Name: Rules and Advice on Scientific Research
Author: Santiago Ramón y Cajal

This is an AI modernization of Rules and Advice on Scientific Research into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg (6th edition, Madrid 1923). Also available as an epub.

Editor's Introduction

Santiago Ramón y Cajal was born in 1852 in Petilla de Aragón, a village in Navarre, the son of a country surgeon who later taught anatomy at Zaragoza. He was a difficult boy who wanted to be a painter. He qualified in medicine at Zaragoza in 1873, served as an army doctor in Cuba and came home with malaria, and then taught anatomy and histology at Valencia, Barcelona and, from 1892, Madrid. In Barcelona he took up Camillo Golgi's silver stain and, improving it, showed that the nervous system is made of separate cells, the neurons, and not a continuous net. In 1906 he and Golgi, who never accepted that conclusion, shared the Nobel Prize.

This book, known in English as Advice for a Young Investigator, began as his address on entering the Royal Academy of Sciences in Madrid, on 5 December 1897. A year later Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States in a short war, and Spaniards called it simply "the Disaster." Writers and politicians spent the next decades asking what was wrong with the country, and Cajal's answer was science: Spain was not decadent but untaught, and it would catch up only by training investigators. A friend, Dr. Lluria, paid to print it for students in 1899, and Cajal went on enlarging it; the third edition of 1912 added several chapters, among them the last, on sending young Spaniards abroad. By then the government had founded a Board for Advanced Study (1907) to do exactly that, and Cajal was its president until his death in 1934.

The book is advice from a working scientist to a beginner: how to choose a problem, why the great men were less great than they look, which habits ruin a gifted mind, how to write a paper and how to train a student. Much of it is funny. His portraits of the professor who collects microscopes and lets nobody touch them, or the scholar who reads everything and publishes nothing, are recognizable in any university today.

Some of it will read as strange or worse. Cajal writes as a patriot of a beaten country, and his "race" means the Spanish people in the language of his day. His chapter on the scientist's family sorts possible wives into four types and prefers the one who will obey; he believed it and said so plainly, and it is translated as he wrote it. Some of his science has dated too. Where a fact has since been corrected, or where his memory slipped, a short translator's note says so.

This edition is translated from the Spanish of the sixth edition (Madrid, 1923), as Project Gutenberg transcribed it; Cajal's preface to it calls the fourth to sixth editions his best text. His own notes, many of them added in later editions, appear as endnotes. The academic "we" of the Spanish becomes "I".

On the cover. A drawing by Cajal from his book on the structure of the nervous system, Textura del sistema nervioso del hombre y de los vertebrados (Madrid, 1899–1904), in the copy photographed by the Wellcome Collection, London (CC BY 4.0). It is his Fig. 15: a giant nerve cell from the lower part of Ammon's horn, the hippocampus, of a rabbit, stained by the Ehrlich–Bethe method. The cell body sits in the middle with its dendrites branching above and below; the beads along them are the varicosities he labeled d, and a is the axon. He drew thousands of cells like it, and the drawings were his evidence.

Preface to the Second Edition

Paid for by the generosity of Dr. Lluria.

This book is my address on admission to the Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences (the session of December 5, 1897), reprinted with a good deal of retouching and enlarging.

Like plenty of academic speeches far more deserving of an audience, it would have been forgotten on the shelves of the official libraries if a dear friend of mine, Dr. Lluria, had not generously reprinted it at his own expense to give away to students and to anyone with a taste for work in the laboratory.

Dr. Lluria believes (God reward him for so lovely an illusion) that the advice and warnings in it, coming as they do from someone in love with research, may do something to kindle love and enthusiasm for laboratory work in studious young people.

Whether this advice, set down with a fervor and enthusiasm that may be a little overdone and naive, will really help to make investigators, I can't say. I will only say this for myself: perhaps because I never got such advice from any relative or teacher when I took up the reckless ambition of devoting myself to the religion of the laboratory, I wasted the best years I had on useless attempts, and more than once I despaired of having any gift for scientific research at all. How many times, for want of knowing the literature (and sadly, not always for want of diligence but for want of money) and for want of anyone to show me the way, did I discover anatomical facts that had already been published in languages I couldn't read, and that the people who ought to have been able to read them couldn't read either!

And how many times, too, for lack of discipline, and above all because I lived far from the intellectual atmosphere that gives a new investigator his stimulus and his energy, did I give up the work at the very moment when, worn out and sick to death less of the work than of my sad and sapping solitude, I was beginning to glimpse the first faint dawn of the new idea!

Routine in science and mental servitude to foreigners ruled our schools so despotically in those days that when it was merely announced that I, a humble doctor just out of the lecture halls, with no prestigious official label, meant to publish an experimental paper on inflammation (a beginner's piece that was bad and incomplete, but showed good intentions and a love of work), one of the professors of my beloved University of Zaragoza, and by no means one of the worst, exclaimed in astonishment: "But who does Cajal think he is, to go passing judgment on the work of the learned!" And bear in mind that this professor was at the time (1880) our Faculty's most active writer and one of its most modern and best-informed minds. But he held the belief (still held, sadly, by many of our professors, whether sincerely or as a handy way to dress up their own laziness I can't say) that scientific discoveries are not the fruit of methodical work but gifts from heaven, graces generously bestowed by Providence on a privileged few, who are bound to belong to the most industrious nations: France, England, Germany and Italy, that is.

Fortunately, times have changed. The investigator in Spain today is not the solitary he once was. We are not yet a legion, but we already count a whole constellation of young enthusiasts held together in a heartening spiritual fellowship by the love of science and the wish to share in the great work of progress. Today, in short, those questions that all of us who love science asked ourselves as we took our first uncertain steps have lost their power to crush us: Who here cares about what I'm doing? Whom can I tell about the joy of my little discovery? If I get it right, who will applaud? And if I get it wrong, who will correct me and encourage me to go on?

Some readers of this address have pointed out to me, in a spirit of kindly criticism, that I give too much weight to the discipline of the will and too little to the exceptional gifts that great investigators possess. I am certainly not the one to deny that the most illustrious pioneers of science belong to the aristocracy of the mind, and that theirs were intellects of a very high order that those of us in the crowd of modest workers will never reach, however hard we try. But having made that concession, which is no more than just, I still believe that any man of ordinary understanding who hungers for a name has a broad field left in which to exercise his energies and try his luck. And luck, like the lottery, does not always smile on the rich; now and then it likes to brighten the homes of the humble. Consider, besides, that every man can, if he sets his mind to it, become the sculptor of his own brain, and that even the most poorly endowed can bring in a rich harvest, like poor land that is well tilled and well manured.

I may be wrong, but I declare in all sincerity that from my travels abroad and my conversations with illustrious scientists I came away with the impression (granting the odd exception) that most of them belong to the class of ordinary minds, but minds that are disciplined, highly cultivated, and driven by an insatiable appetite for fame. More than that: I have sometimes run into famous scientists who were inferior, in their passions as in their intellect, to the discovery that lifted them out of obscurity, a discovery they reached by the blind and unexpected paths of chance. The case of Courtois, of whom a witty writer said that nobody knows whether he discovered iodine or iodine discovered him, is more common than many people imagine.

In any case, what does it cost us to try whether we are capable of creating original science? And how shall we ever know whether there is someone among us gifted with superior aptitudes for science, if we don't give that person, through the benefits of a fitting moral and technical discipline, the occasion to reveal them? As Balmes says, "if Hercules had never handled anything but a walking stick, he would never have believed himself able to swing the heavy club."

May this humble pamphlet, which I address to studious youth, help to strengthen the love of laboratory work, and to revive the hopes, somewhat fallen after recent and crushing disasters, of all who believe in our intellectual and scientific rebirth!

Madrid, December 20, 1898.

Preface to the Third Edition

The edition paid for by Dr. Lluria's generosity ran out more than three years ago, and to meet the requests coming from America I had to allow this pamphlet to be reprinted in two American scientific journals. I was about to grant the same permission to a scientific and literary society in Spain when it dawned on me that leaving the little book to other people's initiative was a sin of negligence, and one that could make trouble.

I am far from deluding myself about the merits of my Address. From the philosophical point of view as much as the literary one, it has serious faults. No doubt today, with the help of wider and better-chosen reading in philosophy and education and of the fifteen years of teaching that have gone by since, I could enrich and improve its doctrine and clean it of many faults of style and not a few naive arrogances and exaggerations.

All the same, I can't bring myself to take the pruning knife hard to this modest work of my youth. Good or bad, every book has a personality of its own; the public has grown used to it and has the right to expect the author to respect it, and not to disguise it or spirit it away on the pretext of improving it. Besides, it may well be that now, an old man, I take for faults (and perhaps they are) the very features that caught the reader's attention and won his goodwill. Books are like people: we respect and admire them for their good qualities, but we love them only for some of their faults.

In case those suspicions are well founded, this third edition keeps the 1897 text essentially as it was. I have allowed myself only a few touches of style and the odd added paragraph to develop ideas the text had barely sketched. But this edition contains several new chapters, among them a last one in which I set out, as best I understand it, the work that Spain's teaching institutions, and above all the Board for Fellowships and Advanced Study Abroad, are called on to do, so that our country may join as soon as possible, as far as its mental powers and its finances allow, in the enterprise of universal culture and civilization.

Madrid, January 1912.

Preface to the Latest Editions

For the 4th, 5th and 6th editions.

Pressing work and the mounting ailments of age have kept me from enlarging and polishing the text of this little book as I wished. My plan, to repay the public's favor worthily and above all to answer the repeated requests of cultivated foreigners eager to translate it, was to make it as universal as I could, purging it of certain overheated exhortations and some outbursts of patriotism that would sound out of place or shrill in the ears of young people in nations where science, cultivated by long tradition and constantly renewed, has no need of strong stimulants. But, I repeat, forces greater than my will have reined in my reforming zeal. The book was written for Spain, and among Spaniards and Spanish Americans it must stay for now.

Even so, and in spite of the haste with which these last three editions were printed, I have made in each of them some changes I think worthwhile: I have struck out the odd thought that was cloyingly lyrical or plainly out of place; I have filed down the style where it was too leafy or incorrect; and I have developed some chapters, enriching them with new examples or relevant observations.

I sincerely believe, then, that these latest editions (the 4th, 5th and 6th) justify better than the earlier ones the undeserved favor shown by studious young people and the flattering welcome of certain illustrious professors, to whose kindness I remain fervently and humbly grateful.

Madrid, July 20, 1923.

Chapter 1: On General Methods

Thoughts on the general methods. Why abstract rules bear no fruit. The need to inform the mind and strengthen the will. How this book is divided.

I take it the reader has some general grounding in philosophy and education, and knows, therefore, that the chief sources of knowledge are observation, experiment, and reasoning, inductive and deductive.

It would be pointless to dwell on truths so well known. I'll only recall that the natural sciences gave up for good, a century ago now, on a priori principles, intuition, inspiration and dogma.

That peculiar way of reasoning of the Pythagoreans and Platonists (followed in modern times by Descartes, Fichte, Krause and Hegel, and lately, though only in part, by Bergson), which consists in exploring our own minds to find there the laws of the Universe and the answers to the great mysteries of life, now inspires only pity and distaste. Pity for the talent used up in chasing fantasies; distaste for all the time and labor so sadly thrown away.

The history of civilization proves to the point of tedium that metaphysics has failed, over and over, in its attempts to guess the laws of nature. It has rightly been said that the human intellect, turning its back on reality and wrapped up in itself, is powerless to explain even the simplest wheels of the machinery of the world and of life.

Faced with the phenomena that parade before the senses, the intellect can be really useful and fruitful only if it modestly confines itself to observing them, describing them, comparing them and classifying them by their likenesses and differences, so as to arrive afterward, by induction, at a knowledge of the conditions that determine them and of their empirical laws.

Another truth, worn quite threadbare with repetition, is that human science must give up, as an impossible undertaking, the explanation of first causes and any knowledge of the underlying substance hidden beneath the appearances of the Universe. As Claude Bernard declared, the investigator cannot get past the determinism of phenomena. His mission comes down to showing the how of the changes he observes, never the why. A modest ideal in philosophy, but still a grand one in practice: to know the conditions under which a phenomenon arises lets us produce it or stop it at will, and makes us its masters, free to put it to work for human life. Foresight and action: those are the fruits a man gets from the determinism of phenomena.

This strict discipline of determinism may seem a little narrow as philosophy¹. But we have to admit that in the natural sciences, and in biology above all, it works very well to protect us from that inborn urge to shut up the whole Universe in one general formula, a sort of germ in which everything is contained as the tree is in the seed. The seductive generalizations with which certain philosophers invade the biological sciences from time to time are usually purely verbal solutions, barren and without positive content. At best they are useful as "working hypotheses."

It must be confessed that the great riddles of the Universe listed by Du Bois-Reymond are, for now, out of reach. We have to resign ourselves to the ignoramus, "we do not know," and even to the inexorable ignorabimus, "we shall never know," proclaimed by the great German physiologist. For solving those formidable problems (the beginning of life, the nature of substance, the origin of motion, the appearance of consciousness, and so on) the human mind seems beyond doubt to be radically unfit. Our brain is an organ of action aimed at practical ends, and it seems to have been built not to find the ultimate reasons of things but to pin down their proximate causes and fix their constant relations. And this, which looks like little, is a great deal; for since we have been granted the supreme power of acting on the world, softening it and changing it for the benefit of life, we can get along very well without knowing the essence of things.

When it comes to general methods of research, we can't leave out those cure-alls of scientific invention called Bacon's Novum Organum and Descartes's Discourse on Method, the latter so warmly recommended by Claude Bernard. These are excellent books in every way for making us think, but nowhere near as good at teaching us to discover. I grant that reading them can suggest more than one fruitful idea. Still, I must declare that I am very close to thinking of them what De Maistre thought of the Novum Organum: "that those who have made the most discoveries in the sciences had never read it, and that Bacon himself never drew a single discovery from his rules." Liebig is harsher still when he says, in his celebrated Academic Address, that Bacon was a scientific dilettante whose writings, pompously praised by lawyers, historians and other people outside science, contain nothing of the procedures that lead to discovery.

The precepts Descartes laid down, namely to accept nothing as true but what is evident; to divide each difficulty into as many parts as needed to attack it better; to begin the analysis with the simplest objects and the easiest to understand, and to rise by degrees to knowledge of the most complex, and the rest, are rules that everyone uses by instinct in studying any difficult question. The French philosopher's merit lies not in having applied these rules, but in having stated them clearly and rigorously after having used them unconsciously, like everybody else, in his philosophical and geometrical reflections.

I am convinced that the little we get from reading such works, and in general from all writings on the philosophical methods of inquiry, comes from the vagueness and generality of their rules. When they are not empty formulas, they amount to a formal description of the machinery of the understanding at work on a problem. That machinery runs unconsciously in every head that is reasonably well organized and educated; and when the philosopher, by an act of reflection, sets out its psychological laws, neither he nor his reader becomes one bit better at scientific research. The writers on logical method strike me the way an orator would who hoped to grow more eloquent by studying the speech centers of the brain, the mechanics of the voice and the nerve supply of the larynx. As if knowing these anatomical and physiological contrivances could create an organization we lack, or improve the one we have!²

It is worth recording that the most dazzling discoveries were owed not to a knowledge of written logic but to the living logic a man carries in his mind, with which he works out ideas as perfectly unconsciously as Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose. Far more useful is reading the works of the great pioneers of science, such as Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Faraday, Ampère, Claude Bernard, Pasteur, Virchow, Liebig and the rest. And yet it has to be admitted that if we lack even a spark of the splendid light that shone in those minds, and at least an echo of the noble passions that drove such lofty characters, learning will turn us into enthusiastic or entertaining commentators, perhaps into worthy popularizers of science, but it will not create in us the spirit of research.

Nor, when the time comes to investigate, will we gain much from knowing the laws that govern the development of Science. Herbert Spencer says that intellectual progress goes from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and that, by virtue of the instability of the homogeneous and of the principle that every cause produces more than one effect, each discovery at once sets off a great many others. But while this notion lets us appreciate the historical course of Science, it cannot give us the key to its revelations. What matters would be to find out how each scientist, in his own field, managed to draw the heterogeneous out of the homogeneous, and why many men who set out to do it did not succeed.

Let me hasten to say, then, that there are no logical recipes for making discoveries, still less for turning people who lack that natural gift for reasoning I mentioned into lucky experimenters. As for geniuses, everyone knows they rarely bend to written rules: they prefer to make them. As Condorcet says, "mediocrities can be educated, but geniuses educate themselves."

Must we, for that reason, give up every attempt to instruct and train people in scientific inquiry? Are we to leave the beginner lost, thrown on his own resources and walking without a guide or advice down a road full of difficulties and dangers?

By no means. On the contrary, I think that if we leave the vague region of philosophical principles and abstract methods and come down to the ground of the particular sciences, and of the moral and instrumental technique that the process of inquiry cannot do without, we shall easily find some rules of real use to the new investigator.

Some advice about what he ought to know, about the technical training he needs, about the lofty passions that should spur him on, about the timidities and prejudices he will have to shed: this, I believe, can do him far more good than all the precepts and cautions of theoretical logic. That is the justification for this work, in which, to put it in a word, I have gathered the encouragement and fatherly warnings I would have liked to receive at the dawn of my own modest scientific career.

My warnings will be superfluous for anyone lucky enough to be trained in a scientist's laboratory, under the kindly influence of living rules embodied in an illustrious person moved by the noble proselytizing spirit of science and teaching. They will be idle, too, for strong characters and lofty talents, who, as I said, need no advice to rise to the knowledge of truth beyond what study and reflection suggest. But perhaps, I repeat, they will comfort and help many modest, timid spirits who hunger for a reputation and yet fail to gather the longed-for fruit, through weakness of will or through studying the wrong way.

My advice is aimed at the will more than at the intelligence, because I am convinced that the will, as Payot wisely says, can be educated just as much as the intelligence can; and I believe, besides, that every great work, in art as in science, is the result of a great passion put at the service of a great idea.

I shall divide this work into seven chapters. In the first I shall try to dispel the prejudices and false judgments that sap the beginner's strength and rob him of that robust faith in himself without which no research ever comes to a happy end; in the second I shall set out the moral qualities that ought to grace him, which are, as it were, the reservoirs of the energy that braces his will; in the third, what he needs to know to arrive well enough prepared on the field of battle with Nature. In the fourth I shall point out the diseases of the will and of judgment he must guard against; in the fifth I shall go through the plan and course of the research itself (observation, explanation or hypothesis, and verification); in the sixth I shall offer some advice on writing up the scientific work; and in the seventh, finally, I shall consider the investigator's duties as a teacher.³

Because it is a problem of exceptional importance in Spain, I shall end my little book with a short study of the causes of our scientific backwardness and of the State's obligations to promote and teach research.

Claude Bernard seems to me to go a little too far when, as examples to prove his thesis, he says that "we shall never know why opium puts us to sleep, or why the combination of hydrogen and oxygen gives rise to a body as different in its physical and chemical properties as water." This impossibility of reducing the properties of bodies to laws of the position, shape and motion of atoms (today we would say of ions and electrons) is real, but it does not seem to be real in principle and forever. ↩
This doctrine coincides remarkably with the one Schopenhauer developed (I did not know it when I wrote the first edition of this address) in his book The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, pages 98 and following. Discussing logic, he says "that the logician most versed in his science abandons the rules of logic as soon as he actually reasons." And further on: "to try to make practical use of logic is as if, before walking, one wished to take advice from mechanics." Eucken expresses a similar view in our own day when he says "that the laws and forms of logic are not enough to produce a living thought." ↩
Translator's note. Cajal counts from the chapter after this one, so his seven are this edition's Chapters 2 to 9, which follow his order; his list leaves out Chapter 6, on the social conditions science needs. ↩

Chapter 2: Prejudices That Sap the Beginner

Too much admiration. The belief that the subject is exhausted. Devotion to practical science. Lack of ability.

Excessive Admiration for the Work of the Great Pioneers

Among the most harmful prejudices of intellectual youth I count an excessive admiration for the work of great minds, and the conviction that, given how dim our own lights are, we can do nothing to carry it on or complete it.

This excessive devotion to genius is rooted in a double feeling of justice and modesty, too likable to be scolded. But if it takes over the novice's mind too far, it kills all initiative and makes him wholly unfit for original research. If we must have a fault, arrogance is better than timidity: boldness measures its strength and wins or is beaten, while excessive modesty runs from the battle and condemns itself to shameful idleness.

When you leave the atmosphere of prestige you breathe while reading the book of an investigator of genius, and go into the laboratory to check the facts on which he rests his fascinating ideas, it sometimes happens that your worship of the idol shrinks just as fast as your self-respect grows. Great men are sometimes geniuses, sometimes children, and always incomplete. And even granting that the genius comes out of the test of observation free of all error, consider that whatever he has discovered in a given field is next to nothing beside what he leaves undiscovered. Nature offers all of us an inexhaustible wealth. We have no reason to envy those who came before us, or to cry out like Alexander at Philip's victories: "My father is going to leave me nothing to conquer."

There is no denying that some scientific creations are so complete, so luminous and so solid that they seem the fruit of an almost divine intuition, sprung forth perfect like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. But our just admiration for such works would shrink a good deal if we imagined the time and effort, the patience and perseverance, the trial and error and correction, even the lucky accidents that worked toward the final success and contributed to it almost as much as the investigator's genius. It is the same with the marvelous adaptations of living bodies to particular functions. The eye or the ear of a vertebrate, looked at by itself, is a wonder, and it seems impossible that it was formed by natural laws alone. But if we consider all the gradations and transitional forms these organs show us along the series of descent, from the shapeless sketch of an eye in certain infusoria and worms up to the complicated organization of the eye of a lower vertebrate, our admiration loses much of its force, and the mind ends by getting used to the idea of a natural formation through variation, organic correlation, selection⁴ and adaptation.

What a tonic it would be for the new observer if his teacher, instead of dazzling and disheartening him with the sublimity of great finished achievements, laid out for him how each scientific discovery came about, the string of errors and hesitations that went before it, which make up, from the human point of view, the true explanation of every discovery! A teaching tactic that clever would convince us that the discoverer, for all his enlightened mind and powerful will, was after all a man like anyone else.

Far from being cowed by the great authorities of Science, the novice investigator should know that his destiny, by a law cruel but inescapable, is to grow a little at the expense of their reputations. Few people who have opened their scientific explorations with any luck have not had to chip away at the pedestal of some idol, historical or living. For the classic examples, remember Galileo refuting Aristotle on gravitation; Copernicus wrecking Ptolemy's system of the world; Lavoisier reducing Stahl's idea of phlogiston to nothing; Virchow refuting the spontaneous generation of cells supposed by Schwann, Schleiden and Robin. This law is so general and so binding that it holds in every field of Science and reaches even the humblest investigators. If I may even mention myself after such lofty examples, I would add that when I began my inquiries into the anatomy and physiology of the nerve centers, the first obstacle I had to clear away was the false theory of Gerlach and Golgi about the diffuse nerve networks of the gray matter and about the way the currents are transmitted.

The life of a scientist usually has two phases. The first is the creative or opening one, given to destroying the errors of the past and bringing new truths to light. The second is the senile or argumentative one (which doesn't necessarily coincide with old age), in which, as the power of scientific production wanes, he defends the hypotheses hatched in his youth⁵, sheltering them with fatherly love from the attacks of newcomers. No great man, once he has entered history, fails to be a miser of his titles, or to fight the new generation tooth and nail over its rights to glory. Very sad, but usually very true, is that bitter saying of Rousseau's: "There is no scientist who does not prefer a lie he invented himself to a truth discovered by someone else."

Even in the most perfect sciences you will always find some doctrine held up by nothing but authority. To show that it is false, and if possible refute it with new research, will always be an excellent way to open your own scientific work. It matters little if the reform is greeted with spiteful criticism, with treacherous abuse, with silences crueler still. As long as reason is on his side, the innovator will soon carry the young with him, who, being young, have no past to defend; and fighting beside him will be all those impartial scientists who, amid the overpowering torrent of the reigning doctrine, kept a calm mind and an independent judgment.

But tearing down is not enough. You have to build. Scientific criticism is justified only when it hands over a truth in exchange for an error. As a rule the new doctrine will rise from the ruins of the abandoned one, and will rest strictly on facts rightly interpreted. The innovator must make no pious concessions to the traditional error or to fallen ideas, if he doesn't want to see his fame quickly shared by the detail men and improvers who spring up in great numbers after every discovery, like mushrooms in the shade of a tree.

The Belief That the Subjects of Science Are Exhausted

Here is another of the false notions you often hear from our brand-new graduates: "Everything of substance in every scientific subject has been worked out. What does it matter if I add some detail, if I glean in a field where more diligent observers have already brought in a rich harvest? My work won't change the face of Science, and my name won't come out of obscurity."

That is often how laziness talks when it dresses up as modesty. That is how some young people of merit reason when they feel the first faintness that comes over them at the thought of the great undertaking. There is nothing for it but to root out so shallow a conception of Science, if the young investigator doesn't want to be beaten for good in the struggle going on in his will between the utilitarian promptings of his moral surroundings, which would make him a common, well-paid practitioner, and the noble impulses of duty and patriotism that draw him toward honor and glory.

Eager to pay the honorable debt he has contracted with his teachers, the new observer would like to find a fresh vein of ore lying right at the surface, easy to work, that would lift his name with a single push. Unfortunately, as soon as he starts his first explorations of the literature, he sees with sorrow that the metal lies very deep, and that the surface deposit has been almost exhausted by lucky observers who got there first and exercised the comfortable right of first occupants.

People who reason this way don't stop to think that if we have come too late for some questions, we have been born too early for others; and that a century from now we ourselves will be, by the force of things, the hoarders of science, the deflowerers of subjects and the strippers of details.

All the same, there's no denying that there are periods when, starting from a fact discovered by chance or from the invention of a happy method, great scientific advances come in a series, as if by spontaneous generation. That is what happened in the Renaissance, when Descartes, Pascal, Galileo, Bacon, Bayle, Newton, our own Sánchez and others laid bare the errors of the ancients and spread the belief that, far from having exhausted the sciences, the Greeks had barely taken the first steps toward a positive knowledge of the Universe⁶. It is a great piece of luck for a scientist to be born in one of these great crises of ideas, when much of the work of the past has been swept clean away and nothing is easier than to choose a fruitful subject.

But let's not exaggerate this point. Bear in mind that even in our own day the building of science often rises on the ruins of theories that passed for indestructible. Consider that while some sciences seem close to perfection, others are still taking shape and some are not yet born. In Biology especially, despite the immense work of the last century, the most essential questions still await an answer (the origin of life, the problem of heredity and evolution, the structure and chemical makeup of the cell, and so on).

In general it can be said that there are no exhausted questions, only men exhausted by questions. Ground stripped bare for one scientist proves fertile for another. A fresh mind that comes to a subject without prejudice will always find a new side to it, something missed by those who thought the study had been worked out for good. Our knowledge is so fragmentary that unheard-of findings turn up when least expected even in the most thoroughly explored subjects. A few years ago, who would have suspected that light and heat still held secrets from Science! And yet there they are, the argon in the atmosphere, Röntgen's X-rays and the Curies' radium, to show how inadequate our methods are and how premature our syntheses.

It is in Biology that Saint-Hilaire's fine phrase applies best: "Before us there is always the infinite." And Carnoy's no less vivid thought: "Science is being created, but it is never created." Not everyone can venture into the forest and cut a usable road by sheer energy. But even the humblest of us can make use of the path genius has opened, and, walking along it, wrest some secret from the unknown.

Even granting that the beginner must resign himself to gathering details that escaped the sharp eyes of the pioneers, it is also a fact that the hunters of small details end up acquiring such an exquisite analytical sensitivity and such remarkable skill in observation that eventually they take on the great questions with success.

How many facts, trivial to all appearances, have led investigators properly prepared by a knowledge of methods to great scientific conquests! And consider, too, that as Science keeps dividing into specialties, today's trifles may be tomorrow's important truths.

That is without even counting the fact that our sense of the important and the incidental, the great and the small, rests on a false judgment, a real anthropomorphic error. In Nature there is no higher and lower, no incidental and principal. These ranks our mind likes to assign to natural phenomena come from looking at things not in themselves and in their inner connections, but only in relation to the use or pleasure they can give us. In the chain of life every link is equally valuable, because every link is equally necessary. We judge small what we see from far off or don't know how to see. Even from the standpoint of human selfishness, how many questions of the highest human importance throb in the mysterious protoplasm of the humblest microbe! Nothing in bacteriology seems more momentous than knowing the infectious bacteria, and nothing more secondary than knowing the harmless microbes that swarm in infusions and rotting organic matter. And yet, if these humble fungi disappeared, whose mission is to return to the general circulation of matter the elements locked up by the higher animals and plants, the planet would soon become uninhabitable for man.

Perhaps nowhere does the importance of detail show itself better than in the technical methods of Biology. To give just one example, remember that R. Koch, the great German bacteriologist, because he had the idea of adding a little alkali to a basic aniline dye, managed to stain and discover the tuberculosis bacillus, and so unraveled the cause of a disease that had until then defied the sharpest minds of the most illustrious pathologists.

Even the most distinguished intellects have shared in this lack of moral perspective when it comes to weighing scientific gains. How many seeds of great inventions, mentioned as curiosities of little account, do we find today in the works of the ancients, and even of the scientists of the Renaissance! Lost in an indigestible treatise of theology (Christianismi Restitutio), Servetus wrote three lines on the pulmonary circulation, almost in passing, and they are now his chief title to glory. How surprised the Aragonese philosopher would be if he came back to life today and saw his laborious metaphysical disquisitions entirely forgotten and a fact exalted that he must have thought no more of than as a side argument for his thesis that the soul resides in the blood! A passage of Seneca shows that the ancients already knew the magnifying power of a glass globe full of water. Who would have suspected that this magnifying effect, ignored for centuries, held asleep in germ two powerful instruments of analysis, the microscope and the telescope, and two sciences each grander than the other, Astronomy and Biology!

To sum up, there are no small questions; those that look small are great questions not understood. Instead of trifles unworthy of the thinker's attention, what there are is men whose intellectual smallness can't see into the importance of the minute. Nature is a harmonious mechanism in which every part, even those that seem to play an incidental role, works toward the whole. Looking at this mechanism, the shallow man arbitrarily sorts its chief organs into essential and secondary. The judicious thinker, on the other hand, is content to classify them, without regard to their size or their immediate usefulness, as known and little known. As for their future importance, no one can be a prophet.

The Exclusive Worship of So-Called Practical Science

Another vice of thought to be fought at all costs is the false distinction between theoretical science and practical science, with the praise of the latter and the systematic scorn of the former that go with it. This error spreads unnoticed among the young and turns them away from all disinterested inquiry.

It is certainly not the people in the trade who fall into this misjudgment, but many lawyers, writers, industrialists, and sadly even some prominent statesmen, whose initiatives can have the gravest consequences for the work of our national culture.

Such people never stop saying things like this: "Fewer learned doctors and more industrialists. Nations don't measure their greatness by what they know, but by the wealth of scientific discoveries applied to commerce, industry, agriculture, medicine and the art of war. Let's leave the slow, phlegmatic Germans to their subtle researches in pure science, to their mad urge to probe the last springs of life, and devote ourselves instead to squeezing the practical juice out of the principles of Science, embodying them in real improvements to human life. Spain needs engines for our trains and ships, practical recipes for agriculture and industry, fertilizer plants, rational hygiene; in short, whatever helps increase the population, wealth and well-being of nations. God deliver us from idle scientists, amusing themselves with subtle speculations or given over to conquering the minute, which, if it didn't cost so much, could be called a frivolous and even ridiculous pastime."

Such is the heap of absurdities constantly put forward by people who travel abroad and, through some strange mirage, see progress in the effects and not in the causes; who, in their short-sightedness, don't notice the mysterious threads that tie the factory to the laboratory as the stream is tied to its spring. They honestly believe that scientists, like nations, fall into two groups: those who waste their time on speculations of pure and barren science, and those who know how to find facts of immediate use for enlarging and easing life⁷.

