Abstract
THE rather widespread feeling that science and literature are, in some way, opposed to one another seems, at first sight, inexplicable. For we can say that science is merely a way of ordering experience in terms of certain fundamental principles and concepts, and that literature is a way of ordering experience which employs different principles and concepts. Opposition could arise only if one of these methods professed to be exhaustive and declared that there was no room for the other. But science certaiily does not make that claim. No scientific man asserts that the comprehension of a certain region of experience that is given to us by Shakespeare's plays is contained in any scientific treatise, and although we are frequently told that some poet or philosopher has anticipated some great scientific theory-e.g. Einstein's-it is probable that this statement is not intended seriously. Yet it is true that there are many literary men who regard science as if it were, in some way, opposed to literature.
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Science and Literature. Nature 114, 399–400 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/114399a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/114399a0