106_ WHAT IS SCIENCE? 



to us, and they play quite as important a part as do laws 

 in rendering it intelligible. And if anything is real that 

 renders the world intelligible, then surely the ideas of 

 theories molecules and extinct animals and all the rest 

 of it have just as much claim to reality as the ideas of 

 laws. 



But my questioner will almost certainly not be satisfied 

 with that answer ; it will seem to him to shirk just the 

 question that he wants to raise. He will feel that the 

 view that reality is merely what leads to intelligibility 

 deprives reality of all its importance ; if science is merely 

 an attempt to render the world intelligible, in what does 

 it differ from a fairy tale which has often the same 

 object ? Or to put the matter in a different way 

 intelligibility is a quality that depends on the person who 

 understands ; one person may find intelligible what 

 another may not. Reality on the other hand is, by its 

 very meaning, something independent of the person who 

 thinks about it. When we say that a thing is real we do 

 not mean that it is peculiarly suited to our understand- 

 ing ; we mean much more that it is something utterly 

 independent of all understanding ; something that would 

 be the s?me if nobody ever thought about it at all or ever 

 wanted to understand it. 



I think the essence of this objection lies in the sentence : 

 " One person may find intelligible what another may not." 

 When we feel that science is deprived of all value by being 

 likened to a fairy tale, our reason is that different people 

 like different fairy tales, and that one fairy tale is as good 

 as another. But what if there were only one possible 

 fairy tale, only one which would explain the world, and 

 if that one were intelligible and satisfactory to every 

 one ? For that is the position of science. There have 

 been many fairy tales to explain the world ; every myth 

 and every religion is (in part at least) a fairy tale with that 

 object. But the fairy tale which we call science differs 



