The Act of Creation (97 page)

p. 256
).
One might as well identify 'the artist' with the factory-girls who put
in the colour on 'hand-painted' souvenirs.

 

 

It is a fallacy of relatively recent origin. Tillyard [1] and
Marjorie Nicolson [2] have shown how profoundly the Pythagorean
revival had influenced Shakespeare and transformed the Elizabethan
world-picture. Perhaps the greatest experience of Milton's youth was
peering for the first time through a Galilean telescope:

 

Before [his] eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary Deep -- a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension . . .

 

And we remember John Donne's excitement caused by Kepler's discoveries:

 

Man hath weav'd out a net, and this net throwne
Upon the Heavens, and now they are his owne . . .

 

The sense of wonder was shared by mystic, poet, and scientist alike;
their falling apart dates only from the end of the nineteenth century.
In Book One,
XI
, I have discussed the scientist's
motivational drive, and the emotions to which it gives rise: the present
appendix is meant to illustrate these general considerations by concrete
examples from the lives of a few outstanding men.

 

 

 

Aristotle on Motivation

 

 

The mental image that one tries to form of a white-clad, sandalled member
of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, living around 530 B.C. in Croton, southern
Italy, is necessarily hazy. But at least we know that the Brotherhood was
both a scientific academy and a monastic order; that its members led an
ascetic communal life where all property was shared, thus anticipating
the Essenes and the primitive Christian communities. We know that much
of their time was spent in contemplation, and that initiation into the
higher mysteries of mathematics, astronomy, and medicine depended upon
the purification of spirit and body, which the aspirant had to achieve
by abstinences and examinations of conscience. Pythagoras himself, like
St. Francis, is said to have preached to animals; the whole surviving
tradition indicates that his disciples, while engaged in number-lore and
astronomical calculations, firmly believed that a true scientist must be a
saint, and that the wish to become one was the motivation of his labours.

 

 

The Hippocratics followed a materialist philosophy; yet that wonderfully
precise ethical commandment, the Hippocratic Oath, prescribed not only
that the physician should do everything in his powers to help the sick,
but also that he should refrain, in the patient's house, 'from any act
of seduction, of male or female, bond or free' -- a truly heroic act
of self-denial. The motivation of Greek science in general was summed
up in a passage by Aristotle, from which I have briefly quoted before
(my italics):

 

Men were first led to study [natural] philosophy, as indeed they are
today, by wonder. At first they felt wonder about the more superficial
problems; afterwards they aavanced gradually by perplexing themselves
over greater difficulties; e.g., the behaviour of the moon, the
phenomena of the sun, and the origination of the universe. Now he who is
perplexed and wonders believes himself to be ignorant. Hence even the
lover of myths is, in a sense, a philosopher, for a myth is a tissue
of wonders. Thus if they took to philosophy to escape ignorance, it is
patent that they were pursuing science for the sake of knowledge itself,
and not for utilitarian applications. This is confirmed by the course
of historical development itself. For nearly all the requisites both
of comfort and social refinement had been secured before the quest
for this form of enlightenment began. So it is clear that we do
not seek it for the sake of any ulterior application. Just as we call
a man free who exists for his own ends and not for those of another,
so it is with this which is the only free man's science: it alone of
the sciences exists for its own sake. [3]

 

It is musing to note Aristotle's belief that applied science and
technology had completed their task long before his time -- as the
italicized lines and other passages in his writings clearly indicate. His
statement is somehow biassed, because it does not take into account the
utilitarian element in the origin of geometry: land-surveying, and of
astronomy: calendar-making. Nevertheless, his summing up of the motives
which drove the Greek men of science seems to be by and large true. Thus
Archimedes, the greatest of them, was compelled by necessity to invent
a whole series of spectacular mechanical devices -- including the water
screw, and some engines of war which brought him all the fame and glory
an inventor can dream of. Yet such was his contempt for these practical
inventions that he refused to leave a written record of them. His passions
were mathematics and pure science; his famous words, 'give me but a firm
spot on which to stand and I will move the earth' reflect a metaphysical
fantasy, not an engineer's ambitions. When Syracuse fell in 212 B.C. to
the Roman general Marcellus, the sage, in the midst of the turmoil and
massacre, was calmly drawing geometrical figures in the sand; according
to tradition, his last words were -- after being run through the body
by a Roman soldier: 'Pray, do not disturb my circles'. Apocryphal or
not, that tradition symbolizes the Greek attitude to science as a quest
transcending the mortal self.

