ntific
mind in the presence of something that cannot be known, something that
can only be used by being wondered at (which is all most of the universe
is for), it has yet to be pointed out.

He may be better off than he looks, and I don't doubt he quite looks
down on me as,

A mere poet,
The Chanticleer of Things,
Who lives to flap his wings--
It's all he knows,--
They're never furled;
Who plants his feet
On the ridge-pole of the world
And crows.

Still, I like it very well. I don't know anything better that can be
done with the world, and as I have said before I say again, my friend
and brother, the scientist, is either very great or very small, or he is
moderately, decently unhappy. At least this is the way it looks from the
ridge-pole of the world.

VI

The Romance of Science

Science is generally accredited with being very matter-of-fact. But
there has always been one romance in science from the first,--its
romantic attitude toward itself. It would be hard to find any greater
romance in modern times. The romance of science is the assumption that
man is a plain, pure-blooded, non-inferring, mere-observing being and
that in proportion as his brain is educated he must not use it.
"Deductive reasoning has gone out with the nineteenth century," says The
Strident Voice. This is the one single inference that the scientific
method seems to have been able to make--the inference that no inference
has a right to exist.

So far as I can see, if there are going to be inferences anyway, and one
has to take one's choice in inferring, I would rather have a few
inferences on hand that I can live with every day than to have this one
huge, voracious inference (the scientist's) which swallows all the
others up. For that matter, when the scientist has actually made
it,--this one huge guess that he hasn't a right to guess,--what good
does it do him? He never lives up to it, and all the time he has his
poor, miserable theory hanging about him, dogging him day and night.
Does he not keep on guessing in spite of himself? Does he not live
plumped up against mystery every hour of his life, crowded on by
ignorance, forced to guess if only to eat? Is he not browbeaten into
taking things for granted whichever way he turns? He becomes a doleful,
sceptical, contradictory, anxious, disagreeable, disapproving person as
a matter of course.

One would think, in the abstract, that a certain serenity would go with
exac