Do I really need to insist on how absurd this doctrine is? Is there anyone so short of common sense as not to notice that wherever principles or facts are discovered, applications spring up at once? In Germany, France and England the factory lives in close communion with the laboratory, and as a rule the very person who first found the scientific truth directs its industrial use, either himself or through companies set up to exploit it. These alliances are plain to see in the great aniline dye works that are one of the richest veins of German, Swiss and French industry. The fact is so well known that examples to prove it are hardly needed. Still, because they are recent and telling, I want to give you two. One is the great industry of precision lenses (for microscopes, cameras and telescopes) created in Germany by the deep studies in mathematical optics of Professor Abbe of Jena, which give Prussia a monopoly of enormous value paid for by the whole world⁸. The other is the manufacture of therapeutic serums, born in Berlin and perfected in Paris, in which, as is natural and right, Behring and Roux take part, the creators of the scientific principles of serum therapy.

Let us cultivate science for its own sake, without thinking for the moment of its applications. They always come, sometimes after years, sometimes after centuries. It hardly matters whether a scientific truth is put to use by our children or by our grandchildren. The cause of progress would be in a fine state if Galvani, Volta, Faraday and Hertz, the discoverers of the basic facts of the science of electricity, had despised their findings because at the time they had no industrial use!

I have already said that the useless, even from the human standpoint (with the necessary qualifications of time and place), does not exist in Nature. And in the last resort, even if certain scientific conquests could never be put to our comfort and profit, one real use would always remain: the noble satisfaction of our curiosity satisfied, and the incomparable delight the mind feels in its sense of power over a difficulty overcome.

In short, when you take on a problem, consider it in itself, without being drawn aside by secondary motives whose pursuit would scatter your attention and weaken your analytical force. In the struggle with Nature the biologist, like the astronomer, must forget the earth he lives on and fix his gaze on the serene region of ideas, where, sooner or later, the light of truth will appear. Once the new fact is established, its applications will come in their season, that is, when another fact turns up able to fertilize it; for, as everyone knows, an invention is nothing but the joining of two or more truths into a useful result. Science records many facts whose usefulness is unknown today. But after some decades, or perhaps centuries, a new truth sees the light that has some mysterious affinity with them, and the resulting industrial offspring is called photography, the phonograph, spectral analysis, wireless telegraphy, mechanical flight and so on. It is always a synthesis, sooner or later. Porta discovered the camera obscura, an isolated fact that was hardly used except as an aid to drawing. Wedgwood and Davy pointed out in 1802 that photographic images could be obtained on paper soaked in a solution of silver nitrate, but since the copy could not be fixed, this second finding had no consequences. Then came John Herschel, who managed to dissolve away the silver salt that the light had not acted on, and with that it became possible to fix the fleeting outline of light. Even so, the weak sensitivity of the silver salts used up to then made Porta's apparatus almost impossible to use. At last Daguerre appears and in 1839, with the exquisite sensitivity of silver iodide, discovers the latent image; he admirably combines the inventions of his predecessors and lays the foundations of photography as we know it.

That is how all inventions evolve. The materials are carted in, at different times, by observers as shrewd as they are unlucky, who never reap any fruit from their findings while they wait for the truths that will fertilize them. But once all the data have been gathered, along comes a fortunate scientist, fortunate less for his originality than for being born at the right moment. He looks at the facts from the human point of view, makes the synthesis, and the invention appears.

Supposed Lack of Ability

To excuse their desertions and their faint hearts, some people plead a lack of ability for science. "I enjoy laboratory work," they tell me, "but I'm no good at inventing anything." It is true that there are heads unsuited to experimental work, and among them I count all those incapable of sustained attention and empty of curiosity and of wonder at the works of Nature. But are the great majority of those who confess themselves incapable really so? Don't they perhaps exaggerate the difficulties of the undertaking and the poverty of their gifts? I believe so, and I'll add that many habitually mistake for incapacity what is merely slowness in grasping and learning, and sometimes plain laziness, or the lack of some secondary quality, such as patience, care for detail or perseverance, qualities quickly acquired with the habit of work and the satisfaction of success.

In my view the list of people fit for scientific work is much longer than is believed. It includes not only the superior talents, the quick learners, the sharp wits hungry for a reputation and eager to tie their names to a great work, but also those ordinary minds known as handy for the skill and sureness with which they do any manual task; those others with an artistic temperament who feel the beauty of Nature's works intensely; and finally the merely curious, the phlegmatic, the unhurried, devotees of the religion of the minute, able to spend long hours examining the most insignificant natural phenomenon. Science, like an army, needs generals and soldiers: the generals conceive the plan, but it is the soldiers who actually win. And the collaboration of those who refine and confirm is no less valuable for being modest: thanks to these workers of progress the idea of the genius gains force and clarity, and passes from an abstract symbol to a living reality, valued and known by all.

There are various ways for each person to make sure of his aptitude for laboratory work. Speaking of the studies I love best, I would recommend these two:

1. Take up an analytical method that has a name for being uncertain and difficult, and keep at it, with patience and hard work, until you get the results the authors report. Success in this, especially if achieved without the teacher's supervision, that is, working alone, is a clear sign of aptitude for research.

2. Study a scientific subject of some difficulty, one full of conflicting opinions, preparing for it by looking over the state of the question in a superficial way (merely reading the reference books, without going as far as the specialist Monographs). If after some months of experimental work our beginner finds, on consulting the latest literature on the subject, that he has managed to anticipate some recent discoveries; that on hotly disputed points he has agreed with the interpretations of illustrious scientists; that, in short, he has succeeded in steering clear of errors of judgment some authors fell into, then he should drop his timidity and give himself without reserve to scientific work. Triumphs and satisfactions await him there, few or many according to the energy he puts in.

Even people of middling intellectual gifts can achieve something, provided they keep a firm faith in the creative power of education and confine themselves to going deep into a limited subject over a long time.

At the risk of repeating myself, or seeming tedious and long-winded, let me set the following reflections against those who doubt the miracles of the will:

(a) As many thinkers and educators have said, discovery is not the fruit of any specially gifted talent, but of common sense improved and strengthened by technical training and by the habit of thinking about scientific problems⁹. Whoever has reasonable judgment for steering through life, then, will have enough to make his way freely along the road of research.

(b) The young brain has an exquisite plasticity, by virtue of which, driven by an energetic will, it can greatly improve its organization, creating new associations among ideas and refining and sharpening its judgment.

(c) Shortfalls in native aptitude can be made up by extra work and attention. One might say that work takes the place of talent, or better, creates talent. Whoever wants with all his heart to improve his capacity will succeed in the end, provided the training does not begin too late, at an age when the plasticity of the nerve cells has almost entirely stopped. Let us not forget that by reading and thinking over masterpieces any man can make his own a large part of the mind that created them, since he takes from it not only its doctrines but its judgment, its guiding principles and even its style.

(d) In most cases what we call a special talent or genius implies a superiority not of quality but of speed. It consists only in doing quickly and splendidly what ordinary minds work out slowly, but well. Instead of dividing minds into great and small, it would be better and more accurate (at least in many cases) to class them as slow and quick¹⁰. Quick minds are certainly the most dazzling and stimulating. They are irreplaceable in conversation, in public speaking, in journalism, in any work where time is the deciding factor. But in the undertakings of science the slow ones are as useful as the quick, because the scientist, like the artist, is judged not by how fast he produces but by how good his product is. I would even venture to add that, by a very common compensation, slow heads have great staying power for prolonged attention and plow a broad, deep furrow through a question, while quick ones tend to tire soon, having barely cleared the ground. There are many exceptions to this, however: Newton, Davy, Pasteur, Virchow and others were quick talents and left a broad, shining wake.

(e) If, despite all our efforts to improve it, our memory is fickle and has a poor grip, let us manage it well. As Epictetus says: "When the game of life deals you bad cards, there's nothing to do but make the best of the ones you hold." The history of great discoveries teaches that their excellence does not always flow from a superior mind, but from an ordinary understanding and memory, skillfully used. Great innovators in science, such as Helmholtz, complained of a poor memory and thought learning a text by heart a torment. By way of compensation, people with a poor memory for words and phrases usually have an excellent memory for ideas and for chains of reasoning. Locke already noticed that people of great wit and a ready memory don't always excel in judgment.

(f) To give all our scant faculties to the subject of our thought, let us throw out unnecessary occupations, and those parasitic ideas about the futile trifles of life, and fix in our minds, by hard, persistent attention, only the data that bear on the problem at hand. While our work is gestating, let us condemn ourselves to ignorance of everything else: politics, literature, music, gossip and the rest. There are cases where ignorance is a great virtue, almost a heroism. Useless books, which distract the attention, weigh and take up room in our brains as much as on library shelves, and they undo or hinder the mind's adaptation to the subject. Knowledge does take up room, whatever the proverb says.

(g) Even a middling talent can distinguish itself with worthy work in several sciences, provided it gives up the pretension of embracing them all at once. It will concentrate its attention on each subject in turn, that is, period by period, and let its earlier acquisitions in other fields weaken or fade. Which is to say that the brain can be adapted to the whole of science in time, but not in space. In fact even great minds go about it this way; and when some scientist amazes us with publications on various disciplines, note that each subject belongs to a period. Certainly, his earlier knowledge will not have vanished entirely from the author's mind, but it will have been simplified, condensed into formulas or extremely abbreviated symbols, so that a large space is left free on the cerebral slate for recording and printing the new images.

Today I believe less in the power of natural selection than I did when I wrote these lines thirty years ago. The more I study the organization of the eye in vertebrates and invertebrates, the less I understand the causes of its marvelous and exquisitely adapted organization. ↩
In a recent book Ostwald confirms this, pointing out that nearly all great discoveries were the work of young men. Newton, Davy, Faraday, Hertz and Mayer are good examples. ↩
The dazzling series of electrical discoveries that followed Volta's invention of the battery at the beginning of the last century; the host of histological studies set off by Schwann's discovery of cell multiplication; and the deep repercussions throughout physics of the fairly recent discovery of Röntgen's rays (the finding of radioactivity, the discovery of radium, of polonium, of the phenomenon of emanation, and so on): these are good examples of the creative and in a sense automatic power that every great discovery has, which seems to grow and multiply like seed thrown at random on fertile ground. ↩
The common opinion attacked here has been eloquently rejected by nearly every scientist. I can't resist, however, the temptation to copy a comparison put forward in various splendid forms by our incomparable popularizer of science, Don José Echegaray, whose death has left Spanish science orphaned of a great talent:

"Pure science is like the splendid cloud of gold and scarlet that spreads across the West amid flashes of light and marvelous shades. It is no illusion; it is the radiance, the beauty of truth. But that cloud rises, the wind carries it over the fields, and it takes on darker and sterner tints. It is going to work, changing its holiday clothes, so to speak, for a work smock. And then it condenses into rain, and waters the land, and toils in the soil, and prepares the coming harvest, and in the end gives men their daily bread. What began as beauty for the soul and the mind ends as food for our poor bodily life." (Academy of Sciences, solemn session of March 12, 1916.) ↩
This was written in 1896. Today the optical instrument works at Jena has no fewer than 33 investigators at the head of its departments, mathematicians, opticians, mechanics and chemists, all of the first rank. Legions of chemists work as well in the great German chemical works, proving that the only way for industry to avoid routine and stagnation is to make the laboratory the anteroom of the factory. ↩
"It is common sense working at high tension," in the vivid phrase of our Echegaray. ↩
This doctrine coincides remarkably with the division into classics and romantics (talents of slow reactions and talents of quick reactions) given by Ostwald in his recent and interesting book on Great Men. ↩

Chapter 3: The Moral Qualities of an Investigator

The moral qualities an investigator ought to have.

The qualities a researcher cannot do without are independence of mind, intellectual curiosity, perseverance in work, a religion of country, and the love of glory.

Of intellectual gifts I need say nothing, since I take it for granted that anyone drawn to laboratory work has a decent understanding, an imagination not to be despised, and above all that harmonious balance of faculties which is worth far more than a brilliance that is erratic and lopsided.

Charles Richet says that the man of genius combines the idealism of Don Quixote with the good sense of Sancho. The investigator should have something of this happy combination: an artistic temperament that leads him to seek out and contemplate the number, beauty and harmony of things, and a sound critical sense able to rein in the reckless leaps of fancy and to make sure that, in the struggle for life that ideas wage in our minds, the thoughts that win are the ones that most faithfully render objective reality.

Independence of Judgment

The dominant trait of eminent investigators is a proud independence of judgment. Faced with the work of their predecessors and teachers, they do not stand awestruck and crushed, but wary and searching. The minds that, like Vesalius, Eustachius and Harvey, corrected Galen's anatomy, and those others named Copernicus, Kepler, Newton and Huygens, who threw down the astronomy of the ancients, were no doubt illustrious intellects. But above all they had an individuality of mind, ambitious and hard to satisfy, and an extraordinary critical daring. Saints may come from the docile and humble, but scientists seldom do. I am convinced that excessive love of tradition, the stubborn insistence on fixing Science in the old formulas of the past, when it does not betray an invincible mental laziness, is the flag that covers the vested interests created by error.

Woe to the man who stands speechless and spellbound before a book! Extreme admiration shrinks the personality and clouds the understanding, until it takes hypotheses for proofs and shadows for light.

I am well aware that not everyone can spot at first reading the gaps and blemishes of an inspired book. Excessive veneration, like every state of passion, shuts out the critical sense. If after a seductive reading we feel weak, let a few days go by; then, with a cool head and a calm judgment, let us read it a second time and even a third. Little by little the gaps appear, the weak reasoning shows itself, the ingenious hypotheses lose their credit and reveal how flimsy their foundations are, and even the magic of the style ends by leaving us unmoved. Our understanding, in a word, fights back. The book no longer has a devotee in us, but a judge. This is the moment to investigate, to replace the author's hypotheses with more reasonable ones, to put everything to strict criticism.

Like many natural beauties, human works must be seen from a distance if they are not to lose their charm. Analysis is the microscope that brings us close to the object and shows us the coarse warp of the weave; the illusion vanishes when the artifice of the embroidery and the faults of the design leap to the eye.

It may be said that in our times, which have seen so many idols toppled and so many old reputations diminished or forgotten, there is no need to call for a critical sense and a spirit of doubt. Certainly it is not as urgent today as in other periods; but routine still keeps its privileges. It still happens far too often that the disciples of an illustrious man spend their talents not on shedding light on new problems but on defending their master's errors. It should be noted that even in this age of irreverent criticism and the reappraisal of values, the discipline of the school reigns in the universities of France, Germany and Italy with a despotism that sometimes smothers the best initiatives and keeps original thinkers from flowering. Those of us who fight in the breach as plain soldiers could give so many cases of this servitude to a school or a coterie! How many talents I know whose only misfortune was to have been the pupils of a great man! I mean here those generous and grateful natures who, though they know how to seek out the truth, dare not proclaim it for fear of robbing the master of part of a prestige that, resting as it does on error, will sooner or later fall to the push of less scrupulous opponents.

As for those docile natures, as open to suggestion as they are passive and persistent in error, who make up the retinue of the heads of schools, their mission has always been to flatter genius and applaud its aberrations. This is the homage of vassalage that mediocrity complacently pays to superior talent. It is easy to understand once we remember that weak brains adapt better to error, which is almost always simple, than to the truth, which is often austere and difficult.

Perseverance in Study

The writers on logic rightly praise the creative power of attention, but they say little about one variety of it, which might be called cerebral polarization or chronic attention: the steady orientation of all our faculties, for months and even years, toward one object of study. There are countless gifted minds that come to nothing in their thinking for want of this quality, which the French call esprit de suite. I could name Spaniards by the dozen who, with an intellect admirably suited to scientific research, withdrew discouraged from a question without ever seriously measuring their strength, and perhaps at the very moment when Nature was about to reward their labors with the long-awaited revelation. Our lecture halls and laboratories are full of these fickle, restless natures who love research and spend their days from dawn to dusk at the retort or the microscope. Their feverish activity shows in an avalanche of lectures, pamphlets and books, in which they lavish considerable learning and talent. They are forever lashing out at the chattering mob of translators and theorists, proclaiming the absolute need for observation and of studying Nature in Nature herself. And when, after long years of propaganda and experimental work, you ask the intimates of these men, the regulars of the mysterious coterie where they officiate in full pontificals, about the sublime master's discoveries, they confess with a blush that the very force of his talent, the near impossibility of seeing on a small scale the extraordinary breadth and reach of the work he took on, has prevented him from achieving any particular and positive advance. That is the inevitable fruit of slackness or of attention scattered too wide, and of a childish show of encyclopedism, unthinkable today, when even the most eminent scientists specialize and concentrate in order to produce. But I shall deal with the vices of the will later on.

To bring a scientific inquiry to a successful end, once we know the methods that lead to the goal, we must fix the terms of the problem firmly in our minds, so as to set up strong currents of thought, that is, ever more complex and precise associations between the images received through observation and the ideas dozing in our unconscious, ideas that only a vigorous concentration of our mental energies can bring into the field of consciousness. Expectant, intent attention is not enough; we have to reach the point of obsession. We must use for the work every lucid moment of the mind: the meditation that follows a long rest, the super-intensive mental work that only a nerve cell heated by congestion can give, and the unexpected intuition that often flies, like the spark from the flint, out of the clash of scientific discussion.

Nearly everyone who distrusts his own strength is unaware of the marvelous power of prolonged attention. This kind of polarization of the brain toward a certain order of perceptions sharpens the judgment, enriches our analytical sensitivity, spurs the constructive imagination, and, concentrating all the light of reason on the darkness of the problem, lets us discover unexpected and subtle relations in it. With hours of exposure, a photographic plate at the focus of a telescope pointed at the sky will reveal stars so distant that the most powerful telescope cannot show them. With time and attention, the intellect comes to see a ray of light in the darkness of the most abstruse problem.

The comparison is not quite exact. Astronomical photography merely records faint stars that were already there, whereas in the work of the brain there is an act of creation. It is as if the mental image, stubbornly contemplated, put out invading feelers like an amoeba, which, after growing in all directions and suffering detours and halts, ended by binding themselves tightly to related ideas.

Forging a new truth nearly always demands strict abstentions and sacrifices. During this intellectual incubation the investigator should be like the sleepwalker who heeds only the hypnotist's voice, seeing and considering nothing but what relates to his object of study. In the lecture hall, out walking, at the theater, in conversation, even in reading purely for art, he will look for occasions of intuition, comparison and hypothesis that might bring some light to the question that obsesses him. In this process of adaptation nothing is useless. The first crude errors, and the false trails down which imagination ventures, are necessary, because they end by leading us onto the right road, and so they are part of the final success, as the first shapeless sketches are part of the artist's finished painting.

When one reflects on the curious power man has to change and improve his mental activity with respect to an object or problem he has pondered at length, one can't help suspecting that the brain, thanks to its plasticity, evolves anatomically and dynamically, adapting itself progressively to the subject. This fitting and specific organization acquired by the nerve cells produces in the long run what I would call professional or adaptive talent, and its motor is the will itself, the energetic resolve to fit our understanding to the nature of the subject. In a certain sense it would be no paradox to say that the man who poses a problem is not entirely the same man who solves it. That gives an easy, plain explanation for the cries of astonishment every investigator lets out when he sees how easy the solution was that he sought so laboriously. "Why didn't that occur to me from the start!" we cry. "How blind I was, insisting on going down roads that lead nowhere!"

If in spite of everything the solution does not appear, and yet we sense that the matter is ripening, let us take some time to rest. A few weeks of leisure and silence in the country will bring calm and clarity back to the mind. This freshness of the intellect, like the morning frost, will wither the parasitic and noxious growth that was choking the good seed. And at last the flower of truth will appear, usually opening its calyx at daybreak after a long, deep sleep, in those peaceful morning hours that Goethe and so many others thought favorable to invention.

Travel, too, by bringing us new images of the world and stirring up the store of our ideas, has the precious power of renewing thought and dispelling the preoccupations that sap our strength. How many times the rough clatter of the locomotive and the spiritual solitude and quiet of the railway carriage (the desert of men, as Descartes would say) have suggested ideas to me that the laboratory later justified!

In times like ours, when scientific research has become a regular profession drawing a salary from the State, it is not enough for the observer to concentrate on one subject for a long time: he also has to work at great speed. Gone are the fine old days when the student of Nature, shut away in the silence of his study, could be sure that no rival would come to disturb his quiet meditations. Nowadays research is a fever. Barely is a new method sketched out when many scientists seize on it and apply it almost simultaneously to the same subjects, diminishing the glory of the originator, who lacks the leisure and the time to gather all the fruit of his industry and his lucky star.

Coincidences and quarrels over priority are therefore unavoidable. Once an idea has been put before the public, it becomes part of the intellectual atmosphere on which we all feed our minds; and because of the functional synchrony that reigns in heads prepared and polarized for a given piece of work, the new idea is taken up at the same time in Paris and Berlin, in London and Vienna, in almost identical ways and with similar developments and applications. The invention grows and develops like an organism, spontaneously and automatically, as if scientists were reduced to mere growers of the seed sown by a genius. Everyone glimpses the splendid flowering of new facts, and everyone naturally wants to corner the splendid harvest. That explains the impatience to publish, and the imperfect, fragmentary character of so much laboratory work. The eagerness to get there first sometimes leads us into rashness, but it also happens that the feverish urge to reach the finish line first wins us the merit of priority.

In any case, if someone gets ahead of us, we'd be wrong to lose heart. Let us carry on with the work undaunted; in the end our turn will come. A glorious woman, Madame Curie, gave us an eloquent example of tireless perseverance. Having discovered the radioactivity of thorium, she had the unpleasant surprise of learning that the same fact had been announced shortly before by Schmidt in Wiedemann's Annalen. Far from being discouraged by the news, she pressed on with her inquiries without a pause. She tested new substances with the electroscope, among them a certain uranium oxide (pitchblende) from the mine at Johanngeorgenstadt, whose radioactive power is four times that of uranium. And suspecting that this highly active material contained a new element, she undertook, with Monsieur Curie's help, a series of ingenious, patient and heroic labors whose reward was the discovery of a new element, the astonishing radium, whose marvelous properties, setting off a great deal of research, have revolutionized chemistry and physics.

In Spain, where laziness is less a vice than a religion, people find it hard to understand those monumental works of the German chemists, naturalists and physicians in which the time needed just to make the drawings and consult the literature would seem to be counted in decades. And yet these books were written in a year or two, calmly, without feverish haste. The secret lies in the method of work: in using every available moment for the task; in never taking one's daily rest without having given at least two or three hours to the work; in putting a prudent dam against the scattering of the mind and the waste of time that social life demands; in cutting short, as far as possible, the clever chatter of the café or the evening gathering, which squanders nervous energy (when it doesn't cause quarrels) and takes us away from the main task with childish vanities and futile cares.

If our occupations allow us to give the subject only two hours, let us not give up the work on the pretext that we would need four or six. As Payot wisely says, "a little is enough each day, if each day we achieve that little."

The trouble with certain distractions, when they grow too dominant, is not so much the time they steal as the slackening of the mind's creative tension, and the loss of that sort of tone our nerve cells acquire when we have adapted them to a particular subject.

I don't mean to forbid distractions altogether; but the investigator's will always be light ones, such as don't hinder in the least the formation of new associations of ideas. A walk in the open air, looking at works of art or at photographs of scenes, countries and monuments, the charm of music, and above all the company of someone who understands our situation and carefully avoids any serious or thoughtful conversation: these are the best recreations for the man of the laboratory. On this score it would be good to follow Buffon's rule as well. His carelessness in conversation shocked many admirers of the nobility and elevation of his style as a writer, and he justified it by saying, "These are my moments of rest."

To sum up, every great work is the fruit of patience and perseverance, combined with attention stubbornly fixed, for months and even years, on one particular object. Illustrious scientists have admitted as much when asked about the secret of their creations. Newton declared that it was only by always thinking about the same thing that he had arrived at the sovereign law of universal gravitation. One of Darwin's sons relates that his father reached such concentration in studying the biological facts connected with the great principle of evolution that for many years he systematically denied himself all reading and thinking unrelated to the target of his thoughts. Buffon did not hesitate to say that "genius is nothing but extreme patience." His, too, is this answer to those who asked him how he had won glory: "By spending forty years of my life bent over my desk." And everyone knows that Mayer, the inspired discoverer of the principle of the conservation and transformation of energy, devoted his whole life to that one idea.

Since it is beyond all doubt, then, that scientific undertakings call less for intellectual vigor than for a strict discipline of the will and the constant subordination of all the mind's forces to one object of study, how great is the harm unwittingly done by the biographers of illustrious scientists when they put down great scientific conquests to genius rather than to work and patience! What more could the weak will of the student or the professor ask than to be able to excuse its laziness with the modest, and disheartening, confession of intellectual mediocrity! Not even biographers of such good sense as L. Figuier are free of the disastrous habit of exalting beyond measure the minds of great investigators without a thought for how it discourages the reader. Many autobiographies, on the other hand, in which the scientist shows himself to the reader full length, with his weaknesses and passions, his falls and his successes, are an excellent moral tonic. After reading them, his heart swelling with hope, the reader may well exclaim: Anche io sono pittore, "I too am a painter."

The Passion for Glory

The psychology of the investigator departs somewhat from that of the ordinary run of intellectuals. No doubt he is spurred by the same aspirations and moved by the same springs as other men; but in the scientist two of them work with unusual force: the worship of truth and the passion for glory. The dominance of these two passions explains the investigator's whole life; and the contrast between the ideal he forms of existence and the one the crowd forms gives rise to the struggles, estrangements and misunderstandings that have always marked the scientist's relations with society.

It has often been said that the man of science, like the great religious or social reformers, shows the mental traits of the misfit. He lives on a higher plane of humanity, indifferent to the pettiness and miseries of material life.

For all that, the sincere scientist with a true vocation remains human to the core. In love of his fellow men he outdoes the best of them. This passion radiates through time and space, embraces his own people and strangers alike, and is directed as much to humanity as it is now as to humanity to come. It is thanks to these singular talents, whose gaze pierces the shadows of the future and whose exquisite sensitivity forces them to grieve over the errors and stagnation of routine, that social and scientific evolution is possible. Only genius can stand against the current and change the moral climate; and in this respect we may say that its mission is not to adapt its ideas to society's, but to adapt society to its ideas. And as long as it is right (and it usually is) and goes about it with prudent energy and without losing heart, sooner or later humanity follows it, applauds it and crowns it with glory. Every investigator works trusting in this flattering tribute of veneration and justice; for he knows that while individuals are capable of ingratitude, communities seldom are, once they become fully aware of the reality and usefulness of an idea.

It is a commonplace that the desire for approval and applause moves all men in varying degrees, and above all those with a great heart and an uncommon mind. But each seeks glory by a different road. One takes the road of arms, so celebrated by Cervantes in his Quixote, and aims to increase his country's political greatness. Others take the road of art, longing for the easy applause of the crowds, who understand beauty much better than truth. And only a few in each country, especially in the most civilized ones, follow the road of scientific research, the only path that can lead us to a rational and positive explanation of man and of the nature around him. I believe this aspiration is one of the worthiest and most praiseworthy a man can pursue, because perhaps more than any other it is steeped in the perfume of universal love and charity.

The contrast between the moral figure of the scientist and that of the hero has often been drawn. Since we live in a country that has sacrificed too much on the altar of its heroes (warriors, politicians or churchmen), and has abandoned its most original thinkers when it has not persecuted them, I may be allowed to overdo the praise here in the opposite direction.

The hero and the scientist are the two poles of human energy, and both are equally necessary to the progress and well-being of nations; but the reach of their works is very different. The scientist fights for the good of all humanity: to lengthen life and give it dignity, to spare human effort, to quiet pain, to delay death and make it gentler. The hero, on the other hand, sacrifices a more or less considerable part of humanity to his prestige. His statue always stands on a pedestal of ruins and corpses. His triumph is celebrated only by a tribe, a party or a nation, and it leaves behind it, among the conquered people, a wake of hatred and bloody claims for revenge. The scientist's crown, by contrast, is granted by all humanity. His statue has love for its pedestal, and his triumphs defy the outrages of time and the judgments of history. His only victims (if those redeemed from ignorance can be called victims) are the laggards, the throwbacks, those who prospered by lies or error: all those, in short, who in a well-ordered society ought to be outlawed as declared enemies of the happiness of good people.

Fortunately our country does not lack high intellects whose happiness lies in winning the applause of public opinion. Unfortunately, with a few honorable exceptions, our talents prefer to win the laurel along the path of art or literature, an undertaking in which the vast majority of them fail or come to nothing. Apart from a handful of very lofty artistic and literary geniuses whose work is valued and applauded abroad, how few of our painters and poets will posterity consecrate! How many who struggle in vain to make a world reputation as writers or orators could win one, perhaps with less effort, as scientific investigators! How hard originality is in a field where almost everything was worked out by the ancients, who, gifted with a marvelous intuition for literary beauty and plastic form, left hardly anything to glean in the field of art!

After reading the orations of Demosthenes and Cicero, the dialogues of Plato, the parallel lives of Plutarch and the speeches in Livy, you come away convinced that no modern orator has managed to invent a wholly new device for persuading the understanding or moving the human heart. The modern orator's role is to apply to particular and more or less new cases the countless commonplaces of form and argument devised by the classical authors.

And what shall we say of those who seek the prestige of originality in poetry or artistic prose? After Homer and Virgil, Horace and Seneca, Shakespeare and Milton, Cervantes and Ariosto, Goethe and Heine, Lamartine and Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand and Rousseau and the rest, who is bold enough to claim to invent a poetic figure, a shade of sentimental expression, a refinement of style unknown to those incomparable minds?

I don't mean to deny altogether that artistic creations may arise to compare with those the classics left us, or even surpass them. The grand monuments raised by the many-sided writers of the Renaissance, and the sublime creations of the Romantic school in the last century, are there to bear witness that the vein of literary originality is still far from exhausted. I say only that literary compositions of outstanding merit are extremely hard to achieve and cost more sleepless nights and labor than original scientific work. And the reason is obvious. Art, keeping to the common view of the Universe and feeding on the limited ground of feeling, has had time to exhaust almost the whole emotional content of the human soul, the beauties of the outer world and the ingenious combinations of verbal imagination. Science, by contrast, barely touched by the ancients and wholly free of the swings of fashion and the fickle rules of taste, piles up new material every day and offers us endless work. Before the scientist lies the whole Universe, barely explored: the sky sprinkled with suns that stir in the darkness of an infinite space; the sea with its mysterious depths; the earth holding in its bowels the past of life and the history of man's forerunners; and finally the human body, the masterpiece of creation, offering us a riddle in every cell and a subject for deep thought in every heartbeat.

Carried away by my enthusiasm, I may be falling into hyperbole; but I am convinced that true originality is found in Science, and that the lucky discoverer of an important fact is the only person who can flatter himself that he has trodden wholly virgin ground and forged a thought that never before passed through a human mind. And his ideal conquest, let us add, is not subject to the swings of opinion, to the silence of envy, or to the whims of fashion, which today rejects as detestable what yesterday it praised as sublime. To the lucky searcher of nature, above all, applies the thought of James, for whom man's ideal is to become a collaborator with God.

Certainly the scientist's glory is not as popular or as noisy as the artist's or the playwright's. The people live on the plane of feeling, and to ask them for warmth and support for the heroes of reason would be to ask in vain. But the scientist has his public too. It is made up of the aristocracy of talent; it lives in every country, speaks every language and stretches to the most distant generations to come. The admirers of the man of science, of course, don't clap or lose their composure in transports of passion; but they study with love, judge with measure, and in the end, whatever the passing attacks of envy, do full and irrevocable justice. Where reputation is concerned, the supreme good fortune would be to earn the approval of those rare superior spirits that humanity produces from time to time. That makes it easy to understand the noble pride with which the mathematician and philosopher Fontenelle, presenting his treatise Géométrie de l'infini to a certain personage, told him: "Here is a work that only four or six people in France will be able to read." Heartfelt and noble, too, are the well-known words with which Kepler, radiant with joy and trembling with emotion at the discovery of the last of his memorable laws, ended his Harmonices mundi: "The die is cast. With this I end my book, and I care little whether it is read by the present age or by posterity. It will find its reader someday. Why, has not God had to wait six thousand years to find in me a contemplator and interpreter of his works?"

Patriotism

Among the feelings that should drive the man of science, patriotism deserves special mention. In the scientist this feeling has an exclusively positive sign: he longs to raise the prestige of his own country, but without disparaging others.

