384 GEORGE JOHN ROMANES 1894 



moment left unnoticed. There was one such line of 

 advance in the life of George Romanes, of which it 

 may be hard to speak, but wrong, perhaps, to be 

 wholly silent. Few men have shown more finely 

 the simplicity and patience in sustained endeavour 

 which are the conditions of attainment in the quest 

 of truth. It is easy to see how the training and 

 habits of a mind devoted to natural science may 

 render faith more difficult, and cross or check the 

 venture of the soul towards the things eternal and 

 unseen. But there is one quality proper to such a 

 mind which should have a different effect, and act as 

 a safeguard against a fault that often checks or mars 

 the growth of faith. That quality is tenacity of un- 

 correlated fragments ; the endurance of incomplete- 

 ness ; the patient refusal to attenuate or discard a 

 fact because it will not fit into a system ; the deter- 

 mined hope that whatsoever things are true have 

 further truth to teach, if only they are held fast 

 and fairly dealt with. The sincerely scientific mind 

 shows such tenacity as that under every trial of its 

 faith and patience, howsoever long and unpromising 

 and unrelieved ; for it knows itself responsible not for 

 attainment, but for perseverance ; not for conquest, 

 but for loyalty. It resists even the temptation to dis- 

 like the untidy scraps of observation or experience 

 which will match nothing and go nowhere ; for it 

 suspects and reveres in all the possibility of new light. 

 And surely there is a like excellence of thought, 

 rare, and high, and exemplary, in regard to the things 

 unseen, the things that are spiritually discerned. 

 Scattered up and down the world, coming one way or 



