THE ANATOMY OF SCIENCE 83 



which is no longer either philosophy or handicraft because it encom- 

 passes both; each of his manipulations is guided by thought, each of 

 his thoughts by experimental evidence. 



The Egyptian and the Greek inquiries come thus to complement and 

 strengthen each other, and from their crossing emerges a modern 

 science invested with true hybrid \'igor. 



The principle of corrigible fallibility. However we conceive sci- 

 ence, we cannot begin our work without some facts and some ideas 

 provisionally accepted as unchallengeable. But the ideas may be 

 quite wrong; the facts ill-observed or laden with "credulity" (see 

 p. 44). Obsessed by such fears we don't do science! From such ob- 

 session scientists are freed by their acceptance of what I call the 

 principle of corrigible fallibility. It is a principle of action. Beginning 

 with the best available facts and ideas, we proceed vigorously in the 

 faith that any errors in them will be revealed by the interaction of 

 facts and ideas— by the interaction of rational and empirical elements 

 in neither of which individually we have, or can have, absolute con- 

 fidence. We amend our hypotheses in the light of our experiments; 

 but we also reject (as "errors"), "correct," and explain away some of 

 our data when they conflict with "indubitable principles." In such 

 unquestioning acceptance of principles to which all experience is 

 made to conform {e.g., the conservation laws) science may seem at 

 one with divination, or magic. Yet science progresses as magic does 

 not, and not simply because science had the good fortune to hit on 

 the "right" principles at the outset. It did not! But it learned better 

 principles. 



Bacon envisioned a "gradual and unbroken ascent" to the most 

 powerful axioms, or first principles. The subsequent history of sci- 

 ence demonstrates, however, that even a gradual ascent is not un- 

 broken, that no principle remains forever beyond the challenge of 

 experience. It is then far from facetious to describe the history of 

 science as a tale of great and beautiful theories slain by ugly little 

 facts— or, in Bronowski's phrasing: 



Science is a great many things, . . . but in the end they all return to 

 this: science is the acceptance of what works and the rejection of 

 what does not. That needs more courage than we might think. 



It needs more courage than we have ever found when we have 

 faced our worldly problems. 



