Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/51

Rh The authors are entirely in the right; their readers are physicians and engineers, and not physiologists and physicists; their subject-matter is held together and unified by a practical aim, and not by an initial point of view; it is unfair to judge them by the standards of science. A textbook of physics or of physiology, on the other hand, is—as we have seen—a transcription of the world of experience from a particular standpoint, which is deliberately adopted at the outset and deliberately maintained to the end; no item of experience that is not visible from this standpoint can properly get into it; and it is unfair to judge it by the needs and aims of a technology. All human activities have their limitations: and if the technologist is less clearly conscious of the restriction laid upon him by his practical end, and the man of science feels more keenly the narrowing of his universe by the scientific point of view,—the rule is certainly not without exceptions; but we may grant the tendency,—that is due partly to the greater outward diversity of the technological career, and partly to the more rigorous training in logic that scientific investigation affords and demands. The technologist never, to be sure, handles experience in its totality, but he deals with individual cases, and so comes nearer to the concrete than his scientific colleague; and he may, moreover, change from the practical to the scientific or the appreciative attitude without any great fear of leaving his last; his interests are thus diversified. The man of science, constantly applying the principles of logic, and constantly on his guard against the encroachment of logical theory upon the facts of observation, is forced to be self-critical, and so comes nearer to a true perspective.