754 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



conception is a product of evolutionary science, in fact it 

 follows from it as a necessary corollary and is perhaps the 

 latest scientific idea that is old enough to have influenced 

 poetry in any definite manner. 



The more one thinks about it the more is one convinced 

 that the scientific movement must necessarily from its very 

 nature have had a profound and lasting influence on modern 

 poetry. In tracing such influence one can only generalise, 

 pointing out tendencies and directions that the thoughts of 

 men — poets in particular — have taken. The real meeting-point 

 of the poet and the scientist is in the imagination and the 

 emotions of men. We have too long been accustomed to 

 regard these as being the exclusive happy hunting ground of 

 the poet and as being but a sterile desert to the scientific investi- 

 gator except in so far as he regards them objectively as parts of 

 that Nature which it is his function to study. This, in fact, was 

 the feeling in the materialistic philosophy of last century, but it 

 has happily given place to another. Science can play on the 

 imagination and emotions of men to an extent scarcely inferior 

 to that of poetry, and it is only by so doing that science can 

 become and remain a living thing and of real and lasting interest 

 to mankind. 



