USE OF THK IMAGINATION. 417 
maneut security. They diminish your chance of falling 
when assailed, and they augment your chance of recovery 
when overthrown. 
CHAPTER XXX. 
SCIENTIFIC USE OF THE IMAGINATION.* 
" If tbou would'st know the mystic song 
Chaunted when the sphere was young, 
Aloft, abroad the paean swells, 
Oh wise man, hear'st thou half it tells? 
To the open ear it sings 
The early genesis of things; 
Of tendency through endless ages 
Of star-dust and star-pilgrimages, 
Of rounded worlds, of space and time, 
Of the old floods' subsiding slime, 
Of chemic matter, force and form, 
Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm. 
The rushing metamorphosis 
Dissolving all that fixture is, 
Melts things that be to things that seem, 
And solid nature to a dream." 
EMERSON. 
" Was war' ein Gott der nur von aussen stieose, 
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse 
Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 
Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen." 
GOETHE. 
Lastly, physical investigation, more than anything besides, helps 
each us the actual value,and right use of the Imagination of that 
wondrous faculty, which, left to ramble uncontrolled, leads us astray 
into a wilderness of perplexities and errors, a land of mists and 
shadows; but which, properly controlled by experience and reflection, 
becomes the noblest attribute of man; the source of poetic genius, the 
instrument of discovery in Science, without the aid of which Newton 
would never have invented fluxions, nor Davy have decomposed the 
earths and alkalies, nor would Columbus have found another conti- 
nent." Address to the Royal Society by its President Sir Benjamin 
Brodie, November 30, 1859. 
I CARRIED with me to the Alps this year the burden of 
this evening's work. Save from memory I had no direct 
aid upon the mountains; but to spur up the emotions, on 
* Discourse delivered before the British Association at Liverpool, 
September 16, 1870. 
