It is against such reductionism that Butts stands. As Scylla tells Carston: “If the materialist’s universe is true, not a working truth to make bridges with and things, we are a set of blind factors in a machine. And no passion has any validity and no imagination. They are just little tricks of the machine. It either is so, or it isn’t. If you hold that it isn’t, you corrupt your intellect by denying certain facts. If you stick to the facts as we have them, life is a horror and an insult.” There is no question for Butts of an overall refusal of materialist scientific explanations, no denying certain facts, but no question either of allowing such explanations the custody of the truth of the imagination, the emotions, religious experience. She was interested in the new physics, not least for its own challenge to orthodox materialist assumptions, but found nothing in that or the new psychology (“the merry-go-round of the complex and the wish-fulfilment and the conditioned reflex”) that could replace the beliefs shattered by the discoveries of science. Religion, and with religion the health of humankind, depends on recognition of a spiritual whole, the wholeness of a natural world transfused by the supernatural. Like many writers of the time, and in parallel again with Eliot, she was influenced by Sir James Frazer’s massive proto-anthropological study
