The Principles of Literary Criticism is a milestone, though not an altogether satisfactory one. Mr Richards had difficult things to say, and he had not wholly mastered the art of saying them; it is probable that what he has there said with much difficulty, he will be able to say better. The present little book [Science and Poetry] marks a distinct advance in Mr Richards' power of expression and arrangement. It is very readable; but it is also a book which everyone interested in poetry ought to read.

The book is notable not because of providing the answer to any question. Such questions as Mr Richards raises are usually not answered; usually they are merely superseded. But it will be a long time before the questions of Mr Richards will be obsolete: in fact, Mr Richards has a peculiar gift for anticipating the questions which the next generations will be putting to themselves…. Exactly what these questions are will cause us some trouble to explain. This book … is, first of all, an enquiry into a new and unexplored aspect of the Theory of Knowledge: into the relation between truth and belief, between rational and emotional assent. It is an essay in The Grammar of Belief; the first intimation that I have met with that there is a problem of different types of belief. It touches on the immense problem of the relation of Belief to Ritual. It sketches a psychological account of what happens in the mind in the process of appreciation of a poem. It outlines a theory of value. Incidentally, it contains much just observation on the difference between true poetry and false. (pp. 239-40)

[Mr Richards' importance] is not in his solutions but in his perception of problems. There is a certain discrepancy between the size of his problems and the size of his solutions. That is natural: when one perceives a great problem, one is the size of one's vision; but when one supplies a solution, one is the size of one's training. There is something almost comic about the way in which Mr Richards can ask an unanswerable question which no one has ever asked before, and answer it with a ventriloqual voice from a psychological laboratory situated in Cambridge. Some of his faiths seem to be knocking each other on the head. "… Our thoughts are the servants of our interests," he says on page 22: it is the up-to-date psychologist speaking. But as we read on we find our thoughts turning out to be very poor servants indeed. For it appears to be to our interest (what is to our interest, we ask) to hold some kind of belief: i.e. a belief in objective values issuing from objective reality. One would expect Mr Richards to maintain—and he does maintain in part—that "science" is purely a knowledge of how things work, and that it tells us nothing of what they ultimately are. "Science," he says…. "can tell us nothing about the nature of things in any ultimate sense." In that case, we should expect that science would leave "the nature of things in their ultimate sense" quite alone, and leave us free to "believe," in the "ultimate" sense, whatever we like. Yet science does interfere with the "ultimate," or Mr Richards would not have had to write this book; for his view is just that science (restricted though it be) has squashed the religious, ritual, or magical view of nature upon which poetry has always depended. I think that Mr Richards will have to reperpend this matter: the objection is not so petty and frivolous as it looks. If one is going to consider philosophically the nature of Belief, it is as dangerous to be a scientist as to be a theologian; the scientist, still more—in our time—than the theologian, will be prejudiced as to the nature of Truth. Mr Richards is apt to ask a supra-scientific question, and to give merely a scientific answer.

In his theory of value, again, Mr Richards asks the suprascientific question, and gives merely the scientific answer. His theory of value appears to be the same as it was in his Principles of Literary Criticism. Value is organization …: "For if the mind is a system of interests, and if an experience is their play (what does "play" mean?) the worth of any experience is a matter of the degree to which the mind, through this experience, attains a complete equilibrium." "Interests," for Mr Richards, tend to be atomic units; a difference of strength between interests tends to be merely quantitative. The difference between Good and Evil becomes therefore only the "difference between free and wasteful organization": Good is Efficiency, a perfectly working mental Roneo Steel Cabinet System. The best life … for "our friend" (whom we wish well) is one "in which as much as possible of himself is engaged (as many of his impulses as possible)." (pp. 240-41)

I am not so unsophisticated as to assert that Mr Richards' theory is false. It is probably quite true. Nevertheless it is only one aspect; it is a psychological theory of value, but we must also have a moral theory of value. The two are incompatible, but both must be held, and that is just the problem. If I believe, as I do believe, that the chief distinction of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever, Mr Richards' theory of value is inadequate: my advantage is that I can believe my own and his too, whereas he is limited to his own. Mr Richards' faculty for belief, in fact, suffers, like that of most scientists, from too specialized exercise; it is all muscle in one limb, and quite paralysed in another. (pp. 241-42)

The whole problem turns on the question whether emotional values can be maintained in a scientific universe…. It seems quite possible, as Mr Richards suggests, that a future increase in scientific knowledge may be accompanied by a steady deterioration in "spirituality" (the word is mine, not Mr Richards'). Mr Richards thinks that the only thing that can save us from "mental chaos" is poetry, a poetry of the future detached from all belief. What this poetry will be I cannot conceive. If his description of the "poetry of belief" were clearer, we should also have a clearer idea of what he means by the poetry of unbelief. If there is such a distinction as he draws, between the poetry of all the past and the poetry of all the future, then I do not think that he is justified in making exceptions of such poems as King Lear. If he is right, then I think that the chances for the future are not so bright as he hopes. Poetry "is capable of saving us," he says; it is like saying that the wall-paper will save us when the walls have crumbled. It is a revised version of Literature and Dogma.

The chief fault of the book is that it is too small; the subject is immense. In the ninety-six pages Mr Richards covers so much ground that I have had to leave some of his most interesting theses, and all of his penetrating and highly valuable criticism of contemporary poetry, untouched. He has worried and tantalized us, and we demand a bigger book. (p. 243)