Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

[33] formerly Director of the United States Geological Survey. After weighing more skilfully than I have ever seen it done elsewhere the strength and weakness of the literary or classical training of the past, he thus deals with the other side: “With all its novel powers and practical sense, I am obliged to admit that the purely scientific brain is miserably mechanical; it seems to have become a splendid sort of self-directed machine, an incredible automaton, grinding on with its analyses or constructions. But for pure sentiment, for all that spontaneous, joyous Greek waywardness of fancy, for the temperature of passion and the subtle thrill of ideality, you might as well look to a cast-iron derrick.” ¹ For all these, then, we must come back, by the very testimony of those scientific leaders who would seek to be whole men also, to the world outside of science.

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 usually called intuitive or inspirational; a realm whose characteristic it is that it is not subject to processes or measurable by tests. The yield of