time: the refreshing river 



no cash value to anybody, and addressing a physical chemist of 

 great industrial importance, I should like to ask if something of this 

 sort is not true already ? Our civilisation is, to some degree, a society, 

 and not a mere collection of individuals. Men of science are, again to 

 some degree only, involved in the social bonds which create society's 

 coherence. One could only be justified in calling for a less degree of 

 involvement in those bonds if one disapproved of the society as a 

 whole, if, for example, one was a revolutionary who wished to stay 

 outside it so as to overthrow it." And no one could suppose that 

 this description could apply to Prof Polanyi. 



A society and not a mere collection of individuals. Has not science 

 itself risen to its present position of domination over nature precisely 

 by virtue of taking social coherence seriously ? Is not modern science 

 distinguished from primitive forms of science such as alchemy by 

 the fact that the free publication of results permits of confirmation, 

 or failure of confirmation, by a thousand observers and experimental- 

 ists, scattered over the earth's surface, of every race, religion, colour 

 and creed .^ Does not science strive to perfect the means for the 

 communicability of human thought about nature? Science is a society 

 within a society. Its social nature and function are inescapable. Its 

 holiness, or the reverse, cannot be thought of without considering the 

 holiness of society as a whole. We shall return later to this question. 



Science^ Authority and Freedom. 



Here I would interject an extremely important matter to which 

 C. H. Waddington, in another place,^ has recently drawn attention. 

 Science, he says, is the most perfect resolution which man has yet 

 found, of the antinomy between Authority and Freedom. The 

 structure of human scientific knowledge about the world is never 

 complete; there is always the possibility that some fundamental 

 discovery may be made which will require the modification of at 

 any rate large parts of it. Such was the case with the theories of 

 Einstein on space and time. Authority in science can never, therefore, 

 be absolutely secure. It is open to anyone to upset the whole structure 

 or a large part of it, if he can. And it is part of the spirit of science 

 that he should try his best to do so. Freedom is therefore secure, but 

 in so far as the greater part of scientific knowledge is solidly established, 

 and therefore has a certain Authority^ Freedom becomes indeed the 



^ The Scientific Attitude (Penguin Books, London, 1941), p. 93. 



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