532 Remarks on Research [April-July 



essential characteristic of scientific progress. Science does not aim 

 at ultimate explanations ; and could we find them, science would be 

 emptied of its interest to the investigator. (Wilson: Science, 

 1913, xxxvii, p. 826.) 



What is scholarship ? The answer is : The discovering, the or- 

 ganizing and the explaining of new facts. Only the uninformed 

 and unscholarly are in the habit of designating the mere diffusion 

 of knowledge as scholarship. The man who merely reads and 

 speaks what he reads is no scholar, nor is the man a scholar who 

 merely requires others to study what is already known. Any 

 nation that believes only in the diffusion of knowledge is on the 

 road to decay. (Brown : Science, 1914, xxxix, p. 587.) 



The experiment, however, is by no means a modern invention. 

 As early as the thirteenth Century Roger Bacon was proclaiming to 

 unsympathetic scholars its soundness as an instrument for the dis- 

 covery of truth. . . . Although Roger Bacon's utterances in favor of 

 experimental science were made over three centuries before the days 

 of his illustrious fellow countryman, Francis Bacon, and at a time 

 when such utterances were dangerous, they were by no means the 

 earliest expression of the experiment. Some sixteen centuries be- 

 fore Roger Bacon's time, Aristotle wrote in simple language an 

 account of what is probably the earliest recorded hiological experi- 

 ment. It deals with the physiology of the senses and reads as 

 follows : By crossing the fingers a single object under them ap- 

 pears to be two and yet we do not say there are two; for sight iä 

 more decisive than touch. If, however, touch were our only sense, 

 our judgment would declare that the single object is two. 



But if these are the realities of the experimental method, what 

 are its vanities? I think the chief pitfall that besets the experi- 

 mentalist is apparatus. What a stränge allurement this feature 

 of the Situation has for us! . . . But if apparatus is our pitfall, we 

 must remember that many of the pioneers in the new movement have 



