time: the refreshing river 



rationalists and the empiricists in philosophy. The contemporary 

 rationaHsts were people who held that "human beings were in 

 possession of certain principles of interpretation which were not 

 simply generalisations from experience, but could nevertheless be used 

 as major premises in arguments concerning nature. If observations 

 were not in accordance with expectations founded on such reasoning, 

 they were dismissed as illusions. The empiricists, on the otlier hand, 

 held that there was no knowledge independent of observation, and 

 that the rationalists' principles, in so far as they were admissible at 

 all, were generalisations from experience." It is obvious that nearly 

 all the preformationists were rationalists. They thought that Reason 

 was in a position to decide the issue whatever might be the results 

 of observation. "It is remarkable," as Cole says,^ in his book on 

 this period, "that the preformationists did not realise that if the 

 point to be established is assumed at the outset all further discussion 

 is superfluous." In this example, then, we have a disturbance of the 

 balance towards the side of rationalistic speculation. 



It would be a mistake, however, to regard this tendency as confined 

 to the eighteenth century. Ample examples of its presence can be 

 collected from nearly every period in biological history. "We plume 

 ourselves," says Cole, "on that aspect of our work which is vain and 

 argumentative, and condescend to the more modest but enduring 

 labour of observation." There can be no doubt that this state of 

 affairs, so unfortunate for science, is one aspect of that contempt for 

 manual labour which has run through the stratified structures of all 

 societies in the history of civilisation. The manipulator of paper and 

 ink, educated in the classical traditions of his time, has always 

 seemed, by reason of his superficial similarity to the political 

 administrator, a superior being to the empirical mechanic engaged 

 in the manual work of the arts and industries. The tradition is as old 

 as civilisation, yet for the advance of science it must be broken. Not 

 until the manuar worker and the audacious theorist are combined 

 in one person will the fullest development of scientific thought be 

 possible. 



All the greatest experimental scientists are evidence of this, but 

 by no means all of them have been conscious of it. It is therefore 

 of particular interest to read the words which the great Russian 

 physiologist, Pavlov, wrote to a meeting of Stakhanovist miners, 

 in 1935. 



^ Early Theories of Sexual Generation (Oxford, 1930). 



156 



