106 BIOLOGY AND THE STATE H 



increase both the intensity and the extension of 

 healthy human life ; that is a good reason, and for 

 some persons, it may be, the only reason. But there 

 is something to be said beyond this. 



The pursuit of scientific discovery, the making of 

 new knowledge, gratifies an appetite which, from 

 whatever cause it may arise, is deeply seated in man's 

 nature, and indeed is the most distinctive of his 

 properties. Man owes this intense desire to know 

 the nature of things, smothered though it often be by 

 other cravings which he shares with the brutes, to an 

 inherited race-perception stronger than the reasoning 

 faculty of the individual. When once aroused and in 

 a measure gratified, this desire becomes a guiding 

 passion. The instinctive tendency to search out the 

 causes of things, gradually strengthening as genera- 

 tion after generation of men have stumbled and 

 struo'oied in io^uorance, has at last become an active 

 and widely extending force ; it has given rise to a 

 new faith. 



To obey this instinct — that is, to aid in the pro- 

 duction of new knowledo;e — is the keenest and the 

 purest pleasure of which man is capable, greater than 

 that derived from the exercise of his animal faculties, 

 in proportion as man^s mind is something greater and 

 further developed than the mind of brutes. It is in 

 itself an unmixed good, the one thing which com- 

 mends itself as still " worth while " when all other 

 employments and delights prove themselves stale and 

 unprofitable. 



Arrogant and foolish as those men have appeared 



