THE SCIENTIFIC MOOD 3 



discipline." The sceptical, distrustful, scientific 

 desire to test everything was charmingly hit off 

 in the definition of a professor given in Fliegende 

 Blatter "Ein Professor ist ein Mensch der an- 

 derer Meinung ist." "A professor is a man who 

 is of a different opinion." 



It is true that the scientific mood is continually 

 making hypotheses or guesses at truth; the 

 scientific use of the imagination is a recognized 

 method. It is a kind of intellectual experimenta- 

 tion, and it suggests actual experiments by 

 which it is itself tested. The danger of this is 

 not so much for experts as for those who have 

 incomplete mastery of the rules of the game, but 

 every one will admit that provisional hypotheses 

 have a tendency to put on the garb of full-grown 

 theories, or even of established doctrines. As 

 Mr. Bateson has phrased it, the controlled scien- 

 tific mood will avoid "giving to the ignorant as 

 a gospel, in the name of science, the rough guesses 

 of yesterday that to-morrow should forget." As 

 Huxley said with memorable severity: "The as- 

 sertion that outstrips the evidence is not only a 

 blunder but a crime." 



A fine illustration of scientific restraint is to 

 be found in Huxley's agnostic position in regard 

 to the theory of evolution before the publication 

 of the Origin of Species. He had studied Lamarck 

 attentively, and he had fought many and pro- 



