experience,
our impressions and beliefs are the results of inaccurate sense
observation colored by hope and fear, aversion and revulsion,
and limited by accidental circumstance. Through science
we are enabled to detach ourselves from the personal and the
particular and to see the world, as, undistorted, it must
appear to any man anywhere:

The scientific attitude of mind involves a sweeping away of all
other desires in the interests of the desire to know--it involves
suppression of hopes and fears, loves and hates, and the whole subjective
emotional life, until we become subdued to the material, able to see
it frankly, without preconceptions, without bias, without any wish
except to see it as it is, and without any belief that what it is must be
determined by some relation, positive or negative, to what we should
like it to be, or to what we can easily imagine it to be.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Mysticism and Logic_, p. 44.]

Besides the satisfactions of system and clarity which the
sciences give, they afford man power and security. "Knowledge
is power," said Francis Bacon, meaning thereby that to
know the connection between causes and effects was to be
able to regulate conditions so as to be able to produce desirable
effects and eliminate undesirable ones. Even the most
disinterested inquiry may eventually produce practical
results of a highly important character. "Science is," as
Bertrand Russell says, "to the ordinary reader of newspapers,
represented by a varying selection of sensational triumphs,
such as wireless telegraphy and aeroplanes, radio-activity,
etc." But these practical triumphs in the control of natural
resources are often casual incidents of patiently constructed
systems of knowledge which were built up without the slightest
reference to their fruits in human welfare. Wireless
telegraphy, for example, was made possible by the disinterested
and abstract inquiry of three men, Faraday, Maxwell,
and Hertz.

In alternating layers of experiment and theory these three men
built up the modern theory of electromagnetism, and demonstrated
the identity of light with electromagnetic waves. The system which
they discovered is one of profound intellectual interest, bringing
together and unifying an endless variety of apparently detached
phenomena, and displaying a cumulative mental power which cannot
but afford delight to every generous spirit. The mechanical details
which remained to be adjusted