Such is true science.  Is it a study to make men conceited and self-sufficient?  Believe it not.  If a scientific man, or one who calls himself so, be conceited, the conceit was there before the science; part of his natural defects:  and if it stays there long after he has really given himself to the patient study of nature, then is he one of those of whom Solomon has said:  “Though you pound a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his folly depart from him.”

For what more fit to knock the conceit out of a student, than being pounded by these same hard facts—­which tell him just enough to let him know—­how little he knows?  What more fit to make a man patient, humble, reverent, than being stopped short, as every man of science is, after each half-dozen steps, by some tremendous riddle which he cannot explain—­which he may have to wait years to get explained—­ which as far as he can see will never be explained at all?

The poet says:  “An undevout astronomer is mad,” and he says truth.  It is only those who know a little of nature, who fancy that they know much.  I have heard a young man say, after hearing a few popular chemical lectures, and seeing a few bottle and squirt experiments:  Oh, water—­water is only oxygen and hydrogen!—­as if he knew all about it.  While the true chemist would smile sadly enough at the youth’s hasty conceit, and say in his heart:  “Well, he is a lucky fellow.  If he knows all about it, it is more than I do.  I don’t know what oxygen is, or hydrogen, either.  I don’t even know whether there are any such things at all.  I see certain effects in my experiments which I must attribute to some cause, and I call that cause oxygen, because I must call it something; and other effects which I must attribute to another cause, and I call that hydrogen.  But as for oxygen, I don’t know whether it really exists.  I think it very possible that it is only an effect of something else—­another form of a something, which seems to make phosphorus, iodine, bromine, and certain other substances:  and as for hydrogen—­I know as little about it.  I don’t know but what all the metals, gold, silver, iron, tin, sodium, potassium, and so forth, are not different forms of hydrogen, or of something else which is the parent of hydrogen.  In fact, I know but very little about the matter; except this, that I do know very little; and that the more I experiment, and the more I analyse, the more unexpected puzzles and wonders I find, and the more I expect to find till my dying day.  True, I know a vast number of facts and laws, thank God; and some very useful ones among them:  but as to the ultimate and first causes of those facts and laws, I know no more than the shepherd-boy outside; and can say no more than he does, when he reads in the Psalms at school:  “I, and all around me, are fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.”