g a glowing point of ageless light,
infinitely remote, intolerably mysterious, a symbol of all the lustrous
energies of the aspiring soul. And in one sense indeed the pure
imagination could invest such vast creatures of God with even a finer,
freer charm than scientific apprehension. Science could indicate its
bulk, its motions, its distance, even analyse its very bones; but it
could do no more; while the spirit could glide, as in an aerial
chariot, through the darkness of the impalpable abyss, draw nearer and
nearer in thought to the vast luminary, see unscathed its prodigious
vents spouting flame and smoke, and hear the roar of its furnaces; or
softly alight upon fields of dark stones, and watch with awe the
imagined progress of forms intolerably huge, swollen as with the
bigness of nightmare. Here was the strange contrast, that science was
all on fire to learn the truth; while the incomprehensible essence of
the soul, with its limitless visions, was capable of forming
conceptions which the truth should disappoint. And here again came in
a strange temptation. If life and identity were to be indefinitely
prolonged, then Hugh had no wish but to draw nearer to the truth,
however hard and even unpalatable it might be; but if, on the other
hand, this life were all, then it seemed that one might be even the
happier for comfortable and generous delusions.

Hugh, then, felt that if the old division of more highly developed
minds was the true one; if one was either Aristotelian or Platonist,
that is to say, if one's tendencies were either scientific or
idealistic, there was no doubt on which side of the fight he was
arrayed; not that he thought of the two tendencies as antagonistic; and
if indeed the scientific mind tended to contemn the idealistic mind, as
concerning itself with fancies rather than with facts, he felt that
there could not be a greater mistake than for the idealistic mind to
contemn the scientific. Rather, he thought, the idealists should use
the scientific toilers as patient, humble, and serviceable people, much
as the Dorian conquerors of Sparta used the Helots, and encourage them
to perform the necessary and faithful work of investigation for which
the idealists were unfitted. The mistake which men of scientific
temper made, Hugh thought, was to concern themselves only or mainly,
with material phenomena. The idealistic and imaginative tendencies of
man were just as much realities, and no amount of m