HUMAN SCIENCE
R. J. H.
It is in the sciences of living things that we find the greatest confusion, but also the clearest demonstrations of the ways in which the two kinds of observations—the observation of human beings by human beings and of physical nature by human beings—meet. One group of students of living things have attempted to adopt as far as possible the methods of the physical sciences through the use of controlled experiments, the deliberate limitation of the number of variables to be considered, and the construction of theories based on the findings arrived at by these means. The other group, taking their cue from our human capacity to understand through the observation of natural situations, have developed their methods from a natural history approach in which the principle reliance is on the integrative powers of the observer of a complex, non-replicable event and on the experiments that are provided by history and by animals living in a particular ecological setting.
I would argue that it is not by rejection by one or another but by appropriately combining the several methods . . . that we are most likely in the long run to achieve a kind of scientific activity that is dominated neither by the arrogance of physical scientists nor by the arrogance of humanists who claim that the activities which concern them cannot meaningfully be subjected to scientific inquiry.
