Inquiries and Opinions | Page 2

"a tonic force" stimulating to all the arts.
By the side of this, it may be well to set also the statement of a man of
science. In his address delivered in St. Louis in December, 1903, the
President of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science,--who is also the president of one of the foremost of American
universities,--declared that "the fundamental characteristic of the
scientific method is honesty.... The sole object is to learn the truth and
to be guided by the truth. Absolute accuracy, absolute fidelity, absolute
honesty are the prime conditions of scientific progress." And then Dr.
Remsen went on to make the significant assertion that "the constant use
of the scientific method must in the end leave its impress upon him
who uses it. A life spent in accord with scientific teaching would be of
a high order. It would practically conform to the teachings of the

highest type of religion."
This "use of the scientific method" is as remote as may be from that
barren adoption of scientific phrases and that sterile application of
scientific formulas, which may be dismissed as an aspect of "science
falsely so called." It is of deeper import also than any mere utilization
by art of the discoveries of science, however helpful this may be. The
painter has been aided by science to perceive more precisely the effect
of the vibrations of light and to analize more sharply the successive
stages of animal movement; and the poet also has found his profit in
the wider knowledge brought to us by later investigations. Longfellow,
for example, drew upon astronomy for the figure with which he once
made plain his moral:
Were a star quenched on high, For ages would its light, Still travelling
downward from the sky, Shine on our mortal sight.
So, when a great man dies, For years beyond our ken The light he
leaves behind him lies Upon the paths of men.
Wordsworth, a hundred years ago, warmly welcomed "the remotest
discoveries of the chemist, the botanist and mineralogist," as "proper
objects of the poet's art," declaring that "if the time should ever come
when what is now called 'science,' thus familiarized to men, shall be
ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend
his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the being
thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man."
Again, the "use of the scientific method" is not equivalent to the
application in the arts of scientific theories, altho here once more the
man of letters is free to take these for his own and to bend them to his
purpose. Ibsen has found in the doctrine of heredity a modern analog of
the ancient Greek idea of fate; and altho he may not "see life steadily
and see it whole," he has been enabled to invest his somber 'Ghosts'
with not a little of the inerrable inevitability which we feel to be so
appalling in the master work of Sophocles. Criticism, no less than
creation, has been stimulated by scientific hypothesis; and for one thing,
the conception of literary history has been wholly transformed since the

theory of evolution was declared. To M. Brunetière we owe the
application of this doctrine to the development of the drama in his own
language. He has shown us most convincingly how the several literary
forms,--the lyric, the oration, the epic, with its illegitimate descendant,
the modern novel in prose,--may cross-fertilize each other from time to
time, and also how the casual hybrids that result are ever struggling to
revert each to its own species.
Science is thus seen to be stimulating to art; but the "use of the
scientific method" would seem to be more than stimulation only. It
leads the practitioners of the several arts to set up an ideal of
disinterestedness, inspired by a lofty curiosity, which shall scorn
nothing as insignificant, and which is ever eager after knowledge
ascertained for its own sake. As it abhors the abnormal and the freakish,
the superficial and the extravagant, it helps the creative artist to strive
for a more classic directness and simplicity; and it guides the critic
toward passionless proportion and moderation. Altho it tends toward
intellectual freedom, it forces us always to recognize the reign of law. It
establishes the strength of the social bond, and thereby, for example, it
aids us to see that, altho romance is ever young and ever true, what is
known as "neo-romanticism," with its reckless assertion of individual
whim, is anti-social, and therefore probably immoral.
The "use of the scientific method" will surely strengthen the conscience
of the novelist and of the dramatist; and it will train them to a sterner
veracity in dealing