ABSTRACT
Natural scientists abstract and select (especially, they select abstractions) comparatively untroubled by problems of objectivity. Matter includes as many individual items as human society does, and to a layman the items look as various. In their behavior, scientists nevertheless discover numerous identities in regular relations with one another. Because most of these regularities are reliably unaffected by being discovered, discovery allows the controlled rearrangement and use of matter – by humans, not so far by inanimate matter itself as a result of its better education. Humans value each other above other materials; they permit each other to experiment with the nonhuman world and, when its regularities are discovered, to exploit it without misgiving. Few would deny that eventual social use is what chiefly justifies the activity of science, and we sometimes exaggerate the extent to which the detail of research is divorced from thoughts about its social use. Nevertheless their unanimous valuation of their regular subject-matter allows scientists to agree upon many rules of search.
