EDITOR'S TABLE. 



849 



yiel# no valid results, and came at 

 length to consider that valid conclu- 

 sions, being impossible, were undesira- 

 ble. But, as active thought could not 

 be stopped, it was concluded that the 

 virtue of philosophy consists merely in 

 the mental exercise it involves. And, 

 as philosophy had proved useless as a 

 means of arriving at assured truth, its 

 uselessness was claimed to be a merit. 

 And so utility, or the value of results 

 attained, both in themselv^es and in their 

 practical service to man, was explicitly 

 repudiated. Alike in old Greece and 

 in modern Germany from Plato to 

 Hegel this has been the philosophic 

 teaching, and we have seen the doctrine 

 solemnly promulgated in our own times. 

 Sir William Hamilton, as is well known, 

 opens his lectures on metaphysics and 

 logic with a formal defense of it. He 

 maintains that the pursuit of knowledge 

 by man for any end beyond himself 

 that is, for any practical benefit, private 

 or public is nothing less than debas- 

 ing. It is a degradation of the ideal of 

 scholarship. He says that the attain- 

 ment of truth is not the proper object 

 of mental activity, but the pleasure of 

 the pursuit of truth. To seek is noble; 

 but to seek successfully that is, to find 

 the object sought is a calamity, be- 

 cause it ends the gratification of the 

 search. The founder of a modern and 

 influential school of philosophy ran- 

 sacks antiquity and ranges down all 

 the dark ages after authorities who 

 have held this doctrine, and his case is 

 fully made out. 



Now, when this old philosophical 

 notion that truth, for itself and for its 

 uses, is not the proper end of study, is 

 still theoretically maintained in our col- 

 leges and universities to be the first law 

 of all liberal education, we need not be 

 surprised at the extent of the ignorant 

 prejudice against science, and that the 

 influence of this prejudice should still 

 be widely manifested. Illustrations of 

 it appear everywhere. "We pick up the 

 last number of "Scribner's Monthly," 

 VOL. XIX. 54 



and this is the way it talks to its hun- 

 dreds of thousands of readers : 



"We doubt whether what we call literature 

 will ever be indebted to science or what is 

 recognized as " the scientific spirit" for any- 

 thing good. Science deals with matter, its 

 essence, laws, phenomena. Its tendency is to 

 materialize everything. Life itself is evolved 

 from matter. Its " promises and its potencies " 

 are found in that. The tendencies of science 

 are to count God out of the universe, to deny 

 immortahty, and the existence of mind in- 

 dependent of matter, and to believe nothing 

 that can not be demonstrated. Hard mate- 

 rial facts are the things with which science 

 deals, and it refuses to have to do with any- 

 thing else. It refuses to recognize the exist- 

 ence of anything like imagination except in a 

 scientific way. Imagination is a product of 

 molecular action in the brain. Science must 

 necessarily deny to this faculty of the soul 

 any legitimate functions because it can not 

 follow a scientific method, and because it 

 denies the existence of the realm in which it 

 is most at home. Imagination must have an 

 over-world in which to spread its wings, or 

 it can not fiy. To bind itself to demonstrable 

 facts and to tie itself to a scientific method 

 would be to commit self-destruction. To 

 circumscribe the horizon of the poetic faculty 

 is to clip its wings, or, rather, to deny it 

 space for action. It is a faculty that demands 

 illimitable space, illimitable time, illimitable 

 freedom of invention, release from bondage 

 to the material and real, and liberty to explore 

 the spiritual and the ideal. Any influence 

 or power which interferes with this liberty 

 in any direction is a foe to poetry and a curse 

 to literature. 



Crude and ridiculous as this state- 

 ment is, it represents a widespread 

 feeling. The fact is that, so long as 

 science sticks to the manipulations of 

 matter, it is let alone ; but, when it 

 comes forward with its revelations of 

 the constitution of nature, and asserts 

 that these must in future affect all the 

 higher departments of thought, it is 

 met with denunciation from every 

 school of cultivated ignorance which 

 grew up before scientific knowledge 

 arose. This explains the ill-will of mul- 

 titudes toward Spencer's system. It 

 represents science in its most obnox- 

 ious aspect, in carrying its method into 

 the fleld of general ideas. 



