LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
and intellectual values. The creative mind can 
quicken a dead fact and make it mean something in 
the emotional sphere. 
When we humanize things, we are beyond the 
sphere of science and in the sphere of literature. We 
may still be dealing with truths, but not with facts. 
Tyndall, in his “Fragments,” very often rises from 
the sphere of science into that of literature. He does 
so, for instance, in considering the question of per- 
sonal identity in relation to that of molecular change 
in the body. He asks: — 
How is the sense of personal identity maintained across 
this flight of the molecules that goes on incessantly in our 
bodies, so that while our physical being, after a certain 
number of years, is entirely renewed, our consciousness 
exhibits no solution of continuity? Like changing sen- 
tinels, the oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon that depart 
seem to whisper their secret to their comrades that arrive, 
and thus, while the Non-ego shifts, the Ego remains the 
same. Constancy of form in the grouping of the mole- 
cules, and not constancy of the molecules themselves, is 
the correlative of this constancy of perception. Life is a 
wave which in no two consecutive moments of existence 
is composed of the same particles. 
Tyndall has here stated a scientific fact in the 
picturesque and poetic manner of literature. Henri 
Bergson does this on nearly every page. When his 
subject-matter is scientific, his treatment of it is 
literary. Indeed, the secret of the charm and power 
of his “Creative Evolution” is the rare fusion and 
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