A. You ought to talk to a man called Heisenberg. He called it the
inexactitude principle, but it's the same thing. For example, men
are always going around asking each other questions; they call it
taking a poll, only when you try to find out that way what people
are thinking, you change them. Or anthropology--when you study a
tribe, you alter its way of life. Furthermore, it alters yours.
Q. It would appear that you have lost your sense of objectivity.
A. That's the way my last husband talks. There is no such thing.
It's a strange fact, but it seems that the mathematicians are the
only ones who have a glimmering of the truth--they and the
physicists. I was beginning to think that mankind as a whole was
progressing quite nicely.
Q. I thought you said they were. It seems you're never satisfied.
A. Well, some things improve, but their point of view keeps
changing with regard to what should and what should not improve.
It's hard to say whether the Greeks really believed in progress:
they thought there had been a golden age and that the world had
degenerated from it. Some of them may have wanted to return to it,
but I always suspected their motives--by their own showing, they
were decadent. During the Middle Ages, it was felt that art was on
the way up--part of an evolutionary process--whereas science was
not. Aristotle and the Thomists had science all cut and dried.
Nowadays it's fashionable to say the art was as "good" in primitive
times as it is now, while science on the other hand is evolving to
a higher state of truth. The latter happens to be true, but they
still have war.
Q. Perhaps it's inevitable.
A. If it is, we are wasting our time.
Q. That is for the Unity to decide. You set yourself up as
Mankind's conscience.
A. Not conscience. I plead for self-examination--for a reappraisal
of ideas.
Q. Yet you only succeed in irritating them.
A. That may be the best way. And you confuse conscience with
consciousness. If there's one thing I've found out, it's that Man
differs from the animals in having more consciousness, just as
animals have more than plants. I don't suppose that hydrogen has
any at all.
Q. But you have turned what was intended to be a field-trip for
examination and analysis into a crusade. With all your nagging and
irritating them, there have been no results--no real advances.
A. I thought you were complaining that I was altering what I was
sent to examine. You talk about unification--or absorption--as if
it were a catchword. That's the trouble with generalities: they're
not necessarily true in all cases.
Q. You mean they are too general?
A. I mean that they are not general enough. I agree that men
progress too slowly toward unification, but we mustn't confuse it
with domination. We cannot _impose_ it on them. That would lead to
a world divided into the ruled and the rulers--not a unity.
Q. Then you are for absorption?
A. You know, you twist things around much worse than I do.