A central theme throughout Lethaby's writings is the conviction that architecture must fuse the ideas and strategies of multiple disciplines and world-views, and in particular, those of ‘art’ and ‘science'. Victorian readings of ‘myth’ demonstrated that such a fusion of ‘art’ and ‘science’ was not only possible, but that it also had distinct advantages. Foremost amongst these was the belief that the language of myth possessed a clarity and efficiency — the ability to speak in multiple ‘tongues’ and communicate with both ‘man’ and ‘child’ — which had been lost in modern language. Suggesting that architecture, ‘to excite an interest, [both] real and general', must ‘possess a symbolism immediately comprehensible [to] the great majority of spectators', the English architect and theorist William Richard Lethaby (1857-1931) applied Victorian observations on myth to the invention of a modern architectural language. In Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891), Lethaby achieved this by arguing that a modern architecture, like the mythic construct of the ‘temple idea', must give representation to both the ‘known’ — rational observations of the phenomenal world — and the ‘imagined’ — subjective inventions of the artisan or architect.