Project Gutenberg
2025-08-03
Public domain in the USA.
234
Sullivan, J. W. N. (John William Navin)
1886
1937
Sullivan, John William Navin
28006294
Gallio : $b or, The tyranny of science
$aNew York :$bE. P. Dutton & Co., $c1928.
[To-day and to-morrow series]
Produced by Donald Cummings and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
"Gallio : or, The tyranny of science by J. W. N. Sullivan" is a philosophical essay of cultural criticism written in the early 20th century. The book examines the growing prestige of science and challenges its claim to define reality, especially where it sidelines art, morals, and spiritual experience. Its likely topic is the limits of scientific method and the need to recognize values, purpose, and imagination as central to human knowledge. The essay opens with the rise of scientific authority from Darwin to Einstein, noting how artists first resisted and then, after the War, often embraced a bleak materialism. It argues that modern physics—especially relativity—undermines the old “iron laws,” showing that scientific laws are mind-shaped selections from a world of “point-events,” and that science offers only partial, abstract descriptions of reality. Sullivan criticizes the fetish of measurement and the misuse of scientific prestige in fields like eugenics, crude psychoanalysis, and behaviourism, as well as the fallacy of “explaining by origins.” He urges humility before quantum mysteries and calls for richer abstractions, drawing on thinkers like Eddington and Whitehead to replace “substance” with “organism” and to reconnect space, time, memory, and expectation. Art—especially music—is presented as a mode of genuine knowledge that reveals possibilities of the spirit and anticipates human growth. The book closes by denying that science should tyrannize culture: its scope is limited, its laws are provisional and self-referential, and it is largely irrelevant to the deepest moral and spiritual concerns. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3105814
20250105113023sullivan
1928
US
Reading ease score: 50.6 (10th to 12th grade). Somewhat difficult to read.
en
Science
Science -- Philosophy
Q
Text
Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
Category: Philosophy & Ethics
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