6 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE IN THE CENTURY. 



tion or in main result. Its main intention is to 

 describe in the simplest possible formulae, to classify 

 and inter-relate sense-impressions, to interpret the 

 known world ; its main result is an intellectual system 

 and the development of a certain way of looking at 

 things. 



Similarly, though emotion has influenced the 

 growth of natural knowledge not a little both 

 for good and ill, and though scientific discoveries 

 have in turn given nutriment to emotion, science is 

 certainly in itself non-emotional. 



The student of science seeks, not like the practical 

 man, to realise the ideal, but rather to idealise [con- 

 ceptualise] the real, or those fractions of reality 

 which constitute his experience. He elects pri- 

 marily to know, not do. He would make the world 

 translucent, not that emotion may catch the glimmer 

 of the indefinable light that shines through, but for 

 other reasons, — ^because of his inborn inquisitiveness, 

 because of his dislike of obscurities, because of his 

 craving for a system — an intellectual system in 

 which phenomena are provisionally unified. 



Like the other moods, the scientific mood has its 

 virtues of method and ideal. It is painstaking, pa- 

 tient, precise; it is careful, conscientious, contriv- 

 ing; it aims at making a working thought-model of 

 the universe. 



But it has also its vices, — of over-knowing, of 

 ranking science first and life second (as if science 

 were not after all for the evolution of life), of ignor- 

 ing good feeling (as if knowledge could not be bought 

 at too dear a price), of pedantry (as if science were 

 a " preserve " for expert intellectual sportsmen, and 

 not an education for the citizen), of maniacal muck- 

 raking for items of facts (as if facts alone consti- 



