Has There Ever Been A Society Which

By The Worldly Standards Of Public Life, All Scholars In Their Work Are Of Course Oddly Virtuous. They Do Not Make Wild Claims, They Do Not Cheat, They Do Not Try To Persuade At Any Cost, They Appeal Neither To Prejudice Nor To Authority, They Are Often Frank About Their Ignorance, Their Disputes Are Fairly Decorous, They Do Not Confuse What Is Being Argued With Race, Politics, Sex Or Age, They Listen Patiently To The Young And To The Old Who Both Know Everything. These Are The General Virtues Of Scholarship, And They Are Peculiarly The Virtues Of Science.

All Those Formal Systems, In Mathematics And Physics And The Philosophy Of Science, Which Claim To Give Foundations For Certain Truth Are Surely Mistaken. I Am Tempted To Say That We Do Not Look For Truth, But For Knowledge. But I Dislike This Form Of Words, For Two Reasons. First Of All, We Do Look For Truth, However We Define It, It Is What We Find That Is Knowledge. And Second, What We Fail To Find Is Not Truth, But Certainty; The Nature Of Truth Is Exactly The Knowledge That We Do Find.

I Set Out To Show That There Exists Single Creative Activity,which Is Displayed Alike In The Arts And In The Sciences.it Is Wrong To Think Of Science As A Mechanical Record Of Facts, And It Is Wrong To Think Of The Arts As Remote And Private Fancies. What Makes Each Human, What Makes Them Universal, Is The Stamp Of The Creative Mind.

The Painter's Portrait And The Physicist's Explanation Are Both Rooted In Reality, But They Have Been Changed By The Painter Or The Physicist Into Something More Subtly Imagined Than The Photographic Appearance Of Things.

The Progress Of Science Is The Discovery At Each Step Of A New Order Which Gives Unity To What Had Seemed Unlike.