SCIENCE AND POETRY 167 



which should be added the newspapers ; and consider further that many 

 of the metropolitan dailies contain enough words to make three hundred 

 large volumes every year, we are constrained to believe that the present 

 generation is one of readers, not of thinkers. We are in fact told now 

 and then that thinking has almost become a lost art. In science a con- 

 cept is recognized as produced by an external entity, or at least by an 

 entity external to the cognitive faculty, as when it takes cognizance of 

 its own operations and states. These concepts are verifiable by any num- 

 ber of experiments and observations and must agree in the main. Sci- 

 ence deals with things that can be counted, or weighed, or measured. In 

 poetry, speaking by and large, concepts are alfo recognized as external 

 entities, it is true, but there is no agreement between any two observers 

 and the phenomena 'are not verifiable. In truth, in all primitive poetry 

 phenomena are envisaged as external, because the mind, though aware of 

 its own operations, is unconscious of them. An important element of 

 poetry is mythology, and mythologies are not the exclusive possession of 

 primitive peoples. In the Homeric poems all mental states are regarded 

 as external objects. We find the same conditions in the Old Testament. 

 God is represented as speaking to men out of a corporeal body, or in 

 dreams. This is just what we find in early Greek poetry. We can not 

 draw a clear line of demarcation between the figments of the imagina- 

 tion and facts any more than we can do so between light and darkness. 

 The imagination frequently leads to wholly diverse interpretations of the 

 same data, as may often be seen in history. Here science finds its most 

 difficult field of operations. What is called the historic imagination dif- 

 fers widely in different writers. Variety or lack of uniformity is a prime 

 characteristic of all poetry. No productions on the same theme are ex- 

 actly alike. In science there is a substantial agreement among any 

 number of persons. The same feeling or emotion finds expression in 

 many different ways. What an endless variety of treatment there is of 

 the familiar theme of romantic love ! It may be, however, that the pas- 

 sion does not manifest itself in exactly the same way in any two persons. 

 This may seem a strong statement, but it is neither extravagant nor ex- 

 aggerated in view of the circumstance that of all the millions of human 

 beings upon the earth no two are so much alike that it is impossible to 

 distinguish one from the other. The imagination often casts a glamor 

 over persons of the opposite sex and endows them with attributes which 

 they by no means possess. This state of mind is amusingly exhibited by 

 Don Quixote with his rhapsodies over Dulcinea del Toboso, although 

 she was in fact nothing more than a plain and coarse village wench. 

 Similar instances occur not only in fiction, but even in greater abundance 

 in real life. Here lies the limitless domain in which writers of imagina- 

 tive literature find most of their themes. The Germans call both prose 

 and fiction Dichtung, very properly making no distinction between the 

 two since in both the imagination is the dominant agency. 



