Let us not overlook the further great fact, that not only
does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is
itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a
delusion. On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the
unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly
show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the
poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into Hugh Miller's works on
geology, or read Mr. Lewes's “Seaside Studies,” will perceive that science
excites poetry rather than extinguishes it. And whoever will contemplate the
life of Goethe will see that the poet and the man of science can
co-exist in equal activity. Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a
sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it?
Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water,
loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held
together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of
lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as
a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen
through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals?
Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much
poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over
this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have
never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which
they are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects,
knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedge-rows can assume.
Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical
associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found.
Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn
what the highest pleasures of the seaside are. Sad, indeed, is it to see how
men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest
phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the universe, but are
deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary
Queen of Scots!—are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by without a
glance that grand epic upon the strata of the Earth!
Herbert Spenser
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