ot
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.

But we cannot get rid of our wonder--we who have brought down the wild
lightning, from writing fiery doom upon the walls of heaven, to be our
errand-boy and penny-postman. Wonder is crude imagination; and it is
necessary to us, for man shall not live by bread alone, and exact
knowledge is not enough. Do we get nearer the truth or farther from it
that we have got a gas or an imponderable fluid instead of a spirit? We
go on exorcising one thing after another, but what boots it? The evasive
genius flits into something else, and defies us. The powers of the outer
and inner world form hand in hand a magnetic circle for whose connection
man is necessary. It is the imagination that takes his hand and clasps
it with that other stretched to him in the dark, and for which he was
vainly groping. It is that which renews the mystery in nature, makes it
wonderful and beautiful again, and out of the gases of