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AnnaP's picture

There is no frigate like.... reason?

When talking about “Organs of extreme perfection and complication,” Darwin states that “His reason ought to conquer his imagination; though I have felt the difficulty far too keenly to be surprised at any degree of hesitation in extending the principle of natural selection to startling lengths” (212). He seems to say that, if we let ourselves trust reason and let it carry our thoughts, reason can take us places where even our imaginations don’t have the power to take us. I think this is particularly interesting because literature sometimes seems to imply the opposite; that imagination can take us where reason cannot. Doesn’t science then become a sort of literature if it is asking us to trust in something that we can never know, and to imagine what then might be possible? I wonder, however, if my last two statements are just different sides of the same coin, and if it just puts science and literature on the same plane of being different types of story-telling.

 

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