THE ART OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 



Not only is this to be deplored as a quite indefensible breach of 

 ethics and of the international spirit of science, but it rebounds 

 on the offenders, often to the detriment of themselves and their 

 country. The person failing to appreciate advances in science 

 made elsewhere may be left in the backwater he deserves, and 

 he shows himself a second-rate scientist. Among the great majority 

 of scientists there exists an international freemasonry that is one 

 of the main reasons for faith in the future of mankind, and it is 

 depressing to see this marred by petty selfishness on the part of a 

 few individuals. 



Different types of scientific minds 



Not all minds work alike. Attempts are often made to divide 

 scientists broadly into two types, but the classification is arbitrary 

 and probably the majority fall somewhere between the two 

 extremes and combine many of the characteristics of both. 



W. D. Bancroft,^" the American chemist, calls one type the 

 " guessers " (using the word guess in the sense of making a shrewd 

 judgment or hypothesis in advance of the facts) : these follow 

 mainly the deductive or Aristotehan methods. They get their 

 hypothesis first, or at any rate early in the investigation, and then 

 test it by experiment. The other type he calls the "accumulators" 

 because they accumulate data until the generalisation or hypo- 

 thesis is obvious; these follow the inductive or Baconian method. 

 However, the terms inductive and deductive, and Aristotelian 

 and Baconian can be confusing and have sometimes been misused. 

 Henri Poincare^^ and Jacques Hadamard^" classify mathemati- 

 cians as either "intuitive" or "logical" according to whether 

 they work largely by intuitions or by gradual systematic steps. 

 This basis of classification seems to agree with Bancroft's. I will 

 use the terminology "speculative" and "systematic" as this seems 

 the simplest way of indicating the principal difference between 

 the two types. 



Charles Nicolle®^ distinguished (a) the inventive genius who 

 cannot be a storehouse for knowledge and who is not necessarily 

 highly intelligent in the usual sense, and {b) the scientist with a 

 fine intelligence who classifies, reasons and deduces but is, 

 according to NicoUe, incapable of creative originality or making 



148 



