LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 



fail as literature. Accordingly, the poet is poet by 

 virtue of his power to make himself the centre and 

 focus of the things about him, but the scientific 

 mind is such by virtue of its power to emancipate 

 itself from human and personal consideration, and 

 rest with the naked fact. There is no art without the 

 play of personality, and there is no science till we 

 have escaped from personality, and from all forms of 

 the anthropomorphism that doth so easily beset us. 

 It is not that science restricts the imagination; it is 

 that it sterilizes nature, so to speak, reducing it to 

 inorganic or non-human elements. This is why the 

 world as science sees it is to so many minds a dead 

 world. 



When we find fault with science, and accuse it of 

 leading us to a blank wall of material things, or of 

 deadening our aesthetic sensibilities, we are finding 

 fault with it because it looks upon the universe in 

 the light of cold reason, and not through that of the 

 emotions. But our physical well-being demands the 

 dehumanization of the physical world; until we see 

 our true relation to the forces amid which we live 

 and move, our concrete bodily relations, we 

 are like children playing with fire, or with edged 

 tools, or with explosives. Man made no headway 

 against disease, against plague and pestilence, till 

 he outgrew his humanistic views, dissociated them 

 from evil spirits and offended deities, and looked 

 upon them as within the pale of natural causation. 

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