One thing more, too, from the facts of history may have our attention, although possibly this addition is quite unnecessary--the fact, namely, of scepticism coupled always with a hopeful curiosity. A disrupted society, dividing the labour of human life, is as sceptical as it is conventional, and as given to experiment and exploration, which are never without their sense of mystery, and even to conquest, never without its risks, as it is utilitarian. Was it curiosity or mere Hellenic conceit, the sense of adventure or the mere dogmatism of a Greek, that took Alexander abroad with his armies, or that earlier turned the attention of Athens to the possibilities of the West? And which, curiosity or religious and political propagandism, a pagan greed or a Christian piety, inspired the Western and Southern voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Which gave rise even to the Crusades? It would be interesting, if our present purposes only warranted the undertaking, to trace the forerunning conditions of a period of scientific endeavour. We could then show both how scientific curiosity has developed as but one expression of a general interest in experimental endeavour, in adventure and in conquests of all sorts, and especially how this interest, with its mingling of doubt and [p.069] confident seeking, has been preceded by a period of art. Art, appeal as it always is from the human as expressed in the established ways of some given social organization to the natural, shows a people sensitive to a mystery, a real but unseen end, in its developed activities, but not yet willing to let the experimental and instrumental character of those activities have free expression. It appeals to the natural, which is of course the sphere of all adventure, but, still cherishing the human, it never gets, so to speak, out of sight of home. Science, the successor of art, shows home, that is, the human and the subjective, left far behind. But to follow out the line of thought here suggested would take us too far afield. Let it suffice, then, that we see these two things: how historically and socially the investigations of science, whatever their relations to an antecedent art, such as that of the Greeks or of Christendom in the Renaissance, are but an incident within a general life of appeal to nature--that is, of exploration and conquest--and then how the scepticism, involved in the inquiries of science, is intrinsic to a life that, for reasons now clear to us, has become both conventional and utilitarian, both formal--or unreal in itself--and consciously only instrumental. The first of these brings to mind what was referred to in a previous chapter, that science is man in his doubt seeking the companionship of nature; and the second will aid us greatly in understanding the attitude and method of science, to which, having the evidence of history, we have next to turn.