Has the intellect a function? : a lecture given at the institute of pathology, St. Mary's Hospital, on June 20 / by Wilfred Trotter.

  • Wilfred Trotter
Date:
[1939]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Has the intellect a function? : a lecture given at the institute of pathology, St. Mary's Hospital, on June 20 / by Wilfred Trotter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    true or revolts our reason, are quite irrelevant to its scientific validity. All knowledge comes from noticing resemblances and recurrences in the events that happen around us. Although some of us may be much quicker than others in the power of seeing and comparing, it is obvious that the greatest talent cannot carry us very far as long as observation and experiment are applied only to random experience. Jt is the discovery of natural science that experience can be simplified so that on the one hand resemblances and recurrences in events can be more easily seen, and on the other that the conditions in which they occur can be completely specified. This, using the term in the broadest sense, is the experimental method. In one aspect it may be regarded as a mere refinement of the rough and ready trial and error of the crafts- man and the common man. [In another aspect however the change is so great as to be virtually a qualitative one and to make the method distinct from all others. It is not necessary to dilate here on the power it has displayed in advancing knowledge or the huge acceleration it has imparted to that process. It is more relevant to note the limits to which its application is subject. The scientific method is unfitted to tackle directly the turbulent stream of everyday experience and common affairs ; it must run off minute fractions of it into carefully specified and engineered channels before it can bring its powers to bear. Thus for example the work of social government is not as such directly accessible to it on account of the jumbled miscellaneity of the matters involved. In saying this I must guard myself against being thought to pronounce on a wholly different question which might be supposed to be similar. It is of course obvious that governments now existing fail to make use of much knowledge already established by science and capable of immediate application. Even however if this deplorable lag could be abolished, the direct application of scientific method to govern- ment itself as a whole would, with our present powers, be impossible. After what has been to some extent a digression we pick up the line of our argument again when we ask ourselves what part in the scientific method is taken by what I have called the extended reasoning process. The history of science is generally supposed to furnish a wonderful display of the triumphs of human reason. I must confess that the reading of
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