There is one point of view in which Darwin's relation to present thought is very interesting, to which I think sufficient attention has not been called. It involves what I should call, and have called in one or two places, "The World Outside of Science." I think one of the most interesting things about Darwin was his illustration of the world. outside of science. And being firmly convinced that there is such a world, and that it is a world of great importance, I will tell you the point of view in which that matter has presented itself to me. I have stated it once or twice before, but never in just this form, I think. It is a commonplace saying that we live in an age of science. We are assured without ceasing, and it is, within just limits, perfectly true, that modern science has transformed the world of thought. The world of action it has certainly transformed. Scientific mechanics are keeping pace, in the most astounding way, with abstract science; and we are all, as has been said, "gazing into the light of the future, our profoundest curiosity quivering under the currents of new thought as a magnet vibrates in the grasp of an induction-coil." The wonders of the Arabian Nights are the commonplaces of living and moving. With this has naturally come a shifting of the old standards of education, and the claim that science, as such, is exclusively to rule the world. An accomplished German savant, long resident in this country, once told me that in his opinion poetry, for instance, was already quite superseded, and music and art must soon follow. Literature, he thought, would only endure, if at all, as a means of preserving the results of science, probably in the shape of chemical formulæ. He was a most agreeable man, who always complained that he had made a fatal mistake in his career through rashly taking the whole of the Diptera, or two-winged insects, for his scientific task, whereas to have taken charge of any single genus, as the gnats or the mosquitoes, would have been enough for the life-work of a judicious man. That is the German standard, of which we perhaps may have a glimpse through one of our speakers to-day. We smile at this as extravagance, and yet we have, by the direct confession of the great leader of modern science, the noble and large-minded Darwin, an instance of almost complete atrophy of one whole side of the mind at the very time when science is carried to its highest point. Up to the age of thirty, Darwin tell us, he took intense delight in poetry,Milton, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Shelley, while he read Shakespeare with supreme enjoyment. Pictures and music also gave him much pleasure. But at sixty-seven he wrote that "for many years he could not endure to read a line of poetry"; that he had lately tried Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated him; and that he had almost lost all taste for pictures and music. This he recorded not with satisfaction, but with "great regret " [Life, by his son, Am. ed. pp. 30, 81]; he would gladly have had it otherwise, but could not. It is simply that one whole side of his intellectual being was paralyzed; a loss which all the healthy enjoyment of the other side could scarcely repay. Yet it is possible that the lesson of Darwin's limitations may be scarely less valuable than that of his achievements. his strength he revolutionized the world of science. By his weakness he gave evidence that there is a world outside of science. By If there be an intellectual world outside of science, where is the boundary line of that world? We pass that boundary, it would seem, whenever we enter the realm often called intuitive or inspirational; a realm whose characteristic it is that it is not subject to processes or measurable by tests. The yield of this other world may be as easily recognized as that of the scientific world, but its methods are not traceable, nor are its achievements capable of being duplicated by the mere force of patient will. Keats, in one of his fine letters, classifies the universe, and begins boldly with "things real, as sun, moon, and passages of Shakespeare." Sun and moon lie within the domain of science; and it is not long since the astronomers were following out that extraordinary discovery which revealed in the bright star Algol a system of three and perhaps four stellar bodies, revolving round each other and in fluencing each other's motions, and this at a distance so vast that the rays of light which reveal them left their home nearly fifty years ago. The imagination is paralyzed before a step so vast; yet it all lies within the domain of science, while science can tell us no more how Macbeth or Hamlet came into existence than if the new astronomy had never been born. It is as true of the poem as of the poet, Nascitur, non fit. We cannot even define what poetry is; and Thoreau says that there never yet was a definition of it so good but the poet would proceed to disregard it by setting aside all its requisitions. Shelley says that a man cannot say, "I will compose "poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it, for the mind "in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, "like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; "this power arises from within, like the color of a flower "which fades and changes as it is developed, and the con"scious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its "approach or its departure." ["Defense of Poetry," Essays and Letters, Am. ed. i. 56.] In the same way Schiller wrote to Körner that what impressed him when he sat down to write was usually some single impulse or harmonious tone, and not any clear notion of what he proposed writing. "These observations," he says, "arise from an Ode to Light "with which I am now busy. I have as yet no idea what the "poem will be, but a presentiment; and yet I can promise "beforehand that it will be successful." [Corresp. of Schiller and Körner, ii. 173.] So similar are the laws of all production in the imaginative arts that we need only to turn to a great musician's description of the birth of music to find something almost precisely parallel. In a letter from Mozart, condensed by Professor Royce in his ". Spirit of Modern Philosophy,” p. 456, he writes: "My ideas come as they will, I don't know how, in a "stream. . . If I can hold on to them, they begin to join "on to one another, as if they were bits that a pastry cook "should join on in his pantry. And now my soul gets "heated, and if nothing disturbs me the piece grows larger "and brighter, until, however long it is, it is all finished at "once, so that I can see it at a glance." In both arts, therefore, there occurs something which it is hardly extravagant to call inspiration, or direct inflow from some fountain unknown, and which at any rate lies outside of all science. The first essential of scientific observation the recurrence of similar phenomena under similar conditions is absolutely wanting. Coleridge's poem of "Kubla Khan" was left hopelessly a fragment by the inconvenient arrival of a man from Porlock; but there is no ray of evidence that its continuation could have been secured by placing Coleridge at the same hour the next day, before the same table, with the same pens and paper, and placing a piece of artillery before the front door to compel every resident of Porlock to keep his distance. We have now the key to that atrophy on one side of Darwin's nature. It was, in his case, the Nemesis of Science, the price he paid for his magnificent achievements. Poetry is not a part of science, but it is, as Wordsworth once said, "the antithesis of science"; it is a world outside of science, and for that very reason touches us all the nearer. THE PRESIDENT. Ten years is altogether too long an interval between addresses to this Association by Professor Nathaniel Schmidt, but he tells me it is ten years since he was here before. As he would tell you, this is surely not from lack of invitation. Moreover, during the ten years, although we have not heard his voice, we have again and again read his works, and that makes his welcome here the warmer. I have great pleasure in presenting Professor Nathaniel Schmidt, of Cornell University. [Applause.] ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR NATHANIEL SCHMIDT, Ladies and Gentlemen: Charles Darwin was not a theologian, and was not guided in his researches by religious motives, unless indeed the boundless thirst for truth be such a motive. From the manner in which he was treated by the religious leaders of his day, he would probably have been astonished had some one, looking forward a generation, suggested that his theory of the natural origin of species would prove to be one of the greatest powers in the world to rejuvenate man's religious life. ertheless, that is just what has happened. Darwinism, more perhaps than any other spiritual force, has served to vitalize religious thought and to deepen and refine religious senti ment. Nev It would be possible, I think, to show that even the foregleams of his theory, by men like Empedocles, Aristotle, and Lucretius in antiquity, by Leibnitz, Buffon, Lamarck, and others in more modern times, have had the same effect. Herder and Hegel could not have written their works on the development of the human race without the growing idea of evolution. There is no reason to find fault with the categories of Hegel; but neither Hegel himself nor his immediate disciples knew how to apply these categories. Thus it was that Hegel fell into the error of setting Christianity as the absolute religion over against all other religions as erroneous systems of thought. Hence Vatke could reason in Hegelian fashion that the Pentateuchal laws must be postexilic, while Bruno Bauer found nothing in the system and method of his master to prevent him from accepting the traditional authorship of the Pentateuch, though he was led by Hegelian dialectics to assign, contrary to the then prevailing view, a late post-exilic date to the book of Job. The thesis, |