JULY

A POET'S SCIENCE.

BY MIRIAM ALLEN DEFORD.

ULY 8, 1922, will mark the centenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley's untimely end in the waters of Via Reggio. How many who will celebrate him then as poet and idealist, will remember also his keen interest and life-long delight in the problems of natural science?

Chemistry and astronomy were the only two sciences at all known to Shelley. In 1820, when he wrote that most charming of poetic epistles, the "Letter to Maria Gisborne", he expressed his passing interest in the workshop of her son, Henry Reveley, the engineer, with his

"Forms of unimaginable wood,. . . .

Great screws, and cones, and wheels, and grooved blocks"; but Shelley's enthusiasm for Reveley and his steamship, so rudely interrupted by a real or apparent attempt to defraud him, was more humanitarian than scientific. From the days at Eton, however, when the embryo poet set trees on fire with gunpowder and a burning-glass, or "raised the devil"-and his tutor-with electric batteries; even from earlier days, when he brought stained hands and singed clothing to the nursery at Field Place, and tried to "shock" his little sisters into a cure for chilblains; Shelley's great interest lay in chemical and physical experiments, that gave free scope to fancy and were too primitive to call for the exactness alien to the romantic nature of the experimenter.

Eton brought Adam Walker, the self-taught lecturer on natural philosophy, with his orrery and his talks on the planets. Shelley has spoken of the flood of joy and wonder that swept over him when first he realized the existence of a plurality of worlds. He purchased an orrery of his own, and a solar microscope, that, though it was pawned afterwards to relieve an acquaintance's dis

tress, was recovered, and seems to have been the last scientific instrument that Shelley disposed of in his wandering life.

At Oxford, during his five meteoric months there, Hogg has described Shelley's rooms-a mass of retorts, phials, crucibles, mingled with books and personal belongings "as if the young chemist, in order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to reconstruct the primeval chaos." A spot burned by a chemical in the new carpet was being rapidly enlarged by its owner's frequent tripping as he crossed it. "An electrical machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar miscroscope, and large glass jars and receivers, were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter". It was a symbol of Shelley's wide and undisciplined researches in science. Natural history was always nearly allied in his mind to witchcraft; it was the romance, the strangeness and the mystery of life that seized upon his eager imagination. One lecture on mineralogy was enough he could not even endure it to the end; and mathematics and the exact science were closed to such a temperament as his.

But this very romanticization and idealization of nature gave to Shelley glimpses into the future which are often amazingly accurate. If he dreamed of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of youth, he foresaw also the wonders of irrigation, of aerial navigation, of applied electricity. "It will be possible, perhaps, at no very distant date," he said, "to produce heat at will and to warm the most ungenial climates-as we now arise the temperature of our apartments to whatever degree we may deem agreeable or salutory. But if this be too much to anticipate, at any rate we may expect to provide ourselves cheaply with a fund of heat that will supersede our costly and inconvenient fuel, and will suffice to warm our habitations for culinary purposes and for the various demands of the mechanical arts." How Shelley would have greeted the thought of harnessing intra-atomic force!

Again: "What a mighty instrument would electricity be in the hands of him who knew how to wield it? What will not an extraordinary combination of troughs of colossal magnitude, a wellarranged system of hundreds of metallic plates, effect? The balloon has not yet received the perfection of which it is surely capable; the art of navigating the air is in its first and most helpless infancy. It promises prodigious facilities for locomotion, and will enable us to traverse vast tracts with ease and rapidity, and to explore unknown countries without difficulty. Why are we still so ignorant of

the interior of Africa?-why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction, and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks?" This same Africa was to be turned from a desert to a garden by properly directed irrigation.

With the swift onslaught of disaster, following those Oxford months, and with the troubles and journeys of his too few years to come, Shelley never afterwards had opportunity for scientific investigation or speculation. Even so early, it was tinged, not only with poetry, but with philosophy and humanitarianism, the two other loves of his life. Chemistry was to open up the study of "things themselves", as opposed to their outward forms; the shadow the balloon that flew over Africa was to be the promise of freedom to its million slaves. For a brief time, in London, he thought of studying medicine as a profession; he even attended Abernethy's lectures on anatomy at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. His eager assistance to Reveley's ill-fated steamboat, his ardent interest in the casting of its giant cylinder, proved that his love of science slept; it was not dead. All his life he visited the homes of the poor who surrounded him,-not only as a friend, but more or less as a physician, tending them in illness with the scraps of learning remembered from the weeks he "walked St. Bartholomew's". But in every such enterprise, though the initial attraction—as in the building of the great dam at Tremadoc-might be purely scientific, before very long Shelley was caught by the philanthropic aspects of the undertaking.

