158 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



Throughout the century, it is true, we find that most 

 of the great leaders in science, both in their own per- 

 sonalities and in the general trend of their teaching, 

 keep their touch with the deeper realities of the un- 

 sounded depths of the human soul. They, at all 

 events, still grasp, unconsciously it may be, the con- 

 nection between the experimental method in natural 

 science and an attitude of open-minded reception of 

 spiritual experience ; between the intuitive religious 

 instinct of the great mystics and the scientific insight 

 of a Leonardo or a Faraday, who apprehend intui- 

 tively the essence of a problem and frame conceptions 

 fit to guide not only their own experiments and those 

 of the lesser men who follow, but also to throw light 

 on the meaning of life itself. Such men as Faraday, 

 Pasteur, Stokes, Kelvin (who is said to have begun 

 his lectures on physics with the Collect for the 

 day) were very far from the materialistic dogmatism 

 of some of their followers. This humility, this sane 

 and calm balance of mind, is oftener found in great 

 physicists who deal with subjects of the more funda- 

 mental kind, subjects in which such conceptions as 

 matter and force, in which other sciences are apt to see 

 complete and conclusive explanations of natural pheno- 

 mena, are themselves analysed and, as ultimate verities, 

 found wanting. It is less common among those who 

 have to apply the more fundamental concepts to the 

 secondary sciences, nor is it often developed among 

 those whose business it is to apply the results of science 

 to the arts of practical life. An overestimate of the 

 function and power of science becomes as common in 

 one direction as an ignorance of the breadth and scope 

 of the ground it may rightly claim is in another. 



