72 WHAT IS SCIENCE? 



proper subject-matter of science, or because we feel 

 instinctively that, even if we could force it into such 

 an order, that order would not be appropriate to it. 

 I incline to the second alternative ; it seems to me 

 that there is something so fundamentally different 

 in the internal and external worlds (of Chapter II) that 

 we would not, even if we could, group them in the same 

 categories. But whichever alternative we adopt, it 

 remains equally difficult to explain why even the limited 

 part of experience which science takes as its province 

 conforms so closely to our desires, or why there should 

 be a part which can be selected so that it conforms. 



The other consideration arises when it is asked who are 

 the " we," to whose intellectual desires nature conforms. 

 It is a grave difficulty, inherent in all the many attempts 

 to lay down rules whereby science may discover laws 

 valid for future experience, that they would indicate 

 that anybody who knew the rules could discover laws. 

 But that is not the fact ; it is not every one who has that 

 power. Indeed the fact seems to be precisely contrary. 

 Those who have professed the most intimate knowledge 

 of the rules, the great philosophers of science, such as 

 Bacon or Mill, have never been able to apply their rules 

 to the discovery of any law of the slightest value. Laws 

 have been discovered for the most part by people naively 

 innocent of all philosophical subtleties. The great man 

 of science, like the great poet or the great artist, is born 

 and not made ; like the artist he must train his faculties, 

 but training alone will not confer them. The vast majority 

 of mankind (a majority which includes a great many of 

 those who have done useful scientific work) cannot 

 discover laws, except in so far as they are helped, in a way 

 we shall notice immediately, by the previous work of an 

 infinitesimal minority. Either they cannot see order in 

 experience at all, or the order which they think they see 

 does not prove to be that to which nature is prepared to 



