THE SUMMIT OF THE YEARS 



dreams. One brings home to our understanding 

 what the other brings home to our emotions and 

 aesthetic perceptions. The poets have always known 

 there was nothing mean or commonplace; science 

 shows this to be a fact. The poets and prophets have 

 always known that the earth was our mother and 

 the sun our father; science shows us how and why 

 this is so. The poets know that beauty and mystery 

 lurk everywhere, and they bring the fact home to 

 our emotions, while science brings it home to our 

 understanding. When Whitman says, "I am stuc- 

 coed with birds and quadrupeds all over," he makes 

 a poetic or imaginative statement of Darwinism. 

 We think science kills poetry, and it does when it 

 kills the emotion which the poet awakens, but in 

 many cases science awakens an emotion of its own. 

 In astronomy, in geology, and often in chemistry, 

 it awakens the emotion of the sublime. Poetry ap- 

 peals to man, the emotional being; science appeals 

 to him, the reasonable being. Science kills poetry 

 when it moves the reason alone. The botanist with 

 his pressed flower, and the collector with his skins, 

 or his eggs and nests, are not objects the poet likes 

 to contemplate. There are the aesthetic values of 

 things and the scientific values. The interest of the 

 poet is in the beauty of the flower, its human signifi- 

 cance, and the like; that of the man of science in its 

 structure and relations, etc. 

 There is one emotion of knowledge and one emo- 

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