Materialists, Magicians, & Mere Transhumanism: C. S. Lewis’s Case Against “The Science™”
One of the more under-appreciated elements in the apologetics of C. S. Lewis was his war against scientism. This even features in his fictional writings. Some would go as far to say that he extended this criticism to modern science per se,1 though that is a dubious critique at least in confining the scope of “modern science” to something that is more a consequence of the Enlightenment.
There are a few more famous spots in the Lewis corpus that have to do with science. In Miracles, he challenges the notion of uniform “laws of nature,” that may, a priori, circumvent the need to investigate the evidence for supernatural intrusions into our world. There is that subtle undressing of the thoughtless transition of the old language of “the heavens” for its cold replacement “outer space,” underlying the story in Out of the Silent Planet. But these have to do with the content, the confident deliberations, of modern thought. This is not my subject matter. I am more interested in what Lewis thought that science actually is in contrast to what people seem to think it is on a popular level, and how those mistakes can come back to haunt us all.
Science versus Scientism
Lewis’s conception of scientism is of “the notion that the scientific enterprise alone can discover truth.”2 That is standard. Any ism can take a perfectly good thing and make it the lens through which we view all else. Science becomes scientism when we reduce reality to its sensible surface. The first glance becomes the depths, and claiming to be wise we become fools. Whereas the word “science,” from the Latin word for “knowledge” (scientia), used to suggest any knowledge methodically organized into systematic form, by the nineteenth century, the word had settled upon a predominant usage about the material sciences. That need not be problematic, so long as we do not lose our whole heads in the microscope.
We might remember in Mere Christianity, when the objection from modern science—namely, that its so-called “laws of nature” were sufficient to account for what he called the moral law—had to be met. In the first place, he replied, as long as there have been thinking people, both the naturalist and the supernaturalist views have been held, so that it will not to conceive of “the scientific explanation” as equivalent to “what we now know” and other such forms of chronological snobbery. Furthermore, as to method:
You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense. Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks, really means something like, “I pointed the telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 A.M. on January 15th and saw so-and-so,” or “I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so.” Do not think I am saying anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this is the job of science—and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind the things science observes—something of a different kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is “Something Behind,” then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do not usually make them.3
That statement moves further into the limitations of science and is well worth reading in its own context. What matters here is to get a sense of some line of demarcation between that limited conception of science proper versus what is really amateur philosophy masquerading as science. One first way to approach that line is to move from left to right in history and ask how scientific knowledge actually advances or accumulates. Or, is it sometimes one versus the other? Storck compares Lewis’s statements on science with those of Thomas Kuhn, in his controversial work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). At about the same time, in The Discarded Image, Lewis wrote,
The revolution [in biology] was certainly not brought about by the discovery of new facts. When I was a boy I believed that ‘Darwin discovered evolution’ and that the far more general, radical, and even cosmic developmentalism which till lately dominated all popular thought was a superstructure raised on the biological theorem. . . . The truth would seem to be the reverse; that when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support that new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes. . . . We can no longer dismiss the change of Models as a simple progress from error to truth. No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. . . . [E]ach reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s knowledge. Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical.4
In this light, Storck depicts the view Lewis had of the scientist as cross-examiner on behalf of what Kuhn would have called a paradigm. “The scientist works within the confines of a model that simultaneously guides and restricts his research choices. In short, we can say that, ‘nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her.’”5
Now paradigms are inseparable from personal bias, or at least analogous to them. For most, they coincide. This does not necessarily imply a nefarious purpose. It simply demands that the model (or paradigm), as understood by each scientist, research team, or sponsor with their research money, is what it is in a pre-inductive, pre-experimental orientation. They may be right or wrong; they may operate (what is normally the case) from within the paradigm, or from the outside with a challenge. Yet the personal stance is not subject to the scientific method.
