If we are any kind of a machine, then we are a learning machine.
The ability to plan actions for which the reward is a long way off is the central thing that the human brain has, to which there’s no match in animal brains.
This is a world run by specialists. Isn’t that what me mean by “scientific society”? No, it isn’t. A scientific society is one in which specialists can indeed do the things like making the electric light work, but it’s you, it’s I who have to know how nature works, how electricity is one of her expressions in the light and in my brain.
And what is ahead of us? At last: the bringing-together of all that we’ve learned in physics and in biology towards an understanding of where we have come, what man is.
Fifty years from now, if an understanding of man’s origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not the commonplace of the schoolbooks, we shall not exist.
We are now able to know, if we devote ourselves to it, an understanding of man himself. Self-knowledge at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science.
I’ve been so optimistic about the ascent of man. Am I going to give up at this moment? Of course not. The ascent of man will go on. But don’t assume that it will go on carried by Western civilization as we know it. We are being weighed in the balance at this moment. If we give up, the next step will be taken—but not by us. We have not been given any guarantee that Assyria and Egypt and Rome were not given. We are a scientific civilization. That means: a civilization in which knowledge and its integrity are crucial.
