Editorial May 19, 1980 Issue

Man or guinea pig?

BEULAH M. ROEGGE

A matter-world is a world of experimentation: use two more teaspoons of baking powder and see what happens; try the painting on the south wall and explore what the light does to it there; make a trial run to find out what time you need to leave the house in order to catch the 7:35.

As useful as are such little daily experiments, they are not ends in themselves. The goal, in each instance, is to find that which is exactly right. No one wants to keep on experimenting; even the indefatigable shopper at times wearies of trying on one more coat.

Experiments go from known factors to the unknown. Obviously, the more we know, the less trial and error there is in a progressive life. Yet the way to know more is not necessarily to accumulate sense-information based on our own or another's experiments and experience. In a radical statement, the Discoverer of Christian Science, Mrs. Eddy, declares: "Empirical knowledge is worse than useless: it never has advanced man a single step in the scale of being." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 234;

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