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The more one pursues scholarship, the more one is impressed by the futility of most of the tracing of sources that goes on in some bookish circles, the endless efforts to establish “priority” and “originality.” In history, the best test for the originality of an idea turns out to be this. If people are shocked by it or fight it or feel compelled to accept it, it is original. If they accept it without a struggle, then it is old stuff. The Great Man in science is usually a rediscoverer and organizor of older facts and ideas, a disciplined imaginer, a curious reviver of old prejudices, whose findings turn out to suit or anticipate the social temper of an age. Freud elaborated on this phenomenon in his paper on Popper-Lynkeus and, in his work on collective psychology, summed up the problem as follows:
It remains an open question, moreover, how much the individual thinker or writer owes to the stimulation of the group in which he lives, or whether he does more than perfect a mental work in which the others have had a simultaneous share.1
Yet the question of originality and priority does have much to do with the mythology of scientific movements. Although less than other disciplines, science is also subject to internal convulsions and revolutions in which almost supernatural powers are attributed to “creative” personalities. Although less than the devotees of politics and religion, scientists and therapists also defend themselves with the icons of