Intelligence is never gayer, never surer, than when it is strictly formal,
satisfied with the evidence of its materials, as with the lights of
jewels, and filled with mounting speculations, as with a sort of laughter.
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire
to the condition of mathematics. Their logic is their spontaneous and
intelligible side: and while they differ from mathematics and from one
another in being directed in the first instance upon various
unintelligible existing objects, yet as they advance, they unite: because
they are everywhere striving to discover in those miscellaneous objects
some intelligible order and method. And as the emotion of the pure artist,
whatever may be his materials, lies in finding in them some formal harmony
or imposing it upon them, so the interest of the scientific mind, in so
far as it is free and purely intellectual, lies in tracing their formal
pattern. The mathematician can afford to leave to his clients, the
engineers, or perhaps the popular philosophers, the emotion of belief: for
himself he keeps the lyrical pleasure of metre and of evolving equations:
and it is a pleasant surprise to him, and an added problem, if he finds
that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify
them; much as if a composer found that the sailors could heave better when
singing his songs.
Yet such independence, however glorious inwardly, cannot help diminishing
the prestige of the arts in the world.
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