Carroll Quigley Remarks on Scientific Method
condensed and excerpted from: The Evolution of Civilizations (an. 1961) Chapter 1 - Scientific Method and the Social Sciences
Editor’s introduction:
The editor finds that, much as he has implied that Quigley is, at times a ranter, that in the present instance the pot and the kettle are, yet again, blacked by the same brush. The editor has bracketed this presentation in rants ( perhaps he has erred by too close and too careless an examination of the subject text? ) and being unwilling to excise them, can only hope that they serve by being… amusing, at least somewhat. At any rate, he begs the reader’s kind forbearance.
Well indeed, it seems, the Rough Beast has come ‘round at last, for certainly an abundance of passionate intensity exists, particularly regarding the low, pernicious, narcotic new theologies such are “The Science”. How disgusting, how tragic really, it is to hear its acolytes crying out “The Science is settled!” as they burn their offerings of canceled neighbors, and canceled institutions, and rattle their dry Neo-Leninist bones, all the while perversely, corrosively, encouraged by cynical pirates, giddy with bloated materialism, sitting atop their vertically integrated grotesqueries of agitation-politics, hyperkinetic media, anti-industry, and whirling clouds of intricately hypothecated, absurdly leveraged paper. Many of these souls are thoroughly, and tragically lost to retrieval in this brooding hour, but undoubtedly for some (as hope and endurance must always exist) some antidote must be possible, some anodyne, some means of return to, or preservation of, rationality. At very least some counter-narrative, accessible even to the [;tldr] cognitive fashion, so widely expressed in this moment, twenty-one hundred years post, the objective zenith of classical civilization.
As counter-narratives go, there is no grand universal antidote available, rather such small nostrums as can be prepared by fathers and mothers, teachers and mentors, in the home, workshop, and school; in moments of everyday life. It is in this spirit that the editor offers the following excerpt, condensed from a larger scholarly work in order to make accessible a particularly brief, cogent explanation of scientific process as it is correctly understood, as it has ever been understood this past age, by actual scientists, so that it may be used in a pedagogical manner. The editor has in mind particularly home schools and other such private, high quality, non-state, learning environments. In this way he desires to contribute, in small measure, to preserving scholarship and fostering intellect, in a dissipated and distracted age.
The first chapter of Carroll Quigley’s The Evolution of Civilizations can be usefully analyzed as if structured in three levels:
In the first level we have an explanation of how Quigley plans to use the scientific process, in which, as a physicist, he is formally trained, to inform a work of sociological history, a much less objective field than physics which may not obviously lend itself, he points out, to certain types of quantitative rigor.
In the second level we have some extraneous material; departures, rants, diatribes. Quigley’s writing style can be elliptical, it often weaves around a point, becomes distracted, unnecessarily perhaps, beats some arguably irrelevant drums. It could be considered conversational in this sense.
It is within the third level that he embeds the part in which we are interested. The core of the writing is a wonderfully succinct, clear definition, at times poetic; not exhaustive, but rather introductory, of scientific process, which we would like to extract. So, these explanations relevant to the original text, and these odd departures as well, can be allowed to fall to the cutting room floor, and what is left is very close to a nice, tight professorial nut.
Scientific Method can be loosely abstracted ( not defined, for its definitions strive to be exact, exact and elegant ) as a basic, rigorous method which scholars, scientists, and technicians, have inherited, as resulting from a vast weight and struggle of inquiry through countless lives and across centuries, from the very earliest days of human civilization.
Across the charming transition from the Lithic to the Metallurgical, through the astonishing and revolutionary Domestication of the Grasses, through Classical Antiquity, through the long ages of Islamic and of Chinese scholarship, through Christendom, through the Renaissance, through the Age of Enlightenment, through the magnificent progress of the German, Austrian, Czech, and Hungarian Principalities, through Industrial Modernity, and now Post Modernity, even through the quiet, introspective, ceremonial, and slow, but highly refined, progress of intensely reserved Medieval Japan.
The reward, of all those generations of intellectual labour, is a singularly practical tool, an absolutely basic instrument, a fundamental foundation stone for any civilization which would dare bridge the heavens. This instrument to be gifted upon those generations which we, in our time, would train, love, uplift, and encourage to slip the skirts of our nativity, of our beloved, provincial, little gravity well, and reach for the sidereal. To pursue vistas which are literally, as yet, un-dreamable.
