ps indifferent enough, in order to arrive at eventual facts
and to conceive the aspect which given things would actually wear from a
different point of view in space or time, the emotion we feel when we
succeed is that of security and intellectual dominion; science has a
rational value. To see better what we now see, to see by anticipation
what we should see actually under other conditions, is wonderfully to
satisfy curiosity and to enlighten conduct. At the same time, scientific
thinking involves no less inward excitement than dramatic fiction does.
It summons before us an even larger number of objects in their fatal
direction upon our interests. Were science adequate it would indeed
absorb those passions which now, since they must be satisfied somehow,
have to be satisfied by dramatic myths. To imagine how things might have
been would be neither interesting nor possible if we knew fully how
things are. All pertinent dramatic emotion, joyous or tragic, would then
inhere in practical knowledge. As it is, however, science abstracts from
the more musical overtones of things in order to trace the gross and
basal processes within them; so that the pursuit of science seems
comparatively dry and laborious, except where at moments the vista opens
through to the ultimate or leads back to the immediate. Then, perhaps,
we recognise that in science we are surveying all it concerns us to
know, and in so doing are becoming all that it profits us to be. Mere
amusement in thought as in sportive action is tedious and illiberal: it
marks a temperament so imperfectly educated that it prefers idle to
significant play and a flimsy to a solid idea.

[Sidenote: Its continuity with common knowledge.]

The fact that science follows the subject-matter in its own movement
involves a further consequence: science differs from common knowledge in
scope only, not in nature. When intelligence arises, when the flux of
things begins to be mitigated by representation of it and objects are at
last fixed and recognisable, there is science. For even here, in the
presence of a datum something virtual and potential is called up,
namely, what the given thing was a moment ago, what it is growing into,
or what it is contrasted with in character. As I walk round a tree, I
learn that the parts still visible, those that have just disappeared
and those now coming into view, are continuous and belong to the same
tree.

This declaration, though dialectic might find