ABSTRACT
Science stems mainly from practical common sense, and to its major prophet, Professor Huxley, “trained and organized common sense” seemed an adequate definition of it. Its results aspire to be “common”—that is, accessible to, and verifiable by, everybody who has the leisure and ability to understand them; it has no kinship with privately delightful subjective beliefs. In order to become expert, however, practical good sense had to isolate itself from certain more ingratiating preoccupations with which in its amateur condition it had often been confused: from sorcery and magic, charlatanism, pseudo science, poetry, religion, and religious metaphysics. To complete Huxley’s definition, therefore, authors have to distinguish science from what is centrally implied by each of these other terms. Between the man of expert common sense and the primitive magician there stands a wavering type, also commonly identified as an enemy of science, the charlatan.
