Eead before the Bristol Naturalists' Society, 
By the rev. a. C. MACPHERSON, M.A. 
December 2nd, 1897. 
THE poet and the scientist have at least one thing in 
common : they have the same great subject on which 
their work is to be spent. This visible and audible world,- 
with the unseen mental phenomena connected with it, these 
are the foundation of their power and the object of their 
love. True, the great Greek philosopher, who busied himself 
with transcendental speculations, and the first great English 
philosopher, who based all scientific knowledge, not on 
reasonings based on nothing, like the tortoise that carried 
the world, but on the consentient voices of observation and 
experiment — both of these, it is marvellous to relate, despised 
and neglected poetry. As the late Professor Brewer says : 
" Strange that the two most poetical philosophers should 
have treated poetry so indignantly " (J. S. Brewer, Novum 
Organon). And yet the poet and the philosopher have in 
common so large a reality as the love of the great world of 
Nature. This world is, in its physical aspect, even as it 
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