The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Michael
Polanyi
The Structure of Consciousness
Brain,
Vol.
LXXXVIII
1965,
799-810
http://brain.oupjournals.org/.
Knowing and Being,
ed. M. Grene,
Sir Francis Walshe, in whose honour this essay was first published [1], has often spoken of the inadequacy of
anatomic structures to account for the full range of mental actions; he
insisted on the presence of integrative mental powers not explicable in these
terms. Toward the end of this paper I
shall give reasons supporting this view.
I shall start with an analysis of perception and shall arrive by
successive generalizations of the result to a stratified structure of living
things, which will include the structure of consciousness in higher animals.
Take a pair of stereoscopic photographs, viewed in the proper way, one
eye looking at one, the other eye at the other. The objects appear then distributed in depth,
more rounded and real, harder and more tangible. This result is due to slight differences
between the two pictures, taken from two points a few inches apart. All the information to be revealed by the
stereoscopic viewing is contained in these scarcely perceptible disparities. It should be possible to compute from them the
spatial dimensions of the objects and their distribution in depth, and I could
imagine cases in which the result of such processing may be of interest. But this would not tell us what the things
photographed look like. If you want to
remember a family party or identify a criminal, you must integrate the
stereo-pictures by looking at them simultaneously with one eye on each.
When looking at the stereo-image, we do see the separate pictures too;
for we see the stereo-image only because we have a precise impression of the
two pictures which contribute to it. But
we must distinguish between the two kinds of seeing: we are focusing our
attention on the stereo-image, while we see the two pictures only as they bear
on the stereo-image. We don’t look at
these two in themselves, but see them as clues to their joint appearance in the
stereo-image. It is their function to
serve as clues.
We may describe the situation by saying that we are focally aware of
the stereo-image, by being subsidiarily aware of the
two separate pictures. And we may add
that the characteristic feature of subsidiary awareness is to have a function,
the function of bearing on something at the focus of our attention. Next we may observe that the focal image, into
which the two subsidiary pictures are fused, brings out their joint meaning;
and thirdly, that this fusion brings about a quality not present in the
appearance of the subsidiaries. We may
recognize then these three features as parts of a process of knowing a focal
object by attending subsidiarily to the clues that
bear on it. We meet here the structure
of tacit knowing, with its characteristic functional, semantic, and phenomenal
aspects.
I have developed this analysis of tacit knowing many times before and
have now chosen the example of stereoscopic viewing in order to prevent a
recurrent misconception. [2] It
is a mistake to identify subsidiary awareness with subconscious or preconscious
awareness, or with the fringe of consciousness described by William James. The relation of clues to that which they
indicate is a logical relation similar to that which a premise has to the
inferences drawn from it, but with the important difference that tacit
inferences drawn from clues are not explicit. They are informal, tacit.
Remember that Helmholtz tried to interpret
perception as a process of inference, but that this was rejected, because
optical illusions are not destroyed by demonstrating their falsity. Tacit inference is like this. The fusion of the two stereoscopic pictures to
a single spatial image is not the outcome of an argument; and if its result is
illusory, as it can well be, it will not be shaken by argument. The fusion of the clues to the image on which
they bear is not a deduction but an integration.
Jean Piaget has drawn a striking distinction between a sensorimotor act and an explicit inference. Explicit inference is reversible: we can go
back to its premises and go forward again to its conclusions, rehearse the
whole process as often as we like. This
is not true for the sensorimotor act: for example,
once we have seen through a puzzle, we cannot return to an ignorance of its
solution.
The seeing of two stereo-pictures as one spatial image is, indeed,
irreversible in two senses. Firstly, it
is difficult to find our way back to the clues in the two pictures, because
they are hardly visible. And there are many
other clues to seeing something, like memories and the feeling inside our eye
muscles, which we either cannot trace or cannot experience in themselves at
all; they are largely submerged, unspecifiable.
Secondly - and this is more important for us - to go back to the
premises of a tacit inference brings about its reversal. It is not to retrace our steps, but to efface
them. Suppose we take out the
stereo-pictures from the viewer and look at them with both eyes. All the effects of the integration are cancelled;
the two pictures no longer function as clues, their joint meaning has vanished.
What has happened here may be regarded
as the inverse of tacit inference; a process of logical disintegration has
reduced a comprehensive entity to its relatively meaningless fragments.
