254: FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



The reader of my small contributions to the literature 

 which deals with the overlapping margins of Science and 

 Theology, will have noticed how frequently I quote Mr. 

 Emerson. I do so mainly because in him we have a poet 

 and a profoundly religious man, who is really and entirely 

 undaunted by the discoveries of Science, past, present, 

 or prospective. In his case Poetry, with the joy of a 

 bacchanal, takes her graver brother Science by the hand, 

 and cheers him with immortal laughter. By Emerson 

 scientific conceptions are continually transmuted into the 

 finer forms and warmer hues of an ideal world. Our 

 present theme is touched upon in the lines 



The journeying atoms, primordial wholes 



Firmly draw, firmly drive by their animate poles. 



As regards veracity and insight these few words outweigh, 

 in my estimation, all the formal learning expended by Mr. 

 Martineau in those disquisitions on Force, where he treats 

 the physicist as a conjurer, and speaks so wittily of atomic 

 polarity. In fact, without this notion of polarity this 

 4 'drawing" and "driving" this attraction and repulsion, 

 we stand as stupidly dumb before the phenomena of Crys- 

 tallization as a Bushman before the phenomena of the 

 Solar System. The genesis and growth of the notion I 

 have endeavored to make clear in my third Lecture on 

 Light, and in the article on "Matter and Force" published 

 in this volume. 



Our further course is here foreshadowed. A Sunday 

 or two ago I stood under an oak planted by Sir John 

 Moore, the hero of Corunna. On the ground near the 

 tree little oaklets were successfully fighting for life with 

 the surrounding vegetation. The acorns had dropped ir>to 



