If thou would'st know the mystic song
Chaunted when the sphere was young,
Aloft, abroad, the paean swells,
O wise man, hear'st thou half it tells?
To the open ear it sings
The early genesis of things;
Of tendency through endless ages
Of star-dust and star-pilgrimages,
Of rounded worlds, of space and time,
Of the old floods' subsiding slime,
Of chemic matter, force and form,
Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm.
The rushing metamorphosis
Dissolving all that fixture is,
Melts things that be to things that seem,
And solid nature to a dream.'

EMERSON.

Was waer' ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse,
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse
Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen,
Natur in Sich, Sich in Natur zu hegen.'

GOETHE.

*****

VIII. SCIENTIFIC USE OF THE IMAGINATION.

[Footnote: Discourse delivered before the British Association at
Liverpool, September 16, 1870.]

'Lastly, physical investigation, more than anything besides, helps to
teach us the actual value and right use of the Imagination--of that
wondrous faculty, which, left to ramble uncontrolled, leads us astray
into a wilderness of perplexities and errors, a land of mists and
shadows; but which, properly controlled by experience and reflection,
becomes the noblest attribute of man; the source of poetic genius, the
instrument of discovery in Science, without the aid of which Newton
would never have invented fluxions, nor Davy have decomposed the
earths and alkalies, nor would Columbus have found another
Continent.'--Address to the Royal Society by its President Sir
Benjamin Brodie, November 30, 1859.

I carried with me to the Alps this year the burden of this evening's
work. Save from memory I had no direct aid upon the mountains; but to
spur up the emotions, on which so much depends, as well as to nourish
indirectly the intellect and will, I took with me four works,
comprising two volumes of poetry, Goethe's 'Farbenlehre,' and the work
on 'Logic' recently published by Mr. Alexander Bain. In Goethe, so
noble otherwise, I chiefly noticed the self-inflicted hurts of genius,
as it broke itself in vain against the philosophy of Newton. Mr. Bain
I found, for the most part, learned and practical, shining generally
with a dry light, but exhibiting at times a flush of emotional
strength,