h science
deals. The reason as here exercised organizes man's experience in this
great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of
true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses
him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and
metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself. Such
knowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence to
mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge;
for to penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to grasp it with the
mind and conform to it with the will, is not, as is the case with every
other sort of knowledge, the special and partial effort of selected
minds, but the daily business of all men in their lives. The method of
the mind here is and must be the same with that by which it accomplishes
its work elsewhere, its only method. Here, too, its concern is with the
universal; its end is to know life--the life with which literature
deals--not empirically in its facts, but scientifically in its necessary
order, not phenomenally in the senses but rationally in the mind, not
without relation in its mere procession but organically in its laws; and
its instrument here, as through the whole gamut of the physical sciences
and of philosophy itself, is the generalizing faculty.

One difference there is between scientific and imaginative truth,--a
difference in the mode of statement. Science and also philosophy
formulate truth and end in the formula; literature, as the saying is,
clothes truth in a tale. Imagination is brought in, and by its aid the
mind projects a world of its own, whose principle of being is that it
reembodies general or abstract truth and presents it concretely to the
eye of the mind, and in some arts gives it physical form. So, to draw an
example from science itself, when Leverrier projected in imagination the
planet Uranus, he incarnated in matter a whole group of universal
qualities and relations, all that go to make up a world, and in so doing
he created as the poet creates; there was as much of truth, too, in his
imagined world before he found the actual planet as there was of reality
in the planet itself after it swam into his ken. This creation of the
concrete world of art is the joint act of the imagination and the reason
working in unison; and hence the faculty to which this act is ascribed
is sometimes called the creative reason, or shaping power of th