Imagine that you are reading a book abouI the Cosmos. You<br >find it so interesting that you go out and buy a telescope. One<br >fine clear moonless night you set up your tel~scope and focus<br >on the brightest star in the sky. It is a planet， not a star， with<br >a reddish spot and several moons. Excited， you look up the<br >planets in your book about the Cosmos. You read a descrip-<br >tion of the planets. You read a sentence about a large yellow-<br >ish planet with a red spot and several moons. You recognize<br >both the description and the picture. Clearly， you have been<br >looking at Jupiter.<br > You have no difficulty at all in saying that it is Jupiter，<br >not Mars or Saturn， even though the object you are looking<br >at is something you have never seen before and is hundreds<br >of millions of miles distant.<br > Now imagine that you are reading the newspaper. You<br >come to the astrology column. You may or may not believe<br >in astrology， but to judge from the popularity of astrology<br >these days， you will probably read your horoscope. Accord-<br >ing to a recent poll， more Americans set store in astrology<br >than in science or God.<br > You are an Aries. You open your newspaper to the<br >astrology column and read an analysis of the Aries personal-<br >ity. It says among other things:<br >You have the knack of creating an atmosphere of<br >thought and movement， unhampered by petty<br >jealousies. But you have the tendency to scatter<br >your talents to the four winds.<br >Hm， you say， quite true. I m like that.<br > Suddenly you realize you ve made a mistake. You ve<br >read the Gemini column. So you go back to Aries:<br >Nothing hurts you more than to be unjustly mis-<br >treated or suspected. But you have a way about<br >LOST IN THE COSMOS<br >you， a gift for seeing things through despite all ob-<br >stacles and distractions. You also have a desperate<br >need to be liked. So you have been wounded more<br >often than vou will admit.<br >Hm， you say， quite true. I m like that.<br > The first question is: Why is it that both descriptions<br >seem to fit you--or， for that matter， why do you seem tc<br >recognize yourself in the self-analysis of all twelve astrolog-<br >ical signs? Or， to put it another way， why is it that you car<br >recognize and identify the planets Jupiter and Venus so read<br >fly after reading a bit and taking one look， yet have so much<br >trouble identifying yourself from twelve descriptions when<br >presumably， you know yourself much better than you knox~<br >Jupiter and Venus?<br > (2) Can you explain why it is that there are， at las<br >count， sixteen schools of psychotherapy with sixteer<br >theories of the personality and its disorders and that patient<br >treated in one school seem to do as well or as badly a<br >patients treated in any other--while there is only one gener.<br >ally accepted theory of the cause and cure of pneumococca<br >pneumonia and only one generally accepted theory of the<br >orbits of the planets and the gravitational attraction of ou<br >galaxy and the galaxy M31 in Andromeda? (Hint: If yot<br >answer that the human psyche is more complicated than th~<br >pneumococcus and the human white-cell response or th~<br >galaxies or Einstein s general theory of relativity， keep il<br >mind that the burden of proof is on you. Or if you answe<br >that the study of the human psyche is in its infancy， remem<br >ber then this infancy has lasted 2，500 years and， unlike phys<br >ics， we don t seem to know much more about the psych<br >than Plato did.)<br ><br >