THE ART OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION 



gone beyond the facts, I reply : ' it is true that I have freely put 

 myself among ideas which cannot be rigorously proved. That is 

 my way of looking at things.' " 



" Only theory can bring forth and develop the spirit of inven- 

 tion." 



W. Ostwald classifies scientists slightly differently.'*^ He distin- 

 guishes the classicist whose main characteristic is to bring to 

 perfection every discovery and is systematic, and the romanticist 

 who has a multitude of ideas but has a certain amount of super- 

 ficiality in dealing with them and seldom works them out com- 

 pletely. Ostwald says the classicist is a bad teacher and cannot 

 do anything in front of others, while the romanticist gives away 

 his ideas freely and has an enormous influence on his students. 

 He may produce some outstanding students but sometimes spoils 

 their originality. On the other hand, as Hadamard points out, 

 highly intuitive minds may be very obscure. Kenneth Mees 

 considers that practical scientific discovery and technology 

 embrace three different methods of working : {a) theoretical 

 synthesis, (b) observation and experiment, (c) invention. It 

 is rare, he says, for one man to excel in more than one 

 of these activities, for each requires a different type of mind.^^ 



The systematic type of scientist is probably more suited to 

 developmental research and the speculative type to exploratory 

 research; the former to team work and the latter either to 

 individual work or as leader in a team. Dr. E. L. Taylor describes 

 the organisation of a large commercial research organisation 

 which employed men of the speculative type to play about with 

 their ideas, but as soon as they hit on something that promised 

 to be of value it was taken out of their hands entirely and given 

 to a systematic worker to test and develop fully. ^° 



The speculative and systematic types, however, represent 

 extremes and probably most scientists combine some of the 

 characteristics of both. The student may find that he has natural 

 tendencies toward one type or the other. Bancroft considers that 

 often one type cannot be converted to the other. It is probably 

 best for each to follow his natural tendencies and one wonders 

 if many scientists have not been unduly influenced by the teacher 

 under whose influence they happened to fall. The important 

 thing is for us not to expect everyone to think the same way as 



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