What doesn’t exist (art) seems more precious than what does (science)

Aile scientific language is merely denotative. serving to denote 

Science deals with facts, and art with values (whatever they are!). 

The Victorian man of letters spent much of his time seeking to coat unpalatable scientific truths with the sugar of spiritual consolation. 

Science’s chilling reports on the material world were not what the spiritual self, hungry for purpose and transcendent value, wanted to hear.rt is organic, science is mechanical. 

Poetic language is richly connotative, (associations connected to a word is known as its connotative meaning)

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 Humanism prizes pedigree, provenance, heritage and tradition; evolutionary science seems to offer struggle, disruption, waste and chance in their place.

 for the persistence of an activity so complex, so costly in time and resources and of so little apparent benefit to the competitive struggle for existence. Storytelling makes us more skilled in social situations, speeding up our capacity to process information and allowing us to test out alternative scenarios. It allows us to think beyond the here and now, which brings evolutionary benefits in its wake. Narratives can consolidate and communicate social norms, providing us with models of co-operation. As a richly patterned form of cognitive play, art serves to stimulate a flexible mind, modifying key perceptual, cognitive and expressive systems in ways conducive to our evolutionary flourishing. It improves our attunement to one another, thus fostering sociability within the group, and develops habits of imaginative exploration which can have a pay-off in real life. It raises our confidence by allowing us to reshape the world on our own terms, as well as offering us general principles and social information which can guide our behaviour and improve our decision-making. Fiction increases our range of behavioural options, acquaints us with risks and opportunities, and supplies the emotional resources needed to cope with inevitable setbacks.

source:  Terry Eagleton London Review of Books

No appeal to Darwin is necessary to claim that art can refine our senses or yield us a sharper sense of other minds

We learn a lot in one sense about our responses to art, and in another sense precious little, by being told that ‘neurons in the substantia nigra and the ventral tegmental areas of the brain secrete dopamine in reaction to the surprising but not to the expected.’

Part of its point, however, may lie in not having a poin