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This article throws light upon the four important qualities of a researcher.
1. A researcher must be one that vibrates in unison with that of which he is in search, the seeker after truth must himself be truthful, truthful with truthfulness of nature; which is far more imperious, far more exacting than that which men sometimes call truthfulness.
Truthfulness corresponds to the desire for accuracy of observation and precision of statement. First, to make sure of facts is a fundamental precept in science. But this is not an easy matter.
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The difficulty here may be due to the untrained eye, which sees only that which it has the power of seeing, sometimes little indeed. It may be due to preconceptions which often make men see what is not to be seen. It also may be due to lack of discipline in the method of science.
The unscientific man is often content with ‘approximately’, ‘nearly’ and so forth but nature never is. It is not her way to call the same two things which differ, however minutely. She resents the conduct of men who treat such differences in any other way than she treats them herself.
2. The man of science must be of alert mind. Nature is ever making signs to us, she is ever whispering to us the beginnings of her secrets. The scientific reearcher must be ever on the watch, ready at once to lay hold on nature’s hint, however small, to listen to her whisper, however low.
Receptivity to the hints and gestures of nature to the ignorant and the common place to see the unusual behind the routine demands a systematic immersion into the subject of concern to be able to catch the slightest hint that might give birth to significant research problems.
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As Cohen and Negel so rightly point out, “The ability to perceive on some brute experience, the occasion for a (research) problem is not a common talent among men. It is mark of scientific genius to be sensitive to difficulties where less gifted people pass by untroubled by doubt.”
3. Scientific enquiry, though preeminently an intellectual effort, needs a moral quality of courage; not so much the courage which helps a researcher to face a sudden difficulty as the courage of steadfast endurance. The prosecution of science is a thorny affair.
There are times when the scientist feels defeated and lost in wilderness. This is when he needs a supreme courage of conviction. A researcher must learn to endure hardship intellectually. Darwin said, “It’s dogged that does it.”
The sacrifice demanded of a scientist at the altar of truth requires no less a courage than that exemplified by Von Siebold and associates who swallowed bladder worms to certify the truth of their ‘theory.’ It takes qualities of courage to be able to stand by one’s conclusions or scientific conviction at the risk of social disapproval.
4. This is a quality of cautiousness of statement. As Huxley puts it, “The assertion that outstrips the evidence is not only a blunder but a crime.” The researcher should habituate himself to withholding any judgement when data are obviously incomplete.
According to W.K. Brooks, “The hardest intellectual virtue is philosophic doubt; the mental vice to which we are most prone is our tendency to believe that lack of evidence for an opinion is a reason for believing something else … suspended judgement is the triumph of intellectual discipline.”
Cautiousness then, is the essence of science. One form of cautiousness most difficult of attainment and yet indispensable, is distrust of our personal bias in forming judgements. Karl Pearson aptly remarks, “The scientific researcher has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgements, to provide an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own.”