202 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



chemical agencies have, for thousands of years, evaded 

 our discovery and our regard. Having done so, we create 

 an artificial world of our own making which ministers 

 to our wants, comforts, pleasures, and supplies that 

 most inestimable of all commodities of civilisation, 

 varied and stimulating work for ready hands and active 

 brains. The wants and creations of artificial life have 

 thus proved the greatest incentives to that abstract and 

 artificial treatment of natural objects and processes for 

 which the chemical and electrical laboratories with the 

 calculating room of the mathematician on the one side, 

 and the workshop and factory on the other, have in the 

 course of the century become so renowned. All this 

 great activity is — as I have abundantly shown — more 

 and more governed by the scientific, the exact, or the 

 mathematical spirit. 

 3. There is, however, in the human mind an opposite 



Interest 



opposed to interest which fortunately counteracts to a considerable 



the spirit of 



abstraction, extcut the onc-sidcd working of the spirit of abstraction 

 in science and the growing tendency towards artificial- 

 ity in our practical life. This is the genuine love of 

 nature, the consciousness that we lose all power if, to 

 any great extent, we sever or weaken that connection 

 which ties us to the world as it is — to things real and 

 natural : it finds- its expression in the ancient legend 

 of the mighty giant who derived all his strength from 

 his mother earth and collapsed if severed from her. In 

 its extreme and purest form this interest probably lies 

 at the root of all poetry and all art, and it accordingly 

 governs a great part of the literature and thought of the 

 century. It will occupy us later on in our historical 