It has been said that Science has no country, and that is true; but, as Pasteur replied on a solemn occasion, "scientists do." The conqueror of Nature belongs not only to humanity but to a race that takes pride in his talents, to a nation honored by his triumphs, and to a region that regards him as the choice fruit of its soil.

Since Science and Philosophy represent the highest categories of mental activity, the dynamometers of men's spiritual energy, it is easy to understand the noble pride with which civilized nations show off their philosophers, their mathematicians, their physicists and naturalists, their inventors, all those, in short, who knew how to exalt the sacred name of their country.

We Spaniards, it must be admitted, have a greater need to cultivate this passion, because of the disdain with which, for reasons not to the point just now, we have for many centuries looked on everything to do with scientific research and its fruitful applications to life. It is the inescapable duty of all of us whose patriotic fiber is still sensitive, wounded more than once by the darts of foreign ill will, to stand up for the prestige of the race. We must prove to outsiders that the people who centuries ago made their names immortal, rivaling the leading nations as much in the feats of war and in the perils of exploration and geographical discovery as in the peaceful undertakings of Art, Literature and History, will also know how to compete with equal tenacity and energy in the investigation of Nature, collaborating in step with the most enlightened peoples in the great work of civilization and progress.

Some thinkers, Tolstoy among others, inspired by a humanitarian feeling as much at odds with reality as it is out of season in these times of cruel international competition, declare that patriotism is a selfish feeling, the inspirer of endless wars, and bound to disappear and give way to the nobler and more altruistic feeling of universal brotherhood.

It must be admitted that patriotic passion, exaggerated into chauvinism, creates and keeps alive very dangerous rivalries and hatreds among nations. But kept within prudent limits and tempered by the justice and respect owed to the science and virtue of foreigners, it promotes an international emulation of the very best kind, in which the cause of progress gains too, and in the end even that of humanity. In this respect international scientific congresses are extremely effective. Many scientists who at first looked at one another with suspicion, whether from international rivalry or from that noble and praiseworthy envy Cervantes approved of, come to know one another and to feel a cordial esteem once they are brought into contact; and the currents of sympathy and justice born on the heights soon filter down into the depths of society, steadily easing the political relations between rival peoples¹¹.

In any case, whatever progress cosmopolitanism may make, the feeling for one's country will always keep its power to generate energy and will go on being the great spur of scientific and industrial competition. It springs from a psychological root too deep for the assaults of international socialism or the lucubrations of philosophical humanism to extinguish. Passions of this kind are not argued with; they are put to use, because they are priceless reservoirs of manly energy and sublime heroism. It is the mission of governments and of teaching institutions to channel this admirable force and tame it, applying it to profitable and redeeming undertakings and turning it away from the uproar and riots of fratricidal separatism.

P. J. Thomas observes very aptly, in his Education of the Feelings, "that the idea of country, like the idea of family, is necessary, as are the feelings bound up with them. They act as stimulants of progress and guarantee our own dignity. One fights for the glory of one's country as one fights for the honor of one's name... The nation, it has been said, is an indestructible element of the harmony of the worlds, with the same title as the province, the family and the individual... The human race must remain diverse to stay strong and to unfold an activity ceaselessly reborn."

Even in the unlikely case of a United States of Europe, or of the World, man will always love best his near material and moral surroundings, that is, his own bell tower, his region and his race, and will give only a lukewarm affection, bordering on indifference, to distant surroundings. It has rightly been said more than once that man's attachment and fondness for the things of the world is inversely proportional to their distance in space and time. And I say time, because one's country is not only home and native soil. It is also the past and the future: our remote ancestors and our distant descendants.

Bayle was right to say, "It is not the general opinions of the mind that move us to act, but the passions present in the heart." And among them none has more glorious feats in its annals than love of country. It matters little to know whether such feelings are just or unjust, whether or not they reproduce the primitive and barbarous phase of humanity. They are moral tonics, and should be judged only by their effects, pragmatically, as people say nowadays.

A Taste for Scientific Originality

The spurs of patriotism and the noble desire for fame are excellent for driving men to carry out great undertakings. All the same, our beginner would risk failure if he did not also have a decided liking for originality, a taste for research, and the desire to feel the incomparable delights that come with the very act of discovery.

Action, in the work of probing mysteries or seeking out new facts, has often been praised. Eucken, among others, has written admirable pages on it. He shrewdly observes "that action personalizes us, carrying individuation to its height; it gives us the pleasing illusion of being creative kings, and, with the consciousness of an unfettered freedom, the enjoyment of an unlimited power."

Setting aside the swelling of self-esteem and the approval of our own conscience, the conquest of a new truth is beyond dispute the greatest happiness a man can aspire to. The flatteries of vanity, the outpourings of instinct, the caresses of fortune all pale beside the sovereign pleasure of feeling the wings of the mind sprout and grow, and of overcoming the difficulty in step with our effort until we master and subdue elusive Nature.

Strengthened by this hedonistic feeling, the man of science defies even injustice. He will not be wounded by the deliberate silence of his rivals, who often, as Goethe says, pretend to be ignorant of what they wish to stay unknown; nor by the incomprehension of his moral surroundings, nor by the neglect of official institutions. The deference the world pays to power, to nobility or to money is not the chief object of his aspirations, because he feels in himself a nobility higher than any granted by blind fortune or the good humor of princes. This nobility, which he is all the prouder of because it is his own work, consists in being a minister of progress, a priest of truth and a confidant of the Creator. He alone manages to understand something of that mysterious language God has written in Nature; and to him alone it has been given to unravel the marvelous work of Creation, so as to offer the Absolute the most pleasing and acceptable worship of all, which is to study its prodigious works and, in them and through them, to know, admire and revere it. Even coming down to the miseries of human selfishness, we can all confirm that the only people who esteem and respect us are the ones who read us and try to understand us.

As I said, the pleasure attached to the act of discovery is so great that one can understand perfectly the sublime madness of Archimedes, who, the historians tell us, beside himself at solving a problem he had long pondered, ran out of his house almost naked crying the famous Eureka, "I have found it!"

Who does not remember Newton's joy and emotion when, faced with the new figures Picard had supplied by measuring a meridian of the earth, he saw his inspired intuition of universal gravitation confirmed by calculation! Every investigator, however modest, will at some time have felt something of the superhuman satisfaction Columbus must have felt on hearing Rodrigo de Triana's cry of "Land! Land!"

This inexpressible pleasure, beside which all the other delights of life shrink to pale sensations, more than repays the investigator for the painful, persevering work of analysis that goes before the appearance of the new truth, as labor pains go before a birth. It is so true that for the scientist nothing compares with a fact he has discovered himself that you would perhaps not find a single investigator willing to trade the fatherhood of a scientific conquest for all the gold on earth. And if there is anyone who looks to Science not for the applause of the learned and the private satisfaction that comes with the very act of discovering, but for a way to make money, he has mistaken his vocation. He ought to have gone straight into industry or trade¹².

For above all the spurs of vanity and self-interest stands the supreme delight of the intellect in contemplating the inexpressible harmonies of the world and taking possession of the truth, lovely and virginal as a flower that opens its calyx to the caresses of the morning sun. As Poincaré says in his fine book Science et méthode: "Intellectual beauty is enough in itself, and it is for its sake alone, more than for the future good of humanity, that the scientist condemns himself to long and painful labors."

This naive optimism has now been flatly and roundly refuted by the horrible international war that began in 1914. When this was written, everything led us to believe that the era of great European wars was over. Railways, telegraphs, newspapers, congresses, international conferences, the spread of languages and so on seemed to be organs destined to realize, sooner or later, the generous aspiration of binding the European nations together and bringing them into cordial closeness.

It was a comforting sight to see philosophers, scientists and workers shaking hands warmly across the frontiers. Unfortunately, military governments and insatiable profiteers worked in the opposite direction and kept smothering the seed of love with the poison of hatred, by an intensive inoculation that began in the schools. It will fall to the 21st century to begin again the work, perhaps a chimera, of the final reconciliation of the States of Europe, and of subjecting atavistic greed and unbridled territorial ambitions to the rule of law once and for all.

(This note was written in 1916. Today, with peace signed, Europe ruined, the failure of the naive Wilsonian conception of the League of Nations plain to see, and the hatred of the defeated peoples festering as they already dream of revenge before long, I look with bitter skepticism on every legal attempt at perpetual peace. It is sad to admit it, but every people, whether shaped as a monarchy or a republic, turns fiercely imperialist the moment it can. Woe to the weak, and to the unpatriotic!) ↩
Things have changed somewhat on this point today. The type of inventor who works for profit is very common now in Germany and in the most advanced nations generally. The race for the patent and the fever of industrial competition have disturbed the august calm of Minerva's temple. Is that a bad thing or a good one? ↩

Chapter 4: What the Beginner Needs to Know

What anyone drawn to biological research ought to know.

General Culture

It would be idle to insist that our beginner needs a thorough knowledge of the science he means to explore, not only from the descriptions in books and monographs but from the study of nature itself. But it is no less urgent that he know, at least in a general way, all the branches of science linked directly or indirectly with his chosen one, where he will find now the guiding principles, now the means of action. The biologist, for example, will not stop at knowing Anatomy and Physiology, but will take in the fundamentals of Psychology, Physics and Chemistry as well.

The reason for this extra culture is obvious. Almost always, the discovery of a fact or the meaning of a biological phenomenon turns out to be no more than a consequence of applying principles from Physics or Chemistry. To discover, as Laplace said, is to bring together two ideas that were apart. And it's worth noting that most of the time this fruitful meeting takes place between a fact from a complex science (Biology, Sociology, Chemistry and so on) and a principle drawn from a simple one. Put another way, the general or abstract sciences, in the classifications of Comte and Bain, often explain the phenomena of the complicated and concrete sciences. Which makes us realize that a well-understood ranking of human knowledge is a real family tree. Logic and Mathematics assist and clarify Physics and Chemistry, and these in turn explain, and in part beget, Biology, Sociology and their various branches.

To discover often means bringing the fact under a law, fitting it into a wider frame of ideas, classifying it, in short. That is why it has been said that to discover is to give the right name to a thing wrongly or provisionally christened. It follows that when science reaches its highest perfection, every phenomenon will get the name that belongs to it, once its deep relations to the general truths have at last been established. In this light Mach's well-known phrase is very telling: "a well-chosen word can save an enormous amount of thought." For to name is to classify, to establish lines of descent among ideas, relations of analogy between little-known phenomena and some general notion or principle in which they lie latent, like the tree in its germ.

Philosophical studies above all are a good preparation and an excellent workout for the man of the laboratory. It is certainly striking how many illustrious investigators came to science from the field of philosophy. Needless to add, the investigator will care less about philosophical doctrine or creed (a creed that, unfortunately, changes every fifteen or twenty years) than about the criteria of truth and the critical apparatus. By exercising these he will gain flexibility and shrewdness, and learn to distrust the apparent certainty of the most captivating scientific systems and to keep a proper rein on the flights of his own imagination. His motto will always be Cicero's phrase: Dubitando ad veritatem pervenimus, "by doubting we arrive at the truth."

As for the microscopic anatomy of animals and plants, most of the facts that make up this science are the results of conflicts between the chemical properties of certain reagents and the structure of cells and tissues. In bacteriology, in neurology and elsewhere, nearly everything we know we owe to the happy application of dyes created by modern Chemistry. It is the same in general biology. Recall Loeb's interesting studies on artificial parthenogenesis, and those of Harrison, Carrel, Lambert and others on growing the cells of animal tissues in artificial cultures. These astonishing experiments are pure consequences of chemical or physical changes produced in the cell's surroundings.

Many people have felt this close solidarity of the sciences, Letamendi in particular, who, speaking of scientific specialties, defined one as "the application of the whole of Science to a particular branch of knowledge."

For a higher mind that knew all the mysterious reasons that bind together the phenomena of the Universe, there would be not sciences but a single Science. Before such a being, the frontiers that seem to divide our knowledge would vanish entirely, and with them the formal scaffolding of our classifications and the artificial chopping up of things so dear to our intellect, which can only look at reality bit by bit, facet by facet. In its eyes the whole of Science would look like a gigantic tree, whose branches were the particular sciences and whose trunk was the principle or principles on which they rest. The specialist works like a caterpillar settled on a leaf, fancying that his little world sways alone in space. The general scientist, with a philosophical sense, glimpses the stem common to many branches. But only that genius of knowledge I spoke of would have the happiness and power of contemplating the whole tree, that is, Science, many and infinite in its forms, one in its principles.

The Need to Specialize

We must not overdo the rule just given, though, and run aground on the reef of encyclopedism, where all minds end up that are scattered, restless, undisciplined and unable to hold their attention on a single idea for long. Rotating hobbies, as a highly original doctor and writer used to call them, can make great writers, delightful conversationalists and distinguished orators, but rarely scientific discoverers.

The well-known proverb "knowledge takes up no room" is an error of the first magnitude. Fortunately it has no serious practical consequences, since even those who believe it have to admit that learning many things takes up time, if not room. Only too flattering an opinion of our talents can explain the encyclopedic mania. To try to master several sciences is a fantasy when we see men of true genius and tireless industry resign themselves, in order to harvest a few truths, to a deep knowledge of one branch of learning, and often of one concrete subject within one particular science.

Let's not delude ourselves, then. If a man's life is long enough to learn something of every human discipline, it is barely long enough to master one or two of them down to the detail.

Modern encyclopedists like Herbert Spencer, Mach, Wundt and others are really specialists in the philosophy of the sciences and arts, as Leibniz and Descartes were in their day, although those scientists, because knowledge in their time was naturally more limited, could embrace a considerably wider field and make discoveries in two or three sciences.

The many-sided investigators have had their day, perhaps never to return. At present we have to recognize that in Physics as in Mathematics, in Chemistry as in Biology, discoveries are made by specialist scientists. But let's be clear: not by narrow particularists, one-sided and embedded in a detail, but by workers who, without losing sight of their own field, follow closely the most important advances of the related sciences. Such a division of labor is not only good tactics but an inescapable necessity. We are forced into it by the extraordinary time it takes to try out and master the methods discovered every day, by the growing flood of publications, and by the considerable number of scientists working on every subject at once.

To finish with the common philosophy summed up in the respected maxim grasp all, lose all, as against the no less respected saying knowledge takes up no room, let me offer a homely comparison. The inquiring mind is like a weapon. If we grind a single edge on it, we get a cutting sword. With two, the weapon can still cut, though less well; but if we grind three or four, the sharpness of the edges will keep shrinking until it becomes a harmless square rod. A bayonet could still cut, strictly speaking, but only with formidable force behind it, whereas a well-sharpened dagger is fearsome even in the hands of a child.

Like raw steel, our intellect is a sword in the making. Forged and filed by study, it turns into the tempered, keen scalpel of Science. Let's grind the edge on one side only, or on two at most, if we want to keep its analytical power and strike deep into the heart of questions; and let's leave the simpletons of encyclopedism to turn their understanding into a harmless square rod.

Specialized or Technical Reading

It goes without saying that the investigator's library should contain every important book and journal in his specialty published in the most advanced nations. The German journals will be consulted constantly, since in Biology it must be admitted that Germany alone produces more new facts than all the other nations put together¹³.

Whoever wills the ends wills the means. Since at present a knowledge of the German language is indispensable for keeping up with the latest science, let us study it seriously, at least far enough to translate it, and rid ourselves of the superstitious terror that the tangled words and turns of phrase of the northern languages inspire in us Spaniards. German is so necessary that you will perhaps not find a single Italian, English, French, Russian or Swedish investigator who cannot read the Teutonic monographs fluently. And because the German papers appear in a country that may now be regarded as the center of scientific production, they have for us the priceless advantage of containing extensive and accurate historical and bibliographical information¹⁴. After German come English and French, in that order of importance. I'll say nothing of Italian, because there is no moderately educated Spaniard who can't translate it, even without a dictionary. Nor should anyone forget that in some scientific disciplines Italy leads the way.

Scientific work is now published in more than six languages. To the laudable attempts to restore Latin, or to use Esperanto as a universal language of science, scientists have responded by multiplying still further the number of languages in which their work appears. It must be recognized that in practice Volapük or Esperanto is just one more language¹⁵ to learn. That result was to be expected, because neither the essentially popularizing and democratic tendencies of modern knowledge nor the economic aims of authors and publishers allow anything else. Their moral and material interests push them to spread among the general public the scientific conquests that were once the exclusive property of the Academies or of certain luminaries of the lecture hall.

Don't think, however, that the investigator must speak and write every language in Europe. It will be enough for a Spaniard to translate the following four, which by agreement are called the learned languages and in which nearly all scientific work is published: French, English, Italian and German. Naturally Spanish is not among the learned languages, so our scientists have no choice, if they want their findings to be known and valued by the specialists, but to write and speak in one of those four European languages¹⁶.

How to Study the Monographs

When reading the monographs of the specialty you want to cultivate, you should pay attention above all to two things: the methods of research the author used, and the problems left unsolved. As for the popular book, it deserves less of our attention and trust, unless it is some voluminous general survey or contains general ideas of fruitful use in the laboratory. In general, a book can be said to reflect a stage of Science that is already history. Because of the long time it takes to write, and the author's overriding concern to simplify his subject so the general public can follow, the topics of the moment, the details of the methods and the gaps in the research are missing or only lightly sketched.

We should study closely the monographs of the most gifted authors, the ones who have done most to push the question forward, since original talent has, among other qualities, a great power of suggestion. It is the mark of every good book that the reader gathers from it not only the ideas the author deliberately set out but others entirely new, different for each person, which spring from the clash between our own store of images and the ideas of the text. Which shows that a monograph of genius, besides being a good source of scientific information, is also a powerful reagent for our own brain's energies.

Human heads, like the palm trees of the desert, fertilize each other at a distance. But for such a union between two minds to take place and bear blessed fruit, you have to take a deep interest in reading the book of genius, steep yourself in its deeper meaning and, in a word, sympathize with the author. In Science as in life, the fruit always comes after love. How many beginners, from failing to consult the original papers and trusting general surveys, fall into the error of taking other people's long-standing discoveries for the fruit of their own labor!

Our new man of science should flee summaries and manuals like the plague. Good for teaching, manuals are dreadful guides for the investigator. Whoever summarizes, summarizes himself; I mean that he often sets out his own judgments and doctrines in place of the author's. He takes from the author what he likes, or what he understands and digests without effort; he gives the principal as incidental and the other way round. On the pretext of clarifying and popularizing another man's work, the abridger ends by putting his own personality in the place of the author's, whose intellectual face, so interesting and instructive for the reader, stays in the shadows.

It follows that the investigator, if he wants to avoid unpleasant surprises, is strictly bound to read authors in their original works, unless the summaries come from the authors themselves. In that case, by way of compensation for the brevity, we may find original conceptions and guiding ideas of great use for the work of analysis.

Here a question arises. Before beginning a laboratory investigation, should one exhaust the literature or not? Steeped and as it were saturated in everything that has been written on the subject, don't we run the risk of being swayed and of losing the priceless gift of independent judgment? Won't the very impression that the subject is exhausted, produced by the thorough reading we have given ourselves up to, be fatal to our hopes of finding something wholly original?

Each person settles this question in his own way. To my mind, though, if it were put to a vote of scientists, the answer would be not to start any inquiry without having all the earlier literature in view. Proceeding this way spares us the painful disappointment of learning that we have wasted our time rediscovering known things, and neglected, as a result, the deep study of the subject's real gaps.

The most prudent course, as I see it, is certainly to exhaust the specialized literature before throwing yourself into the work of analysis. But when insuperable difficulties make that impossible (as unfortunately happens in Spain, where the universities lack modern foreign books and the Academies have no money to subscribe to the most important scientific journals), we must not stay out of the laboratory for the sake of a monograph more or less. If we know the best methods in use and work hard and steadily, we shall always find something that escaped the sharp eyes of the latest observers, precisely because, not having been influenced by them, we shall have traveled different roads and looked at the subject from a different point of view. In the last resort it is a thousand times better to risk repeating discoveries than to give up every attempt at experimental inquiry. The beginner who, in his first attempts as an observer, manages to find things published a short while before, far from being discouraged, strengthens his confidence in his own worth, takes heart for future undertakings, and ends up making original science, as soon as his means come up to his good intentions.

The Absolute Need to Seek Inspiration in Nature

We shall learn a great deal from books, but more from contemplating Nature, the cause and occasion of every book. The direct examination of phenomena has some ferment that stirs up our mental inertia, a certain exciting and life-giving power that is wholly absent, or barely at work, in even the most faithful copies and descriptions of reality.

We have all noticed that when we try to confirm a fact described by the authors, it always shows a different face from the one we expected, and suggests ideas and plans of action that reading alone never raised. This comes, I think, from the inability of human words to paint outer reality faithfully. As a source of knowledge, reality is a bundle of extremely varied and complex sensations, of which symbolic expression, which always works by abstraction and simplification, reflects only the smallest part.

Every description, however objective and artless it looks, is a personal interpretation, the author's own point of view. Man mixes his personality into everything, as we know, and when he thinks he is photographing the outer world he is often contemplating and portraying himself.

Besides, observation supplies, on top of the empirical data from which we have to form our judgment, certain irreplaceable emotional factors: surprise, enthusiasm, pleasurable excitement, which are the driving forces of the constructive imagination. Emotion fires up the machinery of the brain, which gets from it the heat it needs to forge lucky intuitions and plausible hypotheses.

To show what suggestive effects Nature has on the observer when she acts on him directly, let me describe what I felt when I first saw the circulation of the blood.

I was in my third year of Medicine and had learned the details of that phenomenon from various books, but without these readings holding my attention or setting off any strong currents of thought. Then one of my friends, Señor Borao, the assistant in Physiology, was kind enough to show me the circulation in the mesentery of a frog. Before that sublime spectacle I felt something like a revelation. I was thrilled and moved to see the red and white corpuscles tumbling along like pebbles in a torrent; to note how, by their elasticity, the red cells stretched out and squeezed with difficulty through the finest capillaries, snapping back into shape like a spring once the obstacle was passed; to observe that at the slightest obstruction in the current the joints of the endothelium opened and hemorrhage and edema followed; and to see, finally, how the heartbeat, weakened by too strong a dose of curare, feebly jostled the jammed red cells. It seemed to me as if a veil had been drawn back in my mind, and my belief in some mysterious forces or other, to which the phenomena of life were then attributed, faded away and was lost. In my enthusiasm I burst out with the following words, not knowing that many people, Descartes above all, had said the same centuries before: "Life looks like pure mechanism. Living bodies are hydraulic machines so perfect that they can repair the damage done by the rush of the torrent that drives them, and can produce, by generation, other hydraulic machines like themselves." I am sure that this vivid impression, made by seeing directly the inner mechanism of life, was one of the decisive spurs to my love of biological studies¹⁷.

Mastery of Methods

Once he has chosen his subject, and informed himself in detail, if possible, about the present state of the point to be cleared up, the investigator will go on to apply every analytical method that has been proposed, so as to confirm the facts described and illustrated in the latest monographs. During this attempt at confirmation the doubtful points, the untenable hypotheses and the gaps in observation will often reveal themselves to him, and more than once he will glimpse the road by which he may push the knowledge of the subject forward.

Mastery of method, particularly in the biological sciences, is so important that it can be said without fear of error that the great discoveries are made by the finest technicians: by those scientists who, through persevering trials, have got to the bottom of every secret of one or more analytical tools.

To support this claim it is enough to recall that, despite the hundreds of histologists, embryologists and anatomists known in Europe and America, the most outstanding scientific conquests are owed to a dozen men who have made their mark by inventing some methods of inquiry, by perfecting them, or by their complete command of them.

Among the procedures of study, choose by preference the most recent, and above all the most difficult, since they are the least worked out. The time spent on fruitless trials matters little, for if the method has great power to discriminate, the results will be of great importance and will repay our efforts many times over. And we shall have the priceless advantage, besides, of traveling almost alone, or of meeting few rivals and competitors on our road.

In Search of the New Fact

Here is the hard question, the supreme worry of the beginner, who knows from the history of scientific research that once the first discovery is made, others follow from it as consequences follow from premises.

A new truth is often the fruit of patient and stubborn observation, the result of having given the subject more time, more constancy and better methods than our predecessors did. As I said earlier, the scrupulous and repeated consideration of the same facts ends by giving us a refined analytical sensitivity, overexcited, as it were, in everything that touches the chosen subject. How many times, thanks to that sure eye that comes from experience, have I found entirely new things in preparations where my students saw nothing in particular! And how many new facts must have escaped my attention when, still green in the technique of microscopy, every preparation looked to me like a sphinx!

Besides the notable growth in our power of discrimination that comes from repeating experiments and observations, the persevering study of a question nearly always leads us to improve the methods of research, by pinning down all the conditions of failure and hence the causes that produce the best technical results.

Sometimes discovery is the reward of diligence. It is a matter of applying a recent and barely exploited procedure to new subjects. This tactic has brought great and easy advances in the vast domains of Bacteriology and of comparative Anatomy and Histology.

Since the great movers of science have usually been creators of methods, the best and most fitting thing would be to lay down rules for finding them. Unfortunately, in the biological Sciences almost all the analytical tools are owed to chance.

In general we can say that methods are happy applications, in one field of science, of truths that belong to another discipline. But this application is usually the work of random trial and error, or at most is inspired by vague analogies. In Bacteriology, Histology and Histochemistry, for example, the methods are, as I have already pointed out, the selective effects of dyes or reagents created by modern Chemistry. No plausible reason, except the attempt to provoke chance, could have inspired Gerlach to stain nuclei with carmine; Max Schultze to use osmic acid on nerve tissue; Hannover to introduce chromic acid and bichromates for hardening tissues; Koch, Ehrlich and others to use aniline dyes for impregnating bacteria; and so on.

If we knew the chemical composition of living cells perfectly, the results of applying this or that staining reagent would be mere deductions from the principles of biological Chemistry. But since we are very far from that ideal, anyone who wants to discover new biological methods has no recourse but to subject living tissues to the same blind trials the chemists of past centuries gave themselves up to, in order to get, now and then, some unforeseen combination out of the clash and mixture of various substances.

We must leave something to chance, then, and provoke it by a long series of trials, in which we can be guided only by intuition aided by the deepest and most precise possible knowledge of the reagents and technical procedures newly introduced in Chemistry and Industry.

And that brings me to say something about chance in scientific research. Chance plays a large part in empirical work, there's no doubt about it, and we mustn't hide the fact that Science owes it some dazzling acquisitions. But chance does not smile on the man who wants it, but on the man who deserves it, in Duclaux's vivid phrase. And it must be recognized that only great observers deserve it, because only they know how to court it with the tenacity and perseverance it calls for; and when they do get the unexpected revelation, only they are able to guess its importance and its reach.

In science, as in the lottery, luck usually favors whoever plays most, that is, whoever, like the hero of the fable, keeps turning over the soil of the garden. If Pasteur discovered bacterial vaccines by chance, his genius had a hand in it too, for it saw what could be made of a chance fact: that a bacterial culture left exposed to the air lost its virulence, very likely weakened by the action of oxygen.

The history of Science is full of findings like that. Scheele stumbled on chlorine while working to isolate manganese. Claude Bernard, devising experiments to catch the organ that destroys sugar, found the glycogenic function of the liver. And recent examples of almost miraculous good fortune are the astonishing discoveries of Röntgen, Becquerel and the Curies.

The discovery of X-rays by Professor Röntgen was pure chance, as everyone knows. In his laboratory at Würzburg this scientist was repeating Lenard's experiments on the peculiar properties of cathode rays. As was customary, these rays were projected onto a fluorescent screen of barium platinocyanide. One day, wanting to find out how long the fluorescence lasted, it occurred to him to darken the laboratory and cover with a cardboard box the Crookes tube, the apparatus that, as is well known, produces the cathode rays. When he switched on the coil, he looked at the screen and saw to his extraordinary astonishment that it lit up brightly. He then put a piece of wood in the way, then a book, and saw that the radiation, the new rays, passed easily through these opaque bodies. Finally, in a moment of feverish impatience, he happened to put his hand between the Crookes tube and the receiving screen, and, seized with intense emotion, perhaps with terror, he saw a macabre sight: on the surface of the fluorescent screen the bones of the hand were faithfully drawn in black, as if the surrounding tissues did not exist. The marvelous X-rays had been discovered, and with them radioscopy. Soon came radiography and the admirable surgical and industrial applications everyone knows.

The second case, also very telling, was the chance discovery of the radioactivity of matter by the distinguished French physicist Henri Becquerel.

The late lamented H. Poincaré had already wondered whether the production of X-rays might not turn out, after all, to be a property of fluorescent bodies. Wanting to confirm this conjecture, and well prepared besides for that kind of inquiry, Monsieur Becquerel planned to test uranium sulfate, a typically fluorescent substance. But these were the foggy days of February, and the sun would not deign to appear. While waiting for the king of the heavens to clear away the thick mists of Paris, the physicist had set up the experiment well in advance, placing several crystals of uranium sulfate on a sensitive plate wrapped in black paper, with a copper cross in between as well. Impatience was eating him alive. Goaded by it, one day he took the plate out of its protective wrapping and developed it on the off chance. Great was his astonishment to find, against everything he expected (the uranium salt had been kept in the dark), a strong image on the plate, where the crystals of the uranium salt showed in black and the metal cross in white. Without meaning to, he had discovered the radioactivity of matter, one of the most prodigious conquests of modern science.

But the most striking and astonishing thing about the case was that Monsieur Becquerel made this tremendous discovery (which won him the Nobel Prize) guided by a false hypothesis (that X-ray emission and fluorescence are linked as cause and effect). Of all the known fluorescent bodies, as it happens, uranium alone is radioactive. The effect, as you see, was theatrical. One would say it had been arranged by an ironic genius determined to push Science forward in spite of the most mistaken ideas.

But it has to be granted that if many scientists discovered what they were not looking for, all of them looked with admirable tenacity, and were worthy of success, because with rare insight they managed to catch the great advances lying hidden in the timid, fragmentary revelations of chance. In short, a lucky accident is almost always the reward of persevering effort.

Courting chance is like stirring muddy water so that the objects sunk at the bottom rise and show themselves. Every observer will do well to try his luck; but he should not rely on it too much, and should appeal more often to regular work. Whoever has mastered the methods and is up to date on the problems still unsolved but open to solution will nearly always make some discovery of greater or lesser worth, without venturing on trials that are usually barren.

Once the first new fact has been won (above all if it is one of those whose arrival sets new currents of ideas flowing through the scientific world), our task will be as smooth as it is splendid. It will come down to drawing out, step by step, the consequences the new acquisition holds for the various spheres of Science. That is why it has been said that only the first discovery is hard; the rest are usually corollaries of the first. It is a known doctrine, proclaimed by philosophers like Taine and scientists like Tyndall, that every problem solved raises an infinity of new questions, and that today's discovery holds tomorrow's discoveries in germ. The summit of truth, climbed with so much effort, which looked like an imposing mountain from the valley, is only a tiny foothill of a formidable range glimpsed through the mist, which draws us on with insatiable curiosity. Let us satisfy this longing to climb, and, taking advantage of the pleasant rest that the view of the new horizon gives us, let us plan, from the newly won summit, the route that will take us to higher regions.

But, as I said, the good fortune of opening a promising study with a momentous fact is rare, and no prudent investigator should count on it too much. To start our work, therefore, we should not hesitate to set out from other people's discoveries. Even so, we won't lack work, and fruitful work. The new fact, the fruit of another man's sleepless nights, usually causes a revolution in the scientific world. It casts suspicion on doctrines once held as firm truths; it sets up new positions of balance in those vague regions of conjecture that lead from the known to the unknown; and it raises a series of new questions the originator, short of time, could not settle himself.

Besides, on the critical side the originator nearly always leaves his work incomplete. Still influenced by tradition, he can't quite bring himself to break openly with the prejudices of the past; wary, perhaps, of meeting too much opposition in the scientific world, and impatient for approval and applause, he presents his theory as a compromise between old and brand-new doctrines. For that reason a less punctilious observer, arriving fresh, usually perfects the originator's work with little effort, drawing from it the last theoretical and practical consequences. All that pile of problems raised by the new scientific conquest is extremely fertile ground for the new investigator. He will go to it with his analytical weapons well tempered, without arrogance or excessive hope. But he shouldn't expect to arrive alone. He will find a whole crowd of rivals there trying to beat him to it, and he will get ahead of them only by sheer activity, insight and perseverance.

