INTRODUCTORY 31 



account of the exercise it gives to the imaginative faculties 

 and the gratification it provides for the aesthetic judgment. 

 The exact meaning of the terms " scientific fact " and 

 " scientific law " will be considered in later chapters, but 

 for the present let us suppose an elaborate classification 

 of such facts has been made, and their relationships and 

 sequences carefully traced. What is the next stage in 

 the process of scientific investigation ? Undoubtedly it is 

 the use of the imagination. The discovery of some 

 single statement, some brief fornmla from which the 

 whole group of facts is seen to flow, is the work, not of 

 the mere cataloguer, but of the man endowed with creative 

 imagination. The single statement, the brief formula, 

 the few words of which replace in our minds a wide 

 range of relationships between isolated phenomena, is 

 what we term a scientific law. Such a law, relieving our 

 memory from the burden of individual sequences, enables 

 us, with the minimum of intellectual fatigue, to grasp a 

 vast complexity of natural or social phenomena. The 

 discovery of law is therefore the peculiar function of the 

 creative imagination. But this imagination has to be a 

 disciplined one. It has in the first place to appreciate the 

 whole range of facts, which require to be resumed in a 

 single statement ; and then when the law is reached — 

 often by what seems solely the inspired imagination of 

 genius — it must be tested and criticised by its discoverer 

 in every conceivable way, till he is certain that the 

 imagination has not played him false, and that his law 

 is in real agreement with the whole group of phenomena 

 which it resumes. Herein lies the key-note to the 

 scientific use of the imagination. Hundreds of men have 

 allowed their imagination to solve the universe, but the 

 men who have contributed to our real understanding of 

 natural phenomena have been those who were unstinting 

 in their application of criticism to the product of their 

 imaginations. It is such criticism which is the essence 

 of the scientific use of the imagination, which is, indeed, 

 the very life-blood of science.-^ 



^ La critique est la vie de la sciences, says Victor Cousin. 



