“the capital-T truth science purports to produce is merely the average of the various subjectivities of the villagers”
“Science, like every effort of thought, consists in interpreting experience… It is a mistake to think that experiment is of any use for this purpose, because all human thought, including beliefs which appear completely absurd, is experimental and claims to be based on and confirmed by experience… All thought is an effort of interpretation of experience, and experience provides neither model nor rule nor criterion for the interpretation; it provides the data of problems but not a way of solving or even of formulating them. This effort requires, like all other efforts, to be oriented towards something; all human effort is oriented and when man is not going in any direction he remains motionless. He cannot do without values. For all theoretical study the name of value is truth. It is impossible, no doubt, for men of flesh and blood in this world to have any representation of truth which is not defective; but they must have on — an imperfect image of the non-representable truth which we once saw, as Plato says, beyond the sky.”
“So soon as truth disappears, utility at once takes its place, because man always directs his effort toward some good or other. Thus utility becomes something which the intelligence is no longer entitled to define or to judge, but only to serve. From being the arbiter, intelligence becomes the servant, and it gets its orders from the desires. And, further, public opinion then replaces conscience as sovereign mistress of thoughts, because man always submits his thoughts to some higher control, which is superior either in value or else in power.”
“The official guardians of spiritual values have allowed them to decay… In the period of sorrow and humiliation which we have already entered and which will perhaps be a very long one, our only hope of recovering some day what we lack is to feel with our whole soul how well-merited our misfortune is… When someone exposes himself as a slave in the market place, what wonder if he finds a master?”