20 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



clear until they have been set forth by the specialists who are 

 to follow me. 



At its outset, knowledge of nature, or what passes for 

 such at the time, is usually very highly organized indeed, 

 though deficient in detail and diversity of content. The his- 

 toric originators of those general methods of interpreting 

 phenomena still largely used in the construction of the 

 'scientific' view of the world, were men with a strong craving 

 for unity, with a deep-seated faith in the possibility of reduc- 

 ing the apparent heterogeneity, incoherency, separateness of 

 things to homogeneity and simplicity. They accordingly be- 

 gan with bold generalizations, all-inclusive syntheses; they 

 theoretically treated phenomena that seemed at first most dis- 

 similar as special cases of a single and simply formulable type- 

 phenomenon. All specificities, qualitative diversities, were to 

 be brought back to essential identity; all seeming discontin- 

 uities in scientific law were to be regarded as due merely to 

 our ignorance, it being assumed that there is really only one 

 law, or at most few and closely inter-related laws, which ad- 

 equately describe the mode of behavior of everything, or 

 every physical thing, whatever, under all possible changes of 

 its circumstances. Thus the atomism of Democritus and the 

 Epicureans regarded such dissimilar facts as thought, sensa- 

 tion, the distinctive chemical peculiarities of different sub- 

 stances, as all equally explicable by the assumed properties of 

 the unchanging and homogeneous atoms and the laws of their 

 concourse. The attempts of the ancient atomists to explain 

 the sensible specificities of different kinds of matter by referr- 

 ing them all to differences of shape, position and rate of mo- 

 tions of atoms all qualitatively identical, amusing and na'ive 

 though these now seem to us as we read them, were merely 

 heroic efforts to carry out in some degree of detail this pro- 

 gramme of unification. A similar sweeping unification was 

 undertaken at the beginning of modern science by the man 

 who has more than any other (with the possible exception of 

 Galileo) shaped its ideals and larger ambitions and influenced 



