The Pasteurian Doctrine
“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 can be summarized as a procedure judged a priori logical and then carried out by means and for the purpose of testing and verification. The Pasteurian doctrine primarily came into being as a logical sequence. This is true for each individual experiment, but the same observation can be made if one examines the entire set of research programs developed by Pasteur. In every research adventure, one finds the same attitude in the choice of themes to be pursued, the development of hypotheses, and the stating of conclusions. This is so striking that some may say that Pasteurianism is an eternal series of beginnings…
“Pasteur chose to work on the intangible. He had prepared himself to understand, interpret, and discern that which cannot be seized. He began by revolutionizing chemistry when he discovered the differing spatial orientation of molecules that were rigorously identical in every other respect; but he did not stop there and immediately foresaw the significance of his discovery for the study of the biosphere. In the same manner, his approach to the role of microbes and their reproduction shows the truly phenomenal rigor of his thinking, for although his experiments confronted Pasteur with tremendously complex phenomena, he knew how to divide them in very imaginative ways in order to interpret them….” (pp. 358-359)