{HE CULTURE OF THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD. 133 
You remember Clerk Maxwell’s boyish question—“ What 
is the go of this?”—and when put off with some vague 
verbalism, “ But what is the particular go of this?” Such 
a question applied to any order of facts is a mark of the 
scientific mood. 
The mole has a sort of half-finished lens, which is 
physically incapable of throwing a precise image on the 
retina. If there is any image, it must be a blurred tangle 
of lines. In our busy lives, we tend to acquire mole-like 
lenses in regard to particular orders of facts; we see certain 
things clearly, others are blurs; but the scientific mood 
is in continual protest against obscurities. It wearies us 
with its insistence on lucidity. 
SENSE OF INTER-RELATIONS. 
A fourth characteristic of the scientific mood is a sense 
of the inter-relations of things, The scientific mood 
regards nature—the world—mankind—all—as a unity, 
as a vibrating system most surely and subtly intercon- 
nected. I mean, to put it more definitely, that the student 
of biology, for instance, has hardly caught on at all, unless 
he has a vision of the web of life, of the correlations of 
organisms; of the links between old maids, cats, bees, and 
clover-crop; earthworms and the world’s bread-supply ; 
mosquitos and malaria; white ants and African agriculture ; 
ivory ornaments and the slave trade. It is readily possible 
to show a long chain connecting muddy manure with clear 
thinking ; it is possible that the persecution of the walrus 
is linked to the enthusiasm for cycling, and so on endlessly. 
All these are MHouse-that-Jack-built puzzles until the 
procession of causes is indicated, and then they become clear 
as daylight—as possibilities (if not in all cases, actualities) 
of inter-relation. 
The scientific mood discloses a world of inter-relations, 
a long procession of causes, a web of life, infinite sequences 
bound by the iron chains of necessity. It may be that 
another mood can transmute the metal so that the iron 
bonds are seen as gold chains. 
