From C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures:
“At one pole, the scientific culture really is a culture, not only in an intellectual but also in an anthropological sense. That is, its members need not, and of course often do not, always completely understand each other; biologists more often than not will have a pretty hazy idea of contemporary physics; but there are common attitudes, common standards and patterns of behaviour, common approaches and assumptions. This goes surprisingly wide and deep. It cuts across other mental patterns, such as those of religion or politics or class.”
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“At the other pole, the spread of attitudes is wider. It is obvious that between the two, as one moves through intellectual society from the physicists to the literary intellectuals, there are all kinds of tones of feeling on the way. But I believe the pole of total incomprehension of science radiates its influence on all the rest. That the total incomprehension gives, much more pervasively than we realise, living in it, and unscientific flavour to the whole ‘traditional’ culture, and that unscientific flavour is often, much more than we admit, on the point of turning anti-scientific.”
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“The feeling of one pole become the anti-feelings of the other. If the scientists have the future in their bones, the the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist. 6 It is the traditional culture, to an extent remarkably little diminished by the emergence of the scientific one, which manages the western world.”
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6 – Compare George Orwell’s 1984, which is the strongest possible wish that the future should not exist, with J.D. Bernal’s World Without War.
