/ CREATWE SCIENCE 331 



The scientist who has a fertile mind and is rich in ideas does not find it 

 so difficult to abandon one found to be unsatisfactory as does the 

 man who has few. It is the latter who is most in danger of wasting 

 time in hanging on to a notion after the facts warrant its discard. 

 Zinsser picturesquely refers to people clinging to sterile ideas as re- 

 sembling hens sitting on boiled eggs. 



Such functioning of intelligence to produce detachment is of major 

 importance, but does not fully solve our problem. Kepler and Ehrlich, 

 for example, succeeded by clinging to ideas that most of their con- 

 temporaries held "boiled eggs"— ideas we might similarly dismiss had 

 not Kepler and Ehrlich succeeded. Moreover, the very intelligence 

 that helps produce detachment may blind us to the need for detach- 

 ment. Thus Priestley's great ingenuity permits him to explain away all 

 objections to the phlogiston theory suggested by Lavoisier's work. 

 Here Priestley displays precisely that impairment of detachment by 

 intelligence sketched in his own comment that 



. . . we may take a maxim so strongly for granted, that the plainest 

 evidence of sense will not entirely change, and often hardly modify 

 our persuasions; and the more ingenious a man is, the more eftectually 

 he is entangled in his errors; his ingenuity only helping him to deceive 

 himself, by evading the force of truth. 



Detachment from commitment. The deepest source of detachment 

 is commitment. This is no paradox: we see it often realized. As par- 

 ents we address ourselves with passionate devotion to the rearing 

 of a child. But from this very devotion arises in time a curious de- 

 tachment. As responsible parents we recognize that some day our 

 child must make his way alone in a difficult world. He must learn to 

 do so, and we to let him learn. Because we love him, and are com- 

 mitted to faith in his potential competence, because we wish for 

 him every success, we force ourselves to watch with detachment the 

 often unsuccessful struggles by which alone he can at last achieve 

 self-sufficiency. 



Some parents are incapable of such detachment: they can never 

 give up directing and protecting "for the child's good." Some scien- 

 tists are similarly incapable of viewing their brainchildren with any 

 degree of detachment. The chemist Thomas Thomson oflfers an apt 

 example of this failing. He was convinced of the soundness of Prout's 

 hypothesis, and instituted experiments to show that the atomic 



