Science and Myth

Book excerpt: In Science and Myth the author shows, in the first place, that science too has its mythology, unrecognized and unacknowledged though the fact be. These scientistic myths, however, turn out to constitute what he terms anti-myths: "a kind that would banish all others, and in so doing, undermine not only religion and morality, but indeed all culture in its higher modes." What invalidates the contemporary "scientific" world-view and renders it "mythical" in the pejorative sense, he goes on to contend, proves finally to be the underlying hypothesis that human perception terminates, not in an external object, but in a subjective phantasm. Not only does the author maintain cogently that visual perception, in particular, does penetrate to the external world, but basing himself on traditional sources-fromVedic to Biblical-he shows that sight as such opens in principle to a veritable gnosis: a "seeing of the Real."