ORGANIZED SCIENCE 309 



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... I will indulge my sacred fury; I will taunt mankind with the 

 frank confession that I have stolen the golden vases of the Egyptians, 

 in order to build of them a tabernacle to my God, far indeed from the 

 bounds of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are angry, 

 I shall bear it; the die is cast, the book is written, whether to be read 

 now or by posterity I care not; it may wait a hundred years for its 

 reader, if God himself has waited six thousand years for a man to 

 contemplate his work. 



THE CO-ORDINATION OF EFFORT 



The indicated normative functions are all alike in one crucially im- 

 portant respect: they leave the individual free to choose his own line 

 of research. The protective function is in part designed to guard just 

 this freedom. The appreciative function merely encourages the in- 

 dividual to the best eflFort of which he is capable. The selective func- 

 tion has, to be sure, some eflFect prior to the initiation of research: 

 the individual's position, facilities and funds perforce affect the work 

 he can undertake. But, in science, position, funds, and facilities de- 

 pend less on the individual's plans for future research than on his 

 past accomplishments. Hence even here the normative action turns 

 on what has been done, not on what is projected. The individual's 

 freedom in the initiation of research may seem to negate all hope for 

 a co-ordination of scientific effort. But, operating within the frame- 

 work of the normative influences we have examined, this laissez- 

 faire system seems in fact to produce a very well co-ordinated 

 endeavor. 



Conserve scientific effort by outlawing "irresponsible speculation"? 

 But how, save through somebody's "irresponsibility," can everybody's 

 "indubitability" be shown insufficient? The indifference, and even 

 hostility, with which important results of speculative inquiry have 

 been received, by the most illustrious scientists, leaves no ground for 

 the illusion that, given authority, they would have permitted the 

 initiation of any such inquiry. Judged by their issue, most numero- 

 logical investigations are irresponsible and worthless. In retrospect 

 we see extraordinary value in some such investigations, e.g., those 

 of Kepler and Balmer. How to strike a nice balance between the 

 certainty of loss and the possibility of gain? Modern science con- 

 trives to do so automatically— hy the simple expedient of denying 



