and directed to different ends; and hence, although the "Principia"
demanded an imagination of not less vivid and sustained power than was
demanded by "Othello," it would be very false psychology to infer that
the mind of Newton was competent to the creation of "Othello," or the
mind of Shakspeare capable of producing the "Principia." They were
specifically different minds; their works were specifically different.
But in both the imagination was intensely active. Newton had a mind
predominantly ratiocinative: its movement was spontaneously towards the
abstract relations of things. Shakspeare had a mind predominantly
emotive, the intellect always moving in alliance with the feelings, and
spontaneously fastening upon the concrete facts in preference to their
abstract relations. Their mental Vision was turned towards images of
different orders, and it moved in alliance with different faculties;
but this Vision was the cardinal quality of both. Dr. Johnson was
guilty of a surprising fallacy in saying that a great mathematician
might also be a great poet: "Sir, a man can walk east as far as he can
walk west." True, but mathematics and poetry do not differ as east and
west; and he would hardly assert that a man who could walk twenty miles
could therefore swim that distance.

The real state of the case is somewhat obscured by our observing that
many men of science, and some even eminent as teachers and reporters,
display but slender claims to any unusual vigour of imagination. It
must be owned that they are often slightly dull; and in matters of Art
are not unfrequently blockheads. Nay, they would themselves repel it as
a slight if the epithet "imaginative" were applied to them; it would
seem to impugn their gravity, to cast doubts upon their accuracy. But
such men are the cisterns, not the fountains, of Science. They rely
upon the knowledge already organised; they do not bring accessions to
the common stock. They are not investigators, but imitators; they are