The best-known example of this is the way a spoken word loses its
meaning if we repeat it a number of times, while carefully attending to the
movement of our lips and tongue and to the sound we are making. All these elements are meaningful, so long as
we attend through them to that on which they bear, but lose their meaning when
we attend to them in themselves, focally. The famous tight-rope walker, Blondin, says in his, memoirs that he would instantly lose
his balance, if he thought directly of keeping it; he must force himself to
think only of the way he would eventually descend from the rope. [3]
The purpose of this paper is to show that the relation between body and
mind has the same logical structure as the relation between clues and the image
to which the clues are pointing.
I believe that the paradoxes of the body-mind relation can be traced to
this logical structure and their solution be found in the light of this
interpretation.
The example of stereo-vision stands of course for a wide range of
similar intellectual and practical feats of knowing. We know a comprehensive whole, for example a
dog, by relying on our awareness of its parts for attending focally to the
whole. When we perform a skill, we
attend focally to its outcome, while being aware subsidiarily
of the several moves we co-ordinate to this effect. I have carried out this analysis often
elsewhere and shall take it for granted here. [4] But there is a further
step which I must restate once more. I
shall say that we observe external objects by being subsidiarily
aware of the impact they make on our body and of the responses our body makes
to them. All our conscious transactions
with the world involve our subsidiary use of our body. And our body is the only aggregate of things
of which we are aware almost exclusively in such a subsidiary manner.
I am speaking here of active consciousness, which excludes incoherent
dreams or pathological bursts of temper. Active consciousness achieves coherence by
integrating clues to the things on which they bear or integrating parts to the
wholes they form. This brings forth the
two levels of awareness: the lower one for the clues, the parts or other
subsidiary elements and the higher one for the focally apprehended
comprehensive entity to which these elements point. A deliberate act of consciousness has
therefore not only an identifiable object as its focal point, but also a set of
subsidiary roots which function as clues to its object or as parts of it.
This is the point at which our body is related to our mind. As our sense organs, our nerves and brain, our
muscles and memories, serve to implement our conscious intention, our awareness
of them enters subsidiarily into the comprehensive
entity which forms the focus of our attention. A suitable term is needed to speak of this
relation briefly. I shall say that we
attend from the subsidiary particulars to their joint focus. Acts of consciousness are then not only
conscious of something, but also conscious from certain things which include
our body. When we examine a human body
engaged in conscious action, we meet no traces of consciousness in its organs;
and this can be understood now in the sense that subsidiary elements, like the
bodily organs engaged in conscious action, lose their functional appearance
when we cease to look from them at the focus on which they bear, and look
instead at them, in themselves.
The way we know a comprehensive entity by relying on our awareness of
its parts for attending to its whole is the way we are aware of our body for
attending to an external event. We may
say therefore that we know a comprehensive entity by interiorizing its parts or
by making ourselves dwell in them; and the opposite process of switching
attention to the parts can be described as turning the parts into external
objects without functional meaning; it is to externalize them.
This formulation of tacit knowing, is
particularly suited for describing the way we know another person’s mind. We know a chess player’s mind by dwelling in
the stratagems of his games and know another man’s pain by dwelling in his face
distorted by suffering. And we may
conclude that the opposite process, namely of insisting on looking at the parts
of an observed behaviour as several objects, must
make us lose sight of the mind in control of a person’s behaviour.
But what should we think then of current schools of psychology which
claim that they replace the study of mental processes, by observing the several
particulars of behaviour as objects and by establishing
experimentally the laws of their occurrence? We may doubt that the identification of the
particulars is feasible since they will include many unspecifiable
clues; but the feasibility of the programme will not
only be uncertain, it will be logically impossible. To objectivize the
parts of conscious behaviour must make us lose sight
of the mind and dissolve the very image of a coherent behaviour.
Admittedly, behaviourist studies do not reach
this logical consequence of their programme. This is due to the fact that we cannot wholly
shift our attention to the fragments of conscious behaviour.
When we quote a subject’s report on a
mental experience in place of referring to this experience, this leaves our
knowledge of that experience untouched; the report has in fact no meaning,
except by bearing on this experience. An
experimenter may speak of an electric shock as an objective fact, but he
administers it only because he knows its painful effect. Afterwards he observes changes in the
conductivity of the subject’s skin which in themselves would be meaningless,
for they actually signify the expectation of an electric shock - the skin
response is in fact but a variant of goose flesh.
