6 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE IN THE CENTURY. 



tion or in main result. Its main intention is to 

 describe in the simplest possible formulae, to classify 

 and inter-relate sense-impressions, to interpret the 

 known world ; its main result is an intellectual system 

 and the development of a certain way of looking at 

 things. 



Similarly, though emotion has influenced the 

 growth of natural knowledge not a little both 

 for good and ill, and though scientific discoveries 

 have in turn given nutriment to emotion, science is 

 certainly in itself non-emotional. 



The student of science seeks, not like the practical 

 man, to realise the ideal, but rather to idealise [con- 

 ceptualise] the real, or those fractions of reality 

 which constitute his experience. He elects pri- 

 marily to know, not do. He would make the world 

 translucent, not that emotion may catch the glimmer 

 of the indefinable light that shines through, but for 

 other reasons, because of his inborn inquisitiveness, 

 because of his dislike of obscurities, because of his 

 craving for a system an intellectual system in 

 which phenomena are provisionally unified. 



Like the other moods, the scientific mood has its 

 virtues of method and ideal. It is painstaking, pa- 

 tient, precise; it is careful, conscientious, contriv- 

 ing; it aims at making a working thought-model of 

 the universe. 



But it has also its vices, of over-knowing, of 

 ranking science first and life second (as if science 

 were not after all for the evolution of life), of ignor- 

 ing good feeling (as if knowledge could not be bought 

 at too dear a price), of pedantry (as if science were 

 a " preserve " for expert intellectual sportsmen, and 

 not an education for the citizen), of maniacal muck- 

 raking for items of facts (as if facts alone consti- 



