180 INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 



J. M. Montmasson * suggests that the act of discovery may 

 be considered from the point of view of three types of factor 

 which enter into it. The first is the phenomenon of feeling. 

 All discovery is motivated by desire. This may be a desire 

 for knowledge, for fame or money, or for esthetic values 

 such as order and symmetry. And all discovery culminates 

 in intense joy. 'This took the form of a mystical exaltation 

 in the case of Keplar, Gutenberg, and Descartes; of an 

 ecstasy produced by the unveiling of a new order in the case 

 of Newton, Pasteur, and Ampere. In all these cases it was 

 an enthusiasm evoked by an original vision of rational 

 beauty." 2 The second factor is the conscious intellectual 

 phenomena. Here Montmasson discloses three stages — 

 conscious preparation, sudden intuition, and conscious 

 verification — corresponding roughly to the last three stages 

 of Wallas. The first of these stages exhibits a discontinuity 

 between the work of research and the appearance of the new 

 idea. In the second state there is often no element of sur- 

 prise or suddenness; physics, biology, and technology are 

 characterized by the slow progressive revelation of ideas 

 through analogies, while mathematics and the moral sci- 

 ences exhibit more often the sudden revelation. In the third 

 stage the mind enters into a new period of conscious activity. 

 ' 'The mind, delighted to have glimpsed the end, cannot be 

 satisfied until it has illuminated the road which it appears to 

 have passed over like a bird in flight. This is the phase of 

 experimental verification, of the justification which is 

 necessary for the hypothesis." 3 The final factor is the 

 unconscious element — the idea in its potential or hidden 

 state prior to its entrance into consciousness. One can- 

 not say that such an idea is a mere nothing. "It is a 

 being which already exists, although incomplete; it 

 awaits its perfection, its complements, its act." 4 The 

 birth of an idea requires certain psychical antecedents; 

 these are the potentiality of the resulting idea in the same 



1 Invention and the Unconscious (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932). 



2 Ibid., p. 189. 3 Ibid., p. 117. * Ibid., p. 194. 



