it has ever existed in this world. In order to escape all temptation to
treat science at this dangerously extreme level of abstraction, I have
throughout made a systematic effort to develop general ideas in the
context of actual events in the history of science. I say nothing of
what science could or should or might be, or of what scientists
could or should or might think. I have instead said only what I be-
lieve science has been and is, and what scientists have thought and
do think. I believe their practice and beliefs distorted only to the
extent that I have tried to make explicit views that are often only
implicit, and to the extent that I have emphasized the enormous area
of agreement at the expense of the small but significant areas in which
scientists disagree.

Second: I have tried to give a complete and integrated representa-
tion of science, with a just apportionment of attention to science as
such and to its history, philosophy, internal organization, social ties,
and so forth. I have tried to dissect the total problem, so that its
"parts" can be seen clearly; but I have tried to reassemble the "parts"
in order that they may be seen correctly. In their natural context
there are between them crucially important interactions which can-
not be grasped when, as ordinarily, "parts" are treated in complete
abstraction from one another. The perspective on science thus de-
veloped can treat only cursorily some topics that have been treated
in depth by others but, if I have succeeded, this perspective should
have a breadth and balance not to be found elsewhere--simply be-
cause the depiction of real science "in the round" is so very rarely
essayed.

The reader of this work needs no understanding of higher mathe-
matics, nor of the intricacies of quantum mechanics and relativity.
Less than half a dozen algebraic equations appear in the whole of
the book and, of course, some loss of coverage is thus entailed. How-
ever, I conceive that the most fundamental questions relative to the
nature of science were broached long before the advent of contem-
porary physics, and that these questions can be treated quite ade-
quately in simpler contexts. But even if these examples should prove
obscure, the technically untrained reader will, I think, still find him-
self quite well able to appraise the validity of the basic arguments
which--like the conclusions drawn from them--are largely independ-
ent of the technical examples I have used to document and illus-
trate them.

-viii-