rious phenomena gradually dawned upon him, and he _saw_
them, as if by some process of instinctive vision denied to others.
... His imagination was vivid; in his intense enthusiasm, he seemed
to be driven rather than to drive himself. The man was lost in his
subject, becoming as truly inspired as is the artist in the act of
creation.[1]

[Footnote 1: Sylvanus P. Thompson; _The Life of William Thomson,
Baron Kelvin of Largs_, pp. 1125 ff.]

In the working-out of a principle, the systematizing of
many facts under a sweeping generalization, the scientist
finds a creator's joy. He is giving form and significance to
the disordered and chaotic materials of experience. The
scientific imagination differs from the artistic imagination
simply in that it is controlled with reference to facts. The
first flash is subjected to criticism, examination, revision, and
testing. But the grand generalizations of science originate
in just such an unpredictable original vision. The discovery
of the fitting formula which clarifies a mass of facts hitherto
chaotic and contradictory is very closely akin to the process
by which a poet discovers an appropriate epithet or a musician
an apposite chord.

But in its products as well as in its processes, scientific
investigations have a high aesthetic value. There is symmetry,
order, and splendor in the relations which science reveals.
The same formal beauty that appeals to us in a Greek statue
or a Beethoven symphony is to be found in the universe, but
on a far more magnificent scale. There is, in the first place,
the sense of rhythm and regularity:

There comes [to the scientific investigator] a sense of pervading
order. Probably this began at the very dawn of human reason--when
man first discovered the year with its magnificent object-lesson
of regularly recurrent sequences, and it has been growing ever
since. Doubtless the early forms that this perception of order took
referred to somewhat obvious uniformities; but is there any essential
difference between realizing the orderliness of moons and tides, of
seasons and migrations, and discovering Bodes's law of the relations
of the planets, or Mendeleeff's "Periodic Law" of the relations of
the atomic weights of the chemical elements?[1]

[Footnote 1: Thomson: _Introduction to Science_, p. 174.]

Ever since Newton's day the harmony of the spheres has
been a favorite poetic metaphor. The spaciousness of the
solar system has captivated the ima