made by a given people at a given period. He will endeavor to keep
himself free from lip-service and from ancestor-worship, holding himself
derelict to his duty if he should fail to admit frankly that in every
masterpiece of the past, however transcendent its merits, there must
needs be much that is temporary admixt with more that is
permanent,--many things which pleased its author's countrymen in his own
time and which do not appeal to us, even tho we can perceive also what
is eternal and universal, even tho we read into every masterpiece much
that the author's contemporaries had not our eyes to perceive. All the
works of Shakspere and of Molière are not of equal value,--and even the
finest of them is not impeccable; and a literary critic who has a
scientific sincerity will not gloss over the minor defects, whatever his
desire to concentrate attention on the nobler qualities by which
Shakspere and Molière achieved their mighty fame. Indeed, the scientific
spirit will make it plain that an unwavering admiration for all the
works of a great writer, unequal as these must be of necessity, is proof
in itself of an obvious inability to perceive wherein lies his real
greatness.

Whatever the service the scientific spirit is likely to render in the
future, we need to be on our guard against the obsession of science
itself. There is danger that an exclusive devotion to science may starve
out all interest in the arts, to the impoverishment of the soul. Already
there are examples of men who hold science to be all-sufficient and who
insist that it has superseded art. Already is it necessary to recall
Lowell's setting off of "art, whose concern is with the ideal and the
potential, from science which is limited by the actual and the
positive." Science bids us go so far and no farther, despite the fact
that man longs to peer beyond the confines. Vistas closed to science are
opened for us by art; and science fails us if we ask too much; for it