LITERATURE AND SCIENCE 
aside for nothing. Though all our gods totter and 
fall, it must go its way. It dispels our illusions 
because it clears our vision. It kills superstition 
because it banishes our irrational fears. 
Mathematical and scientific truths are fixed and 
stable quantities; they are like the inorganic com- 
pounds; but the truths of literature, of art, of reli- 
gion, of philosophy, are in perpetual flux and trans- 
formation, like the same compounds in the stream 
of life. 
How much of the power and the charm of the 
poetic treatment of nature lies in the fact that the 
poet reads himself into the objects he portrays, and 
thus makes everything alive and full of human 
interest! He sees — 
“The jocund day 
Stand tip-toe on the misty mountain-top”; 
he sees the highest peak of the mountain range tobe— 
“The last to parley with the setting sun”; 
he sees — 
“The white arms out in the breakers tirelessly tossing”; 
while the power and the value of science is to free 
itself from these tendencies, and see things in the 
white light of reason. Science is the enemy of our 
myth-making tendency, but it is the friend of our 
physical well-being. 
Every material thing and process has its physics, 
which, in most cases, seem utterly inadequate to 
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