I

"The scientific spirit," so an acute American critic defined it recently
in an essay on Carlyle,--who was devoid of it and detested it,--"the
scientific spirit signifies poise between hypothesis and verification,
between statement and proof, between appearance and reality. It is
inspired by the impulse of investigation, tempered with distrust and
edged with curiosity. It is at once avid of certainty and skeptical of
seeming. It is enthusiastically patient, nobly literal, candid,
tolerant, hospitable." This is the statement of a man of letters, who
had found in science "a tonic force" stimulating to all the arts.

By the side of this, it may be well to set also the statement of a man
of science. In his address delivered in St. Louis in December, 1903, the
President of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science,--who is also the president of one of the foremost of American
universities,--declared that "the fundamental characteristic of the
scientific method is honesty.... The sole object is to learn the truth
and to be guided by the truth. Absolute accuracy, absolute fidelity,
absolute honesty are the prime conditions of scientific progress." And
then Dr. Remsen went on to make the significant assertion that "the
constant use of the scientific method must in the end leave its impress
upon him who uses it. A life spent in accord with scientific teaching
would be of a high order. It would practically conform to the teachings
of the highest type of religion."

This "use of the scientific method" is as remote as may be from that
barren adoption of scientific phrases and that sterile application of
scientific formulas, which may be dismissed as an aspect of "science