Robert Pirsig1 2 described our subject ( as part of a much broader essay ) in this way:
“When I think of formal scientific method, an image sometimes comes to mind of an enormous juggernaut. A huge bulldozer–slow, tedious, lumbering, laborious, but invincible… ( When ) you know that Nature this time has really decided to be difficult, you say, ‘Okay, Nature, that’s the end of the nice guy,’ and you crank up the formal scientific method.”
Persig’s is a masculine metaphor. Muscular. The editor appreciates Persig, but prefers the metaphor of the sharp instrument, or even more so the key. The key which can be used to open those doors which are locked before us now. The key which turns the intricate lock in the doors behind which rest the true, and the unalloyed, Promethean Fire. The key to those doors which we know we must somehow learn to open, or else to slide backward, through slow stages of gathering ignorance, of inexorably dissipating intellect, of indefinable loss, to some sad end, gazing wistfully upon some sad, obscure and lifeless strand.
Where notes and emphasis are added in the following text, they are mine. CA, editor- Berkshire County, 3/23
During the summer that I was twelve years old, I walked four or five times a week to fish from Hingham Bridge. The distance was about five miles, part of it along a high railroad embankment that had been ballasted with crushed quartz. In this ballast were hundreds of quartz crystals. Each day I stopped awhile to look for a perfect crystal. I found some excellent ones, but never one that could be called perfect. The books I consulted told me that a quartz crystal should be a hexagonal prism with a regular hexagonal pyramid at the end. The ones I found were invariably irregular in some way, with sides of varying sizes, frequently with several crystals jammed together so that, in seeking to share the same material, they mutually distorted each other's hexagonal regularity.
After several weeks of casual searching, I found three or four crystals that were almost perfect, at least at the pyramidal end. But to find these, I had examined and discarded hundreds of distorted crystals. By what right, I asked, did the books say that quartz crystals occurred in regular pyramidal hexagonal prisms when only a small percentage of those found had such a shape? Obviously, the books meant that crystallized quartz has a tendency to take hexagonal form and will do so unless distorted by outside forces. The fact that ninety-nine percent are distorted does not deter the scientist from forming in his mind an idealized picture of an undistorted crystal, or from stating, in books, that quartz crystals occur in that idealized form.
Later, when I studied science in school and college, I found that most scientific "laws" were of this idealized character. They were not statements of what actually happens in the world or of what we observe through our senses, but rather were highly idealized and much oversimplified relationships that might occur if a great many other influences, which were always present, were neglected. I found that the most highly praised "scientific laws" attributed to great men like Galileo or Newton were of this character. It was a blow to discover that Newton's laws of planetary motion did not, in fact, describe the movements of the sun's satellites as we observe them, except in a very approximate way. In some cases, notably that of the planet Mercury, the approximation was by no means close.3 4
[Hereby]… we should review what we understand by the term "scientific method." In general, this method has three parts which we might call:
(1) gathering evidence,
(2) making a hypothesis, and
(3) testing the hypothesis.
The first of these,"gathering evidence," refers to collecting all the observations relevant to the topic being studied. The important point here is that we must have all the evidence, for, obviously, omission of a few observations, or even one vital case, might make a considerable change in our final conclusions.
It is equally obvious, I hope, that we cannot judge that we have all the evidence or cannot know what observations are relevant to our subject unless we already have some kind of tentative hypothesis or theory about the nature of that subject. In most cases a worker does have some such preliminary theory. This leads to two warnings. In the first place, the three parts of scientific methodology listed above were listed in order, not because a scientist performs them separately in sequence, but simply because we must discuss them in an orderly fashion. And, in the second place, any theories, even those regarded as final conclusions at the end of all three parts of scientific method, remain tentative. As scientific methodology is practiced, all three parts are used together at all stages, and therefore no theory, however rigorously tested, is ever final, but remains at all times tentative, subject to new observation and continued testing by such observation. No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything. Rather he feels that science advances by a series of successive (and, he hopes, closer) approximations to the truth; and, since the truth is never finally reached, the work of scientists must indefinitely continue. Science, as one writer put it, is like a single light in darkness; as it grows brighter its shows more clearly the area of illumination and, simultaneously, lengthens the circle of surrounding darkness.
Having gathered all the "relevant" evidence, the scientist may proceed to the second part of scientific methodology, making a hypothesis. In doing this, two rules must be followed:
(a) the hypothesis must explain all the observations and,
(b) the hypothesis must be the simplest one that will explain them.
