246 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tion. We sometimes think we are getting wise when we are only get- 

 ting rusty. 



It is this consideration that indicates a man should receive very 

 little help with his doctor's thesis, he should sink or swim without the 

 help of a convenient raft — or professor. For then is the witching time 

 when he is finding out whether he holds the power of research, and he 

 alone can tell whether he has it; he can tell by a certain elation and 

 undefined feeling of strength. The student should be given a soluble 

 problem for his thesis, also certain technical aid, then left rather severely 

 to his own devices. If he succeed he will have proved his ability ; if he 

 fail it is still well, for he will be saved from an ill-chosen career. "While, 

 on the other hand, the result of aid constantly given is what we may 

 call the " one-thesis man," he who finishes his thesis, to be sure, and gets 

 his degree, but who afterwards, when he is thrown upon himself, proves 

 unable to carry out further investigation. The best test of a leader of 

 a school of investigation is not the number of doctors graduated, but 

 the number who afterwards actively continue to investigate. For their 

 own good students should prosecute their problems so far as possible 

 without extraneous help. 



The highest that graduate work can foster is independent thinking, 

 not scholastic learning. A man may be led to knowledge, but he can 

 not be made to think. 



There are three particular gifts that the investigator should cherish 

 to his utmost, imagination, judgment and the maintenance of an ideal. 



As the insect stretches out his antennae, feeling and smelling at once, 

 forming thereby an idea of what is ahead of him, so it is that by the 

 help of our imagination we can reach out into the unknown. Blind 

 searching for a clue is not profitable, and it is waste of time to expect 

 some happy fortune to bring an answer to us. Science is not a game 

 of chance. It is necessary to form tentative explanations, and the work- 

 ing hypothesis is the outcome of the imagination much more than of the 

 reason. The reason deals with the known and experienced, it is the 

 imagination that must as a pioneer leap into the unknown. Thus the 

 scientist makes his soundings and feels the depths. He has to forecast 

 various possibilities, and to test these severally. Yet the imagination is 

 only a feeler and not a leg to stand upon. We must bear in mind that 

 hypotheses are but suggestions, invaluable though they be in directing 

 effort, and that the real labor of the scientist is the testing of his 

 hypotheses. The immediate subject matter of all of us, physicist, 

 mathematician, chemist, philologist, whatever our calling may be, is 

 hypothesis, and out of hypotheses we have to reach explanations; an 

 explanation so attained is a theory. We must not confuse hypothesis 

 with theory, nor inflict upon suffering colleagues, much less publish, 

 all our hypotheses. If, as Goethe says, all theory is gray, how colorless 

 must hypothesis be until it has been turned to account. 



