322 Thurs
Despite such increased prominence, initial success at professionalizing
scientifi c work mitigated the desire of many early- twentieth- century sci-
entifi c enthusiasts for any far- reaching “cosmological theory.” Growing
specialization and the practical need to attend to specifi c patrons rather
than to inspire the imagination of the public at large made a narrower
view of science’s boundaries easier to bear. Indeed, scientifi c method
largely assimilated more traditional methodological notions. Millikan de-
scribed the scientifi c method as an approach that “starts by trying to get
to defi nite facts, and then allows these facts themselves, with their inevi-
table consequences, to determine the direction in which conclusions are
formed.” It was a statement worthy of the Fowlers. Inductivist rhetoric
survived even among educators. In 1929, M. Louise Nichols, from the
science department at South Philadelphia High School, declared that the
scientifi c method, “as all educated persons are nowadays aware, consists
in the accurate observation and comparison of a number of particulars
followed by the drawing of a conclusion.”^54
The growing prominence and power of science as a category of
thought also corresponded with attempts to expand its methodological
boundaries. After World War I, some advocates of Albert Einstein’s relativ-
ity theory announced its inevitable and revolutionary impact on religion,
philosophy, even ethics. The method of the German physicist himself
was “surprisingly analogous to that of the artist” who created “a clear,
harmonious world of thought.” Others were less sanguine about such
claims. Critics charged that Einstein had turned physics into geometry;
even sympathizers admitted that his work appeared more characteristic of
the age of the Greeks when the universe “could only be understood by...
reason” rather than the modern world, where “physics rather than math-
ematics is the dominant science.” An expansive methodology not only
threatened the distinction between science and mathematics but also the
one between science and religion. Einstein’s image in particular seemed to
waver between scientist and prophet, and his theories between mere tools
and divine truth. “If his studies and intuitions turn out to be an important
new revelation,” a columnist in Harper’s wrote, “it will be interesting to
observe that they have come through the Jewish mind,” the same mind
“through which have proceeded in times past revelations of the highest
importance to humanity.”^55
While such expansive methodological depictions often threatened to
blur the borders of science and frequently confl icted with narrower vi-
sions of scientifi c method, the term had achieved enough fl exibility by
the early years of the twentieth century to encompass even broad visions
of scientifi c practice. Howard Roelofs may have initially been confused