scientific, impersonal,
out-of-the-universe sort of way will not go very far.

And yet, the things that need to be said about the scientific mind--the
things that need to be done for it--need to be said and done so very
much, that it seems as if almost any one might help. So I am going to
keep on trying. Let no one suppose, however, that because I have turned
around the corner into another chapter, I am setting myself up as a
sudden and new authority on the scientific mind. I do not tell how it
feels to be scientific. I merely tell how it looks as if it felt.

I have never known a great scientist, and I can only speak of the kind
of scientist I have generally met--the kind every one meets nowadays,
the average, bare scientist. He always looks to me as if he had a grudge
against the universe--jealous of it or something. There are so many
things in it he cannot know and that he has no use for unless he does.
It always seems to me (perhaps it seems so to most of us in this world,
who are running around and enjoying things and guessing on them) that
the average scientist has a kind of dreary and disgruntled look, a look
of feeling left out. Nearly all the universe goes to waste with a
scientist. He fixes himself so that it has to. If a man cannot get the
good of a thing until he knows it and knows all of it, he cannot expect
to be happy in this universe. There are no conveniences for his being
happy in it. It is the wrong size, to begin with. Exact knowledge at its
best, or even at its worst, does not let a man into very many things in
a universe like this one. A large part of it is left over with a
scientist. It is the part that is left over which makes him unhappy. I
am not claiming that a scientist, simply because he is a scientist, is
any unhappier or needs to be any unhappier than other men are. He does
not need to be. It all comes of a kind of brutal, sweeping, overriding
prejudice he has against guessing on anything.

V

On Keeping Each Other in Countenance

I do not suppose that my philosophising on this subject--a sort of slow,
peristaltic action of my own mind--is of any particular value; that it
really makes any one feel any better except myself.

But it has just occurred to me that I may have arisen, quite as well as
not, without knowing it, to the dignity of the commonplace.

"The man who thinks he is playing a solo in any human experience," says
this morning's paper, "only needs a little more experien