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One of the central ideas of modern science is an idea of maturity: Just as a child, in order to grow up, has to grow out of its childlike fantasies when dealing with the world, so the scientist when dealing with nature has to replace his egocentric and anthropocentric everyday ideas with ways of thinking which are more adequate to objective reality. This may sound like a religious or even mystical attitude, and it has in fact been expressed as such with impressive pathos by scientists themselves, for example by Albert Einstein.¹ In science, however, this attitude takes a specific shape which distinguishes it rather clearly from the genuinely religious or mystical attitude. Whereas religion or mysticism is mostly directed toward the "inner world' and strives for immediate access to what this inner world reveals, science mostly turns to the "outer world' which it tries to uncover through theoretical constructions. The scientific attitude is to check the theoretical constructions by means of outward directed experience and always to be ready to be corrected by this experience. This is also the really essential and important tenet of what is called "empiricism".

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2872-0_5

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