It is the case that, throughout his work -- both his lighter, more journalistic work and the work he saw as his most serious, his anthropology -- Lang privileged facts, stressed the importance of facts, and castigated others for lapses in the presentation of facts. His major challenges to the ideas of others are rooted in the supremacy of facts; there the facts are he says very often in conclusion (Myth, Ritual and Religion 1: 5). In this, Lang's work seems to fit with a question which underlies many of the debates of the second half of the nineteenth century, as science hardened its boundaries and at the same time sent its methods and assumptions out into those areas beyond them. Across the period, at stake in so many debates, in so many developments in scientific understanding and for so many of those who resisted them, is the relation between the substance of the world, that which is experienced through the senses, and what it means. Work in the history and philosophy of science has done much to unravel the complex relations between science and facts, and between science and its supposed `others' through the course of the nineteenth century, but sharp divergences are visible across this work which suggest that there is still much to be said in this area. In particular, despite attempts to see the interactions between science and its perhaps most extreme `other' -- the literary -- as complex and nuanced, these relations are still the site of disagreement. In his study of the legacies of Baconian induction in nineteenth-century science, for example, Jonathan Smith, in Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth- Century Literary Imagination (1994), sees through the period a fundamental instability and equivocation -- between ideas of scientific knowledge and the imagination, between facts and feelings -- at the heart of scientific method and debate. While increasingly through the century he argues that a naïve Baconianism was challenged and the role of imagination and speculation in science was gradually brought to the fore, such shifts could not then help but threaten science's claims to tell the truth and so send it back to its factual basis. In discussing William Whewell's assertion that facts and theories are inseparable, Smith argues that [t]he implication is that ultimately there is no such thing as pure facts, but such an implication would just as clearly threaten the very foundations of science's authority, its access to knowledge that is true and permanent (21).
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