Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/34

18 of the universe. That passion for detail which has dulled the spirits of so many of his successors had seized him all too firmly. In a certain sense (and I am sincerely sorry to speak so ill of him) he was a positivist long before the time of positivism. For that reason, perhaps, he is held in high esteem by our own scientists. Every now and then one of these gentlemen discovers that Leonardo was the founder of some science or other, and salutes him as father and master of the experimental method.

There is doubtless a certain amount of exaggeration in this point of view. I am even inclined to believe that Leonardo was much less of a positivist than the moderns would have us think—some of his cosmological conceptions, for instance, are hopelessly marked by animism and anthropocentrism. Nevertheless, one can but recognize that he deserves the title of scientist, that he is even more of a scientist than an artist—and for that I cannot forgive him. Even his painting, though he poured into it the treasure of his dreams, was to him primarily a form of science, destined to reproduce the aspects of nature with the most scrupulous fidelity. All his studies, even those which were directly related to his work as painter, led in reality toward a complete knowledge of the universe. And this constant preoccupation, which wins the plaudits of