The eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a moral one.  Few detect the morality in the former, or the science in the latter.  Aristotle defined art to be Lo’gos tou~ e’rgou a’neu hy’l_es, The principle of the work without the wood; but most men prefer to have some of the wood along with the principle; they demand that the truth be clothed in flesh and blood and the warm colors of life.  They prefer the partial statement because it fits and measures them and their commodities best.  But science still exists everywhere as the sealer of weights and measures at least.

We have heard much about the poetry of mathematics, but very little of it has yet been sung.  The ancients had a juster notion of their poetic value than we.  The most distinct and beautiful statement of any truth must take at last the mathematical form.  We might so simplify the rules of moral philosophy, as well as of arithmetic, that one formula would express them both.  All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of the words by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense.  They are already supernatural philosophy.  The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science.  Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.  The Tree of Knowledge is a Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.  He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application.  It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws.  The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.  Mathematics should be mixed not only with physics but with ethics, that is mixed mathematics.  The fact which interests us most is the life of the naturalist.  The purest science is still biographical.  Nothing will dignify and elevate science while it is sundered so wholly from the moral life of its devotee, and he professes another religion than it teaches, and worships at a foreign shrine.  Anciently the faith of a philosopher was identical with his system, or, in other words, his view of the universe.

My friends mistake when they communicate facts to me with so much pains.  Their presence, even their exaggerations and loose statements, are equally good facts for me.  I have no respect for facts even except when I would use them, and for the most part I am independent of those which I hear, and can afford to be inaccurate, or, in other words, to substitute more present and pressing facts in their place.

The poet uses the results of science and philosophy, and generalizes their widest deductions.