Science and method / by Henri Poincaré ; translated by Francis Maitland ; with a preface by Bertrand Russell.

Date:
[1914?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Science and method / by Henri Poincaré ; translated by Francis Maitland ; with a preface by Bertrand Russell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    cians are to confine ourselves to waiting for orders, and, instead of cultivating our science for our own pleasure, to have no other care but that of accom- modating ourselves to our clients’ tastes? If the only object of mathematics is to come to the help of those who make a study of nature, it is to them we must look for the word of command. Is this the correct view of the matter? Certainly not; for if we had not cultivated the exact sciences for themselves, we should never have created the mathematical instrument, and when the word of command came from the physicist we should have been found without arms. Similarly, physicists do not wait to study a phenom- enon until some pressing need of material life makes it an absolute necessity, and they are quite right. If the scientists of the eighteenth century had dis- regarded electricity, because it appeared to them merely a curiosity having no practical interest, we should not have, in the twentieth century, either telegraphy or electro-chemistry or electro-traction. Physicists forced to select are not guided in their selection solely by utility. What method, then, do they pursue in making a selection between the dif- ferent natural facts? I have explained this in the preceding chapter. The facts that interest them are those that may lead to the discovery of a law, those that have an analogy with many other facts and do not appear to us as isolated, but as closely grouped with others. The isolated fact attracts the attention of all, of the layman as well as the scientist But what the true scientist alone can see is the link that unites several facts which have a deep but hidden analogy. The anecdote of Newton’s apple is probably