1920] on Science and Poetry 209 



of science ; and I suppose that everyone here, except perhaps the 

 very wisest of us, whom I will not name, have suffered from it. 

 Psychology, like charity, begins at home : and you may ask what was 

 my own encyclopaedic course of study, and why on earth I undertook 

 it. Before I was twenty-five, I had not only progressed in my 

 zoology, but had written two of the said five-act dramas besides 

 numerous lyrics ; had modelled the figure of Prometheus chained to 

 the rock ; had commenced an oil-painting of the fall of the rebellious 

 angels (in the manner of Michael Angelo) ; had composed a number 

 of sonatas and songs ; had passed through my medical curriculum ; 

 had seen something of life and sport, of land and sea ; and, finally, 

 carried away by reading a book on astronomy, had laboured right 

 through the mathematical works of the ponderous Isaac Todhunter, 

 F.R.S., and had created a theory of matter which has never been 

 proved only because I could not solve the mathematical problem 

 involved ! This seems a large programme, but it is not so ; it is, with 

 variations, the common programme of youth, and I suppose that 

 many of yon have had similar ones. But why do we take so much 

 trouble ? Does anyone really believe that young men do this kind of 

 thing in the pursuit of knowledge — what, in order to keep stuffed facts 

 in glass cases in the museum of the mind ? Or do they do it out of 

 vanity, as shallow psychologists (including the great Lord Yerulam) 

 declare ? Why, as you are aware, if others knew of our ambitions 

 we should have only been ridiculed for our pains ! Xo, it is the force 

 which makes every young man climb the first mountain he sees, in 

 order to reach the top and look round. It is the force which makes 

 the explorer, the big game hunter, the arctic voyager, the inventor, 

 the philosopher, the true statesman. It is the force which has been 

 implanted in us by the evolution of ages, in order to perfect the 

 human race. It is the force which creates both poetry and science. 

 It is the force which leads us step by step out of the jungles, ever 

 towards the final godhood of man. It is the prime and the sublime 

 aesthetic element of the soul— the sense of beauty, the desire for 

 perfection. 



This is a matter worth your profound investigation, for both 

 science and poetry are to-day being attacked by a generation of very 

 poor criticism ; and I was glad to see that Mr. Alfred Xoyes, in this 

 hall on January 2-4, and Sir Reginald Blomfield, R.A., before the 

 British Academy on May 5, undertook something of the defence of 

 real art. Do you really imagine that science is concerned only with 

 the discovery of petty utilities ; art with the discovery of new tricks 

 of technique ; and literature with mean books written by, for, and 

 about mean people ? There are even certain schools which dare to 

 maintain that both science and art have nothing to do with ethics, 

 with teaching, with the advancement of the race. If this were the 

 case I for one would have had nothing to do with either of them. I 

 sav, not art for art's sake, nor science for the sake of science, but 

 * Vol. XXIII. (Xo. 114) p 