These two rules might be summed up in the statement that a scientific hypothesis must be adequate and, it must be simple. Once again let us confess that these two rules are idealistic rather than practicable, but they remain, nevertheless, the goals by which a scientist guides his activities.
When we say that a hypothesis must be adequate, and thus must include all of the relevant observations, we are saying something simple. But carrying out this simple admonition is extremely difficult. It is quite true that every scientific hypothesis suffers from inadequate evidence—that is, it does not include in its explanation all the relevant evidence, and would be different if it did so. It is not easy to tear any event out of the context of the universe in which it occurred without detaching it from some factor that has influenced it.
The second requirement of a scientific hypothesis—that it should be simple—is also more difficult to carry out in practice than it is to write down in words. Essentially, it means that a hypothesis should explain the existing observations by making the fewest assumptions and by inferring the simplest relationships. This is so vital, that a hypothesis is scientific, or fails to be scientific, on this point alone. Yet in spite of its importance, this requirement of scientific method is frequently not recognized to be important by many active scientists.
The requirement that a scientific hypothesis must be "simple" or, as it is sometimes expressed, "economical" does not arise merely from a scientist's desire to be simple. Nor does it arise from some aesthetic urge, although this is not so remote from the problem as might seem at first glance. When a mathematician says of a mathematical demonstration that it is "beautiful," he means exactly what the word "beautiful" means to the rest of us, and this same element is undoubtedly significant in the formulation of theory by a scientist as well.
The rule of simplicity in scientific hypotheses is by no means something new. First formulated in the late Middle Ages, it was known as "Occam's razor"5 and was applied chiefly to logic. Later, it was applied to the natural sciences. This application of Occam's razor to natural phenomena was a major step forward in making the study of nature scientific.
These rules about the nature of scientific hypothesis are so important that science would perish if they were not observed. This has already happened in the past. During the period 600-400 B.C. in the Greek-speaking world, the Ionian scientists applied these rules about scientific hypothesis by assuming that the heavens and the earth were made of the same substance, and obeyed the same laws, and that man was part of nature. The enemies of science6 7 about the year 400 B.C. made assumptions quite different from those of the Ionians; namely, that the heavens were made of a substance different from those on earth and, accordingly, obeyed different laws, and, furthermore, that man was not part of nature (since he was a spiritual being). They accepted the older idea that the earth was made up of four elements (earth, water, air, fire), but assumed that the heavens were made of a quite different fifth element, quintessence. They admitted that the earth was changeable but insisted that the celestial areas were rigidly unchanging. They claimed that the laws of motion in the two were quite different, objects on the earth moving naturally in straight lines at decreasing velocity to their natural condition of rest, while objects in the heavens moved in perfect circles at constant speed as their natural condition. These nonscientific assumptions, made about 400 B.C. without proof and by violating the fundamental rules of scientific method, set up a nonscientific world view which could not be disproved. The Pythagorean rationalists were able to do this and to destroy science because the scientists of that day, like many scientists of today, had no clear idea of scientific method and were therefore in no position to defend it.
It was this recourse to rational processes independent of observation that led the ancient rationalists to assume the theories violating Occam's razor that became established as "Aristotelian" and dominated men's ideas of the universe until, almost two thousand years later, they were refuted by Galileo and others who reestablished observation and Occam's razor in scientific procedure.
Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer non-scientists realize that science is a method and nothing else. Even in books pretending to be authoritative, we are told that science is a body of knowledge or that science is certain areas of study. It is neither of these. Science clearly could be a body of knowledge only if we were willing to use the name for something that is constantly changing. From week to week, even from day to day, the body of knowledge to which we attribute the name science is changing, the beliefs of one day being, sooner or later, abandoned for quite different beliefs.8
Closely related to the erroneous idea that science is a body of knowledge is the equally erroneous idea that scientific theories are true. One example of this belief is the idea that such theories begin as hypotheses and somehow are "proved" and become "laws." There is no way in which any scientific theory could be proved, and as a result such theories always remain hypotheses. The fact that such theories "work" and permit us to manipulate and even transform the physical world is no proof that these theories are true. Many theories that were clearly untrue have "worked" and continue to work for long periods. The belief that the world is a flat surface did not prevent men from moving about on its surface successfully. The acceptance of "Aristotelian" beliefs about falling bodies did not keep people from dealing with such bodies, and doing so with considerable success.
