THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD. 



Yet it has its vices; if unruled or uncorrelated, 

 if uncurbed h^ science, if unrelated to the prac- 

 tical problems of life, it tends to become morbid, 

 mawkish, mad. There may be over-feeling, just as 

 there may be over-doing. Most serious consequences 

 of feeling without knowledge, of sympathy without 

 synthesis (in the language of the learned), are well 

 known in the practical affairs of to-day. 



On the other hand, we must not be slow to admit 

 that just as the practical man has some justification 

 when he reacts from science, because, as he says, it 

 is too theoretical, so the artist, poet, or man of feel- 

 ing has some justification when he recoils from 

 science because it is disproportionately analytic. 

 It must be granted that science, like a child pulling 

 a flower to bits, is apt to dissect more than it re- 

 constructs, and to lose in its analysis the vision of 

 unity and harmony which the artist has ever before 

 his eyes. Perhaps, however, if the artist had pa- 

 tience, he would often find that science restores the 

 unity with more meaning in it than before. 



Thirdly, there is the dominant scientific mood. 

 To this mood the world-picture is no phantasma- 

 goria, but a scene in an ordered drama; even its 

 beauty is not kaleidoscopic but rather of growth. To 

 the scientific mood it is plain that through the mul- 

 tiplicity of items great likenesses are observable, 

 which admit of being summed up in brief descrip- 

 tive formulae — law^s of motion, gravitation, in- 

 destructibility of matter, conservation of energy, 

 development from the apparently simple to the ob- 

 viously complex evolution. 



Although science has some of its roots in practice, 

 and often receives stimulus from the actual needs 

 of the day, it is not practical either in main inten- 



