740 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



greater, and we can only hope to understand the man and his- 

 work in so far as we view him in his relation to the spirit 

 and thought of his age. This being so, it is easy to see that 

 the influence of science on poetry is not a mere figment of a 

 perverted imagination, but is as real as it is lasting ; for the 

 spirit of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was, and 

 is, essentially scientific; and by "scientific" one must not be 

 understood to mean " materialistic," which is a philo- 

 sophical and not a scientific term, and so outside the 

 scope of this article. By the scientific spirit is meant 

 merely submission to the conception of universal law. The 

 greatest intellectual triumph of the early part of the nine- 

 teenth century was the establishment of the two laws of the 

 uniformity of Nature and of universal causation on a firm 

 basis of experience, and the consequent elimination of the 

 supernatural from natural phenomena. Such an intellectual 

 revolution could not fail in leaving its mark upon contemporary 

 literature, for the simple reason that it altered our whole con- 

 ception of the relation of man to the Universe. 



This influence has sometimes been deplored on the ground 

 that science means the disappearance of mystery and of super- 

 stition and so takes away from the poet a great deal of his raw 

 material. The idea is quite a wrong one. It is true, indeed, it 

 is universally admitted that natural science has had the greatest 

 possible influence in the extirpation of superstition ; but this 

 in no way limits the activity of the poet. The error is based on 

 a confusion in thought. Superstition is not a necessary nor a 

 permanent possession of mankind ; it is but a phase — although 

 an inevitable one — in human history. During the period of 

 infancy — alike of the race as of the individual — in which the 

 power of thought is but slightly developed, and the reason 

 hardly more than a rudiment, the form given by this faculty of 

 thought to the impressions of the senses is very imperfect and 

 only superficially correct. But during his development man 

 acquires a considerable knowledge of himself, and his know- 

 ledge of himself has, and must necessarily have, an immense 

 influence on his comprehension of the world. He embodies all 

 his feelings, his desires, his fancies into the sensible world, and 

 imagines that everything around him is living, feeling, and 

 desiring as he is. He, in fact, does and can only regard 

 phenomena in terms of his own consciousness. He does the 



