as though he had thus
really settled the whole case of Darwin _versus_ Moses. Our reverence
of great poets is probably as deep and sincere as the Bishop's, but
we never thought of treating them as scientific authorities, or as
witnesses to events that happened hundreds of thousands of years before
their birth. Poets deal with subjective facts of consciousness, or with
objective facts as related to these. The dry light of the intellect,
radiated from the cloudless sun of truth, is not their proper element,
but belongs exclusively to the man of science. They move in a softer
element suffused with emotion, whose varied clouds are by the sun of
imagination touched to all forms of beauty and splendor. The scientific
man's description of a lion, for instance, would be very different from
a poet's; because the one would describe the lion as it is in itself,
and the other as it affects us, a living whole, through our organs of
sight and sound. Both are true, because each is faithful to its purpose
and expresses a fact; yet neither can stand for the other, because
they express different facts and are faithful to different purposes.
Shakespeare poetically speaks of "the ruddy drops that visit this sad
heart," but the scientific truth of the circulation of the blood had
to await its Harvey. In like manner, it was not Milton but Newton
who expounded the Cosmos; the great poet, like Dante before him, wove
pre-existent cosmical ideas into the texture of his sublime epic, while
the great scientist wove all the truth of them into the texture of his
sublime theory. Let each receive his meed of reverent praise, but do not
let us appeal to Newton on poetry or to Milton on physics. And when a
Bishop of Carlisle, or other diocese, complains that "the views advanced
by scientific men tend painfully to degrade the views of poets and
philosophers," let us reply that in almost every case the great truths
of science have been found to transcend infinitely the marvels of
theology, and that the magnificence of song persists through all
fluctuations of knowledge, because its real cause lies less in the
subject than in the native grandeur of the poet's mind.

Man's place in nature is, indeed, a great question, and it can be
settled only by a wide appeal to past and present facts. And those
facts, besides being objective realities, must be treated in a purely
scientific, and not in a poetic or didactic spirit. Let the poet sing
the beauty of a consu