38 The Bible of Nature 



because of his dislike of obscurities, because of 

 his craving for a system — an intellectual system in 

 which phenomena are at least provisionally unified. 



Now, it is surely best to say that the three dom- 

 inant moods of man — practical, emotional, and 

 scientific — which correspond metaphorically to 

 hand, heart, and head, are all equally necessary 

 and worthy, but that they are most worthy when 

 they respect one another as equally justifiable out- 

 looks on nature, and when they are combined, in 

 some measure at least, in a full human life. A 

 thoroughly sane life implies a recognition of the 

 trinity of knowing, feeling, and doing. This 

 spells health, wholeness, holiness, as Edward 

 Carpenter has said. 



One-sidedness, whether practical, emotional, or 

 scientific, implies a denial of the trinity of know- 

 ing, feelings and doing, a violence to the unity of 

 life. When any one of the moods becomes so 

 dominant that the validity of the others is denied, 

 the results are likely to be tainted with some vice 

 — some inhumanity, some sentimentalism, some 

 pedantry. 



When the practical mood becomes altogether 

 dominant, when things get into the saddle and 

 override ideas and ideals and all good-feeling, 

 when the multiplication of loaves and fishes be- 

 comes the only problem of the world, we know 

 the results to be vicious. The vices of the hyper- 