Thus a behaviourist analysis merely
paraphrases mentalist descriptions in terms known to be symptoms of mental
states and its meaning consists in its mentalist connotations. The practice of such paraphrasing might be
harmless and sometimes even appropriate, but a preference for tangible terms of
description will often be restrictive and misleading. The behaviourist
analysis of learning, for example, has banned the physiognomies of surprise,
puzzlement, and concentrated attention, by which Koehler described the mental
efforts of his chimpanzees. It avoids
the complex, delicately graded situations which evoke these mental states. The study of learning is thus cut down to its
crudest form known as conditioning. And
this oversimple paradigm of learning may then be misdescribed as it was by Pavlov, when he identified eating
with an expectation to be fed, because both of these induce the secretion of
saliva. Wherever we define mental
processes by objectivist circumlocutions, we are apt to stumble into such
absurdities.
The actual working of behaviourism therefore
confirms my conclusion that strictly isolated pieces of behaviour
are meaningless fragments, not identifiable as parts of behaviour.
Behaviourist
psychology depends on covertly alluding to the mental states which it sets out
to eliminate.
Principles of Boundary Control
But is not the material substance of all higher entities governed
throughout by the laws of inanimate matter? Does it not follow then that it must be
possible to represent all their workings in terms of these laws? Yes, this would follow. If I claim that these higher entities are
irreducible, I must show that they are governed in part by principles beyond
the scope of physics and chemistry. I
shall do so. I shall show first that a
number of different principles can control a comprehensive entity at different
levels. I have repeatedly presented this
theory in more particular terms. [5] It will be developed here
on general lines.
There exist principles that apply to a variety of circumstances. They can be laws of nature, like the laws of
mechanics, or be principles of operation, like those of physiology, as for
example those controlling muscular contraction and co-ordination; or they can
be principles laid down for the use of artifacts, like the vocabulary of the
English language or the rules of chess. Not
all important principles have such wide scope; but I need not go into this, for
it is enough to have pointed out that some principles exist that do.
We can go on to note then that such a principle is necessarily
compatible with any restriction we may choose to impose on the situation to
which it is to apply; it leaves wide open the conditions under which it can be
made to operate. Consequently, these
conditions lie beyond the control of our principle and may be said to form its
boundaries, or more precisely its boundary conditions. The term ‘boundary
conditions’ - borrowed from physics - will be used here in this sense.
Next we recognize that in certain cases the boundary conditions of a
principle are in fact subject to control by other principles. These I will call higher principles. Thus the boundary conditions of the laws of
mechanics may be controlled by the operational principles which define a
machine; the boundary conditions of muscular action may be controlled by a
pattern of purposive behaviour, like that of going
for a walk; the boundary of conditions of a vocabulary are usually controlled
by the rules of grammar, and the conditions left open by the rules of chess are
controlled by the stratagems of the players. And so we find that machines, purposive
actions, grammatical sentences, and games of chess, are all entities subject to
dual control.
Such is the stratified structure of comprehensive entities. They embody a combination of two principles, a
higher and a lower. Smash up a machine, utter
words at random, or make chess moves without a purpose and the corresponding
higher principle - that which constitutes the machine, that which makes words
into sentences, and that which makes moves of chess into a game - will all
vanish and the comprehensive entity which they controlled will cease to exist.
But the lower principles, the boundary conditions of which the now
effaced higher principles had controlled, remain in operation. The laws of mechanics, the vocabulary
sanctioned by the dictionary, the rules of chess, they will all continue to
apply as before. Hence no description of
a comprehensive entity in the light of its lower principles can ever reveal the
operation of its higher principles. The
higher principles which characterize a comprehensive entity cannot be defined
in terms of the laws that apply to its parts in themselves.
On the other hand, a machine does rely for its working on the laws of
mechanics; a purposive motoric action, like going for
a walk, relies on the operations of the muscular system which it directs, and
so on. The operations of higher
principles rely quite generally on the action of the laws governing lower
levels.
Yet, since the laws of the lower level will go on operating, whether
the higher principles continue to be in working order or not, the action of the
lower laws may well disrupt the working of the higher principles and destroy
the comprehensive entity controlled by them.
