Daily Inspiration Quote by George Henry Lewes

George Henry Lewes, a Victorian critic steeped in physiology and positivism, draws a boundary line: science is not addressed to poets. Its claims are offered to the understanding, not the imagination, and success is measured by verification rather than by beauty. To demand of science the rapture or symbolic density of lyric is to judge it by alien standards, much as one would fault a barometer for not being a sonnet. Lewes spent his career urging clarity about methods and aims. In an age anxious about the encroachment of laboratories on the province of art, he argued that confusion of criteria produces both bad science seduced by rhetoric and bad poetry bloated with jargon. Poets compress experience into image and rhythm; scientists abstract and generalize from phenomena. Both seek truth, but they navigate different registers of truth: empirical regularity versus felt insight. The distinction is not a wall so much as a change of address. Scientific prose, like Darwin’s, advances by precision, restraint, and replicable reasoning; its metaphors are scaffolds to be discarded once understanding is secured. Poetic language trades in resonance and ambiguity, where metaphor is not a ladder but a dwelling. Lewes, the intimate of George Eliot and a champion of realist art, saw no need to choose one over the other. He rejected the Keatsian charge that analysis “unweaves the rainbow” by insisting that expectation governs disappointment: if you come to science seeking enchantment, you will miss its austere wonder; if you come to poetry seeking proof, you will miss its truth of feeling. Better to let a theorem court assent from disciplined minds, and a poem court the imagination. When each keeps its proper addressee, exchange becomes fruitful: discoveries offer poets new images and horizons, while poetic sensitivity can sharpen the scientist’s attention to complexity and value without deforming the method.