in order to utilize their discoveries
for a practical system of telegraphy demanded, no doubt, very
considerable ingenuity, but had not that broad sweep and that
universality which could give them intrinsic interest as an object of
disinterested contemplation.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Mysticism and Logic_, p. 34
("Science and Culture").]

SCIENCE AND A WORLD VIEW. One of the values of disinterested
science that is of considerable psychological importance
is the change in attitude it brings about in man's realization
of his place in the universe. Lucretius long ago thought to
free men's minds from terror and superstition by showing
them how regular, ordered, and inevitable was the nature of
things. The superstitious savage walks in dread among natural
phenomena. He lives in a world which he imagines to be
governed by capricious and incalculable forces. To a certain
extent he can, as we have seen, control these. But he is ill at
ease. He is surrounded by vast ambiguous forces, and moves
in a trembling ignorance of what will happen next.

To those educated to the scientific point of view, there is a
solidity and assurance about the frame of things. Beneath
the variability and flux, which they continually perceive, is
the changeless law which they have learned to comprehend.
Although they discover that the processes of Nature move on
indifferent to the welfare of man, they know, nevertheless,
that they are dependable and certain, that they are fixed
conditions of life which, to a certain extent, can be controlled, and
the incidental goods and ills of which are definitely calculable.
Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, noted the eternal
flux, yet perceived the steady order beneath, so that he could
eventually assert that all things changed save the law of
change. The magnificent regularity of natural processes has
been repeatedly remarked by students of science.

THE AESTHETIC VALUE OF SCIENCE. As pointed out in the
chapter on Art, scientific discovery is more than a mere
tabulation of facts. It is also a work of the imagination, and
gives to the worker in the scientific field precisely the same
sense of satisfaction as that experienced by the creative artist.
Of Kelvin his biographer writes:

Like Faraday and the other great masters in science, he was accustomed
to let his thoughts become so filled with the facts on which his
attention was concentrated that the relations subsisting between
the va