“They are the answers which his own mind suggests to her,—nothing more. His mind studies the laws of matter, and in that study makes experiments on matter; out of those experiments his mind, according to its previous knowledge or natural acuteness, arrives at its own deductions, and hence arise the sciences of mechanics and chemistry, etc. But the matter itself gives no answer: the answer varies according to the mind that puts the question; and the progress of science consists in the perpetual correction of the errors and falsehoods which preceding minds conceived to be the correct answers they received from Nature. It is the supernatural within us,—namely, Mind,—which can alone guess at the mechanism of the natural, namely, Matter. A stone cannot question a stone.”
The minstrel made no reply. And there was a long silence, broken but by the hum of the insects, the ripple of onward waves, and the sigh of the wind through reeds.
CHAPTER XVII.
SAID Kenelm, at last breaking silence—
“‘Rapiamus, amici,
Occasionem de die, dumque virent genua,
Et decet, obducta solvatur fronte senectus!’”
“Is not that quotation from Horace?” asked the minstrel.
“Yes; and I made it insidiously, in order to see if you had not acquired what is called a classical education.”
“I might have received such education, if my tastes and my destinies had not withdrawn me in boyhood from studies of which I did not then comprehend the full value. But I did pick up a smattering of Latin at school; and from time to time since I left school I have endeavoured to gain some little knowledge of the most popular Latin poets; chiefly, I own to my shame, by the help of literal English translations.”
“As a poet yourself, I am not sure that it would be an advantage to know a dead language so well that its forms and modes of thought ran, though perhaps unconsciously, into those of the living one in which you compose. Horace might have been a still better poet if he had not known Greek better than you know Latin.”