France is not at war with the sciences

[jody1]

"To write about literature and science of the nineteenth century requires the suspension of belief
in what C. P. Snow described as an intellectual life made up of two cultures. Or, more precisely,
it requires that  one recognize that science and literature are distinct activities that have often
entertained shared concerns in a common pursuit of knowledge. And an accurate historical perspective
requires additional distancing: if the nineteenth century challenged the belief in two cultures,
then the belief did not begin in the twentieth century. Pascal was already describing it, in the
seventeenth century, when he discussed the opposition between the 'esprit de finesse' and 'the esprit
de géométrie.' With these terms he named the mind seeking knowledge by critically using intuitive
insight and the mind demanding mathematical formalism as the ultimate criterion of knowledge. These
two types of mind characterize, respectively, the modern academic humanist and the contemporary
scientist. The opposition of two types of knowledge—or minds—underwrites what many see as the
institutionalization of two cultures in the modern university. However, this opposition must go
back at least to the mathematically inclined Plato and his attack on poets in The Republic. And
I would maintain, Pascal notwithstanding, that the opposition does not accurately describe the
history of all the relations between literature and science. The point of this book will be
precisely that nineteenth-century novelists in France wanted to overcome the distinction between
two minds or two cultures..."

Fiction Rivals Science: The French Novel from Balzac to Proust

https://www.academia.edu/6855149/Fiction_Rivals_Science_The_French_Novel_from_Balzac_to_Proust