34 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



life and discoveries are too meagre for us to see his method 

 as closely as we can Darwin's, and the account I have 

 given of the latter is amply sufficient to show the actual 

 application of scientific method, and the real part played 

 in science by the disciplined use of the imagination.^ 



^ 13. — Science and the Aesthetic Judgmetit 



We are justified, I think, in concluding that science 

 does not cripple the imagination, but rather tends to 

 exercise and discipline its functions. We have still, how- 

 ever, to consider another phase of the relationship of the 

 imaginative faculty to pure science. When we see a 

 great work of the creative imagination, a striking picture 

 or a powerful drama, what is the essence of the fascination 

 it exercises over us ? Why does our aesthetic judgment 

 pronounce it a true work of art ? Is it not because we 



1 That the classification of facts is often largely guided by the imagination 

 as well as the reason must be fully admitted. At the same time, an accurate 

 classification, either due to the scientist himself or to previous workers, must 

 exist in the scientist's mind before he can proceed to the discovery of law. 

 Here, as elsewhere, the reader will find that I differ very widely from Stanley 

 Jevons' views as developed in his Principles of Science. I cannot but feel 

 that chapter xxvi. of that work would have been recast had the author been 

 acquainted with Darwin's method of procedure. The account given by 

 Jevons of the Newtonian method seems to me to lay insufficient stress upon 

 the fact that Newton had a wide acquaintance with physics before he pro- 

 ceeded to use his imagination and test his theories by experiment — that is, to 

 a period of self-criticism. The reason that pseudo-scientists cumber the 

 reviewer's table with idle theories, often showing great imaginative power and 

 ingenuity, is not solely want of self-criticism. Their theories, as a rule, are 

 not such as the scientist himself would ever propound and criticise. Their 

 impossibility is obvious, because their propounders have neither formed for 

 themselves, nor been acquainted with others' classifications of the groups of 

 facts which their theories are intended to summarise. Newton and Faraday 

 started with full knowledge of the classifications of physical facts which had 

 been formed in their own days, and proceeded to further conjoint theorising 

 and classifying. Bacon, of whom Stanley Jevons is, I think, unreasonably 

 contemptuous, lived at a time when but little had been done by way of 

 classification, and he was wanting in the scientific imagination of a Newton 

 or a Faraday. Hence the barrenness of his method in his own hands. The 

 early history of the Royal Society's meetings shows how essentially the period 

 of collection and classification of facts preceded that of valuable theory. 



With Stanley Jevons' last chapter on The Liinits of Scientific AletJiod the 

 present writer can only express his complete disagreement ; many of its 

 arguments appear to him unscientific, if it were not better to term them anti- 

 scientific. 



