“Scientific method, simple as it is in essence, has been acquired only with great difficulty, and is still employed only by a minority, who themselves confine its employment to a minority of the questions upon which they have opinions. If you number among your acquaintances some eminent man of science, accustomed to the minutest quantitative precision in his experiments and the most abstruse skill in his inference from them, you will be able to make him the subject of a little experiment which is likely to be by no means unilluminating. If you tackle him on party politics, theology, income tax, house-agents, the bumptiousness of the working-classes and other topics of a like nature, you are pretty sure, before long, to provoke an explosion, and to hear him expressing wholly untested opinions with a dogmatism which he would never display in regard to the well-founded results of his laboratory experiments.
As this illustration shows, the scientific attitude is in some degree unnatural to man; the majority of our opinions are wish-fulfilments, like dreams in the Freudian theory. The mind of the most rational among us may be compared to a stormy ocean of passionate convictions based upon desire, upon which float perilously a few tiny boats carrying a cargo of scientifically tested beliefs.
…It is not, however, the lapses of scientific men that concern us when we are trying to describe [the] scientific method. A scientific opinion is one which there is some reason to believe true; an unscientific opinion is one which is held for some reason other than its probable truth.
…[Galileo’s] predecessors had known how the world was created, what was man’s destiny, the deepest mysteries of metaphysics, and the hidden principles governing the behaviour of bodies. Throughout the moral and material universe nothing was mysterious to them, nothing hidden, nothing incapable of exposition in orderly syllogism. Compared with all this wealth, what was left to the followers of Galileo? – a law of falling bodies, the theory of the pendulum, and Kepler’s ellipses. Can it be wondered at that the learned cried out at such a destruction of their hard-won wealth? As the rising sun scatters the multitude of stars, so Galileo’s few proved truths banished the scintillating firmament of medieval certainties.
Socrates had said that he was wiser than his contemporaries because he alone knew that he knew nothing. This was a rhetorical device. Galileo could have said with truth that he knew something, but knew he knew little, while his Aristotelian contemporaries knew nothing, but thought they knew much. Knowledge, as opposed to fantasies of wish-fulfillment, is difficult to come by. A little contact with real knowledge makes fantasies less acceptable.”
The full book can be found here.
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