The Act of Creation (35 page)

philo-sophia
,
the love of knowledge. It was one of the many key concepts they coined
and which are still basic units in our verbal currency. The cliché
about the '
mysteries
of nature' originates in the revolutionary
innovation of applying the word referring to the secret rites of the
worshippets of Orpheus, to the devotions of stargazing. 'Pure science'
is another of their coinages; it signified not merely a contrast to
the 'applied' sciences, but also that the contemplation of the new
mysteria was regarded as a means of purifying the soul by its immersion
in the eternal. Finally, 'theorizing' comes from
Theoria
, again
a word of Orphic origin, meaning a state of fervent contemplation and
participation in the sacred rites (
thea
spectacle,
theoris
spectator, audience). Contemplation of the 'divine dance of numbers'
which held both the secrets of music and of the celestial motions
became the link in the mystic union between human thought and the
anima mundi
. Its perfect symbol was the Harmony of the Spheres
-- the Pythagorean Scale, whose musical intervals corresponded to the
intervals between the planetary orbits; it went on reverberating through
'soft stillness and the night' right into the poetry of the Elizabethans,
and into the astronomy of Kepler.

 

 

It was indeed this sublimated form of Orphic mysticism which, through
the Pythagorean revival in Renaissance Italy, inspired the scientific
Revolution. Galileo, Descartes, and Newton all regarded God as a kind
of 'chief mathematician' of the Universe. 'Geometry existed before the
Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself', [6] wrote
Kepler; and the other giants echoed his conviction. The 'oceanic feeling'
of religious mysticism had been distilled into differential equations;
the mind of the "anima mundi" was reflected in the rainbow colours of
the spectroscope, the ghostly spirals of distant galaxies, the harmonious
patterns of iron-filings around a magnet. In all the 'great and generous
minds', from Nicolas of Cusa down to Einstein, we find this feeling of awe
and wonder, an intellectual ecstasy of distinctly religious flavour. Even
those who professed to be devoid of it based their labours on an act of
faith: the belief that there is a harmony of the spheres -- that the
universe is not a tale told by an idiot, but governed by hidden laws
waiting to be discovered and uttered. 'The mystic believes in an unknown
God, the thinker and scientist in an unknown order; it is hard to say
which surpasses the other in nonrational devotion' (L. L. Whyte). [7]
In a similar vein, Butterfield wrote on the pioneers of the scientific
revolution: 'The aspiration to demonstrate that the universe ran like a
piece of clockwork . . . was itselfinitially a religious aspiration. It
was felt that there would be something defective in Creation itself
-- something not quite worthy of God -- unless the whole system of
the universe could be shown to be interlocking, so that it carried
the patttern of reasonableness and orderliness. Kepler, inaugurating
the scientist's quest for a mechanistic universe in the seventeenth
century, is significant here -- his mysticism, his music of the spheres,
his rational deity demand a system which has the beauty of a piece of
mathematics.' [8]

 

 

It is the axiomatic belief that the pointers on his dials do not move at
random, which makes the readings of his instruments meaningful to the
scientist. Though Eddington may have been justified in saying that the
dials, in the present state of physics, have no more bearing on reality
than telephone numbers, this takes nothing away from the excitement
of watching their motions. After all, to the worshipful lover even her
telephone number acquires some of the magic attraction of the beloved.

 

 

The sublimation of the self-transcending emotions has transformed
'magic' into 'science'; but there is no hard-and-fast boundary between
the two. Unconscious, pre-rational, 'magical' thinking enters both
into the creative act and into the beliefs or superstitious of the
scientist. As Dubos said, 'the alchemist never entirely ceased to live
and function within the academician'. Not only Kepler's astronomy was
derived from belief in the Holy Trinity and the Harmony of the Spheres;
most of the giants of science were similarly inspired by religious,
mystical or transcendental beliefs.

 

 

In
Appendix II
the reader will find this
generalization exemplified by a series of short character-sketches,
from Copernicus and Galileo to Franklin, Faraday, Maxwell, Darwin,
and Pasteur. I shall close this section with three quotations by men
who played decisive parts in shaping the scientific outlook of the
twentieth century. The first is Louis Pasteur, who was born a Roman
Catholic and remained one throughout his life. At the age of sixty he was
elected a member of the Académie Française; the welcoming
speech on that ceremonial occasion was made, ironically, by that great
and wise agnostic, Ernest Renan. In his reply Pasteur explained that
although an inescapable conclusion of thinking, the notion of infinity
is incomprehensible to human reason -- indeed more incomprehensible
than all the miracles of religion: 'I see everywhere in the world the
inevitable expression of the concept of infinity. It establishes in
the depths of our hearts a belief in the supernatural. The idea of God
is nothing more than one form of the idea of infinity. So long as the
mystery of the infinite weighs on the human mind, so long will temples
be raised to the cult of the infinite, whether God be called Brahmah,
Allah, Jehovah or Jesus. . . . The Greeks understood the mysterious
power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the
most beautiful words in our language-the word 'enthusiasm' --
en
theos
-- a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured
by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a
god within -- an ideal of beauty and who obeys it, an ideal of art,
of science. All are lighted by reflection from the infinite.'

