The Ascent of Man (11 page)

Yet there is something in the geometrical vision which is universal. Let me explain my preoccupation with beautiful architectural sites – such as the cathedral at Rheims.
What does architecture have to do with science? Particularly, what does it have to do with science the way we used to understand it at the beginning of this century, when science was all numbers – the coefficient of expansion of this metal, the frequency of that oscillator?

The fact of the matter is that our conception of science now, towards the end of the twentieth century, has changed radically.
Now we see science as a description and explanation of the underlying structures of nature; and words like structure, pattern, plan, arrangement, architecture constantly occur in every description that we try to make. I have by chance lived with this all my life, and it gives me a special pleasure: the kind of mathematics I have done since childhood is geometrical. However, it is no longer
a matter of personal or professional taste, for now that is the everyday language of scientific explanation. We talk about the way crystals are put together, the way atoms are made of their parts – above all we talk about the way that living molecules are made of their parts. The spiral structure of DNA has become the most vivid image of science in the last years. And that imagery lives in these arches.

What did the people do who made this building and others like it? They took a dead heap of stones, which is not a cathedral, and they turned it into a cathedral by exploiting the natural forces of gravity, the way the stone is laid naturally in its bedding planes, the brilliant invention of the flying buttress and arch and so on. And they created a structure that grew out of the analysis of nature
into this superb synthesis. The kind of man who is interested in the architecture of nature today is the kind of man who made this architecture nearly eight hundred years ago. There is one gift above all others that makes man unique among the animals, and it is the gift displayed everywhere here: his immense pleasure in exercising and pushing forward his own skill.

A popular cliché in philosophy
says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting the rainbow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analysing nature. Michelangelo said that vividly, by implication, in his sculpture (it is particularly clear in the sculptures that he did not finish), and he also said it explicitly in his sonnets on the act of
creation.

When that which is divine in us doth try

To shape a face, both brain and hand unite

To give, from a mere model frail and slight,

Life to the stone by Art’s free energy.

‘Brain and hand unite’: the material asserts itself through the hand, and thereby prefigures the shape of the work for the brain. The sculptor, as much as the mason, feels for the form within nature, and for him
it is already laid down there. That principle is constant.

The best of artists hath no thought to show

Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell

Doth not include: to break the marble spell

Is all the hand that serves the brain can do.

By the time Michelangelo carved the head of Brutus, other men quarried the marble for him. But Michelangelo had begun as one of the quarrymen in Carrara,
and he still felt that the hammer in their hands and in his was groping in the stone for a shape that was already there.

The quarrymen work in Carrara now for the modern sculptors who come here – Marino Marini, Jacques Lipchitz and Henry Moore. Their descriptions of their work are not as poetic as Michelangelo’s, but they carry the same feeling. The reflections of Henry Moore are particularly
apposite as they run back to the first genius of Carrara.

To begin with, as a young sculptor, I could not afford expensive stone, and I got my stone by going round the stone-yards and finding what they would call a ‘random block’. Then I had to think in the same way that Michelangelo might have done, so that one had to wait until an idea came that fitted the shape of the stone and that was seen,
the idea, in that block.

Of course, it cannot be literally true that what the sculptor imagines and carves out is already there, hidden in the block. And yet the metaphor tells the truth about the relation of discovery that exists between man and nature; and it is characteristic that philosophers of science (Leibniz in particular) have turned to the same metaphor of the mind prompted by a vein
in the marble. In one sense, everything that we discover is already there: a sculptured figure and the law of nature are both concealed in the raw material. And in another sense, what a man discovers is discovered
by him
; it would not take exactly the same form in the hands of someone else – neither the sculptured figure nor the law of nature would come out in identical copies when produced by
two different minds in two different ages. Discovery is a double relation of analysis and synthesis together. As an analysis, it probes for what is there; but then, as a synthesis, it puts the parts together in a form by which the creative mind transcends the bare limits, the bare skeleton, that nature provides.

