Since antiquity, perceptive thinkers in western culture have maintained that literature has its own rationality, a rationality as valid in its own domain as the reasoning of theoretical and empirical science. The dismissal of literature's rationality in our own scientific era has wreaked havoc in the philosophy of education, sowed discord in religion, and led poets like William Blake to warn of our diminished humanity. And yet, in spite of their uneasy relations, there is a mutuality between literature and science. The author, Jane Rupert, tries to draw out this mutuality and demonstrate the ways in which scientists and philosophers, as well as poets and theologians, have turned to literary reasoning in their work. She attempts to rescue literary patterns of reasoning from the obscurity and dismissal which they tend to be subject to in our modern scientific age.