ON SCIENCE AND ART 151 



ately obvious what of the things that interest us may 

 be regarded as pure science, and what may be regarded 

 as pure art. It may be that there are some peculiarly 

 constituted persons who, before they have advanced far 

 into the depths of geometry, find artistic beauty about 

 it; but, taking the generality of mankind, I think it may 

 be said that, when they begin to learn mathematics, their 

 whole souls are absorbed in tracing the connection be- 

 tween the premises and the conclusion, and that to them 

 geometry is pure science. So I think it may be said 

 that mechanics and osteology are pure science. On the 

 other hand, melody in music is pure art. You cannot 

 reason about it; there is no proposition involved in it. 

 So, again, in the pictorial art, an arabesque, or a "har- 

 mony in gray," touches none but the aesthetic faculty. 

 But a great mathematician, and even many persons who 

 are not great mathematicians, will tell you that they 

 derive immense pleasure from geometrical reasonings. 

 Everybody knows mathematicians speak of solutions and 

 problems as "elegant," and they tell you that a certain 

 mass of mystic symbols is "beautiful, quite lovely." 

 Well, you do not see it. They do see it, because the in- 

 tellectual process, the process of comprehending the 

 reasons symbolised by these figures and these signs, 

 confers upon them a sort of pleasure, such as an artist 

 has in visual symmetry. Take a science of which I 

 may speak with more confidence, and which is the most 

 attractive of those I am concerned with. It is what we 

 call morphology, which consists in tracing out the unity 

 in variety of the infinitely diversified structures of ani- 

 mals and plants. I cannot give you any example of 

 a thorough aesthetic pleasure more intensely real than 

 a pleasure of this kind the pleasure which arises in 

 one's mind when a whole mass of different structures run 

 into one harmony as the expression of a central law. 



