August 17, 1872.] 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
137 
been so far disclosed. For what love of the truth as it 
is in nature was ever more conspicuous, than that which 
Kepler displayed, in his abandonment of each of the 
ingenious conceptions of the planetary system which 
Jiis fertile imagination had successively devised, so soon 
as it proved to be inconsistent with the facts disclosed 
by observation ? In that almost admiring description 
•of the way in which his enemy Mars, “ whom he had 
left at home a despised captive,” had “ burst all the 
•chains of the equations, and broke forth from the prisons 
•of the tables,” who does not recognise the justice of 
(Schiller’s definition of the real philosopher, as one who 
always loves truth better than his system ? And when 
•at last he had gained the full assurance of a success so com¬ 
plete that (as he says) he thought he must be dreaming, 
■or that lie had been reasoning in a circle, who does not feel 
•the almost sublimity of the self-abnegation, with which, 
after attaining what was in his own estimation such a 
glorious reward of his life of toil, disappointment, and 
self-sacrifice, he abstains from claiming the applause of 
his contemporaries, but leaves his fame to after ages in 
these noble words : “ The book is written ; to be read 
•either now or by posterity, I care not which. It may 
well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited 
six thousand years for an observer.” 
And when a yet greater than Kepler was bringing 
to its final issue that grandest of all scientific concep¬ 
tions, long pondered over by his almost superhuman in¬ 
tellect,—which linked together the heavens and the 
•earth, the planets and the sun, the primaries and their 
satellites, and included even the vagrant comets, in the 
■nexus of universal attraction—establishing for all time 
the truth for whose utterance Galileo had been con¬ 
demned, and giving to Kepler’s laws a significance of 
which their author had never dreamed,—what was the 
meaning- of that agitation which prevented the philo¬ 
sopher from completing his computation, and compelled 
him to hand it over to his friend F That it was not the 
thought of his own greatness, but the glimpse of the 
grand universal order thus revealed to his mental vision, 
which shook the serene and massive soul of Newton 
to its foundations, we have the proof in that beau¬ 
tiful comparison in which he likened himself to a child 
picking up shells on the shore of the vast ocean of truth; 
a comparison which will be evidence to all time at once 
of his true philosophy and his profound humility. 
Though it is with the intellectual representation of 
nature which we call science , that we are primarily con¬ 
cerned, it will not be without its use to cast a glance in 
the first instance at the other two principal characters 
under which man acts as her interpreter,—those, 
namely, of the artist and of the poet. 
The artist serves as the interpreter of nature, not 
when he works as the mere copyist, delineating that 
which he sees with his bodily eyes, and -which we could 
•see as well for ourselves; but when he endeavours to 
awaken within us the perception of those beauties and 
harmonies which his own trained sense had recognized, 
and thus impart to us the pleasure he had himself de¬ 
rived from their contemplation. As no two artists agree 
in the original constitution and acquired habits of their 
minds, all look at nature with ditferent (mental) eyes; 
•so that to each, Nature is wlxat he individually sees in 
her. 
The poet, again, serves as the interpreter of Nature, 
not so much when by skilful word-painting (whether in 
prose or verse) he calls up before our mental vision the 
picture of some actual or ideal scene, however beauti¬ 
ful ; as when, by rendering into appropriate forms those 
deeper impressions made by the nature around him on 
the moral and emotional part of his own nature, he 
transfers these impressions to the corresponding part of 
-ours. For it is the attribute of the true poet to pene¬ 
trate the secret of those mysterious influences which we 
all unknowingly experience; and having discovered 
•this to himself, to bring others, by the power he thus 
wields, into the like sympathetic relation with nature,— 
evoking with skilful touch the varied response of the 
soul’s finest chords, heightening its joys, assuaging its 
griefs, and elevating its aspirations. Whilst then, the 
artist aims to picture what ho sees in nature, it is the 
object of the poet to represent what he feels in nature ; 
and to each true poet, Nature is what he individually 
finds in her. 
The philosopher’s interpretation of nature seems less 
individual than that of the artist or the poet, because it 
is based on facts which any one may verify, and is 
elaborated by reasoning processes of which all admit 
the validity. He looks at the universe as a vast book 
lying open before him, of which he has in the first 
place to learn the characters, then to master the lan¬ 
guage, and finally to apprehend the ideas which that 
language conveys. In that book there are many chap¬ 
ters, treating of different subjects; and as life is too 
short for any one man to grasp the whole, the scien¬ 
tific interpretation of this book comes to be the work 
of many intellects, differing not merely in the range 
but also in the character of their powers. But whilst 
there are “ diversities of gifts,” there is “ the same 
spirit.” While each takes his special direction, the 
general method of study is the same for all. And it 
is a testimony alike to the truth of that method and 
to the unity of nature, that there is an ever-increasing 
tendency towards agreement among those who use it 
arighttemporary differences of interpretation being 
removed, sometimes by a more complete mastery of her 
language, sometimes by a better apprehension of her 
her ideas ;—and lines of pursuit which had seemed en¬ 
tirely distinct or even widely divergent, being found to 
lead at last to one common goal. And it is this agree¬ 
ment which gives rise to the general belief—in many, to 
the confident assurance—that the scientific interpretation 
of nature represents her not merely as she seems , but as 
she really is. 
When, however, we carefully examine the foundation 
of that assurance, we find reason to distrust its security ; 
for it can be showm to be no less true of the scientific 
conception of nature, than it is of the artistic or the 
poetic, that it is a representation framed by the mind itself 
out of the materials supplied by the impressions which 
external objects make upon the senses ; so that to each 
man of science, Nature is what he individually believes her 
to be. And that belief will rest on very different bases, 
and will have very unequal values, in different depart¬ 
ments of science. Thus in what are commonly known 
as the “exact” sciences, of which astronomy maybe 
taken as the type, the data afforded by precise methods of 
observation can be made the basis of reasoning, in every 
step of which the mathematician feels the fullest as¬ 
surance of certainty; and the final deduction is justi¬ 
fied either by its conformity to known or ascertainable 
facts,—as when Kepler determined the elliptic orbit ot 
Mars; or by the fulfilment of the predictions it has 
sanctioned,—as in the occurrence of an eclipse or an 
occultation at the precise moment specified many years 
previously ; or, still more emphatically, by the actual 
discovery of phenomena till then unrecognized,—as 
when the perturbations of the planets, shown by Newton 
to be the necessary results of their mutual attraction, 
were proved by observation to have a real existence; 
or as when the unknown disturber of Uranus was found, 
in the place assigned to him by the computations of 
Adams and Le Verrier. 
We are accustomed, and I think most rightly, to speak 
of these achievements as triumphs of the human intel¬ 
lect. But the very phase implies that the work is done 
by mental agency; and the coincidence of its results 
with the facts of observation is far from proving the 
intellectual process to have been correct. I or we 
learn from the honest confessions of Kepler, that he was 
led to the discovery of the elliptic orbit of. Mars by a 
series of happy accidents, which turned his erroneous 
