Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/701

Rh 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 complete that (as he says) he thought he must be dreaming, or that he 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, 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 6,000 years for an observer."

And when a yet greater than Kepler was bringing to its final issue that grandest of all scientific conceptions, long pondered over by his almost superhuman intellect—which linked together the Heavens and the Earth, in the nexus of a universal attraction, establishing the truth for whose utterance Galileo had been condemned, 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 philosopher from completing his computation, and compelled him to hand it over to his friend? 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 soul of Newton to its foundations, we have the proof in that 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 of his profound humility.

Though it is with the intellectual representation of Nature which we call science that we are primarily concerned, 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 endeavors to awaken within us the perception of those beauties and harmonies which his own trained sense has recognized, and thus impart to us the pleasure he has himself derived from their contemplation. As no two artists agree in the original constitution and acquired habits of their minds, all look at Nature with different (mental) eyes; so that, to each, Nature is what 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 beautiful, 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