“Pasteur’s experiments were not so much a matter of inventing anything ex nihilo as of assembling and connecting scattered notions in ways that had not been tried or even envisaged before him. His discoveries were due to this uncompromising experimental rigor.
“It stands to reason that this amounted to a full-fledged method. Pasteur’s philosophy of experimentation [...]
“‘Many times in the past I have had occasion to recognize the truth inherent in the practice of the old crafts,’ wrote Pasteur. ‘It does happen, of course, that these are truths of legend, tinged with the miraculous; but if you don’t mind a bit of the supernatural, and if you look at the facts [...]
A certain research idea “could have led to the solution at which Pasteur arrived several years later, but because it was purely speculative, it was simply written up and never used for serious experimentation. In view of this shortcoming, Pasteur once again stated one of the articles of his scientific credo: ‘In the experimental sciences, [...]