Examines Charles Sanders Peirce's treatment of authority which illustrates the sense in which the social aspects of science are as vital to the success of science as the formal principles of logic. Distinction of Peirce's account of the abstract, formal conditions of the convergence of scientific opinion, which have essentially to do with the logic of science, from his account of the concrete, social conditions of the success of science; Historical problem of explaining the meteoric advancement of modern science since its emergence as a mode of inquiry around the seventeenth century.