314 ORGANIZED SCIEXCE 



The critical scepticism of Mach and Poincare thus prepares the way 

 for an Einstein led on by an almost childlike vision of a harmonious 

 uni\'erse, Relati\^e to the alleged scientific method, Dingle remarks 

 that: 



. . . the method of arriving at the principle of least action was to 

 prove that God works in the most economical way, and the method 

 of finding a relation between the wave-lengths in the hydrogen spec- 

 trum, from which the whole of modern atomic theory has proceeded, 

 was to hand the figures to a numerical mystic innocent of physical 

 know^ledge, . . . 



The case of Maupertuis may perhaps be dismissed; he belonged to 

 the youth of science. But Balmer's work was done in the latter part 

 of the 19th century, when physicists were amply sophisticated— far 

 too sophisticated— to think to look for what Balmer found: a relation 

 that later became the focus of Bohr's first quantum theory of the atom. 



Complementarity (and cancellation?) of commitments. Advancing 

 toward truth held as a group consensus, science proceeds by reject- 

 ing error rendered easily recognizable as such by the diversity of 

 commitments within the group. There is no paradox. Consider that 

 the best grounds 1 can find for the rejection of error will lie in the 

 antecedent labors of those men most firmly committed to the truth 

 of what I would hold error. The fallibility of an opinion is made 

 manifest, and corrigible, through the failure of those who will surely 

 have left undone nothing that could possibly sustain the opinion. 

 Men long dedicated themseh^es to the construction of perpetual mo- 

 tion machines of the first kind, and long failed. Given this failure of 

 the most earnest eflforts, ice take as principle the conservation of 

 energy, which is then not improperly described as a "principle of 

 impotence." 



Operating within the immense context of scientific agreement, the 

 diversity of individual commitment powerfully promotes the attain- 

 ment of impersonal knowledge useful to all regardless of their com- 

 mitments. Our best assurance that we have made some approach to 

 the hypothetical "naked fact" is the concordant obser\/ations of men 

 who have examined that fact in diflFerent lights and from diflFerent 

 points of view. The final aseptic statement of the textbook of taxon- 

 omy is a far cry from the experience of the discoverer so vividly de- 

 scribed by A. R. Wallace. 



