhat logic. The great blunder of science was to imagine that science could be indefinitely developed for the physical benefit of man and never concurrently applied to his subjective needs, states, motives."
"It was hard enough for the early scientists to get across the simple truth about objects. If they'd tampered with man's beliefs—they'd all have been burned to death."
"What about you later scientists, then? Would anybody burn old Johann Brink to death, today, say for studying Freud?"
Paul chuckled. "The picture is beyond imagining."
"Yeah. And I'm sick of it. All your eminent predecessors rushed ahead investigating stars and bugs and drugs and air currents and left any inquiry into man himself to philosophers—who were usually ignorant even of physical science—or to James and Wundt and a few trying, solitary people. You didn't ever really apply science. Not all science to all reality. You just promulgated pure science along exactly half of its possible lines—and called it a job. Looking forever at the light outside—and never at the interior dark. Justifiable in a sense. But not bright. And not really scientific at all."
"Hear, hear!"
"If the Greeks had worked out math and aerodynamics and built flyable air frames—without bothering to study the problem of engines, we would regard them as remarkably skillful imbeciles. They would have littered old Attica with the fusilages of Piper Cubs and maybe B-29's that couldn't get off the ground. In a sense, that's what they did do: they pushed knowledge ahead along certain lines a certain distance—and never followed through. You goons are still doing the same half-baked job."