Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/47

Rh unaided observation; more often, since the conditions are complex, by the roundabout way—which is still observation—of experiment and measurement. We need not pause to illustrate, or to cite the authorities; the conclusion is generally accepted; and every piece of apparatus in our laboratories shows as an instrument for the control or the extension or the refinement of observation.

It is, perhaps, less apparent that all the problems of science may be summed up in the single problem of analysis; that the task which lies before the man of science, in his character as scientific, is always the analysis—under which is included, of course, that synthesis which is a test of analysis—of some complex object or complex situation. The reduction of a compound to its elements, the differentiation of factors, the establishment of correlations among the components of a given whole,—these are the things that the scientific investigator finds himself doing. True, we shrink a little from running all men of science into the same mold; we individualize them; we think of Newton as wielding "the ponderous instrument of synthesis," of Darwin as "working on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collecting facts on a wholesale scale." We are right in thus individualizing; for not only is the man of science something more than a scientific machine, but science itself is also (as we are to see in a moment) something more than what we have so far made it out to be. The witness of history is, nevertheless, straightforward enough; what Newton and Darwin, as scientific men, had before all things to do was to analyze, and to analyze again, and again to analyze. To be scientifically active is disinterestedly to apply the method of observation to the task of analysis.

Our three adjectives are thus given: disinterested, observational, analytical. Taken together, they characterize the scientific attitude with sufficient accuracy for the purposes of this essay. They do not, however, cover the full meaning of "science" as that word is ordinarily used and understood. When we speak of science, we mean, not an assemblage of observed facts, the direct results of analysis, but rather an organized and systematized body of knowledge, a closed and self-contained whole. That every science, every transcription of the world from a scientific point of view, should yield a system, as if there were of necessity some immanent principle of order which the facts illustrate and to which they conform, is of course an assumption, and an assumption that we might find curious were it not so familiar. Originating perhaps in physics, supported by the belief in the general uniformity of nature, and favored by the tendency to regard the sciences as departments of knowledge, and therefore as concerned with divisions of the cosmic mechanism, it has been accepted, more or less consciously, by