LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 



orderly his intellect runs, with what force and preci- 

 sion, turning out its closely woven philosophical 

 fabric as great looms turn out square mileS of tex- 

 tiles, without a break or a flaw in the process. 

 Never was a mind of such power so little inspired; 

 never was an imagination of such compass so com- 

 pletely tamed and broken into the service of the rea- 

 soning intellect. There is no more aerial perspective 

 in his pages than there is in a modern manufacturing- 

 plant, and no hint whatever of "the light that never 

 was on sea or land." We feel the machine-like run 

 of his sentences, each one coming roimd with the 

 regularity and precision of the revolving arms of 

 a patent harvester, making a clean sweep and a 

 smooth cut; the homogeneous and the heterogene- 

 ous, the external and the internal, the inductive and 

 the deductive processes, alternating in a sort of 

 rhythmic beat like the throb of an engine. Spencer 

 had a prodigious mind crammed with a prodigious 

 number of facts, but a more juiceless, soulless sys- 

 tem of philosophy has probably never emanated 

 from the human intellect. 



IV 



The tendency to get out of the sphere of science 

 — the sphere of the verifiable — into the sphere of 

 literature, or of theology, or of philosophy, is pro- 

 nounced, even in many scientific minds. It is pro- 

 nounced in Sir Oliver Lodge, as seen in his book on 

 189 



