CREATIVE SCIENCE 349 



conditions necessary for revolution. But the not uncommon phe- 

 nomenon of simultaneous discovery alerts us to the importance of 

 this build-up. The most subtle of the preparatory developments is 

 probably a very gradual refashioning of scientific language, in forms 

 that facilitate conceptual reconstruction. Thus Polanyi maintains 

 that: 



. . . every use of language to describe experience in a changing 

 world applies language to a somewhat unprecedented instance of its 

 subject matter, and thus somewhat modifies both the meaning of 

 language and the structure of our conceptual framework. . . . the 

 reiteration of linguistic utterances with reference to identifiable occa- 

 sions carries with it a change of their meaning, . . . 



Far beyond this, Tyndall remarks that the potential innovator will 

 also find, already afloat in the intellectual atmosphere of his time, 

 more or less vague intimations of the ideas that will determine the 

 form of the new conceptual pattern. 



Before any great scientific principle receives distinct enunciation by 

 individuals, it dwells more or less clearly in the general scientific 

 mind. The intellectual plateau is already high, and our discoverers are 

 those who, like peaks above the plateau, rise a little above the general 

 level of thought at the time. 



The man. Of many reared in the same culture, comparably edu- 

 cated, equally youthful, with much the same fields of view, living in 

 the same scientific situation— how very few rise at all above the 

 plateau. The active variables are not yet exhausted, nor likely soon to 

 be so. The flight of a human's thought is often inertial: small details 

 of individual history may thus ultimately produce large effects. 

 Dalton and Ingen-Housz offer us examples of men who, having once 

 adopted positions on apparently minor scientific points, found in- 

 escapable the attitudes they later assumed toward much larger 

 scientific issues. Similarly small details of extra-scienti^c history are, 

 presumably, no less important in determining the whole "set" of in- 

 dividual attention and endeavor, both in and out of science. As an 

 example, consider the vivid juxtaposition of a Luther and a Coperni- 

 cus that Dingle presents. 



At the junction of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries two Church- 

 men from northern Europe went to Italy. The disgust aroused in one 