Such is the mechanism of a two-levelled
comprehensive entity. Let me show now
that the two-levelled logic of tacit knowing performs
exactly what is needed for understanding this mechanism.
Tacit knowing integrates the particulars of a comprehensive entity and
makes us see them forming the entity. This integration recognizes the higher principle
at work on the boundary conditions left open by the lower principle, by
mentally performing the workings of the higher principle. It thus materializes the functional structure
of tacit knowing. It also makes it clear
to us how the comprehensive entity works by revealing the meaning of its parts.
We have here the semantic aspect of
tacit knowing. And since a comprehensive
entity is controlled as a whole by a higher principle than the one which
controls its isolated parts, the entity will look different than an aggregate
of its parts. Its higher principle will
endow it with a stability and power appearing in its shape and motions and
usually produce also additional novel features. We have here the phenomenal aspect of tacit
knowing.
And finally, we are presented also with an ontological counterpart of
the logical disintegration caused by switching our attention from the
integrating centre of a comprehensive entity to its particulars. To turn our attention from the actions of the
higher principle, which defines the two-levelled
entity, and direct it to the lower principle controlling the isolated parts of
the entity is to lose sight of the higher principle and indeed of the whole
entity controlled by it. This mirrors
the destruction of a comprehensive entity when it is pulled to pieces. The logical structure of tacit knowing thus
covers in every detail the ontological structure of a combined pair of levels.
Application of these Principles to Mind and
Body
The next question is whether the functioning of living beings and of
their consciousness is in fact stratified. Is it subjected to the joint control of
different principles working at consecutive levels?
The laws of physics and chemistry do not ascribe consciousness to any
process controlled by them; the presence of consciousness proves, therefore,
that other principles than those of inanimate matter participate in the
conscious operations of living things.
There are two other fundamental principles of biology which are beyond
the scope of physics and chemistry. The
structure and functioning of an organism is determined, like that of a machine,
by constructional and operational principles which control boundary conditions
left open by physics and chemistry. We
may call this a structural principle, lying beyond the realm of physics and
chemistry. I have explained this a number of times before and will not argue it here
again. [6]
Other functions of the organism not covered by physics and chemistry
are exemplified by the working of the morphogenic field.
Its principles are expressed most
clearly by C. H. Waddington’s ‘epigenetic landscapes’. These show that the development of the embryo
is controlled by the gradient of potential shapes, in the way the motion of a
heavy body is controlled by the gradient of potential energy. [7] We may call this
principle an organizing field or speak of it as an organismic
principle.
Most biologists would declare that both the principles of structure and
of organizing fields will be reduced one day to the laws of physics and
chemistry. But I am unable to discover
the grounds - or even understand the meaning - of such assurances, and hence I
will disregard them and recognize these two principles as actually used in
biology today.
Living beings consist in a hierarchy of levels, each level having its
own structural and organismic principles. On the mental level, explicit inferences
represent the operations of fixed mental structures, while in tacit knowing we
meet the integrating powers of the mind. In all our conscious thoughts, these two modes
mutually rely on each other, and it is plausible to assume that explicit mental
operations are based on fixed neural networks, while tacit integrations are
grounded mainly in organizing fields. I
shall assume also that these two principles are interwoven in the body, as
their counterparts are in thought.
The purpose of this paper is to explain the relation between body and
mind as an instance of the relation between the subsidiary and the focal in
tacit knowledge. The fact that any
subsidiary element loses its meaning when we focus our attention on it explains
the fact that, when examining the body in conscious action, we meet no traces
of consciousness in its organs. We lose
the meaning of the subsidiaries in their role of pointing to the focal. Using this principle, we are now ready to
complete our project.
We have seen that we can know another person’s mind by dwelling in his
physiognomy and behaviour; we lose sight of his mind
only when we focus our attention on these bodily workings and thus convert them
into mere objects. But a
neurophysiologist, observing the events that take place in the eyes and brain
of a seeing man, would invariably fail to see in these neural events what the
man himself sees by them. We must ask why
the neurologist cannot dwell in these bodily events, as he could in the subject’s
physiognomy or intelligent behaviour.
