USE OF TH/Z IMAGINATION. 417 



manent security. They diminish your chance of falling 

 when assailed, and they augment your chance of recovery 

 when overthrown. 



CHAPTER XXX. 



SCIENTIFIC USE OF THE IMAGINATION.* 



" If thou would'st know the mystic song 

 Chaunted when the sphere was young, 

 Aloft, abroad the paean swells, 

 Oh wise man, hear'st thou half it tells? 

 To the open ear it sings 

 The early genesis of things; 

 Of tendency through endless ages 

 Of star-dust and star- pilgrimages, 

 Of rounded worlds, of space and time, 

 Of the old floods' subsiding slime, 

 Of chemic matter, force and form, 

 Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm. 

 The rushing metamorphosis 

 Dissolving all that fixture is, 

 Melts things that be to things that seem, 

 And solid nature to a dream." 



EMERSON. 



" Was war' ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, 

 Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse 

 Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, 

 Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen." 



GOETHE. 



" Lastly, physical investigation, more than anything besides, helps 

 to teach us the actual value and right use of the Imagination of that 

 wondrous faculty, which, left to ramble uncontrolled, leads us astray 

 into a wilderness of perplexities and errors, a land of mists and 

 shadows; but which, properly controlled by experience and reflection, 

 becomes the noblest attribute of man; the source of poetic genius, the 

 instrument of discovery in Science, without the aid of which Newton 

 would never have invented fluxions, nor Davy have decomposed the 

 earths and alkalies, nor would Columbus have found another conti- 

 nent." Address to the Royal Society by its President Mir Benjamin 

 Brodie, November 30, 1859. 



I CARRIED with me to the Alps this year the burden of 

 this evening's work. Save from memory I had no direct 

 aid upon the mountains; but to spur up the emotions, on 



* Discourse delivered before the British Association at Liverpool, 

 September 16, 1870. 



