IN LITERATURE
life would be like, were we to make intelligent use of the laws we profess to believe in.
Here and there, however, poets have given us glimpses of the vision. Such a poet is Shelley. We do not usually praise him for a sense of fact. Yet few men have tried so honestly to give their enthusiasms to the proper objects, or have contemplated with such genuine rapture the control over experience which a knowledge of nature's order should give. His education in science was amateurish and fragmentary, but no specialist conceives more clearly or more rapturously the magic possibilities of exact knowledge. For Shelley, science was to be the key to nature's secrets, and those secrets, once known, were to subject nature to man. The fullest expression of this faith is in Prometheus Unbound, the last act of which, in praise of what
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