THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 317 



the point it may have readied, or to any fixed point. For this purpose he should 

 view his own life and that of others at all its stages as a continuous whole, 

 developing in accordance with divine laws. Only in this way can man reach an 

 understanding of history, of the history of human development as well as of 

 himself, the history and phenomena, the events of his own development, the 

 history of his own heart, of his own feelings and thoughts; only in this way 

 can he learn to understand others; only in this way can parents hope to under- 

 stand their child. 



III. Having now defined what sort of history is under discussion, 

 we may now turn to ask what we are to understand by science. This 

 term is generally considered to be synonymous with classified or organ- 

 ized knowledge. But if we confine' ourselves to this meaning of the 

 word science, and if we think that we are studying the history of sci- 

 ence when we study the gradual accretion of classified knowledge, we 

 shall not be able to get from our labors much illumination on the sub- 

 ject of culture epochs; for in the early stages of civilization, in the 

 ruder culture epochs, we find no classified knowledge that would now 

 be recognized as science — no laws of nature, no great abstract prin- 

 ciples. Yet there must have been, in those barbaric and primitive 

 times, something that bore the earmarks of science — something which 

 could serve as a means of identifying the nature of the culture epoch 

 from the point of view of science. What was this, and how discover 

 it ? Is there any characteristic of scientific work — any typical factor 

 which always appears in a scientific investigation, and whose rudiments 

 may be discovered even in so-called uncultivated epochs and in appar- 

 ently scienceless eras ? 



Eecently it has been suggested that the scientific status of a nation 

 at any epoch may be determined from a study of the kind of problems 

 over which the people puzzled and the way in which they solved them, 

 i. e., problem-solving furnishes a criterion of culture from the point of 

 view of science.- This criterion is evidently capable of universal appli- 

 cation, since every nation and every individual of every nation has had 

 to meet and to solve problems. Furthermore, problem-solving always 

 involves, to a greater or less extent, the use of the creative imagination ; 

 hence this criterion justifies itself in the light of the definition of his- 

 tory just given, since the kind of history that is needed has to be 

 studied through the expressions of that imagination. 



One thing more is necessary in order completely to define our cri- 

 terion of scientific culture, and that is a statement of the conditions 

 under which problem-solving may be classed as scientific. It is prob- 

 ably not necessary here to more than state those conditions, since their 

 meaning is now so well understood. A problem has been solved scien- 

 tifically when its solution has stood the test of the most unprejudiced 

 and relentless criticism both from the side of reason and from that of 

 experiment; and also, when the limits within which its solution is valid 



