40 Introduction 



The logical investigation of science has tempted many scholars'*^ and 

 the more optimistic, such as the physico-chemist, Wilhelm Ostwald 

 (1853-1932),^^ believed that it might facilitate new discoveries. It is 

 true that an experienced investigator may obtain stimulating "hints" 

 from the reading of ancient memoirs, but he might obtain similar "hints" 

 in many other ways. The most unexpected and bizarre occurrence may 

 excite a mind which is on the alert, sensitive and vigorous. The deeper 

 methods of discovery are not more patient of analysis than the methods 

 of artistic creation. Or to put it otherwise we may analyze them as 

 much as we please, the essential is bound to escape us. It does not fol- 

 low that the analysis is useless but simply that its usefulness is uncertain, 

 unpredictable and at best small. 



The historian of science is not satisfied with such a statement as "Bec- 

 QUEREL discovered the radioactivity of uranium in 1896." He wants to 

 know much more "How did that happen? Why did it happen in 1896 

 and not before? What caused or occasioned the discovery? Who was 

 Becquerel and why was he following that particular track? . . ." The 

 answers to such questions are not likely to reveal secrets of discovery; 

 their heuristic value is negligible; they reveal something less practical 

 and less pregnant but perhaps more interesting and more moving — the 

 human sources and contingencies of scientific development. The word 

 "reveal" is not excessive; if men of science are properly attuned to it this 

 kind of knowledge comes to them as a revelation of something they could 

 hardly have imagined. Indeed, as long as we study science in the trea- 

 tises ( and we must begin that way ) or in technical monographs we have 

 an entirely false view of it as a growing thing, in its genesis and becom- 

 ing. The treatise gives us the scientific knowledge we need and it gives 

 it in the simplest and most direct manner, without unnecessary detours 

 and digressions; it is unavoidably dogmatic and anti-historical; it has to 

 put in the first place not the oldest notions but the most fundamental, and 

 these are likely to be the latest or at least very recent. In fact the dis- 

 covery of a new fundamental notion invites the redaction of a new treatise 

 properly focussed upon that very notion. 



A complete body of science, or one that seems to be complete, we 

 might say, one that is sufficiently complete, as is oflFered to us in a well 

 written treatise, such a body is beautiful to look at, so beautiful that it 

 may excite the enthusiasm of a neophyte and determine his career. It 

 is very abstract, almost superhuman or inhuman, but it is in reality — im- 

 plicitly — very human. The neophyte, if he has imagination and sensi- 

 bility, feels that even as he would feel a living faith in spite of rite and 

 ceremonial. 



After all a discovery, even the most abstract, let us say, a mathemati- 

 cal or physical theorem, is abstract only in its final shape. Was it not 



*^E.g., Frederick Barry: The scientific habit of thought (372 p., New York 

 1927; Isis, 14, 265-68); various others are enumerated in Sarton: The study of the 

 history of science (56-57, Cambridge, Mass., 1936), and in chapter 7 in the bibh- 

 ography below. 



*«Isis (1, 27). 



