scientific mood we wish to
know what the nature of things is. There are men who seem
to have a boundless, insatiable curiosity, who have a lifelong
passion for acquiring facts and understanding the relationship
between them.

SCIENCE AS EXPLANATION. The satisfactions which scientific
investigators derive from their inquiries are various. There
is, in the first place, the sheer pleasure of gratifying the normal
human impulse of curiosity, developed in some people to an
extraordinary degree. Experience to a sensitive and inquiring
mind is full of challenges and provocations to look
further. The appearance of dew, an eclipse of the sun, a flash
of lightning, a peal of thunder, even such commonplace phenomena
as the falling of objects, or the rusting of iron, the
evaporation of water, the melting of snow, may provoke inquiry,
may suggest the question, "Why?" Experience, as it
comes to us through the senses, is broken and fragmentary.
The connections between the occurrences of Nature seem
casual, and connected, as it were, purely by accident. A
black sky portends rain. But such an inference made by the
untrained mind is merely the result of habit. A black sky
has been followed by rain in the past; the same sequence of
events may be expected in the future. But the connection
between the two is not really understood. Sometimes
experiences seem to contradict each other. The straight stick
looks crooked or broken in water. The apparent anomalies
and contradictions, the welter of miscellaneous facts with
which we come in contact through the experiences of the
senses, are clarified by the generalizations of science. The
world of facts ceases to be random, miscellaneous, and
incalculable. Every phenomenon that occurs is seen to be an
instance of a general law that holds among all phenomena that
resemble it in certain definable respects. Thus the apparent
bending of the stick in water is seen to be a special case of the
laws of the refraction of light; the apparent anomaly or
contradiction of our sense experiences is, as we say, explained.
What seemed to be a contradiction and an exception is seen
to be a clear case of a regular law.

The desire for explanation in some minds is very strong.
Science _explains_ in the sense that _it reduces a phenomenon to
the terms of a general principle, whatever that principle may be._
When we meet a phenomenon that seems to come under no
general law, we are confronted with a mystery and a m