38 



DISCOVERY 



en. 



that faithfulness to fact in every detail is required of 

 him. The habit of mind thus acquired is never willing 

 to base conclusions upon the flimsy evidence which 

 satisfies most people. It is a mill that requires verifiable 

 fact for its grist before it can deliver the good white 

 flour of scientific conclusion into the hopper. This is 

 the mind which a scientific education is intended to 

 produce ; and no substitute of words or symbols for 

 things can give it. 



Advocates of traditional learning cannot understand 

 the educational difference between contact with natural 

 fact and the study of allusions in classical literature. 

 Theirs was the view taken by the old school of thought 

 in the University of Cambridge when a demand was 

 made for funds to build laboratories in the last third of 

 the nineteenth century. Provision of opportunity for 

 the development of an independent observational type of 

 mind was opposed on the ground that it was not good 

 to attach more importance to things seen and done than 

 to things communicated to it by someone in authority. 

 " If," said a leading mathematician of those days, " he 

 does not believe the statement of his teacher probably 

 a clergyman of mature knowledge, recognised ability, 

 and blameless character his suspicion is irrational and 

 manifests a want of power of appreciating evidence." 



Everything depends upon the meaning to be attached 

 to evidence. The only evidence of value in science, and 

 the only testimony which a student of science is com- 

 petent to give, is that derived from his own observations. 

 Hearsay evidence is not admitted in a court of law or 

 given any weight in a scientific discussion, even when the 

 informant is a clergyman of blameless character. A 

 witness is expected to give a truthful account of the facts 

 of a case as they presented themselves to him ; and at the 



