uth, is no automatic product of logical thought or
scientific method, and it has been well said that the greatest
discoveries in science are brilliant guesses on insufficient evidence. A
nation must, so to speak, live close to its own life, be intimate and
sympathetic with natural events. That is what gives understanding, and
justifies the observation that the intuitions of scientific discovery and
the artist's perceptions are closely related. It is perhaps not
altogether without significance for us that primitive science and poetry
were indistinguishable. Nor is it strange that latter-day research should
confirm so many sayings of the poets. In all great ages art and science
have enriched each other. It is only eccentric poets and narrow
specialists who lock the doors. The human spirit doesn't grow in
sections.

I shall not press the point for it would lead us far afield. It is enough
that we remember the close alliance of art, science and politics in
Athens, in Florence and Venice at their zenith. We in America have
divorced them completely: both art and politics exist in a condition of
unnatural celibacy. Is this not a contributing factor to the futility and
opacity of our political thinking? We have handed over the government of
a nation of people to a set of lawyers, to a class of men who deal in the
most verbal and unreal of all human attainments.

A lively artistic tradition is essential to the humanizing of politics.
It is the soil in which invention flourishes and the organized knowledge
of science attains its greatest reality. Let me illustrate from another
field of interests. The religious investigations of William James were a
study, not of ecclesiastical institutions or the history of creeds. They
were concerned with religious experience, of which churches and rituals
are nothing but the external satisfaction. As Graham Wallas is
endeavoring to make human nature the center of politics, so James made it
the center of religions. It was a work of genius, yet no one would claim
that it is a mature psychology of the "Varieties of Religious
Experience." It is rather a survey and a description, done with the eye
of an artist and the method of a scientist. We know from it more of what
religious feeling is like, even though we remain ignorant of its sources.
And this intimacy humanizes religious controversy and brings
ecclesiasticism back to men.

Like most of James's psychology, it opens up investigation instead