88 Research and National Purpose 



of the establishment in which it is being carried out could, I 

 feel, be mitigated by administrative procedures. The essential 

 point about the publication of the results of truly basic re- 

 search is that the research worker himself should ahvays be 

 conscious of the right to publish — unless good reason is shown 

 why he should not. 



There is an additional point. In the world of military 

 science secrecy does not, as we are only too well aware, 

 inevitably prevent treachery, any more than treachery has been 

 completely eliminated from other parts of the military ma- 

 chine. If it had been, what need would there be for parts of the 

 secret services we maintain? 



The basic science which I am talking about is the body of 

 knowledge which has been rigorously established through the 

 use of genuine methods of scientific inquiry. I am talking 

 particularly about what can still be called the "natural sciences". 

 As scientists, we know what they are, and we know how they 

 have been built up with the years. We also know how new 

 sciences are born. If it were ever to become the case that the 

 occult sciences became scientific, or that water-divining 

 became a science, they would do so only because scientific 

 methods of inquiry had made them so. Primitive man found 

 his minerals by following outcrops of rock back into the earth, 

 having first learnt that some other material, a metal — gold, 

 copper or tin — for which he had found a use, could be ex- 

 tracted from the rock by smelting. He learnt to recognize the 

 rocks he wanted by particular characteristics which he could 

 discern by eye. Today the geologist uses not only the eyes with 

 which he was born, but also new eyes that have been furnished 

 through the advances of science — magnetometers, geiger count- 

 ers, boring equipment, and so on. He uses scientific methods 

 of observation and analysis to build a corpus of knowledge 

 which not only "explains" the past and present, but also fore- 

 tells part of the future. That is the only way a science can be 

 created, the only way areas of human interest ever become 

 transformed into bodies of knowledge consisting of proposi- 



