I've published this here before, but I couldn't resist putting it here again. It's from the last paragraph of the last page of "The Edge of the Sea".

"Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp. What is the message signaled by the hordes of diatoms, flashing their microscopic lights in the night sea? What truth is expressed by the legions of the barnacles, whitening the rocks with their habitations, each small creature within finding the necessities of its existence in the sweep of the surf? And what is the meaning of so tiny a being as the transparent wisp of protoplasm that is a sea lace, existing for some reason inscrutable to us - a reason that demands its presence by the trillion amid the rocks and weeds of the shore? The meaning haunts and ever eludes us, and in its very pursuit we approach the ultimate mystery of Life itself." - Rachel Carson, 1955

That "universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp" is what brings people to science. There is nothing in mysticism that can even come close to this feeling of joyous, childlike wonder.