342 CREATIVE SCIENCE 



Rejecting the finality of the accepted set of cues, the maker of pe- 

 ripheral discoveries is capable of giving his attention even to those 

 over-the-horizon clues to something that, were current knowledge 

 supposed final, simply cannot exist. His attention is more mobile be- 

 cause he forever expects the unexpected. Hooke suggests that 



. . . the believing strange things possible may perhaps be an occa- 

 sion of taking notice of such things as another would pass by without 

 regard, . . 



Bernard praised always a "philosophic doubt," but he never 

 doubted certain fundamental credos of the peripheral discoverer. 



If we find disconcerting or even contradictory results in perfoiTning 

 an experiment, we must never acknowledge exceptions or contradic- 

 tions as real. That would be unscientific. We must simply and neces- 

 sarily decide that conditions in the phenomena are diff^erent, whether 

 or not we can explain them at the time. 



. . . what we now call an exception is a phenomenon, one or more 

 of whose conditions are unknown; . . . 



Nothing is accidental, and what seems to us accident is only an un- 

 known fact whose explanation may furnish the occasion for a more or 

 less important discovery. 



So believing, the man made for discovery becomes able to see pe- 

 ripheral manifestations others miss— and all the more discerningly 

 when he is endowed with wit enough to conceive the something 

 those manifestations might signify. The twitching of a frog during 

 dissection is not so much a puzzling as an absurd triviality of which 

 Swammerdam made nothing. But Galvani conceived the twitching a 

 phenomenon, associated with the operation nearby of an electro- 

 static generator. Just so the regression of bacterial colonies first be- 

 came a phenomenon when observed by Fleming. His mind prepared 

 by long labor to contrive the ideal antiseptic he thought possible, 

 Fleming conceived that the mold secretes a bacteriocidal agent. The 

 accidental discovery is consummated in the conceptual invention of 

 the idea of a phenomenon— and this, no work of empiricism or logic, 

 is the fruit of a creative imagination of which Bernard says most of 

 what can be said: 



A propos of a given obsei-vation, no rules can be given for bringing 

 to birth in the brain a correct and fertile idea that mav be a sort of in- 



