Ah, Valentine's Day; and a young man's fancy turns to . . . scientific analysis? Rational inquiry? Neurophysiological investigations?

Love and science? I can hear the involuntary shudders from here. For if ever there were two domains of human activity destined to be severed by an unbridgeable divide, it is the calmly calculating arena of logical rigour and the irrational realm of unbridled passion.

And yet, since the dawn of recorded history, scholars, poets, philosophers, novelists and, yes, scientists have investigated the meaning of love.

Plato's Symposium concerns a moving account of the different types of love and their associated inspirational power, while more than 2,000 years later, the 17th century philosopher Spinoza delineated 59 propositions on the Origin and Nature of the Emotions.

By the 18th century, however, strikingly different sentiments were afoot as the first proponents of the Romantic movement began trumpeting the elemental, life-giving force of the artist who boldly and, to some extent, unconsciously, created his own universe.

These Romantics were deliberately rebelling against what they saw to be the sterile and desiccated constraints of the Enlightenment, where cool (mostly) French savants, flush with their stunning success at explaining the physical world and developing technologies to harness it, began to extend their ideology of progress to the prospect of restructuring human society along rational grounds.

To the Romantics, the Enlightenment philosophies not only represented the most distasteful form of intellectual hubris, with their silly posturing of developing mathematical formulas to order human societies, but also a dangerous encroachment on free will.

For if human beings were, just as plants and comets, objects that subscribed to the irrevocable laws of nature, what room was there for free will? What room was there for morality? Where was, in short, the nobility of the human condition?

The battle lines were drawn: artistic pursuits were typically characterized as Romantic, driven (sometimes unconsciously) by the unbridled passion of their creator. Scientific activities, meanwhile, were linked to the Enlightenment values of the pursuit of discovering the underlying mathematical laws of the natural world.

Today, these distinctions still exist, but they have become operational rather than philosophical.

In an era when the question of free will is hardly a burning issue to your average educated person, a sort of intellectual laziness has taken root. While evolutionary theory is common knowledge and our underlying chemical makeup is emphasized every time we pop pills to soothe our ills, the thought that our basic emotions can somehow be scientifically interpreted seems unpalatable.

The trouble with this argument, just like the trouble with Romanticism, is that it is not real.

Preferring to exist in a world that gives precedence to the primary, irreducible nature of the human will -- a world that pays homage to the ideals of truth, beauty, justice and love while simultaneously asserting their uniqueness and undefinability -- can certainly be tempting and desirable, but that hardly makes it objectively compelling.

Biologists and cognitive psychologists conduct tests on human beings every single day, and our knowledge of neurophysiology is growing rapidly.

Pharmaceutical companies invest heavily on research in the race to develop medication for a variety of physical and psychological ills.

The human brain, doubtless the world's most complicated creation, will one day, for better or worse, become considerably more transparent to us.

That is hardly a palatable thought. The notion that my feelings of love for my wife might one day be simulated on a computer or encapsulated in a pill fills me with a vague sense of nausea. But that hardly means it's impossible.

As the great American physicist Richard Feynman said so pithily many years ago: "Science doesn't care if you're happy or you're not. Science doesn't care if you believe in it or not. Science just is."

When ignorance is bliss, 'tis truly folly to be wise.

For now, shrouded as we are in ignorance at the mind-boggling complexity of the human brain, the poets still have the upper hand. They should enjoy it while they can.