Abstract

Essays and Asides: Science and Literature

This article presents the author's views on science and literature. lncreasingly, literary criticism has become a matter of various techniques, the historical, the psychological, the sociological, and, most recently of all, the symbolical and mythological. Not one of them has failed to say true and interesting things about various literary works. Science is one of the techniques for reporting on life, and it is similarly useful as well as similarly incomplete. Moreover, one of the disastrous tendencies of our time is just the tendency to turn increasingly from literature on the one hand and from life itself on the other in order to contemplate some account rather than the thing itself with the result that the whole experience of living is desiccated and impoverished.