The Function of the Poet, and Other EssaysLowell, James Russell
History
The Function of the Poet, and Other Essays
Lowell, James Russell
Literature -- History and criticism
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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