This is the source-bounded reading edition of the reconstructed lecture — the strictest of the project's editions: prose that stays within what the manuscript notes license. The left column is the ensemble-verified transcription of the sheets; the right column joins the notes into readable prose. Expansions of Stapledon's shorthand are silent, but every editorial addition — every connective sentence, every framing of a marginal note, every word without a note behind it — is tinted like this, and the scaffolding button hides or shows the tinting. Where you read the notes differently, the disagreement is with a visible editorial choice, not a hidden one. The editorial headnote below records the occasion and the manuscript's shape, with evidence classes stated; the fuller-voiced performing edition (v2) remains available.
Occasion. The manuscript dates itself, and more than once. Sheet 1's right margin stacks three occasions in Stapledon's own hand — John o' London Circle, 20.10.37; WEA Lit. Soc., .11.38; L'pool Univ. Lit. Club, 14.12.38 — so one set of notes served three deliveries between October 1937 and December 1938. That is the speaker's own record on his own papers, the strongest evidence class this archive affords; it does not fix the November 1938 day, and no external notice of any of the three occasions has been acquired. The project's lecture concordance quotes the three inscriptions and dates the set by them.
The manuscript. Seven sheets (Liverpool University Library OS/F8/4; folder F8). It is a disciplined recto outline — display headings, then examples set out point by point; sheet 5 is a single short qualifying aside. The transcription is diplomatic: cancelled matter is shown struck and never voiced (the struck "two" corrected to "three kinds" on sheet 1, the struck "not formerly grasped" after "essential patterns," the struck-then-rewritten "prophesy" on sheet 7), and one disputed negated line on sheet 7 ("N irresponsible &c any") is left unvoiced rather than resolved.
The argument in brief. Three questions: what effect science has had on literature, what effect it ought to have, and what literature's function is within a scientific culture. Stapledon defines science (an attitude and method, tending to determinism; a body of facts, tending to materialism) and literature (of escape, of current needs, of creative imagination), then runs a long survey of examples — Dante, Bacon, Milton, Rabelais, Swift, Shelley, Wordsworth "botanizing on his mother's tomb," Butler, Meredith, Hardy, Verne, Rosny, Flatland; and the contemporaries Wells, Haldane, Bernal, Huxley, Lindsay, O'Neill, Constantine, Hilton, Powys, Bulwer-Lytton, Shiel, the "scientifiction" magazines and Messac. The "upshot" sorts the kinds of influence (the prophecy of power; revulsion and disaster; a natural piety toward the universe; the atrophy of "man's proper study"; the effect on style), qualifies that the amount of such literature is small, and asks how science ought to benefit literature — through escape, creative work, fantasy and myth — and what literature owes the culture in return: suggestive speculation, criticism of the "specialist's fallacy," and a stress on "the higher human capacities." It closes that science cannot describe the mind, and that literature should prophesy modestly, and in hope.
Position in the corpus. Dated 1937–1938, this falls in the years the concordance reads as a "platform bifurcation" — the public, largely secular Stapledon — yet it is the corpus's fullest statement on literature and the arts, and it anticipates the poetics of Science and Fiction a decade later: the "myth" that must "open windows," the symbol of "man-in-the-cosmos." Its "natural piety toward the universe" and its closing question about "the spiritual" touch the agnostic-piety thread the concordance indexes for this set; the wider recurrence of that position across the published shelf is treated in the deep analysis (§3.9); the reader is referred to both for the placement. The sheet-2 Wordsworth quotation ("botanizing on his mother's tomb") is one of the project's worked examples of the corpus faithfulness audit.
What is not known. The day in November 1938; whether the text changed between the three deliveries; whether the seven sheets are complete; any external corroboration of the three occasions; and the disputed sheet-7 line, left unvoiced.
Sheet 1 is the cover. The title, Science and Literature, stands beside a stack of dated occasions in the right margin — John o' London Circle, 20.10.37; WEA Lit. Soc., .11.38; L'pool Univ. Lit. Club, 14.12.38 — so these notes served three deliveries between 1937 and 1938. The prose keeps to what the notes license: editorial connective tissue is tinted like this (toggle below), and shorthand is silently expanded.
The aim of this lecture, in three questions — remote, the margin asks, from our present troubles? but: first, what effect has science had on literature, good and bad? Second, what effect should it have? Third, what is literature's function in a scientific culture — assuming ours is one?
What science is: modern natural science. On one side, an attitude and method — observation, induction, abstraction; and so determinism, in some sense. On the other, facts and details; and so materialism, in some sense. And there is the case of psychology.
What literature is: the expression of thoughts and feelings in words. Apart from good and bad craft or art, there are three kinds. First, the literature of escape — legitimate, but dangerous: it distracts attention from unpleasant reality, and affords wish-fulfilment (compare the fairy story).
Second, the literature of current needs — propaganda and comment, in terms of accepted values.
Third, the literature of creative imagination: it welcomes reality, and explores it; epitomizes reality in symbols, and reveals essential patterns; enhances sensibility and understanding — that is, reveals new aspects of reality, and creates new human capacity.
Now, the impact of science on literature — examples and random comments. Among the early examples: Dante, influenced by contemporary science, his pre-Copernican astronomy giving the poem its verisimilitude.
Bacon, the trumpeter of a new age, the prophet of power — New Atlantis, a republic of science. Milton: the conflict of science and mythology.
Rabelais and Swift, though — the margin notes — without direct influence of science. Rabelais: Gargantua, the people lost in the giant's mouth, the gigantism realistically worked out. Swift works out the consequences of novel ideas — Lilliput and Brobdingnag, the horses, the immortals — and puts man in his place.
