344 CREATIVE SCIENCE 



The child's free-ranging imagination is of no use to science. Know- 

 ing too Httle and accepting too much, he fails to discriminate be- 

 tween imaginative constructions that apply to things as they are, or 

 might be, from other constructions that don't. The educated man has 

 acquired this vital power of critical appraisal, but often he pays for it 

 an inordinately heavy price. Certain thought patterns (if formed at 

 all) may never rise to his consciousness, because they are at once 

 swept aside by an act of appraisal that overlaps the act of imagina- 

 tive creation. There is a selective inhibition of patterns "not worth 

 thinking about"— and, alas, some of the suppressed patterns may 

 have potential value. Too severely chastened by education, "respon- 

 sible" imagination may yield only stereotypes. Indeed a difficult feat, 

 apparently rarely accomplished, is the acquisition of knowledge and 

 discipline without loss of essentially all of the child's facile capacity 

 for seeing the familiar in unfamiliar ways. "Genius is youth recap- 

 tured," says Baudelaire in one context; and in quite another Cohen 

 suggests that: 



The essence of scientific genius (whether in the natural or the social 

 sciences) is just this ability to discover points of view from which new 

 arrangements of facts are visible. . . 



Youth. There is considerable evidence for belief that scientists 

 generally do their most important work by the time they are 35. The 

 recent record is indeed striking, but comparatively young men seem 

 responsible for most major theoretical innovations in all sciences in 

 all times. This would not unreasonably be the case. Imagination is 

 shackled by the habits of a lifetime spent in use of some particular 

 conceptual pattern(s). Beveridge remarks the occurrence of an 

 analogous situation on a much shorter time scale. 



Psychologists have observed that once we have made an error, as for 

 example in adding up a column of figures, we have a tendency to re- 

 peat it again and again. . . . The same thing happens when we pon- 

 der over a problem; each time our thoughts take a certain course, the 

 more likely is that course to be followed the next time. Associations 

 form between the ideas in the chain of thoughts and become firmer 

 each time they are used, until finally the connections are so well es- 

 tablished that the chain is very difficult to break. Thinking becomes 

 conditioned just as conditioned reflexes are formed. We may have 

 enough data to arrive at a solution to the problem, but, once we have 



