Unacknowledged legislators

In 'A Defence of Poetry', Shelley warned that science which enlarges man's power over the outer world, without poetry, makes his inner world shrink. Having enslaved nature, man himself remains a slave.

He claimed that poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the best and happiest minds, and that it holds within it all knowledge.

Poets, he wrote, are like mirrors of the gigantic shadows that the future casts upon the present. And poets are 'the unacknowledged legislators of the world': they shape the world's laws and values, though nobody gives them credit for it.

Chandrasekhar asks why no scientist has ever written an equal 'Defence of Science'. The question itself hints at his answer: perhaps science has not yet found a way to speak for the inner life.

In an interview printed with the lecture, Chandrasekhar says that science is a shared, integrated effort, built by many people. He remembers his mother telling him of the death of the great mathematician Ramanujan, and he wonders whether all his own work has been worth it.

Poetry defends the inner life; science has not yet defended itself.