Platonism and the Mechanical Picture of Human Agency

If, per impossible, the mechanistic views of a barbarized science should turn out to be the provable truth of things, this would be a truth by which we, as practical, inventive, value- and pattern-oriented beings, could not live, and on which we should have, in all but the lowest instrumentalities, to turn our backs.  Truth of this type would neither be worth knowing or applying, and the suasions of a Nocturnal Council might not be too much in order to secure its suppression. These suggestions need not, however, be taken too seriously.  For the science which sees all things in terms of manipulative mechanisms is arguably the product of a transient manipulative phase of human society, which, even as we think and write, is busily in process of destroying itself, and creating an order in which the unified and the purposive will have as irreducible and as firm a place as the mechanically conditioned and the manipulable. In the infinitely well-ordered, stably progressive societies of the future, something like Platonism may well dominate science and practice, and the figure of Plato, with his index finger pointing skywards, and the Timaeus under his arm, may very well occupy the same central place that he takes up in Raphael's Schools of Athens (Plato, The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, p. 412).