ABSTRACT
The way things are at present, it is simply no good pretending that science and literature represent complementary and mutually sustaining endeavours to reach a common goal. The official Romantic view is that Reason and the Imagination are antithetical, or at best that they provide alternative pathways leading to the truth, the pathway of Reason being long and winding and stopping short of the summit, so that while Reason is breathing heavily, there is Imagination capering lightly up the hill. The poet ‘yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul’. Aristotle’s conception enriches or replaces scientific truth by truth of a higher kind, that which represents the testimony of a deeper and more privileged insight – a truth so lofty that, if nature does not conform to it, why then, so much the worse for nature.