The more modest task of true science is to engage in what came to be called a saving of the appearances. This is “the idea that a scientific theory might well adequately explain the phenomena (save the appearances), though it was not necessarily true, simply that it could plausibly account for observable realities.”6 As Lewis explains it,
The business of the natural philosopher is to construct theories which will ‘save appearances’. . . . A scientific theory must ‘save’ or ‘preserve’ the appearances, the phenomena, it deals with, in the sense of getting them all in, doing justice to them. Thus, for example, your phenomena are luminous points in the night sky which exhibit such and such movements in relation to one another and in relation to an observer at a particular point, or various chosen points, on the surface of the Earth. Your astronomical theory will be a supposal such that, if it were true, the apparent motions from the point or points of observation would be those you have actually observed. The theory will then have ‘got in’ or ‘saved’ the appearances.7
This only strikes some people as relativism when one has assumed up front that material phenomena are the only things worth calling “true,” such that if we cannot make an account of truths about them being immutable, necessary, and so forth, then we must imply that such “truth” is relative. At any rate, Lewis was aware of the misgiving: “Nothing I can say will prevent some people from describing this lecture as an attack of science. I deny the charge, of course: and real Natural Philosophers (there are some now alive) will perceive that in defending value I defend inter alia the value of knowledge, which must die like every other when it roots in the Tao are cut.”8
Scientism and Subjectivism
Scientism and subjectivism may both be features of modern thought, but surely, we think, they at least stand as opposites, curiously coexisting. After all, science advances precisely by swallowing up more and more of the subjective into an increasing field of objective facts. This picture is utterly false. One of the ironies of modern thought is that scientism only acquires its lofty “objective” status by a reduction of mind that leads straight toward subjectivism.
Lewis observed that,
“After studying his environment man has begun to study himself. Up to that point, he had assumed his own reason and through it seen all other things. Now, his own reason has become the object: it is as if we took out our own eyes to look at them.”9
We may find that last stage analyzed by Lewis in another essay called “Meditation in a Toolshed.” He draws this distinction between “looking along” as opposed to “looking at” a thing. He begins with a beam of light coming into the toolshed, then moves on to a young man meeting a girl and falling in love, then to a mathematician contemplating formal truth, then to a ritual dance in a remote tribe, and finally to a little girl crying over her broken doll. In each case, along comes a scientist to explain the phenomenon. He is looking at the thing. The young lover, mathematician, tribal dancers, little girl, and Lewis in his toolshed—they were all looking along the same. This raises his question:
You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. Which is the ‘true’ or ‘valid’ experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted … It has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow refutes or ‘debunks’ the account given from inside.10
Again, this might seem to be entirely a shift from the subjective to the objective. But it is precisely here where the modernist had been prematurely self-congratulatory. At first, it would seem that some “scientific account” had reduced previous claims of an objective experience to an object for everyone else to look at—namely, some subject (experiencer) have his experience of either an aesthetic or moral kind to which he assigned some value.
This subjectivism then moves from deconstruction of objective values to scientism’s next step of treating object as patient. In describing the modern view of moral and aesthetic judgments, in contrast to the older objective viewpoint, Lewis says,
It does not believe that value judgments are really judgments at all. They are sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes, produced in a community by the pressure of its environment and its traditions, and differing from one community to another. To say that a thing is good is merely to express our feeling about it; and our feeling about it is the feeling we have been socially conditioned to have. But if this is so, then we might have been conditioned to feel otherwise.11
It is not hard to imagine how this moves from the descriptive to the prescriptive—i.e., from “Their feelings were only conditioned to be so-and-so because of environment and stimulus such-and-such,” to “Then we might very well begin to condition feelings to be otherwise.” All that is required is some alternative environments and stimuli.
We will recall how, in the early going of The Abolition of Man, Lewis moved from a charitable reading of Gaius and Titius to the consideration that they knew all too well what they were doing. They were the deliberate innovators: those who deconstruct to replace one set of values with another. The very fact that these two authors wrote their little textbook debunking what Aristotle called “just sentiments” and Augustine called the ordo amoris, this alone shows that they knew precisely what they were doing. Thus it is not cheap charity, but a finer distinction, at stake in understanding that “These Conditioners are not bad men. It is much worse than that. ‘They are not men at all,’ Lewis writes, ‘[s]tepping outside the Tao [Natural Law], they have stepped into the void’”12
Here we have another opportunity to cross-reference a crucial passage elsewhere—now, from Perelandra, when Ransom’s nemesis Weston becomes the UnMan. He began simply as an adherent to scientism, but, in his journey to Malacandra and back, he had lost whatever was left of himself in soulless space. One loses their humanity when they become unhitched from natural law. They become intoxicated with the promises of shaping space, in which man is a point, and the flattering expectation that the mass of such will thank us later.