Finally, when we find ourselves facing several subjects equally favorable and fruitful, we should choose the one whose methods we know perfectly and for which we feel a decided liking. This is the sensible advice Darwin gave his students when they asked him for a subject of study. And the reason is that our understanding doubles its strength when it glimpses in the distance the reward of pleasure or usefulness.

The explorer of nature, as I have said more than once, should think of research as an incomparable sport, in which everything, from the technical procedures to the working out of doctrine, is an unfailing spring of pleasant satisfactions. Whoever does not feel his enthusiasm rise and his strength grow in the face of a hard problem; whoever, as the solemn moment of the long-awaited fiat lux draws near, does not have his soul flooded with the emotion that heralds pleasure, should give up scientific undertakings. Nature does not grant her favors to the cold of temperament, and coldness is often an unmistakable sign of impotence.

Today, thanks to a growing spirit of emulation, centers of biological production are multiplying everywhere. Italy, France, England and above all the United States are competing with the work of the German universities, unsurpassable only a couple of decades ago, and on many points outdoing it. ↩
Although, thanks to some laudable initiatives, German now appears among the subjects of our secondary schools, sadly our pupils have so far got almost nothing out of it, both because too little time is given to it and because the teaching method is faulty. When there isn't the time needed to master a difficult language, the logical thing would be not to insist on teaching all of German but scientific German: the relatively small sum of grammatical rules and the not very large stock of words needed to translate scientific monographs. Achieving that is the work of six or eight months of steady effort. I advise anyone drawn to biological work to subscribe at once to a German journal in his specialty, some Centralblatt or other. Reading the scientific monographs, very laborious at first, will become easier every day. The pleasure of getting some fruit from his efforts right from the start will steadily increase his love of the work. ↩
If international jealousies allowed it, it would be much simpler and more practical to agree on using a living language, French for example, as the language of science. One might ask the enthusiasts of Esperanto: When you travel in France, will you resign yourselves to not speaking French?

(As was to be expected, today, in 1920, the brand-new Volapük has been forgotten for good. I predict that the same will happen to Esperanto.) ↩
When Spaniards attend a scientific congress, they lament that our language must be eclipsed by German, French or English. These ill-timed patriots would do well, before they voice their complaints and make the scientists smile, to ponder these three unanswerable propositions. 1. Our scientific production is far below that of the four nations that enjoy the privilege of using their languages at congresses, in quality and in quantity. 2. As a result, Castilian is unknown to the vast majority of scientists. If, inspired by a quixotic patriotism, we insisted on using it at international congresses, we would cause a mass desertion of our listeners. 3. Finally, nations like Sweden, Holland, Denmark, Hungary, Russia and Japan, whose scientific production far exceeds Spain's, never had the immodesty to impose their own languages at these gatherings. Their scientists are much too sensible not to realize that, since mastering the four languages named is already an excessive task, learning one or two more would be unbearable torture. ↩
Today I would not subscribe without some reservations to this mechanical, or if you like strictly physical and chemical, conception of life. In life (its origin, the shapes of cells and organs, heredity, evolution and so on) there are phenomena that presuppose causes that are wholly incomprehensible, in spite of the boastful promises of the Darwinians and the postulates of Loeb's biochemical school. ↩

Chapter 5: Diseases of the Will

Contemplators. Bibliophiles and polyglots. Megalophiles. Organophiles. The misplaced. Theorists.

We have all seen professors with superior gifts, overflowing with energy and ideas, with enough means to work, who nevertheless produce no work of their own and hardly ever write. Their students and admirers wait eagerly for the great work that will justify the high opinion they have formed of the master; but the great work never gets written, and the master goes on saying nothing.

Let's not be fooled by optimism and good intentions. Whatever their exceptional merit, and the zeal and energy they show in certain teaching duties, these masters are sick in the will. Perhaps not in the eyes of the psychiatrist: their drowsiness and slackness don't yet justify a diagnosis of abulia. But their students and friends would do well to regard them as abnormal and to propose to them, with the respect and gentleness owed to their high intellect, a suitable spiritual treatment.

These illustrious failures fall into the following main classes: dilettantes or contemplators, erudites or bibliophiles, organophiles, megalophiles, the misplaced, and theorists.

Contemplators. This morbid variety, very common among astronomers, naturalists, chemists, biologists and physicists, can be recognized by the following symptoms: a love of contemplating Nature, but only in her aesthetic aspects: sublime spectacles, lovely forms, splendid colors and elegant structures. If the dilettante is a botanist, he will stay anchored forever in the admiration of algae, the diatoms especially, whose elegant shells will captivate him. In his fetish worship he will spend his hours examining and photographing these fascinating creatures in a thousand ways, arranging them into lettering, Greek-key borders, coats of arms and other ornamental niceties, without ever adding a single new variety to the long catalogue of known species, or contributing in the slightest to our knowledge of the structure, development and workings of these microorganisms.

If the scientific sybarite is a histologist, he will devote himself lovingly to the art of giving cells and tissues showy colors. He will be a wizard with the injection syringe, and in his innocent love of the picturesque he will spend his evenings drawing the elegant little nets that carmine and Prussian blue embroider in the capillaries of the intestine, the muscles and the glands. He will pride himself on mastering the most elegant methods of histological dyeing, without ever feeling the temptation to apply them to a new subject or to settle a disputed question.

If he is a geologist, he will remain enraptured examining under polarized light the splendid colors shown by thin sections of rock; if a bacteriologist, he will take up collecting and cultivating the colored and phosphorescent microbes; if an astronomer, he will give his leisure to photographing the mountains of the moon or the spots on the sun...

Why go on? All my readers will remember interesting types and varieties of this species, as likable for its youthful enthusiasm and warm, captivating talk as it is barren for the real progress of science.

Bibliophiles and polyglots. As the microscopist delights in the diatom, or the zoologist in shells, insects and birds of showy plumage, the bibliophile delights in reading the very latest book or monograph, one of those momentous, epoch-making monographs that only he receives, and which our erudite uses marvelously to dazzle his friends.

The symptoms of this ailment are: encyclopedic tendencies; command of many languages, some of them perfectly useless; subscriptions only to little-known journals; the hoarding of every new book that appears in the booksellers' windows; diligent reading of what one ought to know, but above all of what interests very few; an invincible laziness about writing; and a shying away from the seminar and the laboratory.

Naturally our erudite lives in and for his library, which is huge and monumental. There he receives the regulars of his circle, whom he captivates with an entertaining, bounding, endlessly varied conversation, usually opening with some such questions as: Have you read So-and-So's book? (here an American, German, Russian or Scandinavian name). Do you know Such-and-Such's surprising theory? And without waiting for the answer, the erudite expounds with warm eloquence a doctrine that is more often than not outlandish and bold, without enough objective basis, and passable only as the subject of a witty causerie.

These idlers of science, who talk about everything, wasting and squandering exquisite faculties, are unaware of something very simple and very human: that they are criticized by their own friends and flatterers, in whom they inspire more pity than respect. Nor do they know, or at least they don't feel as keenly as they should, this trite truth: that erudition is worth very little when it is not the preparation and forerunner of intense, persevering personal action. All their eagerness goes into passing for monsters of talent and culture, without noticing that only life-giving effort can save the scientist from oblivion and injustice.

Fortunately there is no need to insist much on this point to correct mistaken social judgments. Everyone knows that the man who counts is the one who knows and acts, not the one who knows and falls asleep. We pay the tribute of veneration to the man who adds an original work to a library, and deny it to the man who carries a library in his head. To end up as a phonograph, it wasn't worth complicating the organization of the brain with study and reflection. Our neurons are for something more substantial. Know, but transform; understand, but act: that is the rule of the true man of science.

Let us give our applause and gratitude, then, to those who left a wake of shining truths, and forget those who wore themselves out to no purpose, turned into pinwheels of resounding words. Like the tenor, the eloquent erudite may no doubt receive enthusiastic congratulations during his lifetime, in the warm intimacy of his circle; but he will wait in vain for the acclaim of the world's great theater. The scientist's public lives far away, or is not yet alive. It reads and does not listen; it is so austere and upright that it recognizes no claims to gratitude and respect except new truths put into circulation in the market of culture.

Megalophiles. This variety of failures is marked by noble and likable traits. They study a great deal, but they also love work of their own; they worship action and have mastered the methods of inquiry; they brim with sincere patriotism and long to exalt their names and honor their country with admirable conquests.

And yet one fatal error makes all their efforts barren. Convinced evolutionists in theory, they are providentialists in practice. As if they were trusting in a miracle, they want to make their debut with some prodigious feat. Remembering perhaps that Hertz, Mayer, Schwann, Röntgen and Curie began their scientific lives with a great discovery, they hope to rise from soldier to general in their first battle, and they spend their lives planning and sketching, building and correcting, always in feverish activity, always in full revision, incubating the great brainchild, the astonishing, overwhelming work. And the years go by, and expectation grows weary, and rivals mutter, and friends rack their imaginations to excuse the great man's silence. Meanwhile, on that very subject so lengthily explored, caressed and licked into shape, important monographs come raining down from abroad that rob our ambitious investigator, alas, of the pleasure of priority and force him to change course. Undaunted, the megalophile takes up another subject, and when he has almost finished building his imposing monument, new rivals, who take the liberty of making science retail, embitter his existence once again. And at last he reaches old age amid the indulgent silence of his students and the ironic smiles of scientists.

And all for not having bowed from the start, modestly and humbly, to this law of nature, which is also a tactic of good sense: take on the small problems first, and then, if success smiles and your strength grows, attempt the great feats of research! This prudent attitude may not always lead to glory, but in any case it will win us the esteem of scientists and the respect and consideration of our fellow citizens.

As a subvariety of the megalophiles I count the schemers, who recall the projectors of old with their plans for saving the kingdom. They are easily recognized by their boiling overabundance of ideas and plans of action. Before their optimistic eyes everything looks rosy. They are sure that once they get support, their initiatives will open wide horizons to science and yield priceless practical fruits. There is only one small setback to lament: no undertaking ever ripens. All of them come to nothing, sometimes for lack of means, sometimes for lack of a favorable atmosphere, most often for lack of students able to cooperate in the great work, or of Corporations and Governments cultivated and shrewd enough to encourage and reward it.

The truth is that they don't work hard enough; they lack perseverance. As Gracián shrewdly said in his Pocket Oracle: "Some people spend everything on beginning and finish nothing. They invent, but don't carry on; with them everything comes to a stop before it comes to anything... Let the shrewd man kill his game, and not spend everything on flushing it."

Organophiles. This minor variety of the barren is recognized at once by a kind of fetish worship of the instruments of observation. Fascinated by the gleam of metal, like the lark by the mirror trap, they lovingly tend their idols, which they keep as if in a tabernacle, shining like mirrors and admirably displayed. Repose and convent discipline reign in the laboratory, where there isn't a stain to be seen or the slightest sound to be heard.

The keys are forever jingling in the organophile's ample pockets. It is impossible for the assistant or the students to consult the indispensable monograph or apparatus when the professor is away. Microscopes, spectroscopes, precision balances, reagents and the rest are locked up and sealed with seven seals. All we need is for the chief to be guilty of some indulgence, and the assistant would ruin the Zeiss objective, the refractometer or the polarizing apparatus! That would be horrible! Besides, isn't he alone responsible for the scientific equipment, the holy ark of the University, and won't he have to render a strict account to his superiors someday? Investigate? Check something? Oh, he'll do it when he has time, and once certain brand-new Monographs arrive that he simply must consult! Ah, if only the Government would raise his equipment allowance, perhaps he could part with some of the sacred deposit for the sake of teaching... But in the meantime!...

These masters, of whom my readers will remember more than one specimen, mistook their vocation¹⁸. They think they are good teachers and zealous officials, and in reality they are excellent housekeepers. Don't they remind you of those excellent ladies who decorate the parlor exquisitely, arrange the furniture scrupulously, wax the parquet every day and, to avoid stains and disorder, receive their acquaintances in the dining room?

Plainly nothing can be done with confirmed organophiles. They suffer from an almost incurable malady, especially if it is combined, as often happens, with a certain moral state they would rather not admit: the selfish and unlovely concern to stop others from working, since they themselves don't know how or don't want to work.

The misplaced. If our professorships were not so often a mere stepping stone to politics or a respectable bait for private patients; if our candidates for chairs were required, in the competitions and examinations, to give objective proofs of aptitude and vocation instead of purely subjective and, in a sense, prophetic ones, there would be fewer of these cases of glaring contradiction between real vocation and official activity, between the paid job and the free pursuit.

"One of the causes of England's prosperity," a Cambridge professor told me, "is that with us everyone is in his place." The opposite of what happens in Spain, with honorable exceptions, where many people seem to hold a post not to perform it but to draw its pay, and to have the pleasure along the way of keeping out the people fit for it.

Who doesn't remember generals born to be peaceable bureaucrats or justices of the peace; professors of medicine cultivating literature or archaeology; engineers writing melodramas; pathologists devoted to ethics, and metaphysicians sworn to politics? The upshot is that instead of giving all the strength of our minds to our official work, we give it only the smallest part, and that grudgingly, as if fulfilling a painful obligation.

I don't mean that the life of a professor, or of a man of science in general, should be so austere and strict that it is entirely consumed by professional work. I would only wish that he gave the surplus of his energy to pleasant occupations or mere pastimes, those healthy flirtations of an attention worn out by the intensity and monotony of the daily labor.

More than abnormal, someone may think, the misplaced are unfortunates on whom adverse circumstances imposed a trade against their inclinations. And yet, all things considered, these failures also belong among the sufferers from abulia, because they lack the energy needed to change course and at last bring their vocation and their job into harmony.

The chronic cases of misplacement seem to me patients past hope. Not so the young, whom family pressures or the tyranny of their surroundings have turned aside from their destiny and sentenced to forced labor. While the joints of the mind are still supple, they would do well to change direction as soon as a favorable wind blows. Even those who, tied to a science foreign to their tastes, live like exiles from their ideal homeland could redeem themselves and work to good effect if, raising their spirits to the fulfillment of sacred duties, they tried to find within their official tasks some agreeable corner where they could work deep and well. What science lacks some delightful oasis where our intelligence can find useful employment and full satisfaction?

Theorists. There are highly cultivated and superbly gifted heads whose will suffers from a special form of laziness, all the more serious because neither they nor anyone else usually takes it for laziness. Here are its chief symptoms: a talent for exposition; a creative, restless imagination; an aversion to the laboratory, and an invincible dislike of concrete science and small facts. They claim to see things on a grand scale, and they live in the clouds. They prefer the book to the monograph, and dazzling, daring hypotheses to classical but solid ideas. Faced with a difficult problem, they feel an irresistible temptation not to question Nature but to formulate a theory. If they manage to perceive some faint, contrived analogy between two phenomena, or to fit the new fact into the frame of some general conception, true or false, they are satisfied and think themselves sublime reformers. The method is legitimate in principle, but they abuse it, and fall into the innocence of looking at things from a single angle. For them the essential thing is the aesthetics of the idea. It hardly matters that it rests on air, as long as it is beautiful and ingenious, balanced and symmetrical.

Naturally, disappointments dog the theorist. The scientific world today is so unfavorable to theories that even those bearing the stamp of genius need decades of struggle and unceasing experimental toil to prevail. How many doctrines that seemed unshakable have fallen!

At bottom the theorist is a lazy man disguised as a diligent one. Without realizing it, he obeys the law of least effort. For it is easier to forge a theory than to discover a phenomenon.

Liebig, a good judge in these matters, wrote in a fatherly way to young Gerhardt, a chemist of great spirit but much too inclined to ambitious syntheses: "Don't make hypotheses. They will earn you the enmity of scientists. Concern yourself with contributing new facts. Facts are the only merits nobody begrudges us; they speak loudly in our favor, they can be checked by every intelligent man, they make us friends, and they compel the attention and respect of our adversaries."

And Liebig was entirely right. Theories are, in fact, extremely dangerous for a beginner's future. Laying down doctrine involves a certain pedantic arrogance, something like a show of intellectual superiority, which is forgiven only in a scientist made illustrious by a long series of positive discoveries. Let's first acquire a personality and be useful workmen; later we'll see whether we are allowed to be architects.

The reader, remembering what I said elsewhere about the need for hypotheses, may wonder whether I am contradicting myself. We have to distinguish between working hypotheses (Weismann's Arbeitshypothesen) and scientific theories. A hypothesis is a question put to nature, seeking an interpretation. It is part of research itself, its opening phase and its almost necessary antecedent. But to speculate all the time, that is, to theorize for the sake of theorizing without turning to the objective analysis of phenomena, is to lose oneself in insubstantial idealisms. It is to turn one's back on reality.

Let me insist once more on this obvious conclusion: a scientist's real assets consist of the sum of the original facts he contributes. Hypotheses pass, but facts remain. Theories desert us; facts defend us. They are our working capital, our real estate and our best patent of nobility, and in the eternal flux of things they alone will be saved from the outrages of time and from the forgetfulness or injustice of men. To stake everything on the success of one idea is to be unaware that theories are renewed every fifteen or twenty years. How many hypotheses that seemed final have come crashing down in physics, chemistry, geology, biology and elsewhere in the last few decades! Meanwhile there they stand, unchanging and defying criticism: the well-observed facts of anatomy and physiology, of chemistry and geology, the laws and equations of astronomy and physics. "Give me a fact," Carlyle used to say, "and I will bow down before it."

To sum up, the beginner should give his greatest energy to discovering new facts, by making precise observations, fruitful experiments and exact descriptions. He will use hypotheses to suggest plans of research and to open up new subjects of work. If in spite of everything he feels compelled to create vast scientific generalizations, let him do it later, when the stock of original observations he has gathered has won him solid authority. Then, and only then, will he be heard with respect and argued with without disdain. And if fortune is with him, he will at last wear the double crown of investigator and philosopher.

I have described the main types of failure, bringing out, perhaps in somewhat lurid colors, their ethical weaknesses and their intellectual poverty. My purpose has been to hold up before them the mirror in which they, and their students and admirers, may see their own deformity. I have no confidence, however, that my diagnosis will correct the mature and the ossified. My advice is aimed at the young who, in their innocence, envy reputations that are more than debatable. And it is aimed above all at those cultivated professors, capable of fruitful work, who, influenced by bad example and lacking inner discipline, begin to feel, as their personal work flags, the unhealthy and unpatriotic wish to imitate our conceited barren ones.

If in spite of all advice the mental reaction is slow in coming, let them examine their consciences and see whether they are not in need of a spiritual cure abroad. A scientist's laboratory is an incomparable sanatorium for straying attention and fainting wills. There old prejudices vanish and sublime contagions are caught. There, beside a hardworking scientist of genius, our sufferer from abulia will receive the baptism of blood of research. There he will witness, with noble envy, an ardent competition to wrest secrets from the unknown. There he will breathe a systematic scorn for empty theories and rhetorical speeches. There, finally, in foreign lands, he will feel holy patriotism born again. And when, launched on the road of personal work, he can count some worthy discoveries to his credit, he will come back to his native country, learn to be sparing with his admiration, and look with disdain, almost with pity, on his old idols.

Chapter 6: The Social Conditions Science Needs

Social conditions favorable to scientific work. Material means. The investigator and his family. The scientist's companion.

The output of the man of science, like every activity of the mind, is strictly conditioned by his physical and moral surroundings. It has rightly been said that the scientist is a delicate plant that can thrive only in a special soil, laid down by the silt of centuries of culture and tilled by society's care and esteem. In a favorable atmosphere even the timid feels his strength grow; a hostile or indifferent one cows the best-tempered spirit. How can we go on when nobody cares about our work? Only an iron, heroic character could rise above adverse surroundings and wait, resigned and obscure, for the approval of posterity. But society should not count on heroes, in case they don't find it convenient to appear. Let us count above all on average characters and ordinary talents, provided they come equipped with noble patriotism and honorable ambition. Governments and teaching institutions ought to help form and cultivate these patriots of the Laboratory, by creating a favorable social atmosphere for them and freeing them, as far as possible, from the worries of material life.

No doubt, for some time yet, and for reasons I leave to examine elsewhere, scientific research in Spain will be a work of self-denial and sacrifice. Even so, it must be said that the moral and material resistance to scientific work has been greatly exaggerated. Our University Jeremiahs lament, sometimes rightly, the lack of means; but more often they complain a little theatrically, striking rhetorical poses of neglect and even of persecution.

Let us be honest enough to admit it. In most cases, disheartening phrases like "I have no laboratory; I practice a profession that leaves none of the leisure scientific work requires; my family obligations rob me of the time and money research demands," and so on and so forth, are pleas for the dolce far niente, or the excuses of a fainting patriotism.

It will be easy to cut such lamentations down to their true value, and to insist in passing on this capital truth: in scientific work the means are almost nothing and the man is almost everything.

Lack of material means. Here is the handy excuse that many professors, and not a few doctors outside teaching who are fit for research, put up the moment they are asked about their work. If the complainer is a philosopher, a jurist, a philologist or the like, he will plead the lack of readers and above all the absence of a library of specialist journals. If he is a bacteriologist, a histologist or a naturalist, he will miss a good microscope, reagents, proper premises and so on. If a physicist, a chemist or an engineer, he will sing the same old song, lamenting the meanness of the instruments and the laboratory's lack of funds. If an astronomer, he will lie down in the furrow until the Government provides him with magnificent telescopes. All of them, in the end, will agree that our politicians, who come in their vast majority from the guild of lawyers and men of letters, scorn experimental science and practical teaching. And falling into a common cliché, they won't hesitate to make them chiefly responsible for our backwardness¹⁹.

It would be childish to deny that we have often suffered from ministers of the old rhetorical type, with no European outlook, and therefore disastrous for our country's intellectual revival. But such politicians, facing toward the past, devoted to tradition and suspicious of modern culture, have almost entirely disappeared.

Our statesmen today have their faults, no doubt (one is that they don't know, or don't feel strongly enough, that the greatness and power of nations is the work of science, and that justice, order and good laws are real factors of prosperity, but secondary ones). But at any rate they will not fall into the unpatriotic error of denying protection and subsidies to the leading lights of the professoriate and to scientific abilities beyond dispute. In their naive optimism they have done more, and it is painful to record: they have created splendid laboratories for the benefit of men whose aptitude and patriotism seem very doubtful. And if sinecures are created and splendid material means piled up for the experts in intrigue and favor, how could they be denied to distinguished masters made illustrious by well-known discoveries or by scientific work of real worth?

The politician has his weaknesses, but he has his nobilities too. And above all he cultivates skill and cunning. The very ministers whose will gives way before the demands of friendship or of their political clients are usually the most eager to reward real merit.

These facilities for work, of course, go by preference to outstanding professors of unquestioned authority. Beginners hungry for a name will meet greater obstacles. They would be wrong, however, to lose heart. To carry on and nurture their noble vocation, they will have to choose between sacrifice and subordination, that is, between a laboratory of their own and the official laboratory.

In the total absence of material means, every beginner will have to turn to the official laboratory. And if he sets his mind to it, he will become one of the master's intimates. As long as his capacity for work and his scientific preparation are sufficient, what professor will deny him a bench to work at and fatherly advice?

And yet I would rather see the beginner (if his finances allowed it at all) start his apprenticeship in a laboratory of his own, set up and kept going out of his modest savings. The official Establishment no doubt offers us, in the master, a valuable and in many cases irreplaceable guide. But working in common has many drawbacks. The short working hours, the constant talk and bustle, the coming and going of students and assistants, the struggle for possession of the analytical instruments, and the other annoyances that go with university laboratories not only waste time but depolarize the attention, which is no help at all to scientific inquiry.

Under such conditions, and all the more if the guide leaves something to be desired, it is better to work alone. Let books be our masters: wise, serene mentors, without eclipses or bad tempers. With them we shall carry out the supreme undertaking, which consists, before discovering, in discovering ourselves; before shaping nature, in shaping ourselves. To forge a strong brain, an original brain, entirely our own: that is the preliminary work, and it cannot be skipped. And then, once technical maturity has come, what freedom and ease for personal inquiry! Ibsen has one of his characters give a friend this advice: "Be yourself." Nothing is better for achieving it than working alone.

O comforting solitude, how kind you are to originality of thought! How sweet and fruitful the winter evenings spent in the home laboratory, when the teaching centers turn their devotees away! They save us from fatal improvisations, tame our impatience and refine our powers of observation. With what fondness we look after our own instruments, each of which stands for a vanity denied or a vice unsatisfied! In our love for them we come to appreciate their excellences, notice their defects, dodge their snares; we enter, in short, into their friendly souls, which always answer the demands of our own, submissively and sympathetically!

But a research laboratory, the reader will object, must be an expensive thing. A sad mistake. Getting the necessary tools costs very little. Professors, naturalists, doctors, pharmacists and the like would have to be wretchedly poor indeed for it to be beyond them to pay for and keep up a private center of experimental studies.

Allow me the immodesty of citing myself on this point. With the slender savings from a provincial professor's salary, and no extra income but a few private lessons, I managed to create and keep up, for fifteen years, a microscopy laboratory and an adequate library of journals. My first microscope, a respectable Verick, was bought in installments. And the case is not exceptional. The usual thing is to begin one's own work with scanty means, but one's own means, which, precisely because they are one's own, prove especially instructive and fruitful. It is well known that most physiological, histological and bacteriological discoveries were the work of young enthusiasts, without name or fortune, who worked in attics or lofts. The comfortable, sumptuous official laboratory came later, as the reward of scientific success.

Classic examples of modest beginnings could be cited by the dozen. Faraday, a bookbinder's apprentice, carried away by his passion for science, took a job as servant and mechanic in Davy's laboratory; later, away from it, and without ever having taken a degree, he set up a research center from which came admirable conquests that renewed the science of electricity. The great Berzelius began his chemical discoveries in the workroom of his pharmacy. Many astronomers of genius explored the sky from the flat roofs of their houses, armed with middling telescopes. Take Goldschmidt, for instance, who from the windows of his room, with a very modest refractor (105 millimeters), discovered many small planets by sheer patience.

In short, there is less a shortage of means than a poverty of will. Enthusiasm and perseverance work miracles. What is exceptional is for a new investigator, in a luxurious, well-stocked laboratory kept up by the State, to make his debut with a memorable scientific feat. From the standpoint of success, what is costly, what demands time, spirit and patience, is not the instruments but, as I have pointed out, developing and maturing an aptitude. At most, financial meanness will condemn us to limit our initiatives and narrow the frame of our inquiry. But isn't that an advantage?

From this angle we can distinguish two sciences: one expensive and aristocratic, whose worship demands sumptuous temples and rich offerings; the other cheap, homemade, democratic, within reach of the humblest purse. And this Minerva of the humble is especially gracious. In her kindness she welcomes the flowers of intense meditation more warmly than showy, royal hecatombs. There is, besides, a noble pride in winning with poor means: the pride of elegance and sobriety. Nothing, moreover, sets off the energetic personality of the investigator better, and distinguishes him from the herd of automatic workers, than those discoveries in which will and logic rule the machinery, and for which the brain is almost everything and material means almost nothing.

To be of use to my readers and banish their money worries, let me come down for a moment to figures and set out a budget or two for cheap laboratories.

The amateur of botany, comparative anatomy, histology, embryology and the like needs, all told, these instruments: a Zeiss microscope, medium model, with an Abbe condenser, one homogeneous immersion objective, two dry ones and a pair of eyepieces (400 to 500 pesetas); a small microtome by Reichert or Schanze (150); and some reagents and dyes (30 to 50 pesetas). In all, a total budget of 1,000 to 1,200 pesetas²⁰.

The bacteriologist and the pathological anatomist need somewhat more varied and expensive equipment, though still within reach of a new doctor or naturalist: a microscope like the one above, two ovens, one for constant temperature and one for sterilizing, test tubes, flasks, cages for animals and so on. Total: 1,800 to 2,000 pesetas.

The physiologist can begin his studies with a vivisection case, an apparatus for holding animals, a Marey recording drum, an induction coil, electric batteries and the like. All of it will cost around 1,000 pesetas.

The zoologist, the geologist and above all the amateur of comparative and experimental psychology can satisfy their tastes with even fewer instruments. Nothing is cheaper, or more captivating to a moderately philosophical mind, than the study of instincts; of the way animals react to stimuli; of the laws of habit and memory; of the disturbances caused by changes in the physical surroundings (variation, heredity, mutation per saltum, and so on); the matter, in short, of the classic observations and experiments of men like Fabre, Réaumur, Huber, Lubbock, Forel, Perrier, Bohm and others.

The pursuit of physics and chemistry certainly calls for greater sacrifices. It often requires the official laboratory, well stocked with costly measuring or analytical apparatus and powerful generators of motive power. And yet if our budding physicist knows how to keep within the limits of a special subject belonging to one of the great chapters of electricity, light, radioactivity, magnetism and so on, he too can work effectively at home with the help of a few instruments, and make his name with worthy inquiries.

The rule of confining oneself to one subject or a few has absolute value. Whoever aspired to explore the whole domain of a science (if that were possible today) would need not only large premises but an arsenal of extremely varied, and therefore enormously expensive, instruments. Here is one more drawback of the encyclopedic mania I protested against in earlier chapters.

How professional practice and research can go together. It hardly takes an effort to show that, far from excluding each other, the two tasks complete and illuminate each other. For the lover of observation, professional practice is the laboratory's best ally. Practice supplies the material for inquiry, and in exchange the laboratory gives practice theoretical rules and practical solutions.

Suppose the professional man is a doctor with a fair practice. I don't hesitate to say that he will not carry out his mission conscientiously without the help of a laboratory, private or official, where he personally works at clearing up the hard problems of the clinic with the microscope and chemical technique. And let no one plead that there is no time for it, and that such work is what the microscopy and chemistry laboratories run by specialists are for (expert analysis of blood, urine, tumors, microbes and so on). These laboratories do useful service, no doubt; but their greatest effectiveness is reached only when the person running them combines the double quality of technician and clinician.

I am far from condemning the excellences of the division of labor. But let us agree that splitting up scientific work too far brings some drawbacks. One of them is separating the inseparable, that is, lodging the terms of a single piece of reasoning in different heads. Kept apart, the experimental datum and the medical judgment are hardly any help to each other; joined in the same intellect, they light up and fertilize each other.

And coming to our subject, the question now arises: if the doctor, busy clearing up practical problems, acquires, as he can't help doing, experimental skill and command of the analytical methods, what would it cost him to go one step further and devote himself, without giving up his profession, to original scientific inquiry? That it is possible, and even feasible and easy, is proved by the conduct of many practicing doctors abroad, who, inspired by noble ideals, managed amid the worries and pressures of practice to set up private laboratories, honoring themselves and their countries with valuable biological discoveries. Let me name, among a thousand, the illustrious Virchow, who wrote his celebrated work on Cellular Pathology while a doctor in Frankfurt; Robert Koch, also a practicing doctor, living in Potsdam, whose investigations renewed bacteriology with extremely fruitful technical findings and admirable observations; and the dazzling constellation of neurologists of Frankfurt, a city without a university, where men like Weigert, Ehrlich and Edinger created valuable methods of histological research.²¹

The investigator and his family. The labors and expenses of founding and keeping a family, against the miserly pay with which the State rewards teaching, are, as everyone knows, another of the reasons many of our professors give for deserting the laboratory and turning their energies to more lucrative undertakings. "Science and the family," they say, "are incompatible. Since a professor's material base," they add, "is a mere subsistence ration, how can you invite anyone to share it? The scientist must choose, then, between his spiritual family and his real one; between his ideas and his children."

It has to be admitted that there is a core of truth in these exaggerations. The cares of home take moral and financial strength away from the work of research. The university ideal would be a monastery whose monks, vowed for life to the study of nature, let themselves be a little distracted from their religious duties.

For we are too imperfect to give our fervor equally to two noble causes. Longing for heaven makes us lose interest in the earth. It is well known that psychologists, absorbed in contemplating the spirit, despise the brain. Those who worry about the devil laugh at the microbe. And the aspiration to eternal glory takes us away from human glory. Glory!... An empty illusion, no doubt, but one able to move mountains and drive humanity ardently toward truth and goodness. Like patriotism, the passion for glory should be suggested and never analyzed.

