ABSTRACT
All new developments in the history of knowledge have been due to those scientists who did more in their social roles than their circles wanted and expected them to do. Some of the scholars, instead of merely receiving and transmitting the traditional doctrines of their schools, developed, reorganized, expanded these doctrines or founded new schools; and in so doing made knowledge systematic and objective, with a validity independent of any extraneous demands and founded entirely on its own rational, theoretic order. Still more vague than the conception of the explorer’s function and status is the idea of the personal qualifications required for this new role of his. Logicians have drawn a sharp dividing line between the logic of science, clearly circumscribed and well ordered, and an indefinite, chaotic discipline called the psychology of knowledge, which—according to them—has nothing to do with questions of validity.
