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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIX. No. 1006 



determining factor. The power in such 

 men has been, is, and always will be found 

 in the spirit with which they work — in 

 their disinterested devotion to their tasks 

 and their sublime faith in the harmony of 

 nature and in the possibility of achieving 

 what they have undertaken. 



This is no new or startling theory. It is 

 a very venerable fact. Tet somehow it 

 seems to have escaped attention entirely in 

 the organization of elementary physics 

 courses. Since the spirit of science is the 

 dominant factor in making a great scien- 

 tist, we physics teachers have not been 

 quite bright in thus omitting it from our 

 courses. We have been trying to play Ham- 

 let, but have inadvertently omitted Hamlet 

 altogether. It is encouraging to note, how- 

 ever, that the importance of this omission 

 has just begun to attract attention. Some 

 progressive teachers include the biog- 

 raphies of physicists in their courses, and 

 some progressive authors include the por- 

 traits of great physicists in their texts. If 

 the materials of physics can not be pre- 

 sented in such a way as to arouse a real live 

 scientific spirit inside a boy, it may be 

 well to show him pictures and to tell him 

 stories of men who had it. 



Yet, after all, we physics teachers are 

 not so very much to blame for omitting the 

 scientific spirit from our courses. If we 

 had been inspired with it when we were 

 children, all would have been different. 

 When we were young, nobody knew what 

 it was. Great scientists just felt it and 

 lived it, but nobody seemed to think of try- 

 ing to describe it, or to define it, or to tell 

 how it felt all welling up inside and over- 

 flowing in laws and principles. There have 

 been many attempts from Aristotle down to 

 the present time to define the scientific 

 method of thinking. But it is only very 

 recently that the effort has been seriously 

 made to portray in words just how the 



scientific spirit feels when it is once safely 

 lodged inside a man. 



Now that we are beginning to know 

 something about how it feels to have the 

 scientific spirit inside one, the stone which 

 the builders of elementary physics courses 

 rejected is to become the headstone of the 

 corner of the new industrial physics. For, 

 though they may not know it yet, the thing 

 that the industries need most just now is 

 this self-same scientific spirit. The public 

 is demanding it, employers are seeking it, 

 trades unions are hunting it everywhere, 

 even in socialism, and the world at large in 

 this machine age is crying out piteously 

 for it. If we are ever to have an industrial 

 teaching of science, it will be of a sort that 

 succeeds in developing the scientific spirit 

 inside people. It will be a kind of teaching 

 that does not emphasize the loading of the 

 intellect with facts, principles and theories ; 

 but rather one that sees to it that at all 

 costs the hearts of the pupils are filled 

 with the scientific spirit. Hence if we 

 would go forward with the development of 

 industrial physics, we must first recognize 

 what is the essential thing in the scientific 

 spirit. 



The essence of the scientific spirit is not, 

 as has been generally supposed, a method 

 of thinking. It is not the intellectual proc- 

 ess that has been divided into the steps 

 called observation, induction, hypothesis, 

 verification. This process, if it signifies 

 anything real, is at best but one of the 

 modes in which the presence of the scien- 

 tific spirit inside is made manifest. Many 

 of us have consciously tried, and as con- 

 sciously failed, to impose this order of 

 thought on our pupils with the idea that 

 we were thereby serving science. We have 

 failed because the essence of the spirit we 

 want is not of this sort. 



The essence of the scientific spirit is an 

 emotional state, an attitude toward life and 



