PSYCHOLOGY 43 



unaided observation; more often, since the conditions are complex, by 

 the roundabout way — which is still observation — of experiment and 

 measurement. We need not pause to illustrate, or to cite the authori- 

 ties; the conclusion is generally accepted; and every piece of apparatus 

 in our laboratories shows as an instrument for the control or the exten- 

 sion or the refinement of observation. 



It is, perhaps, less apparent that all the problems of science may be 

 summed up in the single problem of analysis; that the task which lies 

 before the man of science, in his character as scientific, is always the 

 analysis — under which is included, of course, that synthesis which is a 

 test of analysis — of some complex object or complex situation. The 

 reduction of a compound to its elements, the differentiation of factors, 

 the establishment of correlations among the components of a given 

 whole, — these are the things that the scientific investigator finds him- 

 self doing. True, we shrink a little from running all men of science 

 into the same mold; we individualize them; we think of Newton as 

 wielding " the ponderous instrument of synthesis," of Darwin as " work- 

 ing on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collecting facts 

 on a wholesale scale." We are right in thus individualizing; for not 

 only is the man of science something more than a scientific machine, but 

 science itself is also (as we are to see in a moment) something more 

 than what we have so far made it out to be. The witness of history is, 

 nevertheless, straightforward enough; what Newton and Darwin, as 

 scientific men, had before all things to do was to analyze, and to analyze 

 again, and again to analyze. To be scientifically active is disinter- 

 estedly to apply the method of observation to the task of analysis. 



Ill 



Our three adjectives are thus given: disinterested, observational, 

 analytical. Taken together, they characterize the scientific attitude 

 with sufficient accuracy for the purposes of this essay. They do not, 

 however, cover the full meaning of " science " as that word is ordinarily 

 used and understood. When we speak of science, we mean, not an 

 assemblage of observed facts, the direct results of analysis, but rather 

 an organized and systematized body of knowledge, a closed and self- 

 contained whole. That every science, every transcription of the world 

 from a scientific point of view, should yield a system, as if there were 

 of necessity some immanent principle of order which the facts illustrate 

 and to which they conform, is of course an assumption, and an assump- 

 tion that we might find curious were it not so familiar. Originating 

 perhaps in physics, supported by the belief in the general uniformity 

 of nature, and favored by the tendency to regard the sciences as depart- 

 ments of knowledge, and therefore as concerned with divisions of the 

 cosmic mechanism, it has been accepted, more or less consciously, by 