 

 

 

The Leaders of the Revolution

 

 

After the long dark interlude which came to an end with the Pythagorean
Renaissance in Italy around A.D. 1500, four men stand highlighted on
the stage of history: Copernicus, Tycho, Galileo, Kepler. They were the
pioneers of the scientific Revolution, the men on whose shoulders Newton
stood: what do we know about their personal motives -- which ultimately
changed the face of this planet?

 

 

We know least about Copernicus (1473-1543); as a person, he seems to
have been a pale, insignificant figure, a timid Canon in the God-forsaken
Prussian province of Varmia; his main ambition, as far as one can tell,
was to be left alone and not to incur derision or disfavour. As a student
in Italy, he had become acquainted with the Pythagorean idea of a sun
-centred universe, and for the next thirty or forty years he elaborated
his system in secret. Only in the last year before his death, at the age
of seventy, did he agree, under pressure of his friends and superiors,
to publish it; the first printed copy of his book
On the Revolutions
of the Heavenly Spheres
reached him on the day of his death. It is
one of the dreariest and most unreadable books that made history, and
remained practically unnoticed for the next fifty years, until Kepler
took the idea up (the Church turned against it only eighty years after
Copernicus's death).

 

 

Copernicus was neither an original nor even a progressive thinker; he was,
as Kepler later remarked, 'interpreting Ptolemy rather than nature'. He
clung fanatically to the Aristotelian dogma that all planets must move
in perfect circles at uniform speeds; the first impulse of his long
labours originated in his discontent with the fact that in the Ptolemaic
system they moved in perfect circles but not at uniform speed. It was the
grievance of a perfectionist -- in keeping with his crabbed, secretive,
stingy character (which every Freudian would gleefully identify as the
perfect 'anal' type). Once he had taken the Ptolemaic clockwork to
pieces, he began to search for a useful hint how to put it together
again; he found it in Asistarchus's heliocentric idea which at that
time was much in the air.* It was not so much a new departure as a last
attempt to patch up an outdated machinery by reversing the arrangement
of its wheels. As a modern historian has said, the fact that the earth
moves is 'almost an incidental matter in the system of Copernicus which,
viewed geometrically, is just the old Ptolemaic pattern of the skies,
with one or two wheels interchanged and one or two of them taken out.' [4]
For 'four times nine years', as he later confessed, Copernicus had worked
in secret on his book, hugging it to his aching heart -- it was the timid
Canon's only refuge from a life of frustrations. It was his version of
the harmony of the spheres.
Tycho de Brahe (1546-1601) was an irascible, boastful Danish nobleman,
trucculent and quixotic, born with a silver spoon in his mouth -- to
which a silver nose was added later, for his own had been sliced off in a
duel with another noble Danish youth, who had the temerity to claim that
he was the better mathematician of the two. Devotion to science could
hardly assume more heroic proportions. But with Tycho everything was on
a heroic scale: his figure (he kept, perhaps for the sake of contrast,
a dwarf as a court jester); his eating and drinking, which led to his
premature death from a burst bladder -- because, with quixotic courtesy,
he refused to leave the dinner table to pass water (even his pet animal,
a temperamental elk, died of drinking too much beer); his quarrels with
the kings he entertained, with the fellow astronomers whom he slandered,
and with retainers whom he put in chains. On an even more gigantic scale
were his observatories and the instruments -- the likes of which the
world had never seen -- built on his island in the Sund.
At fourteen Tycho had witnessed a partial eclipse of the sun, and
'it struck him as something divine that men could know the motions of
the stars so accurately that they were able a long time beforehand to
predict their places and relative positions'. [5] From then onward his
course was set, and he became the 'Phoenix of Astronomy' -- against
the resistance of his family who thought such plumage unworthy of a
nobleman. The decisive revelation for him was the
predictability
of astronomical events -- in contrast to the unpredictability of a
child's life among the headstrong Brahes (Tycho had been kidnapped from
his cot and brought up by his Uncle Joerge, a squire and admiral). His
passion for astronomy began much earlier than Copernicus's and Kepler's,
and took a direction almost opposite to theirs: it was not a passion
for theory-making but for exact observation. Unlike those two, he was
neither frustrated nor unhappy, merely irritated by the triviality of
a Danish nobleman's existence among 'horses, dogs, and luxury'.
He took to astronomy not as an escape or metaphysical lifebelt but rather
as a hobby -- which then turned into the only thing held sacred by that
Gargantuan heathen.
* * *
