The Act of Creation (18 page)

Travels on the
Amazon and Rio Negro
).
The expedition lasted four years; two years later, in 1854, he published
an article in a scientific journal in which he postulated that 'every
species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a
pre-existing, closely allied species'; all species together thus formed
a 'branching tree'. But, like Darwin earlier on, he did not know what
made the tree grow: 'the question of
how
changes of species
could have been brought about was rarely out of my mind'. Darwin read
the paper and wrote to Wallace that he agreed with 'almost every word'
in it; he added that he himself had been working for twenty years on
the problem and had a 'distinct and tangible idea of its solution'.
One year later the same 'distinct and tangible idea' came to Wallace. In
his autobiography Wallace described how he was 'lying muffled in blankets
in the cold fit of a severe attack of intermittent fever at Ternate'
(an island near New Guinea) when he suddenly remembered Malthus's essay
on population which he had read 'twelve or more years earlier'. [26]
The effect was analogous to that of friction upon the specially prepared
match, producing that flash of insight which led immediately to the simple
but universal law of the 'survival of the fittest' . . . 'It suddenly
flashed upon me that this self-action process [i.e. the struggle for
existence]
would necessarily improve the race
, because in every
generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior
would remain -- that is,
the fittest would survive
. The more I
thought over it the more I became convinced that I had at length found
the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin
of the species.' [27] In the course of the next two evenings, 'in a few
feverish hours', he put his theory into a paper of four thousand words
and sent it off to Darwin, in the pleasant belief that it would be a
surprise to him -- since Darwin had not yet published his own theory,
although he had put it on paper years earlier in several versions and
shown it to his friends.
'I never saw a more striking coincidence', Darwin wrote. 'If Wallace
had my manuscript sketch written out in 1843, he could not have made a
better short abstract.'
Luckily, both Wallace and Darwin acted with a generosity and
reasonableness rare in the annals of science; the result was the
presentation on 1 July 1848 of a joint memoir by Darwin and Wallace to
the Linnean Society, under the title 'On the Tendency of species to form
Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and species by Natural
Means of Selection'. Neither author was present; Wallace was overseas,
Darwin ill in bed. When the paper was read out there was no discussion
and no sign of interest. At the end of the year the President of the
society said in his annual report: 'The year which has passed . . . has
not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at
once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which
they bear.' [28] In November next year
The Origin of Species
was published, and only then did the storm break.
Though both men were constantly ailing from real and perhaps also
from imaginary diseases, Darwin lived to be seventy-three, and Wallace
ninety. Though they differed on some points of theory and though their
opponents tried to play them out against each other, they managed to
remain life-long friends; towards the end of his life Darwin obtained a
pension for Wallace from Mr. Gladstone, and Wallace was one of Darwin's
pall-bearers. At the fiftieth anniversary, in 1909, commemorating
the joint publication of the Darwin-Wallace papers, Wallace modestly
declared that their relative contributions 'could be justly estimated
as the proportion of twenty years to one week' [29] -- which was an
exaggeration, as Wallace's later works, particularly the 'Contributions'
and 'Darwinism' were of considerable importance.
The psychologically fascinating aspect of the story is that the same
bisociative process was triggered off in Darwin's case by reading Malthus,
in Wallace's by the buried memory of Malthus, whom he had read many years
earlier, popping into consciousness at a feverish moment. Thus Darwin's
discovery strikes one as more rational, Wallace's as more dramatic and
bizarre, and this is in keeping with the character of the two men. If
Darwin had more patience and clarity of mind, Wallace had more fantasy
and perhaps even more depth. His remark that selection through survival
of the fittest was a 'self-acting process' anticipated the concept
of negative feed-back. His conviction that the rise of organic life,
the rise of consciousness, and the rise of man represent 'jumps' in the
evolutionary series, due to some 'unknown reality' which has to be added
to the mechanical operation of natural selection, had a religious flavour;
yet his conclusion that 'man and his rise now appear short in time --
explosively short' has been confirmed by contemporary anthropology. If
Darwin had an 'amiable credulity', Wallace believed, among other things,
in phrenology and in the cruder forms of mesmerism and spiritualism. No
wonder he had to dive into the depths of his unconscious mind to bring up
the same trophy which Darwin spied drifting on the surface, and secured
with a boathook.
That both read Malthus is not much of a coincidence as his essay was well
known and discussed at the time; and had it not been Malthus, they could
have extracted the same idea from other sources -- from Erasmus Darwin,
for instance, or from certain passages in Lamarck. The time was ripe;
'it was not the coincidence of discovery that is surprising but rather
the fact that the coincidence was so long delayed'. [30] This remark
by one of Darwin's biographer's is not based on hind-sight, but on the
opinion of Darwin's friends and contempotaries:
'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that,' was Huxley's first
reaction, reflecting that 'Columbus' companions had probably felt the
same way when he made the egg stand on end'. The same thought suggested
itself to the ornithologist Alfred Newton, who did not know whether to be
'more vexed at the solution not having occurred to me, than pleased that
it had been found at all', particularly since it was 'a perfectly simple
solution' of the problem that had been plaguing him for months. . . . Many
of Darwin's friends must have felt as Huxley did . . . and many of his
enemies must have agreed with Samuel Butler: 'Buffon planted, Erasmus
Darwin and Lamarck watered, but it was Mr. Darwin who said "that fruit
is ripe", and shook it into his lap.' [31]
VII
THINKING ASIDE
Limits of Logic
In an old
Alchemist's Rosarium
, whose author I have forgotten,
I once saw two pieces of advice for finding the Philosopher's Stone I
printed side by side:

