Science Tames Nature by Understanding

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. rhis is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature. The alchemist and the magician in the Middle Ages thought, and the addict of comic strips is still encouraged to think, that nature must be mastered by a device which outrages her laws. But in four hundred years since the Scientific Revolu tion we have learned that we gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only by understanding hi laws. We cannot even bully nature by any insistence that our work shall be designed to give power over her. We must| be content that power is the byproduct of understandinjig. lo the Greeks said that Orpheus played the lyre with i such sympathy that wild beasts were tamed by the hand on the Strings. They did not suggest that he got this gift by setttting out to be a lion tamer.

Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (1965)

• enlightenment
• naturalism
• nature
• science