Daily Inspiration Quote by George Henry Lewes

A small slap disguised as a syllabus note, Lewes's line draws a boundary around who gets to be spoken to by modern knowledge. "Science is not addressed to poets" isn’t really about poets; it’s about audiences and authority. In the 19th century, science is hardening into a profession with its own methods, institutions, and gatekeepers. Lewes, a philosopher and critic steeped in empiricism (and living alongside George Eliot in the thick of Victorian intellectual life), is policing the terms of that new settlement: facts over visions, demonstrations over raptures, laboratories over lyric impulse.

The wording matters. "Addressed" implies deliberate speech - science as a discourse aimed at certain listeners, not a neutral pile of truths anyone can pick up. Lewes suggests that poetic temperament is predisposed to the wrong kind of reading: searching for symbolic meaning where science demands measurable claims, craving elegance where science insists on error bars. It’s also a subtle defense against the era’s Romantic hangover, when poetry and natural philosophy could still be cousins. By Lewes’s time, that marriage is strained; the poem is suspected of seducing the mind away from discipline.

Still, the subtext cuts both ways. If science is not addressed to poets, it may be because science is narrowing its imagination to stay credible. Lewes’s boundary is a warning, but also an admission: the scientific worldview gains power by shedding certain kinds of language, even if it loses a broader public intimacy in the process.