The Stone can only be found when the search lies heavily on the
searcher. -- Thou seekest hard and findest not. Seek not and thou
wilst find.

The introspective reports of artists and scientists on their
sources of inspiration and methods of work often display the same
contradiction. 'Saturate yourself through and through with your
subject . . . and wait' was Lloyd Morgan's advice. 'Chance only favours
invention for minds which are prepared for discoveries by patent study
and persevering efforts.' This was said by Pasteur, and his meaning goes
here beyond what I have called the factor of 'ripeness': he seems to
regard chance as a kind of legitimate reward, causally related to the
effort -- an almost mystic conception. Souriau's famous 'to invent
you must think aside' --
pour inventer il faut penser à
côté
quoted with approval by Poincaré, points in
the same direction. The consensus, at least among mathematicians, seems
to be that if you strive hard enough to get to India you are bound to
get to some America or other. 'One sometimes finds,' Fleming once said,
'what one is not looking for. For instance, the technician who set out
to find a way to synchronize the rate of fire of a machine-gun with the
revolutions of an air-screw discovered an excellent way of imitating
the lowing of a cow.'
The history of discovery is full of such arrivals at unexpected
destinations, 'and arrivals at the right destination by the wrong
boat. Kepler set out to prove that the universe is built on simple
geometrical or musical principles -- and found that it was built 'on
a cartload of dung': the elliptic orbits. He cekbrated his discovery
with a quotation from Virgil's
Eclogues
where Truth appears as a
teasing hussy: you chase after her until you almost collapse; then when
you have given up she smilingly surrenders.
At times one almost suspects that all these references to mysterious
inspirations and sudden flashes of insight, all these protestations about
'I have no idea how I did it' and
je ne cherche pas, je trouve
,
may stem from an unconscious desire to appear as the privileged master of
some Socratic demon. Yet the evidence for large chunks of irrationality
embedded in the creative process, not only in art (where we are ready
to accept it) but in the exact sciences as well, cannot be disputed;
and it is particularly conspicuous in the most rational of all sciences:
mathematics and mathematical physics. From Kepler and Descartes to Planck
and de Broglie, the working methods of the great pioneers seem to have
been inspired by Einstein's jingle, improvised for the benefit of an
unknown lady who asked him for a dedication on a photograph:

A thought that sometimes makes me hazy:
Am I -- or are the others crazy?

