ABSTRACT

Many cleave to faith in science, whose progressive discoveries embrace all human knowledge. They see the cosmos and human culture as an integral system explicable by rational methods immutably true for all times, the places, and the peoples. But this all-embracing explanatory quest, which often goes on to “dictate what one should do and be and believe,” distressed humanists who felt it impinged on their imaginative insights, transcendent visions, or spiritual and political liberty. Wilsonian consilience may hence remain achievable mainly in the epic and the poetic visions linking heaven and earth, heart and hearth. As nature’s mathematically consistent timeless universal and eternal laws give way to statistically contingent differentiated histories. Astronomy and astrology continue to bond stellar with the human fates, telescopes warning us of the solar eruptions and asteroid incursions, horoscopes coupling the human fortunes with the planetary and starry firmament.