Laura Riding, The Telling (1967)

In philosophy, and wherever else intellects adventure, lifeless systems, to take the place of live thought, are borrowed from science with reckless hand now, that we may be rid of pain of mind and travail of soul in our engagements with the unknown. The time, in love with easy knowledge and fast knowledge, has created a new materialism to minister to the appetites of the intellect. Human things are broken up into unreal pieces by this hasty learning-lust, studied in their supposed particulars at scientific remove; and in their reality they are far less visible through science's glass than with the naked eye of human selfhood. The sciences that purport to treat of human things - the new scientific storyings of the social, the political, the racial or ethnic, and the psychic, nature of human beings - treat not of human things but mere things, things that make up the physical, or circumstantial, content of human life but are not of the stuff of humanity, have not the human essence in them.