had been a passing phase.  Reading this we may wonder whether we are in fairness entitled to Dr Bridges’s approval.  “Tastes sweet the water with such specks of earth?” Since he spoke of the “unscientific attitude” of Professor Huxley as a thing of the past, candour obliges us to insist emphatically that the struggle continues and must perpetually be renewed.  Huxley was opposing the teaching of science to that of revelation.  In these days the ground has shifted, and supernatural teachings make preferably their defence by an appeal to intuition and other obscure phenomena which can be trusted to defy investigation.  Against all such apocryphal glosses of evidential truth science protests with equal vehemence, and were Huxley here he would treat Bergson and his allies with the same scorn and contumely that he meted out to the Bishop of Oxford on the notorious occasion to which Dr Bridges made reference.  As well might we decorate our writings with Plantin title-pages, showing the author embraced by angels and inspiring muses, as recommend ourselves in these disguises.

Agnosticism is the very life and mainspring of science.  Not merely as to the supernatural but as to the natural world must science believe nothing save under compulsion.  Little of value has a man got from science who has not learned to be slow of faith.  Those early lessons in the study of the natural world will be the best which most frankly declare our ignorance, exciting the mind to attack the unknown by showing how soon the frontier of knowledge is reached.  “We don’t know” should be ever in the mouth of the teacher, followed sometimes by “we may find out yet.”  Not merely to the investigator but to the pupil the interest of science is strongest in the growing edges of knowledge.  The student should be transported thither with the briefest possible delay.  Details of those parts of science which by present means of investigation are worked out and reduced to general expressions are dull and lifeless.  Many and many a boy has been repelled, gathering from what he hears in class that science is a catalogue of names and facts interminable.

In childhood he may have felt curiosity about nature and the common impulse to watch and collect, but when he begins scientific lessons he discovers too often that they relate not even to the kind of fact which nature is for him, or to the subjects of his early curiosity and wonder, but to things that have no obvious interest at all, measurements of mechanical forces, reaction-formulae, and similar materials.

All these, it is true, man has gradually accumulated with infinite labour; upon them, and of such materials has the great fabric of science been reared:  but to insist that the approaches to science shall be open only to those who will surmount these gratuitous obstacles is mere perversity.  Men’s minds do not work in that way.  How many would discover the grandeur of a Gothic building if they were prevented from seeing one until they could work out stresses and strains, date mouldings, and even perhaps cut templates?  Most of us, to be sure, enjoy the cathedrals more when we acquire some such knowledge, and those who are to be architects must acquire it, but we can scarcely be astonished if beginners turn away in disgust from science presented on those terms.