" The influence of the poetic upon the
scientific imagination is, for instance, especially present in the
construction of an invisible whole from the hints afforded by a visible
part; where the needs of the part, its uselessness, its broken
relations, are the only guides to a multiplex harmony, completeness, and
end, which is the whole. From a little bone, worn with ages of death,
older than the man can think, his scientific imagination dashed with the
poetic, calls up the form, size, habits, periods, belonging to an animal
never beheld by human eyes, even to the mingling contrasts of scales and
wings, of feathers and hair. Through the combined lenses of science and
imagination, we look back into ancient times, so dreadful in their
incompleteness, that it may well have been the task of seraphic faith,
as well as of cherubic imagination, to behold in the wallowing
monstrosities of the terror-teeming earth, the prospective, quiet,
age-long labour of God preparing the world with all its humble, graceful
service for his unborn Man. The imagination of the poet, on the other
hand, dashed with the imagination of the man of science, revealed to
Goethe the prophecy of the flower in the leaf.
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