The Wonder of the World 39 



trophied practical mood are — belittlement, base- 

 ness, brutality. To be wholly practical is to grub 

 for edible roots and see no flowers upon the earth, 

 no stars overhead. The monstrous practical man 

 "will have nothing to do with sentiment," though 

 he prides himself in keeping close to what he calls 

 "the facts"; he cannot abide "theory," though he 

 is himself imbued with a quaint Martin Tupper- 

 ism which gives a false simplicity to the problems 

 of life; he will live in what he calls "the reed 

 world," and yet he often hugs close to himself the 

 most unreal of ideals. 



Similarly, the hypertrophied emotional mood, 

 unruled and uncorrelated, uncurbed by science, 

 unrelated to the practical problems of life, tends to 

 become morbid, mawkish, mad. What we have 

 called rational wonder may degenerate into "a 

 caterwauling about Nature." There may be 

 overfeeling, just as there may be overdoing. The 

 disastrous results of feeling without knowledge, 

 of sympathy without synthesis (in the language 

 of the learned), of effervescence without activity, 

 are familiar enough in our own day. 



Similarly (must we not confess?) the hyper- 

 trophied scientific mood has its vires — of over- 

 knowing, of ranking science first, and life second 

 (as if science were not, after all, for the evolution 

 of life), of ignoring good-feeling (as if knowledge 

 could not be bought at too high a price), of pe- 



