Jacob Bronowski truly educated an enormous number of members of
that diffuse population usually referred to, with a hint of
condescension, as "educated laymen" through his widely shared
television series on the concepts of science and through such
highly regarded books as The Identity of Man and The Ascent of Man.
This volume extends the process to a further level of insight, and
it may be more than suggestive that its final essay is entitled
"The Fulfillment of Man." Bronowski was an extraordinary teacher
precisely because he did not condescend to his audience. He did not
talk down to them; he knew how to talk them up to something near
his own level, however briefly. He felt that if human beings are
taken seriously, they can be led to respond to serious and
difficult subjects that relate to the deepest aspects of nature,
both beyond and within themselves. A Sense of the Future succeeds
brilliantly in this respect, in part because it is a collection of
essays that can be read independently as self-contained, delimited
presentations; and in part because the book is more than the sum of
these individual essays--it is a unified whole in which Bronowski's
most abiding concerns are interrelated, juxtaposed, and tested for
consistency in various intellectual contexts. The major unifying
theme of the work is the intensely creative and human nature of the
scientific enterprise--its kinship, at the highest levels of
individual achievement, with comparable manifestations of the
artistic imagination, and its ethical imperatives, evolved within
the community of scientists over the centuries, which both embody
and forge the values of civilized life at large. Still, the book's
diversity of topics is as striking as the unity of its aim. Among
the subjects within the realm of Bronowski's mind that are
presented here are the limitations of formal logic and experimental
methods, the epistemology of science, the distinctive nature of
human language and the human mind, and the bases of biological and
cultural evolution. Bronowski also contrasts the findings of
science as the "here and now" of man's understanding with the
ongoing activity of science as the open-ended search for truth, and
he undertakes to demonstrate that the factual, individual is and
the ethical, societal ought can be derived each from the other. A
mathematician by training, Bronowski published poetry as well as
books on literature and intellectual history. In addition to those
mentioned above, The Common Sense of Science and Science and Human
Values are among the most widely read of his books. Before his
death in 1974, he was for many years a Senior Fellow at the Salk
Institute for Biological Studies, where his formal area of research
was concerned with the questions of human specificity and
uniqueness. Clearly, his interests ranged far beyond this area, and
in many directions.
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