"fools with tools are still fools"

"second, mysteries are unpublishable because only some can see them, not all.  Mysteries are intrinsically esoteric, and as such are an offense to democracy:  is not publicity a democratic principle?  Publication makes it republican—a thing of the people.  The pristine academies [of Plato and Ficino] were esoteric and aristocratic, self-consciously separate from the profanely vulgar.  Democratic resentment denies that there can be anything that can't be seen by everybody; in the democratic academy truth is subject to public verification; truth is what any fool can see.  This is what is meant by the so-called scientific method:  so-called science is the attempt to democratize knowledge—the attempt to substitute method for insight, mediocrity for genius, by getting a standard operating procedure.  The great equalizers dispensed by the scientific method are the tools, those analytical tools.  The miracle of genius is replaced by the standard mechanism.  But fools with tools are still fools. . . ."

     Norman Oliver Brown, "Apocalypse:  the place of mystery in the life of the mind" (Columbia University, May 31, 1960), in Apocalypse and/or metamorphosis (Berkeley:  The University of California Press, 1991), 3-4 (1-7).  Needless to say, I have my reservations about this wonderful essay.  There have been real geniuses in modern science, too (and in Brown's sense); nor is it "Either miracle or scripture" (6; indeed, "only the fool will take these [too] as mutually exclusive"); etc.  Still, I'm one of those "fools with tools" who needs to be taken down a notch or two from time to time.