Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/46

42 With the latter discipline, science has nothing to do; with the former, as we shall soon see, it has a great deal.

If, however, there are certain difficulties which we may, in the present connection, rightly pass over, there is a further question which can not thus be avoided. We are bound to characterize more closely the scientific attitude, or the scientific point of view. Human experience may be brought together in other than scientific ways; and while we still need not seek for formal definition or final classification, we must try at least to differentiate science from the appreciating disciplines and from what we have called technology. We must find distinguishing adjectives for the attitude itself, for the method which it implies, and for the problem which it discovers.

The history of science leaves no doubt of the answer to be given to this threefold question. The attitude of science, to begin with that, is before all things a disinterested attitude: witness the rise and growth of astronomy, of chemistry, of physiology. Until mankind has learned to take experience in serious earnest "for its own sake," to subordinate personal ends to the pursuit of truth, there is no science, but only something which at its worst is quackery and pseudo-science, at its best common sense and rule of thumb; and conversely, so soon as a man starts out to examine some aspect of experience as if it were for itself important and knowledge of it were intrinsically desirable, so soon does the germ of a science appear. For the race, the learning of this lesson was difficult enough; and so, in the large, the negative form of the adjective—dis-interested—may be justified; science sets aside the oldest and what we might consider the most natural interests of man. For the individual, on the other hand, a positive term would be more suitable. The curiosity or, as Helmholtz named it, the Wissensdrang which marks the scientific temperament renders the "disinterested" work of science the most interesting thing, as Helmholtz also said, that its possessor can find to do. The adjective must be kept, partly for its historical associations, and partly because the writer can not think of a positive word that should replace it; but it must be understood, when the worker in science, the scientifically-minded individual is in question, as meaning self-fulfilment rather than self-renunciation. Otherwise, science would never have had its martyrs.

The scientific attitude, then, is disinterested; the point of view of science is one that shall reveal the unvarnished fact; so much we are plainly taught by the history of science. We gather from the same source that the method of science is observation. All the "facts" of science are gained by a disinterested observation; sometimes, by an