130 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Science and Poetry 



On June 4, Colonel Sir Ronald Ross delivered a Friday evening discourse 

 at the Royal Institution on Science and Poetry. He deprecated the notion 

 that " would fasten the blight of Indian caste upon us ; that would make 

 us either literary men or scientific men, either business men or professional 

 men, either tinkers or tailors." He reminded the members of the Institu- 

 tion that it has always been interested both in science and art, that it has 

 listened to Coleridge and Campbell on poetry, that Tennyson and Browning 

 attended lectures there, and that it is " not only the right but the duty of 

 the spirit to explore every direction, if only to learn the limits of things." 

 He did not agree with " the dictum that every great poet must be the pro- 

 fessional poet, that is a literary man ; and that every man of science should 

 concern himself only with test-tubes and microscopes." Still more did he 

 abhor the superstition that every branch in every kind of science should be 

 further subdivided. This was not the teaching of history. Michelangelo 

 and Leonardo da Vinci combined many pursuits. When Peter Paul Rubens 

 was Ambassador in England, an English courtier called upon him and found 

 him seated at his" easel. " So His Excellency the Ambassador plays at 

 being a painter," exclaimed the courtier. " No," replied Rubens, " His 

 Excellency the Painter plays at being an Ambassador." Goethe commenced 

 not only a literature, but the theory of evolution. He wondered in what 

 witch's cauldron of folly the absurdity was brewed that poetry and 

 science are enemies. Shelley tasted several sciences ; the poems of Cole- 

 ridge were flowers that peeped out from among the rocks of his philosophy ; 

 and Keats had already nearly summed up the matter in his apothegm, 

 " Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty." Nearly all our great modern poets, 

 especially Arnold, followed science more or less closely. " Indeed, it is 

 never among the greater poets that we notice any antipathy to science. It 

 is the lower type of what may be called literary poetry which, like much 

 of our purely literary philosophy, endeavours to attack science." 



Conversely, he said, many men of science have written verses, and some- 

 times very good verses. Francis Darwin, Edward Jenner, and Sir Humphrey 

 Davy were poets ; and the lecturer quoted some fine verses from the last 

 named. He then went on to describe " the encyclopaedic course of study " 

 which Davy had undertaken, and referred to his own excursions in similar 

 lines during youth. He attributed these divagations, not to the pursuit 

 of knowledge, nor to vanity, but to the " fury of youth," which makes every 

 young man climb the first mountain he sees, which makes the explorer, the 

 inventor, and the philosopher ; which has been implanted in us by the 

 evolution of ages in order to perfect the human race. " It is the force which 

 leads us step by step out of the jungles, ever towards the final godhood of 

 man." He then proceeded to show the connection between science and art, 

 and traced that connection through great literature. " These forces are 

 to the mind what the great Calculus is to Mathematics : Science, the Differ- 

 ential Calculus, which separates, subdivides, and analyses ; and Poetry, the 

 Integral Calculus, which sums up." 



He had been asked to give some of his own essays ; and he proceeded 

 to read various poems from his Fables and his Philosophies, and traced the 

 evolution of his ideals in literature, science, and philosophy. The last " is 

 derived from Epicurus, through Lucretius, Comte, and Spencer, culminating 

 in the high and pure philosophy of the science of to-day." Regarding his 

 work in medicine, he said. " Personally I much prefer literature, mathe- 

 matics, and other studies, and am not a biologist, much less a medical man, 

 by any natural proclivity." The lecture will appear in the English Review. 



