The
oldest fairy stories constitute a fascinating introduction to the book
of modern science, curiously predicting its discoveries, its uncovering
of the resources of the earth and air, its growing control of the
tremendous
forces which work in earth and air. It is significant that the recent
progress
of science is steadily toward what our ancestors would have considered
fairy land; for in all the imaginings of the childhood of the race
there
was nothing more marvelous or more audaciously improbable than the
transmission
of accents and modulations of familiar voices through long distances,
and
the power of communication across leagues of sea without mechanical
connections
of any kind.
In a word,
the fairy stories have come true; they are historical in the sense that
they faithfully report a stage of spiritual growth and predict a higher
order of realities through a deeper knowledge of actualities. They were
poetic renderings of facts which science is fast verifying, chiefly by
the use of the same faculty which enriched early literature with the
myth
and the fairy tale. The scientist has turned poet in these later days,
and the imagination which once expressed itself in a free handling of
facts
so as to make them answer the needs and demands of the human spirit,
now
expresses itself in that breadth of vision which reconstructs an
extinct
animal from a bone and analyzes the light of a sun flaming on the
outermost
boundaries of space
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