Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/376

364 ; but it can never destroy this metaphysical mystery, which bears not only upon unknown laws, but upon the essence of things which are perhaps really incognoscible. That mystery will always be competent to sustain in art, above that of the beautiful, pure, and simple, the emotion of the sublime.

Superstition does not appear to us any more indispensable than mystery or ignorance to the flight of the imagination, although Goethe has described it as "the poetry of life." In their origin, it is true, the religious myths had their poetry; but it was, after all, because they were first attempts at explanation. Superstition consists essentially in putting in things, or back of them, wills like ours. Animals are not superstitious, because they do not try to comprehend. Man, on the contrary, tries to account for the phenomena he perceives, and, in order to do this, projects himself, in a fashion, into them. This first attempt to systematize the universe had a kind of grandeur, even in a scientific view, and had also its poetry. But the myths of the ancient ages can no longer be seriously regarded in the age of science. Is this to be regretted for the sake of art? Yes, they say; for it was more poetical to put wills like ours behind exterior objects than to submit them to the hard laws of science: a law is not as good as a god. But we answer to this, that a law in itself has something of the divine. As one of the characteristics of divinity is infinity, a law connecting phenomena one with another, and inviting us unhaltingly to ascend the chain of causes, opens immense perspectives to the mind, and gives to whoever investigates it a view of infinity in the smallest objects, or, we might say, makes the infinite present in every phenomenon. While mythology compels the mind to stop in its search for causes, giving the capricious will of some god as its final explanation, science removes all limitations and puts the mind in immediate view of infinity. From this arises a new kind of poetry, more austere, perhaps, but more profound and more lasting. When Leibnitz respectfully put back upon a leaf the insect he had taken from it to look at through the microscope, he did not regard it with the same eye as an ancient would have regarded it. In that atom he perceived, as Pascal did in the fleshworm, an epitome of the world. This idea of the infinite divine is quite as precious as are the classic wonders and the tinsel decorations of Olympus. The poet loses nothing in the transformation of the universe by science. Mr. Spencer, who once defended the poetry of science against that of the Greek odes, has made some just remarks on this subject. To the man of antiquity or to the ignoramus of our own days, a drop of water is only a drop of water. How it is changed in the eyes of the scientific man when he thinks that, if the force that holds its elements together were set free, it would produce lightning! A dish of snow becomes a wonder when one examines with the microscope the varied and elegant forms of its crystals. A rounded stone striated with parallel scratches calls up the thought of the glacier