The above is an extract from Karl Pearson’s seminal The Grammar of Science (1900)—it is also a great irony.
In the previous section, Pearson has told us that poetry is really science—it’s just a collection of facts about the world, and material science will only make our aesthetic judgement better.
In the next section, he uses the poetic allusion “breast” for the seat of consciousness—for the heart, from the ancient contention that the heart is the seat of consciousness.
However, a later reader, in a fit of scientific pique, has struck through “breast”, it being unscientific, and replaced it with the scientifically correct “head”—since science has shown, through facts, that we think with the head, not the heart.
This destroys the poetic and aesthetic sense of Pearson’s sentence and so, ironically, refutes the main thrust of his whole previous section—that science adds beauty to the world and is compatible with aesthetic experience.
I think also that the later reader might have been motivated by some ignorance—perhaps they thought it was a misprint, not being familiar with the use of the word “breast” to convey the seat of consciousness; perhaps there was a sense of feminist outrage at some possibly demeaning reference to the bosom.
But if that it is so it is because they are a later reader, decades later, grown up in a more fully scientific environment than Pearson; and, therefore, I presume they think that my love for you comes “straight from my head”, not the unscientific heart—hence science has “improved” poetry (though nobody, even the person who added “head”, speaks that way).
When people strike through books like that it’s always to do with ego or an over-emotional reaction—and I often see these strike-throughs on the Internet Archive. The lack of self-control and emotional outburst tells you more about the labile state of the people who do this—who are usually wrong or tendentious in their strike through. The sentence offends their ignorance and they must efface it.
Hence it’s not just “head” but “HEAD”—and why not add, as the scrawlers often do, “!!!!!!” (that means I’m right, you see).
However, the strike-throughs do tell you something about the popular prejudices of the time—or often some time after the book was written (the books on the Archive are mostly scanned from libraries—so you can tell from the return dates roughly when the comments were scrawled in the book).
I find it ironic that “Pearson’s grandchildren” effaced his poetic words in a fit of scientific iconoclasm so as to destroy the poetry and render the work more “scientific”.
And who says that you don’t think with your heart, anyway?
After all, it’s where your body gets its rhythm from—and that is a scientific fact.