Barfield on the "Scientific Spirit"

According to Owen Barfield, in Romanticism Comes of Age, the scientific spirit "means absolute, unqualified open-mindedness.  It means the deletion of the word belief from one's vocabulary, and the readiness to unite one's sympathies temporarily with any conceivable hypothesis for which the barest prima facie case can be made out, in order to give that hypothesis a completely unbiased consideration."  He goes on to say that "if it is true that the pundits of the scientific world are now represented as 'authorities' in much the same way as the Church Fathers once were, it is also true that allegiance is only given to them because they are at any rate in some vague way believed to be really open-minded...We are determined to believe something, so we believe this."