78 THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 



with a respectful, attentive, and observant eye; that is to say, it led to 

 a habit of detailed and accurate observation, based on the postulate 

 that everything in nature, however minute and apparently accidental, 

 is permeated by rationality and therefore significant and valuable. 



\Miatever its source, a new attitude is already clearly working in 

 the founders of modern science. Consider Tycho Brahe. Dissatisfied 

 with the Copernican system, Tycho conceives that a definitive astro- 

 nomical system can be founded only on highly accurate observational 

 data. And he spends his life, as perhaps no man before him had spent 

 his, de^^eloping superior observational instruments and compiling an 

 enormous array of meticulous observations. So to spend one's life is 

 to see the world of experience as— far more than a mass of misleading 

 imperfection— the most essential foundation for the construction of 

 the conceptual world. 



Tycho was more than a little mad; but the same regard for the 

 details of experience rules also the very different madness of the 

 inheritor of Tycho's data. Johannes Kepler was a Pythagorean mystic 

 —a classic seeker after the harmony of the spheres— and yet not quite 

 of the classic mould. The labor of years finally permitted Kepler to 

 fit Tycho's observations of Mars to an orbit which w^as at no point 

 more than 8' of arc out of agreement with obser\'ation. This trivial 

 discrepancy— recognizable as a discrepancy only because of the enor- 

 mous improvements in observational techniques made by Tycho— 

 any mystic before Kepler would have dismissed w^ithout a second 

 thought. An ideal orbit coming this close must be sound; tlie "insig- 

 nificant" deviations indicate no more than inadequacies in the data 

 and/or the crudeness of the world to which the data refer. How dif- 

 ferent was Kepler's attitude! 



Divine Mercy has given us in Tycho an observer so faithful that he 

 could not possibly have made this error of eight minutes. We must 

 thank God and take advantage of this situation; we must discover 

 where our assumptions have gone wrong. 



Kepler came so to a step wholly unprecedented: rejecting orbits com- 

 pounded from circles, he sought a less "ideal" orbit that would bet- 

 ter fit the data. 



What was to become the new scientific attitude did not of course 

 spring full-blown with Tycho and Kepler. Only slowdy does the ap- 

 peal to brute experience come to be established as the commonplace 



