on philosophy is similarly indirect. Perhaps there is no philosophy which does not still find defenders; our objection to many of these philosophies is not that they are illogical, but that they look so funny. When we come to study the influence of science on the arts we see that there is yet another way in which science modifies culture. Many of the pleasurable emotions associated with the arts are not unknown to the student of science. The study of such sciences as astronomy, physics or biology awakens emotions not readily distinguishable from those evoked by even the greatest works of art. It is as if the universe with which science deals was itself a work of art; it is, to an increasing number of people, the greatest of all works of art. Such students often acquire a new standard of æsthetic excellence. Darwin’s indifference to poetry in his later years was probably the result, not of the atrophy of a faculty, but of its fuller exercise elsewhere. The young William Thomson, reading at night in the library, and drawing great breaths of rapture over Lagrange’s _Mécanique Analytique_, was experiencing emotions probably not very different from those of Swinburne when reading Shakespeare. Before such satisfactions become accessible to the ordinary cultured classes more is required than that vague acquaintance with outstanding generalities to which we have referred. In such a science as astronomy the mere results are often sufficiently attractive to rouse pleasurable emotions in the reader, although the actual march of the investigation by which the results were obtained is often of equal interest. At the present day both results and the broad lines of the investigations are in many cases accessible to the ordinary cultured person, with the result that his intellectual interests are added to, or at least find a new field for deployment. A greater number of æsthetic objects people his world, and it may even happen that the new arrivals affect the estimate in which he held the old. He may discover an unsuspected futility in some of his earlier occupations; he may, in fact, change his ideals of culture. But it is, in truth, impossible to trace precisely the effect on an individual of a new belief or of a new interest. Psychologists have made us aware of the fact that the mind is not only immensely complex, but that the connections between its elements are often of the most unsuspected character. Destruction of an old belief or the grafting of a new interest may issue in results as unlike their cause as the butterfly is unlike the chrysalis. The effect of the impact of science on the old culture cannot be foreseen; it has, however, already produced such changes that the culture of the comparatively near future will probably differ from ours by more than ours differs from that of Babylon. JAMES CLERK MAXWELL