The tension with understanding with the mind, and understanding with the heart, isn’t a new one. Scientist and novelist John Snow in 1959 described the Two Cultures, represented by science and the humanities.
I had assumed that this tension arose in the 20th century. Reading Andrea Wulf’s biography of naturalist Alexander from Humboldt makes clear this the schism goes back further than that. Humboldt himself advocated for combining poetry and science and wrote several books for the lay public. Consider this paragraph about chemist Humphry Davy, an acquaintance of Humboldt’s and the president of the Royal Society from 1820 to 1827:
Maybe more than anybody else, Davy lived what Humboldt was preaching because he was a poet and a chemist. In his notebooks, for example, Davy filled one side with the objective accounts of his experiments, while on the other page he wrote his personal reactions and emotional responses.
Andrea Wulf: The Invention of Nature
It’s a good idea.
Nehaveigur 