We may notice that the latter kind of indwelling, for which we appear
to be equipped by nature, enables us to read only tacit thoughts of another
mind: thoughts and feelings of the kind that we may suitably ascribe to organismic processes in the nervous system. We can get to know the explicit thoughts of a
person - which may correspond to anatomically fixed functions of the nervous
system - only from the person’s verbal utterances. The meaning of such utterances is artificial;
though ultimately based on demonstrations pointing at tacit experiences, such
utterances have no direct appeal to the native mind. The facility for indwelling can be seen to
vary also when prehistoric sites, unperceived from the ground, are discerned
from the air. Our incapacity for
experiencing the neural processes of another person in the manner he
experiences them himself may be aligned with these gradual variations of
indwelling.
We arrive thus at the following outline. Our capacity for conducting and experiencing
the conscious operations of our body, including that of our nervous system,
lies in the fact that we dwell fully in them. No one but ourselves can dwell in our body
directly and know fully all its conscious operations; but our consciousness can
be experienced also by others to the extent to which they can dwell in the
external workings of our mind from outside. They can do this fairly effectively for many
tacit workings of our mind by dwelling in our physiognomy and behaviour,
such powers of indwelling are fundamentally innate in us. By contrast, our explicit thoughts can be
known to others only by dwelling in our pronouncements, the making and understanding
of which is founded on artificial conventions. Objectivization,
whether of another person’s gestures or of his utterances, cancels our dwelling
in them, destroys their meaning and cuts off communication through them. The nervous system, as observed by the
neurophysiologist, is always objectivized and can
convey its meaning to the observer only indirectly, by pointing at a behaviour or at reports that we
understand by indwelling.
The logic of tacit knowing and the ontological principles of stratified
entities were derived here independently of each other, and we found that our
tacit logic enables us to understand stratified entities. It shows us then that the higher principle of
a stratified entity can be apprehended only by our dwelling in the boundary
conditions of a lower principle on which the higher principle operates. Such indwelling is logically incompatible with
fixing our attention on the laws governing the lower level. Applied to mind and body, as to two strata in
which the higher principles of the mind rely for their operations on the lower
principles of physiology, we arrive at three conclusions.
(1) No observations of physiology can make us apprehend the operations
of the mind. Both the mechanisms and organismic processes of physiology, when observed as such,
will always be found to work insentiently.
(2) At the same time, the operations of the mind will never be found to
interfere with the principles of physiology, nor with the even lower principles
of physics and chemistry on which they rely.
(3) But as the operations of the mind rely on the services of lower
bodily principles, the mind can be disturbed by adverse changes in the body, or
be offered new opportunities; by favourable changes
of its bodily basis.
The way integration functions in tacit knowing, as well as the presence
of irreducible organismic principles in living
beings, are both consonant with the arguments, presented by Sir Francis Walshe for the presence of integrative, mental powers, not
accounted for by the fixed anatomic structures of the central nervous system. [8]
Many philosophic efforts of our century can be see to have pointed
towards such conclusions. A systematic
attempt to safe-guard the content of unsophisticated experience against the
effects of a destructive analysis was made by Edmund Husserl
during the first three decades of this century with far-reaching influence on
Continental philosophy. But its bearing
on the body-mind problem was derived mainly later by Merleau-Ponty
in his Phenomenologie de la Perception (1945). He gives a vivid and elaborate description of
the way we experience our body. The body
is ‘known to us’, he writes, ‘through its functional value’; its parts engaged
in the performance of our actions ‘are available to us in virtue of their
common meaning’; [9] our body expresses
meaning but ‘language does not express thought, it is the subject’s taking up
of a position in the world of his meanings’. [10]
‘If a being is conscious it must
be nothing but a network of intentions;’ [11]
‘I do not understand the gestures of others by an act of intellectual
interpretation... The act by which I lend myself to the spectacles must be
recognized as irreducible to anything else;’ [12]
our experience of our body is an existential act, not based either
on observation nor on explicit thought. These remarks foreshadow my analysis, but I
find among them neither the logic of tacit knowing nor the theory of
ontological stratification, which I regard as indispensable for the
understanding of the phenomena described by Merleau-Ponty.
Another follower of Husserl, Dr F. S.
Rothschild, arrived even earlier at the conclusion that the mind is the meaning
of the body. [13] He
developed this idea widely in neurophysiology and psychiatry, where I am not
competent to follow him.
