52 ON SOME ASPECTS OF THE 



transcend experience, but we can, at all events, carry it 

 a long way from its origin.' 'We are gifted with the 

 power of imagination, and by this power we can lighten 

 the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses. 

 Bounded and conditioned by co-operant reason imagina- 

 tion becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical 

 discoverer.' 



' There is in the human intellect a power of expansion, 

 I might almost call it a power of creation, which is 

 brought into play by simple brooding over facts,' 'the 

 spirit brooding over chaos.' 



Tyndall contrasts the unimaginative with the imagina- 

 tive scientific investigator. 



' To two men,' he says, ' one educated in the school 

 of the senses, who has mainly occupied himself with 

 observation, and the other educated in the school of 

 imagination as well, a bit of matter will present itself 

 differently. The one descends to it from his molar 

 heights, the other climbs to it from his molecular low- 

 lands. ... As regards the appreciation of those most 

 minute forms of life revealed by the microscope, to one 

 of these men they naturally appear conterminous with 

 the ultimate particles of matter, and he readily figures 

 the molecules from which they spring; with him there 

 is but a step from the atom to the organism. The other 

 discerns numberless organic gradations between both ; 

 compared with his atoms the smallest vibrios and 

 bacteria of the microscopic field are as behemoth and 

 leviathan.' 



' It is plain that beyond the present outposts of micro- 

 scopic inquiry lies an immense field for the exercise of 

 the imagination. It is only, however, the privileged 

 spirits who know how to use their liberty without abusing 

 it and who are able to surround imagination by the firm 



