Not surprisingly, Eiseley’s understanding of the connectedness of artand science made him an outspoken critic of the dichotomy of the “twocultures.” In an essay specifically addressed to Snow’s (1959) conception,for example, he noted that “today’s secular disruption between the creativeaspect of art and that of science is a barbarism that would have broughtlifted eyebrows in a Cro-Magnon cave” (1978, p. 271), and as a writer withthe credentials to be accepted in both camps, he exemplified, like othergreat humanist scientists such as Polanyi and Bronowski, a stereoscopicway of thought which surmounts the illusory division.Eiseley came to think of himself as a kind of trickster figure, ridicul-ing the pretensions of science in much the same way that native American“sacred clowns” deride the presumed sanctity of tribal holy men as theyperform their rituals. Throughout human history, Eiseley knew, mankind’sgreatest accomplishments had, until the present age, always been accom-panied by “dark shadows”—what the Greek mind called “Nemesis”—which hinted that such triumphs might soon meet with devastation. Butwith the tremendous upsurge of knowledge introduced by the scientificrevolution and the subsequent development of an advanced technology,the “dark shadows” “passed out of all human semblance; no societal ritualsafely contained their posturings . . . ” (1969, p. 82). Thus modern sciencenow stands in need of a trickster who would call into question the sanctityand unassailability of science and seek to rein in its longing. Eiseley wouldcertainly have applauded Polanyi’s (1968) professed desire to assume arole in relation to science’s accomplishments like that of the innocent boyin “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” pointing an accusing finger at an insti-tution that pretends to be something that, as a human product, it cannotbe: objective. Eiseley never forgot that behind the “concealing drapery” ofscience there always lurks “the swirling vapor of an untamed void whosevassals we are—we who fancy ourselves as the priesthood of powers safelycontained and to be exhibited as evidence of our own usurping godhood”(1969, p. 20).For such attitudes Eiseley had nothing but disdain. He was, for ex-ample, disgusted with a United States Senator’s announcement (followingthe moon landing) that men had become “the masters of the universe”(1970, p. 32). He wondered too about the sanity of a prominent scientistwho once speculated about what the next ten billion years would offerthe species, as if it were a fixed and immutable final product of evolution(1957, pp. 56–57). And he stood amazed at the pomposity of an unnamedturn-of-the-century scientist’s proclamation that all generations previousto his own (which had not lived to see Freud, Einstein, or modern genetics)had lived and died in illusion (1975b, p. 5). In contrast to these outrageousinstances of species egotism, he quoted with approval von Bertalanffy’s