Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/473

Rh boundless? No syllogism is competent here. Let imagination seek its own conclusions, with strong white wings that melt not even in the dazzling light and heat of its own glorious achievements. What care I for the crutch of logic here, or any Ariadne's thread in a labyrinth of verbal niceties! Enthusiasm bears too hard upon the check-rein of sober reflection; fancy leaps lightly; ecstasy beckons, and the lotos is waving over the still, cool waters of my judgment. But expression may lawfully seek even the pinnacle of rhapsody, for naught but superlatives are fitting for that which is beyond comparison.

We can but imagine the possibilities of this attribute of intellect; as its peculiarities deny comparison, and its processes scrutiny, so do its powers defy comprehension. But what of its effective operation and manifest results? What of its purposes and pleasures of its pangs and penalties? And what, alas! of its perversions? Of these we know something, if not from our own experience, then from the teachings of the consummate masters of expression whose thought-laden voices strike home—or, should they pass over our heads, leave us, at least, in no doubt that something has gone over.

To a practical point first: one excellent and most useful purpose which the imagination subserves at the hands of the gifted few whom the higher development of this faculty makes leaders of thought and watchful guardians of human progress, is, to put men of science on their proper level, and to teach them to know their place.

As this may possibly be considered—by some of my friends whose generous appreciation of my efforts in scientific lines of inquiry may blind them to the slightness of my acquirements—to be rather a ticklish position for me to assume, let me fortify with authority as well recognized in literature as is that of the sinewy, daring, and brilliant gladiator of the scientific arena who stigmatized poetry as "sensuous caterwauling."