Lecture: Organization of Data (1952)

In this 1952 lecture, Hubbard criticizes the scientific method that he says has been in use for a long time, because it “results in super specialization.” Hubbard gives an example of “super specialization,” and names his authority: Dr. Pottenger, Monrovia, California.

Why, you go down a hall in a medical building and you check in and you say, “There’s something in my eye.”

And the doctor looks at you and he says, “No,” he says, “I’m an optic specialist and you’ll have to go next door. An optic surgeon is next door, and what I handle is the cornea.

And you go next door and you find out he handles the pupil. Well, this spot of dirt is in the white. And you have to shop around for quite a while, and you find somebody with this – that handles the white part of the eye, you see, and he takes the spot of dirt out ONLY if he is a surgeon for the white spot of the eye. By the way, I’m going along with old Doc Pottenger. I know the old man – he’s a great old man. And he says, “If there was just some way we could break down this G. D. blankety-blank-blank specialization,” he says, “maybe we could cure something.”

Well, this method of thinking, then, going back here counterclockwise, is scientific thinking “Let’s go and gather a whole bunch of data. Let’s gather a lot of data and let’s look at a lot of phenomena. And after we’ve gotten everything we can find on the subject, then let’s go find a theory for it. And let’s just take any old theory that happens to come along and see if it explains some of this data. If it does, we’re all set.”

As a consequence, science won’t advance around here counterclockwise, but just keeps sort of wandering off, and it gets off here and there and gets all confused about it. And it has been doing so, so that you get cytology arguing with biology, arguing with evolutionists. And these theories are all different. These theories were not arrived at inductively, and these theories do not predict new phenomena.

Scientology is an effort to go around the clock clockwise – to take data and then look for material, look for the phenomena predicted by that data and see if it exists in the physical universe. Well, it’s an interesting – an interesting field, Scientology, because all it’s trying to do is pick up all the loose ends of people who were trying to travel backwards in this circle. It’s trying to get a unification of science, combine it with a unification of anything – the humanities, religion or even mathematics, aesthetics. It’s trying to bring these things all into the same field so that they can all be used.

Now, that all by itself is a worthwhile goal. It wouldn’t have to have anything to do with processing or application, curing up anything in people, to be quite worthwhile as a goal. As a matter of fact, it does that. It does that.

It’ll predict – by the way, you can take Scientology and you can predict what should be the whole field of biology and where it should mesh with cytology and where that should mesh with evolution. And you will come out with a package of data and phenomena which, if you presented them to the cytologist, to the biologist and to the evolutionist, you would find a point of agreement. They would agree on the data which you had there.¹

Notes