40 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



at the present day, is hopefulness as to the future of 

 human achievement, and in particular as to the useful 

 work that may be accomplished by any intelligent 

 student. This merit and the cheerful outlook which it 

 engenders prevent what might otherwise be the de- 

 pressing effect of another aspect of science, to my mind 

 also a merit, and perhaps its greatest merit I mean the 

 irrelevance of human passions and of the whole subjective 

 apparatus where scientific truth is concerned. Each of 

 these reasons for preferring the study of science requires 

 some amplification. Let us begin with the first. 



In the study of literature or art our attention is per- 

 petually riveted upon the past : the men of Greece or 

 of the Renaissance did better than any men do now ; the 

 triumphs of former ages, so far from facilitating fresh 

 triumphs in our own age, actually increase the diffi- 

 culty of fresh triumphs by rendering originality harder 

 of attainment ; not only is artistic achievement not 

 cumulative, but it seems even to depend upon a certain 

 freshness and naivete of impulse and vision which civilisa- 

 tion tends to destroy. Hence comes, to those who have 

 been nourished on the literary and artistic productions 

 of former ages, a certain peevishness and undue fas- 

 tidiousness towards the present, from which there 

 seems no escape except into the deliberate vandalism 

 which ignores tradition and in the search after originality 

 achieves only the eccentric. But in such vandalism 

 there is none of the simplicity and spontaneity out of 

 which great art springs : theory is still the canker in its 

 core, and insincerity destroys the advantages of a merely 

 pretended ignorance. 



The despair thus arising from an education which 

 suggests no pre-eminent mental activity except that of 

 artistic creation is wholly absent from an education 



