130 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



thus to give not only to professed students, but to others 

 with the necessary bias, industry, and capacity, an intelli- 

 gent interest in the operations of science. Time and labor 

 are necessary to this result, but science is the gainer from 

 the public sympathy thus created. 



How, then, are those hidden things to be revealed ? 

 How, for example, are we to lay hold of the physical basis 

 of light, since, like that of life itself, it lies entirely without 

 the domain of the senses ? Philosophers may be right in 

 affirming that we cannot transcend experience ; but we can 

 at all events carry it a long way from its origin. We can also 

 magnify, diminish, qualify, and combine experiences, so as to 

 render them fit for purposes entirely new. We are gifted 

 with the power of imagination — combining what the Ger- 

 mans call Anschauungsgabe and Einbildungskraft — and by 

 this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the 

 world of the senses. There are tories even in science who 

 regard imagination as a faculty to be feared and avoided 

 rather than employed. They had observed its action in 

 weak vessels, and were unduly impressed by its disasters. 

 But they might with equal justice point to exploded boil- 

 ers as an argument against the use of steam. Bounded and 

 conditioned by cooperant Reason, imagination becomes the 

 mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. Newton's 

 passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was, at the 

 outset, a leap of the imagination. When William Thom- 

 son tries to place the ultimate particles of matter between 

 his compass-points, and to apply to them a scale of milli- 

 metres, he is powerfully aided by this faculty. And in 

 much that has been recently said about protoplasm and 

 life, we have the outgoings of the imagination guided and 

 controlled by the known analogies of science. In fact, 

 without this power, our knowledge of Nature would be a 

 mere tabulation of coexistences and sequences. We should 

 still believe in the succession of day and night, of summer 



