Science and Literature

Tonight I want to explore three questions. First, what effect has science had on literature—for good and for ill? Second, what effect should it have? And third, what is literature's proper function in a scientific culture?

These may seem remote questions, but they touch on our whole culture and our use of words. Let us proceed.

By "science" I mean modern natural science: observation, induction, abstraction—the method that assumes some form of determinism and materialism, at least as working hypotheses. Science has two aspects: first, an attitude and method; second, the accumulated facts and details that method has produced.

The case of psychology is interesting here. It attempts to apply scientific method to the mind itself—with what success, we may debate. But it shows how science expands its domain into territory once reserved for literature alone.

By "literature" I mean the expression of thoughts and feelings in words—but we must distinguish types, apart from mere good or bad craftsmanship.

First, literature of escape: legitimate but dangerous, since it distracts from unpleasant reality and offers wish-fulfillment, like fairy stories. We all need escape sometimes, but a diet of it enfeebles.

Second, literature of current needs: propaganda and social comment, working within accepted values. This serves immediate purposes but rarely transcends its moment.

Third, and most important, literature of creative imagination: work that welcomes reality and explores it, epitomizing experience in symbols, revealing essential patterns that were not formerly grasped. This highest literature enhances our sensibility and understanding. It both reveals new aspects of reality and creates new human capacity for experience.

Let me trace the impact through literary history. Dante was influenced by contemporary science—his cosmology follows pre-Copernican astronomy exactly, lending verisimilitude to his spiritual journey. The architecture of the afterlife is scientifically precise by medieval standards.

Bacon was the trumpeter of a new age, a prophet of power through knowledge. His New Atlantis imagined a Republic of Science governing society—the first technocratic utopia.

Milton shows the conflict between science and mythology, uncertain whether to follow the old or new astronomy. He hedges his bets.

Rabelais, though not directly influenced by science, worked out gigantism realistically—people lost in Gargantua's mouth, the physical consequences of enormous size. A scientific imagination, if not scientific content.

Swift brilliantly works out consequences of novel ideas with scientific rigor: Lilliput and Brobdingnag explore scale; the Houyhnhnms expose human pretension; the Struldbrugs examine what immortality would really mean—not eternal youth but eternal decay. He puts man in his place.

Shelley made Prometheus a symbol of science, promising a New World through knowledge and power—a medley of Greek mythology and modern aspiration.

Wordsworth, alarmed by scientific abstraction, fled to perceived nature. He was accused of "botanizing on his mother's tomb"—reducing living things to specimens even while celebrating them. He feared abstraction, dissection, materialism—the scientific reduction of the living to the dead.

Samuel Butler's Erewhon brilliantly inverts our categories through scientific analysis and logical "shuffling": sickness treated as crime, crime as sickness. His warning about machines taking power remains relevant—he foresaw mechanical evolution superseding biological. He was a prophet of creative evolution, of Life Purpose working through matter.

Meredith absorbed evolutionary thinking more objectively than Wordsworth, showing the small scale of human effort against geological time—as in his image of the "Warrior Horse" charging against indifferent nature.

Hardy in Two on a Tower evokes the fear and fascination of cosmic immensity. Looking through the telescope, the Moon's disc reveals its desolation; Earth shrinks; human drama plays against the backdrop of the stars. Yet he never loses the heath bells, the small tender details. A large-scale vision of Man's place.

The French author Rosny (J.-H. Rosny aîné) produced remarkable scientific fantasies: Un Autre Monde imagines superimposed worlds occupying the same space; Les Xipéhuz depicts truly alien life forms—not merely humans in disguise but geometrical beings with incomprehensible motivations.

Flatland by Edwin Abbott works out the consequences of two-dimensional life with mathematical rigor, then fills it with imaginative social satire. What would a society of flat beings be like? How would they perceive a three-dimensional intruder?

And of course Jules Verne—the great popularizer of scientific adventure, if not the deepest thinker. His submarines and rockets have a plausibility that continues to inspire.

Among contemporaries, Wells is the master. His scientific melodramas—War of the Worlds, The Star, The Time Machine—combine rigorous extrapolation with narrative power. He imagines a levitating drug, accelerated living, invisibility—each worked out with scientific consistency. The Country of the Blind is sheer mind-stretching: what if seeing were not the dominant sense? Throughout his work he is the prophet of scientific utopia, for good and ill.

J.B.S. Haldane's essays in Possible Worlds explore the fall of the moon, life on Venus, the abolition of pain—and its reinstatement when we realize pain serves warning purposes. He writes as a scientist who understands imagination.

J.D. Bernal in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil imagines live worlds—thinking planets, artificial environments for transformed humanity. Pure scientific speculation as literature.

Aldous Huxley in Brave New World warns us of mechanization's consequences: mass production leading to regimentation, mass suggestion through Pavlovian conditioning, aimless industry producing happiness without meaning. The world of technocracy plus robots—comfort without purpose, pleasure without significance.

