Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/516

496 life enjoyed a keen perception of the beauty offered us by nature and by art. Now, physical science may, and probably will, some day enable our posterity to set forth the exact physical concomitants and conditions of the strange rapture of beauty. But, if ever that day arrives, the rapture will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond the physical world; and, even in the mental world, something superadded to mere sensation. I do not wish to crow unduly over my humble cousin the orang, but in the æsthetic province, as in that of the intellect, I am afraid he is nowhere. I doubt not he would detect a fruit amid a wilderness of leaves where I could see nothing; but I am tolerably confident that he has never been awe-struck, as I have been, by the dim religious gloom, as of a temple devoted to the earth-gods, of the tropical forest which he inhabits. Yet I doubt not that our poor long-armed and short-legged friend, as he sits meditatively munching his durian fruit, has something behind that sad Socratic face of his which is utterly "beyond the bounds of physical science." Physical science may know all about his clutching the fruit and munching it and digesting it, and how the physical titillation of his palate is transmitted to some microscopic cells of the gray matter of his brain; but the feelings of sweetness and of satisfaction which for a moment hang out their signal-lights in his melancholy eyes are as utterly outside the bounds of physics as is the "fine frenzy" of a human rhapsodist.

Does Mr. Lilly really believe that, putting me aside, there is any man with the feeling of music in him who disbelieves in the reality of the delight which he derives from it, because that delight lies outside the bounds of physical science, not less than outside the region of the mere sense of hearing? But, it may be, that he includes music, painting, and sculpture under the head of physical science, and in that case I can only regret I am unable to follow him in his ennoblement of my favorite pursuits.

The third thesis runs that I put aside as "unverifiable" "everything which can not be brought into a laboratory and dealt with chemically"; and once more, I say No. This wondrous allegation is no novelty; it has not unfrequently reached me from that region where gentle (or ungentle) dullness so often holds unchecked sway—the pulpit. But I marvel to find that a writer of Mr. Lilly's intelligence and good faith is willing to father such a wastrel. If I am to deal with the thing seriously, I find myself met by one of the two horns of a dilemma. Either some meaning, as unknown to usage as to the dictionaries, attaches to "laboratory" and "chemical," or the proposition is (what am I to say in my sore need for a gentle and yet appropriate word?)—well—unhistorical.

Does Mr. Lilly suppose that I put aside as "un verifiable" all the truths of mathematics, of philology, of history? And, if I do not, will he have the great goodness to say how the binomial theorem is to