An Introduction to the History of ScienceLibby, Walter
History
An Introduction to the History of Science
Libby, Walter
Science -- History
The need of expert study of the human mind as the instrument of
scientific discovery might have been inferred from the fact that the
physicist Tyndall read before the British Association in 1870 a paper on
the Scientific Use of the Imagination, in which he spoke of the
imagination as the architect of physical theory, cited Newton, Dalton,
Davy, and Faraday as affording examples of the just use of this creative
power of the mind, and quoted a distinguished chemist as identifying the
mental process of scientific discovery with that of artistic production.
Tyndall even chased the psychologists in their own field and stated that
it was only by the exercise of the imagination that we could ascribe the
possession of mental powers to our fellow creatures. "You believe that
in society you are surrounded by reasonable beings like yourself....
What is your warrant for this conviction? Simply and solely this: your
fellow-creatures behave as if they were reasonable."
On the traces of this brilliant incursion of the natural philosopher
into the realm of mental science, later psychologists must follow but
haltingly. Just as in the history of physics a long series of studies
intervened between Bacon's hypothesis that heat is a kind of motion
(1620) and Tyndall's own work, _Heat as a Mode of Motion_ (1863), so
must many psychological investigations be made before an adequate
psychology of scientific discovery can be formulated. It may ultimately
prove that the passages in which Tyndall and other scientists speak of
scientific _imagination_ would read as well if for this term, intuition,
inspiration, unconscious cerebration, or even reason were substituted.
At first glance it would seem that the study of the sensory elements of
consciousness, motor, tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory,
thermal, internal, pursued for the last half century by the experimental
method, would furnish a clue to the nature of the imagination. A visual
image, or mental picture, is popularly taken as characteristic of the
imaginative process. In fact, the distinguished psychologist William
James devotes the whole of his interesting chapter on the imagination to
the discussion of different types of imagery. The sensory elements of
consciousness are involved, however, in perception, memory, volition,
reason, and sentiment, as they are in imagination. They have been
recognized as fundamental from antiquity. Nothing is in the intellect
which was not previously in the senses. To be out of one's senses is to
lack the purposive guidance of the intelligence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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