44 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



quotation, of externally acquired information, any more 

 than manners are an affair of the etiquette-book. The 

 scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of 

 all other desires in the interests of the desire to know 

 it involves suppression of hopes and fears, loves and 

 hates, and the whole subjective emotional life, until we 

 become subdued to the material, able to see it frankly, 

 without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish 

 except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what 

 it is must be determined by some relation, positive or 

 negative, to what we should like it to be, or to what we 

 can easily imagine it to be. 



Now in philosophy this attitude of mind has not as 

 yet been achieved. A certain self-absorption, not per 

 sonal, but human, has marked almost all attempts to 

 conceive the universe as a whole. Mind, or some aspect 

 of it thought or will or sentience has been regarded 

 as the pattern after which the universe is to be con 

 ceived, for no better reason, at bottom, than that such 

 a universe would not seem strange, and would give 

 us the cosy feeling that every place is like home. To 

 conceive the universe as essentially progressive or essen 

 tially deteriorating, for example, is to give to our hopes 

 and fears a cosmic importance which may, of course, 

 be justified, but which we have as yet no reason to suppose 

 justified. Until we have learnt to think of it in ethically 

 neutral terms, we have not arrived at a scientific attitude 

 in philosophy ; and until we have arrived at such an 

 attitude, it is hardly to be hoped that philosophy will 

 achieve any solid results. 



I have spoken so far largely of the negative aspect of the 

 scientific spirit, but it is from the positive aspect that its 

 value is derived. The instinct of constructiveness, which is 

 one of the chief incentives to artistic creation, can find 



