ARE SCIENCE AND ART ANTAGONISTIC ? 363 



us, for they address themselves to a limited faculty, not to the whole 

 man ; for that reason poetry is eternal. All the theorems of astron- 

 omy will never prevent the view of the infinite sky exciting the vague 

 restlessness in us and the unsatisfied desire to know which constitute 

 the poetry of the heavens. Are there any discoveries that do not 

 touch upon other mysteries, and thus favor the always still wider play 

 of the imagination? Science, which begins by astonishment, ends 

 also, Coleridge says, with astonishment, of which poetry as well as 

 philosophy is bom ; there is, therefore, an eternal suggestion, and con- 

 sequently an eternal poetry in science. That very craving for the 

 mysterious and the unknown which the human imagination feels, will 

 appear, if we analyze it to the end, a disguised form of the desire to 

 know. We have just spoken of the peculiar charm of narrow roads, 

 of thickets, and turnings ; the chief source of their charm is in their 

 allowing us to make discoveries at every step, in their keeping the 

 mind in a constant stretch of curiosity. The poetry in them does not 

 come only from their closing the horizon to us, but rather from their 

 always promising us something new. That science is constantly 

 changing the points of view from which we have been in the habit of 

 regarding men and things, that it keeps on producing new light- 

 effects, and often surprises, and even vexes us, no one will deny ; but 

 what is there in that to disturb the poet ? I have sometimes envied 

 the ant, whose horizon is so narrow that it has to mount a leaf or a 

 stone to see a half step around itself ; it must be able to distinguish 

 a host of things that wholly escape us ; to it a gravel-walk, a piece of 

 turf, the bark of a tree, are replete with poetries unknown to us. If 

 its view were enlarged it would be at first unhomed, and in the sight 

 of our forests and mountains would miss the fleeting shadows of its 

 grass-blades. So if we were to rise high enough we should regret to 

 see the poetry of details disappearing, the little things blending to- 

 gether, all the angles in which our thought was lost smoothed away, 

 all the turns that excited our curiosity straightened out. ^N'othing, at 

 first sight, but the view of a grand whole, bare and shadeless, in a 

 harsh, uniform light ; but what breadth ! As we survey it, we see 

 still beyond it, a new set of endless perspectives still losing themselves 

 in the shadows ; still something to look at, to learn, and to experiment 

 upon. 



There is another mystery which science can not destroy, and which 

 is destined to be always a theme of poetry ; the metaphysical mystery. 

 There is no need of weaving, as the theologians do, new obscurities 

 around the one that everlastingly envelops the beginning of things ; 

 having got to that, the investigator himself, obliged to stop, may suffer 

 himself, as Claude Bernard says, " to be rocked in the wind of the un- 

 known, amid the sublimities of ignorance." Science may dispel, with- 

 out poetry suffering by it, the artificial mysteries of religions, which 

 apply their symbols even to the explanation of purely scientific phe- 



