DOC.
7
MOTIVES FOR RESEARCH 43
PRINCIPLES
OF
RESEARCH
225
which consists of
nothing
but
creepers.
For these
people any
sphere
of human
activity
will
do,
if it
comes
to
a
point;
whether
they
become
engineers,
officers,
tradesmen,
or
scientists
depends
on
circumstances. Now let
us
have
another
look
at
those
who
have found favor with the
angel.
Most of
them
are
somewhat
odd,
uncommunicative,
solitary
fellows,
really
less
like each
other, in
spite
of these
common
characteristics,
than the hosts
of the
rejected.
What has
brought
them
to
the
temple?
That
is
a
difficult
question
and
no
single
answer
will
cover
it. To
begin
with, I
believe
with
Schopenhauer
that
one
of the
strong-
est
motives that leads
men to
art
and science
is escape
from
[2]
everyday
life with its
painful
crudity
and
hopeless
dreariness,
from the fetters of
one’s
own ever
shifting
desires. A
finely
tempered nature longs to escape
from
personal
life
into the
world of
objective
perception
and
thought;
this desire
may
be
compared
with the townsman’s
irresistible
longing
to escape
from his
noisy,
cramped surroundings
into the
silence of
high
mountains, where the
eye
ranges freely
through
the
still, pure
air and
fondly traces
out
the restful
contours apparently
built
for
eternity.
With this
negative
motive
there
goes a positive one.
Man
tries
to
make for himself
in the fashion that suits
him
best
a
simplified
and
intelligible
picture
of the
world;
he
then tries
to
some
extent to
substitute this
cosmos
of his for the
world
of
experience,
and thus
to overcome
it. This
is
what the
painter,
the
poet,
the
speculative
philosopher,
and the
natural
scientist
do,
each
in
his
own
fashion. Each makes this
cosmos
and its
construction
the
pivot
of his
emotional
life,
in
order
to
find
in
this
way
the
peace
and
security
which he
cannot
find in the
nar-
row
whirlpool
of
personal experience.
What
place
does the
theoretical
physicist’s
picture
of
the
world
occupy among
all these
possible pictures?
It
demands
the
highest
possible
standard
of
rigorous precision
in
the de-
scription
of relations,
such
as
only
the
use
of
mathematical
[3]
language
can
give.
In
regard
to
his
subject matter,
on
the
other
hand,
the
physicist
has
to
limit
himself
very severely:
he
must
content
himself
with
describing
the
most simple
events
which