Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/592

574 the first kind. Before the stars, the winds, the trees and plants, could be grasped scientifically, and the laws which govern them studied, they had been grasped, and as it were appropriated, by the human mind experimentally and imaginatively. The latter kind of knowledge was in some respects better than the former. It was more intimate and realized, so that, as far as it was true, it was more available. For practical purposes, accurate scientific knowledge of a thing is seldom sufficient. To obtain complete practical command over it you must take possession of it with the imagination and feelings as well as the reason, and it will often happen that this imaginative knowledge, helped very slightly by scientific knowledge, carries a man practically further than a very perfect scientific knowledge by itself. Witness the instinctive, as we say, and unanalyzable skill sometimes possessed by savages. Moreover, this kind of knowledge is more attractive and interesting, and so has a more powerful modifying influence upon its possessor, than the other kind, for the simple reason that it takes hold of the most plastic side of his nature. But just because it is so fascinating, and is at the same time not by itself trustworthy, it has certain mischievous consequences when it comes, as it generally does, first. Then it fills the mind with prejudices, hasty misconceptions, which, seizing upon the imagination, are stereotyped in the form of superstitions; and these sometimes exercise by themselves a most pernicious influence, and in any case close the mind against the entrance of the sounder scientific knowledge. When this imaginative medley of observation and prejudice has long had possession, science arrives. Then follows a contest between the two kinds of knowledge, in which the human being suffers much. Truth cannot in the long-run be resisted, and so, after whatever defense, the fortress is carried and the phantom garrison of superstition is driven out. The mind passes now under a new set of impressions, and places itself in a new relation to the universe. Its victory over superstition has been won by placing a careful restraint upon imagination and feeling. In order not to be misled by feeling, it has been forced artificially to deaden feeling; lest the judgment should be overwhelmed by the impressiveness of the universe, it arms itself with callousness; it turns away from Nature the mobile side, and receives the shock upon the adamantine shield of the skeptical reason. In this way it substitutes one imperfect kind of knowledge for another. Before, it realized strongly, if that expression is clear, but scarcely analyzed at all; now, it analyzes most rigidly, but ceases in turn to realize. As the victory of the scientific spirit becomes more and more decided, there passes a deep shudder of discomfort through the whole world of those whose business is with realizing, and not with testing, knowledge. Religion is struck first, because the whole work of realizing presupposes faith, and yet, as the testing process comes late, faith is almost always more or less premature. But poetry and art suffer in their turn. How