ORGANIZED SCIENCE 315 



None but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I ex- 

 perienced when at last I captured it [a new species of butterfly]. My 

 heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I 

 felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension 

 of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was 

 the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very 

 inadequate cause. 



Wallace was in fact a very sound observer, as well as co-discoverer 

 of the modern theory of evolution. Yet we cannot but feel more 

 secure knowing that the butterfly that so profoundly stirred him— as 

 discovery always stirs the first discoverer— has also been seen and 

 similarly described by others not so stirred. 



Depersonalizing even fact, the diversity of individual commitment 

 becomes all the more important when theory is concerned. The ap- 

 proach route of the innovator always leaves some marks on a newly 

 created theory. It bears some imprint of his history, personal and 

 scientific, and of his own cosmology and metaphysics. But, as noted 

 in the last chapter, the theory will ultimately acquire its optimal 

 form as it is used, and reconstructed, by others who do not share all 

 its creator's preconceptions. Pri\'ate knowledge, not wholly distinct 

 from private inspiration, is thus winnowed, refined ( and, on occasion, 

 vulgarized ) into the public science of the textbook. Dingle's testimony 

 suggests the well-nigh incredible efiFectiveness of this process. 



In contemplating the history of science one cannot but marvel at the 

 sureness with which, by the instinct of the movement itself, the spuri- 

 ous has been eliminated and the genuine preserved. Kepler is roused 

 to the same rhapsody by his theory of the five regular solids as by the 

 laws that now bear his name; the first is forgotten, the second lie at 

 the basis of dynamical astronomy. Doppler, . . . Balmer. . . . Over 

 the terrain of rocks and quicksands science walks as sure-footed as a 

 mule— and as sapient. 



As in so many other cases, the "marvel of instinct" is the resultant of 

 natural selection: here, just that natural selection of theoretic ideas 

 described in the last chapter. 



PERTURBATIONS OF THE MECHANISM OF SELECTION 



In organic evolution the balance of stability and mutability is heavily 

 weighted toward stability— lest the species peter out in a succession 

 of stillbirths and monsters. As a whole the species "breeds true," but 



