Varieties of scientific experience

the long version

Lewis S. Feuer shows that the gestation of the hypotheses of original-minded scientists, such as Darwin, Einstein, or Bohr, is in large part a subconscious process. Scientists try to project upon the world structural laws that, beside fitting the given physical realities, will also realize their own emotional longings among alternative worldviews. Repeatedly, too, in examining the standpoints of philosophical figures ranging from Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, and Mill to contemporary figures such as Einstein, Lovejoy, and Hook, Feuer illumines how sociological antipathies project themselves into scientific divergences. Feuer delves into the bearing of emotive beliefs such as pacifism, socialism, anti-Semitism, upon the formation of concurrent worldviews, often fixations of scientific belief, held with the same passion in science as in religion. Feuer conveys his own sense of the torments no less than the triumphs of science; even the crucial verification in 1919 of Einstein's theorizing took place on an island where once unspeakable cruelties had been visited upon thousands of small Jewish children. The volume suggests how sombre backgrounds of scientific discovery may have been omitted in the more usual view of science and scientists as imbued only with a liberal spirit.