'You cannot help it, Signor Sarsi, that it was granted to me alone
to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody
else.' [6] The most conspicuous feature in the character of Galileo
(1564-1642) and the cause of his tragic downfall was vanity -- not
the boisterous and naïve vanity of Tycho, but a hypersensitivity to
criticism combined with sarcastic contempt for others: a fatal blend of
genius plus arrogance minus humility. There seems to be not a trace here
of mysticism, of 'oceanic feeling'; in contrast to Copernicus, Tycho,
and Kepler, even to Newton and Descartes who came after him, Galileo
is wholly and frighteningly modern in his consistently mechanistic
philosophy. Hence his contemptuous dismissal in a single sentence of
Kepler's explanation of the tides by the moon's attraction: 'He [Kepler]
has lent his ear and his assent to the moon's dominion over the waters,
to occult properties and such like "fanciullezze".' [7] The occult
little fancy he is deriding is Kepler's anticipation of Newtonian gravity.
Where, then, in Galileo's personality is the sublime balance between
self-asserting and self-transcending motives which I suggested as the
true scientist's hallmark? I believe it to be easily demonstrable in his
writings on those subjects on which his true greatness rests: the first
discoveries with the telescope, the foundations of mechanics, and of a
truly experimental science. Where that balance is absent -- during the
tragic years 1613-33, filled with poisonous polemics, spurious priority
claims, and impassioned propaganda for a misleadingly oversimplified
Copernican system -- in that sad middle period of his life Galileo made
no significant contribution either to astronomy or to mechanics. One
might even say that he temporarily ceased to be a scientist -- precisely
because he was entirely dominated by self-asserting motives. The opposite
kind of imbalance is noticeable in Kepler's periods of depression,
when he entirely lost himself in mystic speculation, astrology, and
number-lore. In both these diametrically opposed characters, unsublimated
residues of opposite kind temporarily dominated the field, upsetting
the equilibrium and leading to scientific sterility.
But in the balanced periods of Galileo, the eighteen happy years in Padua
in which most of his epoch-making discoveries in the study of motion
were made, and in the last years of resignation, when he completed
and revised the "Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences" -- in these
creative periods we seem to be dealing with a different kind of person,
patiently and painstakingly experimenting and theorizing on the motions
of the pendulum; on the free fall and descent along an inclined plane of
heavy bodies; on the flight of projectiles; the elasticity, cohesion,
and resistance of solid bodies, and the effects of percussion on them;
on the buoyancy of 'things which float on the water', and a hundred
related matters. Here we have a man absorbed in subjects much less
spectacular and conducive to fame than the wonders of the Milky Way
and the arguments about the earth's motion -- yet delighting in his
discoveries, of which only a select few friends and correspondents were
informed; delighting in discovery for discovery's sake, in unravelling
the laws of order hidden in the puzzling diversity of phenomena.
That order was for Galileo, as it was for Kepler, a mathematical order:
'The book of nature is written in the mathematical language. Without
its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.' [8]
But unlike Kepler and the Pythagoreans, Galileo did not look at the
'dance of numbers' through the eyes of a mystic. He was interested
neither in number-lore nor in mathematics for its own sake -- almost
alone among the great scientists of his period, he made no mathematical
discoveries. Quantitative measurements and formulations were for
Galileo simply the most effective tools for laying bare the inherent
rationality of nature
. The belief in this rationality (and in
the rationality of nature's creation, the human mind) was Galileo's
religion and spiritual salvation -- though he did not realize that it
was a religion, based on an act of faith.
His revolutionary methods of proving the rationality of the laws governing
the universe was later called 'experimental philosophy' -- and even
later, by the much narrower terms 'experimental science' or 'empirical
science'. It was a fertile combination of experimenting and theorizing,
which had been tentatively used by some of Galileo's precursors since
the fourteenth century -- but it was Galileo who elevated it to a modern
technique and a philosophical programme. It was a monumental bisociation
of the valid elements in Greek thought transmitted by the Schoolmen (and
particularly by the Occamists) on the one hand, and of the experimental
knowledge of engineers, artisans, and instrument-makers on the other.
The
Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences
characteristically opens with
a most unusual suggestion by Salviati (Galileo's mouthpiece): that,
as a philosopher, he had much to learn from mechanics and craftsmen.

