Dualism: from Descartes and Bacon to AJNR.

T he Oxford English Dictionary defines duality as " an opposition or contrast between two concepts or aspects. " 1 In the American Journal of Neuroradiology (AJNR), I see these aspects reflected in the nature of our articles, which are either basic research or clinically oriented. Basic research articles tend to be multiauthored, hypothesis-driven, and thus prospective, blinded, and controlled, and often extramurally funded. Clinical ones are often retrospective and descriptive. Opposing concepts are found in most of our activities, and though many times these result in anxiety and difficulties, I believe that a balance between them is needed for any activity to succeed. Reality itself is defined by its duality, subjective and objective , so it is no surprise that all other human activities contain some twofold elements. From ancient times, duality has guided Western thinking according to 2 major activities: theo-logic and scientific. Theologic thinking, at least as it relates to Christianity, has been, in turn, dominated by another duality, the struggle between good and evil. Generally speaking, in our Western environment, being both religious and scientific is at odds and often incompatible. This is not the case with Eastern religions, where the duality of beliefs and science may coexist within individuals. Unlike the Old and New Testaments, other religious texts tend to be descriptive rather than analytic, a fact that allows these to be incorporated into everyday life without competition from other strong beliefs. Muslims can be scientists , but most Western neuroradiologists I know do not profess a Christian religion. The true separation between Western religions and science occurred as a result of Galileo's observations about the earth's orbit (and his conflicts with the Church) and later with Dar-win's theory of evolution. Until the 18th century, the 2 dominant disciplines of science were astronomy and mathematics. Although intimately related, the first fell into the category of observation through motivation and the second was (and still is) driven by interpretation of facts. Mathematicians themselves have their own duo of ideas: pure and applied. The modern scientific revolution began in the early 1600s with René Descartes. Often called the " father of analytical geometry , " Descartes was mainly responsible for rationalism and a significant school of philosophy. The other great scientific figure of that epoch was Sir Francis Bacon. A true man for all seasons, Bacon was responsible for the creation of the in-ductive methodology now simply …