POETRY AND SCIENCE. 813 



or the rise of a new hypothesis concerning the work!, causes nn- 

 looked-for expansion of thought. Unknown aspects of the uni- 

 verse are brouglit to light, hidden processes revealed, undreamed- 

 of conceptions introduced. What follows ? The traditional bal- 

 ance between knowledge and emotion is disturbed. The intellect 

 adjusts itself rapidly to the changed conditions; the emotions 

 cling tenaciously to the conditions that are being left behind. 

 Years, perhaps generations, have to go by before once more the 

 intellectual possessions of the age are brought into sympathetic 

 relation with its common feelings and aspirations, and the adjust- 

 ment in this way approximately restored. 



Illustrations of the principle here outlined may be found with- 

 out going further than the experiences of our own lives. We all 

 know well enough that at a time of great emotional stress or 

 upheaval we tend to revert to those ideas of our earlier days 

 which we fancy we have outgrown, and which in calmer seasons 

 no longer have any hold upon us. This is so notoriously the 

 case that much capital has been made in theological literature 

 out of the undeniable fact that during periods of unusual excite- 

 ment during periods, that is, when the feelings take the upper 

 hand the most skeptical spirits are apt to be driven back from 

 the open sea of doubt to the safe anchorage of their boyish faith. 

 It is a trite remark, too, that long after the judgment has been 

 convinced of some new proposition, the feelings will still persist 

 in protest and opposition. " A man convinced against his will is 

 of the same opinion still," as Hudibras long ago told us. Now all 

 this, in view of our generalization, is precisely what we should 

 expect. The feelings in most of us are very imperfectly adjusted 

 to our new intellectual acquisitions and their philosophical con- 

 sequences ; hence, in times of crisis, the almost inevitable lapse 

 into our older thought of the world, and our cruder guess at the 

 riddle behind it. In other words, the most advanced thinker is 

 likely to be more or less conservative upon the side of his emo- 

 tions. And all this explains not only the conservatism of women 

 and elderly men, but also the constant tendency among those en- 

 gaged in the study of the problems of life to segregate into oppos- 

 ing parties, roughly definable as the theological and the scientific 

 those who, guided mainly by the feelings, resist the new knowl- 

 edge of the age ; and those who, looking at facts from the point 

 of view of the insulated intellect, accept such knowledge, con- 

 cerning themselves but little with the question of its emotional 

 results.* 



Now this generalization interprets for us certain well-known 



* A striking commentary upon these remarks will be found in the wonderful scene be- 

 tween Clotilda and Doctor Pascal in Zola's novel, Le Docteur Pascal, chap. iv. 



