ABSTRACT
Illusions don’t float about in mid-air; somebody has to entertain them. Certainly Christian Scientists and some other sages have told that pain too is an illusion, and by doing this they have sometimes actually managed to mitigate people’s suffering. Accounts such as Francis Crick’s tell that the language used in the physical sciences trumps the language of everyday life in a crucial way. This technical language is not just more suited to certain detailed enquiries than ordinary speech but it is ontologically superior – closer to reality. Atomization illustrates the simplest, most literal meaning of the word “reduction”; it works by making things smaller. The illumination that follows does not, of course, flow simply from their being smaller but from the wider scientific picture into which they have been fitted. The chief source of mistakes is a general overconfidence in the reductive method, but the trouble has been much increased by a parallel change in the concept of science itself.
