152 EMPIRICAL TOOLS AND EMPIRICISM 



tional effects, the creation of the modern (Newtonian) concept of in- 

 ertia might not have been so long deferred. Today such laboratory 

 experiments help even the novice to a firm grip on the concept which, 

 without the aid of experiment, was not fully grasped even by Galileo. 

 Of course the creation of this concept long antedated the laboratory 

 production of any approximation to inertial motion. But sometimes 

 simple laboratory experiences have clearly furnished powerful and 

 suggestive stimuli to concept-creation. Boyle's conception of a 

 "spring of the air"— a springiness later quantitatively expressed in 

 Boyle's law— is prompted by the physical sensations felt when operat- 

 ing a laboratory vacuum pump. Faraday's concept of "lines of force" 

 seems fairly to leap from the pattern observed in die distribution of 

 iron filings around a magnet and, more generally. Born remarks that: 



The revolutionary conception which distinguished electrodynamics 

 from classical mechanics is that of the field. One can see in Faraday's 

 work how it sprang from his observations of dielectric, paramagnetic 

 and diamagnetic properties; . . . 



Such clean-cut cases are presumably quite rare, but in another sense 

 experiment practically always renders our thinking easier and more 

 secure. 



We gain new conceptual power as we pass on from observation to 

 experiment but, Sambursky notes, we will essay that passage only 

 when we have come to accept the principle of dissolubility much 

 more fully than did the Greeks. 



The essential thing in an experiment is the isolation of a certain phe- 

 nomenon in its pure form, for the pui-pose of studying it systemati- 

 cally. Herein lies its artificiality. Natural phenomena occur as part of a 

 web of intei-woven and interconnected processes; their continuity in 

 time and space makes them appear to us a single complete unit. . . . 

 [Early experiments in mechanics by Galileo and Newton] were all 

 based on the notion that friction or the resistance of environment are 

 to be considered as incidental interferences with the study of the phe- 

 nomenon that illustrates a natural law or principle in its pure form. 

 This conception is as different as could be from Aristotle's. For him 

 the environment was actually an integral part of the phenomenon 

 itself, and he regarded the very idea of isolation as untenable. 



Pushing to the extreme that dissection of Nature envisioned by 

 Bacon, in the laboratory we leave behind us the complexity of the 



