“‘Always cultivate the spirit of criticism. Once it has been allowed to fail, there is nothing to awaken an idea, nothing to stimulate great things. Without it, nothing will hold up. It will always have the last word. What I am here asking of you, and what you in turn will ask of those whom [...]
“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 [...]
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, [...]