UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
the creative artist puts himself, as the bee puts 
herself into the nectar she gathers from the flowers 
to make it into honey. Honey is the nectar plus the 
bee; and a poem, or other work of art, is fact and 
observation plus the man. In so far as scientific 
knowledge checks our tendency to humanize nature, 
and to infuse ourselves into it, and give to it the 
hues of our own spirits, it is the enemy of literature 
and art. In so far as it gives us a wider and truer 
conception of the material universe, which it cer- 
tainly has done in every great science, it ought to be 
their friend and benefactor. Our best growth is at- 
tained when we match knowledge with love, insight 
with reverence, understanding with sympathy and 
enjoyment; else the machine becomes more and 
more, and the man less and less. 
Fear, superstition, misconception, have played 
a great part in the literature and religion of the 
past; they have given it reality, picturesqueness, 
and power; it remains to be seen if love, knowledge, 
democracy, and human brotherhood can do as well. 
Ill 
The literary treatment of scientific matter is nat- 
urally of much more interest to the general reader 
than to the man of science. By literary treatment I 
do not mean taking liberties with facts, but treating 
them so as to give the reader a lively and imagina- 
tive realization of them — a sense of their esthetic 
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