It would seem as though scientism was the modernist’s mythos for which subjectivism was his ethos. Whereas traditional myths rooted culture in an imagined origin, the present myth is not rooted at all, but projected into an unaccountable future. Each of its advocates flatters themselves into thinking that they are the hero who will harness the powers of nature, saving the human race from the malevolent abuses of the same powers that everyone else is sure to make of them. He alone will not so abuse them.
Science as the Conquest of Nature?
The “mastery of nature” may seem altogether neutral. That is what technology is. Modern science may be thought to have accelerated the technological curve such that applied science is really its defining quality, or, as Storck describes, “its orientation toward the manipulation of the natural world for the convenience of mankind. This characteristic of modern science has, of course, been noted over and over again, and as one philosopher of science asserted, ‘modern science is not so much the understanding of nature as the art of mastering nature.’”13
We have heard much of man’s conquest of nature. It is usually assumed. We must distinguish how the phrase sells itself and how it winds up. It begins in the narrative of progress. Even as many still die of disease and live in squalor, on the whole, sacrifices give way to a better world. Some such sacrifices are incidental. They were not born in time. That is all. But the purpose of heart surgery was not to fail to find this person a donor versus that person. Every advance moves onward toward the maximum utilitarian good. At least that is the surface assumption.
Lewis then zooms in to space and out to time to give a more accurate picture. “What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.” The airplane and wireless may increase speed of travel and information, but the man on the other end is also “the target both for bombs and for propaganda.”14 The same contraception that removes guilt and duty from pleasure also denies existence. “From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”15
Then there is man himself as the object set for improvement.
In seeing how scientism and subjectivism become modern twins, we saw the feature of reductionism. The inference is made that since what surrounds man can be studied by man in x way, then man himself can be studied by man in x way. There is a similar mental direction when applied science is reduced, just as theoretical science was reduced. Lewis puts himself in the modern voice by surmising,
But many things in nature which were once our masters have become our servants. Why not this? Why must our conquest of nature stop short, in stupid reverence, before this final and toughest bit of ‘nature’ which has hitherto been called the conscience of man? ... Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny.16
The syllogism is irresistible. Science handles nature. Man is part of nature. Therefore, science ought to handle man. But of what exactly does such “handling” consist? Do we mean something like applying medicine to the body or inventing such conveniences as help us to better navigate our world? Perhaps they will answer in the affirmative, though we may ask who is mixing the prescriptions and charting the course.
There is even a relationship between the reduction of Nature—stripped of objective value and final causality—and the religion of progress. There is a great difference between objects of science considered only in terms of “our analytical knowledge and manipulative power,” versus those same objects in the large context of the sort of supernatural reality we and they exist within, or, in other words, “our total reaction”17 to those same objects in their full range of meaning.
From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may “conquer” them. We are always conquering Nature, because “Nature” is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature.18
Now before Lewis moves from here to that final conquest being man’s nature, it is worth pausing for a moment over the transaction itself—this “price.” What we have conquered, on the definition of scientism, is something now reduced, isolated, passive, neutered. He continues, “But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.”19 Consider this language of “gain” and even “sacrifice.” I think that Lewis is hinting at scientism as sacrificing its objects on the altar of a petri dish or a lab table, the object of oblation now appeasing a deity that one might simply call “Progress.” The scientists in this religion are merely the priesthood of this cult.
The Materialist as the Magician
One might remember that note in the Preface to The Screwtape Letters, in which Lewis wrote,
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race has fallen about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.20
All of this empties out in what Lewis refers to as “the magician’s bargain.” Concisely stated, this is to “give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, our selves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.”21 Thus man’s mastery over nature turns out to be, first, the power of some men over others, nature being merely the instrument; but then this turns out to be nature’s power over all, even the innovators.
The mathematical focus of those physicists after Sir Arthur Eddington may also contribute to the priestcraft of scientism. If applied science is the end goal, and so to know nature becomes to manipulate nature; and if the mathematical conception gets us nearer not to essential knowledge but the practical, then it follows, “as the mathematician Henri Poincaré wrote, ‘The object of mathematical theories of physical phenomena is not to reveal to us the true nature of things; that would be an unreasonable claim. Their sole aim is to co-ordinate the physical laws that are made known to us by experiment, but which we could not even express without the aid of mathematics.’”22
It turns out that there is an immaterial dimension that the modernist will allow himself to believe in—but its distinguishing characteristic from a supernatural realm with an infinite personal God is that it remains form and is ready at hand to the new counsel of gods whose reality is verified by the results they derive from its application.
