LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
fail as literature. Accordingly, the poet is poet by 
virtue of his power to make himself the centre and 
focus of the things about him, but the scientific 
mind is such by virtue of its power to emancipate 
itself from human and personal consideration, and 
rest with the naked fact. There is no art without the 
play of personality, and there is no science till we 
have escaped from personality, and from all forms of 
the anthropomorphism that doth so easily beset us. 
It is not that science restricts the imagination; it is 
that it sterilizes nature, so to speak, reducing it to 
inorganic or non-human elements. This is why the 
world as science sees it is to so many minds a dead 
world. 
When we find fault with science, and accuse it of 
leading us to a blank wall of material things, or of 
deadening our esthetic sensibilities, we are finding 
fault with it because it looks upon the universe in 
the light of cold reason, and not through that of the 
emotions. But our physical well-being demands the 
dehumanization of the physical world; until we see 
our true relation to the forces amid which we live 
and move, — our concrete bodily relations, — we 
are like children playing with fire, or with edged 
tools, or with explosives. Man made no headway 
against disease, against plague and pestilence, till 
he outgrew his humanistic views, dissociated them 
from evil spirits and offended deities, and looked 
upon them as within the pale of natural causation. 
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