Beyond these, the essential and the eminently
desirable elements of all education, let each man take up his special
line--the historian devote himself to his history, the man of science
to his science, the man of letters to his culture of that kind, and the
artist to his special pursuit.
Bacon has prefaced some of his works with no more than this: Franciscus
Bacon sic cogitavit;[85] let "sic cogitavi" be the epilogue to what I
have ventured to address to you to-night.
THE METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION [86]
The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of
the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the mode
at which all phenomena are reasoned about, rendered precise and
exact. There is no more difference, but there is just the same kind of
difference, between the mental operations of a man of science and those
of an ordinary person, as there is between the operations and methods of
a baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales, and the
operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis
by means of his balance and finely graduated weights. It is not that
the action of the scales in the one case, and the balance in the other,
differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working; but
the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and
of course turns by the addition of a much smaller weight.
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