PRESENT PROBLEMS OF BELLES-LETTRES 547 



II 



"The scientific spirit," so an acute American critic defined it 

 recently in an essay on Carlyle, who was devoid of it and detested 

 it. -"the scientific spirit signifies poise between hypothesis and 

 verification, between statement and proof, between appearance and 

 reality. It is inspired by the impulse of investigation, tempered 

 with distrust and edged with curiosity. It is at once avid of certainty 

 and skeptical of seeming. It is enthusiastically patient, nobly literal, 

 candid, tolerant, hospitable." This is the statement of a man of 

 letters, who had found in science "a tonic force" stimulating to all 

 the arts. 



By the side of this it may be well to set also the statement of a man 

 of science. In his address delivered here in St. Louis last December, 

 the President of the American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science who is also the president of one of the foremost of 

 American universities declared that "the fundamental character- 

 istic of the scientific method is honesty. . . . The sole object is to 

 learn the truth and to be guided by the truth. Absolute accuracy, 

 absolute fidelity, absolute honesty are the prime conditions of 

 scientific progress." And then Dr. Remsen went on to make the 

 significant assertion that ''the constant use of the scientific method 

 must in the end leave its impress upon him who uses it. A life spent 

 in accord with scientific teaching would be of a high order. It would 

 practically conform to the teachings of the highest type of religion." 



This "use of the scientific method" is as remote as may be from 

 that barren adoption of scientific phrases and that sterile application 

 of scientific formulas, which may be dismissed as an aspect of 

 "science falsely so called." It is of deeper import also than any mere 

 utilization by art of the discoveries of science, however helpful this 

 may be. The painter has been aided by science to perceive more 

 precisely t he effect of the vibrations of light and to analyxe more 

 sharply the successive stages of animal movement: and the poet also 

 has found his profit in the wider knowledge brought to us by later 

 investigation. Longfellow, for one. drew upon astronomy for t he 

 Mini re with which he once made plain his moral: 



