"There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul"
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Bennett’s line flatters the rational mind, then quietly demotes it. “We may be aware of a truth” grants the brain its tidy little fact-check, but “until we have felt its force, it is not ours” insists that ownership is emotional, not intellectual. Knowledge isn’t a filing cabinet; it’s a conversion experience. The phrasing does the work: “aware” is passive, almost bureaucratic, while “felt” is kinetic and bodily. Truth becomes something that hits you, not something you hold.
The subtext is a rebuke to the early 20th-century faith in pure reason and “expertise” as social salvation. Bennett wrote in a Britain reshaped by industrial modernity, mass literacy, and new professional classes who treated information as status. His novels are often preoccupied with how people are formed by institutions and habits; here, he’s warning that cognition alone produces compliance, not conviction. You can recite principles and still live untouched by them. That’s how hypocrisy survives: a person can “know” without being changed.
“Experience of the soul” is intentionally broad and slightly old-fashioned, giving spiritual weight without committing to church doctrine. It’s a novelist’s move: he’s arguing, in effect, for the authority of lived interiority. The sentence structure even mimics his thesis, stacking clauses until the final pivot from “brain” to “soul.” Bennett isn’t anti-intellectual; he’s anti-disembodied. He’s telling readers that the facts you haven’t emotionally metabolized are just borrowed furniture in someone else’s house.
The subtext is a rebuke to the early 20th-century faith in pure reason and “expertise” as social salvation. Bennett wrote in a Britain reshaped by industrial modernity, mass literacy, and new professional classes who treated information as status. His novels are often preoccupied with how people are formed by institutions and habits; here, he’s warning that cognition alone produces compliance, not conviction. You can recite principles and still live untouched by them. That’s how hypocrisy survives: a person can “know” without being changed.
“Experience of the soul” is intentionally broad and slightly old-fashioned, giving spiritual weight without committing to church doctrine. It’s a novelist’s move: he’s arguing, in effect, for the authority of lived interiority. The sentence structure even mimics his thesis, stacking clauses until the final pivot from “brain” to “soul.” Bennett isn’t anti-intellectual; he’s anti-disembodied. He’s telling readers that the facts you haven’t emotionally metabolized are just borrowed furniture in someone else’s house.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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