458 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



stance, that the gi-eat scientists and the great artists are in really- 

 closer brotherhood than many suppose they hold divided sway over 

 much common ground ; it is only a seeming paradox, that few dis- 

 coveries in science, perhaps no great ones, have been made without 

 the exercise of the imagination, or of some faculty so nearly like it 

 that distinction between them is difficult; for the line which separates 

 the operations and results of imagination from those of induction is 

 obscure. Katiocination is the twin-brother of imagination. The 

 apple that Eve plucked, and the apple that Newton saw fall, grew 

 on the same tree. 



But to my iutrencbment : " Poetry," says one who understood it, 

 " is the first and last of all knowledge it is immortal as the heart 

 of man. If the labors of the men of science should ever create any 

 material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the 

 impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no 

 more than at present ; he will be at the side of the man of science, 

 carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself. 

 The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, the mineralo- 

 gist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which 

 it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things 

 shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are con- 

 templated by the followers of the respective sciences shall be mani- 

 festly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. 

 If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus 

 familiarized to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of 

 flesh and blood, then the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the 

 transfiguration, and will welcome the being thus produced as a dear 

 and genuine inmate of the household of men." ' 



This utterance of half a century ago seems like prophecy now 

 when the presaged changes are imminent. The conflict may never- 

 theless be protracted as long as either contestant is blinded to the 

 real strength of his antagonist senseless though it be to attempt the 

 impossible divorce of the material from the immaterial, of matter 

 from force, of the body from the spirit that would be death. And 

 it is the physicist himself who is loudest to proclaim that, without the 

 force which gives motion to material particles, there is no light, no 

 heat, no life. 



the whole world more saddening and more revolting than is offered by men sunk in ignorance of 

 everything but vphat other men have written seemingly devoid of moral belief or guidance, but 

 with the sense of beauty so keen, and the power of expression so cultivated, that their sensuous 

 catorwauling may be almost mistaken for the music of the spheres. 



" At present, education is almost entirely devoted to the cultivation of the power of expression 

 and of the sense of literary beauty. The matter of having anything to say beyond a hash of other 

 people's opinions, or of possessing any criterion of beauty, so that we may distinguish between 

 the godlike and the devilish, is left aside as of no moment. I think I do not err in saying that, 

 if science were made the foundation of education, instead of being, at most, stuck on as a cornice 

 to the edifice, this state of things could not exist." 



' Quoted from E. C. Stednaan's " Victorian Poets," the page where Wordsworth is 

 thus reproduced being further laid under contribution. 



