6 WHAT IS SCIENCE? 



Whether we regard the childhood of the race or of the 

 individual, we find that, as soon as man begins to think 

 at all, he utters his perpetual question, Why ? The world 

 around him does not appear to him immediately intel- 

 ligible ; it seems to have no meaning and to be arranged 

 on no comprehensible plan. He asks how the world 

 came to be what it is and why it is what it is. To such 

 questions, inspired in the first place by mere curiosity 

 rather than by a desire to control the world to his liking, 

 answers of some sort are given by the most elementary 

 religions and the crudest systems of magic. Some form 

 of religion or magic, which attempts to explain the world 

 in terms of ideas that are the product of thought and 

 reflection rather than of immediate perception, seems 

 characteristic of almost all races of men, however low their 

 intelligence and their material advancement. 



It is, of course, impossible to determine certainly 

 whether these rudimentary attempts at pure knowledge, 

 which are found among the less developed races of to-day, 

 represent different stages in an evolution through which 

 all men's ideas have passed and must pass, or whether 

 they are entirely independent. And in particular it is 

 impossible to trace back the history of our own pure 

 knowledge to its earliest origins. But we can trace it 

 back a very long way to the speculations of the ancient 

 Greeks in the third and fourth centuries before our era. 

 Greek thought, in the earliest stage in which we encounter 

 it, is very different from the primitive religions and magics 

 of savages ; but classical scholars find in it relics which 

 lead them to believe that its first origins were not very 

 different from the ideas of the most backward races of 

 the present day. But in spite of these relics, the advance 

 that was made in the great Age of Greece was enormous. 

 It has largely determined all subsequent European 

 thought ; and it is not too much to say that there was 

 less advance made in pure learning in the 2,000 years 