In the popular imagination these men of science appear as sober ice-cold
logicians, electronic brains mounted on dry sticks. But if one were shown
an anthology of typical extracts from their letters and autobiographies
with no names mentioned, and then asked to guess their profession, the
likeliest answer would be: a bunch of poets or musicians of a rather
romantically naïve kind. The themes that reverberate through their
intimate writings are: the belittling of logic and deductive reasoning
(except for verification after the act); horror of the one-track mind;
distrust of too much consistency ('One should carry one's theories
lightly', wrote Titchener); scepticism regarding all-too-conscious
thinking ('It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is
a limit case which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me
connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness Enge des
Bewusstseins,' -- Einstein). This sceptical reserve is compensated by
trust in intuition and in unconscious guidance by quasi-religious or by
aesthetic sensibilities. 'I Cannot believe that God plays dice with the
world,' Einstein repeated on several occasions, rejecting the tendency in
modern physics to replace causality by statistical probabilities. 'There
is a scientitic taste just as there is a literary or artistic one',
wrote Renan. Hadamard emphasized that the mathematician is in most cases
unable to foresee whether a tentative line of attack will be successful;
but he has a 'sense of beauty that can inform us, and I cannot see
anything else allowing us to foresee. This is undoubtedly the way the
Greek geometers thought when they investigated the ellipse, because there
is no other conceivable way.' Poincaré was equally specific:
'It may be surprising to see emotional sensibility invoked à
propos of mathematical demonstrations which, it would seem, can interest
only the intellect. This would be to forget the feeling of mathematical
beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This
is a true aesthetic feeling that all real mathematicians know. The useful
combinations [of ideas] are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those
best able to charm this special sensibility.' Max Planck, the father of
quantum theory, wrote in his autobiography that the pioneer scientist
must have 'a vivid intuitive imagination for new ideas not generated
by deduction, but by
artistically
creative imagination'. The
quotations could be continued indefinitely, yet I cannot recall any
explicit statement to the contrary by any eminent mathematician or
physicist.
Here, then, is the apparent paradox. A branch of knowledge which operates
predominantly with abstract symbols, whose entire rationale and credo
are objectivity, verifiability, logicality, turns out to be dependent
on mental processes which are subjective, irrational, and verifiable
only after the event.
The Unconscious before Freud
The apparent paradox arises out of certain misconceptions about the
process of thinking and about the methods of science. Both originated
in the Age of Enlightenment, and hardened into a dogmatic creed during
the nineteenth century; the rapid expansion of the area of knowledge
exacted its price in a temporary loss of depth. The depth-psychologies
of men like Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung bore through the shallow crust,
but each drove its shafts into one particular direction inhabited by
demons of a particular breed. The concept of the unconscious acquired a
mystical halo and a clinical odour; it became a kind of Pandora's box,
which sceptical psychologists asserted to be empty, while to others it
served as a stage-magician's trunk, equipped with a trapdoor underneath
and secret drawers. A good many of these violent reactions originated in
the mistaken belief that 'the unconscious mind' was, like the Relativity
Theory and sub-atomic physics, an invention of the twentieth century.
In fact, however, the unconscious was no more invented by Freud than
evolution was invented by Darwin, and has an equally impressive pedigree,
reaching back to antiquity; a brief historic retrospect may help to
see it in a broader perspective and a more balanced context. The larger
part of the quotations which follow are taken from L. L. Whyte's book on
The Unconscious Before Freud
(1962) -- a remarkable contribution
to that neglected branch of historiography, the History of Ideas.
I shall not bore the reader with obscure quotations from the Upanishads,
or ancient Egypt and Greece. At the dawn of Christian Europe the dominant
influence were the Neoplatonists; foremost among them Plotinus, who
took it for granted that 'feelings can be present without awareness of
them', that 'the absence of a conscious perception is no proof of the
absence of mental activity', and who talked confidently of a 'mirror'
in the mind which, when correctly aimed, reflects the processes going
on inside it, when aimed in another direction, fails to do so -- but the
process goes on all the same. Augustine marvelled at man's immense store
of unconscious memories -- 'a spreading, limitless room within me --
who can reach its limitless depth?'
The knowledge of unconscious mentation had always been there, as can be
shown by quotations from theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas, mystics
like Jacob Boehme, physicians like Paracelsus, astronomers like Kepler,
writers and poets as far apart as Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and
Montaigne. This in itself is in no way remarkable; what is remarkable
is that this knowledge was lost during the scientific revolution,
more particularly under the impact of its most influential philosopher,
René Descartes, who flourished in the first half of the seventeenth
century.
As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern
philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The
catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms
of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious
thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow rationalism
of "l'esprit Cartesien," and an impoverishment of psychology which it
took three centuries to remedy even in part. But it also had a further,
unexpected consequence. To quote Whyte:

