something is happening today that throws new light on
religious, and so on all, values.

Critics analyze poetry in terms of myth and do not
mean that poetry deals with the unreal or the superstitious.
Poets and novelists follow Mr. Eliot into the church.
Critics discover that fictional naturalism has run its course
and that at best it was severely limited in the quantity and
quality of reality it could reveal. The same kinds of young
people who in the twenties were followers of Mencken
are now devoted to Charles Williams. Scientists argue that
science itself must become "humanistic" and philosophi-
cal. Jung's psychology, capable of a religious interpreta-
tion, is absorbed into literary criticism. Books like Lecomte du Nouy's
Human Destiny start heated debates in aca-
demic circles. Arnold Toynbee, who is thought by bright
young historians with neo-Marxist leanings to have spoiled
his history by taking his cue from myth and some of his
assumptions from Christianity, is studied as seriously as
Spengler was twenty-five years ago, and by the same sort
of people. These are straws in the wind. Poetry has sur-
vived, and religion is not safely dead. All of which means
that an examination of the relations of science and poetry
must be undertaken today in very different terms from
those of Mr. Richards.

Just what those terms are in this volume I think I
should try to state immediately. For scientific "objectiv-
ity"--which in literary scholarship and particularly in
criticism seems to me an ideal either impossible to attain
or attainable only at the price of triviality--is particularly
impossible of attainment in such a study as this. But
simple honesty requires that one state one's assumptions
so far as he is conscious of them; for the assumptions we

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