Literature and Science

Fülszöveg

Science and literature both try to explain the world in their different ways. Science investigates and orders; it simplifies and thus communicates. The aim of the scientist is to be as clear as possible about one thing at a time. As a scientist he is concerned with a public world.
Literature's more characteristic domain is private, the investigation of the complex multiplicities of human life, and the use of language to convey simultaneously a variety of human experience.
These are the Two Cultures whose right relations have engaged thinkers from T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold, to F. R, Leavis and G. P. Snow, Lionel Trilling and Robert Oppenheimer—and now Aldous Huxley with his own receptiveness to great literature coupled with his close attention to the concrete discoveries of modern science.
Consider, he says for example, that poetic bird the nightingale. Science discovers weed killers; weeds are killed; so incidentally are caterpillars; and the niglitingale, which feeds on... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Science and literature both try to explain the world in their different ways. Science investigates and orders; it simplifies and thus communicates. The aim of the scientist is to be as clear as possible about one thing at a time. As a scientist he is concerned with a public world.
Literature's more characteristic domain is private, the investigation of the complex multiplicities of human life, and the use of language to convey simultaneously a variety of human experience.
These are the Two Cultures whose right relations have engaged thinkers from T. H. Huxley and Matthew Arnold, to F. R, Leavis and G. P. Snow, Lionel Trilling and Robert Oppenheimer—and now Aldous Huxley with his own receptiveness to great literature coupled with his close attention to the concrete discoveries of modern science.
Consider, he says for example, that poetic bird the nightingale. Science discovers weed killers; weeds are killed; so incidentally are caterpillars; and the niglitingale, which feeds on them, becomes rarer and rarer. Today the nightingale theme is no longer the traditional moonlight melody that Keats heard but fresh knowledge about the nightingale's digestive system which makes it sing at night, and fresh problems raised by the untoward consequences of man's increasing propensity to interfere with nature.
This essay is in itself an example of the Two Cultures at their best, displaying the clarity of the scientific mind and the sensitivity of the literary imagination. Vissza