Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/190

186 as well as those of the macrocosm, the spiritual tendencies and the intellectual methods of man. It is a universal law. Perhaps a static equilibrium means death—all things tend to that so far as we know. But will it never be possible to establish a unity of the two methods of seeking truth? Surely they are not wholly antagonistic—they are not essentially hostile forces like attraction and repulsion, like positive and negative electricity. Can we not have, now Cuvier is dead—peace to his ashes—a little pause—a little time for discussion, a little space for a contemplation of the umbilicus—a little space for logic and criticism in the Centralblatts and other cash registers?

It is the concatenation of circumstance, to repeat a former phrase, and not the fact itself which lends it charm. The naked truth no one ever saw, except the nymph who perished at the sight. The facts of sense, like those of the prophet, like those of the poet, like those of the philosopher, are relative, not real, and the results of such musings as I am indulging in can lead the seeker after truth only to the conclusion that each is but the facet of a whole of which our conception is the less complete and the narrower the more exclusively we tread the path illuminated solely by one aspect of the truth. He who knows nothing of the imagination, of the workings of logic, of the inspiration of the poet and the prophet, he who is ignorant of the past and finds no comfort in the speculations of the prophet as to the future, is badly equipped for the interpretation of the impression of the senses. No life is a rounded life without a touch of something more than that of materialism. The method of science which rests solely on that is fatally defective. It withers the powers of youth and it favors the approach of a premature intellectual sterility from which there is no escape but in the silence which falls upon those who have not heeded the warning in their youth.

Thus musing, the old yellow papers are cast aside for fresh tablets, but with the consideration that in science it does not matter much, since the evanescence of facts, not at once built into the structure which forms the woof and web of contemporaneous thought, is soon evident to the seeker after truth if he digs deep enough.