that a man who is obviously uprooting mountains and dividing seas,
tearing down temples and stretching out hands to the stars,
is really a quiet old gentleman who only asks to be allowed to
indulge his harmless old hobby and follow his harmless old nose.
When a man splits a grain of sand and the universe is turned upside down
in consequence, it is difficult to realize that to the man who did it,
the splitting of the grain is the great affair, and the capsizing
of the cosmos quite a small one. It is hard to enter into the feelings
of a man who regards a new heaven and a new earth in the light of a
by-product. But undoubtedly it was to this almost eerie innocence
of the intellect that the great men of the great scientific period,
which now appears to be closing, owed their enormous power and triumph.
If they had brought the heavens down like a house of cards
their plea was not even that they had done it on principle;
their quite unanswerable plea was that they had done it by accident.
Whenever there was in them the least touch of pride in what
they had done, there was a good ground for attacking them;
but so long as they were wholly humble, they were wholly victorious.
There were possible answers to Huxley; there was no answer possible
to Darwin. He was convincing because of his unconsciousness;
one might almost say because of his dulness. This childlike
and prosaic mind is beginning to wane in the world of science.
Men of science are beginning to see themselves, as the fine phrase is,
in the part; they are beginning to be proud of their humility.
They are beginning to be aesthetic, like the rest of the world,
beginning to spell truth with a capital T, beginning to talk
of the creeds they imagine themselves to have destroyed,
of the discoveries that their forbears made. Like the modern English,
they are beginning to be soft about their own hardness.
They are becoming conscious of their own strength--that is,