"As an evolutionary idealist and populizer of science for the community, LeConte gave to science, an artistic charm. He believed that the "logic of science," temporarily concealed by uncertainties and inadequate data, would eventually emerge as a completed masterpiece, enabling the scientist not only to trace the course of man's wisdom from the past, but also to analyze and direct his potential in the future.
LeConte had an artists concern for unity and therefore never accepted a polarity between man's physical and spiritual nature. Likewise, he never separated science from art-- the desire for metaphysical unity, a harmony of all categories of life, was the pervasive theme running through all of his work. Wrote Royce of LeConte,"Every definite series or province of facts or of processes [became for him] a subordinate part of a larger whole, intolerable in its fragmentariness."
Art, the highest for of unity, preceded science and was its condition for being. Art led to science ,but when science advanced sufficiently it in turn perfected art. Science, the "heavenly daughter of an earthly mother," led men to a fuller understanding of life by uniting empirical data with specualative genius, a union of intuition and patient research."
Emprical art precededs science and is its condition; rational art comes after science and is its embodiment. Empirical art is the outcome of the use of intuitive reason, which works without the understanding itself, and which in its highest forms we call genius. Scientific art is the outcome of the use of the formal reason which analyzes and understands the principles on which it works. Empirical art may indeed attain great perfection, but sooner or later reaches its limit and either petrifies or decays. Scientific art, because it understands itself, is of necessity indefinitely progressive."
John S Haller. Outcasts from Evolution pg 157.