How then do applied science and magic come together? Lewis answers,
The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. . . . There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men. . . . Bacon condemns those who value knowledge as an end in itself: this, for him, is to use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit. The true object is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible. He rejects magic because it does not work, but his goal is that of the magician.23
Consider a few other characters from Lewis’s fiction—in The Magician’s Nephew, where the “Magician, Uncle Andrew, says: ‘Men like me . . . are freed from common rules’” and in That Hideous Strength, where “the technocrats of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (‘NICE’)” propose to be in command of their environment. How do these characters reflect both subjectivism and scientism and how do the two “isms” go together? Here we have the magician and the materialist, or the adherents to subjectivism and scientism. In the above statement from The Screwtape Letters, these are pit as opposites, and the devil is content to steer us into either. In The Abolition of Man, we start to get the sense that they seem to have a symbiotic relationship. They become the same man. The cool-headed man who began with beating his breast over “brute facts” could hardly notice that he has wound up talking about his quest, his consensus, his reflection in the microscope. I am The Science™.
Things move quickly to a detailed dystopia in That Hideous Strength. There was that head that was set up in the attempt to give it new life. Wiegel explains the strict symbolism:
“The name Alcasan,” he writes, “which hints at alchemy and its association with the wonders of modern radiology, also looks forward to the strange misogynistic brew of science and magic that impels the secret agenda of the N.I.C.E.” Alchemy refers to the attempt to transmute base metals into gold, and it also involves the quest to discover the means to human immortality. The latter alchemical goal is what impels the N.I.C.E. The first point to note is that “Alcasan” and “alchemy” share the first three letters and the phonetic sound of the first syllable. Lewis then notes the ethnicity of Alcasan, not to make a point about Arabs in general, but because of the Arabian etymology of the word “alchemy.”24
Actual science was going on that gave Lewis some of these ideas. There was, as Weigel writes, “the first X-ray in 1895 to the realization that there are radioactive elements in 1896, to the discovery of electrons, protons, neutrons ... Science was looking inside what were believed to be the basic building blocks of matter (atoms), and some elements, most notably radium, were found to be truly radioactive. Radium was already used to treat cancer at the turn of the century, and, as Morrisson explains, the fascinating element was thought to have regenerative effects on human cells.”25
I mentioned in passing some who take Lewis’s critique of scientism to be a broader criticism of the possibilities of science per se. I have Thomas Storck, especially, in mind. He writes,
And in fact it is not “the modern scientific movement” that he refrains from attacking, but rather, as he goes on to say, “a new Natural Philosophy,” one based perhaps on the scientific ideas of Goethe or even Rudolph Steiner, and that “would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself.” But this is hardly science as understood or practiced today. Of course, in Lewis’ understanding such an activity would be genuine science, but it would not be what we know as “modern science.”26
Storck was writing in a cultural bubble, in that “positive world” fog in between the end of WWII in 1945 and that globalist technocratic overreach of 2020, where the credibility of a scientific consensus took perhaps the biggest hit than at any other time in the modern era. Just prior to this, science was viewed at “the end of history” and thus the end of ideological manipulation. Inside that bubble, Lewis’s alarm bells may have seemed quaint.
Those in the Baby Boom generation and even some of those in Generation X, who grew up with the few network news sources, the local paper, public broadcasting, and the public school system, can read Lewis and assume that when he begins to transition from subjective debunking to “innovators,” or when he weaves such characters into his story, that he is only allegorizing some other-worldly point of Christian apologetics. He certainly cannot be winking forward to the same sort of things that one’s tinfoil-hat-wearing uncle wants me to check out in the documentary. It may well be that not everyone is as profound and subtle of a storyteller as Lewis, but it does not follow that the same horse sense, as the old timers would call it, is not at work in them both.