Shelley: a medley of science and Greece — Prometheus as science, the promise of a new world. Wordsworth, by contrast, alarmed, flies to perceived nature: his protest against the man "botanizing on his mother's tomb" — what he fears is abstraction, dissection, materialism.
Samuel Butler's Erewhon: scientific analysis and a "shuffling" — sickness and crime exchanged; the machines take power — a warning; and Butler a prophet of evolution, bound up with life-purpose. Meredith: evolution again, his nature more objective than Wordsworth's — the "Warrior Horse," the small effects of our effort.
Hardy's Two on a Tower: immensity — fear, fascination; the moon's disc; Europe dwindling in a large-scale vision of Man (the margin: heath bells).
Jules Verne must at least be named; and Rosny — Un Autre Monde, Les Xipéhuz — imagines superimposed worlds. Flatland: the consequences of two-dimensional life, with imaginative filling.
The margin adds Shaw — an evolutionist, but hostile to science, and to medicine. So to the contemporary examples.
Wells, the master: scientific melodrama — The War of the Worlds, The Star, The Time Machine; a levitating drug; "quick" living. But also sheer mind-stretching — The Country of the Blind; and, in all his work, the prophet of a scientific Utopia.
J. B. S. Haldane's Possible Worlds: the fall of the moon; Venus; the abolition of pain, and its reinstatement. J. D. Bernal's The World, the Flesh and the Devil: living worlds.
Aldous Huxley warns us — Brave New World: the consequences of mechanization — mass production into regimentation, mass suggestion through the pillow-phone; aimless industry, technocracy and robots.
Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus: a rotating universe, strange scenery, yellow water; human beings glorified. O'Neill's Land Under England: the influence of psychology — its implausible mechanism, the subterranean light, the fungus, the food from the upper earth; but its hypnotic people, a symbol of Fascism.
Murray Constantine's Proud Man: psychology again — an angel visits us, a perfect disposition, and finds self-tortured humans. Here I will unfrock myself.
Hilton's Lost Horizon: psychological, mystical, scientific. J. C. Powys's Morwyn: hates science, links scientists and sadists — its faulty mechanism, the meteor fall, gravity at the centre. Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, with its underground race. M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud: a gas cloud destroys all life — its force in the description of a dead world.
Then "scientifiction" — Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories and the like: subterranean races, intelligent reptiles, time, life on the subatomic scale; the crude human factor. Messac, writing on Micromégas, is taken with fantasies of the big and the little — giants whose heads are too high, subatomic laws of life; and his Quinzinzinzili, La Cité des Asphyxiés.
The upshot of the foregoing examples — the types of influence of science on literature. First, the prophecy of wisdom and power: mechanical power; man's greatness and potentiality.
Second, revulsion against science, and the prophecy of disaster: man's littleness and inconsequence; the ruin of individuality; determinism; the effects of industrialism deplored; materialism deplored; the obsession of size and number.
Third, a natural piety toward the universe — for its aloofness, and for its potentiality.
And an atrophy of "man's proper study" — man — a weakening of human interest; the cult of the marvellous; "realism"; objectivity.
Finally, the effect of science on literary style: unemotional, unrhetorical, dry, concise, abstract.
A qualification. We name Jules Verne, and Wells, and the amazing stories — but the amount of such literature is very small; and whether Wells and the amazing stories are properly scientific literature is itself a question.
Now, how science ought to benefit literature. First, escape literature (not necessarily bad, but minor): science affords it new satisfactions — wonder, power, aloofness; but it needs to be plausible.
The same — creative literature: plausibility, else farcical. On general creative literature, science should, in manner, keep it in touch with the actual; in matter, afford it new themes, and an understanding of man and of the world.
Then the scientific fantasy: particular mind-stretchings — it must be abreast of exploration.
Then myth: a symbol of the pattern of a whole culture — compare the epic poem. It must "open windows"; the myth of a scientific culture cannot but assimilate science — but beware of passing fashions.
And the function of literature in a scientific culture? First, suggestive speculation in terms of the culture itself.
Second, criticism of the culture — a correction of the specialist's fallacy: the mistaking of abstraction, materialism, determinism, magnitude, myopic detail for the whole.
And it must stress the higher human capacities — which the sciences cannot yet tackle, and so fail to notice.
The style: unconventional, restrained — learning from social science, history, philosophy. And is the art of studying nature itself an escape? Anthropology and astronomy may become escape. One thinks of Meredith and Hardy.
Science cannot describe the mind. Man is electrons and atoms — but where is mind? and what of the spiritual? The correlates are needed — necessity and requirement — but of what? An open question.
God, some behave as though, whispers in their ear. To them: do not under-prophesy; do not overstep the mark; do not be over-awed by any scientist, for all his subtlety — though some of the ideas are right.
We can escape from reality — in sanity; there may be an emotional purge of science — by writing.
Science lacks mere religion's bitterness; but science is dangerous — the amount of good done (some people's) getting awry. Hence pessimism and optimism. There is racial superiority; and the myth of Communism — one coming.
The facts of science are so contradictory and numerous that they are not yet synthesized. There are isolated discussions — Maugham on sadism, Shakespeare on the whole of human nature, Priestley's Midnight on the Desert — but the scientists' specialism remains. A thousand years ago the learned world had fewer facts, and a more manageable synthesis.
So back to the start: science — to define; and examples of unscientific literature. Then the scientific drama: if the scientist could speak as an artist, would he give but another Jules Verne?
Literature must prophesy — but modestly, and, in the end, prophesy in hope.