THE DISCOVERY OF LAWS 73 



conform ; they do not discover laws, or the laws that 

 they discover predict falsely. It is only the great leaders 

 of science who see the right order. They, and they only, 

 can establish an order which satisfies their intellectual 

 desires and yet find that it is valid for the future as well 

 as for the past. They, and they only, are in such har- 

 mony with the universe that it obeys the dictates of 

 their minds. 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF GENIUS 



I fear this point of view will seem to some readers too 

 mystical for their tastes. Nevertheless I would press it 

 strongly on their attention. Of course I do not claim in 

 the least that it explains why laws, devised even by the 

 greatest of men, do predict, but it is necessary for the 

 understanding of science, as much as for the understand- 

 ing of art, to recognize that there are great men who 

 surpass their fellows in some scarcely comprehensible 

 manner. Science would not be what it is if there had 

 not been a Galileo, a Newton or a Lavoisier, any more 

 than music would be what it is if Bach, Beethoven and 

 Wagner had never lived. The world as^j&ejmow it^is 

 the prpjto^nts^enmses and there may be evil as well 

 as beneficenT genius and to deny that fact, is to stultify 

 all history, whether it be that of the intellectual or the 

 economic world. 



But in one, as in the other, genius itself is too rare and 

 too short-lived to achieve much by its unaided efforts. 

 Great men and this is particularly true of the greatest 

 achieve more by their influence than by their direct action. 

 They change the world by enabling others to complete 

 what they have themselves begun. And in no direction 

 is this more true than in science. By far the greater 

 part of scientific work has been done, and by far the 

 greater number of laws discovered, by those of us who 

 have not the remotest claims to genius or any but the 



