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THE GREEK SCIENTISTS crranslated by Herbert M. Howe INTRODUCTION By THE TERM "science" we today usually understand the study of nature in accordance with certain wellunderstood principles and logical procedures. We are so used to them that we take them for granted; but their discovery was a long and slow process, and their combination into the methods of investigation to which we are accustomed did not take place until quite modem times. For many of the earlier advances in man's knowledge of nature we are indebted to the Greeks. At the very base of scientific work is the assumption that similar causes have similar effects, and that nothing happens without a natural cause. Primitive man, on the contrary, commonly believed that the world was governed by the whims and desires of a multitude of un· predictable spirits. In the Iliad, the rivers of Troy leave their beds and try to flood the Greek army-not because of heavy rains upstream, but because Apollo has persuaded the river gods to come to the defense of Troy; and they are thwarted when Hephaestus, a supporter of the Greeks, sends a wave of fire to dry them up. In the sixth century B.C_ we find the first attempts, by Thales and his followers, to formulate general principles for the actions of nature. A second fundamental assumption of the scientist is that, generally speaking, the information given us by our senses is accurate and reliable. There were some ancient thinkers who were so impressed by the gulf between the world of matter, which we perceive by the senses, and that of the mind, to be grasped only by resson , that they insisted that only tho second was real; matter and change they regarded as illusory, and scarcely worth the trouble of investigation. To such men, of course, there could be no experimental knowledge, for they doubted the only evidence we have about the world outside ourselves_ They were extremists; but most thinkers maintained that the results of reasoning were more reliable than those of sense perception. Even when these principles-that every happening is in accordance with natural ]aw, and that the senses can be trusted-are accepted, methods of investigation must be worked out; we must be able to formulate general laws to explain what we have observed, and we must check the general laws, once we have formulated them, against the facts of our experience-if necessary, altering our theories to agree with the facts. The two parts, then, of scientific investigation are observation and reasoning_ One of the weaknesses of ancient science was a tendency to magnify one or the other of these processes. Let us first consider the observers, best represented by the physicians. When one of them was confronted by a suffering patient, he was concerned with the iIIness of the particular man affected; his problem was to cure this particular case. Later, if he wished, he might generalize about this and similar cases; for the present his attention must be fixed on the man before him. Accordingly , in some of the early medical works-by no means all-we find a distrust of facile theory and a grest concern for the careful description of symptoms in each individual case. Knowledge, these physicians felt, can come only from experience; theory must follow practice, and we must not be too hasty in seeking theory out. Ancient medical observation was thus more productive than ancient medical theory. This method of the physicians must be contrasted with that of the thinkers who devoted themselves to the study of deductive ressoning. The mathematicians, for example, reduced to a minimum their dependence on the senses; this minimum, which cannot be proved logically, they formulated as the axioms, which are universally accepted without further proof. Working from them, with no further appeal to external evidence, they built up a structure of reasoning which is stiII studied everywhere_ Unquestionably the Greek work most widely studied today (except for the New Testament) is the Elements of Euclid ; high school geometry is little more than a rearrangement of it with the addition of problems and applications. Thus we have the physicians emphasizing the importance of observation and the mathematicians that of reasoning from unquestioned premises. One of the most interesting attempts to combine the two methods was that of the astronomers, who had a long series of careful and surprisingly accurate observations on which to work. Unfortunately , they started from the plausible but incnr- 306 CLASSICS...

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