.742 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



ought not even to attempt to, get away from contemporary life 

 and activity on the mistaken idea that he serves the eternal 

 beautiful ; or, rather, under a misapprehension as to what the 

 eternal beautiful is. Whatever men think, do, suffer, hope is 

 the poet's theme. Poetry therefore must change with life and 

 grow with thought and will never suffer from a scarcity of 

 subject-matter until life and thought alike have disappeared. It 

 is true that only recently have we begun to awaken to this 

 conception of the function of poetry. In the middle of the 

 nineteenth century a materialistic anti-poetic movement swept 

 over the intellectual world to the great detriment of poetic 

 expression. One must always be thankful that such a move- 

 ment was transient, even evanescent, in its nature and in its 

 effects on poetry ; but this movement again was an inevitable 

 phase in the intellectual development of mankind, and to it we 

 owe our present firm belief in the universality of law and our 

 rejection of the old theological ideas of the causeless, the 

 arbitrary, the capricious in the government of Nature. It arose 

 out of an attempt to correct the false perspective of previous 

 generations, and like all attempts at re-adjustment erred through 

 its very exaggeration ; we find the same exaggeration to-day in 

 the ideas of such writers as Tolstoi and G. B. Shaw. We see 

 then that there are two ways of regarding the natural world — 

 first, as it appears to the bodily eye and to the normal untutored 

 imagination ; secondly, as we know it actually is, having sought 

 out the truth of its phenomena, and the laws which underlie 

 their beauty or repulsiveness. The former, although purely 

 empirical, was formerly the raw material on which the poet 

 worked ; the latter is due to that spirit of inquiry which we call 

 the scientific movement. 



The materialism of the middle nineteenth century was due 

 to an attempted transition from one point of view to the other — 

 an attempt, however, which from its very violence carried the 

 intellectual pendulum far beyond its point of equilibrium into a 

 position in which it was as unstable as it was before. Thus 

 Huxley in a lecture on " Scientific Education" in 1869 deplored 

 the fact that " at present, education is almost entirely devoted to 

 the cultivation of the power of expression and of the sense of 

 literary beauty." The spirit of the conflict is aptly summed up 

 by another writer who says : " The truth is that our school-girls 

 and spinsters wander down the lanes with Darwin, Huxley, and 



