Scientifi c Methods 323about its precise nature, but he knew that it worked “miracles,” something
mere calculation could never do. It involved intelligence and imagina-
tion, elements that could not be taught “by a year’s course in a laboratory
science,” where “all too often only measuring and counting are learned.”
For others, scientifi c method relied on “insight” and on thinking about
events “until they become luminous.”^56
Such newfound fl exibility, in turn, encouraged its spread as a conve-
nient slogan, one that could mean many things to many people and thus
served as a point around which numerous groups and individuals could
fi nd the appearance of consensus. An expanded range of meaning also
meant a widened scope of use as a means of inclusion within the scientifi c
world. The diffusion of scientifi c method as a mindset rather than a tech-
nique, and sometimes associated with virtues such as honesty and healthy
skepticism, occasionally became vital to the continued functioning of de-
mocracy. This was true especially during the spread of totalitarianism in
the late 1930s and 1940s. Scientifi c method provided a balance between
an open and a critical mind, which allowed citizens to evaluate claims
made by political fi gures. Its application by the American public fore-
shadowed a true “science of democracy.”^57 References to scientifi c method
migrated further to such diverse realms as law, parenting, education, and
journalism, and beyond. During the 1920s and 1930s, consumers in the
new advertising- driven marketplace encountered books such as Eby’s Com-
plete Scientifi c Method for Saxophone (1922), Martin Henry Fenton’s Scientifi c
Method of Raising Jumbo Bullfrogs (1932), and Arnold Ehret’s A Scientifi c
Method of Eating Your Way to Health (1922). Authors of such works used sci-
entifi c method to sell new ways of solving old problems. Sometimes this
method involved the application of scientifi c knowledge, such as biologi-
cal information about bullfrogs. At other times, it meant something more
like paying attention to the facts. Often, the ambiguity of the term was
left intact. Eby never spelled out his complete scientifi c method for saxo-
phone, nor even mentioned it once in the small amount of text included
in his book. Nevertheless, its invocation was in perfect harmony with the
growing sense of many Americans during the fi rst third of the twentieth
century that the “greatest gift of science is the scientifi c method.”^58
Educators especially sought to spread this newly important method,
the meaning of which they tailored to fi t the environment of the class-
room. Speaking to the educational section of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science in 1910, John Dewey charged that “sci-
ence has been taught too much as an accumulation of ready- made ma-
terial with which students are to be made familiar and not enough as a
method of thinking.” By 1947, the 47th Yearbook of the National Society for