science and conduct

To primitive man each thing says what it is and what he ought to do with it: a fruit says "Eat me"; water says, "Drink me"; thunder says, "Fear me," and woman says, "Love me." . . . [but] man slowly discovered the errors in his original world. . . [H]e developed a new activity which he called thinking. . . By thinking he created knowledge in the sense of scientific knowledge, knowledge which was no longer a knowledge of individual things, but of universals. Knowledge thereby becomes more and more indirect, and action, to the extent that it loses its direct guidance by the world of things, more and more intellectualized . . . Thought had developed categories or classes . . . Concrete situations which demand decisions and prompt actions do not, however, fall into only one such class. And so action, if it were to be directed by scientific knowledge, had to be subjected to a complex thought process, and often enough such a process failed to give a clear decision.

In other words, whereas the world of primitive man had directly determined his conduct, had told him what was good, what bad, the scientific world proved all too often a failure when it came to answering such questions. Reason seemed to reveal truth, but a truth that would give no guidance to conduct; but the demand for such guidance remained and had to be filled. Thus arose eventually the dualism of science and religion, with its various phases of double-truth theory, bitter enmity, and sentimentalization of science, one as unsatisfactory as the other.

~ Kurt Koffka (1935) Principles of Gestalt Psychology