EMPIRICAL TOOLS AND EMPIRICISM 159 



production of important discoveries. Well-known facts contravene 

 that prediction. Consider further: important experimental discoveries 

 are made by but one of a hundred men equally trained in Method— 

 equally in command of empirical techniques and of the elementary 

 deductive operations which are all that experimental discovery or- 

 dinarily requires of logic. Moreover, the discoverer is often not the 

 most skillful experimentalist nor he most abundantly supplied with 

 experimental devices. Is he simply "lucky"? How very painful to re- 

 duce Method to chance! 



Du Noiiy finds the great discoverer distinguished from the pedes- 

 trian fact-collector in this : 



The man of science who cannot formulate a hypothesis is only an 

 accountant of phenomena. 



An hypothesis is an idea: beyond facts and the logical analysis 

 thereof, the creation of ideas demands imagination. And imaginative 

 capacity I suppose is precisely the faculty weaker in the old than in 

 the young, precisely that so sparsely and unevenly distributed even 

 among men amply trained in Method. Sometimes all too prolific of 

 speculations that harden disastrously into preconceived ideas, imag- 

 ination remains always the irreplaceable source of the hypotheses that 

 power the successes of empiricism. Bernard writes: 



The experimental method, then, cannot give new and fiTiitful ideas to 

 men who have none; it can serve only to guide the ideas of men who 

 have them, to direct their ideas and to develop them so as to get the 

 best possible results. The idea is a seed; the method is the earth 

 furnishing the conditions in which it may develop, flourish, and give 

 the best of fruit according to its nature. But as only what has been 

 sown in the ground will ever grow in it, so nothing will be developed 

 by the experimental method except the ideas submitted to it. The 

 method itself gives birth to nothing. . . . 



. . . Consequently, there can be ho method for making discov- 

 eries, because philosophic theories can no more give inventive spirit 

 and aptness of mind, to men who do not possess them, than knowl- 

 edge of the laws of acoustics or optics can give a correct ear or good 

 sight to men deprived of them by nature. 



Neither Bernard nor I would for a moment deny that some methodo- 

 logical precepts guide the practice of scientists: my present concern is 

 only to show the vacuousness of the textbook stereotype of Method. 



