And as the emotion of the pure artist,
whatever may be his materials, lies in finding in them some formal harmony
or imposing it upon them, so the interest of the scientific mind, in so
far as it is free and purely intellectual, lies in tracing their formal
pattern. The mathematician can afford to leave to his clients, the
engineers, or perhaps the popular philosophers, the emotion of belief: for
himself he keeps the lyrical pleasure of metre and of evolving equations:
and it is a pleasant surprise to him, and an added problem, if he finds
that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify
them; much as if a composer found that the sailors could heave better when
singing his songs.

Yet such independence, however glorious inwardly, cannot help diminishing
the prestige of the arts in the world. If science misled us before, when
it was full of clearness and confidence, how shall we trust it now that it
is all mystery and paradox? If classical physics needed this fundamental
revision, near to experience and fruitful as it was, what revision will
not romantic physics require? Nor is the future alone insecure: even now
the prophets hardly understand one another, or perhaps themselves; and
some of them interlard their science with the most dubious metaphysics.
Naturally the enemies of science have not been slow to seize this
opportunity: the soft-hearted, the muddle-headed, the superstitious are
all raising their voices, no longer in desperate resistance to science,
but hopefully, and in its name. Science, they tell us, is no longer
hostile to religion, or to divination of any sort. Indeed, divination is a
science too. Physics is no longer materialistic since space is now curved,
and filled with an ether through which light travels at 300,000 kilometres
per second--an immaterial rate: because if anything material ventured to
move at that forbidden speed, it would be so flattened that it would cease
to exist. Indeed, matter is now hardly needed at all; its place has been
taken by radio-activity, and by electrons which dart and whirl with such
miraculous swiftness, that occasionally, for no known reason, they can
skip from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening positions--an
evident proof of free-will in them. Or if solids should still seem to be
material, there are astral bodies as well which are immaterial although
physical; and as to ether and electricity, they are the very substance of
spirit. A