One sees very well that a new astronomy was predicted in the build of
that sky-confronting mind; for harmonic ratios, laws, and rhymes played
in his spheral soul, galaxies and gravitations stretched deeper within,
and systems climbed their flaming ecliptic.
The highest problem of Science is the problem of Method. Hitherto man
has worked on Nature only piecemeal. The understanding and the
logic-faculty are allowed to usurp the rational and creative powers.
One would say that scientists systematically shut themselves out of
three-fourths of their minds, and the English have been insane on
Induction these two hundred years. This unholy divorce has, as it
always must do, brought poverty and impotence into the sciences, many
of which stand apart, stand haggard and hostile, accumulations of
incoherent facts, inhospitable, dead.
It is when contemplated in its historic bearings, as an education of
the faculties of man, that the emphasis that has been placed on special
scientific methods discloses its significance. The speculative
synthesis of Greek and Alexandrine Science was a superb training in
Deduction,--in the descent from consciousness to Nature. Abstracted
from its relations with reality, the scholasticism of the Middle Ages
pushed Deduction to mania and moonshine.
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