CREATIVE SCIENCE 323 



Keynes in discoursing on what is required of the competent econ- 

 omist. 



He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch 

 abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the 

 present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. . . . He 

 must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof 

 and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a 

 politician. 



Order and chance are inseparables— and all the more obviously so 

 in modern science, where many elements of macroscopic order are 

 conceived resultant from microcosmic chance. In scientific history, 

 too, long-term order incorporates, and is in part product of, "acci- 

 dental discoveries" rendered meaningful by the context of order in 

 which they occur. Logic and imagination form, in science, a second 

 pair of inseparables. In the "inductive" production of theoretic pos- 

 tulates, the severely disciplined imagination of the scientist rarely 

 if ever functions in complete disregard of logical considerations. Con- 

 versely, even deductive logic requires, as we saw, a "notion of appre- 

 ciation" presumably demanding some function of the imagination; 

 and a great deal of imagination may be required to draw a distinctly 

 novel theoretic deduction. 



When modern science was just dawning, the theorist Blaise Pascal 

 wrote: 



Ours is an incapacity for proof supreme over all dogmatism. 

 Ours is an idea of truth triumphant over all scepticism. 



In the 19th century Claude Bernard exhorted his fellow empiricists 

 to place themselves 



... in an intellectual attitude which seems paradoxical but which, 

 in my opinion, expresses the true spirit of an investigator. We must 

 have robust faith and not believe. 



How maintain such ambivalent mixtures of faith and scepticism? 

 That question arises only from the misconception that makes an- 

 titheses of inseparable polarities. Faith and scepticism are no more 

 than opposite faces of the same coin. Nowhere outside the asylum is 

 there a wholly pure faith or a wholly pure scepticism. Scepticism 

 of one authority is the measure of faith in another, and conversely. 

 Consider Copernicus. He is sceptical of the everywhere-accepted 



