e_, pp. 239-40.]

Pasteur, whose researches are of such immediate consequence
in human health, began his studies in the crystalline forms
of tartrates. The tremendous commercial uses which have
been made of benzene had their origin "in a single idea,
advanced in a masterly treatise by Auguste Kekule in the year
1865."[1]

[Footnote 1: Quoted by Thomson from an address on "Technical
Chemistry" by C. E. Munroe.]

Practical life has been continually enriched by theoretical
inquiry. Scientific descriptions increase in value as they
become absolutely impersonal, absolutely precise, and especially
as they become condensed general formulas, which will
be applicable to an infinite variety of particular situations.
And such descriptions are necessarily abstract and theoretical.

ANALYSIS OF SCIENTIFIC PROCEDURE. Scientific method is
merely common sense made more thoroughgoing and systematic.
Reflection of a more or less effective kind takes place
in ordinary experience wherever instinctive or habitual action
is not adequate to meet a situation, whenever the individual
has a problem to solve, an adjustment to make. Thinking,
of some kind, goes on continually. Scientific thinking merely
means careful, safeguarded, systematic thinking. It is thinking
alert and critical of its own methods. As contrasted
with ordinary common-sense thinking, it is distinguished by
"caution, carefulness, thoroughness, definiteness, exactness,
orderliness, and methodic arrangement." We think, in any
case, because we have to, being creatures born with a set of
instincts not adequate to meet the conditions of our environment.
We can think carelessly and ineffectively, or carefully
and successfully.

Scientific method, or orderly, critical, and systematic
thinking, is not applicable to one subject-matter exclusively.
Examples are commonly drawn from the physical or chemical
or biological laboratory, but the elements of scientific method
may be illustrated in the procedure of a business man meeting
a practical problem, a lawyer sifting evidence, a statesman
framing a new piece of legislation. In all these cases the
difference between a genuinely scientific procedure and mere
casual and random common sense is the same.

Science is nothing but _trained and organized common sense_,
differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit:
and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far as the
guardsman's cut and thrus