What is the central argument of the speaker?
<answer> In this essay, the author figures out the reasons for the variations in the patterns of creativity between the practitioners in science and art. He created an assortment of remarks which contained the answer. He gives examples depicting how the scientists and poets noticed each other explain the contrast in their opinions. Poets like Keats and Wordsworth who are nature's worshippers and believe that nature is sabotaged by humans due to technological advancement. There are a few poets such as Shelley who create poetry on Science. It is very difficult to separate the views of the practitioners and hold them into compartments which are water tight. For example, Darwin enjoyed literature immensely as it provided him joy until the age of 30. By appreciating Shelley’s A Defence of poetry, W. B. Yeats named it “the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry in the English language.” In the end, the author wonders about “why there is no similar A Defence of Science written by a scientist of equal endowment.” Probably, he was aware of the answer to the question.  <context> ...But I must return to the question: why is there a difference in the patterns of creativity among the practitioners in the arts and the practitioners in the sciences? 1 shall not attempt to answer this question directly; but I shall make an assortment of remarks which may bear on the answer. First, I should like to consider how scientists and poets view one another. When one thinks of the attitude of poets to science, one almost always thinks of Wordsworth and Keats and their off-quoted lines A fingering slave, One that would peep and botanises Upon his mother’s grave? A reasoning self-suffering thing. An intellectual AlI-in-AIl! Sweet is the lore which Nature brings: Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things: We murder to dissect. (Wordsworth) Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings. (Keats) These lines, perhaps, find an echo in a statement of Lowes Dickinson, “When Science arrives, it expels Literature”. It is to be expected that one should find scientists countering these views. Thus, Peter Medawar counters Lowes Dickinson by The case I shall find evidence for is that when literature arrives, it expels science… The way things are at present, it is simply no good pretending that science and literature represent complementary and mutually sustaining endeavours to reach a common goal. On the contrary, where they might be expected to cooperate they compete. It would not seem to me that one can go very far in these matters by pointing accusing fingers at one another. So, let me only say that the attitudes of Wordsworth and Keats are by no means typical. A scientist should rather consider the attitude of Shelley. Shelley is a scientist’s poet. It is not an accident that the most discriminating literary criticism of Shelley’s thought and work is by a distinguished scientist, Desmond King-Hele. As King-Hele has pointed out, “Shelley’s attitude to science emphasises the surprising modern climate of thoughts in which he chose to live and Shelley describes the mechanisms of nature with a precision and a wealth of detail unparalleled in English poetry”. And here is A.N. Whitehead’s testimony Shelley’s attitude to Science was at the opposite pole to that of Wordsworth. He loved it, and is never tired of expressing in poetry the thoughts which it suggests. It symbolises to him joy, and peace, and illumination… I should like to read two examples from Shelley’s poetry which support what has been said about him. The first example is from his Cloud which ‘fuses together a creative myth, a scientific monograph, and a gay picaresque tale of cloud adventure’ I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky: I pass through the pores of the ocean and the shores: I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again. The second example is from Prometheus Unbound, which has been described by Herbert Read as “the greatest expression ever given to humanity’s desire for intellectual light and spiritual liberty” The lightning is his slave, heaven’s utmost deep Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on! The tempest is his steed, he strides the air; And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare, Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me: I have none. Let me turn to a slightly different aspect of the matter. What are we to make of the following confession of Charles Darwin? Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley gave me great pleasure; and even as a school boy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially historical plays... I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now, for many years, I cannot endure to read a line of poetry; I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have almost lost my taste for pictures or music... My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. Or consider this: Faraday discovered the laws of electromagnetic induction and his discoveries led him to formulate concepts such as ‘lines of force’ and ‘fields of force’ which were foreign to the then prevailing modes of thought. They were, in fact, looked askance by many of his contemporaries. But of Faraday’s ideas, Maxwell wrote with prophetic discernment The way in which Faraday made use of his idea of the lines of force in coordinating the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction shows him to have been, in reality, a mathematician of a very high order—one from whom the mathematicians of the future may derive valuable and fertile methods. We are probably ignorant even of the name of the science which will be developed out of the materials we are now collecting, when the great philosopher next after Faraday makes his appearance. And yet when Gladstone, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, interrupted Faraday in his description of his work on electricity by the impatient inquiry, “But after all, what use is it?” Faraday’s response was, “Why, Sir, there is every probability that you will soon be able to tax it”. And Faraday’s response has always been quoted most approvingly. It seems to me that to Darwin’s confession and to Faraday’s response, what Shelley has said about the cultivation of the sciences in his Defence of Poetry is apposite The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave. Lest you think that Shelley is not sensitive to the role of technology in moden society, let me quote what he has said in that connection Undoubtedly the promoters of utility, in this limited sense, have their appointed office in society. They follow the footstep of poets, and copy the sketches of their creations into the book of common life. They make space and give time. Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, from which I have just quoted, is one of the most moving documents in all of English literature. W.B. Yeats called it “the profoundest essay on the foundation of poetry in the English language”. The essay should be read in its entirety; but allow me to read a selection Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and the best minds. Poetry, thus, makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life,.. Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is, at the same time, the root and blossom of all other systems of thought. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors or the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. On reading Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, the question insistently occurs why there is no similar A Defence of Science written by a scientist of equal endowment. Perhaps in raising the question I have, in part, suggested an answer to the one I have repeatedly asked during the lecture.