Shelley's science was strictly that of a poet-not reasoned and classified, as Goethe's was, for example, but personal, exalted and speculative. Even so, however, it is a phase of the life and thought of a great writer and a great man that affected much of his most unrelated work, and that should not be left to die forgotten in the archives of biography, a hundred years after he went to find if it be true that "after we die we wander as spirits through the other planets."

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY IN ANCIENT INDIA.

BY HARDIN T. MCCLELLAND.

PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEMS.

T IS usual to notice that Western Philosophy, from Ionian speculation to the genetic thought of our modern day, is an evolution upward from a vague materialism to a rationally intelligible idealism. But with India it has been almost a reverse process, Hindu thought having first been engaged in a vague religious idealism and then passing through various philosophical speculations, has ended (i. e. in the classical age at least) in systems which are primarily materialistic. Thus, and quite apart from chronological difficulties, the genetic course of Hindu thought in its most prominent points was through the Samkhya, Nyaya, Purva Mimamsa, Voga, and the Vaiseshika schools. The strong psychologism which runs through all of the Hindu's intellectual operations always valued principles and methods of inquiry above the mere subject-matter with which they dealt, and in a system which proposed to lay before us the plan and purpose of Reality's construction, they could not help but give primary attention to the method of presentation.

A. KAPILA'S SAMKHYA PHILOSOPHY.

The first thinker who seems to have given any orderly expression of philosophical method was Kapila, the Monkey-colored, who flourished during the sixth century B. C. and developed a sort of primitive common-sense philosophy in regard to individual psychic reality. The soul, according to him being a real existent having the particular function of purity and intelligence, is eternal in its universal continuity of being, but does not always have a corporeal body connecting it with physical Nature and by which it may manifest its presence in the world of life and action. Kapila's Samkhya philosophy derived its name from its enumeration of twenty-five scientific and metaphysical principles called tattva, twenty-four of

them being material through objective physical manifestation, and one being of an immaterial nature through subjective application and psychic control. In the theology which he constructed on the basis of these principles Kapila stood in opposition to Vedic doctrine by denying a special creator's existence or a god who had any intelligent purpose in mind at the time of the so-called creation of the Universe; and also in denying that the existence of pain and misery in the world makes no difference to our affirmation of the reality and knowability of a Supreme Being, or to our belief in the divine origin of the world. He anticipated by twenty-four centuries the Kantian dictum that the subjective can never be objective and hence what we know of one cannot reasonably be used to "prove" anything about the other. A further degree surely of Buddha's theory of individuality and mental finitude.

Another difference or opposition to Vedic doctrine was Kapila's premiss of the Prakriti, an objective reality corresponding to what we call physical Nature and conceived, as existing independently of both Brahma and the Purushas or created souls. And yet, while thus allowing a dualism of material Nature and immaterial Spirit, he did not in any way approach so decided an atheism as was later charged against Buddhism or the Vedanta. His enumeration of the philosophical principles was not advocated in any absolute negation of the Deity nor of any possible element of the divine whatsoever, even though there was in his day a great diversity of opinion regarding the proper interpretation of the Veda and its Sruti or revelation. Rather was he more concerned to place a more strict emphasis and a purer reverence upon the philosophical knowledge which could be had of the Supreme Ruler by means of the triune possibility of acquiring that knowledge: through spiritual perception, logical inference, and Aptasruti or trustworthy revelation.

But, after all that we may read of Brahmanical counter-claims (and not a little priestly invective), the psychological fact remains that Kapila's divergence from strictly Vedic ideas arose chiefly through his thinking that the Veda was not a non-human expression of divinity and truth, but was merely a product of Aptävakanä or human historical authority, or literally, trustworthy utterance. Even in his notion predicating concreteness of Astitva or NatureReality, he is directing his thought more in favor of objective existence and a sort of experiential method of deriving philosophical