THE NOTION OF SCIENCE 11 science a motivation that is sociological. For him the proving and disproving of theories that embodies the on-going struggle within science serves less to penetrate the secrets of nature, but serves a larger cause by overthrowing established ideas. Coming to the approaches adopted by scientists in pursuing their investigations, one encounters two opposing trends. First is the formal and idealistic, the second practical and materialistic. It is not the case that science is now this and now that but the kind of science done at a given period of history reflects the Social order prevalent at the time. For example, the idealistic trend exemplifies order, aristocracy and established religion and within the classical, philosophical tradition Plato is the deification of this tendency. The commitment to knowledge that arose from this position is of the form where the objective of science is (1) to explain why things are the way they are and (2) it is impossible to change things in their essentials. Change in this world view is considered evil: The ideal, the good, the true and the beautiful are ture and beyond question". The materialistic view constitutes a philosophy of objects and their movement and insofar as it is dynamic view of the world it provides an explanation of nature and society from below and does not impose order from above. At the level of action, materialism expresses the inexhaustible stability of the material moving world and man's power to alter it. During the industrial revolution, science acquired a dominantly materialistic practice while it continued to pay lip service to idealism. By the middle of the 19th century materialism strove to rid itself of its philosophical inadequacies and for the first time it rose beyond providing an explanation of natural phenomenon, to give an account of society and its transformation. This was largely the work of Marx and his followers. The struggle between idealism and materialism is clearly evident in the debates between the Platonists and the Democriteans, and the Platonic -Aristotelians and Roger Bacon. Whereas the former was backed by the church the latter had only experimental science to support their views. Lastly in the 19th century one clearly saw the confrontation between religion and science when the Darwininan revolution came to be: The very persistence of the struggle despite the successive victories won by materialist science shows that it is not essentially a philosophic or scientific one but a reflection of political struggle in scientific terms." INTERACTION OF SCIENCE AND SOCIETY It is customary to see the interaction between science and society in terms of the emergence of technology from scientific theory, where the latter is designed to meet social needs. However, these are not the only forms of interaction possible and very often scientific theories have emerged in the light of the development of technology. For example, the whole domain of thermo-dynamics and statistical mechanics was consequent to the development of the steam engine. BemaFs bias was not so much towards