68 THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 



but no clear concept of a simple machine? Who will conceive a clock- 

 work universe before a clock is invented? 



Again a more fully developed technology helps to get things mov- 

 ing. Beyond providing an abundance of materials and de\aces, serv- 

 iceable to science as experimental tools, the mature technology of 

 the post-Renaissance period opened the way to new conceptual tools. 

 On a new wealth of industrial experience was founded a new and 

 (in the issue) powerful group of mechanistic concepts and analogies, 

 as alternati\'e to the limited and limiting group of animistic concepts 

 and analogies used in ancient science. Through history, once again, 

 earlier errors become recognizable, and so avoidable. Nothing sig- 

 nified a priori the inappropriateness of the alchemists' conception 

 that chemical change is most significantly characterized by the 

 changes in color accompanying it. More than a millennium of patient 

 but fruitless endeavor does convey some impression of such in- 

 appropriateness, and so encourages a search for new and better 

 concepts. 



Organization. The preservation of scientific history requires some 

 organization. For this will suffice organizations external to science 

 —Islamic library or Christian monastery. But history itself teaches us 

 how much more fundamental is the need for organization within 

 science. In the ancient world there existed no generally accepted 

 scientific tradition, practically no stable scientific institutions (the 

 Alexandrian Museum is a notable but late exception), and very few 

 persons working as scientists at any one time. DijEerent workers, 

 largely self-educated, disagreed about the fundamental tenets of the 

 science then cultivated by each in his own way. Men asked wholly 

 dijBFerent questions, and found for them wholly diflFerent answers. The 

 work of each had then little relevance and often, because of termino- 

 logical uncertainties, little meaning for the others. Ancient scientists 

 were by necessity, if not by inclination, thoroughgoing individualists. 

 Ancient science faltered, failed, because it lacked cohesiveness. 



From its rebirth modern science could draw on organizational pos- 

 sibilities unknown to the ancients. In stable academic institutions like 

 the University of Padua a tradition might be maintained in a library, 

 and interpreted by able teachers to students who, in their turn, would 

 become teachers of their successors. All the universities rested on one 

 common foundation in scholasticism. From Oxford and Cambridge 

 to Paris and Padua we find important diflFerences in detail, but al- 



