The Limitations of Science (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1915 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD The truth of science has ever had not merely the task of evolving herself from the dull and uniform mist of ignorance, but also that of repressing and dissolving the phantoms of the i magination.--Faraday. If we are compelled to revert to old and supposedly discarded systems of thought when we attempt to make new hypothetical systems, we should inquire whether we are really advancing the theory of science by that method. Is it true that Descartes reaches in his wonderful clarity of expression the highest attainment in speculative thought? Even in the then little cultivated subjects of electricity and magnetism, his imagination did not fail him and he drew a picture of the field of force about a magnet which is strikingly like those in modern treatises. And to explain electrical attraction, he supposed bodies to contain little filaments of his elementary matter which were crowded out when the bodies were rubbed together. These filaments attached themselves like lines of force to neighboring bodies. When the rubbing was stopped they retracted and so drew the electrified bodies together. If we modernize this explanation, we have a fair statement of Faraday's lines of force. Faraday believed that when a body is electrified the space about it is filled with lines of electric force which are stretched in the direction of their length and experience a pressure at right angles to their direction. This idea, or rather the modification of it by Maxwell, who was able to assign quantitative values to those forces which correspond with the laws of electrical attraction and repulsion, is expressed more precisely. But qualitatively: that is, in telling us what electricity is; why it is produced by friction; and what lines of force are; the...