The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    together in vital tension that he became so potent an instrument of research into Nature’s secrets. Tyndall, who was his friend and fellow-worker, seems to have perceived this. “ The force of his imagination,” wrote Tyndall, “ was enormous,”—he “ rose from the smallest beginnings to the greatest ends,” from <c bubbles of oxygen and nitrogen to the atmospheric envelope of the earth itself,”—but “ he bridled it like a mighty rider.” Faraday himself said to the same effect: “ Let the imagination go, guarding it by judgement and principles, but holding it in and directing it by experiment.” Else¬ where he has remarked that in youth he was, and he might have added that he still remained, “ a very lively imaginative person and could believe in the Arabian Nights as easily as in the Encyclopedia.” But he soon acquired almost an instinct for testing facts by experi¬ ment, for distrusting such alleged facts as he had not so tested, and for accepting all the conclusions that he had thus reached with a complete indifference to commonly accepted beliefs. (It is true he was a faithful and devout elder in the Sandemanian Church, and that is not the least fascinating trait in this fascinating man.) Tyndall has insisted on both of these aspects of Faraday’s mental activity. He had “ wonderful vivacity,” he was “ a man of excitable and fiery nature ” and “ underneath his sweetness was the heat of a volcano.” He himself believed that there was a Celtic strain in his heredity ; there was a tradition that the family came from Ireland ; I cannot find that there are any Faradays, or people of any name resembling Faraday, now in Ireland, but Tyndall,