Ancient and Mediaeval Science 39 



Leaving out of account calamities and prejudices, how could one 

 expect the path between one discovery and the following to be the 

 shortest one? How could one determine the shortest distance from A 

 to B as long as B is unknown (Fig. 3)? What happens, of course, is 

 that men of science having reached the point A are wondering what 

 to do next; they feel their way around A and after more or less beating 

 about the bush, after many circumvolutions, hesitations, retrogradations, 

 one of them may finally discover B. When B has been sufficiently recon- 

 noitred and its coordinates are known but not before, it is easy to de- 

 termine the shortest distance to it. After that the shortest distance from 

 A to B will be the way from A to B and investigators will be carried as 

 rapidly as possible to this new outpost and be prepared to continue their 

 exploration further on. There are thus always at least two roads from 

 A to B, the long "historical" one which leads to the discovery of B, and 

 the "dogmatic" one which leads from A to B in the simplest and quick- 

 est manner. Any discovery is a new outpost and a new starting point; 

 nobody can tell what may still be discovered beyond it; it may be little 

 or nothing or else a new world may be hidden behind it. This is espe- 



FIGURE3 



cially tangible when the discovery is a new instrument, multiplying the 

 sensitiveness of our senses or perhaps creating new ones, but it is equally 

 true when it is simply an idea, for a scientific idea is like a scientific in- 

 strument, a new means of exploration. 



One might claim that Christopher Columbus did not discover Amer- 

 ica because he never thought of a new world but remained convinced 

 until the end of his life that he had simply found a westward road to the 

 Far East. Our language perpetuates that illusion of his, for we still call 

 the aboriginal Americans "Indians" and the Islands off the western Amer- 

 ican coast "West Indies." To me that claim seems a bit pedantic, and 

 if applied to Columbus one might apply it just as well to many other 

 discoverers, who could not possibly know their Americas. They dis- 

 covered some islands off the coast but as they were not prophets, they 

 could not possibly guess where the mainland lay or what it really was. 

 In a strict sense they could discover only what they saw, they could not 

 discover the things as yet unseen to which they had opened a path; they 

 were the masters of to-day, not of to-morrow. If Columbus did not dis- 

 cover America, then Faraday is not the father of electrotechnics nor 

 Galois, the father of the theory of groups. Should we credit a man with 

 the whole of his posterity or only with his immediate children? 



