This semester I am taking English 215 or Textual Analysis and our first assignment was to read an essay by Northrop Frye; The Motive for Metaphor. The essay discussed a lot about what makes literature important but it had an exert about art and science that thought was interesting.

"On this basis, perhaps, we can distinguish the arts from the sciences. Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience; that is, it tries to make itself as convincing and recognizable as it can. you can see why we tend to think of the sciences as intellectual and the arts as emotional: once starts with the worlds as it is and the other with the world we want to have. Up to a point it is true that science gives an intellectual view of reality, and that the arts try to make the emotions as precise and disciplined as sciences do the intellect. But of course it's nonsense to think of the scientist as a cold unemotional reasoner and the artist as somebody who's in a perpetual emotional tizzy. you can't distinguish the arts from the sciences by the mental processes of the people in them use: they both operate on a mixture of hunch and common sense. A highly developed science and a highly developed art are very similar together, psychologically and otherwise. "