LIV THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



words of Dr. Raymond Pearl, come to "supplicate the great goddess, 

 Truth, with one ear closely applied to the ground." 



Why does a scientific man find satisfaction in the study of nature ? 

 Schuster, in his presidential address to the British Association in 

 1915, quotes Poincairé as follows: 



"The student does not study because that study is useful, but 

 because it gives him pleasure, and it gives him pleasure because 

 nature is beautiful; if it were not beautiful, it would not be worth 

 knowing and life would not be worth living. I am not speaking, be it 

 understood, of the beauty of its outward appearance — not that I 

 despise it, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science — I mean 

 that more intimate beauty which depends on the harmony in the order 

 of the component parts of nature. Without this intellectual support, 

 the beauty of the fugitive dreams inspired by sensual impressions could 

 only be imperfect, because it would be indecisive and always vanishing. 

 It is this intellectual and self-sufficing beauty, perhaps more than the 

 future welfare of humanity, that impells the scientific man to condemn 

 himself to long and tedious studies. And the same search for the 

 sense of harmony in the world leads us to select the facts which can 

 most suitably enhance it, just as the artist chooses among the features 

 of his model those that make the portrait and give it character and 

 life. There need be no fear that this instinctive and unconscious 

 motive should tempt the man of science away from the truth, for the 

 real world is far more beautiful than any vision of his dreams. And 

 we see that the cult of the beautiful guides us to the same goal as the 

 study of the useful." 



Referring to Poincairé's view regarding the connection between 

 the search for the beautiful and the achievement of the useful, 

 Schuster asks, "if the imagination of the mathematician is fired 

 by the beauty and symmetry of his methods, if the moving 

 spring of his action is identical with that of the artist, how much 

 truer is this of the man of science, who tries by the experimental 

 method to reveal the hidden harmonies of nature ?" 



Schuster's reference to the harmonies of nature suggests that it is 

 because the scientist has an intuitive faith that the world is harmonious 

 and a well co-ordinated organism, that he is inspired to toil for years 

 on a single problem. When he undertakes any investigation, any 

 excursion into the unknown, he consciously or unconsciously is look- 

 ing for the confirmation or the establishment of harmony in existing 

 knowledge. All the fundamentals of science, such as Newton's Laws of 

 Motion, the conservation of energy, evolution, the Mendelian law, etc., 

 are but a few special instances of the universal harmony of nature. The 