But the monastic life would be an intolerable sacrifice for most scientists. This ideal of close community seems to have been a reality in the famous school of Alexandria. Yet those celebrated geometers and astronomers were no doubt married. If woman is an evil, let us agree that she is a necessary evil. Very few are the austere souls for whom the fair half of the human race is something like a showy specimen in an ornithological collection. Besides, it would be poor tactics for winning recruits to offer them abstinence and martyrdom. Let whoever can be self-denying be so, but let's not impose self-denial on anyone.

Here is a point where the State's protection is needed. It is purely a question of money. It is the State's sacred obligation to reconcile scientific work with a comfortable family life, sparing the investigator painful renunciations. Like every citizen who cares for the public good, the scientist should be in a position to satisfy his irrepressible social instincts to the full. In more advanced countries, where they know very well that national prosperity is the fruit of science, this economic problem was satisfactorily solved long ago. And in Germany and England they have done more. In their generosity toward their teachers they have turned the lecture hall and the laboratory into fat sinecures, and the scientist has ended by having a signature as good in the checkbook as in the scientific book.

In those happy nations what Liebig wrote to Gerhardt always comes true: "Aim at a high goal, and in the end honors and riches will come without your having to take the trouble to seek them."

In Spain we are still very far from this economic ideal. We are moving toward it, however. It is well known, as I pointed out earlier, that the material conditions of our Professoriate, and of the devotees of the laboratory in general, have improved greatly thanks to laudable initiatives by the Governments²². But even if the State were deaf to our cries, we must not lose heart. Let our motto be that of the great financiers: to earn a great deal so as to meet all our needs, and especially the higher ones, rather than squeeze ourselves into a life of petty economy and cowardly abstinence.²³

Let's take the worst case and see how the new professor can serve both his family and his plans. I assume our professor lives in a provincial city with a squalid atmosphere, where no private practice is possible, and so lacks the means to meet at once the unavoidable demands of home and those of his beloved research.

Shall he deny himself everything for the sake of his vocation? Shall he live alone and give up marriage? By no means. Let him serve his ideals and his good instincts with equal devotion. For his work, let him take up cheap research that asks for little equipment and a lot of effort. And let him put his spare energy into those teaching trades least removed from the object of his love: writing textbooks and even popular books, expert analyses, and private teaching. With this extra income he will feed his noble ambitions without giving up the legitimate pleasures of home. And let him wait patiently for better times. If his work is really meritorious, the reward will come and surprise him in his corner. To the sublime joy that comes with the austere fulfillment of duty will be added material well-being and the flattery of renown as well.

Against the opinion of many, I have declared that the man of science ought to be married and face bravely the worries and responsibilities of family life.

He should not imitate the selfishness of Epicurus, who did not marry in order to spare himself cares and worries, nor the very refined selfishness of Napoleon, who saw in woman only an extremely useful nurse for old age²⁴. For the man of science a wife's help is as necessary in youth as in old age. A wife is like the knapsack in battle: without it you fight unencumbered, but what about afterward?

On this point I make only one reservation: that the scientist take account of his own special psychology²⁵ before choosing a companion, and above all that he avoid at all costs letting others choose her for him. There is little need to insist on the case for the scientist's marriage. In a robust, normal man, celibacy is usually a standing invitation to an irregular life, if not to the excesses of debauchery. And ideas are flowers of virtue that do not open their corollas, or quickly wither, in the fumes of the orgy. Besides, the bachelor lives in a constant sexual preoccupation. In him the gallant intrigue interrupts the course of the speculative intrigue too much. And as is well known, there is no surer way to stop being preoccupied with women than to be satisfied with a woman. Moreover, as has often been said, a happy home banishes selfishness from the soul, ennobles the sexual instinct, breeds high social aspirations and strengthens patriotism.

The choice of a companion! Here I touch on a very delicate point. What qualities should grace the woman a man of science chooses? It is a very grave question, for it is well known that the wife's moral qualities are decisive for the success of scientific work. Many citizens suffer from their wives, but they suffer alone; from the scientist's wife, though, society and even the whole of humanity sometimes suffer. How many important works were cut short by a young wife's selfishness! How many vocations were thwarted by feminine vanity or caprice! How many distinguished professors gave way under the yoke of marriage, turning into common gold seekers and lowering and sterilizing themselves with an insatiable hoarding of honors and prebends!²⁶

Even a wife's most human and noble impulses, when they swell too far, become formidable enemies of scientific work. As is well known, the spirit of family lives in woman, the healthy tendency toward the physical preservation of the race. A holy selfishness, because it stands for the supreme interest of the species! Renan said, not without reason and depth, "what woman wants, God wants." Woman concentrates her love and self-denial on her offspring; man, less exclusive, knows how to divide his affections between his family and society. Woman loves tradition, adores privilege, has little feeling for justice and is usually indifferent to every work of renewal and progress; whereas the man really worthy of the name, the homo socialis, abhors routine and privilege, venerates justice, and in many cases puts the cause of humanity before the interest of his family. That is why the mother longs to live only in the memory of her children, while the father longs, besides, to survive in the annals of history.

Both tendencies, the centripetal and the centrifugal, the one of concentration and the one of expansion, are legitimate and necessary. The prosperity of the race and the advance of civilization depend on their harmony and adjustment. When the man's altruistic tendency prevails too far, the offspring decline; when, on the contrary, the feminine tendency predominates, the family prospers but society and the State suffer. In the scientist's home, as in the honest politician's, the spirit of self-denial and sacrifice will reign, but not to the point of creating conditions adverse to the children's growth and education. For even from the standpoint of the common interest, there is no doubt that domestic quarrels and worries, when they go on and on, end by souring the thinker's life and so hindering the pursuit of his scientific or social work.

To sum up, as a general rule I advise the lover of science to look in the chosen of his heart less for beauty and money than for a suitable psychology, that is, feelings, tastes and tendencies in some way complementary to his own. He should choose not a woman but his woman, whose best dowry will be tender obedience and a full, warm acceptance of her husband's ideal of life.

At this point the reader may want me to leave generalities behind and define the type of woman best suited to the man of science. Let me give my opinion here, with the natural reservations and caution. And to those who smile at seeing me stoop to such matters, I will say that a thing like love, which decides a life, is no frivolous matter. Nor is it a matter of indifference whether a woman is, for the man of study, the gas that lifts him to the sky or the ballast that forces him, at the height of his flight, to land in the swamp.

Among the women of the middle class, where the man of study usually looks for a companion, there are four main types: the intellectual, the rich heiress, the artist, and the homemaker.

The intellectual woman, that is, the young woman with a scientific or literary degree, or who, drawn by an irresistible vocation for study, has managed to acquire a fairly solid and varied general education, is a very rare species in Spain. We have to give up so pleasant a companionship, then. It is a pity, no doubt; though the few specimens of women doctors (with a couple of exceptions) I have met in Athenaeums, Laboratories and drawing rooms seem bent on consoling us for their inaccessibility.

This category of woman abounds abroad, on the other hand, and in it the learned woman stands out with special prestige: she works with her husband on his scientific undertakings and is free (as far as that is possible) of the fancies and frivolities of the feminine temperament. Such a woman, intelligent and even-tempered, brimming with optimism and strength, is the ideal companion for the investigator. She triumphs in the home and in the scientist's heart, wearing the triple crown of loving wife, intimate confidante and diligent collaborator. The case, I repeat, is not exceptional in the fortunate nations of the North.

With what admiration, not free of envy, have I watched in some Laboratories those happy couples busily absorbed in the same work, into which each spouse puts the finest of his or her mental temperament and technical skills! Not to dwell on the moving example of the Curies, the discoverers of radium, and keeping to the small circle of my own friends and scientific interests, three admirable couples come to mind: Monsieur and Madame Dejerine of Paris, devoted to the study of the normal and pathological anatomy of the brain; Monsieur and Madame Nageotte, of the same city, who work together on histological and neurological research; and finally the Vogts, O. Vogt and Cécile Vogt, of the Neurobiological Institute in Berlin, engaged in the great undertaking of mapping the human brain plot by plot, like the astronomers who spend their lives absorbed in photographing and cataloguing stars and nebulae.

But, I repeat, this phoenix, the serious and discreet woman doctor, her husband's diligent collaborator, has not yet deigned to appear on our social horizon, where, oddly enough, the greatest feminine talents are self-taught and wholly outside regular university studies. The Spanish man of science must choose, then, among the other categories of women.

Shall he turn to the wealthy woman? It seems to me extremely dangerous. Used to a life of luxury, pomp and display, it would be a miracle if she did not infect her husband with her tastes, and so repeat the case of the illustrious English physicist Davy, who, having married a woman of high lineage, almost entirely broke off his splendid career as an investigator and used up the best of his life in the parties and receptions of high society.

It would be a great piece of luck to come upon a rich and educated heiress who, abandoning the whims and vanities of her sex, devoted her gold to the service of science. Admirable women of this kind abound in France and England. In our country I have not known a single professor devoted to the laboratory whose work was not ruined by his wife's wealth. If discretion did not seal my lips, I could show here with living examples how a wife's frivolously showy tastes, or a mother's exaggerated selfishness, have cut short promising careers, forcing the new man of science to trade study for politics, the microscope for the automobile, and the redeeming evenings in the laboratory for idle hours at the social gathering or the theater.

But let's not blame these rich ladies too much. They are excellent at heart, though victims of their lack of education; and in the end the endless reproaches with which they paralyze their husbands' honest initiatives ("why exert yourself when you have enough to live comfortably," and so on) are forgivable, since they spring from conjugal love. Far more disagreeable are those haughty heiresses who, without the least consideration, throw in the unhappy husband's face his parasitic condition and financial incapacity, and, mortifying him with daily gibes, force him to work like a beast of burden to pay in full (the wife's dowry vanishes into finery, jewels, luxurious furniture and trips to fashionable spas and beaches) for the pomp of a life as full of vanity as it is empty of ideals!

Shall the scientist prefer the woman artist or the professional woman of letters? With honorable exceptions, such women are a constant disturbance and an endless occasion of trouble for the cultivator of science. It is disheartening to admit that as soon as she enjoys a manly talent and culture, a woman usually loses the charm of modesty, puts on the airs of a schoolmaster, and lives in a perpetual display of refinements and accomplishments. Woman is always a little theatrical, but the woman of letters or the artist is always on stage. And then their tastes are so lordly and complicated!... The wealthy wife, at least, usually pays for her own whims. No great friend of books and journals, she browses only in jewelers' and dress shops; but the literary woman runs her eyes with equal greed over the windows full of jewels and hats and over the booksellers' displays.

All that is left to our budding scientist, then, as a likely and desirable companion in glories and labors, is the thrifty, hardworking young woman, healthy in body and mind, graced with optimism and a good disposition, with enough education to understand and encourage her husband and enough passion to believe in him and dream of the hour of triumph, which she considers quite certain. Inclined to simple happiness and an enemy of notoriety and display, she will place her pride in her husband's health and happiness. And he, instead of reproaches and resistance, will find at home a pleasant atmosphere favorable to the germination and growth of ideas. And if, by good fortune, glory smiles, its radiance will surround two twin brows with a single halo.

Glory!... The modest wife deserves it too, because thanks to her self-denial, sacrificing finery and jewels so that books and journals should not be lacking, consoling and comforting genius in its hours of discouragement, she made the carrying out of the great undertaking possible in the end.

Fortunately this delightful type of woman is not rare in our middle class. Very unlucky will be the man who, looking for her in earnest, fails to find her or does not know how to join her wholeheartedly to his destiny. The trick is to win her over to the common work, to become her spiritual director, to mold her character, bending it to the demands of a serious life of intense work and austere reserve; to make of her, in short, as I said before, a complementary mental organ, absorbed in small things (if the government of the home and the education of the children can be called small), so that her husband, free of worry, can attend to great ones, that is, to the germination and rearing of his beloved discoveries and his scientific speculations.

There are now (1923) laboratories in Spain so lavishly equipped that the greatest scientists abroad envy them. And yet little or nothing is produced in them. The fact is that our ministers and teaching bodies have forgotten two important things: that it is not enough to declare yourself an investigator to be one, and that discoveries are made by men, not by scientific apparatus and well-stocked libraries. ↩
This was written many years ago. Today (1923), after the world war, these modest budgets would of course have to be raised by more than half. ↩
Translator's note. Cajal's memory slips on two of these: Virchow gave the lectures of Cellular Pathology (1858) as a professor in Berlin, and Koch did his anthrax work as a country district physician in Wollstein, in the province of Posen, before moving to Berlin. ↩
The writer of these lines, the humblest of Spanish professors, would be guilty of ingratitude if he did not record a fact that speaks very highly for the generosity of our Governments. The mere telegraphed news that the prize called the Moscow Prize, awarded by the International Medical Congress of Paris (1900), had gone to a Spaniard was enough for them to seek me out incontinenti in the corner where I was working in silence and put a splendid laboratory at my disposal. The Helmholtz Medal and the Nobel Prize, new gifts of my lucky star that came afterward (1908), not to mention the high distinctions received from the chief scientific bodies of the world, gave me the satisfaction of thinking that the modest sacrifice made by the Spanish State had not been barren for Science.

And my case, fortunately, is not unique. Anyone in our country who has been consecrated by foreign science gets honors and prebends without wanting them or looking for them. Sometimes even too many!... Let the selfish, then, who always put the reward before the merit, know that in our country too (and I am inclined to say better than abroad) the serious pursuit of science is a reasonable business. ↩
Translator's note. The dates are off: the Helmholtz Medal of the Prussian Academy came in 1905 and the Nobel Prize, shared with Golgi, in 1906. ↩
Everyone knows the famous remark Bonaparte made before the Council of State when he was Consul: "If man did not grow old, I would wish him to do without woman." ↩
I am thinking especially of the effects of mental concentration and intensive work, which can turn the scientist into a man perpetually absent-minded, as slack and careless in bringing up his children as in managing his property. ↩
I could name more than twenty young men of great ability and excellent preparation whose research, barely begun, was shipwrecked by marriage. At present, as far as biology is concerned, nearly all our best producers are bachelors. ↩

Chapter 7: How an Investigation Proceeds

The course of scientific research. Observation. Experiment. The guiding hypothesis. Verification.

Following the writers on logic, and E. Naville in particular, I distinguish three successive operations in every scientific investigation: observation and experiment, supposition or hypothesis, and verification. In some cases the inquiry itself is preceded not by personal observation but by an act of criticism, a repugnance our mind feels a priori toward certain more or less generally accepted doctrines. But it has to be granted that such a disagreement often presupposes some personal objective study, if only a light one, of the subject or of matters related to the problem to be solved.

Observation

The advice the writers on literary style give, on which Pérez de Ayala has written so aptly and wittily, "to see things for the first time," that is, to wonder at them afresh, setting aside bookish memories, borrowed descriptions and stock phrases and commonplaces, applies very markedly in scientific research. We must clear our minds of prejudices and other people's images, and make a firm resolve to see and judge for ourselves, as if the object had been created expressly for the treat and delight of our intellect. We must, in short, recapture as far as possible the state of mind, a mixture of surprise, emotion and the liveliest curiosity, that the lucky scientist went through who discovered the fact we are considering or first posed the problem.

And this ties in closely with another rule that the masters of scientific research press on us insistently. It is not enough to examine; we must contemplate. Let us steep the things we observe in emotion and sympathy; let us make them ours, with the heart as much as with the mind. Only then will they give up their secret. For enthusiasm heightens and sharpens our perception. Like the lover who manages to discover new perfections in his beloved every day, whoever contemplates an object with delight ends by making out in it interesting details and rare properties that escaped the wandering attention of the routine workers.

Coming down now to more concrete ground, let me set out some rules indispensable for good observation in biological matters.

Observation should be done under the best possible conditions, using the most perfect analytical instruments and the most trustworthy methods of study. If possible, we will apply several methods to the same subject and correct the shortcomings of some with the revelations of others. Let us choose the most exact technique, the one that gives the clearest and most conclusive images. It is important, too, to avoid any rashness in judging the facts, reproducing them in a thousand ways until we are sure they are perfectly constant and that we have not fallen victim to one of those deceptive appearances that lead young explorers astray (particularly in microscopic studies).

If our study concerns an object of Anatomy, Natural History and the like, observation should go hand in hand with drawing. Besides its other advantages, the act of copying disciplines and strengthens the attention, forces us to go over the whole of the phenomenon studied, and so keeps us from missing details often overlooked in ordinary observation. In the natural sciences we can only flatter ourselves that we know a form or a structure when we can draw it easily and in detail. All the more so since certain morphological studies would be incomprehensible without drawing. The great Cuvier was right when he said that "without the art of drawing, Natural History and Anatomy would have been impossible"²⁷. It is no accident that all great observers are highly skilled draftsmen.

When, despite having applied the proper technique, the preparation of the object does not come out quite to our liking, we must make it again as many times as needed to get the most out of the method. It will be a great help to have before us, for comparison with our own, some excellent preparation made by the author of the method or by one of his inner circle of pupils. Let us bear in mind that a new fact is discovered not by the man who sees it first, but by the man who, through a highly skilled technique, manages to show it with complete evidence, so that everyone is convinced. As I said earlier, in the biological sciences nearly all the great scientists have owed their conquests to their complete command of one or more methods of demonstration or experiment.

Experiment

In many sciences (Physiology, Pathology, Physics, Chemistry and so on) experiment surpasses observation itself in importance. It is impossible to make discoveries in Physics or Physiology without devising an original experiment, without subjecting the phenomenon under study to more or less new conditions. Even Morphology (Histology, Anatomy, Embryology and the like), for which mere observation seems enough, is growing more experimental every day. And to this change of course we owe valuable conquests that would never have been reached along the beaten track of the anatomical analysis of static forms. Among a thousand examples, let me recall the production of artificial parthenogenesis in the starfish (a sexual animal) by replacing natural fertilization (the action of the spermatozoon) with the influence of seawater loaded with magnesium chloride; the interesting experiments in merogony (destroying the first cleavage spheres of the fertilized egg) carried out on amphibians by Roux, Hertwig, Wilson and others, which showed that each primitive cell can generate a whole embryo and so finally ruined the embryological hypotheses of preexistence and of the mosaic; the work of Nageotte, Marinesco and others on transplanting nerves and ganglia, proving that the form of the nerve cell is simply a function of its chemical surroundings; the marvelous results Harrison, Carrel and his school (the Rockefeller Institute) have obtained in growing the cells of normal and diseased tissues artificially, in series and in vitro; and the interesting experiments of H. de Vries and many modern naturalists on the mutation of species and the mechanism of heredity.

Such admirable successes should encourage us to complete the merely static study of forms, as far as we can, by bringing in the experimental method. In this way we provoke violent changes in the normal biological conditions of cells and organisms, and so simplify the logical process of determining the causes and the physical and chemical mechanism of the phenomenon studied. No doubt changes in the conditions of phenomena sometimes occur in observation itself; but such changes, due to natural causes, are rare and occasional, whereas by experiment we shorten the delays and make ourselves masters both of the natural determinism and of the causes of variation.

The Guiding Hypothesis

Once the facts have been observed, we have to settle their meaning and the relations that tie the new truth to the whole body of the postulates of Science. Faced with an unusual phenomenon, the mind's first move is to imagine a hypothesis that accounts for it and brings it under one of the known laws. Experience will then rule definitively on how likely the idea is.

Thinking about the character of good hypotheses, one realizes that most of them are happy generalizations or daring inductions, by which the newly discovered fact is provisionally treated as a particular case of a general principle, or as an unknown effect of a known cause. Transformism, for example, so fruitful in the biological sciences, is nothing but the generalization to all living things of the law of heredity, which has been positively demonstrated only within the history of each species. When Lavoisier created the theory of animal heat, he reduced the respiration of animals, whose essence was unknown before, to the general law of the production of heat by the oxidation of carbon. And so on.

In framing the hypothesis we should keep the following rules in mind. (1) The hypothesis must be necessary, that is, without it there must be no other way to explain the phenomena. (2) It must also be testable or verifiable, or at least it must be possible to conceive of its being verified at some more or less distant date; for hypotheses that escape entirely from the touchstone of observation or experiment really leave the problems unsolved, and can be nothing more than artificial syntheses that arrange the facts without explaining them, if they are not mere verbal explanations. (3) It must be easy to picture, that is, translatable into physical and chemical language and, if possible, as Lord Kelvin wanted, into pure mechanism (obscure or overly abstract hypotheses run the risk of being empty verbal explanations). (4) Steering clear of occult properties and metaphysical essences, it should tend to turn questions of quality into problems of quantity. (5) It should if possible also suggest inquiries and controversies that, even if they don't settle the question, at least bring us closer to the right road by prompting new and happier ideas (Weismann's working hypotheses). Even if it is wrong, a hypothesis can serve progress effectively, provided it rests on new observations and points scientific thought in an original direction. And in any case, an explanation rejected as false will always have one advantage: that of narrowing, by exclusion, the field of the imaginable, eliminating unacceptable solutions and sources of error. Le Bon rightly says "that whoever refuses to take hypothesis as his guide must resign himself to taking chance as his master."

Many illustrious scientists, the great physicist Tyndall in particular, have insisted eloquently on the importance of hypotheses in Science and on the important part imagination plays in creating good and fruitful theories. I agree, and I believe that if the hypothesis is a weapon much abused, it is also a logical instrument without which even observation, passive as it is in itself, cannot be carried out. Good or bad, a conjecture, some attempt at explanation, will always be our guide, for nobody searches without a plan.

Even the so-called chance findings are usually owed to some guiding idea that experience did not confirm, but that nevertheless had the power to lead us onto ground little or not at all explored. If the homeliness of the comparison may be forgiven, I would say that it is the same in these matters as with acquaintances who appear in the street among the crowd of passersby at the very moment we are thinking of them, for the very simple reason that when we are not thinking of them they pass close by without our noticing. Driven by the hypothesis, we may happen to catch in the facts something other than what we were looking for; but that is better than finding nothing, which is exactly what happens to the mere impassive contemplator of natural phenomena. As Peisse says, "the eye sees in things only what it looks for in them, and it looks only for what is already in the mind as an idea."

There is no need to recall that all the great investigators were fertile creators of hypotheses. It has been said, very profoundly, that hypotheses are the first stammering of reason amid the darkness of the unknown; the sounding line lowered into the mysterious abyss; the bridge, airy and bold, that joins the familiar shore to the unexplored continent.

Hypotheses have been much abused. It must be recognized, however, that without them our stock of positive facts would be very meager and would grow very slowly. The hypothesis and the objective datum are bound by a close relation of cause and effect. Besides its value as concept or explanation, a theory has a value as an instrument. "The scientist must not forget," says Huxley, "that the hypothesis must be regarded as a means, never as an end." To observe without thinking is as dangerous as to think without observing. The hypothesis is our best intellectual tool: a tool that, like all tools, can get blunted and rusty and needs constant repair and replacement, but without which it would be almost impossible to cut a deep breach in the hard block of reality.

It is hard to lay down rules for imagining hypotheses. Whoever lacks a certain intuition of causal connection, a divining instinct for glimpsing the idea in the fact and the law in the phenomenon, will seldom hit on a reasonable explanation, however great his talent as an observer. It is possible, though, as far as biological hypotheses are concerned, to point to some general concepts or rules worth remembering when the time comes to imagine explanatory hypotheses.

Here are some of them:

1. Nature uses the same means for the same ends. By virtue of this principle, which has few exceptions, we can in many cases reduce an unknown arrangement to a known one. When mitosis or karyokinesis was discovered in the large cells of newt and salamander larvae, for example, one could rationally expect to find similar phenomena in the cell division of man and the higher vertebrates, in health and in disease alike; and experience did confirm the forecast. To give another example: once the free ending of the motor and sensory nerve fibers, by varicose arborizations, had been cleared up in the vertebrates thanks to the researches of Kühne, Krause, Ranvier and others, it could be foreseen, by virtue of this law, that the same fact would recur in the nerve centers, not only of the vertebrates but of the invertebrates. And this rational suspicion was later fully confirmed by me, by Kölliker, Lenhossék, van Gehuchten and others for the vertebrates, and by Retzius, Lenhossék and others for the invertebrates. There is no need to multiply examples.

2. Study the fact in its simple forms. Since ontogeny and phylogeny are two almost parallel series of forms running from the simple to the complicated, the best thing we can do to clear up the structure of an organ that is complex and almost impenetrable in the higher vertebrates is to study it in its simple forms, whether in the development of the individual or in the series of species. An excellent method for determining the meaning of a thing is to find out how it came to be what it is; for in pointing out its place in the chain of evolution we clear up, without meaning to, its anatomical and physiological value.

3. Every natural arrangement, however capricious it looks, serves a useful end. Leaving aside the atrophied organs, this teleological principle applies to every particular of structure in animals and plants. In stating this law I do not claim, as Linnaeus, Cuvier and Agassiz supposed, that each organ is a direct incarnation of the creative Principle. I only mean to record that, whatever the cause, every organ that Nature has kept, that is, fixed through heredity over thousands of years, almost always represents an arrangement useful to the individual or the species, since superfluous or unfavorable organizations brought about by variation and other conditions end by being eliminated. In keeping with this principle we will assign an important function to all organs or tissues that persist stubbornly through the animal series, and a less urgent activity, at least for the life of the individual, to those poorly represented in the zoological scale. The physiologist uses and abuses this postulate all the time when he tries to interpret the workings of organs like those of circulation, digestion and locomotion, workings on which so much light is thrown by our knowledge of Physics and Chemistry, or, as Letamendi used to say, by the present state of our industrial knowledge.

There are exceptions to the utility principle, no doubt; but they are few and easily explained by recent, and therefore incomplete, adaptation to new conditions (organs atrophied by disuse and so on). Metchnikoff discusses these biological incongruities, more common still in man than in animals and consequences of Lamarck's principle of the use and disuse of organs, ingeniously in his Studies on Human Nature.

The hypothesis is always applied, as we know, to explaining facts already in hand. Without going into the thorny philosophical problem of scientific explanation (that would call for developments out of place in this little book), I will point out that the understanding, in considering natural phenomena, can take one of two attitudes, both satisfying our need for certainty:

1. The new fact is referred to a known law (Meyerson's lawful explanation).

2. The new fact, besides being lawful, that is, tied to a general law, also resolves itself before reason into pure mechanism and fits obediently into the equations of dynamics. This second kind of explanation represents for Maxwell, and for most modern physicist-philosophers, a higher degree of scientific understanding, and it requires general theories that rank above the empirical laws.

It must be admitted that our understanding imperiously demands theories it can conceive, that can be pictured in mechanical terms. Whatever resists material representation runs a great risk of being a mere play of the imagination with no objective reality. The psychological reason for this need still escapes us. Perhaps it is because, as Bergson would say, our concepts are modeled on the discontinuity of sensation, so that the imagination can forge, as the ultimate representation of things, only something like the sense datum itself: variations in the motion of discontinuous parts, disturbances in the configuration and workings of material systems.

In Physics, Chemistry and Astronomy, hypothetical explanations by mechanical reduction are extremely common, and the investigator should draw on them to give his ideas plastic shape and carry his speculations forward. In Anatomy, Biology, Pathology and the like we shall almost always have to be content with lawful hypotheses, which, if they don't fully satisfy our hunger for understanding, are enough to meet reason's two great longings: to act and to foresee.

Verification. Once the hypothesis has been imagined, it must be submitted to the verdict of experience, and for this we will choose precise, complete and conclusive experiments or observations. Devising good experiments is one of the characteristic marks of a superior mind, which finds a way to settle at a stroke questions that mediocre scientists manage to clear up only by long and wearisome experiments.

If the hypothesis does not fit the facts, it must be rejected without mercy, and another explanation imagined that is free of reproach. Let us impose on ourselves a strict self-criticism, based on distrust of ourselves. During verification we will be as diligent in looking for the facts against our hypothesis as for those that may support it. Let us avoid growing too fond of our own ideas, which should find in us not a defense lawyer but a prosecutor. A tumor must be removed, even if it is our own. It is far better to correct ourselves than to suffer correction by others. For my part, I feel not the least mortification in abandoning my ideas, because I believe that to fall and get up by oneself shows strength, whereas to fall and wait for a compassionate hand to lift us up betrays weakness.

We will confess our blunders, however, whenever someone proves them to us. In doing so we shall act as decent men; and by proving that only love of truth moves us, we shall win greater consideration and esteem for our opinions.

Vanity and pride rob us of the sovereign pleasure of feeling ourselves sculptors of ourselves, the incomparable delight of having corrected and surpassed ourselves, refining and perfecting our cerebral machine, the legacy of heredity. If conceit is ever forgivable, it is when the will shapes us or re-creates us, acting, so to speak, as a sovereign demiurge.

If our pride raises some objections, let us bear in mind that, like it or not, all our contrivances will be powerless to delay the triumph of the truth, which will usually come in our own lifetime, and will be all the more lamentable the more energetic the protest of our vanity has been. There will be no lack, no doubt, of some peevish and perhaps ill-meaning spirit to throw our inconsistency in our faces, vexed, no doubt, because our spontaneous correction robbed him of an easy victory at our expense. To such people we will answer that the duty of the man of science is not to petrify in error but to adapt continually to the new scientific surroundings; that the brain's vigor lies in moving, not in stiffening into ankylosis; and that in man's intellectual life, as in the life of animal species, the bad thing is not change but regression and atavism. Variation implies vigor, plasticity, youth; fixity is a synonym for repose, cerebral laziness, the petrifaction of thought, in a word for fatal inertia, the sure herald of decrepitude and death²⁸. A scientist once said, with likable sincerity, "I vary because I study." It would be nobler and more modest still to declare, "I change because others study, and I take pride in renewing myself."

When the work of confirmation throws little light, let us devise new experiments and try to put ourselves in the best position to weigh the reach of the hypothesis. In Anatomy or Physiology, for example, it often proves impossible to clear up the structure or function of a complex organ, because we attack the problem from its hardest side, trying to solve it in man or the higher vertebrates. But if we turn to embryos or lower animals, Nature shows herself more artless and less coy, offering us an almost diagrammatic plan of the structure and workings we are after, and our hypothesis will often receive unexpected and definitive confirmation.

To sum up, the course the investigator follows in conquering a scientific truth is usually this. 1. Observation of the facts, shown by decisive, clear and highly precise methods. 2. Experiment, to create new conditions in which the phenomena appear. 3. Criticism and elimination of the mistaken hypotheses, and the working out of a rational interpretation of the facts, by which they are brought under a general law and, if possible, a physical and chemical representation or diagram. 4. Verification of the hypothesis by new observations or repeated experiments. 5. If it does not agree with reality, replacement of the hypothesis by another, which will in turn be submitted to rigorous objective analysis. 6. Applications and ramifications of the hypothesis, now become firm truth, in other spheres of knowledge.

Quoted by the distinguished professor Pou y Orfila in an excellent pamphlet on the study of Anatomy: Observaciones sobre la enseñanza de la Medicina (Observations on the Teaching of Medicine). Montevideo, 1906. ↩
The cult of consistency, which passes for a virtue in politics, is in science almost always an unmistakable sign of pride or of dim wits. Variability is one of the traits that best express the investigator's honesty. In my view, whoever cannot abandon a false opinion declares himself a fool, an old man or an ignoramus; for in fact only fools, the decrepit and those who don't read cling to error. The thoroughgoing devotees of consistency seem to declare, with their Olympian disdain for every scientific novelty: "I am worth so much and know so much that nothing science may discover will make me correct my opinions one jot." The brain is a tree whose branches grow and become more intricate with study and reflection. To demand, then, that it not change in matters of opinion is to want the tree of the future to stay a shrub, or never to grow crooked branches. Science teaches us that in the course of his life man renews himself, in body and mind, many times over; that in the individual life there are various avatars that come close to breaking the continuity of consciousness and the sense of one's own personality. New reading and the change of our moral and intellectual surroundings continually alter and improve our inner atmosphere and purify and refine our judgments. Once past fifty, who would dare sincerely defend all the ideas of his personality at twenty, that is, the thinking of inexperienced and generous youth? ↩

Chapter 8: Writing Up the Work

On writing the scientific paper.

