Introduction

Abstract

In his “Thoughts on the evolution of a scientific problem,” Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood (1897–1967), Dr. Lee’s Professor of Chemistry and Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, in this 1953 Presidential Address to the Science Masters’ Association of Oxford University, observed “the scientific aspiration towards the understanding of Nature represents one of the great movements of the human mind….” (Hinshelwood 1954, p. 300). Hinshelwood wisely noted, “Science is not the dryly syllogistic handling of obvious facts. It is an imaginative adventure of the mind seeking truth in a world of mystery.” He continued, “… and, as it happens, one of the most important steps is almost always that made by people who have the vision to realize that certain phenomena raise questions of unusual interest. And it may be that the first tentative answers to these questions go further along the road than the latter amendments simply because they provide the motive and occasion for the key discoveries” (Hinshelwood 1954, pp. 300–301). A decade later in his 1965 Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Hinshelwood noted that “at all the boundaries of science we come up against what are probably the inherent limitations of human understanding. At the edge of biology we meet the chasm between what science describes and what the mind experiences…” (Hinshelwood 1965, p. 355). George Santayana (1863–1952) observed, “Science is nothing but developed perception, integrated intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated” (Santayana 1906, p. 307), and Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874–1965) is alleged to have echoed a somewhat similar theme in a lighter manner, “Science is no more than organized curiosity” (Priestley 1957, p. 148).

Some Divines count Adam 30. yeares old at his creation, because they suppose him created in the perfect age and stature of man; and surely we are all out of the computation of our age, and every man is some moneths elder than hee bethinks him; for we live, move, have a being, and are subject to the actions of the elements, and the malice of diseases, in that other world, the truest Microcosm, the wombe of our mother…. In that obscure World…, our time is short, computed by the Moone; yet longer than the days of many creatures that behold the Sunne, our selves being not yet without life, sense, and reason; though for the manifestation of its actions, it awaits the opportunity of objects; and seemes to live there but in its roote and soule of vegetation: entring afterwards upon the scene of the world, wee arise up and become another creature….

(Sir Thomas Browne 1642, 1964, p. 38)