For years in our society, there has been an age-old crotchety debate over Imagination vs. Reality and Creativity vs. Practicability; in essence the debate over Literature vs. Science.

Students of literature are considered to be too deeply immersed in their utopian view of life, which is dogmatically romantic and out of touch from actuality whereas students of science are either considered to be too brilliant or termed as mechanical beings, not fit enough to exercise any form of creativity.

Literature, which happens to be a beautiful subject, seems to charmingly condition the thought processes of the individuals who own it.

Science, which happens to be emblematic of all practicability, nurtures one’s mind and engenders a yearning to learn and discover more.

Both develop a need to collect diverse thoughts, and reorganize evaluations.

It is not about how you think, it is about how you are made to think and believe that makes you different. Like one peels off the raw layers of a stone in order to get to the finer, precious part of it, that’s how literature and science refine and polish the mental faculties of an individual. They change man’s perception about the world he inhabits, and change the outlook of the physical world before man’s eyes too.

The mental faculties that make us understand literary pieces, are the same that make us understand scientific discourse. Two things, observation and experience, carve out man’s mental faculties to grasp the creative imagination of a rhetorician in literature as much as they help to make him comprehend the signs, symbols and theories in science.

Why then science and literature are always kept side by side and the need to establish a gauge to measure them against each other is proposed? 

In his speech at the Royal banquet, Prof. Huxley offered some suggestive and thought-provoking remarks on the relationship between science and literature. “I imagine,” he said, “that it is the business of the artist and of the man of letters to reproduce and fix forms of imagination to which the mind will afterwards recur with pleasure; so, based upon the same great principle by the same instinct, if I may so call it, it is the business of the man of science to symbolize, and fix, and represent to our mind in some easily recallable shape, the order, and the symmetry, and the beauty that prevail throughout Nature”.

Science and Literature are both products of one’s observation and experience. Literature is engendered when a creative imagination is at work and science is engendered when a curious imagination is at work.

Irving Wallace writes in the afterword to The Prize that his imageries and representations of Stockholm and the Nobel ceremonies are factual; however, he continues, “the characters who people these pages . . . are make-believe; and the entire plot [is] purest fabrication. . . . If the characters or situations have . . . any counterparts in real life, the resemblance must be accepted as surprising coincidence.”

One inhales experience over a course of time, and exhales literature. It is the reason why most pieces of literature are too close to reality, the characters are organic and pulsate with life. Similarly, one inhales curiosity, and exhales symbols and theories that satiate the hunger to know the undiscovered truth behind them. They differ, however, in the way they are penned down: a matter of mere academics. 

Demanding a writer to “prove” his literary work as “real”, is pretty much like commenting upon a scientist’s long-held research as being, “unreal”. It takes to literally burn all peripheries to shape a veritable piece, valid enough to be accepted in either literature or science, and hence, both disciplines are tyrannically real in their own realms.

Anthony O’ Hear in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, talks about science and the other human endeavors as ways of aiming “at the discovery of causes and regularities in the physical world . . . with an existence apart from us”. He further talks about humanities and arts as concerned with “the way things appear to us, matter to us, and have significance for us”. With regards to the aforementioned reference, be it literature or science, both are human activities and human constructions. Not only would it be criminal to understate one in front of the other but also would it be unethical to doubt the measureless expanse of any one of them.

The consideration of Psychoanalysis, as being taught as a valid literary theory today, goads one into believing how Freud might not have been completely oblivious about the potential of his psychoanalytical theories to be applied to works of pure literature. The various psychoanalytic complexes being applied to D.H. Lawrence’s works, is material enough to create the realization that literature and science do have the features to coincide in some space without bounds.

Each discipline exerts a unique influence on the other in terms of its complexities and concerns. Newton would not have been alive in history as a mathematical genius, had he not housed the streak of curiosity within his disposition. What drove his curiosity to the level of exploring mathematical marvels from merely offering a mark of attentive observation towards a falling apple, was the force of imagination itself. Likewise, it was the same imagination that helped Ibsen carve his evaluations and analysis about the state of affairs of his society, through the infrastructure of his drama.

Conclusively, by establishing both as disciplines with irreconcilable complexities and hence by understating one in front of the other, neither would we serve science, nor would we do any good to literature. What all individuals would unanimously agree to, is the idea that be it literature or science, it is but important to let an individual explore and elevate himself. This self-elevation is what would help him enlighten his mind, and only then can we have more of Ibsens and more of Newtons in our bags to ultimately be proud of ourselves for giving them a chance to surface, to burgeon, and to make history.