Galileo's excision of God from the world of matter mirrored the even more audacious banishment of subjective experiences from the domain of rigorous intellectual exploration.
Not only their knowability was questioned, but even their reality.
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Science is the study of reality
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What is not measurable is not a valid subject of science.
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Therefore what is not measurable is not real.
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A century later, David Hume took up this position with great enthusiasm:
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Let us ask,
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Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?
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No.
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Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?
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No.
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Commit it then to the flames; for it contains nothing but sophistry and illusion.
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Ironic indeed, then, is the present state of science,
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In which once again vast areas of inquiry are off-limits.
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In which experimental results that contradict orthodoxy are excluded from publication.
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In which knowledge is restricted to those initiated into the language of its abstruse texts.
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In which whole fields wallow in fruitless hyperspecialization.
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In which the public can only await the pronouncements of this new quasi-ecclesiastical hierarchy.
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Holder of the keys to the gates of knowledge.
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Can we say that we have not replicated the old world within the new?
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Upon the Scientific Method, which freed thought from the institutionalized, authoritarian superstition of the Middle Ages.
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We have built yet a new orthodoxy.
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More totalitarian, if more subtle, than the first.
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Charles Eisenstein
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