to be welcomed; yet only under one important moral condition, and with a
paradoxical result. The moral condition is that the pride of science
should turn into humility, that it should no longer imagine that it is
laying bare the intrinsic nature of things. And the paradoxical result is
this: that the forms of science are optional, like various languages or
methods of notation. One may be more convenient or subtle than another,
according to the place, senses, interests, and scope of the explorer; a
reform in science may render the old theories antiquated, like the habit
of wearing togas, or of going naked; but it cannot render them false, or
itself true. Science, when it is more than the gossip of adventure or of
experiment, yields practical assurances couched in symbolic terms, but no
ultimate insight: so that the intellectual vacancy of the expert, which I
was deriding, is a sort of warrant of his solidity. It is rather when the
expert prophesies, when he propounds a new philosophy founded on his
latest experiments, that we may justly smile at his system, and wait for
the next.

Self-knowledge--and the new science is full of self-knowledge--is a great
liberator: if perhaps it imposes some retrenchment, essentially it revives
courage. Then at last we see what we are and what we can do. The spirit
can abandon its vain commitments and false pretensions, like a young man
free at last to throw off his clothes and run naked along the sands.
Intelligence is never gayer, never surer, than when it is strictly formal,
satisfied with the evidence of its materials, as with the lights of
jewels, and filled with mounting speculations, as with a sort of laughter.
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire
to the condition of mathematics. Their logic is their spontaneous and
intelligible side: and while they differ from mathematics and from one
another in being directed in the first instance upon various
unintelligible existing objects, yet as they advance, they unite: because