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Such a picture is dangerously fascinating to thinkers
oppressed by the bloody disorders of the living world. Craving for purer
subjects of thought, they find in the contemplation of crystals and
magnets a happiness more dramatic and less childish than the happiness
found by the mathematicians in abstract numbers, because they see in the
crystals beauty and movement without the corrupting appetites of fleshly
vitality. In such Materialism as that of Lucretius and Tyndall there
is a nobility which produces poetry: John Davidson found his highest
inspiration in it. Even its pessimism as it faces the cooling of the
sun and the return of the ice-caps does not degrade the pessimist: for
example, the Quincy Adamses, with their insistence on modern democratic
degradation as an inevitable result of solar shrinkage, are not
dehumanized as the vivisectionists are. Perhaps nobody is at heart fool
enough to believe that life is at the mercy of temperature: Dante was
not troubled by the objection that Brunetto could not have lived in the
fire nor Ugolino in the ice.


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