Ancient and Mediaeval Science 41 



due to the observations and meditations of a living individual, a being as 

 limited and imperfect as ourselves? However abstract from the outside, 

 it is very concrete from the inside. 



The hard-boiled physicist may retort that he is interested only in the 

 results, the technical results, and not at all in the men who obtained 

 them, nor in the contingencies of discovery. His historical curiosity, if 

 he has any, is restricted to the sequences of technical points, as were 

 enumerated by Hoppe,^*^ or for that matter by anyone who is charged 

 to relate past events in the briefest time and space; the inventors are 

 named, barely named, and possibly a few dates are hooked to the names; 

 that is all. The names might almost be replaced by mute symbols, for 

 without further explanation they are meaningless. One reads, "In 1828 

 NicoL invented a prism enabling one to obtain a single pencil of white 

 polarized light." Who was Nicol? Nicol is the man who invented the 

 Nicol prism. Not very helpful. Such historical outlines are almost as 

 abstract as the ideas which they list, but this is due only to their incom- 

 pleteness. If one empties all the humanities from a story, that story is 

 pretty inhuman, but it is not a real story, only the ghost of one. 



The humanist on the contrary is not satisfied unless he be able not 

 only to set forth the discoveries in their chronological sequence, but also 

 to explain the long travail and maybe the sufferings which led to each 

 of them, the mistakes which were made, the false tracks which were fol- 

 lowed, the misunderstandings, the quarrels, the victories and the failures; 

 he rejoices in the gradual unveiling of all the contingencies and hazards 

 which constitute the warp and woof of living science. He loves the ab- 

 stractions of science, the final or latest results, to be sure, but he loves 

 also the human elements mixed with them. He loves science, but he 

 loves men more and men of science, best. He is full of gratitude and 

 wonder, but his wonder occurs as it were on three different levels, first, 

 the wonders of nature, second, the wonders of science, and third, best 

 of all, the wonders of scientific discovery — the wonder that such wonders 

 have been discovered by men, men like ourselves.*^^ Therefore, he often 

 takes more interest in the process of discovery or in the discoverer than 

 in the thing discovered. The latter in many cases, whether it be the 

 temperature of a star or the behavior of a louse's louse, leaves him cold. 

 Looked at from that angle, the history of science is a part and perhaps 

 the best part, of the divine comedy, or the human comedy, in which we 

 all participate. We love the truth in itself and for itself. Yet we are 

 eager to know how we reached whatever we reached of it, and thus be 

 able to direct our gratitude to the seekers, the rebels, the fighters, all 

 those who helped us to obtain our main treasures. 



The account of these spiritual conquests and of our gradual liberation 

 from errors, doubts, superstitions and fears, fills the best pages in the 



"* Edmund Hoppe (1854-1928): Geschichte der Physik (Braunschweig 1926; 

 Isis, 9, 571; 13, 45-50). 



" For example, the nebulae themselves are wonderful; stellar astronomy is more 

 wonderful, but most wonderful of all is the fact that that astronomy has been dis- 

 covered and described by infinitesimal creatures. 