The third part of scientific method is testing the hypothesis. This can be done in three ways:
(a) by checking back,
(b) by foretelling new observations, and
(c) by experimentation with controls.
Of these the first two are simple enough. We check back by examining all the evidence used in formulating the hypothesis to make sure that the hypothesis can explain each observation. A second kind of test, which is much more convincing, is to use the hypothesis to foretell new observations. If a theory of the solar system allows us, as Newton's did, to predict the exact time and place for a future eclipse of the sun, or if the theory makes it possible for us to calculate the size and position of an unknown planet that is subsequently found through the telescope, we may regard our hypotheses as greatly strengthened.
The third type of test of a hypothesis, experimentation with controls, is somewhat more complicated. If a man had a virus he believed to be the cause of some disease, he might test it by injecting some of it into the members of a group. Even if each person who had been injected came down with the disease, the experiment would not be a scientific one and would prove nothing. The persons injected could have been exposed to another common source of infection, and the injection might have had nothing to do with the disease. In order to have a scientific experiment, we must not inject every member of the group but only every other member, keeping the un-injected alternate members under identical conditions except for the fact that they have not been injected with the virus. The injected members we call the experimental group; the un-injected persons we call the control group. If all other conditions are the same for both groups, and the injected experimental group contract the disease while the control group do not, we have fairly certain evidence that the virus causes the disease. Notice that the conditions of the control group and the experimental group are the same except for one factor that is different (the injection), a fact allowing us to attribute any difference in final result to the one factor that is different.
Science is a method, not a body of knowledge or a picture of the world. The method remains largely unchanged, except for refinements, generation after generation, but the body of scientific knowledge resulting from the use of this method or the world picture it provides is changing from month to month and almost from day to day. The scientific picture of the universe today is quite different from that of even so recent a man as Einstein, and immensely different from those of Pasteur and Newton.
At any given moment the body of knowledge possessed by any single scientist, or the world picture he has made from that knowledge, is quite different from that possessed by other scientists. Yet such persons are all worthy to be called scientists if they use scientific method.9
Editors note: It should be pointed out here that Carroll Quigley’s opinion of Pythagorean, and Aristotelian rationalism, strikes the editor as somewhat illiberal, even extreme. The pejorative “Enemies of Science” in reference to gentlemen who are commonly reckoned intellectual giants of classical antiquity, indeed, of any age, seems rather to toe the limit of indelicate hyperbole; and, as an opinion, though clearly strongly, even passionately held, and from certain points of view, warranted, may not actually be widely shared. In the editor’s view, this reactionary assessment of classic age rationalists, as an interesting, slightly eccentric opinion of Quigley’s, should really have been struck in the service of economy, however in this case, the gristle is too closely marbled with the meat.
Somewhat, to somewhat strongly, antithetical to empiricism, might be a less pugilistic descriptor of the company of Sophia in question.
The Science, is most assuredly not “settled”.
Editors note: To the young women reading this, among whom we hope and trust, are one or two of the soon to be most outstanding, and most important, scientists of their time. The editor has not bothered to salt the above work with feminine pronouns as a gratuitous nod to fashion; but rather has left the pronouns masculine as written in 1961, as was the standard at the time. It should be understood by all young readers, young men and young women alike, that this is an English language literary convention which had no basis then, nor does it now, in any systematic attempt to dis-empower, or disregard the social/intellectual relevance of any person based on the fact that they are a woman, and not a man. Any English Language text which makes use of masculine pronouns exclusively, should always be read as if to include “everyone” present and engaged, because that is exactly what it does in fact mean. The editor would like to further point out that actually, at no time, has there ever been a lack of brilliant female representation in all fields of civilized endeavor, not just the sciences. The list of Western women undertaking superlative leading roles is a long, and noble one which reaches deep into history. Attempts to build a narrative wherein women are somehow occupying a position of fundamental disability, or victimhood, within what we call Western Civilization, are frankly grotesque examples of Agitation Propaganda (AgitProp) and are, in this editor’s estimation, introduced as an, unfortunately effective, means to distract, demoralize and destroy. Similarly, but not particularly as corollary, the editor has never entertained, nor would ever entertain, the slightest inclination to convert all pronouns in the above to variations of Xim, Xer, Xem, Xippy, or Xpoopy. You are certainly welcome to correct this ghastly failing on your own account, should you so choose.