In his fascinating timeline of Western thought, The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas describes the conflict between scientific thought and Romantic perspectives in a post-Kantian world. He notes on p. 377 that "both scientist and artist simultaneously experienced the breakdown and dissolution of the old categories of time, space, causality, and substance. But the deeper discontinuities between the scientific universe and human aspiration remained unresolved."

The key term here is human aspiration. When we look at the motive, spoken or unspoken, that has driven art, religion, literature, and even scientific inquiry, we have to come back again and again to human aspiration. Where there's a conflict between science and the humanities -- and in spite of some efforts by the likes of E.O. Wilson to resolve them, they've been present since Copernicus -- it can be largely pinned on the fact that science hasn't, doesn't, or can't enfold human aspirations into its explanations.