REASON 



Later the French philosopher Rene Descartes made people realise 

 that reason can land us in endless fallacies. His golden rule was : 



" Give unqualified assent to no propositions but those the 

 truth of which is so clear and distinct that they cannot be 

 doubted." 



Every child, indeed one might even say, every young verte- 

 brate, discovers gravity; and yet modern science with all its 

 knowledge cannot yet satisfactorily " explain " it. Not only are 

 reason and logic therefore insufficient to provide a means of 

 discovering gravity without empirical knowledge of it, but all 

 the reason and logic apphed in classical times did not even 

 enable inteUigent men to deduce correctly the elementary facts 

 concerning it. 



F. C. S. Schiller, a modem philosopher, has made some illum- 

 inating comments on the use of logic in science and I shall quote 

 from him at length : 



" Among the obstacles to scientific progress a high place must 

 certainly be assigned to the analysis of scientific procedure which 

 logic has provided. ... It has not tried to describe the methods 

 by which the sciences have actually advanced, and to extract . . . 

 rules which might be used to regulate scientific progress, but has 

 freely re-arranged the actual procedure in accordance with its 

 prejudices, for the order of discovery there has been substituted 

 an order of proof."®" 



Credence of the logician's view has been encouraged by the 

 method generally adopted in the writing of scientific papers. 

 The logical presentation of results which is usually followed is 

 hardly ever a chronological or full account of how the investi- 

 gation was actually carried out, for such would often be dull and 

 difficult to follow and, for ordinary purposes, wasteful of space. 

 In his book on the writing of scientific papers, Allbutt specifically 

 advocates that the course of the research should not be followed 

 but that a deductive presentation should be adopted. 



To quote again from Schiller, who takes an extreme view : 



" It is not too much to say that the more deference men of 

 science have paid to logic, the worse it has been for the scientific 

 value of their reasoning. . . . Fortunately for the world, however, 

 the great men of science have usually been kept in salutary 

 ignorance of the logical tradition." ®° 



83 



