Time & Perspective Quote by Morris Raphael Cohen

There is a sly jab hiding in Cohen's courteous phrasing: ideas, unlike experiments, have an undead problem. Literature and philosophy can keep "past idols" on life support long after their empirical shelf life, not because they're true in any testable sense, but because they're rhetorically alive. An old system can be made to feel new with a clever gloss, a fresh metaphor, a shift in moral fashion. In the lab, yesterday's error is ideally buried by replication; in the seminar, it can be revived as heritage, or profundity, or "timeless wisdom."

Cohen's word choice matters. "Idols" is not neutral; it suggests that what's being resurrected isn't merely history but worship - authority mistaken for insight. "Resurrected" invokes a quasi-religious return, hinting that intellectual culture has its own miracles, performed by citation and canon rather than by evidence. And then the punch: "truly distressing to a sober scientist". The scientist is "sober" not just as a personality type but as a methodological ideal: resistant to intoxication by style, charisma, and tradition. Cohen doesn't dismiss literature and philosophy as worthless; he marks their vulnerability. They trade in meaning, values, and imagination, so their standards of survival are porous. That porosity is productive (it keeps conversations across centuries possible) and dangerous (it makes reverence indistinguishable from rigor).

Contextually, Cohen is writing as a 20th-century philosopher steeped in pragmatism and scientific realism, watching modernity professionalize knowledge. His warning isn't anti-humanities; it's a demand that intellectual life stop confusing revival with progress.