 

 

The second quotation is from Einstein who, when questioned about his own
religious views, described them as 'what in ordinary terms one would call
pantheistic'. On another occasion he talked of 'cosmic religiousness':

 

. . . I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most
noble driving force of scientific research. Only the man who can
conceive the gigantic effort and above all the devotion, without which
original scientific thought cannot succeed, can measure the strength
of the feeling from which alone such work . . . can grow. What a
deep belief in the intelligence of Creation and what longing for
understanding, even if only ofa meagre reflection in the revealed
intelligence of this world, must have flourished in Kepler and Newton,
enabling them as lonely men to unravel over years of work the mechanism
of celestial mechanics. . . . Only the man who devotes his life to
such goals has a living conception of what inspired these men and gave
them strength to remain steadfast in their aims in spite of countless
failures. It is cosmic religiousness that bestows such strength. A
contemporary has said, not unrightly, that the serious research scholar
in our generally materialistic age is the only deeply religious human
being. [9]

 

And lastly here is Bertrand Russell, writing at the age of eighty-nine:

 

I must, before I die, find some means of saying the essential thing
which is in me, which I have not yet said, a thing which is neither
love nor hate nor pity nor scorn but the very breath of life, shining
and coming from afar, which will link into human life the immensity,
the frightening, wondrous and implacable forces of the non-human. [10]

 

From the Pythagoreans onward, through the Renaissance to our times,
the oceanic feeling, the sense of participation in the mystery of the
infinite, was the principal inspiration of that winged and flat-footed
creature, the scientist.

 

 

 

The Boredom of Science
We have seen earlier on (
pp. 87-89
) that the
emotional reaction which follows the act of discovery is a complex one,
reflecting the complexity of the motivational drive. There is the sudden
explosion of tension, which has become redundant and must somehow be
worked off in gestures or shouts of jubilation -- an overflow-reaction
continuous with laughter, but of a more individual character because
derived from a more sublimated kind of emotion. Concurrent with it,
there is pure intellectual delight, the peaceful catharsis of the
self-transcending emotions. The first is derived from the fact that 'I'
made a discovery -- the second from the fact that a discovery has been
made, another glimpse of the truth revealed.

 

 

Let me now turn from the creative person's emotional reactions to those
of the audience, to the 'consumer's' point of view. Whether he listens
to a joke, or reads a scientific work, or visits an art gallery, he is
supposed to participate in the intellectual and emotional experiences
of the 'producer' -- to relive or re-create them. The bond between them
is the need for social communication. The consumer hopes that by being
allowed to share the creator's vision he will gain a deeper and broader
view of reality. The producer has an urge to share his own experience with
others -- to win accomplices to his malice, partners in understanding,
resonance for his emotions. In order to succeed, however, he must use
appropriate techniques. In Chapter III (
pp. 82-86
)
I have discussed certain criteria by which to judge the impact of comic
inventions -- originality, emphasis, and economy. Are these criteria of
any value when applied to scientific discovery?

 

 

The importance of
originality
is self-evident. Selective
emphasis
on one particular aspect of reality, with its
concommitant exaggerations and simplifications is, as we saw, the
essence of model-making, and plays almost as great a part in the changing
fashions and 'schools' in science as in art.
Economy
enters in
various ways -- from Occam's razor and the satisfaction derived from an
'elegant' solution to various techniques of enticing the audience in
the lecture-room into an imaginative, re-creative effort.
It is generally supposed that in this respect the creative scientist
and his audience are at a disadvantage. In contrast to the artist,
the scientist is not supposed to appeal to emotions, and the student of
science not to be guided by them. But we have seen that the equation of
science with logic and reason, of art with intuition and emotion, is
a blatant popular fallacy. No discovery has even been made by logical
deduction; no work of art produced without calculating craftsmanship;
the emotive games of the unconscious enter into both.
The aesthetic satisfaction derived from an elegant mathematical
demonstration, a cosmological theory, a map of the human brain, or an
ingenious chess problem, may equal that of any artistic experience --
given a certain connoisseurship. But connoisseurship is equally required
for the true appreciation of any but the most vulgar forms of art; and
particularly for ancient, alien, and 'modern' art. However, the absurd
division of our society into 'two cultures' produced the paradoxical
phenomenon that the average educated person will be reluctant to admit
that a work of art is beyond the level of his comprehension; but he
will in the same breath and with a certain pride confess his complete
ignorance of the principles which make his radio work, the forces which
make the stars go round, the factors which determine the heredity of
his children, and the location of his own viscera and glands.
One of the consequences of this attitude is that he utilizes the products
of science and technology in a purely possessive, exploitive manner
without comprehension or feeling. His relationship to the objects of his
daily use, the tap which supplies his bath, the pipes which keep him warm,
the switch which turns on the light -- in a word, to the environment in
which he lives, is impersonal and possessive -- like the capitalist's
attitude to his bank account, not the art collector's to his treasures
which he cherishes because he 'understands' them, because he has a
participatory relationship to them. Modern man lives isolated in his
artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but
because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work --
of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to
the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence
'unnatural', but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind
it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it,
he leads the life of an urban barbarian.
The historical causes which led to the split between the two cultures
are outside the scope of this book; but I must mention one specific
factor which is largely responsible for turning science into a bore, and
providing the humanist with an excuse for turning his back on it. It is
the academic cant, of relatively recent origin, that a self-respecting
scientist must be a bore, that the more dehydrated the style of his
writing, and the more technical the jargon he uses, the more respect he
will command. I repeat, this is a recent fashion, less than a century old,
but its effect is devastating. The pre-Socratics frequently wrote their
treatises in verse; the ancient Peruvian language had a single word --
hamavec
-- for both poet and inventor. Galileo's
Dialogues
and polemical writings were literary masterpieces which had a lasting
influence on the development of Italian didactic prose; Kepler's
New
Astronomy
is a baroque tale of suspense; Vesalius'
Anatomy
was
illustrated by a pupil of Titian. Even the abstract symbol language of the
mathematicians lent itself to works of art. As the great Boltzmann wrote:
'A mathematician will recognize Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi, or Helmholtz, after
reading a few pages, just as musicians recognize, from the first few bars,
Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert.' And Jeans compared Maxwell's physics
with an enchanted fairyland where no one knew what was coming next.