Part 33 (2/2)

shows the extent and multiplicity of the fruits of theoretical inquiry. Astronomy plays an important part in navigation; but it also earns its living by helping the surveyor and the mapmaker and by supplying the world with accurate time. Industrial chemistry offers, perhaps, the most striking examples.

There is, for example, the fixation of nitrogen, which makes possible the artificial production of ammonia and potash; the whole group of dye industries made possible through the chemical production of coal tar; the industrial utilization of cellulose in the paper, twine, and leather industries; the promise of eventual production on a large scale of synthetic rubber; the electric furnace, which, with its fourteen-thousand-degree range of heat, makes possible untold increase in the effectiveness of all the chemical industries.

Industrial chemistry is only one instance. The application of theoretical inquiry in physics has made possible the telegraph, the telephone, wireless telegraphy, electric motors, and flying machines. Mineralogy and oceanography have opened up new stores of natural resources. Biological research has had diverse applications. Bacteriological inquiry has been fruitfully applied in surgery, hygiene, agriculture, and the artificial preservation of food. The principles of Mendelian inheritance have been used in the practical improvement of domestic animals and cultivated plants. The list might be indefinitely extended. The sciences arose as attempts, more or less successful, to solve man's practical problems. They became historically cut off, as they may in the case of the pure scientist still be cut off, from practical considerations. But no matter how remote and abstract they become, they yield again practical fruits.

Applied science, if it becomes too narrowly interested in practical results, limits its own resources. Purely theoretical inquiry may be of the most immense ultimate advantage. In a sense the more abstract and remote science becomes, the more eventual promise it contains. By getting away from the confusing and irrelevant details of particular situations, science is enabled to frame generalizations applicable to a wide array of phenomena differing in detail, but having in common significant characteristics. Men can learn fruitfully to control their experience precisely because they can emanc.i.p.ate themselves from the immediate demands of practical life, from the suggestions that arise in the course of instinctive and habitual action. ”A certain power of _abstraction_, of deliberate turning away from the habitual responses to a situation, was required before men could be emanc.i.p.ated to follow up suggestions that in the end are fruitful.”[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 156.]

Too complete absorption in immediate problems may operate to deprive action of that sweeping and penetrating vision which a freer inquiry affords. The temporarily important may be the less important in the long run. A practical adjustment of detail may produce immediate benefits in the way of improved industrial processes and more rapid and economical production, but some seemingly obscure discovery in the most abstruse reaches of scientific theory may eventually be of untold practical significance.

Only the extremely ignorant can question the utility of, let us say, the prolonged application of the Greek intellect to the laws of conic sections. Whether we think of bridges or projectiles, of the curves of s.h.i.+ps, or of the rules of navigation, we must think of conic sections.

The rules of navigation, for instance, are in part based on astronomy.

Kepler's Laws are foundation stones of that science, but Kepler discovered that Mars moves in an ellipse round the sun in one of the foci by a deduction from conic sections.... Yet the historical fact is that these conic sections were studied as an abstract science for eighteen centuries before they came to be of their highest use.[2]

[Footnote 2: Thomson: _Introduction to Science_, pp. 239-40.]

Pasteur, whose researches are of such immediate consequence in human health, began his studies in the crystalline forms of tartrates. The tremendous commercial uses which have been made of benzene had their origin ”in a single idea, advanced in a masterly treatise by Auguste Kekule in the year 1865.”[1]

[Footnote 1: Quoted by Thomson from an address on ”Technical Chemistry” by C. E. Munroe.]

Practical life has been continually enriched by theoretical inquiry. Scientific descriptions increase in value as they become absolutely impersonal, absolutely precise, and especially as they become condensed general formulas, which will be applicable to an infinite variety of particular situations.

And such descriptions are necessarily abstract and theoretical.

a.n.a.lYSIS OF SCIENTIFIC PROCEDURE. Scientific method is merely common sense made more thoroughgoing and systematic.

Reflection of a more or less effective kind takes place in ordinary experience wherever instinctive or habitual action is not adequate to meet a situation, whenever the individual has a problem to solve, an adjustment to make. Thinking, of some kind, goes on continually. Scientific thinking merely means careful, safeguarded, systematic thinking. It is thinking alert and critical of its own methods. As contrasted with ordinary common-sense thinking, it is distinguished by ”caution, carefulness, thoroughness, definiteness, exactness, orderliness, and methodic arrangement.” We think, in any case, because we have to, being creatures born with a set of instincts not adequate to meet the conditions of our environment.

We can think carelessly and ineffectively, or carefully and successfully.

Scientific method, or orderly, critical, and systematic thinking, is not applicable to one subject-matter exclusively.

Examples are commonly drawn from the physical or chemical or biological laboratory, but the elements of scientific method may be ill.u.s.trated in the procedure of a business man meeting a practical problem, a lawyer sifting evidence, a statesman framing a new piece of legislation. In all these cases the difference between a genuinely scientific procedure and mere casual and random common sense is the same.

Science is nothing but _trained and organized common sense_, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club. The primary power is the same in each case, and perhaps the untutored savage has the more brawny arm of the two.

The _real_ advantage lies in the point and polish of the swordsman's weapon; in the trained eye quick to spy out the weakness of the adversary; in the ready hand prompt to follow it on the instant.

But, after all, the sword exercise is only the hewing and poking of the clubman refined and developed.

So, the vast results obtained by science are won by ... no mental processes, other than those which are practiced by everyone of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones.... Nor does that process of induction and deduction by which a lady finding a stain of a peculiar kind upon her dress, concludes that somebody has upset the inkstand thereon, differ, in any way, in kind, from that by which Adams and Leverrier discovered a new planet.

The man of science, in fact, simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all, habitually and at every moment, use carelessly; and the man of business must as much avail himself of the scientific method--must as truly be a man of science--as the veriest bookworm of us all.[1]

[Footnote 1: Huxley: _Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews_, pp. 77, 78 (in ”The Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences”).]

The scientific procedure becomes, as we shall see, highly complicated, involving elaborate processes of observation, cla.s.sification, generalization, deduction or development of ideas, and testing. But it remains thinking just the same, and originates in some problem or perplexity, just as thinking does in ordinary life.

SCIENCE AND COMMON SENSE. It is profitable to note in some detail the ways in which scientific method, in spirit and technique, differs from common-sense thinking. It is more insistent in the first place on including the whole range of relevant data, of bringing to light all the facts that bear on a given problem. In common-sense thinking we make, as we say, snap judgments; we jump at conclusions. Anything plausible is accepted as evidence; anything heard or seen is accepted as a fact. The scientific examiner insists on examining and subjecting to scrutiny the facts at hand, on searching for further facts, and on distinguis.h.i.+ng the facts genuinely significant in a given situation from these that happen to be glaring or conspicuous. This is merely another way of saying that both accuracy and completeness of observation are demanded, accuracy in the examination of the facts present, and completeness in the array of facts bearing on the question at hand.

Scientific thinking is thus primarily inquiring and skeptical.

It queries the usual; it tries, as we say, to penetrate beneath the surface. Common sense, for example, gives suction as the explanation of water rising in a pump. But where, as at a great height above sea level, this mysterious power of suction does not operate, or when it is found that it does not raise water above thirty-two feet, common sense is at a loss. Scientific thinking tries to a.n.a.lyze the gross fact, and by accurately and completely observing all the facts bearing on the phenomenon endeavors to find out ”what _special_ conditions are present when the effect occurs” and absent when it does not occur.

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