CREATWE SCIENCE 347 



Use of the conceptual pattern of one field as model or analogue for 

 another is a third and still more important possibility open to the 

 fortunate possessor of multiple fields of view. Thus both Darwin and 

 Wallace, independently, derived from Malthus' sociologic concept, 

 of a struggle for survival, the mechanism of biological natural selec- 

 tion on which they founded the theory of evolution. In maturity, 

 McGeoch maintains, transfer is a primary factor in all learning. 



Where the subject "sees into" the fundamental relations of a problem 

 or has insight, transfer seems to be a major contributing condition. It 

 is, likewise, a basic factor in originality, the original and creative 

 person having, among other things, unusual sensitivity to the appli- 

 cability of the already known to new problem situations. 



Transference of a pattern imposes a particular organization on what 

 may earlier have been an inchoate mass of data. And, given the new 

 questions that will be suggested by the model or analogy, further in- 

 vestigation acquires a definiteness of direction earlier perhaps no- 

 tably absent. One may justifiably generalize to other sciences Du- 

 hem's comment that: 



The history of physics shows us that the search for analogies between 

 two distinct categories of phenomena has perhaps been the surest and 

 most fruitful method of all the procedures put in play in the con- 

 struction of physical theories. 



The situation. A merely negative sense of dissatisfaction with an 

 existing conceptual pattern can, in many ways, contribute positively 

 to the creation of a new pattern. For one who finds the older pattern 

 repugnant (as Copernicus found the Ptolemaic system), the fabric 

 of the phenomena and relations woven together in it is loosened, and 

 the contents become potentially available for reweaving in a new 

 pattern. Moreover, eflForts to "save" the older theory may produce a 

 suggestive clustering of difficulties and ad hoc postulates which be- 

 come, as we saw earlier, the focus of the effort to create a new theory. 

 If, for example, a "subtle fluid" {e.g., ether, caloric, neutrino) has 

 been made to function as solvent for anomalies, evaporation over the 

 fires of scepticism may lead to recovery of the anomalies in partially 

 crystalline form— already partly restructured in a new pattern. Even 

 when this situation does not obtain, innovation is encouraged by the 

 continued failure of (or continued complications enforced by) the 

 efforts to "save" the older theory. Thus convinced that there is no 



