Now, if any of these beliefs are true, we are wickedly wasting our time here in studying the novel--at least any other novels except M. Zola's, and we ought to look to ourselves. Seriously, I do not believe I could render you a greater service than by here arraying such contribution as I can make towards some firm, clear and pious conceptions as to this matter of form, of science, in art, before briefly considering these three concrete errors I have enumerated--to wit, the belief (1) that science will destroy all poetry, all novel-writing and all imaginative work generally; (2) that science will simply destroy the _old_ imaginative products and build up a new formless sort of imaginative product in its stead; and (3) that science will absorb into _itself_ all imaginative effort, so that every novel will be merely the plain, unvarnished record of a scientific experiment in passion. Let me submit two or three principles whose steady light will leave, it seems to me, but little space for perplexity as to these diverse claims. Start, then, in the first place, with a definite recalling to yourself of the province of form throughout our whole daily life. Here we find a striking consensus, at least in spirit, between the deliverances of the sternest science and of the straitest orthodoxy. The latter, on the one hand, tells us that in the beginning the earth was without form and void; and it is only after the earth is formulated--after the various forms of the lights, of land and water, bird, fish and man appear--it is only then that life and use and art and relation and religion become possible. What we call the creation, therefore, is not the making something out of nothing, but it is the giving of _form_ to a something which, though existing, existed to no purpose because it had no form.