Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/146

 136 is proportional to the breadth of its ideas; but only to see that breadth of ideas is an actual feature of most poetry that is with general consent called great. The great poets have been men whose imagination has dared to leave the ground and ascend high enough to enable them to take the world-wide view of things. Now such imagination is philosophical; it arises from the same impulse as that which generates philosophy, requires the same break with common sense, and fundamentally it makes the same contribution to life. There is this difference, that while the poetic imagination either boldly anticipates the results of future arguments, or unconsciously employs the results of arguments already made, philosophy is an argument. Poetry, because it is a fine art, must present a finished thing in sensuous form; philosophy, because it is theory, must present definitions of what it is talking about, and reasons for what it says. And there is need of both poets and philosophers since for every argument there is a vision and for every vision an argument.

PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE The term "science" is now commonly employed to designate a band of special knowledges, headed by physics, pushing rapidly into the as yet unknown, and converting it first into knowledge, then into invention, and finally into civilization. Science is patronized and subsidized by common sense; and it is a profitable investment. But science, although often like Peter it repudiates philosophy and disclaims ever having known it, is of philosophical extraction and has philosophical connections that it cannot successfully conceal. Precisely as you and I were philosophers before the exigencies of life put a constraint upon the natural movements of the mind, so human knowledge was philosophical before it was "scientific," and became divided into highly specialized branches, each with a technique and plan of its own. There are many ways in which the philosophical roots and ligaments of the sciences are betrayed. The different sciences, for example, all have to do with the same world, and their results must be made consistent. Thus physics, chemistry, physiology, and psychology all meet in human nature, and have to be reconciled. Man is somehow mechanism, life, and consciousness all in one. How is this possible? The question is evidently one that none of