When he writes that ‘for scientific language a difference in the references [of words] is failure’, I. A. Richards concisely articulates a crisis that plagues scientific discourse: modern science is the paradoxical struggle to describe things as they are within a language that overflows with metaphor, that describes things very much not as they are (Richards 1924: 268). Quarks may be strange, but they are not charming; electrons are not pessimists; genes do not want anything.

The science of feeling in particular seems to demand metaphor. You walk into a silent room and know that the conversation was tense moments before – maybe we call it ‘temperature’, though the coldshoulder is hardly an endothermic reaction. A look in your friend's eyes makes your stomach tighten – you know something is wrong ‘in your gut’, though your digestive tract lacks cognitive capacity.

Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Associationist science and its predecessors sought to describe things precisely as they were. And the scientists who serve as interlocutors for this book belonged to a particularly stringent line of thinking that brooked no abstraction in cause, effect or explanation. The 1693 epistolary exchange between Isaac Newton and the grandfather of philology and English literary criticism, Richard Bentley, presents a neatly packaged summary of this demand. Bentley had recently been nominated as the first Boyle Lecturer, an (ongoing) endowed lecture on science and Christianity, and had opted to use Newton's exciting theories of gravity to accomplish the title of his lectures, ‘A Confutation of Atheism’. The enormity of space – the space between objects at an astronomical level, and the space between atoms at the microscopic level – suggested to Bentley some sort of agent behind the initial gravitational attraction that brought matter together.

Given the vastness of space, how could any atom have ever of its own accord drawn other atoms to it? (This was, of course, long before a cosmological model that proposed an origin of extreme density and rapid expansion.) He calculated the size of the universe, estimated the amount of matter in it, spread those atoms equidistant from one another, and determined: they simply would not affect one another. With an imminent press deadline on his lectures, Bentley hurriedly wrote to Newton to ask his opinion on his calculations and conclusions.