In fact, the “head” and the end of immortality at NICE prefigured the “cloud” in the transhumanist project of today. Weigel gives us the setting: “According to Filostrato, human consciousness needs to be separated as far as possible from the human body, and human reproduction is to be accomplished ‘without copulation.’ The ‘artificial man,’ Filostrato says, ‘who will not die’ will be ‘free from Nature.’”27 One will have to read that third installment of The Space Trilogy to appreciate all this. But the head they attempted to set up is analogous to the way the cloud will function in the description of Yuval Noah Harari, as a “real” intelligent designer, or in giving oneself to the efficiency of the Neuralink of Elon Musk’s vision. And of course the quest for a form of immortality is nothing new, but it now takes on the more explicit transhumanist lingo which is also a continuation of the flight from objective nature.
Now I should close this section by mentioning that Lewis was able to say all of this so well—or, perhaps, able to say it at all—because of a certain advantage that mythical writing has, that theoretical writing has not. Weigel writes that, “In Lewis’s essay ‘Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said,’ he explains that these stories allow an author to steal past ‘certain inhibitions,’ or ‘watchful dragons.’”28 Sometimes “watchful dragons” can include publishing or other media censors, but other times, these can include the gatekeepers functioning under the guise of “peer review,” forcing the assertive author to die with them in their effeminate death of a thousand qualifications. In giving a second reason, Lewis follows Aristotle: “The true difference” between the historian and the poet explains Aristotle, “is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.”29 “As he puts it in the first book of the Ransom Trilogy—Out of the Silent Planet—“our only chance was to publish in the form of fiction what would certainly not be listened to as fact.”30
Concluding Thoughts on Avoiding the Abolition of Man
Lewis says, “There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.” Is this formula, or “law,” he proposes true inevitably with respect to any advance of applied science? If not, under what exact conditions could applied science advance without such enslaving consequences? One will realize soon enough that all answers lead to the urgency of local borders siphoning power away from central planners. Lewis was not a fan of the excesses of the industrial revolution. Some may even want to dismiss this part of his thesis on that basis. If it were up to him, perhaps that would be no factories near the countryside and not simply no government grants flowing to unaccountable laboratories. But again, such a dismissive thought is now seen to be a luxury we no longer have in a post-2020 world. Many have concluded that globalism—and its technocratic elite in particular—are no allies to human liberty; yet there seems to be no unanimous opinion on how exactly to stop them.
Lewis speaks of a “final stage” of this demonic mastery of human nature project. The new organism that is still, for the moment, calling itself “human” can almost smell victory in its contest with old nature. “But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please?”31 Planners there have always been, and their sites were always set on education. “But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased … The second difference is even more important. In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao.”32
As to reassessments of modern knowledge—and this is especially where those who think Lewis is criticizing science per se ought to read more carefully—he says, “It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighborhood and at an inauspicious hour. Its triumphs may have been too rapid and purchased at too high a price: reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required.”33
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1. cf. Thomas Storck, “Saving the Appearances? C. S. Lewis’s Critique of Scientific Knowledge,” Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, 2016, Vol. 10 (2016), 51-66.
2. Storck, “Saving the Appearances?” 51.
3. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 32.
4. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, 1964), 220-2.
5. Storck, “Saving the Appearances?” 58.
6. Storck, “Saving the Appearances?” 61.
7. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 14-15.
8. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 82.
9. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” in Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 89.
10. Lewis, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” in God in the Dock: Essays in Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 213.
11. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” 90.
12. Joseph Weigel, “N.I.C.E Alchemy: The Quest for Immortality in That Hideous Strength” in Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, 2024, Vol. 18 (2024), 182.
13. Storck, “Saving the Appearances?” 53.
14. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 66.
15. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 67.
16. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 61.
17. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 79.
18. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 79.
19. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 78.
20. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 15.
21. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 80.
22. Storck, “Saving the Appearances?” 57.
23. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 83, 84
24. Weigel, “N.I.C.E Alchemy: The Quest for Immortality in That Hideous Strength,” 185.
25. Weigel, “N.I.C.E Alchemy: The Quest for Immortality in That Hideous Strength,” 186, 187.
26. Storck, “Saving the Appearances?” 53.
27. Weigel, “N.I.C.E Alchemy: The Quest for Immortality in That Hideous Strength,” 189.
28. Weigel, “N.I.C.E Alchemy: The Quest for Immortality in That Hideous Strength,” 180.
29. Weigel, “N.I.C.E Alchemy: The Quest for Immortality in That Hideous Strength,” 180.
30. Weigel, “N.I.C.E Alchemy: The Quest for Immortality in That Hideous Strength,” 184.
31. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 70.
32. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 70, 71.
33. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 84, 85.
