Scottish German-languages scholar Gundula Sharman's 1997 lecture section header, from her conference presentation “Elective Affinities with Ireland: John Banville’s The Newton Letter and Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften”, on the relation between the work of John Banville and German polymath Johann Goethe’s 1809 physical chemistry base masterpiece Elective Affinities (Die Wahlverwandtschaften), the latter of which contains principles, about which Goethe famously defended in the street saying they were “true” and not immoral (Dec 1809), that, according to Sharman, define the “scientific model for human experience.” [1]

“There is an insatiable desire in the human breast to resume in some short formula, some brief statement, the facts of human experience.”

— Karl Pearson (1892), The Grammar of Science [2]

“Snow is the spokesperson for the technologico-Benthamite reduction of human experience to the quantifiable, the measurable, the manageable.”

— Frank Leavis (1962), “The Significance of C.P. Snow” [1]