Having Something to Say

Mr. Billings, the learned librarian in Washington, weighed down by the job of classifying thousands of pamphlets in which, in different styles, almost the same facts were announced, or truths long known were set out, advised scientific writers to submit to the following rules: (1) have something new to say; (2) say it; (3) stop as soon as it is said; and (4) give the publication a fitting title and order.

Here is a reminder I don't think useless in Spain, the classic land of hyperbole and showy dilution. The first thing we need in order to deal with scientific matters, when the mission of teaching does not drive us, is some new observation or useful idea to pass on to others. Nothing is more ridiculous than the pretension of writing without being able to bring any real clarification to the question, with no other spur than to show off a feverish imagination or parade a pedantic learning made of facts taken at second or third hand.

When you take up your pen to write a scientific article, consider that some illustrious scientist may read you, one whose occupations don't allow him to waste his time rereading known things or mere rhetorical dissertations. Many of our academic addresses suffer, unfortunately, from this capital sin. Many a doctoral thesis, and not a few articles in our professional journals, seem written not to shed light on a subject but to show off the author's fluency and get him out of the awkward obligation of writing, somehow or other, and the later the better (for what is lacking in doctrine is made up in width), without his having taken the trouble to think. Notice how common are the addresses headed with titles that seem invented by laziness itself: General Idea of... Introduction to the Study of... General Considerations on... A Critical Assessment of the Theories of... The Importance of Such-and-Such a Science... Titles like these give the writer the incomparable advantage of dodging the literature and holding forth on the subject as he pleases, without obliging himself to treat anything seriously and in depth. In saying this I don't mean to belittle the merit of some well-conceived and well-written works that appear now and then under these familiar headings or ones like them.

Let us make sure, then, through a careful search of the literature, that the fact or idea we want to present is original, and let us beware, besides, of publishing the fruit of our observation too soon. When our thinking still wavers between different conclusions and we are not fully conscious of having hit the mark, that is a sign we left the laboratory too early. The prudent course will be to go back and wait until, under the influence of new observations, our ideas finish crystallizing.

The Literature

Before setting out our own contribution to the subject, it is customary to trace the history of the question, both to mark the point of departure and to pay a just tribute to the distinguished scientists who went before us and opened the road of research. Whenever the new investigator is tempted, for brevity's sake or out of laziness, to skimp on dates and citations, let him consider that others may pay him back in the same coin by deliberately passing over his work in silence. Such conduct is as ungenerous as it is discourteous, since most scientists get no other reward for their painful studies than the esteem and applause of the learned, who make up, as I have said, an insignificant minority.

Respect for the ownership of ideas is only properly practiced once you have become the owner of thoughts that pass from book to book, sometimes with the author's name, sometimes without it, and sometimes with the wrong paternity. When you fall victim to annoying omissions and unjust silences, you realize that every idea is a scientific offspring, and that its author, who gave it life at the cost of great labor, utters, on seeing his paternity ignored, the same cries of pain a mother would utter if the fruit of her womb were snatched from her.

Being ready to do justice, let's do it even in the form: let us not fail to arrange in strict chronological order the lists of names, or cartridge belts of citations, that we sometimes have to give for brevity's sake when reporting a discovery. If such strings of surnames are to be ordered logically, they must begin with the originator and end with the confirmers and improvers. A meticulous, firsthand study of the literature will save us from injustices, and hence from the inevitable claims of priority.

Justice and Courtesy in Judgments

In recording the historical background we are often obliged to give judgments on the reach of other people's work. It goes without saying that in such assessments we should behave not only impartially but with exquisite courtesy, in pleasant and almost flattering form. Indulgent with the novice's mistakes, we will be respectful and modest before the lapses of the great names in science. Let us always fear that our observations may be the rashness of impatience or the mirages of youthful enthusiasm. Before deciding to reject a commonly accepted fact or interpretation, then, let us think it over carefully. And in setting out our objections let us bear well in mind that if there are noble and kindly characters among scientists, there are still more touchy temperaments, imperial hauteurs and exquisitely sensitive vanities. Horace's phrase genus irritabile vatum, "the touchy tribe of poets," applies to scientists even better than to poets. The sharp-eyed Gracián noticed it long ago: "The wise were always short of patience; whoever adds knowledge adds impatience."

With these precautions we will avoid, as far as possible, systematic disdain for our work, and poisoned quarrels and polemics in which we would lose peace and time without gaining a scrap of prestige or authority. For in the assessment of our merits only the new facts we contribute will count, not our polemical dexterity and flair.

When, attacked unjustly, we are forced to defend ourselves, let us do it like gentlemen, wielding the sword, but with the point blunted and decorated, as the common image has it, with a bouquet of flowers.

It is painful to recognize that in most cases the attackers are defending not a doctrine but their own infallibility. Eucken notes very aptly that under color of refuting principles "everyone defends himself and his own nature... It is the instinct of spiritual self-preservation reacting."

When, to our misfortune, we have to contend with opponents of this sort (it is sometimes unavoidable, because every truth exasperates the champions of error), it would be naive to hope to persuade them. It is not to them that we should look, but to the public. Let us bring forward decisive proofs, strengthen the thesis as far as possible with new objective data, and pass over personal attacks and polemical traps in silence. For in such tournaments what matters, before defending ourselves, is defending the truth.

How much vexation and bitterness comes from forgetting these well-known rules of prudence and discretion! Sharp, violent replies and spiteful silences are almost always caused by our lack of good manners and restraint in presenting and assessing other people's work.

Let me give some concrete details for the beginner's instruction. As a rule, criticisms concern either errors of fact or observation, or errors of interpretation.

(a) An error of observation, or in recognizing a fact. In general scientists argue about interpretations, not facts, on the assumption that an investigator, however modest, would not launch into analytical work without enough preparation. For that very reason such lapses are considered serious, and betray in whoever commits them a singular intellectual innocence or inexperience in method. Even so, let us be careful not to gloat when we point out the blunder. Let us be merciful, and bear in mind that in moments of distraction or carelessness even the shrewdest scientists can commit one. Far from censuring it harshly, let us excuse it kindly, pointing out that these are very difficult observations in which mistakes are frequent and almost unavoidable. Let us not put the error down to ignorance, but rather to the imperfection of the technique used, or to the prejudices of the school that inspired the work in question.

When, with the best will in the world, such excuses seem inadmissible, the slip may be put down to the use of insufficient or unsuitable material, adding that if the author had used the same objects of study as we did, he would no doubt have reached the same conclusions, since he has talent and skill to spare, amply proved in earlier publications. Finally, let us try to console him by dwelling at leisure on the more or less original details his work contains, or on the excellence of the descriptions, or on the elegance and precision of the drawings. In short, our expressions will be aimed above all at sweetening the bitterness of the verdict, bringing our adversary to the conviction that his efforts have not been entirely useless to the progress of Science.

(b) A theoretical error. Suppose that, by interpreting the facts too freely, the author has put forward an arbitrary hypothesis with no basis whatever in observation. The critical pill will be gilded with phrases like these: "Certainly the explanation proposed is somewhat venturesome, but on the other hand it is remarkably ingenious, suggests very lofty considerations, and shows in its author a philosophical spirit of high flight. What a great pity that in forging his conception he did not take into account such-and-such facts that flatly contradict it! In any case the hypothesis is seductive and deserves respectful discussion and examination."

Finally, the theoretical interpretation may be so trivial and crude that even an excuse would look like flattery. Then it is best to pass it over in silence, mentioning briefly, as in the previous case, the accurate observations (if there are any) and the literary, philosophical or teaching merit of the work.

Setting Out the Methods

It is important as well to state precisely, either at the beginning or at the end of the monograph, the method or methods of research the author followed. Do not imitate those scientists who, on the pretext of improving their technique later, keep a temporary monopoly on it, reviving the almost lost custom of the chemists and mathematicians of past centuries, who, moved by a childish vanity to astonish people with the power of their insight, kept to themselves the details of the procedures that had led them to the truth. Fortunately esotericism is disappearing from the field of Science, and today the mere reader of a journal can learn the fine points and tours de main of certain methods almost as well as the discoverer's intimates.

Conclusions

Having set out clearly, concisely and methodically the observation or observations that are the fruit of our inquiries, we will close the paper by condensing into a small number of propositions the positive data we have contributed to science, the data that prompted us to take part in the matter at all.

A practice not everyone follows, but which seems to me praiseworthy in every way, is to call the reader's attention to the problems still waiting to be solved, so that other observers may apply their efforts to them and complete our work. By pointing out to our successors the direction of new inquiries and the points our diligence has not managed to clear up, we give young observers hungry for a reputation an easy and generous handhold, and at the same time give our own discoveries the chance of prompt and full confirmation.

The Need for Illustrations

If our studies concern morphology, whether gross or microscopic, it will be essential to illustrate the descriptions with figures copied as exactly as possible from nature. However precise and detailed the description of the objects observed, it will always be less clear than a good engraving. All the more so because the graphic representation of what we observed guarantees the accuracy of the observation itself, and is a precedent of priceless value for anyone who wants to confirm our assertions. With good reason, almost equal merit is granted today to the man who draws an object faithfully for the first time and to the man who makes it known only by a more or less incomplete description.

If the objects shown are too complicated, we will add explanatory diagrams or semi-diagrams to the exact drawings that copy forms or structures. And in some cases ordinary photography and photomicrography can do us important service, as the supreme guarantee of the objectivity of our descriptions.

Style

Finally, the style of our work should be genuinely didactic: sober, simple, unaffected, and showing no concern but order and clarity. Emphasis, declamation and hyperbole should never appear in purely scientific writing, if we don't want to lose the confidence of scientists, who will end by taking us for dreamers or poets, incapable of studying and reasoning coolly about a question. The scientific writer should aim always to reflect objective reality with the perfect serenity and candor of a mirror, drawing with words as the painter draws with the brush, and giving up the pretension of the exquisite stylist and the fatuous show of philosophical depth. Nor should we forget Boileau's well-known maxim: "What is well conceived is clearly said."

Pomp and finery of language have their place in the popular book, in inaugural addresses, even in the preface or introduction to a scientific textbook; but it has to be admitted that a great deal of rhetoric, in a scientific monograph, produces a strange and somewhat ridiculous effect.

Not to mention that rhetorical makeup often gives ideas blurred outlines, and that unnecessary comparisons make the description diffuse, scattering the attention of the reader to no purpose. He certainly doesn't need a constant parade of common images to get the ideas into his head. In this respect writers, like lenses, could be divided into chromatic and achromatic. The achromatic, perfectly corrected for the dispersing mania, know how to condense with full precision the ideas they gather from reading or observation; the chromatic, lacking the curb of correction, like to widen the outlines of ideas with rhetorical iridescence, with fringes of bright colors, which can only be done at the expense of the ideas' vigor and precision.

In literature, as in oratory, chromatic or dispersive minds can be very useful, for the crowd, the final judge of artistic work, needs the funnel of rhetoric to swallow a few truths. But in setting out and discussing the subjects of pure science, the public is a select and cultivated senate, and we would surely offend its learning and good taste by taking questions too far ab ovo, from the egg, and losing ourselves in declamatory amplifications and idle details. Gracián's maxim, praised by Schopenhauer, "good things, if brief, are twice as good," should be our rule. His too is this advice: "Speak as if you were making your will: the fewer the words, the fewer the lawsuits."

A strict discipline of attention, the habit of giving action and thought more importance than words, and the belief that once a lucky image or phrase has been invented the scientific problem we are studying has not moved one step nearer solution: these are an excellent prophylaxis against what Fray Candil (the Cuban critic Emilio Bobadilla) vividly called rhetorical flatulence, which I consider a symptom of our superficial southernness and a very powerful cause of our scientific backwardness.

Publishing the Work

Once the investigator enjoys a world reputation, he may publish his scientific contributions in any journal of his specialty, Spanish or foreign. The scientists interested in the subject will not be stopped by the obstacle of language; they will learn it to know the author's thought, or find publishers to translate and publish it. Even so, the most famous scientist still needs, to save time and win followers abroad, to send his discoveries to the most widely read Beiträge or Centralblatt in Germany. As for the beginner, with no credit yet in the learned world, he will act very wisely to seek hospitality from the start in the great foreign journals, writing his paper in French, English or German or having it translated. In this way the new fact will quickly become known to the specialists, and if it has real value the author will have the pleasant surprise of seeing it confirmed and approved by the great international authorities. Those who, inspired by a narrow and mean patriotism, insist on writing only in Spanish journals, little or not at all read in the learned countries, condemn themselves to be ignored even in their own nation; for since they will always lack the exequatur of the great European authorities, none of their compatriots, and least of all those in their own field, will dare to take them seriously or value them at their true worth.

Since the judgment of the foreign scientific authorities is decisive for the young investigator's future, then, he should think carefully before submitting his first work to them. Let him make sure, by exhaustive searches of the literature, and better still by consulting some famous specialist, that the fact he reports is real and original. And let him not forget that the right to be wrong is allowed only to those already consecrated.

Chapter 9: The Investigator as Teacher

The investigator as teacher.

With the constructive years come and the difficulties of scientific work mastered, I picture our new investigator in possession of the maturity and strength he needs to multiply himself in other minds. The noble course has been run to the end; the longed-for ideal has been wholly achieved. Now an international authority, the master is cited with praise in the foreign journals; the originality and importance of his creations assure him an honored page in the golden book of science.

In so dignified a position the scientist may take one of two attitudes. He may carry on with his laboratory undertakings, absorbed and alone, condemning himself to barrenness as a teacher; or he may make others sharers in his methods of study, fostering vocations and setting himself up as the respected head of a school.

Between these two roads the choice is not in doubt. Working alone, certainly, offers selfishness tempting satisfactions and a quiet life. One obeys the law of least effort, turning one's attention solely to one's own research; one lives in a discreet atmosphere of approval and esteem, where the excessive enthusiasms and veneration are missing, no doubt (and that is a great advantage), but where there are no rivals and competitors to mortify one either. Yet in taking up so comfortable a position, the paternal instinct of the man of science feels a deep unease. "What will become of my work," he asks himself, "when old age comes and I no longer have the strength to defend it? Who will claim the priority of my findings if adversaries or unscrupulous successors happen to appropriate them, or fall, in judging me, into omissions and injustices?"

Even looked at from the selfish point of view, a healthy and clear-sighted selfishness, it matters to the scientist to multiply himself. The task is painful, no doubt. The master's activity splits into the parallel streams of the laboratory and of teaching. His sleepless nights will increase, but so will his joys. Besides feeding his higher impulses, he will know the delight of a spiritual fatherhood, and he will feel the noble pride of having honorably fulfilled his double mission as teacher and patriot. His life will no longer decline sad and lonely. Instead, in its evening, it will be surrounded by a following of enthusiastic disciples, able to understand the master's work and to make it, as far as possible, shining and lasting.

Posterity has always been generous with the founders of schools. Even the originator's errors are forgiven, or piously explained, if he managed to form minds able to understand and correct them. Whoever declines to sow ideas declares himself an egoist or a misanthrope. Everyone will think he worked for his own pride instead of laboring for humanity. And if his talents stand out too much, he will look like something pathological, a formation foreign to his race, which for that very reason he hardly honors: a sort of intellectual meteor fallen from the sky, which shone for a moment but could not pass on its fleeting light to anyone.

To leave spiritual offspring not only gives the scientist's life a high value but is an undeniable social good and civilizing work, which countries like Spain, whose scientific production is wretched and discontinuous, are particularly in need of.

Unhappy the genius who appears sporadically among these peoples and dies out without descendants! The fierce competition among hundreds of foreign laboratories and schools; the overwhelming avalanche of pamphlets and books fighting tooth and nail for the favor of the moment; the iconoclastic tendency of university youth, eager to arrive and to assert and impose their own personalities; the almost total ignorance among scientists of the languages spoken in backward nations; and above all the fierce chauvinism reigning in Germany, France and England, in sad complicity with our national apathy: all these will have the saddest consequences for the proud solitary in his proverbial ivory tower. Many of his discoveries will inevitably be attributed to foreign confirmers who are not scrupulous in their citations, by disciples of theirs who are less scrupulous still; and all the facts that, because they seemed trivial when they were published, did not earn the honor of translation (but which, as time goes by, usually rise in value) will stay buried in the dust of the local libraries. For if literature and history, arts of recreation and charm, have scholars and commentators to spare, in the austere discipline of science the man who reclaims a priority must be at once scientist and scholar, and scientists are not plentiful in countries of insufficient culture!...

It matters, then, that these nations lagging behind civilization should get the greatest teaching return from their scientific pioneers, making up as far as possible for how few they are by steadily increasing their capacity to beget others.

But how are we to form successors, and better still original geniuses, able to surpass the master and point out new directions for research?

At this point an important question arises. How is an irresistible vocation for Science created?

Although Fouillée, Ribot, Bernheim, Lévy and many others have rightly said that every idea the brain accepts tends to turn into an act, the fact is that in most people a scientific idea or piece of knowledge lacks the power to turn into the act of confirming the truth learned or of widening its horizons by personal effort.

In my judgment the will acts in a young man under the impulse of the anticipated image of the ethical pleasure bound up with every intellectual triumph. When the learned esteem us, our self-esteem grows. And the other way round: if we are scorned, we end by scorning ourselves. Hence the need, sadly much forgotten, for the teacher to suggest to his pupil constantly, less by word than by example, the idea of the sovereign enjoyment, the supreme satisfaction, that comes from wresting secrets from the unknown and tying one's own name to an original and useful idea.

Since young people, as is well known, worship illustrious men by imitating them, it would do a great deal to educate the will if every professor, with real affection and with the deliberate aim of suggestion, sketched a short, anecdotal biography of the scientists who most distinguished themselves in the development of his own science. He would be doing, in fact, something of what others have tried from another point of view: A. Comte with his cult of great men; in modern times Carlyle with his book on heroes; Emerson with his enthusiastic praises of representative men or supermen, to whom all the progress and advantages of civilization are owed; and lately Ostwald with his fine book Great Men.

What signs reveal creative talent and an unshakable vocation for scientific inquiry?

It is a grave, a capital problem, on which eminent thinkers and distinguished educators have reflected without arriving at definitive rules. The difficulty grows when one considers that it is not enough to find sharp minds fit for laboratory inquiries; they must be won over for good to the worship of original truth.

Are the future scientists, the object of our educational care, to be found among the most serious and diligent pupils, the prize hoarders and winners of competitive examinations?

Sometimes, yes; but not always. If the rule were infallible, the professor's task would be easy. He would only have to turn to the winners of the special prizes for the degree and to the top places in the competitions for chairs. But reality often delights in mocking forecasts and dashing hopes. Just as the most fervently virtuous and devout men are often formidably selfish, it also happens, with disheartening frequency, that the brightest young men are exquisitely practical minds, very refined financiers in embryo. They study and strive less for love of Science than because they are persuaded that knowledge is an excellent business, and that a good name won at school fetches a very high price in the professional market and in academic circles.

If the reader smiles at this observation, let him search his memory and note what became of his most outstanding classmates, the monsters of memory and diligence, the ones on whom the professor lavished all his indulgence and favor. He will recognize with sorrow that while most of them reached a comfortable social position (and there their calculations did not fail them), very few or none rose to the summits of knowledge or distinguished themselves by any selfless and fruitful political, social or industrial action. All the more so since among the best pupils there are a good many temperaments of the herd type, docile and disciplined, incapable of initiative, who took up study out of blind obedience to parents and teachers and often finish their degree sunk in exhaustion and weariness. Who has not heard these convicts of the textbook exclaim, on finishing their studies, the well-known line: "Then farewell, Horace, whom I hated so"?...

Far more deserving of the shrewd master's preference are those somewhat untamed pupils, scornful of the top places, deaf to the spur of vanity, who, gifted with a rich and restless fancy, spend their surplus energy on literature, drawing, philosophy and every sport of mind and body. To someone watching them from afar, they seem to be scattering and dissipating themselves, when in reality they are finding their channel and growing strong. Generous hearts, poets at times, romantics always, these absent-minded young men have two essential qualities the master can make great use of: a disdain for money and high academic positions, and a chivalrous spirit in love with lofty ideals. Unlike the others, it is when they leave the lecture halls that they really begin to study. And it is not rare to see them, tired by now of working to no purpose and lacking a clear direction, turn up at the laboratories asking for technical advice and a subject to study. And some of them manage to find their channel and triumph.

All the same, these traits are not always a sure syndrome of the future man of science. Among those who show them, fickleness and desertions abound. The qualities I mentioned are forces in potential that do not always become actual. Seduced by appearances, the master runs the risk of training laboratory dilettantes, or talents that dazzle but are incapable of deep, persevering work.

The diagnosis of a scientific vocation is difficult, then. We must look for more exactly distinguishing signs to tell false coin from true gold.

In his admirable book on Great Men, Ostwald, who has posed this very problem, declares, after making some reservations, that specially gifted pupils can be recognized by never seeming satisfied with what ordinary teaching offers them... "Ordinary teaching is aimed, in depth and breadth, at the average, and when a pupil has a great talent he will see at once that the science he receives is insufficient in quantity and above all in quality, and he will demand more." And he adds: "the most important quality of the scientist is originality, that is, the ability to imagine something beyond what he is taught; accuracy in work, self-criticism, conscientiousness, knowledge and skill are also necessary, but all of them can be acquired later through suitable education."

These observations of Ostwald's are apt and often correct. To get any fruit from them, though, the master must get into cordial contact with his pupils, treating them in his laboratory talks as comrades engaged in a common work and encouraging them to speak frankly and spontaneously. In this way he will find it easier to study their characters and to gauge the tone and strength of their passions. Even so, Ostwald's rule sometimes fails. The clever lad who is unsatisfied with the descriptions of the textbooks and the scientific theories may be a proud character and a sharp mind, yet incapable of perseverance and discipline. More often still, the future investigator suffers from excessive shyness. His respect for the master and a natural and likable modesty hold back his wish to ask for clarification of his theoretical doubts, or for approval of his attempts at new solutions. In such cases the budding investigator may go unnoticed by the professor, or not be encouraged enough by him, his reserve perhaps being taken for limitation.

Somewhat surer, though with no claim to infallibility, seems to me the following rule, which combines some subjective signs with some objective ones for the psychological diagnosis.

Subjectively, the young man fit for research reveals himself at once by these traits: an ardent patriotism, but a conscious and reasoning one. Far from the naive optimism of certain patriots, or rather jingoes, who think that by reciting four or five prestigious native names they have proved their country's decisive share in the work of world culture, our young man feels a deep dissatisfaction with how poor and meager that contribution is. Faced with the severe but at bottom just judgments with which foreign criticism lashes the barrenness of our scientists and philosophers, he does not answer with patriotic laments or boastful promises, but by sharpening his weapons and resolving to spend his strength in the universal battle against Nature. Our potential scientist is marked also by a strict worship of truth and by a healthy, honest skepticism. He is ambitious, but with a noble ambition he can avow: he longs to stand out from the surrounding mediocrity and to tie his name to a great undertaking.

Objectively, the candidate scientist confirms these promises in everyone's eyes. Without the cult of action, without proof that the new investigator can work to good effect, we would run the risk of cultivating one more flowery regenerator of the nation, as skilled at pointing out the course as he is incapable of crossing the gulf. But if the young man takes enormous pleasure in the manipulations of the laboratory and has a tireless capacity for work; if above all (and this is the objective sign I chiefly had in mind) we find out that, at the cost of painful sacrifices, with savings stolen from his amusements and sports, he has made himself a little laboratory where he toils to acquire technical mastery and to confirm for himself the discoveries of the leading lights of learning..., then the professor must step in resolutely, helping and protecting him. For a true vocation always consists in that special activity to which a young man, scorning the distractions of his age, sacrifices his time and his money.

Of course even the most sincere and enthusiastic liking is sometimes mistaken. Vocation is not aptitude, and aptitude does not necessarily lead to success. Success has a complex origin, since besides vocation and aptitude other complementary conditions go into it: the shrewdness to track down the rich veins, the gift of assimilating new ideas, a penetrating and sure critical sense, a good grasp of the literature and of method, and even a certain philosophical spirit. But nearly all these complementary qualities can be acquired later. Something must be left to life alongside the master and to the transforming power of imitation.

To sum up, the future scientist is usually an ardent patriot, eager to honor himself and his country, in love with originality, indifferent to money and to bourgeois pleasures, more inclined to action than to talk, a tireless reader, and capable, finally, of every kind of self-denial and renunciation to realize the noble dream of christening with his own name some new star in the firmament of knowledge.

Critical optimism. I said earlier that a master worthy of the name should constantly suggest to his pupils the idea that science is in perpetual becoming, that it advances and grows without ceasing and never reaches full maturity, and that all of us, if we really set our minds to it, can contribute a grain of sand to the imposing monument of progress.

Such an attitude naturally implies a national optimism, that is, a robust faith in the aptitudes and destiny of the race.

Of course this optimism must not be blind, but shrewd and farsighted. Far from the pedantic, self-satisfied conceit typical of many disastrous politicians and not a few portly luminaries of the lecture hall, the good master must be fully conscious of our national lack of culture and of our scientific poverty. He will always bear in mind that Spain has been in debt to civilization for centuries, and that if we persist in such shameful neglect, Europe will lose patience and end by expropriating us. Let him criticize, but let him work. Let him censure and lash the lazy if need be, but without looking back, and with his hand on the plow.

This patriotic optimism, which Godó called paradoxical optimism and which would be better named critical optimism, was shared by, among others, the great Costa, whose apostrophes cracked like whips on the backs of the laggards or across the brows of the unpatriotic; and in more recent times by the exquisite writer and thinker Ortega y Gasset, who proposes, as an essential condition of Spain's cultural and ethical ascent, a full awareness of our spiritual poverty and of our political and administrative corruption.

How to guide the new investigator. Once the intellectual family has been chosen, it must be educated and trained for the hard labor. It would be childish and reckless to enter scientific tournaments that are hard-fought international contests without preparing stubbornly and properly.

It falls to the master to shorten this preparation, orienting the disciple, showing him the seams open to research, guiding him through the literature, and suggesting, finally, that he acquire all the knowledge and accessory skills (drawing, photomicrography, languages, the art of describing with accuracy and propriety, and so on) that may be of use to him. He must instill in him the resolve to complete his education on this point as soon as possible, to avoid humiliating collaborations which, besides, cannot be permanent.

Once the novice's strength has been built up in this way, the professor will try to put it to the test, proposing an accessible subject that does not call for great or sustained efforts and that, if possible, is something like an offshoot or derivative of the master's own fundamental work.

Young people, as is well known, are inclined to take on the great problems and to make their debut with a cathedral. That ambition must be moderated, since it could lead to disheartening failures, by showing the beginner the advantage of starting with small questions: there is little risk of going wrong with them, and when one does go wrong the sting of ridicule never follows. Later, once technical skill and the capacity for speculation have grown, the time will come to carry out the great work he dreamed of.

When the new investigator can walk on his own, let the master try to imbue him with a taste for originality. Let the new idea arise in him with full spontaneity, then, even if it does not agree with the theories of the school. The master's purest glory lies not in forming disciples who follow him but in forging scientists who surpass him. The supreme ideal would be to create wholly new minds, organs unique, if possible, in the machinery of progress. To manufacture docile, interchangeable parts shows that the master has cared more about himself than about his country and Science.

It goes without saying that in his books and monographs the head of a school should do sincere justice to the disciple, citing his work scrupulously and even dwelling on it with encouraging delight. Out of love for his intellectual offspring, rather than modesty, he will keep quiet about his own collaboration. In this way he will increase the young scientist's standing, and his work will quickly win confidence and sympathy abroad.

When the beginner publishes his first paper, many scientists pair their own name with the disciple's, to mark their share in the collaboration: a fair course, but not a generous one. Unless that first paper is almost exclusively the master's own work, I would rather spare the disciple the somewhat humiliating reputation of having been inspired by someone else. In this way the young investigator will taste the exquisite dish of spontaneity. Once he has tried it, it would be strange if he did not acquire a taste for it and strive to deserve it.

It hardly seems necessary, too, to advise masters not to take too much advantage of their pupils' docile labor on the pretext of preparing and directing them. This abuse, which betrays a disagreeable selfishness, flourishes in some foreign schools where, as in certain professions, the novice pays for his teaching by being exploited as an apprentice. How many monumental works bear witness less to the author's fertility than to the discretion and modesty of young collaborators, content with the distant hope of being backed someday by their intellectual mentor and promoted to respectable posts!

The weariness of age, and more than anything the eagerness to hoard honors and prebends, which are incompatible with a peaceful life of deep and persevering work, sometimes drive scientists into such blameworthy exploitation. Having arrived with honor, one must fall with honor. Let each man be content with his own merit. The master is well enough paid by the satisfaction of having awakened latent energies and formed creative minds. If failing senses or weakness of will rob the old man of the vigor needed for research, let him resolutely give up active teaching. One teaches well only what one does, and whoever does not investigate does not teach how to investigate. It is the finesse of the wise, as Gracián puts it, to leave a good aftertaste. Painful as it may be, at a certain age we must leave teaching before teaching leaves us.

Even so, the veteran professor still has a high mission to fulfill. When his weak hands can no longer hold the miner's pick, let him busy himself refining the ore others have dug²⁹. And in the quiet of his retirement let him write the history or the philosophy of science. For no one can set it out better than the man who lived through its events and felt its hard speculative difficulties at close range.

Chapter 10: What the State Owes to Science

The duties of the State toward scientific production. Our scientific backwardness and its supposed causes. Physical, historical and moral explanations of Spain's scientific barrenness. The remedies.

The lasting prosperity of nations is the work of science and of its many applications to the advancement of life and material interests. From this undeniable truth follows the State's inescapable obligation to stimulate and promote culture by developing a science policy, aimed at spreading education and at putting to the common good every useful and fruitful talent that springs up within the race.

A science policy means using these four modes of action at once:

1. Raising the intellectual level of the masses, so as to form a moral atmosphere able to understand, encourage and reward the scientist.

2. Giving the humblest social classes the chance to receive, in lycées, secondary schools or popular teaching centers, enough general scientific education for a young person to recognize his vocation, so that every high intellectual aptitude may be put to use for the good of the nation.

3. Turning the University, hitherto given over almost entirely to conferring degrees and to professional training, into a center of intellectual drive, as in Germany, where the University is the chief organ of philosophical, scientific and industrial production³⁰.

4. Finally, forming and cultivating, through fellowships abroad or by other methods of selection and cultural contagion, a nursery of eminent professors able to discover new truths and to pass on to the young the taste and passion for original research.

I lack the space to study all these aspects of cultural policy in detail. Nor do I think it necessary to go into particulars, since these subjects have been treated and argued over again and again for many years in the political press and in works on education. On them there is, fortunately, a body of solutions that, with slight variations, have been generally accepted. For now I shall confine myself to some remarks on the last point, that is, on the most suitable and quickest methods for refining the present teaching staff as far as possible and for forming the future university professoriate, the essential, though not the only, instrument of our intellectual revival.

But to justify what follows and give my conclusions a solid foundation, I must first settle a preliminary question on which, for fifty years, and above all since the colonial disaster, nearly all our great writers have tried their hand with varying success.

To rise again, to be reborn, to regenerate oneself: these are dynamic processes that imply a previous state of exhaustion, decay or regression. We must first clear up, then, this important point. Is it true that we have really declined in philosophy and science? As producers of civilization in the broadest sense, can we rightly say that we have degenerated in comparison with our ancestors of the 16th and 17th centuries?

Spain is an intellectually backward country, not a decadent one. Let us study impartially the history of Spanish scientific and philosophical production in the Middle Ages, in the 16th century (regarded, somewhat exaggeratedly in my judgment, as the summit of our intellectual life), and finally in the last few centuries. Let us compare with complete sincerity, in depth and in breadth, the Spanish science forged in each of these periods, discounting the rises and falls caused by chance accidents: I mean the cultural advance produced by the discovery of America, which suddenly opened a splendid field of research to our scientists, and the mental prostration brought on by the disastrous wars and political errors of the age of Philip IV. Let us set side by side, finally, in each of these periods, the positive intellectual conquests made by Spaniards and those owed to foreign scientists. We shall be forced to recognize that neither the race nor Spanish science has declined or stood entirely still. Its scientific output has always stayed at more or less the same level.

