The Voice of Science in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Representative Prose and Verse
Science
The Voice of Science in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Representative Prose and Verse
English literature -- 19th century; Literature, Modern; Science; Science in literature
There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions, and the
structural, beneficent illusions of sentiment and of the intellect. There
is the illusion of love, which attributes to the beloved person all which
that person shares with his or her family, sex, age, or condition, nay,
with the human mind itself. 'Tis these which the lover loves, and Anna
Matilda gets the credit of them. As if one shut up always in a tower, with
one window, through which the face of heaven and earth could be seen,
should fancy that all the marvels he beheld belonged to that window. There
is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? or
come to the conviction that what seems the _succession_ of thought is only
the distribution of wholes into causal series? The intellect sees that
every atom carries the whole of Nature; that the mind opens to
omnipotence; that, in the endless striving and ascents, the metamorphosis
is entire, so that the soul doth not know itself in its own act, when that
act is perfected. There is illusion that shall deceive even the elect.
There is illusion that shall deceive even the performer of the miracle.
Though he make his body, he denies that he makes it. Though the world
exist from thought, thought is daunted in presence of the world. One after
the other we accept the mental laws, still resisting those which follow,
which however must be accepted. But all our concessions only compel us to
new profusion. And what avails it that science has come to treat space and
time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical,
and withal our pretension of _property_ and even of self-hood are fading
with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities; but the
incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which
yesterday was a finality to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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