The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

by Iain McGilchrist

Since this applies to the structure of reason itself, it applies a fortiori to the practical business of science, which is why reductionism could succeed only within a self-enclosed system. Thus Einstein: ‘the supreme task of the physicist is the discovery of the most general elementary laws from which the world-picture can be deduced logically. But there is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance, and this Einfühlung [literally, empathy or ‘feeling one’s way in’] is developed by experience’ (‘Preface’, Planck, 1933, p. 12); and Planck himself: ‘… empiricism is unassailable on the fundamental ground of pure logic; and its conclusions are equally impregnable. But if we look at it purely from the viewpoint of knowledge it leads into a blind alley, which is called solipsism. In order to escape from this impasse there is no other way open but to jump the wall at some part of it, and preferably at the beginning. This can be done only by introducing, once and for all, a metaphysical hypothesis which has nothing to do with the immediate experience of sense-perceptions or the conclusions logically drawn from them’

The inability of a system of thought to explain its own core axioms/assumptions upon which it is constructed.