David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus uses science fiction machinery for mystical purposes—a rotating universe, strange scenery, yellow water defying our chemistry. The science is poor, but human beings are glorified through their spiritual quest. It proves that bad science need not mean bad art, if the purpose transcends scientific accuracy.

O'Neil's Land Under England shows the influence of psychology—perhaps more than physical science. The mechanism is implausible: subterranean light, fungus, food somehow from upper earth. But the hypnotic people, their minds erased, serve as a powerful symbol of Fascism. The scientific apparatus enables political allegory.

Murray Constantine (Katharine Burdekin) in Proud Man uses psychological insight: an evolved being, a kind of angel with perfect disposition, visits us and observes our self-tortured humanity. The contrast reveals our pathologies.

One should mention Bulwer Lytton's The Coming Race—an earlier underground-race fantasy, less psychologically sophisticated but influential in establishing the genre.

Hilton's Lost Horizon blends psychological, mystical, and scientific elements—Shangri-La as both geographical discovery and spiritual state.

J.C. Powys in Morwyn frankly hates science, associating scientists with sadists. His mechanism is faulty—a meteor fall, problems with gravity at Earth's center—but the hostility itself is significant. Not all literary responses to science are welcoming.

Shiel's The Purple Cloud imagines a gas cloud destroying all life, leaving one survivor to wander a dead world. The description of global death is powerfully sustained.

Shaw presents a paradox: evolutionist in philosophy, yet hostile to science in practice—especially medicine, which he distrusted deeply. Creative evolution for him was mystical, not biological.

The pulp magazines—Wonder Stories, Amazing Stories, and their ilk—represent "scientifiction" at its crudest and most energetic. Subterranean races, intelligent reptiles, time travel, subatomic life—a chaos of marvels. The human factor is often crude, the science dubious, but the imaginative energy is remarkable. I confess I love reading them.

The French critic Messac wrote illuminatingly on Micromegas and the tradition of fantasies about the big and the little. Voltaire's giant visitor from Sirius sees us as we might see insects. Giants face problems: their heads are too high, communication with us difficult. At the other extreme, subatomic life might follow different laws entirely.

Messac himself wrote Quinzinzinzili and La Cité des Asphyxiés—serious speculative fiction in the French tradition.

What patterns emerge from these examples? Several distinct types of scientific influence on literature:

Prophecy of wisdom and power: literature celebrating mechanical power, human greatness, our potentiality for progress. Bacon, Wells, Haldane—the optimistic tradition.

Revulsion against science; prophecy of disaster: literature deploring man's littleness and inconsequence, the ruin of individuality, the implications of determinism, the effects of industrialism and materialism. Huxley, Powys, many others—the pessimistic tradition. Some complain of science's obsession with mere size and number, as if magnitude were meaning.

Natural piety toward the universe: literature expressing awe at cosmic aloofness and potentiality—not worship of a personal God, but reverence for what simply is. Hardy achieves this, as does much serious science fiction.

Atrophy of human interest: sometimes science weakens literature's traditional focus on "man's proper study"—human character and relationships—in favor of the cult of marvels. Spectacle replaces psychology.

Realism and objectivity: science has encouraged literature to describe the world as it actually is, without sentimentality.

Effect on literary style: unemotional, unrhetorical, dry, concise, abstract—the scientific temper infiltrating prose. This can be good (clarity) or bad (desiccation).

How should science benefit literature? Even escape literature gains from plausibility—scientific accuracy makes fantasy more satisfying, offering new satisfactions of wonder, power, and cosmic aloofness.

Creative literature absolutely requires plausibility, or it becomes farcical. A talking horse can work if the convention is established; a talking horse in a realistic novel is absurd.

Science should keep general creative literature in touch with actuality—the real conditions of human life as we now understand them. It should afford new themes: space, time, evolution, psychology. And it should deepen understanding of both humanity and the cosmos.

Scientific fantasy specifically stretches minds in particular directions. What if time ran backward? What if we could shrink to atomic scale? What if intelligence evolved in dogs? It must keep abreast of current exploration—yesterday's impossibility may be tomorrow's fact.

Myth—the great encompassing narrative of a culture, like the epic poem—must "open windows" onto ultimate questions. In a scientific age, myth cannot help but assimilate science. The old myths were pre-scientific; new myths must be scientific, or at least not anti-scientific.

But beware of passing fashions in scientific theory! What seems established today may be overturned tomorrow. Myth should embody the spirit of science—curiosity, humility, wonder—rather than its transient conclusions.

Literature's function in a scientific culture is twofold.

First, speculative imagination: exploring possibilities in terms of the culture itself—what might we become? How might society evolve? This is science fiction at its best, and also the philosophical novel.

Second, and equally important, criticism of the culture: correcting the specialist's fallacy. Science tends toward abstraction, materialism, determinism, obsession with magnitude, and myopic focus on measurable details.

Literature must stress the higher human capacities—consciousness, creativity, love, moral choice, spiritual aspiration—which science cannot yet tackle and therefore tends to ignore. What science cannot measure, it pretends does not exist. Literature knows better. The specialist sees trees; literature must remember the forest.