WHAT 18 RESEARCH? 175 



arranged series of science studies added. In this study of science 

 care should be taken to begin courses in which lessons are to be learned, 

 and learned upon authority and with exactitude, later to be perfected 

 by laboratory practise; such is, in my judgment, the finest kind of 

 preliminary discipline for a man of research. For it takes a learned 

 man to tell the truth with precision, even when he is its discoverer; 

 and, moreover, only the learned man knows when he has discovered a 

 new truth. Ability to study deeply and accurately is then the second 

 essential qualification to the making of a man of research. 



Thirdly, to undertake original research a man must be a trained 

 investigator. He must know the methods by which other men have 

 discovered truths and interpreted things. To learn this he must have 

 gone through the exercise of a personal discovery of the meaning of 

 things — have tested for himself the reality of the descriptions written 

 in the books. Such training is best given in the laboratory; analysis 

 and experiment leading to already known results must be gone over 

 by the investigator in careful detail, and the steps of the progress, the 

 associated conditions, the order of sequence of phenomena must be 

 closely observed and recorded; and the relation of the phenomena to 

 one another and the results of experiments clearly understood, formu- 

 lated and, best of all, fully written out. 



Fourth, the man of research should have a vivid imagination, which 

 should be trained to be accurate and to be his servant, not his master. 

 This faculty, I fear, is often trained out of men by what is called ex- 

 perience. Not only does the dry, matter of fact, world of every day 

 tend to keep one down to thoughts of the immediate present, but the 

 immensity of science and its practical applications, by the very abun- 

 dance of the known facts, crowds out of use all mental pictures of 

 hypothetical conditions not known to common experience. Neverthe- 

 less, as has been already noted, the very function of research is to go 

 beyond the field of present knowledge, and in it the attention must be 

 fixed steadily upon concepts, the realization of which has not yet been 

 attained. The scientific imagination may be exercised and disciplined 

 by the study of mathematics. The architect's work is a definite appli- 

 cation of imagination to projecting new construction. What are called 

 ' working hypotheses ' are the results of this exercise of imagination in 

 advancing research. The discipline of the faculty of imagination is 

 necessary to enable the researcher to distinguish between his concepts 

 of imagination and his concepts of experience. If he knows how to 

 distinguish them, his imagination becomes his valuable assistant, if 

 ignorant or unobservant of the difference, his results become speculative 

 and ineffective. 



A fifth trait marking the typical man of research is a wide, open 

 mind. Philosophically he should be a whole man, not simply a one- 



