clouds, an idea which seems astonishing to us.[1] But even that is better than to regard the sun, moon, and stars as having a different nature from the earth, and science inevitably and rightly began with the most obvious hypothesis, and it was only the thorough working out of this that could show its inadequacy. It is just because the Greeks were the first people to take the geocentric hypothesis seriously that they were able to go beyond it. Of course the pioneers of Greek thought had no clear idea of the nature of scientific hypothesis, and supposed themselves to be dealing with ultimate reality, but a sure instinct guided them to the right method, and we can see how it was the effort to "save appearances"[2] that really operated from the first. It is to those men we owe the conception of an exact science which should ultimately take in the whole world as its object. They fancied they could work out this science at once. We sometimes make the same mistake nowadays, and forget that all scientific progress consists in the advance from a less to a more adequate hypothesis. The Greeks were the first to follow this method, and that is their title to be regarded as the originators of science.
XIV.Schools of philosophy. Theophrastos, the first writer to treat the history of Greek philosophy in a systematic way,[3] represented the early cosmologists as standing to one another in the relation of master and scholar, and as members of regular societies. This has been regarded as an anachronim, and some have even denied the existence of "schools" of philosophy altogether. But the statements of Theophrastos on such a subject are not to be lightly set aside. As this point is of
- ↑ It is well, however, to remember that Galileo himself regarded comets as meteorological phenomena.
- ↑ This phrase originated in the school of Plato. The method of research in use there was for the leader to "propound" (προτείνειν, προβάλλεσθαι) it as a "problem" (πρόβλημα) to find the simplest "hypothesis" (τίνων ὑποτεθέντων) on which it is possible to account for and do justice to all the observed facts (σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα). Cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, viii. 81, "how build, unbuild, contrive | To save appearances."
- ↑ See Note on Sources, § 7.
