76 THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 



in such progress, we look to make small gains, in expectation of 

 greater. And we do gain where, hoping to win everything with one 

 dramatic insight, the Greeks won little. 



A THIRD QUALIFICATION OF THE PRINCIPLE 

 OF INTELLIGIBILITY 



The Greeks made observations, even experiments, but most often 

 experiments meagre in number and observations needlessly crude. 

 Profound stimulus, the principle of intelligibility can be also snare. 

 Overconfidence in the supreme power of human intelligence breeds a 

 dangerously arrogant rationalism. When diey already "know" the 

 answer men make crvide observations, if they make any. Even when 

 they do not already have an answer, rationalists will suppose they 

 require only a few observations to suggest the axiomatic propositions 

 that yield, by rigorous deduction, definitive theoretical answers to 

 all questions that can be asked. More than a millennium after Greek 

 science died, Descartes still considered diat a few experiments should 

 suffice to reveal the system of the universe— experiments being neces- 

 sary only to establish which of a few comparably self-evident alter- 

 nate propositions the Creator had decided to actualize. 



To conceive necessary only a few observations, or experiments, is 

 far from the worst conclusion rationalists can reach. For how may 

 one best seek the transcendent reality of diat Platonic world of pure 

 ideas, access to which demands all a contemplative reason can sup- 

 ply? How better than by turning one's back on the manifold distrac- 

 tions of the gross material world of the senses, where the pure ideas 

 can at most manifest themselves only as distorted projections in a 

 crude pattern of shadows? "They who wish to approach astronomy 

 correctly will," says Plato, "tLirn their backs upon the heavens." On 

 such a firm denial of the relevance of sensory experience can be 

 founded nothing approximating science as we know it. 



Modern science begins with a newly modest empirical emphasis 

 for which Francis Bacon is spokesman: 



There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discover- 

 ing truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most 

 general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes 

 for settled and immoveable, proceeds to judgement and to the dis- 

 covery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other 

 derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual 



