ABSTRACT
When imaginative or aesthetic possibility takes on responsibility, it becomes scientific possibility. The responsibility looks in two directions, systematic order and application. These are the results of discipline. Scientific imagination is disciplined imagination. This does not mean that imaginative possibility is without form or order. It has a rigour and discipline of its own proper kind, but it need not be intellectually rigorous. It has poetic licence. It is our rather difficult task to point out significant features in the transition. Pegasus may become the scientist's plowhorse, put on a harness and turn up the soil for the planting of crops, physical, biological, and anthropological, but he is still a spirited horse. One who would account for his every move is bound to be embarrassed since his most powerful tugs at the plow are preceded and followed by many a playful pose. He has never been completely domesticated and broken. One who would get close to him should be cautious, but not timid. He will need both philosophic caution and a licence to use terms in new ways in treating such a field as scientific method. The old terms have broken down quite recently, and there is something almost hysterical in the present discussion of the subject. The new terms should not be permanent additions to the subject matter; they should be catalytic rather than constitutive, clarifying and precipitating the significant ideas from this, still the newest and most puzzling component of our culture. Induction, hypothesis, deduction, verification, prediction, and so forth are the old terms. I shall try to analyse, clarify, and reinterpret these as various applications and uses of the concept of possibility.