Salviati: The constant activity which you Venetians display in your famous
arsenal suggests to the studious mind a large field for investigation,
especially that part of the work which involves mechanics; for in
this department all types of instruments and machines are constantly
being constructed by many artisans, among whom there must be some who,
partly by inherited experience and partly by their own observations,
have become highly expert and clever in explanation.
Sagredo: You are quite right. Indeed, I myself, being curious by nature,
frequently visit this place for the mere pleasure of observing the
work of those who, on account of their superiority over other artisans,
we call 'first-rank men'. Conference with them has often helped me in
the investigation of certain effects including not only those which are
striking, but also those which are recondite and almost incredible. [9]

We are reminded of Pythagoras visiting the blacksmith's shop to discover
the secret of vibrating chords -- to learn from those dark, sweaty,
and ignorant men about the harmony of the spheres. This is the point
where hubris yields to humility; in his best and happiest moments,
Galileo achieves not only this transition, but is also transformed from a
scientist into a poet. In the midst of his formidable polemical onslaught
on the Platonist dualism of despair -- which contrasted the perfect,
immutable, crystalline heavens to the earthy corruption of generation
and decay -- his imagination and language suddenly grow wings:

Sagredo: I cannot without great wonder, nay more, disbelief, hear it being
attributed to natural bodies as a great honour and perfection that they
are impassible, immutable, inalterable, etc.: as, conversely, I hear
it esteemed a great imperfection to be alterable, generable, mutable,
etc. It is my opinion that the Earth is very noble and admirable by
reason of the many and different alterations, mutations, generations,
etc., which incessantly occur in it. And if, without being subject to any
alteration, it had been all one vast heap of sand, or a mass of jade,
or . . . an immense globe of crystal, wherein nothing had ever grown,
altered, or changed, I should have esteemed it a wretched lump of no
benefit to the Universe, a mass of idleness. . . . What greater folly
can be imagined than to call gems, silver, and gold noble and earth and
soil base? . . . If there were as great a scarcity of earth as there
is ofjewels and precious metals, there would be no king who would not
gladly give a heap of diamonds and rubies . . . to purchase only so much
earth as would suffice to plant a jessamine in a little pot or to set a
tangerine in it, that he might see it sprout, grow up, and bring forth
goodly leaves, fragrant flowers, and delicate fruit. . . . These men who
so extol incorruptibility, inalterability, etc., speak thus, I believe,
out of the great desire they have to live long and for fear of death,
not considering that, if men had been immortal, they would not have had
to come into the world. These people deserve to meet with a Medusa's
head that would transform them into statues of diamond and jade that so
they might become more perfect than they are. [10]

In another work, Galileo wrote a charming and profound allegory on
the motives, methods, and limitations of the 'experimental philosophy'
which he had created. The work is
Il Saggiatore
, 'The Assayer'
-- which has only recently been translated into English, presumably
because most of it consists of querulous, scientifically worthless
polemics against the Jesuit scholar Grassi on the subject of comets
(which Galileo insisted on treating as optical illusions -- largely
because Tycho and Grassi held the opposite views). Yet hidden in this
nasty bunch of nettles are flowers of rare beauty:

Once upon a time, in a very lonely place, there lived a man endowed by
nature with extraordinary curiosity and a very penetrating mind. For
a pastime he raised birds, whose songs he much enjoyed; and he
observed with great admiration the happy contrivance by which they
could transform at will the very air they breathed into a variety of
sweet songs.
One night this man chanced to hear a delicate song close to his house,
and being unable to connect it with anything but some small bird he set
out to capture it. When he arrived at a road he found a shepherd boy who
was blowing into a kind of hollow stick while moving his fingers about
on the wood, thus drawing from it a variety of notes similar to those
of a bird, though by a quite different method. Puzzled, but impelled
by his natural curiosity, he gave the boy a calf in exchange for this
flute and returned to solitude. But realizing that if he had not chanced
to meet the boy he would never have learned of the existence of a new
method of forming musical notes and the sweetest songs, he decided to
travel to distant places in the hope of meeting with some new adventure.
Subsequently, the man discovered that there are many other ways of
producing musical notes -- from strings and organs, to the swift
vibrations on the wings of mosquitoes and the 'sweet and sonorous
shrilling of crickets by snapping their wings together, though they
cannot fly at all'. But there was an ultimate disappointment waiting
for him:
Well, after this man had come to believe that no more ways of forming
tones could possibly exist . . . when, I say, this man believed he had
seen everything, he suddenly found himself once more plunged deeper
into ignorance and bafflement than ever. For having captured in his
hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise either by
closing its mouth or stopping its wings, yet he could not see it move
the scales that covered its body, or any other thing. At last he lifted
up the armour of its chest and there he saw some thin hard ligaments
beneath; thinking the sound might come from their vibration, he decided
to break them in order to silence it. But nothing happened until his
needle drove too deep, and transfixing the creature he took away its
life with its voice, so that he was still unable to determine whether
the song had originated in those ligaments. And by this experience his
knowledge was reduced to diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were
created he used to answer tolerantly that although he knew a few ways,
he was sure that many more existed which were not only unknown but
unimaginable. [11]