rence. Such options are not forced on us.
On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing
reasons _pro et contra_ with an indifferent hand.

{21}

I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For purposes of
discovery such indifference is to be less highly recommended, and
science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate
desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept
out of the game. See for example the sagacity which Spencer and
Weismann now display. On the other hand, if you want an absolute
duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has
no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the
positive fool. The most useful investigator, because the most
sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of
the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become
deceived.[3] Science has organized this nervousness into a regular
_technique_, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen
so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased
to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technically
verified that interests her. The truth of truths might come in merely
affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it. Such truth as
that, she might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of
her duty to mankind. Human passions, however, are stronger than
technical rules. "Le coeur a ses raisons," as Pascal says, "que la
raison ne connait pas;" and however indifferent to all but the bare
rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the
concrete players who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually,
each one of them, in love with some pet 'live hypothesis' of his own.
Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the
{22} dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving
us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.

The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in our
speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at
least as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery)
always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have
arrived? It seems _a priori_ improbable that the truth should be so
nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that. In the great
boarding-house of nature, the cake