Leonardo comes before us, indeed, in the end, as a figure for awe rather than for love. Yet, as the noblest type of the Overman we faintly try to conceive, Leonardo is the foe, not of man, but of the enemies of man. The great secrets that with clear vision his stern grip tore from Nature, the new instruments of power that his energy wrought, they were all for the use and delight of mankind. So Leonardo is the everlasting embodiment of that brooding human spirit whose task never dies. Still to-day it stands at the mouth of the gloomy cavern of Nature, even of Human Nature, with bent back and shaded eyes, seeking intently to penetrate the gloom beyond, with the fear of that threatening darkness, with the desire of what redeeming miracle it yet perchance may hold. V THAT Leonardo da Vinci was not only supremely great in science, but the incarnation of the spirit of science, the artist and lover of Nature, is a fact it is well to bear in mind. Many mistakes would be avoided if it were more clearly present to consciousness. We should no longer find the artists in design absurdly chafing under what they considered the bondage of the artists in thought. It would no longer be possible, as it was some years ago, and may be still, for a narrow-minded pedagogue like Brunetière, however useful in his own field, to be greeted as a prophet when he fatuously proclaimed what he termed “the bankruptcy of science.” Unfortunately so many of the people who masquerade under the name of “men of science” have no sort of title to that name. They may be doing good and honest work by accumulating in little cells the facts which others, more truly inspired by the spirit of science, may one day work on; they may be doing more or less necessary work by the application to practical life of the discoveries which genuine men of science have made. But they themselves have just as much, and no more, claim to use the name of “science” as the men who make the pots and dishes piled up in a crockery shop have to use the name of “art.”[47] They have not yet even learnt that “science” is not the accumulation of knowledge in the sense of piling up isolated facts, but the active organisation of knowledge, the application to the world of the cutting edge of a marvellously delicate instrument, and that this task is impossible without the widest range of vision and the most restless fertility of imagination.