THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 79 



it is today. It could become established only as confidence in pure 

 rationalism was sapped. But so it was. To some others, as to Bacon, 

 the purely rational endea\^or of scholasticism seemed to stand for 

 stagnation, particularly in view of the notable advances made in 

 technology by aggressive empiricism. And if the new empirical em- 

 phasis seems antirational, then so much the worse for rationalism; if 

 empiricism promises progress, empiricism will be the choice of men 

 intoxicated by the thought of progress. 



A new conception of scientific method. Descartes, builder of a 

 classic "system," envisions science as primarily an enterprise of ra- 

 tionalism. Bacon envisions something closer to natural history than 

 to science when he puts primary emphasis on empiricism. Neither 

 fully grasped the form modern science has assumed. Today the bal- 

 ance of abstract theory and concrete fact makes them essentially co- 

 equal: both are indispensable, either may be in error, each controls the 

 other, and both are equally worthy of earnest attention and stren- 

 uous effort. Unlike his contemporaries Bacon and Descartes, Galileo 

 proposes no formal method. But Galileo helps to set the style of mod- 

 ern science by presenting in his work an illuminating expression of 

 what Hall remarks to be a method at once duly theoretical and duly 

 experimental. 



In the Dialogues and Discourses the foundations of scientific knowl- 

 edge are shown to reside in phenomena and axioms conjointly. By its 

 attention to actual phenomena Galilean science was made real and 

 experiential; by its use of the capacity of the mind to apprehend axio- 

 matic truths its logic was made analogous to that of mathematics. 



Galileo set off down an indistinct track traveled by a very few 

 among the ancients, but among tliem he whom Galileo most ad- 

 mired: Archimedes. With the aid of such concepts as the ideal lever, 

 Archimedes had shown how, by abstraction, one could pass from the 

 confusions of actual phenomena to "purified" phenomena in an ideal 

 universe of mathematical discourse. With the aid of such concepts as 

 "free fall," in an ideal realm without air resistance, Galileo sought to 

 follow Archimedes into that same mathematical universe. Though 

 then supported by a mathematics far more powerful than any known 

 to Archimedes, the abstraction to mathematizable systems ive take 

 wholly for granted still remained in the age of Galileo the extremely 

 difficult feat sketched by Butterfield: 



