SCIENCE AND LITERATURE

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 24, 28 July 1934, Page 18

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE

It is of some significance, says the London correspondent of the "New York Times Book Eeview," that this year the guest of .honour at the annual meeting of the Booksellers' Provident Institution was Sir : Eiehard Gregory. F.E.S. A generation ago the man of science and the bookseller seemed almost to live in different spheres. Nowadays, however, the demand of tin* reading public for the works of such writers as Lodge, Bragg, Eddington. and Jeans has made their names as familiar in the book stores as those of any popular novelist. So the invitation to a distinguished sciontist to give the principal address at; a booksellers' meeting has come to be regarded today as a quite natural and fitting 'compliment. Speaking on "Literature and Science," Sir Eiehard Gregory expressed regret that men of letters ignored the opportunities offered them by modern science. It would bo much easier, he declared, to mention leaders of science who had enriched literature by their writings than to select men of letters who had exercised their imaginations and art upon • scientific conceptions and achievement. ]

"With one or two brilliant exceptions," Sir Richard Gregory continued, '.'popular writers of the present day are completely oblivious to the knowledge gained by scientific study and unmoved by the message which science alone is able to give. Unbounded riches have been placed before them, yet they continue to rako the muckheap of animal passions for themes of composition." What he wanted men of letters to do was not so much to describe scientific discoveries, or to expound scientific facts, as to apply their imagination to these facts, and express stimulating thoughts in a perfect setting of words and phrases. ■ • .

Sir Richard Gregory denied that the atmospheio of science was unfavourable to the exercise of the- imagination, as some supposed. Indeed, the greatest advances of science were made by the disciplined use of it. In contemporary art, ■ literature, and drama imagination might be \dcad, but not in science, which could provide hundreds of arresting ideas awaiting beautiful expression by pen and pencil.