ABSTRACT
‘An original man is another name for an experimental man’: the saying happens to be Carlyle’s, but Murry would have sub- JL JL scribed to it heartily. His own life was experimental through and through: not in the vulgar sense, in which ‘experimental’ is synonymous with ‘unconventional’, but in the strictly scientific. Charles Mauron once pointed out that the account of ‘the effort of living’ in ‘Towards a Synthesis’ applied word for word to the effort of experimental science. It was no coincidence. Like other existential thinkers, Murry was a thoroughgoing empiricist.
