October 27, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



551 



tury French cynic; and the way in which 

 language is most frequently employed now 

 makes it seem applicable to twentieth-century 

 America. A man is a pessimist who disbe- 

 lieves in the accuracy of the glowing pictures 

 painted by popular vanity or personal interest, 

 no matter how much faith he may have in 

 more reasonably attested good; and he is an 

 optimist if, either without effort or by the 

 ostrich's expedient of burying its head in the 

 sand, he shows himself absolutely oblivious to 

 the possibility of anything unflattering or un- 

 comfortable ever arising. With equal disre- 

 gard of their proper application and limita- 

 tion, the words science and literature are con- 

 fused; so that, if anything definite at all is 

 meant by them, it is often something nearer 

 the import of the other, than that of the one 

 employed. It is, of course, not desirable to 

 add to this confusion by attempting to define 

 the words, which are both too extensive in sig- 

 nificance for exact definition, but it may not 

 be inappropriate to discuss their meanings to 

 see if any reasons can be discovered to account 

 for their confusion, and for the fact that, 

 mistakenly, they are often used as if they were 

 mutually exclusive, and understanding of or 

 sympathy with the one implied ignorance of or 

 hostility towards the other. 



Ultimately, of course, literature and science 

 have the same object — to throw light on the 

 deeper problems of existence; but literature 

 seeks to do this by means of thought, and 

 science by means of knowledge, that is, litera- 

 ture is the product of reflecting on knowledge 

 in its entirety, science devotes itself to sys- 

 tematic observation of its details. The pro- 

 ducer of literature, however, must know and 

 observe, just as the scientist must reflect, if 

 he is to be creative; so that each must under- 

 stand the methods and appreciate the achieve- 

 ments of the other, and inability to do so calls 

 into question a man's right to be considered 

 an author or a scientist, however much preten- 

 sion he may make to either title. This is the 

 fact of the matter, but contemporary standards 

 are always mediocre, and the popular concep- 

 tions of literature and science alike are based 

 on such inferior exhibitions of both that it is 



not strange that literature should be associ- 

 ated primarily with subjective conjecture, and 

 science with the perceptions of sense rather 

 than of the intellect, and that literature should 

 be looked on as wholly ephemeral and science 

 as wholly material, as they are. 



It is not entirely because of mediocre stand- 

 ards, however, that such notions of the nature 

 of science and literature obtain, but because 

 of the character of modern civilization, and 

 also because of the quality of the ideas that 

 dominate the modern mind. The law of the 

 universe, according to the observation of in- 

 numerable philosophers, is flux and flow. The 

 earth moves from perihelion to aphelion, the 

 moon from apogee to perigee, and everything 

 else surveyed by the human mind, as well as 

 the human mind itself, moves with a systole 

 and diastole that, though often obscured by 

 the infinite variety of the movements with 

 which it is complicated, is neverthless evident 

 to the observant intellect. In the case of the 

 human mind one exhibition of this movement 

 is between an extreme of dependence on the 

 world of sense without it and another of sub- 

 mission to truths disclosed by inward experi- 

 ences. If a chart or graph of such movements 

 were drawn, provided, of course, that any one 

 dealing in charts and graphs were capable of 

 comprehending the existence of forces as real 

 and extensive as these, it would be shown that, 

 whatever intervening fluctuations there may 

 be, there are periods when the ideas of men 

 rest almost wholly on the principles of their 

 own nature and others in which external 

 forces rule to an equal extent. In the early 

 centuries of the Christian era, when the 

 civilization of to-day was formed, the dom- 

 inant thought of the world was guided to a 

 remarkable degree by the observation of human 

 nature, and the external world was correspond- 

 ingly neglected. With an indifference to any- 

 thing but the necessity of harmonizing all 

 phenomena with preconceived notions equal to 

 that of the German pedant who evolved a 

 description of the elephant solely from his 

 inner consciousness, the entire material world 

 of early Christian times was assumed, in defi- 

 ance of much obvious evidence to the con- 



