BOO KS
115
Part of our trouble certainly has been that we have had no one
III
this country who could have written
The Emperor's Clothes,
com–
bining, as it does, philosophical competence with literary sensibility.
Philosophers of Miss Nott's general persuasion become embroiled either
in the interpretation of world politics or in purely academic concerns
and consequently lose sight of literature. Persons of literary sensibility
are not likely to be interested in any philosophy beyond the purview of
Mrs. Susanne Langer. It won't do, by the way, to be thrown off by Miss
Nott's title. She does sometimes use the language of that jolly British
whimsey that likes to understand human error in terms of the emperor's
clothes or
Through the Looking Glass.
But her book is incisive, pro–
found, and moving.
Some of the most valuable passages are those which examine the
idols of the modern literary mind.
It em:
the belief that reason and
the scientific method have (fortunately) "failed" and that it is there–
fore time for a higher, theological Reason.
It em:
that "Science" is a
matter of atomic horrors, the "Machine," weights, measures, and scal–
pels. Yet "Science," as Miss Nott says, is not to be hypostatized or con–
fined in this manner. Science is a habit of mind, a method of inquiry,
a way of arriving at provisional truth by means of hypothesis and ob–
servation (in the present climate this commonplace definition sounds
positively novel).
Item:
that there are two truths, one theological and
one scientific. Yet, as Miss Nott says, "we know, if at all, in one way,
not two."
Item:
that science is something that was perversely "chosen"
or that fortuitously "set in" in the seventeenth century; that science
stands or falls with mechanistic determinism; that the Heisenberg Un–
certainty Principle (and other modern theories of the sort) abolishes
science, although, as Miss Nott says, the fact that at the ultra-micro–
scopic level of reality we have to bank now on statistical probability
rather than determinacy is hardly an excuse for banning scientific
method from the psychological and social studies in which their religion
enjoins the religious to be interested.
Item:
that, like science itself, the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries do not belong to history, that they
were only, as Eliot suggests, a "state of mind," a disastrous nightmare
of liberalism and humanism which have left us (in
T.
E. Hulme's
chamber-maidish phrase) with "the sloppy dregs of the Renaissance"
of which we must now cleanse the world by means of "classicism" and
a belief in man's fallen nature.
But the most fundamental and decisive error of the contemporary
literary mind, at least in this country, is the idea that poetry is a re–
ligious activity and that the interests and effects of poetry and religion
