nce and reality. It is
inspired by the impulse of investigation, tempered with distrust and
edged with curiosity. It is at once avid of certainty and skeptical of
seeming. It is enthusiastically patient, nobly literal, candid,
tolerant, hospitable." This is the statement of a man of letters, who
had found in science "a tonic force" stimulating to all the arts.

By the side of this, it may be well to set also the statement of a man
of science. In his address delivered in St. Louis in December, 1903, the
President of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science,--who is also the president of one of the foremost of American
universities,--declared that "the fundamental characteristic of the
scientific method is honesty.... The sole object is to learn the truth
and to be guided by the truth. Absolute accuracy, absolute fidelity,
absolute honesty are the prime conditions of scientific progress." And
then Dr. Remsen went on to make the significant assertion that "the
constant use of the scientific method must in the end leave its impress
upon him who uses it. A life spent in accord with scientific teaching
would be of a high order. It would practically conform to the teachings
of the highest type of religion."

This "use of the scientific method" is as remote as may be from that
barren adoption of scientific phrases and that sterile application of
scientific formulas, which may be dismissed as an aspect of "science
falsely so called." It is of deeper import also than any mere
utilization by art of the discoveries of science, however helpful this
may be. The painter has been aided by science to perceive more precisely
the effect of the vibrations of light and to analize more sharply the
successive stages of animal movement; and the poet also has found his
profit in the wider knowledge brought to us by later investigations.
Longfellow, for example, drew upon astronomy for the figure with which
he once made plain his moral:

Were a star quenched on high,
For ages would its light,
Still travelling downward from the sky,
Shine on our mortal sight.

So, when a great man dies,
For years beyond our ken
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men.

Wordsworth, a hundred years ago, warmly welcomed "the remotest
discoveries of the chemist, the botanist and mineralogist," as "proper
objects of the poet's art," declaring that "if the time should ever come
when what is now called 's