In “Careless Engagements: Literature, Science, and the Ethics of Indifference in Early Modernity,” David Carroll Simon (Comparative Literature) offers a new account of the emergence of experimental science in seventeenth-century England, uncovering the affective dimensions of objectivity. Mr. Simon argues that an interest in the ethical advantages of peaceful “nonchalance” (to use Michel de Montaigne’s term) gave rise to the epistemological breakthroughs for which experimentalism is best remembered. The acute receptivity of the scientific observer could only be achieved through an effortless insouciance that forestalled any adherence to dogma. Unlike the Stoic indifference with which early modern science is often mistakenly identified, experimentalist carelessness was not a product of arduous self-discipline but an unlabored and unpredictable experience. Mr. Simon explores the capacity of literary form to solve the paradox of a mode of feeling that had to be cultivated but also, by definition, could not be. Experimentalist texts were technologies of emotion that induced the experience of casual indifference on which the cognitive openness of the new science depended.