ABSTRACT
What MacIver claims above idealistically, William Blake (“Jerusalem” (1975)) would claim poetically: ‘Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organised particulars. To generalise is to be an idiot. To particularise is alone distinction of merit’. Kierkegaard (1940), meanwhile, claims it philosophically: ‘“the public” is an abstraction made up of individuals when they are nothing, when what makes them real people is inoperative’, and Aldous Huxley (1964) claims it novelistically: ‘the general in any man’s conversation must always be converted into the particular and personal if you want to understand him’.
