But because he has come round, after all this further investigation, to something very like his first conclusion, was all that further investigation useless?  No—­a thousand times, no.  It is this very verification of hypotheses which makes the sound ones safe, and destroys the unsound.  It is this struggle with all sorts of superstitions which makes science strong and sure, and her march irresistible, winning ground slowly, but never receding from it.  It is this buffeting of adversity which compels her not to rest dangerously upon the shallow sand of first guesses, and single observations; but to strike her roots down, deep, wide, and interlaced into the solid ground of actual facts.

It is very necessary to insist on this point.  For there have been men in all past ages—­I do not say whether there are any such now, but I am inclined to think that there will be hereafter—­men who have tried to represent scientific method as something difficult, mysterious, peculiar, unique, not to be attained by the unscientific mass; and this not for the purpose of exalting science, but rather of discrediting her.  For as long as the masses, educated or uneducated, are ignorant of what scientific method is, they will look on scientific men, as the middle age looked on necromancers, as a privileged, but awful and uncanny caste, possessed of mighty secrets; who may do them great good, but may also do them great harm.

Which belief on the part of the masses will enable these persons to instal themselves as the critics of science, though not scientific men themselves:  and—­as Shakespeare has it—­to talk of Robin Hood, though they never shot in his bow.  Thus they become mediators to the masses between the scientific and the unscientific worlds.  They tell them—­You are not to trust the conclusions of men of science at first hand.  You are not fit judges of their facts or of their methods.  It is we who will, by a cautious eclecticism, choose out for you such of their conclusions as are safe for you; and them we will advise you to believe.  To the scientific man, on the other hand, as often as anything is discovered unpleasing to them, they will say, imperiously and e cathedra—­Your new theory contradicts the established facts of science.  For they will know well that whatever the men of science think of their assertion, the masses will believe it; totally unaware that the speakers are by their very terms showing their ignorance of science; and that what they call established facts scientific men call merely provisional conclusions, which they would throw away to-morrow without a pang were the known facts explained better by a fresh theory, or did fresh facts require one.