Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/593

Rh full has recent poetry been of this complaint! One poet complains that "science withdraws the veil of enchantment from Nature;" one exclaims that "there was an awful rainbow once in heaven," but that science has destroyed it: another declares that "we murder to dissect," that we should not be always seeking, but use "a wise passiveness" in the presence of Nature; another that "Nature made undivine is now seen slavishly obeying the law of gravitation;" another buries himself in past ages "when men could still hear from God heavenly truth in earthly speech, and did not rack their brains."

And yet to complain of the march of the scientific spirit seems as idle as to complain of the law of gravitation itself. Influenced, some by a deep faith in truth, a faith, I mean, that human well-being must depend ultimately on truth; others by a fanatical truth-worship, determined to set up their idol even "amid human sacrifice and parents' tears;" others by a scientific esprit de corps which hates religion as belonging to a rival corporation; others by that self-importance which is gratified by inflicting pain so much more than by giving pleasure; others by the tyrant's delight in having discovered a new and exquisite torture—influenced, in short, by all the mixed motives which have ever urged on a great destructive movement, the iconoclasts pursue their course. But we may look forward to a time when this transition shall be over, and when a new reconciliation shall have taken place between the two sorts of knowledge. In that happier age true knowledge, scientific, not artificially humanized, will reign without opposition, but, the claims of science once for all allowed, the mind will also apprehend the universe imaginatively, realizing what it knows.

That kind of imaginative eclipse which is produced by the shadow of science passing over any natural object has affected in turn the phenomena of Nature, taken separately, and man and God. The "fair humanities of old religion," which found objects of love in trees and streams, and filled the celestial map with fantastic living shapes—all this has long ago disappeared. More recently man has been subjected to the analyzing process. The mechanical laws which were traced in the physical world, it was long hoped, would never suffice to explain the human being; he at least would remain always mysterious, spiritual, sacred. But nothing stops science; hesitating between curiosity that drags him on and awe that holds him back, vexed not to know, yet half ashamed of knowing, man presses on into every sanctuary. He begins now to reckon his own being among things more than half explained; nerve-force he thinks is a sort of electricity; man differs greatly, indeed, but not generically, from the brutes. All this has for the time at least the effect of desecrating human nature. To the imagination human nature becomes a thing blurred and spoiled, not really because the new view of it is in itself degrading, but because the imagination had realized it otherwise, and cannot in any