The Wonder of the World 45 



of the great clock-maker, she will be quite silent, 

 for no man by searching can find out God, but if 

 we ask how it precisely is that the main-springs 

 work, or why it exactly is that the weights go down, 

 Science will answer that she does not know. If we 

 ask Science to tell us why there is a world-clock 

 or a successor of world-clocks, at all, she will again 

 be quite silent, for Science takes no stock in pur- 

 poses; but if we ask how the first clock, from 

 which all the other clocks are descended, came 

 into being, Science will answer that she does not 

 know. 



This, then, is the real reason why the results of 

 science cannot kill wonder, but should always in- 

 crease it. Minor mysteries disappear, but greater 

 mysteries stand confessed. Science never seeks 

 to give ultimate explanations of phenomena, it de- 

 scribes their appearance in space and their se- 

 quence in time. The man of scientific mood be- 

 comes aware of certain fractions of reality that 

 interest him; he tries to become intimately aware 

 of these, to make his sensory experience of them 

 as full as possible; he seeks to arrange them in 

 ordered series, to detect their interrelations and 

 likeness of sequence; he tries to reduce them to 

 simpler terms or to find their common denomi- 

 nator; and finally , he endeavours to sum them up in 

 a general formula, often called "a law of nature." 



Let us take a concrete case. "The law of gravi- 



