THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD. I5 



Eastern tales took on some definite bodily form there 

 was some chance of tackling him ; as a mere wraith 

 he was invulnerable. 



(d) A fourth characteristic of the scientific mood 

 is a sense of the inter-relations of things. The real- 

 isation of nature as a great inter-connected system is, 

 indeed, one of the ends of science; to be on the out- 

 look for inter-relations is diagnostic of the mood. 

 As long as the collection and registration of facts 

 preoccupies the energies and attention, scientific 

 enquiry has hardly begun. As Mr. Pearson says, 

 ^^ The classification of facts, the recognition of their 

 sequence and relative significance is the function of 

 science.'^ 



To put it more concretely, the student of biology, 

 for instance, has hardly caught on at all unless he 

 has some realisation of the web of life, the correla- 

 tion of organisms. He must have some apprecia- 

 tion of the " system of nature,'' of the links between 

 old maids, cats, bees, and clover crop ; between earth- 

 worms and the world's bread-supply; between mos- 

 quitoes and malaria ; between white ants and African 

 agriculture; between ivory ornaments and the slave 

 trade. 



To sum up: the scientific mood, whose diffusion 

 through wide circles has been one of the achieve- 

 ments of the latter half of the nineteenth century, 

 is characterised by a passion for facts, an alert cau- 

 tiousness, a striving after clearness of vision, and a 

 sense of inter-relations. To which, as will be after- 

 wards made plain, it should perhaps be added that 

 the consistent scientific mood does not at all concern 

 itself with metaphysical problems or ultimate inter- 

 pretations. These may be legitimately complemen- 

 tary to science, but if the word is to retain its present 

 meaning, they are beyond its scope. 



