Lord James Bryce, the eminent English statesman and author, recently called attention to the dominating influence of the scientific spirit as felt in the various activities of our time. He referred to the effect which the enormous increase in knowledge in the scientific world has had upon our intellectual life and upon the ideas, the habits and ways of thought of mankind. He said that the scientific investigations during the past century and a half have occupied a larger proportion of the energetic intellects of the world than ever before. The results of these investigations have been more read than they ever were before, and by a widening circle. They have more affected men’s minds and become part of our thinking--part of the mental furniture of educated men and women. Lord Bryce pointed out that through the everlasting searching after truth and the facts of nature “the methods and the spirit of science have undoubtedly affected such subjects as metaphysical and ethical philosophy, as economic science and history, as political theory, as oratory, as philology, as literature.” And he added that for some reason (he would not call it inscrutable, because he said that everything is more or less discoverable by sufficient study and attention--everything in the human sphere at least) he believed that there did, in the Eighteenth Century, begin to come over the human mind a change, the results of which are seen in all these fields. The novelty of this method, Lord Bryce said, “lies in the scrupulous care which we bestow upon phenomena, in the determination to examine the minutest details and to record exactly what we see, that and nothing more.” Lord Bryce had also expressed the thought that with all careful study we must strive to communicate an impression, which is much more difficult than merely to state facts. For example, he says, the historian’s general impression of a people is no less an expression of truth and no less accurate than is the presentation of many minor facts. Lord Bryce here states a profound truth, namely, that the impression of the whole is of greater importance than the literal representation of detail. This truth applies to art. The elimination of trifling details but emphasizes the power and beauty of the whole.