THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 67 



table faith in the capacities of human reason which is an essential 

 precondition for the emergence of science. 



SOME DIFFICULTIES 



Though science be here created, something more than the infusion of 

 the principle of intelligibility into common sense is required to make 

 of science a going concern. Impressive though it is, ancient science is 

 science still incomplete, imperfect, incapable of self-perpetuation. 



The choice of problems. Ancient science sufiFered simply as a pio- 

 neering enterprise, bound to take wrong turns in a still trackless wil- 

 derness. Over and over again it spent itself in attacks on what ive 

 recognize as trivial and/or intractable problems. Amply perceptive— 

 and, in our view, thoroughly wrong— was, for example, Aristotle's 

 feeling that mortal man is best advised to seek scientific understand- 

 ing of equally mortal plants and animals, and notably ill-equipped to 

 understand the apparently immutable rocks. Scientists can learn to 

 choose better problems only as science acquires a history. Thus, given 

 some two millennia of intermittent effort, continued failure to solve 

 certain of the problems broached by ancient science becomes testi- 

 mony that these problems might better be abandoned or, at the very 

 least, subjected to the kind of drastic reformulation the problem of 

 motion received at the hands of Galileo. 



The technology of the Renaissance world in which science was re- 

 born is relevant in this connection. Practical ballistics, for example, 

 raised in new form, and with new urgency, the classical problem of 

 motion. Retrospectively we see that many such problems derived 

 from technology were "good" problems: i.e., feasible of solution, and 

 with solutions rewarding in insight. Whatever the balance of the his- 

 toric and technologic factors, accession of a worthier set of problems 

 did put modern science on the roads to advances denied its ancient 

 progenitor. 



Heuristic tools. Ancient science picked the "wrong" problems and, 

 again typical of a pioneering venture, had inadequate tools with 

 which to treat them. Lacking experimental tools, it lacked even more 

 acutely intellectual tools. If Empedocles identifies the two major 

 forces of the physical world with Love and Hate, or if Aristotle 

 (among others) constructs a system in which teleology is the prime 

 motive power, who can find this surprising? What else could be ex- 

 pected of men who had a penetrating insight into human motivation 



