Precis Writing on Scientific Humanism

Make a precis of each of the following passages. The precis should be as far as possible in your own words. Suggest a suitable title also for your precis.

One has to function in line with the highest ideals of the age one live in. It had been classified under two heads : humanism and the scientific spirit. Between these two there has been an apparent conflict, but the great upheaval of thought today, with its questioning of all values, is removing the old boundaries between the external world of science and the internal world of introspection. There is a growing synthesis between humanism and the scientific spirit, resulting in a kind of scientific humanism. Science also, while holding on to fact, is on the verge of the other domains or at any rate has ceased to deny them contemptuously. Our five senses and what they can perceive obviously, do not exhaust the universe.
During the past seventy-five years or so there has been a profound change in the scientists picture of the physical world. Science used to look at nature, as something almost apart from man. But now, Sir James Jeans tells us that the essence of science is that man no longer sees nature as something distinct from ‘himself’. And then the old question arises which troubled the thinkers of the Upanishads : How can the knower be known?
How can the eyes that can see external objects see themselves? Science has begun to touch it still, the earnest scientist of today is what the philosopher and the man of religion were in earlier ages. ‘In this materialistic age of ours’, says Professor Albert Einstein, ‘the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people. In all this there appears to be a firm belief in science and yet an apprehension the purely factual and purposeless science is not enough. Was science providing so much of life’s furniture, ignoring life’s significance?
There is an attempt to find a harmony between the world of fact and the world of spirit, for it was becoming increasingly obvious that the over emphasis on the former was crushing the spirit of man. The question that troubled the philosopher of old has come up again in a different form and context : How to reconcile the life of the world with the inner spiritual life of the individual ? The physicians have discovered that it is not enough to treat the body of the individual or of society as a whole.

Scientific Humanism

One has to act according to the age one lives in. Humanism and Scientific spirit have been treated as the two conflicting and different thoughts in the past, but now the two are being synthesized and being called Scientific Humanism. Science relates to factual analysis of the things, but it has been realised by the scientists also that pure factual science is not serving the purpose of humane. Earlier scientist thought that the nature and man are different and have no relation with each other, but now the perceptions have changed. It resulted into the happy blending of science and religion. The need of harmony between the facts of the science and the spirituality is felt necessary, as both are essential for an individual. Taking care of both the physical and the spiritual aspects are necessary to keep a man fit.