y.
To hear him speak you would think he had created the stars, instead of
explaining a secret of their constitution. However, I was used to that
little failing in his manner. It was not that. No, it was chiefly the
matter of his discourse which had been distasteful to me. The sight of
that glorious firmament had filled me with a sentiment of awe and
reverence to which his dry and brutal facts were a kind of desecration.
Why should our sentiment so often shrink from knowledge? Are we afraid
its purity may be contaminated and defiled? Why should science be so
inimical to poetry? Is it because the reality is never equal to our
dreams? There is more in this antipathy than the fear of disillusion
and alloyment. Some of it arises from a difference in the attitude of
the mind.

To the poet, nature is a living mystery. He does not seek to know what
it is, or how it works. He allows it as a whole to impress itself on his
entire soul, like the reflection in a mirror, and is content with the
illusion, the effect. By its power and beauty it awakens ideas and
sentiments within him. He does not even consider the part which his own
mind plays, and as his fancy is quite free, he tends to personify
inanimate things, as the ancients did the sun and moon.

To the man of science, on the other hand, nature is a molecular
mechanism. He wishes to understand its construction, and mode of action.
He enquires into its particular parts with his intellect, and tries to
penetrate the illusion in order to lay bare its cause. Heedless of its
power and beauty, he remains uninfluenced by sentiment, and mistrusting
the part played by his own mind, he tends to destroy the habit of
personification.

Hence that opposition between science and poetry which Coleridge pointed
out. The spirit of poetry is driven away by the spirit of science, just
as Eros fled before the curiosity of Psyche.

How can I enjoy the perfume of a rose if I am thinking of its cellular
tissue? I grow blind to the beauty of the Venus de Medicis when I
measure its dimensions, or analyse its marble. What do I care for the
drama if I am bent on going behind the scenes and examining the stage
machinery? The telescope has banished Phoebus and Diana from our
literature, and the spectroscope has vulgarised the stars.

Will science make an end of poetry as Renan and many others have
thought? Surely not? Poetry is quite as natural and as needful to
mankind as science. All men are poetical