Sciences today often occupy ruts, separated from each other, each as incomprehensible to non-specialists as languages were at the tower of Babel, and separated too from the larger currents of culture.

But it is a myth, Rosenstock-Huessy says (Christian Future), to believe that “sciences can advance without regard to the society of which they are a part, and even that their particular science can move ahead without paying any heed to the philosophy of science as a whole” (84).

He observes that science gained its power only because “at least half the energies of Western thought [were] spent on the perpetual welding together of all contemporaries by a common philosophy, a pervasive belief that all men lived in one nature governed by universal laws. Until the public was disciplined by some degree of unanimity, until a new philosophy taught the public to respect science, the new academic exploration of nature had little chance of success. Otherwise there would have been little cooperation, or support of particular scientific experiments, or selection of important questions. Sciences without philosophy are like spokes without a hub: the wheel must break” (85).