ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with contemptuous shrugs by the professionally literary. Incidentally it is a curious phenomenon that some of the great scientists when they become critics, and are caught in efforts to explain their own sesthetic reactions to poetry, become almost as mystical as the literary analysts. Literature in the sense of prose may be taken to hold a middle ground, shading on the left into epic and narrative poetry, and on the right through psychology, biology, and so forth, toward mathematics. To most of the modern literary critics — probably because of their almost incredible ignorance of scientific thought — the so-called scientist is a "mere rationalist," and science is held, in respect to art, as photography is to painting. This separation on the basis of precision is utterly untenable. The history of science is full of examples of what, in art, would be spoken of as inspiration, but for which Whitehead's definition, "speculative reason," seems much more appropriate.
