SCIENCE, ART, AND EDUCATION — GIBSON 171 



on individual training, skill, ingenuity, or experience. Imaginative 

 ability to perceive, weigh, and integrate intuitively the many ele- 

 ments of a complex phenomenon and to express the results of this 

 intuition in tangible form or communicable pattern is an essential 

 trait of the successful artist. By these attributes, artists through 

 the centuries have been able to reduce to readily apprehended or 

 useful forms complexes of ideas they did not understand explicitly, 

 by rules or practices learned by empirical cut-and-try methods. Thus, 

 the useful arts and industries were founded on complex rules and 

 procedures of purely local or specific application which were often 

 the result of years of patient and groping search. Frequently these 

 riiles and procedures were so specific in their application that a slight 

 departure from standard practice resulted in failure. It is not sur- 

 prising, therefore, that trade secrets were one of the most highly 

 valued possessions of each art or craft. Teamwork was not a char- 

 acteristic of the arts. Departures from standard practice were dis- 

 couraged, and the extension of an art or the creation of a new one 

 depended on chance or on individual intuition. 



In the intensely competitive atmosphere of the modern world, 

 the traditional methods of the arts with their reliance on the expert 

 and his rules have proved to be inadequate and uncertain. Industries 

 have turned more and more to science for assistance in advancing 

 tlie arts on which they depend. 



NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 



"Science," says C. N. Hinshelwood, "is not the mere collection of 

 facts, which are infinitely numerous and mostly uninteresting, but 

 the attempt of the human mind to order these facts into satisfying 

 patterns . . . The imposition of design on nature is in fact an act of 

 artistic creation on the part of the man of science, though it is subject 

 to a discipline more exacting than of poetry or painting." ^ I sub- 

 scribe without reservation to this statement, which places as the 

 principal objectives of science the study of human experience, the 

 establishment of the validity of this experience, and the fitting of 

 valid experiences into satisfying patterns or structures, which can 

 be communicated unambiguously to others. The great contribution 

 of Newton was not the observation that apples fall, but the fitting of 

 this fact into the same pattern that describes the motion of the planets 

 in their orbits and the expression of this pattern by a general formula. 



Thus, while the byproducts of scientific research may be items of 

 such importance as new instruments, new materials, new machines, 

 the amassing of data — or even the creation of new sciences such as 

 electronics or nucleonics — its unique objective is the systematization 



» Hinshelwood, C. N., The structure of physical chemistry. Oxford, 1951. 



