LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 



orderly his intellect runs, with what force and preci- 

 sion, turning out its closely woven philosophical 

 fabric as great looms turn out square miles of tex- 

 tiles, without a break or a flaw in the process. 

 Never was a mind of such power so little inspired; 

 never was an imagination of such compass so com- 

 pletely tamed and broken into the service of the rea- 

 soning intellect. There is no more aerial perspective 

 in his pages than there is in a modern manufacturing- 

 plant, and no hint whatever of " the light that never 

 was on sea or land." We feel the machine-like run 

 of his sentences, each one coming round with the 

 regularity and precision of the revolving arms of 

 a patent harvester, making a clean sweep and a 

 smooth cut; the homogeneous and the heterogene- 

 ous, the external and the internal, the inductive and 

 the deductive processes, alternating in a sort of 

 rhythmic beat like the throb of an engine. Spencer 

 had a prodigious mind crammed with a prodigious 

 number of facts, but a more juiceless, soulless sys- 

 tem of philosophy has probably never emanated 

 from the human intellect. 



IV 



The tendency to get out of the sphere of science 

 the sphere of the verifiable into the sphere of 

 literature, or of theology, or of philosophy, is pro- 

 nounced, even in many scientific minds. It is pro- 

 nounced in Sir Oliver Lodge, as seen in his book on 

 189 