Impartiality obliges me to confess, however, that taken as a whole that output has been poor and discontinuous, showing, in comparison with the rest of Europe, a backwardness and above all a deplorable theoretical meagerness³¹. Among our cosmographers, physicists, metallurgists, mathematicians and physicians the tendency toward the immediately useful, toward a narrow practicality, prevailed. People did not know that only ideas are really fruitful. And in hunting for recipes and formulas for action we let the wings of the mind wither, which left us unfit for great inventions. Besides, in every period our men of science were few, and geniuses, like the highest peaks, rise only in mountain ranges. To produce a Galileo or a Newton you need a legion of worthy investigators.

Like Russia or Japan until recently, or the Germans and Franks before the Renaissance, Spain has remained in a semibarbarous state, given over to religion and politics and almost wholly indifferent to widening the horizons of the mind. But semibarbarism is not decadence, just as the embryonic state is not decrepitude. It would be inexcusably rash to despair of a race almost virgin, extremely rich in subtypes and varieties (a great advantage in the anthropologists' view), which has at all times produced individuals of genius and vigor, and which in almost all its social layers has been held back at the stage of childhood, and is therefore still very far from the fullness of its spiritual growth. Must we remind the pessimists that most Spaniards are illiterate? Shall we declare a man blind who has been deprived of light? Let's first find out whether he can see and think, by handing him the torch of culture.

While our race has slept the age-old sleep of ignorance and cultivated religion and art (the preferred and almost the only activities of primitive peoples), the nations of central and northern Europe have pulled prodigiously ahead of us. We are not going backward; we are far behind. We urgently need to catch up with them at a dizzying run, so as to collaborate, in proportion to our small population and the slender surplus of our moral and economic energies, in the work of conquering nature.

In short, Spain is not a degenerate people but an uneducated one. A glorious minority of intellectuals always existed, and though scantily and sporadically, science was cultivated at all times. Our ills are not constitutional but circumstantial, adventitious. The problem some people raise, whether the Iberian race is capable of rising to the spheres of philosophical and scientific invention, is a question as idle as it is irritating. Discouragement would be justified only if, once illiteracy had disappeared, education and well-being had become general as in England or Germany, and the strength of our best talents had been tried at the fruitful seams of research, we failed again and again. But that test has not been made, and it is worth trying.

From all I have said it follows that the problem of Spanish backwardness should be posed in these terms alone:

Why, when Spain holds a population equal to the inhabitants of Switzerland, Sweden and Holland put together, have fewer philosophical, moral and above all scientific truths arisen in her than in any one of those nations?

I have already given my opinion on the problem in advance. Even so, as a proof of impartiality, I shall record here the views of some of our most distinguished statesmen and writers. Everyone knows that to point out the causes of our shortcomings is as good as to show their remedies.

Nearly all the following theories focus especially on our political and social prostration. But all of them can be extended to scientific activity, since military and political power and intellectual and industrial prosperity usually go together, like branches sprung from the same cultural trunk.

Physical Theories

As curiosities, paradoxical as they are, I will mention briefly the thermal hypothesis and the oligohydric hypothesis, the theory of too little water.

(a) The thermal hypothesis. According to the followers of this idea, we have the misfortune to live in a semi-African climate. In summer a scorching sun halts plant life and flattens our spirits; in winter a mild, caressing sun fills us with the joy of living. How can anyone stay in the laboratory or the library, deaf to the beguiling call of a bountiful, laughing nature, brimming with colors, fruits and perfumes and early roused from its winter lethargy?

Quite the opposite in the countries of the North. There man lives surrounded by a harsh, inclement atmosphere. Everything inclines him to concentration and withdrawal. The cold draws minds together and creates an intensely social life. For want of anything else, people of moderate leisure and culture, fleeing the rain and snow, shut themselves up in the study or the laboratory and, so as not to die of boredom, give themselves up to the puzzles of science, the charades of metaphysics or the daydreams of literature.

The naive inventor of this theory forgot to explain to us why the ancient civilizations arose in India, Egypt, Chaldea and Greece, countries hotter than Spain; how, while those civilizations flourished, rain and snow failed to have any philosophical or scientific effect on the Britons, Germans, Scythians and Gauls, then sunk in the darkness of barbarism; and finally why, in spite of the heat of Phoebus, the Middle Ages in Spain, with its Jews, Arabs and Christians, had a period of splendid intellectual flowering, and the 16th century a formidable political expansion. Nor should we forget that according to the ancient writers Turdetania, the hottest region of Spain, was the most civilized part of the Iberian Peninsula before the Roman conquest.

(b) The oligohydric theory. This is linked with the previous one, of which it is the necessary complement, and it was defended by the distinguished naturalist Mallada, from whom I take not a few of my data. Costa, Picavea, Jiménez, Valdivieso, Maeztu and many other writers have seen in it the chief cause of our backwardness.

Columella already noticed that it rains little in Spain compared with the other countries of Europe. As is well known, the fertility of a country, and therefore its population and wealth, depend on the abundance and regularity of its rainfall, especially in spring and in the dog days of summer. England, Belgium, France, Italy and Germany use almost all their land for farming or stock raising, because on average from 600 to 1,400 millimeters of rain fall on them each year. Thanks to so happy a weather regime, agriculture in those countries has always flourished: cereals, vegetables, legumes, the vine, meadows and every sort of tree grow luxuriantly; even rough land and mountains are covered with a green carpet in August and September, producing nourishing pasture of their own accord. These are the grass countries, gazed at with envy by the lean inhabitants of our central plateau. Irrigation, necessary with us, is almost unknown among those peoples: sun and rain guarantee regular and abundant harvests.

Such enviable natural advantages explain well the density of population of central and northern Europe, the saving and consequent accumulation of wealth, the military and political power, and finally the development of the sciences and the useful arts. For scientific progress, like industry, is a joint function of social well-being and a certain density of population. Science is usually cultivated in countries whose inhabitants number no fewer than 60 or 70 to the square kilometer. In Spain there are no more than 37 on the same area. Nearness in space creates nearness of minds. Close living together, along with plenty of food, produces cultivated leisure, scientific curiosity and spiritual restlessness. In so favorable an atmosphere any useful or merely pleasant aptitude finds encouragement and applause.

Things are very different in our unfortunate country. The Peninsula lies open to the ravaging African winds, and its latitude condemns it to torrid heat and excessive evaporation; it would need more rain than France, when in fact it has far less. The average is estimated at 300 or 350 millimeters³². The Cantabrian coast is the exception: Galicia, Asturias, Santander, the Basque Provinces, and parts of Navarre and Catalonia, regions where the weather is frankly European. There are provinces, like Almería, Murcia, Alicante and Valencia, so desolately dry that in some years it doesn't rain even in winter (the rain antipole); without artificial irrigation they would be real deserts. On the central plateau, which covers most of Spain, there are really only two seasons: the drought, which lasts from June to October, and the rains, which run from October to May.

Because water is so scarce and so unevenly distributed, most of the national territory lies unplowed, and the best arable land yields middling and chancy harvests. Nothing shows the poverty of the central plateau better (except for the Tierra de Campos, the region of Burgos and Vitoria and a few other zones) than this disheartening figure: while wheat yields almost constantly 17 to 25 hectoliters per hectare in Belgium, England and France, in Spain it gives on average only five to six, and that in good years, which are unfortunately rather rare. A sign and expression of this perpetual struggle between the brain and the stomach is our picaresque literature, as Don Rafael Salillas has eloquently pointed out.

Now, poverty breeds ignorance. Even an elementary culture implies a certain economic ease. How can a child go to school if, in most of our villages, children are an indispensable factor of production for the wretched peasant? As for science, it is a luxury only rich nations can afford.

The oligohydric theory is true, unfortunately, and it fully explains the sparse population and the almost general poverty of the farmer in our Peninsula. It is natural, then, that its supporters proclaim the water policy as the supreme remedy. But the hypothesis leaves the real question in the shadows, which, as I said, is this: why are nations poorer than Spain, and less populous in absolute terms, more cultivated and more productive of science than we are? Besides, if everything comes down to good rainfall and to wealth and density of population, it is hard to see why the provinces of the Cantabrian coast, where 1,500 millimeters and more of rain fall and there are some 100 inhabitants to the square kilometer, have not outdone the rest of the Peninsula in scientific production and industrial invention (I am not speaking of mineral and industrial wealth, a pure lottery won by foreigners most of the time). Nor is it sufficiently explained why densely populated Ireland, and southern China, whose density of population is astonishing (500 inhabitants per square kilometer), have contributed less to the undertakings of modern civilization than Sweden and Norway, relatively poor and thinly inhabited (in absolute and in relative terms), and colossal Russia with its 19 inhabitants per square kilometer. It can't all come down, then, to plenty of food and the relative number of inhabitants, although these factors cannot be denied an important influence on the advance of the sciences and the prosperity of nations.

Political and Moral Theories

The economic and political theory. A corollary of the previous one (since the poor fertility of the soil brings political and military weakness with it), this idea was held by almost all our statesmen and thinkers, from Cánovas and Silvela to Pi y Margall and Costa, to name only illustrious men now dead. For that matter, as Azorín aptly recalls, writers of the distant past like Saavedra Fajardo, Gracián, Cadalso, Mor de Fuentes, Fígaro and others had already put a finger on the wound, pointing to the poverty of our resources and the frequency of useless wars as the main factors in our backwardness.

Let us hear first the distinguished Cánovas, who, in his book El Solitario y su tiempo, set down these words, overflowing with patriotic sincerity:

"There can be no real and lasting military and national greatness where there is poverty and economic impotence... The whole history of Spain lies in this apparently insignificant fact: the soldiers the Great Captain took to Málaga to conquer Naples were already barefoot and hungry. That is how one runs adventures, sometimes most glorious ones; but that is not how permanent empires are founded... In vain do people look for the single cause of our misfortunes in the Inquisition, in mortmain, in the exaggeration of the monarchical principle, in the faults of the kings, in the incompetence of their favorites, and so on; there are many vain sophisms of sect or school in all that, and many prejudices of ignorance."

The history of Spain was always, as Cánovas points out, a story of perpetual, agonizing economic want. "When Philip II came to the throne, things were in such a state that his favorite Ruy Gómez de Silva had to tell a certain envoy of a friendly nation 'that the kingdom found itself sensa prattica, sensa soldati, sensa dennari,'" without experience, without soldiers, without money. For this great prostration, in spite of which new and disastrous campaigns were undertaken, Cánovas holds responsible the long-standing backwardness of agriculture produced by eight centuries of war; the shortage of hands that was beginning to be felt after the expulsion of the Jews (made worse later by the expulsion of the Moriscos); the forced exile of many; the persecutions of the Holy Office; civil and ecclesiastical mortmain; the countless soldiers demanded by the long and bloody campaigns of the 16th century; and above all the depopulation caused by the discovery of America.

Cánovas points, besides, to provincialism or regionalism as a factor of national weakness, and we might add caciquismo, the rule of local political bosses, a feudal relic as disastrous as economic misery. This lack of social solidarity, noted also by Hume and other modern historians (the kabilismo, the clannishness, of the distinguished Unamuno), broke the unity and energy of the central Power, which was obliged to respect the charters and privileges of the richest and most populous regions and to lay its levies and exactions almost entirely on the drained Castiles, Extremadura and Andalusia. Choking under a growing poverty, the Spanish State mortgaged all its revenues, altered the value of the currency again and again, seized the property of private persons, and gave itself up, in short, to every kind of outrage and lawlessness to carry on its warlike undertakings.

The population, which according to the calculations of a German economist (Haebler) who devoted a book to clearing up the economic conditions of the Spanish people during our political heyday was over six million in the time of the Catholic Monarchs, fell in the time of Charles II to under four³³.

And Cánovas suggests remedies: "Work, invent, save without respite; contract no more debts; aim not so much to acquire as to keep; trust in no one but yourselves, and stop having faith in fortune...; let your patriotism be, in short, silent, melancholy, patient, but purposeful, constant, implacable."

Our writers of the 16th and 17th centuries already complained of this evil of depopulation and poverty. Let us recall that Fernández Navarrete, writing in the first third of the 17th century, already said in his Conservación de monarquías that "the depopulation of Castile, so much reproached by foreigners, was due to incessant wars, intolerable taxes, the colonization of America, and above all the expulsion of three million Moriscos and two million Jews." Navarrete laments, rightly, that the laborious and industrious races were driven out and not the Gypsies, whom he calls a lawless people given over systematically to theft and plunder.

The distinguished J. Costa expresses similar judgments with no less vigor and a fine critical spirit. "Our politicians," he says, "were deceived by the map. They saw in the Peninsula only its extent, and never troubled to weigh how productive it was, the population it could feed, the resources it could bring to the public Treasury. Two historical accidents, the landing of Columbus in the Peninsula with his lottery of the New World, and the marriage of Doña Juana with its prospects in Central Europe, spread before Spain's eyes visions of greatness and temptations of universal empire. The race did not have enough political prudence to resist them, and they complicated and made irremediable the loss of bearings that has earned us four centuries of decadence... In the hands of our statesmen the art of governing declined into a branch of literature." His too is this fine and exact thought: "Like the Venus de Milo, Spain is a beautiful statue, but without arms."

As for remedies, he proposes the water policy, that is, turning toward agriculture, toward building canals and reservoirs, the funds madly squandered on suicidal wars and on the vanities of a gentleman come down in the world. Agreeing with Cánovas, he also suggests to our ministers the thought of "governing with sadness, like Ferdinand VI, watching over and consoling the misfortune of the governed." And he advises: "Make the country cheaper, so that being a Spaniard stops being a bad bargain; and a double lock on the tomb of the Cid so that he never rides again... The Spaniard must be remade in the school. Fewer universities and more scientists... It is not all a matter of raising the level of general culture; we must also produce great scientific individuals who take an active part in the intellectual movement of the world and in the making of contemporary science... Create Spanish colleges, in the style of the one at Bologna, in the chief scientific centers of Europe, for as many colonies of students and professors, so as to create in a short time a generation of young people steeped in the thought and practice of the leading nations, for scientific research, public administration, industry, teaching and journalism." In short, larder and school: those are the remedies for our ills.

The theory of Cánovas and Costa is now unquestioned doctrine. Nations bled white and impoverished by useless wars, constant emigration and exhausting exactions don't usually long for higher culture. They do well enough to vegetate in obscurity and keep the seed of the race intact. But... why did nations no less devastated by disastrous wars and weakened by constant emigration recover quickly? How did Italy not perish, sacked, harassed, torn apart and insulted by almost every army and adventurer in Europe? What secret spring kept France alive, though she lived in perpetual hostility with her neighbors? What strange virtue kept Germany, the cradle and battlefield of the schism, whose population, consumed by the Thirty Years' War, fell by authoritative estimates to under four million, from ever exhausting her vein of illustrious thinkers and exquisite craftsmen, and let her rise again afterward with irresistible strength? Something is missing, then, from this theory, if it is to clear up the problem of our backwardness completely.

The hypothesis of religious fanaticism. According to this idea, generally accepted abroad³⁴, the chief causes of our political decadence and our scientific backwardness were the exaggeration of the religious principle, and above all the Inquisition, which for centuries pruned and uprooted the most eminent and exquisite part of the national genius. It was a selection in reverse, as Ostwald says. The Holy Office, cleansing the nation of Judaizers, Moriscos and Lutherans, and reducing all heterodox thinkers to silence or exile, deprived Spain of the help of its most original and most renewing minds. For it is precisely among men of little fervor for dogma, who rebel against the despotism of schools, that the great pioneers of Philosophy and Science are usually found. What stayed in the sieve, then, were the routine-minded, the docile, the intolerant, and the coarse and senile intellects.

Even without reaching the violence of intolerance, the exaggeration of the religious principle carries a germ of economic prostration and cultural apathy.

Steeped to the bone in mysticism and in the existence of a better life to come, peoples look on science as something frivolous, profane, of lower dignity than theology, literature and politics. These feelings show through in many writers of the golden age, Gracián, Quevedo and Saavedra Fajardo above all. In this, it must be admitted, they are strictly logical. Since life on earth is only a preparation for heaven, it is natural to cultivate only theology, mysticism and morals, the sacred disciplines that turn us away from worldly frivolities and point out the road to spiritual perfection. Why toil over the useful arts, commerce, industry? Apart from morals, law and a little literature, needed to speak with decorum of holy things, the only effort that seems praiseworthy and desirable is to keep the dogma pure and to impose religious unity on every nation by war.

And Spain fought madly against England, Flanders, France, Italy, Africa, the races of America and the rest. An enormous, superhuman undertaking, which would have demanded geniuses in the Government instead of ordinary royal favorites, the hosts of Xerxes led by Hannibals in the army, and the treasures of present-day France or England in the public Exchequer. Only God can do the impossible, and so everything was trusted to God. Vassals and treasures, brains and hearts were sacrificed to the Holy Crusade against Protestantism.

Swept along by this fever of blind proselytizing, we drove from the Peninsula the Jews and the Moriscos, in whose hands commerce and agriculture had flourished. What little cultivable land there was lay barren and exhausted. On it grew and spread, like a legion of voracious parasites, the friars and the nobles, paralyzing the springs of the country's wealth with material mortmain and annihilating with spiritual mortmain the scientific initiatives and speculative daring of the race... Such, in broad outline, is the theory.

Born abroad with Buckle, Ticknor, Draper, Macaulay, Hume, G. Le Bon and others, and upheld among us by intellectuals of standing (Sanz del Río, Revilla, Pi y Margall, José del Perojo and others), this hypothesis is almost part of the creed of our democracy. It has over the other ideas the priceless advantage of putting our backwardness down to an adventitious condition, in a sense outside and foreign to the mental character of the race. Like every simplistic explanation, it is convenient and therefore attractive. It seduces at first sight because it promises us, as Maeztu points out, an easy and plain remedy within a short time. Sweep away intolerance, set free the critical spirit, and science must spring up of itself as a spontaneous flowering of culture and material prosperity.

I will not deny that the exaggeration of religious feeling, which Cánovas, Valera and others already counted among the many reasons for our decadence, and above all the cruelties of the Holy Office, did a good deal to wither the flower of our scientific and philosophical originality. I have already pointed out that the scientist, however religious he may be, gains a great deal in an atmosphere of free spiritual expansion. I believe more: that at present (there are glorious exceptions) the men most occupied with the problems of the world are usually the least preoccupied with the beatitudes of heaven.

But while recognizing and proclaiming all this, I sincerely believe that the hypothesis of religious fanaticism is plainly exaggerated as history, and in practice extremely dangerous to the hopes placed in the revival of Spain and in the high destiny of the race, hopes that all of us, and teachers especially, ought to instill in the young again and again.

That the anti-cultural role of the Inquisition has been overstated was proved (though they too fell into opposite exaggerations) by Laverde, Vidart, Adolfo de Castro, many of our traditionalists, and above all by the fiery patriot and prodigious scholar Menéndez Pelayo³⁵. In reply to the detractors of the Holy Office, they argued that the peak of Spanish scientific and philosophical production falls precisely in the 16th and 17th centuries, the age when the terrible Tribunal was all-powerful. And they cited overwhelming lists of moral philosophers and scientists who shone with their own light in our golden age. They maintained, besides, that it was not men of science or eminent thinkers who perished in the dungeons of the Holy Office, but Judaizers, Lutherans, Muslims, and above all witches and the possessed, as was happening at the time, though under other institutions, in every country of Europe. They recalled, finally, that Servetus was put to death outside Spain by the ferocious Calvin, and that tolerant Italy burned G. Bruno and imprisoned Galileo.

"In France," says Valera, "not counting the horrors of the civil wars, on the frightful night of Saint Bartholomew alone there were more victims of religious fanaticism than the Holy Office claimed from its foundation to its fall... Nor does it equal," he goes on, "by Schack's own admission, the number of unhappy witches burned alive in Germany in the 17th century alone."

And it must be granted that the facts these authors cite have some force. Maeztu, one of our most vigorous and best-oriented young writers, aptly notes that the Inquisition could hardly have sacrificed philosophers and scientists when Spain never had any (of the first rank, that is). The essential causes of our backwardness lie elsewhere, then, and not in religious intolerance, which also took especially aggressive and inhuman forms and feelings among the schismatics of England, Switzerland and Germany.

But, as I pointed out, the gravest thing about the religious theory is not its sectarian tendency, already noted by Cánovas, but that, trusting in it, we run the risk of lying down in the furrow for good and failing to apply the real remedies to the disease.

For it is more than a century since the Inquisition put out its fires, barring an isolated spark here and there. We have made five or six revolutions, decreed the disentailment of Church and common lands, and set up a regime of religious tolerance. Our Constitution recognizes freedom of conscience, of speech, of association and of the press. Eminent professors have brought into our lecture halls more or less heterodox philosophies, such as Krausism, positivism and materialist evolutionism, and developed them freely, without hindrance or restriction. Though they are not yet a majority, freethinking politicians, journalists, judges and professors are plentiful among us. Contrary to what foreigners suppose, a certain practical tolerance reigns in our educated society. Exceptions may be cited, more or less old ones; but today anyone of real worth reaches the top posts in Spain, whatever his philosophical creed, provided he doesn't proclaim it too loudly and stridently and wound the feelings of the majority.

And yet, for all that, with very slight advances on our former state, we remain behind the small nations of northern Europe. Sister peoples like Portugal and the South American Republics, where indifference to dogma is perhaps greater than among us, live on much the same cultural plane.

If this situation continues and grows worse, the position of the supporters of the theory of religious fanaticism will be singularly compromised. And if they reason calmly, they will soon reach the disheartening conclusion that the peoples of the Peninsula are incapable of the high undertakings of civilization. It would no longer be the bankruptcy of a principle, but the bankruptcy of a race. And this, even if it were true, which it is not, no man of the Peninsula can honorably declare without first exhausting every capacity of his intellect and every energy of his will to prove the contrary.

The hypothesis of Spanish pride and arrogance. Many foreigners, several Spaniards and not a few Spanish Americans (Bunge among them) put our backwardness down in part to this defect of the national character, by which mechanical work, industry and commerce were always regarded among us as base things. The distinguished Valera speaks very eloquently on this.

"The tyranny of the kings of the House of Austria," says Valera, "their bad government and the cruelties of the Holy Office were not the cause of our decadence; they were mere symptoms of a frightful disease that was devouring the whole social body... It was a fever of pride, a delirium of arrogance that prosperity made break out in our minds when we triumphed, after eight centuries, in the struggle against the infidels. We filled ourselves with a fanaticism like that of the Jews of old. Hence our divorce and isolation from the rest of Europe... We believed ourselves the new people of God; we confused religion with patriotic selfishness; we set ourselves the goal of universal dominion, using the cross as a banner or labarum to win the empire. The great movement from which science and modern civilization were born, and to which Spain gave the first push, passed without our noticing it, thanks to ignorant disdain and fanatical conceit"³⁶.

Before Valera, Cadalso (as quoted by Azorín) had already noticed this moral blemish in the Spanish people. "We don't study," he said. "Our fundamental defect is pride... The sciences decline from one day to the next... The true scholars are taken for superficial dabblers by men who know how to stack up seventy-seven syllogisms on whether the heavens are fluid or solid..." And: "Let us work at the positive sciences, so that foreigners stop calling us barbarians..."

The pages of Spanish history offer plenty of evidence of this irritating aristocratic feeling, which led us to spurn agriculture, commerce, industry and the mechanical arts as ignoble things, fit only for Jews and servile folk. The nobility and the middle class, obsessed with purity of blood, could only survive by vegetating like parasites on a mass of taxpaying commoners, traders and manufacturers. And yet, as I said before, we committed the monstrous aberration of decreeing first the expulsion of the Jews, who had the monopoly of commerce, and then that of the Moriscos, in whose hands lay agriculture and industry. Swarms of greedy foreigners, who could never become Spaniards because they cordially hated us, came in to replace the Moriscos and the Jews; they soaked up the gold of America, built up the industries of their own countries at the expense of ours, and turned into usurers who fleeced the State. It is saddening to read the descriptions that foreigners like Campanella, Madame d'Aulnoy and others give of our gentry's neglect and of the near total abandonment of the Castilian countryside, all because of a suicidal contempt for manual work. Just as commerce and banking fell into the hands of Genoese, Flemings and Frenchmen, the very tilling of the soil (what little of it was tilled) passed to foreign laborers, and many millions went abroad with them every year in wages.

The theory of pride explains the poverty of our scientific and industrial output somewhat better than the economic and political hypothesis. Science needs instruments, and only a flourishing industry can supply them; in those days it was hard to import them. Still, this view leaves certain points in the shadow, among them the nation's poverty in philosophy, astronomy and mathematics, and its almost exclusive taste for the kind of learning our eminent Carracido calls ornamental (literature, the humanities, scholastic philosophy and so on), with the contempt for the natural sciences that went along with it. We thought it was enough to rule, without noticing that the only lasting empires are those of science, industry and commerce.

The theory of intellectual segregation. All the hypotheses I've set out, and especially those of Cánovas, Costa and Valera, hold a core of truth, but none of them tells the whole story. Our backwardness was certainly helped along by pointless wars, the Inquisition, a puffed-up aristocratic spirit, emigration to America, disdain for mechanical work, and the hopeless barrenness of a land forever thirsty. But these calamities, great as they were (and many countries have suffered them), would have slowed our production in the knowledge of nature without cutting it down to a nearly negligible minimum, had another factor not been at work: one our writers barely mention, and one, happily, that can be changed. The chief cause of our cultural lag is nothing other than the spiritual encystment of the Peninsula. Like a tumor, Spanish talent grew viciously and lopsidedly, feeding only on the thin national sap. The phrase "Santiago, close Spain!", which Bunge quotes (giving it a wrong sense, no doubt from an imperfect knowledge of Castilian), was not only the battle cry of our warriors; it was the motto of our scholars³⁷. We closed the frontiers so that the spirit of Europe couldn't seep in, and Europe took its revenge by raising over the Pyrenees a far higher moral barrier: the wall of contempt. From the end of the 17th century our scientists, philosophers and men of letters almost entirely stopped being read or cited. Among the scientists only Azara, the great naturalist who shone in the 18th century, escaped oblivion.

As a result of this intellectual segregation, the seed of the Renaissance hardly took root in Spain, as Federico de Onís aptly points out. The men who brought in the new sap, such as Nebrija, El Brocense, Pedro Ciruelo and others, were persecuted. Not to mention Servetus and Dr. Francisco Sánchez, the forerunner of Cartesianism and modern agnosticism, both of whom had to leave the country in order to write. Terror of anything new or foreign obsessed our university faculties, more inquisitorial than the Inquisition itself, which distrusted not only the natural sciences but even such harmless subjects as philology, grammar and history. And that state of mind lasted for many years, as the writings of Villarroel and the later ones of Feijóo, Campomanes and Jovellanos show.

There were, to be sure, some breaks in this isolation. For part of the 16th century, thanks to our wars in Italy, the breezes of the Renaissance put a little life into the petrified Spanish spirit and woke it, partly, from its religious ecstasies and its imperial daydreams. Another window onto Europe opened in the 18th century, and through it a few gifted minds received the healthy influence of the criticism and scientific renewal then stirring Europe.

In support of this doctrine, notice that nearly all our great writers and scholars arose in those periods of relative cultural exchange, and that they were, naturally, tireless travelers. A good many of them, from the end of the Middle Ages on, finished their studies abroad and held chairs in Rome, Bologna, Paris, Montpellier, Toulouse and elsewhere. Remember Arnau de Vilanova, Ramon Llull, Servetus, Luis Vives, Saavedra Fajardo, Father Acosta, the physician Hernández, Garcilaso, Quevedo. Cervantes himself, for all his original genius, owed a great deal to the refined culture of Italy. But on the whole, glorious exceptions aside, our aristocratic pride, seconded by the unlucky position of the Peninsula (the far edge of Europe, and a road to nowhere but Africa), led us into a deplorable mental seclusion. Like those animals of Australia that, cut off from the mainland in remote ages, took on strange and outlandish forms, the Spanish mind, never quickened by intellectual cross-fertilization or corrected by European criticism, wandered away from the standards of world culture and spread itself in the rank, almost exclusive growth of scholastic subtleties, mystical raptures, and the word games of conceptismo and culteranismo.

And yet there was never lacking some Spaniard, the flower of the race, to point out the drawbacks of national isolation, though he preached in the desert. In his famous book of Emblems, Saavedra Fajardo said: "Renewal gives permanence to things perishable by nature... No young man turns out well in his own country... Relatives and friends make him licentious and bold. Not so in foreign lands, where necessity forces him to take care over his conduct and to win people's good will. Away from home a man loses that natural roughness and timidity, that foolish and inhuman haughtiness that is usually born and lasts in those who have not dealt with other nations... The Spaniards, who could see the world more easily than anyone, since their monarchy reaches everywhere, are the ones who stay most shut up in their homelands, except when arms draw them out" (Emblem LXVI)³⁸.

That we traveled little during our military supremacy, and took with us to Flanders and Italy no merchants, scholars or settlers to go along with our soldiers and create material and spiritual bonds with the mother country, is proved by the eloquent fact that today not the slightest trace of the Spanish race, language or customs remains in those countries. It is true that those enterprises were almost always about defending the kings' patrimony, well or badly acquired, and not the real interests of our people, as Cristóbal de Reyna very shrewdly observes³⁹.

We have lived for centuries, then, shut up in our shell, plodding round the water wheel of Aristotelianism and scholasticism, uninterested in and disdainful of (with few intervals) the mighty critical and revisionist movement that drove the sciences and arts forward in Europe. It would be unjust, though, to forget that some of our scientists and philosophers knew and taught the brand new truths of mathematics, astronomy, physics and biology won by Copernicus, Galileo, Torricelli, Newton, Descartes, Vesalius, Harvey and Lavoisier. But very few of them had the drive to move to the great cultural centers and catch the bracing contagion of creative genius.

Because of this incomplete union with Europe, our teachers taught a dead science, essentially formal, the science of books, where everything seems final (when in fact our knowledge is in perpetual becoming), and they knew nothing of living science: dynamic, forever ebbing and flowing, which can be learned only by living alongside the great investigators, breathing that bracing air of healthy skepticism, direct suggestion, imitation and impulse, without which the finest gifts harden into the routine labor of the repeater or the commentator.

The Remedy for Our Backwardness: The Historical Method of Raising Science and Culture

Science, like every specific activity of the mind, is simply the result of imitation and example. It is always a matter of contagion: sometimes at a distance, through the seed lying dormant in books, much more often close up, through germs that arrive by the ear, sprayed out of the heads of men of genius like a shining fountain. Just as a son learns his father's trade by watching and trying, the scientist in the making learns to investigate by watching the investigator and working under his eye. As Castillejo, one of the most fervent and selfless apostles of our intellectual renaissance, rightly says, "cultural flowerings are the product of contact between different civilizations. There is a kind of fertilization which, without digging further for now, may well be put down to the social character of culture, whether it concerns communities of individuals or communities of peoples."

It is so plain a truth that science springs from direct intellectual fertilization that you cannot name a single country where the thirst for knowledge arose wholly spontaneously. However rich and supple a scientist's mind may seem, it will never be able to create a scientific discipline in toto. Its mission comes down to developing a germ it has received, consolidating and enlarging the inheritance.

Do I need to recall historical examples of so trite and commonplace a claim? Everyone knows that the philosophers and scientists of Greece were tireless travelers. Each of those fresh minds, hungry for wisdom, usually divided its life into two phases: in the first it visited the cultural centers of Egypt, Assyria, Persia, India and Magna Graecia; in the second it withdrew into itself, put what it had learned into order, and founded a new school. Old Egypt taught Greece, as in time Greece taught Italy and the Muslim nations; and these in turn, and above all the highly cultivated Italy of the Renaissance (that Italy forever pagan in spite of Christianity, and passionately in love with ancient wisdom), spread classical science through the rest of Europe.

And for nearer examples, don't we see Japan today, a people of the yellow race, pass abruptly from the darkness of the Middle Ages to the splendors of Western culture and civilization? It is a stupendous achievement that looks like a miracle, and it is simply one particular case of the systematic, intensive and extensive inoculation of European science. It was not, whatever some of our politicians like to claim, the Japanese revolution of '68, with its liberal demands and the economic emancipation of the farmer that followed, that was the real cause of so astonishing a rebirth. No: the architects of that grand ascent were, first of all, the high political sense of the Emperor and his ministers, and, as their instruments, those thousands of patient, silent, concentrated young men who came to Europe on the Government's orders and, full of patriotic fervor, searched out the secrets of Western knowledge and power in laboratories, seminars, workshops, factories and arsenals.

