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JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
made between the primary and secondary imagination, or intuition
or power of synthesis, or intellectual grace (in the theological sense),
would be more relevant. At their higher reaches all fields of knowledge
have in common a high esthetic component; thus a mathematical
demonstration or a physical hypothesis or an elegant scientific experi–
ment is "beautiful" in the same way as Vermeer or Mozart or Tolstoy
or, for that matter, Max Weber. They are all
austere,
like
Oedipus Rex.
In Yeats's phrase:
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
At this level too they are all provisional, brilliant and beautiful contour
maps, illuminating for the moment the chosen area which on its part
is only one small slice of the great cake of Reality, which itself is so
wondrous and complex that no human mind could ever have "thought
it." In short, what should be imparted to the student is not the pre–
sumed logic of knowledge, which is a debatable affair, but its beauty and
its fluidity, which are its greatest attractions.
Moreover, to take the learning process in the study of literature,
which is the only one I am at least partially competent to discuss, there
are in it, when it is done properly, all kinds of different things going
on, of which the concentric recurrence of basic themes is only one, and
that not the most important. And some of these other things are
remarkably like what goes on, according to Bell's description, in the
social and natural sciences. For one thing, literature is taught most ef–
fectively and absorbed with most consequence when great emphasis is
given to its historical context, in other words to the
linkages
of literature
to history in the widest sense, not only the history of events and ideas
but that of society, philosophy, psychology, theology and so on. No
teacher, naturally, is capable of handling all approaches, but a good
student in a good, and large, department of literature will encounter
the historical context of literature in many forms. Secondly, the study
of literature is very much the careful reading of specific documents-this
is really the heart of the matter-and reading a complex and intricate
work of literature involves a mental process which has much in com–
mon with conducting a fairly sophisticated scientific experiment. Here,
for example, is Edward Wasiolek's description of what is involved in
reading properly a Dostoevsky novel:
...
Crime and Punishment
is a great novel, and part of its great–
ness comes from a technique that assaults the reader's intellectual
