THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD. 15 



Eastern tales took on some definite bodily form there 

 was some chance of tackling him ; as a mere wraith 

 he was invulnerable. 



(d) A fourth characteristic of the scientific mood 

 is a sense of the inter-relations of things. The real- 

 isation of nature as a great inter-connected system is, 

 indeed, one of the ends of science; to be on the out- 

 look for inter-relations is diagnostic of the mood. 

 As long as the collection and registration of facts 

 preoccupies the energies and attention, scientific 

 enquiry has hardly begun. As Mr. Pearson says, 

 " The classification of facts, the recognition of their 

 sequence and relative significance is the function of 

 science." 



To put it more concretely, the student of biology, 

 for instance, has hardly caught on at all unless he 

 has some realisation of the web of life, the correla- 

 tion of organisms. He must have some apprecia- 

 tion of the " system of nature," of the links between 

 old maids, cats, bees, and clover crop ; between earth- 

 worms and the world's bread-supply; between mos- 

 quitoes and malaria ; between white ants and African 

 agriculture; between ivory ornaments and the slave 

 trade. 



To sum up: the scientific mood, whose diffusion 

 through wide circles has been one of the achieve- 

 ments of the latter half of the nineteenth century, 

 is characterised by a passion for facts, an alert cau- 

 tiousness, a striving after clearness of vision, and a 

 sense of inter-relations. To which, as will be after- 

 wards made plain, it should perhaps be added that 

 the consistent scientific mood does not at all concern 

 itself with metaphysical problems or ultimate inter- 

 pretations. These may be legitimately complemen- 

 tary to science, but if the word is to retain its present 

 meaning, they are beyond its scope. 



