22 SCIENCE AND METHOD. 



thousand times as many possible ones, whose results 

 are known in advance. 



But so far we have only considered one side of the 

 question. The scientist does not study nature because 

 it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes 

 pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is 

 beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be 

 I worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. I 

 y am not speaking, of course, of that beauty which 

 strikes the senses, of the beauty of qualities and ap- 

 pearances. I am far from despising this, but it has 

 nothing to do with science. What I mean is that 

 more intimate beauty which comes from the harmo- 

 nious order of its parts, and which a pure intelligence 

 can grasp. It is this that gives a body a skeleton, 

 so to speak, to the shimmering visions that flatter 

 our senses, and without this support the beauty 

 of these fleeting dreams would be imperfect, because 

 it would be indefinite and ever elusive. Intellectual 

 beauty, on the contrary, is self-sufficing, and it is for 

 it, more perhaps than for the future good of humanity, 

 that the scientist condemns himself to long and painful 

 labours. 



It is, then, the search for this special beauty, the 

 sense of the harmony of the world, that makes us 

 select the facts best suited to contribute to this har- 

 mony ; just as the artist selects those features of his 

 sitter which complete the portrait and give it character 

 and life. And there is no fear that this instinctive 

 and unacknowledged preoccupation will divert the 

 scientist from the search for truth. We may dream 

 of a harmonious world, but how far it will fall short 

 of the real world ! The Greeks, the greatest artists 



