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 round 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 
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