Chapter I CREATIVE INTELLIGENCE A. THE SCIENTIFIC ERA 1. The Laboratory Has Its Day. Only a few hundred years ago the best positive and final method to ascertain trueness was the trial by torture. If the shades of half forgotten experimenters, would-be reformers, enthusiasts, heretics and martyrs could communicate with us they might have some enlightening, as well as interesting, stories to tell about how it felt to be torn on the rack, or boiled in oil, or burned to a crisp at the stake, or ducked in a frog pond. They might also be moved to inform us concerning what they really meant by that for which they were tormented, what actually happened, and what did not happen after all. Probably, for them, the physical pain before death was more bearable than the torment of perishing with unrevealed knowledge in their hearts and minds or with their confessions doubted or scorned. The torture chamber is antiquated as an auditorium for self expression or vocal expression, just as it is a barbarous ancestor of the modern laboratory for the ascertainment of facts about the world we live in. We have no doubt that just as there have been laboratory workers who might have been willing to behold some of their competitors undergoing the ordeals by fire or by water, so there are ever so many college men and women who regard or disregard the public speech platform as a formidable torture chamber. |