82 THE DARWIN CENTENARY AT OXFORD 



common misinterpretation of Darwin's experience, 

 in the second to false assumptions about a class of 

 workers of whom the author evidently knows 

 nothing. His views on the relation between the 

 creative efforts of the imagination in science and 

 in art are true and clear-sighted. They are admir- 

 ably expressed in the following passage : 



' Darwin had, of course, like many lesser men, an 

 immense power of observing and storing facts ; but that 

 after all concerned merely the preparation of the stage, so 

 to speak, which was thus swept and lighted for his genius 

 to occupy. The work of his genius was, as he put it, to 

 grind out general laws, or, rather, as we may more sym- 

 pathetically phrase it, to take the sudden imaginative leap, 

 seizing the exact moment which justifies it, from the 

 particular to the general. To that moment all the patient 

 and impartial amassing of evidence was subsidiary. We 

 may see in that moment, when it arrived, a strong appeal 

 to the imagination on one side, met by an immediate 

 response to it on the other. To fix the eye successively 

 upon detail, and at the critical instant to shift the focus so 

 as to embrace the whole mass that is not a process which 

 implies the suppression of imagination. It is a process 

 which means for the imagination a continual and austere 

 exercise austere because every vague or unmeaning impulse 

 is forbidden, continual because the mind must be unceasingly 

 alert to catch the moment for its leap. It approaches very 

 near, we surely begin to see, to the process by which, for 

 the artist, a thousand different fragments of perception are 

 transmuted into the single symbolic image which embraces 

 and explains them all.' 



It is an unfortunate result of the inevitable 

 specialization of the present day that one who 

 could write so well of science should know 

 absolutely nothing of scientific workers. It is 



