40 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



security assert that Gauss knew more than Newton, and that 

 Newton knew more than Archimedes. The making of knowledge, 

 unlike that of beauty, is essentially a cumulative process. By the 

 way, this is the reason why the history of science should be the 

 leading thread in the history of civilization. Nothing that has been 

 done or invented gets lost. Every contribution, great or small, is 

 appreciated and classified. This cumulative process is so obvious 

 that even very young men may be better informed and more 

 learned than their most illustrious forerunners. As a matter of 

 fact, they are standing on the shoulders of their predecessors, 

 and so they have a chance to see further. If they are not very intel- 

 ligent they may be inclined to think that it is useless to study his- 

 tory, under the misapprehension that they already know from 

 the past all that is really worth knowing. In short, we are not sure 

 that men become more intelligent — that is, whether intelligence 

 increases — but we know positively that human experience and 

 knowledge grow every day. As I have said, one does not pay much 

 heed to mediocre artists. What they do has not much importance. 

 On the contrary, in the laboratories, libraries and museums where 

 science is slowly growing — like an ever-living tree — enormous 

 quantities of excellent work is done by thousands of men who are 

 not unusually intelligent, but who have been well trained, have 

 good methods and plenty of patience. 



Scientific work is the result of an international collaboration, 

 the organization of which is perfected every day. Thousands of 

 scientists devote their whole lives to this collective work — like 

 bees in a hive — but their hive is the world. This collaboration does 

 not take place simply in space, but also in time; the oldest astro- 

 nomical observations are still of some use. Perhaps this collective 

 nature of scientific work is one of the causes of the general indif- 

 ference concerning its history — indifference strongly contrasting 

 with the widespread curiosity about the history of literature and 

 the fine arts. Science aims at objectivity; the scientist exerts him- 

 self to decrease to a minimum his "personal equation." Works of 

 art, on the contrary, are extremely individual and passionate; so 