The mainstream of contemporary English and American philosophy ignores
the inquiries of phenomenologists. But it shares their rejection of Cartesian
dualism, and the kinship of the two movements goes beyond this. Deprive my quotations from the Phenomenology of Perception of their
existentialist perspective, and they can be equated with observations of Ryle in the Concept
of Mind (1949). [14] But
such a transition brings out the theoretical inadequacy of these observations
and results in drawing false conclusions from them. Take a simple example. Merleau-Ponty
says ‘I do not understand the gestures of others by an act of intellectual
interpretation’, and Ryle says the same: ‘I am not
inferring to the workings of your mind, I am following them;’ [15] but Merleau-Ponty
finds an alternative to ‘intellectual interpretation’ in existential
experience, while Ryle has none and affirms,
therefore, that ‘most intelligent performances are not clues to the mind; they
are those workings’, [16] which is
absurd. Many vivid and often subtle
phenomenological descriptions are used by Ryle to
demonstrate that the mind does not explicitly operate on the body, and from
this result he concludes that body and mind are ‘not two things’, [17] ‘not tandem operations’, [18] containing no,’occult
causes’, [19] ‘no occult antecedents’ [20] no ‘ghost in the machine’, [21] in other words, no Cartesian duality. But what actually follows from the fact that
mind and body do not interact explicitly is that they interact according to the
logic of tacit knowing. And it is this
logic that disposes of the Cartesian dilemma by acknowledging two mutually
exclusive ways of being aware of our body.
As Ryle’s powerful argument leads him to
fallacious conclusions, it offers a compelling demonstration of the troubles
arising from the absence of the cognitive and ontological principles outlined
in the present paper; that is why I selected his work for representing
anti-Cartesian thought in contemporary British and American literature.
[1]
Brain, 88 (1965), pp. 799-810.
[2]
Recent publications of the author on which this paper draws: ‘Clues to an Understanding
of Mind and Body’, The Scientist
Speculates (I. J. Good, ed.), London: Heinemann, 1962, p. 67; ‘Tacit
Knowing and Its Bearing on Some Problems of Philosophy’, Reviews of Modern Physics, 34 (1962), pp. 601-16; ‘Science and Man’s
Place in the Universe’, in Science as a
Cultural Force (H. Woolf, ed.), Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1964, Oxford University Press, 1965; ‘On the Modern Mind’, Encounter (May, 1965); ‘The Logic of
Tacit Inference’, Philosophy (Jan.
1966) pp. 1-18; ‘The Creative Imagination’, Chemical
and Engineering News, 44 (1966), pp. 85-93; The Tacit Dimension, Garden City: Double-day, 1966.
[3]Referred
to in F. J. J. Buytendijk, Traité de Psychologie Animate, Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France, 19 5 2, p. 126.
[4]See
2 above.
[5]
Ibid. See also ‘Life’s Irreducible Structure", Science, No. 160, 1968. pp. 1308-12. Also included as Essay 14 in
Knowing and Being, ed. M. Grene,
[6]
Ibid. . See also ‘Life’s Irreducible Structure",
Science, No. 160, 1968. pp. 1308-12. Also included as Essay
14 in Knowing and Being, ed. M. Grene,
[7]
Cf. e.g., C. H. Waddington, The Strategy
of the Genes,
[8]
F. Walshe, Critical
Studies in Neurology and Further Critical Studies in Neurology with other
Essays and Addresses, Edinburgh: Livingstone and Co., 1948 and 1965,
respectively.
[9]
M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology
of Perception,
[10]
Ibid., p. 193.
[11]
Ibid., p. 121.
[12]
Ibid., p. 185.
[13]
See Rothschild’s earlier writings, which extend back to 1930. A fairly recent summary of them is given in
the monograph: F. S. Rothschild, Das Zentralnervensystem als
Symbol des Erlebens,
[14]
G. Ryle, Concept
of Mind,
[15]
Ibid., p. 61.
[16]
Ibid., p. 58.
[17]
Ibid., p. 74.
[18]
Ibid., p. 46.
[19]
Ibid., p. 50.
[20]
Ibid., p. 115.
[21] Ibid., pp. 15-16.
* The text follows the Knowing and Being publication which has a modified first paragraph.
Web copy adapted from The Polanyi
Society
http://www.mwsc.edu/orgs/polanyi/index.html