John Faustus, out of whose story the Teutonic
imagination built up a mythus that may be set beside that of Prometheus.
Science, looked at scientifically, is bare and bleak enough. On those
sublime heights the air is too thin for the lungs, and blinds the eyes.
It is much better living down in the valleys, where one cannot see
farther than the next farmhouse. Faith was never found in the bottom of
a crucible, nor peace arrived at by analysis or synthesis. But all this
is because science has become too grimly intellectual, has divorced
itself from the moral and imaginative part of man. Our results are not
arrived at in that spirit which led Kepler (who had his theory-traps set
all along the tracks of the stars to catch a discovery) to say, "In my
opinion the occasions of new discoveries have been no less wonderful
than the discoveries themselves."
But we are led back continually to the fact that science cannot, if it
would, disengage itself from human nature and from imagination. No two
men have ever argued together without at least agreeing in this, that
something more than proof is required to produce conviction, and that a
logic which is capable of grinding the stubbornest facts to powder (as
every man's _own_ logic always is) is powerless against so delicate a
structure as the brain. Do what we will, we cannot contrive to bring
together the yawning edges of proof and belief, to weld them into one.
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