SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESES 199 



and already needs a specialist's knowledge to accurately present 

 it to any audience. 



The time has passed when science was solely an affair of 

 " cloistered halls " and men of science lived in " academic groves." 

 Science has entered into human affairs, and is now an essential 

 part of them. Men of science are called upon by circumstances 

 to keep pace with the march of events. The old attitude of 

 exclusion from participation in these wider events is no longer 

 possible, if science is to be rightly understood and properly 

 appreciated by Englishmen as a whole. The danger arising 

 from that exclusion is manifested in the event which we are now 

 discussing. To be forewarned should be to be forearmed. 



The Nature of Scientific Hypotheses. 



The discussion on " Speculation in Science," which took place in 

 certain newspapers quite recently cannot fail to arouse wide- 

 spread interest in the subject which has been described as the 

 " scrap-heaps of science." 



The full consideration of the matter at once raises the ques- 

 tion of the nature and use of hypotheses in science, and, it 

 is doubtless possible, by means of various analogies, to convey 

 some concrete idea of their nature and of the part they play in 

 the march of science to those who are not special students of 

 scientific problems. 



The various hypotheses which have been formulated from 

 time to time, in order to attempt some sort of a description of 

 the nature of the aether, have been mentioned in the course 

 of the discussion alluded to above. And, the fact that 

 many of these have been discarded, or, as it was there 

 stated, " thrown on the scrap-heap," is impliedly held to 

 be a rebuke to science. Now far from it being a matter 

 for rebuke, this " scrapping " of defective hypotheses is in 

 reality a great virtue. It is a sign of progress. Holding 

 fast to dogmas when they are no longer tenable is not progression, 

 but either retrogression or stagnation. The greatest victory that 

 science has won for the intellectual freedom of mankind is this 

 very right to relinquish exploded conceptions as soon as they are 

 no longer tenable, and to substitute for them others more in 

 accord with the knowledge of the day. 



The discussion which we are now considering, may perhaps 

 have tended to create the impression that this destruction of 



