WOMEN AS INSPIRERS 



385 



an apple fall, and this simple fact caused him to advance 

 from idea to idea, and to be carried, by what Tyndall loved 

 to call "the scientific use of the imagination, " into the 

 distant realms of space. And, heedless of the operations 

 of nature, neither observing nor experimenting, the great 

 philosopher, by pure a priori reasoning, "completed the 

 most sublime and majestic speculation that it ever entered 

 into the heart of man to conceive." "It was," as Buckle 

 well observes, "the triumph of an idea. It was the au- 

 dacity of genius." It was also the triumph of the deduc- 

 tive method in the solution of a problem that one not a 

 genius could have worked out only by the long and toil- 

 some process of induction. 



Similarly, the great law of metamorphosis in plants, * ' ac- 

 cording to which the stamens, pistils, corollas, bracts, petals 

 and so forth, of every plant, are simply modified leaves," 

 was discovered not by an inductive investigator, but by a 

 poet. "Guided by his brilliant imagination, his passion 

 for beauty and his exquisite conception of form which sup- 

 plied him with ideas, ' ' Germany '& greatest poet, Goethe, by 

 reasoning deductively, was able to generalize a law which 

 lesser minds could never have arrived at except through 

 the application of the inductive method. 



So also was it in the science of crystallography. Its 

 foundations were laid, not by a mineralogist nor a mathe- 

 matician, as one would suppose, but by one of strong imagi- 

 nation and marked poetic temperament. Like Goethe, 

 Haiiy was led by his ideas of beauty and symmetry to 

 work deductively on the problem before him. Descending 

 from ideas to facts, he finally succeeded, after a long series 

 of subsequent labors, in reading "the riddle which had 

 baffled his able but unimaginative predecessors." 



It is the possession of this deductive faculty, so charac- 

 teristic of men of genius their ability to reach conclusions 

 directly, as great mathematicians perceive inferences which 

 those less gifted reach only after pages of elaborate calcu- 



