Page:Blackwell 1898 Scientific method in biology.pdf/60

48 even hinder science. For although the collecting of facts may bring together valuable materials essential for future use, it may also bring together rotten or sham materials, which will interfere with sound work. A faulty method of endeavouring to obtain facts may seriously destroy the value of the phenomena thus observed.

The gratification simply of intellectual activity or curiosity must not be confounded with genuine research. Curiosity is the outcome of ignorance. Now, our ignorance of much in Nature is no reproach to anyone; but the way in which curiosity is gratified marks the difference between the simple child and the rational adult. In the childish development curiosity, though useful, is superﬁcial and short-sighted; it is necessarily a shallow impulse which cannot realize the wide relations of existence, and its satisfaction has no necessary connection with the acquisition of valuable knowledge. But the adult rises into a higher plane of thought. Curiosity is no longer unduly exercised, but has grown into a love of truth. It has become that reverential use of reason which is the basis of truth, and which forms the true guide to the attainment of scientific knowledge;