Can Psychology and Physics provide salvation & comfort...for the whole man? Only if they are re-defined so as to basically subsume religion.
"Scientists/witches like Watho attempt to know nature, but are in error: “human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God’s science” (2, 236). MacDonald does not contradict science, nor does he press a theistic interpretation onto his readers. In fact, allegorising too would come close to an “undoing the tapestry” which would be quite alien to MacDonald. Rather he replaces anthropocentric science with an ecological perspective in which nature and its “sympathetic forms” come first, whether religious/fantastic or scientific/rational."
I find myself in basic agreement with John Pridmore when he writes that “the discourse which thus speaks of nature has its own authenticity and autonomy—The theistic and non-theistic accounts of nature are neither incompatible nor is the one to be reduced to the other.” This is not synthesis nor dichotomy."Instead MacDonald’s art is to present nature in a natural form, that is, in the form of the fairy tale. The cut-up, labelled, specimen means nothing; the flower is everything: “To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it” (Unspoken Sermons)
Obviously, Goethe is triumphant in this. Goethe and Novalis. RH Gammel's work on F. Thompson's poem might be a modern example of such attempts to get at truth through the very avoidance itself of "numbering the people", the sin which David was punished for. Is Science potentially demonic in its invitation to consider that Man Can Live By Bread Alone?
