A FURTHER NOTE ON MYTH
97
application of the scientific method. But.it is not true, as Mr. Bum–
ham would agree, that this is the method that I employed in my
essay. The most important of the discoveries made by modem anthro–
pology through the scientific mode of cognition is, in my opinion, the
fact that men everywhere in the world are governed by a quite
dif–
ferent mode of cognition.
To this mode any number of labels may be applied, but "myth–
ical"
has the advantage of suggesting the concrete form in which it
is
to be discovered in all the literatures of the world. Myth, like
science, is at'(mce a method and a body of ordered experience. And
it is in the sense of a method that I undertook to employ it as a means
of formal interpretation in the essay to which Mr. Burnham makes
objection. It has been my opinion, and I believe that it is the opinion
of more and more people in England and America, that literature has
long been suffering from the ravages of what might be called the
Scientific Fallacy in criticism. This is the fallacy, to which Mr. Bum–
ham gives the latest expression, when he describes works of literature
as
material objects.
It
is the fallacy which has led in our time to that
two-fold process of reduction which consists first in reducing literature
to its abstract content, and then in reducing this content to one or
another of the scientific categories. Of course
if
we are to assign a
beginning to the tendency we must go back to the monumental dis–
tortions of Taine in the mid-nineteenth century. But I believe that the
tendency, insofar as the vague materialism of Taine has sharpened into
an ever more narrow political doctrine, has reached its climax of in–
eptitude in our time.
For must it be repeated that the real objection to the application
of science to art and literature is not to science as such but to its fun–
damental inappropriateness in these reahns. Unfortunately, it is much
less difficult to say what literature is not than to say what.it is: the
anatomy of the imagination will probably remain the last challenge
to
the scientific mind. But we
can
say that although the literary work
is
something material in the sense that it must have a vehicle-the
"context"-the work itself represents a formal transcendence into
something that cannot be deduced from any of its parts. This is what
is
more simply expressed in the formula that
what
a writer says is only
relatively important. And this is the teasing fact that the abstracting
type
of intellect is unable or unwilling to accept. The scientific method
is
necessarily limited to the subject-matter of a work, which includes
of
course the opinionS, views, and judgments of a writer along with
their
concrete expressions, because science is a method which requires
a temporary hypothetical spatialization of its object. The procedure
of the so-called scientific critic of literature is the following: the
