One often distinguishes between modern science and its medieval counterpart by claiming that the former proceeds from the facts, while the latter from universal, speculative propositions and concepts. In a certain sense, this is correct. But it is just as indisputable that medieval and ancient science also observed the facts, and that modern science also works with universal propositions and concepts. This [prejudice] went so far that the reproach Galileo, one of the cofounders of modern science, and his disciples made against scholastic science recoiled upon Galileo’s own work. It was said to be “abstract,” i.e., that it moved about in universal propositions and principles. This did in fact hold for Galileo, only in a sharper and more conscious sense. The contrast between the ancient and the modern scientific attitude cannot, therefore, be established by saying “there [in the ancient world] concepts and theorems, but here [in modern science] facts.” On each [67] side, in both ancient and modern science, we find a handling of both facts and concepts, but the mode and manner in which facts are conceived and concepts established prove decisive.
The greatness and superiority of natural science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are based upon the fact that the investigators were all philosophers; they understood that there are no mere facts, but that a fact is what it is only in light of the explanatory concept and always in accordance with the range of such explanation. The characteristic of positivism, within which we have stood for decades and today more than ever, is opposed to this; it intends to get by with [established] facts or new facts, whereas concepts are merely expedients, which one somehow needs, but with which one ought not to get all too involved—for that would be philosophy. The comedy or, to speak more correctly, the tragedy of the scientific situation of the present is above all that one believes that one can overcome positivism by way of positivism. To be sure, this attitude only prevails where average and derivative work gets done. Where authentic and path-breaking research takes place, the situation is no different than it was 300 years ago; this era also had its obtuseness, just as, conversely, the present leaders in atomic physics, Niels Bohr, and Heisenberg, think philosophically through and through, and only because of this do they create new ways of posing questions and above all hold out in questionability.
Hence it remains fundamentally inadequate when one tries to differentiate modern science from its medieval counterpart by calling the former factual science. Further, one often perceives the difference between the old and the new science to consist in the latter’s experimental character, and that it demonstrates its cognitions “experimentally.” But the experiment, the attempt, to gain information about the behavior of things by way of a definite ordering