a great and strange reputation...............

     So science has, it seems, been so successful that it has inevitably earned a great and strange reputation.  If it has never yet been defeated, presumably it is all-powerful.  And since science is, after all, the work of scientists—for one seldom encounters disembodied science—then presumable these scientists are both so clever and so wise that they can do anything.  Perhaps we should turn the world over to this superbreed.  Perhaps they could, if properly supported, really liberated, and put in charge—perhaps they could solve all problems of human relations, of economic stability, of international peace, and of the good life.  Perhaps they should design not only the churches, but the creeds also.  Perhaps the best music and the loveliest poetry will, in a short time, come out of a machine.
     The sad fact is that some scientists themselves appear to believe precisely this.  And this arrogant attitude quite naturally irritates, or even angers, the social scientists, the humanists, the moralists, and the creative artists.  The classic protest is surely that of Keats:

               Do not all charms fly
               At the mere touch of cold philosophy?  
               There was an awful rainbow once in Heaven:
               We know her woof, her textures; she is given
               In the dull catalogue of common things.
               Philosophy will clip and Angel's wings.

-Warren Weaver, Science and Imagination, 1967