i88 NATURE AND MAN 



deal of what I cannot but regard as fallacious and misleading 

 philosophy — " oppositions of science falsely so called " — abroad 

 in the world at the present time. And I hope to satisfy you, that 

 those who set up their own conceptions of the orderly sequence 

 which they discern in the phenomena of Nature, as fixed and 

 determinate Laws, by which those phenomena not only ai-e within 

 all human experience, but always have been, and always must be, 

 invariably governed, are really guilty of the intellectual arrogance 

 they condemn in the systems of the ancients, and place themselves 

 in diametrical antagonism to those real philosophers, by whose 

 comprehensive grasp and penetrating insight that order has been 

 so far disclosed. For what love of the truth as it is in Nature was 

 ever more conspicuous, than that which Kepler displayed, in his 

 abandonment of each of the ingenious conceptions of the planetary 

 system which his fertile imagination had successively devised, so 

 soon as it proved to be inconsistent with the facts disclosed by 

 observation ? In that almost admiring description of the way in 

 which his eriemy Mars, " whom he had left at home a despised 

 " captive," had " burst all the chains of the equations, and broke 

 "forth from the prisons of the tables," who does not recognize the 

 justice of Schiller's definition of the real philosopher, as one who 

 always loves truth better than his system ? And when at last he 

 had gained the full assurance of a success so complete that (as he 

 says) he thought he must be dreaming, or that he had been 

 reasoning in a circle, who does not feel the almost sublimity of 

 the self abnegation, with which, after attaming what was in his own 

 estimation such a glorious reward of his life of toil, disappoint- 

 ment, and self-sacrifice, he abstains from claiming the applause of 

 his contemporaries, but leaves his fame to after-ages in these 

 noble words : " The book is written ; to be read either now or by 

 " posterity, I care not which. It may well wait a century for a 

 " reader, as God has waited six thousand years for an observer." 



And when a greater than Kepler was bringing to its final issue 

 that grandest of all scientific conceptions, long pondered over 

 by his almost superhuman intellect — which linked together the 

 heavens and the earth, the planets and the sun, the primaries and 

 their satellites, and included even the vagrant comets, in the nexus 

 of a universal attraction — establishing for all time the truth for 



