PHILOSOPHY AND SPECIALTIES. 
35 
can be more strongly presented than by its humorous oppo¬ 
site? If the dry reductio ad absurdum is legitimate, how 
much better is it when laughter brings an echo. Laughter 
must be; therefore Philosophy cannot ignore it. We shall 
not abolish painting and music because individuals are color¬ 
blind and note-deaf, or emasculate style to placate sporadic 
cases of humor-ineptitude. But a yet stronger argument 
can be made. Schiller and Heine say: “The gods fight 
against Stupidity in vain.” Yes, by direct attack, but the 
flank fire of ridicule can sometimes excite even stupidity 
into an exhibition of life, though it be only in retreating 
panic. 
It is not proposed that this Society should usurp the func¬ 
tions of a literary society. Both science and Philosophy are 
separated from literature by well-established boundaries. 
For the moment passing by Philosophy, the distinction 
between science and literature may be sharply drawn by 
recognizing that science deals with facts regardless of the 
vehicle of their expression. Literature, on the contrary, may 
disregard all facts as such, and deal solely with reflection 
and sentiment, and in it the form of expression is essential. 
There is a literature of science and of all the sciences, but few 
scientific works can be embraced in literature if only because 
of their defective form. 
The favorite though not the single province of literature 
is esthetics in the true sense of the term, that which is per¬ 
ceived or apprehended by the senses, but limited to what 
is desirable to be so apprehended, the beautiful, to xaXov. 
The spirit of literature may rove from this elysian realm but 
the body cannot abandon it and survive. Specimens of 
literature may properly be stigmatized as bad—bad in 
tendency and effect, as in their influence upon morals, re¬ 
ligion, politics, and the like, but literature cannot be bad in 
form, because if its form is not esthetically good it is not 
literature at all. The assertion has been made that in litera¬ 
ture the substance is of little moment, that the form alone 
is essential; the style and not the thought; the words but 