Prior to Descartes and his sharp definition of the dualism there was no
cause to contemplate the possible existence of unconscious mentality
as part of a separate realm of mind. Many religious and speculative
thinkers had taken for granted factors lying outside but influencing
immediate awareness. . . . Until an attempt had been made (with apparent
success) to choose awareness as the defining characteristic of
mind, there was no occasion to invent the idea of  unconscious
mind . . . It is only after Descartes that we find, first the idea
and then the term 'unconscious mind' entering European thought. [1]
Only gradually did the reaction set in -- the realization that 'if
there are two realms, physical and mental, awareness cannot be taken
as the criterion of mentality [because] the springs of human nature
lie in the unconscious . . . as the realm which links the moments of
human awareness with the background of organic processes within which
they emerge'. [2]

Among the first to take up the cudgels against Descartes's 'Cogito ergo
sum' was the Cambridge philosopher Cudworth:

. . . Those philosophers themselves who made the essence of the soul to
consist in cogitation, and again, the essence of cogitation in clear
and express consciousness, cannot render it in any way probable, that
the souls of men in all profound sleeps, lethargies, and apoplexies
. . . are never so much as one moment without expressly conscious
cogitations; which, if they were, according to the principles of their
philosophy, they must, ipso facto, cease to have any being. . . . It is
certain, that our human souls themselves are not always conscious of
whatever they have in them; for even the sleeping geometrician hath,
at that time, all his geometrical theorems some way in him; as also
the sleeping musician, all his musical skills and songs. . . . We have
all experience of our doing many animal actions non-attendingly, which
we reflect upon afterwards; as, also, that we often continue a long
series of bodily motions, by a mere virtual intention of our minds,
and as it were by half a cogitation. . . . [3]

John Locke sided with Descartes, declaring boldly: 'It is impossible
to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive.' John Norris
(1657-1711) retorted with equal boldness:

We may have ideas of which we are not conscious. . . . There are
infinitely more ideas impressed on our minds than we can possibly attend
to or perceive. . . . There may be an impression of ideas without any
actual perception of them. [4]

This was written in 1690.
At about the same time the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote:

One would think, there was nothing easier for us, than to know our own
minds. . . . But our thoughts have generally such an obscure implicit
language, that it is the hardest thing in the world to make them speak
out distinctly. [5]

Leibniz -- Newton's rival as a mathematician, and Descartes's opponent
as a philosopher -- tried to determine quantitative thresholds of
awareness. He came to the conclusion:

Our clear concepts are like islands which arise above the ocean of
obscure ones. [6]

We now enter the eighteenth century. Leibniz's concept of the unconscious
found many followers in Gemany, among them Christian Wolff:

Let no-one imagine that I would join the Cartesians in asserting
that nothing can be in the mind of which it is not aware. That is a
prejudice which impedes the understanding of the mind. [7]

Lichtenberg, a hunch-backed genius, satirical writer, and professor
of physics at Göttingen, regarded dreams as a means to self-knowledge,
and thoughts as products of the
Id
:

It thinks, one ought to say. We become aware of certain representations
which do not depend on us; others depend on us, or at least so we
believe; where is the boundary? One should say, it thinks, just as one
says, it rains. To say 'cogito' is already too much if one translates
it by 'I think'.

The same protest is echoed by Lamartine: 'I never think -- my thoughts
think for me.'
Kant is probably the driest among the great philosophers -- who would
have suspected him among the forerunners of Freud? -- :

The field of our sense-perceptions and sensations, of which we are
not conscious, though we undoubtedly can infer that we possess them,
that is, the dark ideas in man, is immeasurable. The clear ones in
contrast cover infinitely few points which lie open to consciousness;
so that in fact on the great map of our spirit only a few points are
illuminated. [8]

The German physician and philosopher E. Platner -- of whom I confess
never to have heard before -- was, according to Whyte, the first to use
the term
Unbewusstsein
, unconsciousness, and to assert that thinking
is a constant oscillation between conscious and unconscious processes: