ORGANIZED SCIENCE 313 



purely routine consolidation of one great success may accumulate 

 the minor inconsistencies and critical commentaries that open the 

 way to the next. 



Complementarity of skills. Brahe, virtuoso observer, collects the 

 data used by the virtuoso calculator, Kepler. The imaginative experi- 

 ments of Faraday fire the theoretical imagination of Maxwell. Ob- 

 serve also the English school of empiricists thinking in terms of crude 

 models (deriving perhaps from Bacon and represented by, say, 

 Young), and the French school of theoretical formalists (deriving 

 perhaps from Descartes and represented, say, by Fresnel ) : the weak- 

 nesses of each are cancelled by the strengths of the partner. The 

 otherwise impossible may also be brought about by the joining of 

 the skills of men working in diflFerent fields. With limited skill 

 in chemistry, Fleming was unable to isolate penicillin or otherwise 

 to exploit his discovery. That isolation and exploitation were the 

 achievement of the quite heterogeneous skills pooled in the collabo- 

 rative endeavor of a large group at Oxford. 



Complementarity of temperaments. Only rarely do we find scien- 

 tists who— like Galileo, Liebig, and Pasteur— are temperamentally 

 equipped for success both as scholars and as controversialists. ( How 

 richly endowed was Leonardo and, in his loneliness, for how little 

 did his work in science count! ) But, through organized science, Dal- 

 ton finds in Thomson a champion of the atomic theory; Darwin finds 

 in Huxley a superb propagandist for the theory of evolution by natu- 

 ral selection. And the power that grows from the diversity of scien- 

 tific temperament reaches far beyond this. Thus Berzelius, impatient 

 to penetrate to the very heart of chemistry, correctly identifies its 

 fundamental problem with characterization of the linkage that holds 

 atoms in molecules. But in the second quarter of the 19th century 

 this was a refractory problem with which Berzelius wrestled in vain. 

 At that time chemical knowledge was most effectively advanced by 

 men who, prepared blandly to ignore the ultimate problem, content- 

 edly pursued with immense success non-ultimate inquiries into the 

 number and arrangement of atoms in molecules. 



Science has urgent need for both the kinds of seeing of which 

 Koestler writes : 



Science emerges in the shape of Janus, the double-faced god, guard- 

 ian of doors and gates: the face in front alert and observant, while the 

 other, dreamy and glassy-eyed, stares in the opposite direction. 



