Science and Public Policy: The Open World 69 



from it any sense of fulfilment, without trying to communicate 

 it to others. This is so even though communication is not inevit- 

 ably associated with acceptance. Something which is new is op- 

 posed to something which is old; and often acceptance of the 

 new is less dependent either on its intellectual force or potential 

 practical value than on the strength of the conventions and 

 vested interest which sustains the old. 



As it exists in the world today, science is a 

 The Origins of cultural development of medieval Western 

 Western Science Europe. Why it should have been that the 



particular system of scientific method that 

 has proved so successful, and which has now swept the world 

 in a way no single religious or political system has, should 

 have emerged in the 17th century rather in some earlier age, 

 and in Western Europe rather than in, say, China or Greece, 

 or some corner of Islam, is a matter for speculation. Unlike 

 what happened in Europe, it may have been, as many have 

 suggested, that the emergence of the urban civilizations of these 

 other parts of the world was associated with a diversification of 

 labor which led to an unfortunate separation of the craftsmen 

 out of whose labors man's earliest views of science were born, 

 from a specialized class of privileged philosophers and priests 

 who were not concerned with the actual doing of things. 



But be this as it may, our kind of scientific environment, 

 an environment of experiment and controlled observation, 

 emerged in a sparsely populated Europe, in which illiteracy 

 was the rule rather than the exception, and in which the Gal- 

 ileos and Newtons, the Leonardos and the Wrens, as well as 

 the informed Princes and merchants to whose society they 

 belonged, were not only interested in the advance of pure 

 knowledge, but generally conscious of the fact that material 

 riches and power followed in the train of science. As Chris- 

 topher Wren put it in a draft constitution which he drew up 

 in 1660 as the basis for Charles IFs prosepective Charter for 

 the Royal Society, the purpose of the members of such a Society 

 should be to "prosecute effectually the Advancement of Nat- 



