When we start explaining the language of famous scientists as examples of ‘poetic diction’, it may well seem that the ordinary meaning of that literary phrase has been inflated beyond the bounds of reason. Nevertheless such an extension was necessary, in order to make clear its real nature. Nor has it been waste of time, if it has convinced a single person who needed convincing, how essentially parochial is the fashionable distinction between Poetry and Science as modes of experience.

It has already been emphasized that the rational principle must be strongly developed in the great poet. Is it necessary to add to this that the scientist, if he has ‘discovered’ anything, must also have discovered it by the right interaction of the rational and poetic principles? Really, there is no distinction between Poetry and Science, as kinds of knowing, at all. There is only a distinction between bad poetry and bad science. That the two or three experimental sciences, and the two or three hundred specialized lines of inquiry which ape their methods, should have developed the rational out of all proportion to the poetic is indeed an historical fact-and a fact of great importance to a consideration of the last four hundred years of European history. But to imagine that this tells us anything about the nature of knowledge; to speak of method as though it were a way of knowing instead of a way of testing, this is instead of looking dispassionately at the historical fact to wear it like a pair of blinkers.

If we must have a fundamental dichotomy, how much more real it is (though even this is properly a division of function rather than of person) to divide man as knower, from man in his other capacity as doer. Then, as knower, we shall find that he always knows by the interaction within himself of these poetic (poietikos) and logistic principles; and so we can divide him again, according to which of the principles predominates. If the poetic is unduly ascendant, behold the mystic or the madman, unable to grasp the reality of percepts at all - a being still resting, as it were, in the bosom of gods or demons - not yet man, man in the fullness of his stature, at all. But if the passive, logistic, prosaic principle predominates, then the man becomes - what? the collector, the man who cannot grasp the reality of anything but percepts. And here at last a real distinction between poet and scientist, or rather between poetaster and pedant, does arise. For if the ‘collector’s’ interests happen to be artistic or literary, he will become the connoisseur, that is, he will collect either objets d’art or elegant sensations and memories. But if they are ‘scientific’, he will collect - data; will, in fact, probably go on doing so all his life, to the tune of solemn warnings against the formation of ‘premature syntheses’.

That the idea of Poetry and Science as two fundamentally opposite modes of experiencing Life should have taken firm hold of a generation which honours Aristotle, Bacon and Goethe, will, I believe, be as much a matter of wonder to our posterity as it will - if not re-adjusted - be a matter of tragedy to ourselves. This is not -the place to consider the effects of such an attitude on ordinary research, except as that can be seen through its effects on art. Alas, the latter are already palpable. For it leads straight-to that Crocean conception of art as meaningless emotion - as personal emotion symbolized - which is so poisonous in its charter to all kinds of posturing and conceited egotism. No reflection is intended on Croce himself, whose works possess an extraordinarily selfless dignity; but that does not alter the fact that the spread of such a conception is a serious matter for a civilization which must look more and more to art - to the individualized poetic - as the very source and fountain-head of all meaning.