364 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nomena ; but it can never destroy this metaphysical mystery, which 

 bears not only upon unknown laws, but upon the essence of things 

 which are perhaps really incognoscible. That mystery will always be 

 competent to sustain in art, above that of the beautiful, pure, and 

 simple, the emotion of the sublime. 



Superstition does not appear to us any more indispensable than mys- 

 tery or ignorance to the flight of the imagination, although Goethe has 

 described it as " the poetry of life." In their origin, it is true, the re- 

 ligious myths had their poetry ; but it was, after all, because they were 

 first attempts at explanation. Superstition consists essentially in put- 

 ting in things, or back of them, wills like ours. Animals are not 

 superstitious, because they do not try to comprehend. Man, on the 

 contrary, tries to account for the phenomena he perceives, and, in order 

 to do this, projects himself, in a fashion, into them. This first attempt 

 to systematize the universe had a kind of grandeur, even in a scientific 

 view, and had also its poetry. But the myths of the ancient ages can 

 no longer be seriously regarded in the age of science. Is this to be 

 regretted for the sake of art ? Yes, they say ; for it was more poeti- 

 cal to put wills like ours behind exterior objects than to submit them 

 to the hard laws of science : a law is not as good as a god. But we 

 answer to this, that a law in itself has something of the divine. As 

 one of the characteristics of divinity is infinity, a law connecting phe- 

 nomena one with another, and inviting us unhaltingly to ascend the 

 chain of causes, opens immense perspectives to the mind, and gives to 

 whoever investigates it a view of infinity in the smallest objects, or, 

 we might say, makes the infinite present in every phenomenon. While 

 mythology compels the mind to stop in its search for causes, giving 

 the capricious will of some god as its final explanation, science removes 

 all limitations and puts the mind in immediate view of infinity. From 

 this arises a new kind of poetry, more austere, perhaps, but more pro- 

 found and more lasting. When Leibnitz respectfully put back upon 

 a leaf the insect he had taken from it to look at through the micro- 

 scope, he did not regard it with the same eye as an ancient would have 

 regarded it. In that atom he perceived, as Pascal did in the flesh- 

 worm, an epitome of the world. This idea of the infinite divine is 

 quite as precious as are the classic wonders and the tinsel decorations 

 of Olympus. The poet loses nothing in the transformation of the 

 universe by science. Mr. Spencer, who once defended the poetry of 

 science against that of the Greek odes, has made some just remarks on 

 this subject. To the man of antiquity or to the ignoramus of our own 

 days, a drop of water is only a drop of water. How it is changed in 

 the eyes of the scientific man when he thinks that, if the force that 

 holds its elements together were set free, it would produce lightning ! 

 A dish of snow becomes a wonder when one examines with the micro- 

 scope the varied and elegant forms of its crystals. A rounded stone 

 striated with parallel scratches calls up the thought of the glacier 



