time: the refreshing river 



into the eighteenth century, until a new economic situation and new 

 imperial conquests brought a new equilibrium of classes in which the 

 Royal Society turned its attention rather to "pure" science. Then the 

 centre of gravity of applied science shifted to the north, where the 

 "Lunar Society" at Birmingham, and certain Scottish groups, took 

 up the tale. 



Evidently, there is a great deal more in the proposal of the 

 Fellows of 1663 not to "meddle with morals or politics" than 

 meets the eye. 



So much by way of commentary on the case of Hill v. Haldane. We 

 may now consider the case of Polanyi v. Waddington. What exactly 

 do we mean by pure science.'^ 



The Meaning of Pure Science. 



Everyone agrees that the essence of science is the spirit of free 

 enquiry. Science is, as Polanyi says, a body of valid ideas about Nature. 

 The basic test of scientific truth is whether or not it fits in with the 

 total body of scientific concepts which has grown up through centuries 

 of human effort. The first necessity, when a new group of facts has 

 been established by competent workers armed with the appropriate 

 techniques, and duly confirmed, is to elaborate some hypothesis 

 linking it up in a rational way with the existing body of scientific 

 knowledge. The predictability of events is taken as justification for 

 the belief that through the centuries science is approximating more 

 and more closely to truth. Science is autonomous in that certain 

 modes of reasoning are entirely foreign to it, and ethically neutral in 

 that natural phenomena are unaffected by our desires. They represent 

 what is, irrespective of what we think ought to be. 



But science does not exist in a vacuum. It is essentially a product 

 of society, and the communism of its co-operating observers is but a 

 prefiguration of that economic and social solidarity which humanity 

 is destined to achieve. The social background of science influences it 

 in many ways. Among the most important of these are the factors 

 which stimulate the interest of a scientist at a given moment in history 

 in one direction rather than another. Out of the infinity of possible 

 problems which he might attack, he does in fact attack only a certain 

 problem since life is short and the art long. The history of science 

 abounds in illustrations of this, starting from primitive examples 

 such as the origin of alchemy in the search for the Pill of Immortality 

 in China and the Philosopher's Stone in the West, to the factors in 



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