things" to terms of nearer correspondence. But Literature,
ambitious to touch life on all its sides, distrusts the way of
abstraction, and can hardly be brought to abandon the point of view
whence things are seen in their immediate relation to the
individual soul. This kind of research is the work of letters;
here are facts of human life to be noted that are never like to be
numerically tabulated, changes and developments that defy all
metrical standards to be traced and described. The greater men of
science have been cast in so generous a mould that they have
recognised the partial nature of their task; they have known how to
play with science as a pastime, and to win and wear her decorations
for a holiday favour. They have not emaciated the fulness of their
faculties in the name of certainty, nor cramped their humanity for
the promise of a future good. They have been the servants of
Nature, not the slaves of method. But the grammarian of the
laboratory is often the victim of his trade. He staggers forth
from his workshop, where prolonged concentration on a mechanical
task, directed to a provisional and doubtful goal, has dimmed his
faculties; the glaring motley of the world, bathed in sunlight,
dazzles him; the questions, moral, political, and personal, that
his method has relegated to some future of larger knowledge, crowd
upon him, clamorous for solution, not to be denied, insisting on a
settlement to-day. He is forced to make a choice, and may either
forsake the divinity he serves, falling back, for the practical and
aesthetic conduct of life, on those common instincts of sensuality
which oscillate between the conventicle and the tavern as the poles
of duty and pleasure, or, more pathetically still, he may attempt
to bring the code of the observatory to bear immediately on the
vagaries of the untameable world, and suffer the pedant's disaster.
A martyr to the good that is to be, he has voluntarily maimed