Science, looked at scientifically, is bare and bleak enough.  On those sublime heights the air is too thin for the lungs, and blinds the eyes.  It is much better living down in the valleys, where one cannot see farther than the next farmhouse.  Faith was never found in the bottom of a crucible, nor peace arrived at by analysis or synthesis.  But all this is because science has become too grimly intellectual, has divorced itself from the moral and imaginative part of man.  Our results are not arrived at in that spirit which led Kepler (who had his theory-traps set all along the tracks of the stars to catch a discovery) to say, “In my opinion the occasions of new discoveries have been no less wonderful than the discoveries themselves.”

But we are led back continually to the fact that science cannot, if it would, disengage itself from human nature and from imagination.  No two men have ever argued together without at least agreeing in this, that something more than proof is required to produce conviction, and that a logic which is capable of grinding the stubbornest facts to powder (as every man’s own logic always is) is powerless against so delicate a structure as the brain.  Do what we will, we cannot contrive to bring together the yawning edges of proof and belief, to weld them into one.  When Thor strikes Skrymir with his terrible hammer, the giant asks if a leaf has fallen.  I need not appeal to the Thors of argument in the pulpit, the senate, and the mass-meeting, if they have not sometimes found the popular giant as provokingly insensible.  The [sqrt of -x] is nothing in comparison with the chance-caught smell of a single flower which by the magic of association recreates for us the unquestioning day of childhood.  Demonstration may lead to the very gate of heaven, but there she makes us a civil bow, and leaves us to make our way back again to Faith, who has the key.  That science which is of the intellect alone steps with indifferent foot upon the dead body of Belief, if only she may reach higher or see farther.

But we cannot get rid of our wonder—­we who have brought down the wild lightning, from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven, to be our errand-boy and penny-postman.  Wonder is crude imagination; and it is necessary to us, for man shall not live by bread alone, and exact knowledge is not enough.  Do we get nearer the truth or farther from it that we have got a gas or an imponderable fluid instead of a spirit?  We go on exorcising one thing after another, but what boots it?  The evasive genius flits into something else, and defies us.  The powers of the outer and inner world form hand in hand a magnetic circle for whose connection man is necessary.  It is the imagination that takes his hand and clasps it with that other stretched to him in the dark, and for which he was vainly groping.  It is that which renews the mystery in nature, makes it wonderful and beautiful again, and out of the gases of the man of