1 86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



cosm as well as those of the macrocosm, the spiritual tendencies and the 

 intellectual methods of man. It is a universal law. Perhaps a static 

 equilibrium means death — all things tend to that so far as we know. 

 But will it never be possible to establish a unity of the two methods of 

 seeking truth? Surely they are not wholly antagonistic — they are not 

 essentially hostile forces like attraction and repulsion, like positive 

 and negative electricity. Can we not have, now Cuvier is dead — peace 

 to his ashes — a little pause — a little time for discussion, a little space 

 for a contemplation of the umbilicus — a little space for logic and criti- 

 cism in the Centralblatts and other cash registers? 



It is the concatenation of circumstance, to repeat a former phrase, 

 and not the fact itself which lends it charm. The naked truth no one 

 ever saw, except the nymph who perished at the sight. The facts of 

 sense, like those of the prophet, like those of the poet, like those of the 

 philosopher, are relative, not real, and the results of such musings as I 

 am indulging in can lead the seeker after truth only to the conclusion 

 that each is but the facet of a whole of which our conception is the 

 less complete and the narrower the more exclusively we tread the path 

 illuminated solely by one aspect of the truth. He who laiows nothing 

 of the imagination, of the workings of logic, of the inspiration of the 

 poet and the prophet, he who is ignorant of the past and finds no 

 comfort in the speculations of the prophet as to the future, is badly 

 equipped for the interpretation of the impression of the senses. No life 

 is a rounded life without a touch of something more than that of mate- 

 rialism. The method of science which rests solely on that is fatally 

 defective. It withers the powers of youth and it favors the approach 

 of a premature intellectual sterility from which there is no escape but 

 in the silence which falls upon those who have not heeded the warning 

 in their youth. 



Thus musing, the old yellow papers are cast aside for fresh tablets, 

 but with the consideration that in science it does not matter much, 

 since the evanescence of facts, not at once built into the structure which 

 forms the woof and web of contemporaneous thought, is soon evident 

 to the seeker after truth if he digs deep enough. 



