154 EMPIRICAL TOOLS AND EMPIRICISM 



of complex machinery— today Goethe's criticism can be put with 

 much greater force. Do scientists grope in the dark for a conception 

 of hght? Do they turn their backs on the "real world" to study a world 

 of purely synthetic phenomena artificially produced in a laboratory 

 purposively cut oflF from the light of day? Can it be that what they 

 study experimentally are not "natural" phenomena, but some artifi- 

 cially contrived experience they do not even accept as such, but "cor- 

 rect" as they deem necessary? 



Undeniably scientists sometimes confuse an artifact of their labora- 

 tory machinery with a manifestation of nature. Eddington suggests 

 a vivid illustration of this possibility: a hypothetical naturalist 

 draws a net with one-inch mesh through the oceans of the world, and 

 concludes from his catch that nowhere in the oceans are there crea- 

 tures less than one inch in length. That scientists have suffered analo- 

 gous, if more sophisticated, delusions is readily demonstrable. But 

 the crucially important thing is that such delusions ultimately be- 

 come recognizable as such. We learn, for example, to make "correc- 

 tions": a half -fish in die net need not connote a half -fish in the ocean, 

 but only a whole fish the other half of which has disappeared into 

 some voracious companion with which, in the net, the victim has been 

 brought in "unnatural" propinquity. Even more to the point, only a 

 hypothetically stupid naturalist could forever content himself with 

 superficial observation. The smallest modicum of experimentation 

 reveals that inside the smaller fish in the net there are still smaller 

 fish. Unpacking the Chinese box of successively smaller organisms, 

 we would then ultimately obtain, from the catch of the one-inch net, a 

 quite substantial knowledge of the microflora and fauna of the ocean. 



Our experimental tools do not of themselves manufacture ex- 

 perience. The otherwise unattainable experience they make acces- 

 sible to us must derive ultimately from nature. Consider, as an ex- 

 ample, how we seek clues to life in the ashes of death. To discover 

 what makes a plant thrive, we pluck it from the field, carry it to the lab- 

 oratory, kill it, incinerate it, and analyze the ashes to find an answer. 

 How absurd. But such studies, made by de Saussure and others, did 

 indicate the chemical elements that figure in the composition of 

 plants. With this knowledge we return from the laboratory to the 

 fields, bringing with us artificial fertilizers that work a notable in- 

 crease in agricultural productivity. The "unnatural" endeavors of the 

 laboratory have then taught us something about nature. Surely we 



