ABSTRACT
From an ideal condition of size and government the polis can only decline. The rhythms which govern its life are cyclical, however, so that from its decline it may rise again to its ideal condition. Science became an organized form of social activity, and scientists began to constitute a society governed, in Bronowski’s phrase, by “the habit of truth, not as dogma but as process.” Science has its metaphors too, and if they serve, unlike the metaphors of poetry, to guide research, they are often like poetic metaphors in stating a set of complex relations which we would not otherwise be able to grasp. The influence of Francis Bacon had given a particular direction to the development of science in England because of his eloquent criticism of the pitfalls to the advance of learning inherent in the nature of language itself.