Less resounding and famous, but just as telling, are the examples of some peoples of pure European stock where, for various reasons, the sciences declined or did not advance with the necessary vigor. Think of Italy, whose universities, a little enervated during the first half of the last century, managed to renew their aging sap by importing German professors and, above all, by systematically educating the flower of their intellectual and teaching youth abroad. The United States has followed the same saving course (there, for various reasons, the scientific spirit seemed smothered by low commercialism), flooding the laboratories and seminars of England, France and Germany with young doctors.

The fruits of this repeated and methodical inoculation with the germ of scientific progress are plain to see. Italy has multiplied her intellectual output tenfold, and in certain fields she already stands at the head of European culture. As for the United States, the spirit of inquiry there is in a rapid crescendo; the swarm of ingenious though empirical inventors has been reinforced by a splendid company of creative scientists, whose discoveries keep making ever better use of the riches above and below the ground and have caused the astonishing flowering of its industrial enterprises. Powerful institutes, like the famous Rockefeller Institute, bequests of patriotic millionaires, have been founded to cultivate pure science. Down the same road, with shining success or well-founded hopes, go Romania, Egypt, Chile, the Argentine Republic and others.

And notice that the cultural rise of these peoples did not come about by slow evolution, as theory demands, but suddenly and theatrically: a real revolution from above, in which the Gazette of official decrees, so discredited among us, worked like a wonder-working talisman.

The cure that has had resounding success in Italy, the United States, Japan⁴⁰, Hungary, Romania and even Russia, that is, in countries of such different races and temperaments, is it going to fail precisely in Spain, the crucible in which nearly all the races of Europe were melted together?⁴¹

I declare here and now that the remedy that has worked miracles in every country will give excellent results in Spain as well. If it fails, the fault will be ours, for not knowing how to use this heroic cure. Failure, and after it final and mortal decline, will come only if we apply it without faith or perseverance; if out of stinginess we give it in homeopathic doses, or off and on; if we fail to recruit our young people and prepare their minds to receive the supreme initiation beyond the Pyrenees; if, while we set up close spiritual communication with foreign countries, we don't manage to keep the sacred fire of research alive in the initiated, by organizing laboratories and seminars, workshops and other centers of intellectual and professional work to hold and spur them on; if, in short, out of respect for musty prejudices or fatal formalities, we don't quickly bring the new teaching corps into the classroom, renewing and fertilizing with it the old university, which is, as I've said, the principal organ of civilization and progress.

For I have proclaimed it a thousand times and will repeat it a thousand more: Spain will not climb out of her mental prostration until she replaces the old heads of her professors (in the universities, the secondary institutes and the special schools), turned toward the past, with new ones turned toward the future. The harm, then, lies not in those who learn, nor in the State, which pays the costs as far as it can, but in those who teach. The one comes out of the other. A pupil's ideal will always be to resemble his master. How is he to surpass himself if he finds no higher standard of comparison near him? And since the iron chain of our backwardness has to be broken, let it be broken at the teaching link, the only one on which the State can act directly and effectively. By rapidly Europeanizing the professor, we will Europeanize the pupil and the whole nation.

As Castillejo puts it so clearly, "there is no other way than to train new people and join them to the usable elements of the old." But these new people won't really be new; they'll inevitably resemble us and suffer from our routines and defects, unless they breathe the air of the foreign university for a long time.

That is the saving plan. No one had to invent the cure. It is a proven remedy, the rule followed by every people that saw its prostration clearly and really wanted to be reborn. Let us now come down to some rules on how to apply the treatment.

Today we are much concerned with university autonomy. Very well. But if each professor does not improve his technical aptitude and his mental discipline; if the teaching centers lack the heroism needed to resist the oppressive claws of the political bosses and of favoritism inside and outside the university; if each master regards his intellectual children as unsurpassable archetypes of talent and fitness, then the brand-new autonomy will yield much the same fruit as the present system. What good would it do to free the professors from the State's tutelage if they don't first try to free themselves from themselves, that is, to rise above their ethical and cultural miseries? The central problem of our University is not independence but the radical and definitive transformation of the aptitude and ideals of the teaching community. And there are few men capable of being their own surgeons. The saving scalpel must be wielded by others. ↩
The accounts of the foreigners who visited Spain in the age of her greatness or at the start of her decline, and the testimony of our own writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, show that our preponderance in Europe was merely military and not cultural. Science, Industry, Agriculture, Commerce, every manifestation of mind and labor, were greatly inferior in the age of the Catholic Monarchs and of Charles V to those of the rest of Europe. To cite one case among a thousand, Simón Abril, in his Notes for Philip II, was already lamenting that we had no mathematicians, "to the shame of the nation and the great harm of the commonwealth, since Spain must go seeking talent in foreign nations, to the grave injury of the public good." It is shameful to learn that almost all our generals and admirals in the wars of Italy and Flanders were foreigners. Cristóbal de Villalón, who also wrote in the golden century of our history, laments, besides the defects of the national character, the mediocrity of our grammarians and humanists, far inferior to the foreign ones. (See his Voyage to Turkey.) ↩
In the Ebro basin (Aragon especially) the column of the rain gauge seldom reaches 300 millimeters, and in Murcia and Almería a year when it rises to 250 is rare. On the whole Cantabrian coast, on the other hand, it exceeds 1,500, sometimes reaching 2,000. ↩
The figure of 40 million supposed by some, and above all by Macías Picavea, is pure fantasy. If today, in spite of the industrial flowering of some regions, the growing expansion of the cities and the notable progress of agriculture and mining, our territory does not produce food enough even for the 20 million inhabitants who people it, by what miraculous art could it once have fed 40 million (rich France still doesn't have that many) with a soil largely unplowed and with cities that, with a few exceptions, were tiny, as the surviving walls of the most populous still bear witness? ↩
Before Buckle there were many foreigners who put our decadence down to the exaltation of the religious principle and contempt for the useful arts. Recall, among others, Montesquieu's remark: "Look at one of their libraries (those of Spain): novels on one side and scholastic philosophy on the other. Wouldn't you say the whole thing was the work of some secret enemy of human reason?" Voltaire's phrase is vivid too: "The Inquisition and superstition perpetuated scholastic errors here (in Spain); mathematics was so little cultivated by the Spaniards that in their wars they always employed Italian engineers." I have already quoted a similar judgment from our own Simón Abril, a writer of the time of Philip II. ↩
Recall the celebrated controversy between Sanz del Río, Revilla, Perojo and others on one side, and on the other the traditionalists, reinforced by the valuable support of Menéndez Pelayo. The Krausists maintained that the Spanish spirit had developed only in part, scorning reason and the understanding, and that since there had been no Spanish science or philosophy, the history of those disciplines could be written without mentioning any names but those of the heroic seamen who discovered the Americas and sailed around the world. The traditionalists, on the contrary, asserted that during the golden age we had created a very high and original science and philosophy, and that this was owed largely to religious fervor and the paternal despotism of the kings. As for my own humble opinion, formed after calmly weighing the arguments of both schools, it agrees almost entirely with the judgment of an impartial French writer of our day. Dusolier, who followed the incidents of the famous controversy with interest, says: "Contrary to the too modest or too disdainful assertions of the Krausist school, we believe that there did in fact exist a Spanish science and a Spanish philosophy; but we also think that all of Menéndez Pelayo's talent is not enough to prove that this philosophy and this science were very important." Dusolier, "Aperçu historique sur la Médecine en Espagne," Paris, 1906. As for mathematics, the greatest of our present geometers, Señor Rey Pastor, points out in a well-documented address that our geometers of the golden age and after often worked without a sufficient knowledge of the great mathematical conquests of the Renaissance, especially those of the Italian, French and English scientists. ↩
Cristóbal de Villalón, who should be regarded as the forerunner of our modern regenerators, was already saying, a little crudely, in the 16th century (Voyage to Turkey), in allusion to Spanish pride and insolence: "Of all the nations of the world we Spaniards are the most disliked by all, and with very good reason, for our arrogance: two days into service we want to be the masters, and if we're invited to dinner once we take over the inn." Villalón also had a very accurate view of the barrenness of our soil and our military poverty when, comparing Spain with Italy, he asked: "Do you think it could keep as many armies as Italy? If fifty thousand men marched about inside it for six months they would lay it waste, so that not a bushel of bread nor a jug of wine would be left," and so on. And if a patriotic Spaniard wrote this in the time of Philip II, how can we be surprised that many foreigners have repeated the same thing in later reigns? ↩
Everyone knows that the verb cerrar, so expressive in our war cry, means to charge, to close with the enemy. But Bunge's thought, that Spain lived almost cut off from the cultivated nations, is unfortunately true, and that is why I quote it. ↩
For the rest, Saavedra shared, as he could hardly help doing, the feelings and prejudices of his time. Nor should we forget that in his Emblems he defends the selfish interest of the prince, which doesn't always coincide with the nation's. We must therefore forgive him maxims like these: "Freedom of conscience is the ruin of a State... The Swiss, who don't exercise themselves much in the sciences, live very quiet and happy... There are too many universities... Attention to the sciences weakens strength and debases courage... Study breeds melancholy wits; they love solitude and celibacy," and so on. ↩
Those interests were almost entirely abandoned, with the odd exception, when the Austrian dynasty arrived. And I'm very close to thinking that Spanish independence practically ended with Ferdinand and Isabella and Cardinal Cisneros. After that, apart from a few periods of patriotic good sense, we were towed along behind dynastic ambitions and the greed of monarchs who often took their orders from foreign courts. ↩
If the theory of the superiority of the hyperborean races of Europe, invented by the naive Frenchman Gobineau and taken up in chorus by Saxons and Germans for their own glorification, had stopped the Japanese, we would by now lack the most decisive proof of the power of contagion and imitation to make a people great. Science, art, industry and the military would have lost some sovereign collaborators. And we physicians could not applaud, among other glorious lives, that of a Kitasato, discoverer of the bubonic plague microbe and founder, with the German Behring and the Frenchman Roux, of the principles of serum therapy. ↩
Translator's note. Kitasato Shibasaburō and Alexandre Yersin both reported the plague bacillus from Hong Kong in 1894; the credit has since gone mainly to Yersin, whose name the organism now bears (Yersinia pestis). ↩

Chapter 11: The Institutions of Our Reconstruction

The social bodies charged with our reconstruction. Fellowships abroad. Importing professors. Founding Spanish colleges in the chief university cities of Europe.

The ideas I've just set out, commonplace abroad, are happily no novelty in Spain either. More or less explicitly, our best writers have proclaimed them, and above all the leading lights of the lecture hall; they have created a state of national awareness and have at last been turned into laws and suitable bodies for action. It is well known that for some years now we have had institutions, like the Board for Fellowships and Advanced Study Abroad and the Foundation for Engineers and Workers, whose main mission is to pick the flower of our intellectual and working youth and to educate and support them in the great centers of scientific and industrial production in Europe and America.

The Board for Fellowships and Advanced Study sets itself these aims, as its energetic secretary, Señor Castillejo, sums them up: "1. Sending fellows abroad, keeping in touch with them, and organizing various forms of guidance and help to make their work easier. 2. An information service on education abroad, to spread knowledge of the teaching centers and the conditions of life in the chief countries. 3. A students' foundation to back private initiative, helping families who send young people abroad at their own expense. 4. The creation of centers of scientific research, organized inside and outside Spain, so that fellows returning from abroad can continue their training, and those who hope to go can begin it together, with whatever resources the country offers, in practical and personal work. Three such groups have been set up so far: the Center for Historical Studies, the National Institute of Physical and Natural Sciences, and the Spanish School of Archaeology and History in Rome. 5. The encouragement of educational institutions, to improve every side of our students' lives. The first Students' Residence has already opened in Madrid, where they find favorable conditions of health, morals and intellect under a regime of healthy freedom"⁴².

The loyalty, the impartiality between creeds and the sincere patriotism with which the Board for Fellowships and Scientific Research has applied these principles of cultural uplift have been acknowledged by most of the leading figures in politics, of every shade. It has also won valuable praise from our finest writers, among whom it would be unforgivable to forget the cultivated and even-handed critic Gómez Baquero, whose eloquent lectures in Portugal dealt precisely with the Board's work and the encouraging results it has obtained. Aware that they serve an essentially national work, the members of the Board, when they propose fellowships or award research grants, see no colors but the glorious ones of the Spanish flag, which are also the colors of the spiritual dawn we all long for.

As a humble collaborator of the institution, I shouldn't be the one to weigh its work. It would be far too early, besides. Let me nonetheless forget my own insignificant share for a moment and look at the results objectively. I repeat that it is still too soon to take stock of what has been gained; the seed will bear fruit only some years from now. Justice compels me to admit, though, that in spite of the timidity and irresolution with which the State, and the Board in its name, have proceeded, some worthwhile harvests have been gathered. For a start, in the new generation the mental type of the declaiming, merely commenting teacher is visibly shrinking, and every day there are more national scientific journals, more research laboratories and seminars, and more enthusiastic professors devoted to original inquiry. Let me be a little more specific.

In biology we already have a nursery of laboratories whose research is known and valued abroad, where some of their people have given courses and directed laboratories. Various German, English and Spanish journals, and especially the Works of the Laboratory of Biological Research and the Bulletin of the Spanish Society of Biology, carry their interesting papers. In the journal of my own laboratory alone (the Works of the Laboratory of Research, for the years 1912 to 1923), students or professors who have held fellowships have published more than 50 original monographs, some with discoveries of the first rank.

The naturalists, as hardworking as ever, though still slow to adopt certain methods of study (histological, embryological, ethological and psychological), have increased their output in quality and quantity. Besides the papers printed in the Bulletin of the Academy of Sciences, those appearing in the respected Annals of the Spanish Society of Natural History grow more interesting every day. The creation of the Commission for Paleontological and Prehistoric Research has also borne rich fruit. Its learned and active members, trained by distinguished French and German specialists, have spared us the shame of having our Peninsula serve, in everything touching prehistoric art and industry, as a field worked exclusively by foreign scientists.

The physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers lately returned from Germany, Holland, Belgium and France give us great hopes too. Some of them have already made their names with important research, published partly by the Board and mostly in the young Journal of Physics and Chemistry. Even the mathematicians, once so phlegmatic and timid, have at last founded a Seminar and a journal, where their studies, more original and profound by the day, find encouragement and an audience.

Splendid and numerous, too, is the company of jurists, historians, philologists, psychologists and others who have brought back from Germany the secret of positive and exact research. Their workshop and channel, its activity in crescendo, is the Center for Historical Studies, along with the many books the Board publishes regularly. It is gratifying to see that the new crop of sociologists, humanists, literary critics, historians and linguists have given up the easy habits of impressionism, tendentiousness and declamation, and now lay down their own doctrine calmly and impersonally on first-hand data, documents and figures. The picture as a whole is consoling, and it opens bright prospects to Spanish patriotism.

Still, we mustn't let so encouraging a result dazzle us. Let us admit that the fruit gathered is still poor, and far below what we could produce. We are moving at a tortoise's pace when we need planetary speeds. Our only consolation is that the gains, meager as they are, roughly match the size of the effort.

Well-known causes, pointed out in good time by clear-sighted minds, explain the modesty of our success. Allow me to set down briefly a few reflections on the chief ones.

1. Too few fellowships. The method of fellowships abroad, good as an educational rule, can yield enough fruit only when it is applied on a grand scale, without timidity or misgivings, and in the conviction that most of the seed will inevitably be lost. We could be satisfied if, out of the present 90 or 100 fellows, we got eight or ten workers useful to the country's cultural uplift⁴³.

But 80 to 90 fellows among professors, doctors of philosophy, engineers, physicians, naturalists, lawyers, historians, philologists, artists, educators and so on (a figure that is a maximum compared with other years) is a laughable, almost negligible quantity, given how backward we are and how generously and decisively other nations act on this point. Let's have no illusions. Our country needs to be reformed radically from top to bottom, with the drowsy body of society goaded and stirred to its very entrails. A fermentation that intense needs hundreds of fellows, perhaps thousands: legions of young people determined to wrest from Europe the secret of its greatness and to breathe a new spirit into all our slack teaching and administrative institutions⁴⁴.

2. Fellowships too short. In Italy, and in nearly all the nations whose scientific output has happened to fall off, fellowships abroad last three years, instead of the one year or half year, barring extensions, that is our custom.

Our term is far too short. Except for cultivated professors already used to research, who visit foreign laboratories to master a new method of study or to dig deeper into some very special subject beside a famous scientist, a fellowship ought to last three years, or two at the least. The reasons for such a term will be obvious to anyone, and least of all hidden from those of us in the teaching profession, aware as we are of the poor technical training and the near total ignorance of languages of the great majority of our doctors and graduates. During the first year the fellow spends almost all his time improving his command of the language and getting used to the methods of work; only later can he take on useful work and enter into the spiritual intimacy of the master.

3. The candidate's youth and poor technical training. These are two important causes of barren fellowships, the unavoidable result of a state of affairs that neither the Gazette nor the Board will be able to correct for now. The candidate is badly prepared because the great majority of our teachers are badly prepared too, and he usually lacks the indispensable mental maturity, thanks to laws that, in keeping with the heart's desire of the father of the family, oblige the factories of the secondary school and the university to rush their flimsy products onto the social market.

Exceptional precocity aside, a vocation is a late state of the soul, the result of the mind's forces feeling their way in different directions and of putting one's own aptitudes to an objective test. As a general rule this clear awareness of one's vocation appears between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-eight, though nothing certain can be laid down on the point. In any case we run a grave risk of wasting time and money when we send abroad young men of twenty to twenty-four who don't know themselves and have no well-defined tastes or calling.

In their heedlessness, many of them mistake for scientific aptitude an adventurous itch to travel, or the wish to pick up, at the State's expense, a certain fashionable general culture; and when their duties oblige them to visit laboratories and attend courses, they go more out of idle curiosity, to learn the master's moral face and the anecdotes about him, than out of any eagerness to soak themselves to the bone in the spirit of the school.

When you ask foreigners who know the Spanish educational system about the causes of our feeble output, the answer is as unanimous as it is fair:

"The foreign university," they say, "receives grown men from secondary education, with a very solid grounding in science and letters; the Spanish university feeds on thoughtless youngsters, without enough mental training and almost wholly lacking solid knowledge of mathematics, physics, chemistry, natural history, modern languages and philosophy"⁴⁵. Many of our teachers have deplored this grave ill too, especially André, whose books (notably the one called The German Mentality) offer an illuminating and fair critique of our faulty university system.

This defect is to be blamed less on the laws than on our impatient fathers of families, whose only concern is that their son should get a professional degree at the least possible cost in time and money. "Whatever he doesn't know," they say, "he'll learn later..." And in fact they almost never do learn it.

It isn't within the Board's powers to give fellowships, as a certain witty politician put it, to heads of families, so that they can learn abroad the art of being proper fathers. But it would be desirable for the Board, when proposing candidates, to bear this cause of barrenness well in mind, and to turn down (justified exceptions aside) all the callow doctors and graduates under twenty-five who have no settled vocation and not even enough elementary technical training.

Spanish colleges in London, Paris and Berlin. Although I'm no enthusiast for this procedure, which Costa recommended, I see no harm in trying it, by founding in Cambridge, Leipzig or Munich a Spanish college where numerous scholarship holders could follow, by modern methods, both secondary and university studies. Among other advantages, this method of early transplanting would have the very great one of molding the will and the character at the age when social surroundings, sports and so on have their greatest educational effect, and the no less important one of offering young minds from the start a rich and wholesome intellectual diet, instead of the rote, superficial instruction served up, with exceptions, in our secondary schools and colleges. The only thing that would hold me back is the fear that this method, applied wholesale and without selection to unripe brains, would impose on the exhausted Spanish Treasury expenses out of all proportion to the results.

Institutions That Complete the Fellowships

It isn't enough to pick out the élite of our intellectual class, more or less automatically, and transport them at one stroke to the scientific centers abroad. We must first create a transitional setting for them, that is, prepare them morally and technically so that they can adjust to the new cultural surroundings without risk. And it is indispensable, besides, to give those best adapted to that setting, when they come back from their fellowship, the means to carry on the work they have begun, so that the mental type so laboriously created doesn't end by losing its differentiation in idle comfort and reverting, like certain artificially cultivated plants, to the common native species.

Such efforts would be idle if our teaching institutions were always in a position to train the candidate technically, and if on his return the university, the special schools or the public service offered him a post fit for his talents. Unfortunately that isn't how things are. The official establishments are sealed organisms, tyrannized by the seniority list and the regulations and tied to a rigid budget, in which everything is provided for except the surprises of life: I mean the sudden appearance of gifted heads and the need to give them moral and financial support, quickly and at the right moment.

That gap is what the National Institute of Sciences, with its various laboratories and seminars, the Center for Historical Studies, organized by the Board, and, finally, a few university laboratories are meant to fill.

It is important to note that these centers are provisional bodies, standing in for the university and the various professional schools. They will disappear when the teaching corporations acquire enough flexibility and sensitivity to take in every usable talent that lacks support. Some university professors are therefore mistaken when they fear that these offshoots of the Board are institutes set up as rivals to the university. How can laboratories directed by tenured professors, and organized precisely to serve as a nursery for the professors of the future, be rivals of official teaching?

Have those who judge other people's initiatives so ungenerously stopped to consider the grave danger of losing precious aptitudes and vocations for good, through neglect and inaction, while the closed ranks of the teaching seniority lists inch open to admit the new colleague? And what if there is no vacancy for many years? Are we to stand by unmoved while the young investigator, prodded by the pressing primum vivere ("first, live"), asks private teaching or some lucrative profession for the crust of bread that the cultivation of pure science denies him, and the State loses the fruit of its sacrifices?

The experience of the last few years has taught us that no precaution is too much to keep the young investigator from sliding back mentally and readapting to the surrounding mediocrity. Everything conspires against him: the lack of social support, the coolness of colleagues who had no fellowship, the disdain, when not the dislike, of some of the old masters, and above all the constant, overpowering lure of professional luxury, and even of unscrupulousness or brazenness raised high. That is how the cause of our culture loses many valuable defenders every year, fallen past redemption into the anonymous heap of gold seekers. This must be prevented at all costs, or at least cut down to a bearable minimum. Not over all of them, which would be impossible, but over the best of the former fellows, the Board, and especially the professors under whose direction they work, ought to exercise a continuous and vigorous guardianship: pleading their case in the administrative spheres, urging them to carry on with their work in spite of everything, and, finally, correcting in a fatherly way the faults of immodesty and conceit that are unhappily not rare among young men educated beyond the Pyrenees. Those faults, it must be admitted, are the main cause of the hostility with which some of the solid old reputations of the university look on them.

Importing Teachers

I have pointed out several times that the problem of our intellectual ascent can be solved only by transforming and raising, step by step, everyone from the primary schoolteacher to the university professor: that is, by forming new men, wholeheartedly joined to the international work of culture, and filling with them every vacancy that death opens in our teaching and administrative institutions.

One important doubt might, however, hold us back in trying to solve this problem in practice. Instead of strengthening our young people by airing them in the English, French or German university, wouldn't it be better to import illustrious scientists from the leading nations, and so transfuse new and abundant blood into the sickly national body all at once?

Considered a priori, so radical a means of spiritual toning, which might be called the method of cultural grafting, seems the quickest, most effective and cheapest. Italy entrusted to this heroic remedy, fifty-five years ago, the renewal of her decadent university. German masters as eminent as Carl Vogt (naturalist), Moleschott (anatomist), Schiff (physiologist), Kleinenberg (comparative anatomy), Schrön (pathologist), Kiesow (experimental psychologist) and several others held chairs in that country. From them came a splendid company of enthusiastic disciples who carried on the work of their foreign masters gloriously. Let me name a few distinguished names, keeping to biology alone: the anatomist Kleinenberg trained Grassi, discoverer of the malaria germ's life cycle outside man; the physiologist Schiff taught the illustrious Mosso, Luciani and Fano at Turin; and Moleschott, for his part, fathered a fine intellectual progeny, represented by the anatomists Todaro and Chiarugi among others.

The method has also been used with excellent, though less dazzling, success in Russia and the United States, and with uncertain or discouraging effects in Chile and Argentina. Remember, finally, that intellectual grafting had an august and enthusiastic pioneer among us in Charles III, who, full of fatherly love for his subjects, tried without success to acclimatize the taste for research in Spain with the chemist Proust and other scientists of world fame.

The temporary immigration or permanent incorporation of foreign investigators is a method of direct, super-intensive inoculation, able in favorable circumstances to shake a country out of its intellectual torpor. But let me hasten to say that the procedure can yield sure benefits only in nations where the moral atmosphere is prepared enough, and on condition that the ethnic, linguistic and mental differences between the donor country and the receiving one are slight. That is why the method of spiritual grafting, so effective in Holland, Switzerland, Russia, Italy and the United States, yielded scant fruit in Spain and yields scant fruit today in the Spanish American states⁴⁶.

For my part, I confess myself a fervent supporter of importing men of science (a method that can be combined to advantage with fellowships), but on condition that people who know the English, French or German universities, ably seconded by our diplomacy, find us scientists of the first magnitude with a robust vocation for teaching.

In Germany above all there is at present an overproduction of investigators. Many of them, driven by necessity, emigrate to Holland, Russia, Hungary, the United States and England, unable as they are to make a decent living in their native universities, where the struggle for existence is overwhelming. It would be easy, then, at moderate cost, to find a few private lecturers or extraordinary professors whose merits, trumpeted by the fame of their discoveries and the admiration of their pupils, had not yet won enough official reward⁴⁷.

Nor would it put me off that these masters might leave us after a few years, eager to take up their university careers again in their own country; for in five or ten years among us they would no doubt have formed disciples, all the better because the professor, hoping to earn at home the coveted title of full professor, would feel no temptation to rest on his laurels. Importing foreign teachers is especially urgent in the subjects that are orphaned in Spain (with few exceptions) of high-level investigators, such as physics, chemistry, astronomy and geology. And although the Spanish cultural atmosphere still leaves much to be desired, I sincerely believe that today's is far superior to that of Charles III's time⁴⁸. (Our university, as is well known, already has a few learned foreign professors on its permanent staff.)

But applied on a grand scale and to the exclusion of all else, this method could bring certain drawbacks, already noted in their own countries by American writers. Here are a few, which I mention in passing, after granting that exceptions abound:

1. The German or Anglo-Saxon investigator who lands in a Latin country finds himself off center; his habits and leanings clash too much with those of his hosts, and at the first opportunity he goes home without having founded a school⁴⁹. In this respect French and Italian masters might be more desirable.

2. For reasons easy to guess, the expatriate scientist is usually not an investigator of the first rank but a bright and promising young man (a Privatdozent or a doctor without an official post), not yet fully formed. The choice ought of course to involve the initiative of a master of unquestioned authority; but the prophet's trade has its failures, even granting that personal liking played no part in his choice.

3. Indifferent to the problem of raising the culture of his adopted country, the illustrious foreigner tends to neglect forming native disciples and to publish his research in the journals of his homeland.

4. The difficulty of understanding the language of the new country takes away from the effectiveness of the foreign master's teaching.

Because of these drawbacks, and others of an administrative kind that are less serious, I consider that the work of our renewal should be entrusted chiefly, though not exclusively, to the fellowship method. I am firmly convinced of this: if it is applied with faith and perseverance; if, shunning stinginess, we send four or five hundred capable young people abroad every year to the great centers of intellectual and industrial production, choosing by preference professors and assistants and the finest and most cultivated of the State's technical officials (soldiers, engineers, scientists and educators, not forgetting a few clergymen, perhaps the most in need of Europeanizing)⁵⁰; if the bodies that select the candidates turn a deaf ear to the siren song of favoritism and act austerely, proposing only men with solid technical training and a record of serious work, more or less important but in every case showing a firm and decided vocation for scientific research; then I hold it beyond dispute that within a few decades all the leading and teaching classes of our country will have been transformed from top to bottom.

And that splendid flowering of scientific truths, useful inventions, and fruitful applications to agriculture, industry and the political and administrative management of the State will forcefully assert our spiritual personality before the world, and will prepare a Spain of the future that consoles us for four centuries of stagnation and makes Europe forget the Spain of the past.

These have since been followed, with unexpected support from public opinion, by the Women Students' Residence, directed by that incomparable educator María de Maeztu, the Residence for Young Children, and finally the Institute-School, which aims to be a secondary school of the European type, combining the excellence of choice instruction entrusted to distinguished teachers with the benefits of a healthy and invigorating education of body and mind. ↩
The war has cut this figure considerably, gravely harming the speed of our scientific and industrial progress. ↩
The Japanese fellows in Berlin, Vienna, London and Paris are counted not by the dozen, as ours are, but by the hundred. Even today, when the Empire of the Rising Sun has already reaped glorious fruit from its European education, there are more than 400 Japanese fellows in Berlin. How many must there be in England, France and the United States? It is a formidable army of intellectuals, storming the laboratories, devouring the books of science, and laboring heroically for the intellectual and political supremacy of their country.

The Japanese success has caught on in China, which is preparing its intellectual rebirth by supporting 10,000 scholarship students in Japan, 600 in the United States and some 300 in Europe, with permanent delegations in those countries to watch over and look after them.

(This was written in 1913. The horrible European war will no doubt have brought those countries the same deplorable consequences as Spain.) ↩
In Germany young men usually enter the university at eighteen or twenty and leave it at twenty-seven or twenty-eight; for although the law sets a minimum of five years of academic study and another of voluntary study at other universities (six years in all), the seriousness and thoughtfulness of the German student, admirably seconded by the foresight of his father, lead him to lengthen his course, widening his knowledge of the most important subjects or of those he has a strong liking for. ↩
The reports I've been able to get from Chile and Argentina show that, apart from a few German professors who stuck to their mission of creating and inoculating science, the rest, that is, the great majority, were swept away by the fever of business, which few emigrants resist. ↩
After the world war the exodus of scientists will almost certainly grow considerably, because of the unbearable economic hardships in Germany, unknown or much milder in the neutral nations. ↩
I don't think much of the present method of inviting certain foreign luminaries to give a few lectures at our teaching centers. The invited scientist must teach at least one full course and, with the necessary equipment at hand, teach his pupils the technique of research. ↩
The splendid results Italy got by importing foreign scientists were no doubt due to the excellence of the scientists themselves; but that excellence depended on conditions not easily repeated. Besides the German's reverence for the homeland of art, the ease and shortness of the journey, the nearly universal knowledge of Italian among educated Germans and so on, the success owed a great deal to the German Revolution of the last century and the reaction that followed it, which forced many men of merit, branded for their liberal ideas, into exile. Today Italy, conscious of her intellectual strength, uses the fellowship method alone. ↩
Today I would add top politicians as well. A law that irrevocably barred from the Councils of the Crown any politician who had not spent at least three years in foreign schools (especially those of Germany, England and France) would be decisive for the success of our cultural, agricultural and industrial renewal. Had this been done before '98, the loss of the Colonies would have been avoided; for, apart from other factors I needn't go into here, hardly any of our ministers and generals of that time had the faintest idea of the overwhelming naval, military and industrial might of the United States. No one is fit to safeguard his country's interests effectively without first knowing thoroughly the political forces and the moral and material resources of other nations. ↩

Three Books to Read Next

Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif

The men Cajal holds up to his students, Koch, Ehrlich, Roux, Behring, Metchnikoff, Grassi, all appear here, their discoveries told as the stubborn, error-strewn hunts they were. De Kruif shows the method of Cajal's Chapter 7 in action: a hunch, trial after failed trial, and the one that worked.
The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday

Cajal's favorite proof that the means matter less than the man is Faraday, the bookbinder's apprentice who became Davy's laboratory assistant and went on to remake the science of electricity. These six Christmas lectures for young people show that mind at work on a single candle.
Science and Hypothesis by Henri Poincaré

Cajal quotes Poincaré and argues, as Poincaré does, that hypotheses are tools to be used and discarded, never a creed. Poincaré makes the case from inside mathematics and physics, with more rigor and less exhortation, and asks how much of physics is fact and how much is convention.