Sculpture is a sensuous art. (The Eskimos make small sculptures that are not even
meant to be seen, only handled.) So it must seem strange that I choose as my model for science, which is usually thought of as an abstract and cold enterprise, the warm, physical actions of sculpture and architecture. And yet it is right. We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye. We are not one of those resigned,
contemplative civilisations of the Far East or the Middle Ages, that believed that the world has only to be seen and thought about – and who practised no science in the form that is characteristic for us. We are active; and indeed we know, as something more than a symbolic accident in the
evolution of man, that it is the hand that drives the subsequent evolution of the brain. We find tools today
made by man before he became man. Benjamin Franklin in 1778 called man ‘a tool-making animal’, and that is right.

I have described the hand when it uses a tool as an instrument of discovery; it is the theme of this essay. We see this every time a child learns to couple hand and tool together – to lace its shoes, to thread a needle, to fly a kite or to play a penny whistle. With the practical
action there goes another, namely finding pleasure in the action for its own sake – in the skill that one perfects, and perfects by being pleased with it. This at bottom is responsible for every work of art, and science too: our poetic delight in what human beings do because they can do it. The most exciting thing about that is that the poetic use in the end has the truly profound results. Even in
prehistory man already made tools that have an edge finer than they need have. The finer edge in its turn gave the tool a finer use, a practical refinement and extension to processes for which the tool had not been designed.

Henry Moore calls his sculpture
The Knife Edge
. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Civilisation is not a collection of finished artefacts, it is the elaboration of
processes. In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action.

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better. You see it in his science. You see it in the magnificence with which he carves and builds, the loving care, the gaiety, the effrontery. The monuments
are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.

So the great temple architecture of every civilisation expresses the identification of the individual with the human species. To call it ancestor worship, as in China, is too narrow. The point is that the monument speaks for the dead man to the living, and thereby establishes
a sense of permanence which is a characteristically human view: the concept that human life forms a continuity which transcends and flows through the individual. The man buried on his horse or revered in his ship at Sutton Hoo becomes, in the stone monuments of later ages, a spokesman for their belief that there is such an entity as mankind, of which we are each a representative – in life and death.

I could not end this essay without turning to my favourite monuments, built by a man who had no more scientific equipment than a Gothic mason. These are the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, built by an Italian called Simon Rodia. He came from Italy to the United States at the age of twelve. And then at the age of forty-two, having worked as a tile-setter and general repairman, he suddenly decided
to build, in his back garden, tremendous structures out of chicken wire, bits of railway tie, steel rods, cement, sea shells, bits of broken glass, and tile of course – anything that he could find or that the neighbourhood children could bring him. It took him thirty-three years to build them. He never had anyone to help him because, he said, ‘most of the time I didn’t know what to do myself’. He
finished them in 1954; he was seventy-five by then. He gave the house, the garden and the towers to a neighbour, and simply walked out.

‘I had in mind to do something big,’ Simon Rodia had said, ‘and I did. You have to be good good or bad bad to be remembered.’ He had learned his engineering skill as he went along, by doing, and by taking pleasure in the doing. Of course, the City Building Department
decided that the towers were unsafe, and in 1959 they ran a test
on them. They tried to pull down one of the towers. I am happy to say that they failed. So the Watts Towers have survived, the work of Simon Rodia’s hands, a monument in the twentieth century to take us back to the simple, happy, and fundamental skill from which all our knowledge of the laws of mechanics grows.

The tool that extends
the human hand is also an instrument of vision. It reveals the structure of things and makes it possible to put them together in new, imaginative combinations. But, of course, the visible is not the only structure in the world. There is a finer structure below it. And the next step in the ascent of man is to discover a tool to open up the invisible structure of matter.

It is with fire that blacksmiths iron subdue

Unto fair form, the image of their thought:

Nor without fire hath any artist wrought

Gold to its utmost purity of hue.

Nay, nor the unmatched phoenix lives anew,

Unless she burn.

Michelangelo,
Sonnet
59

What is accomplished by fire is alchemy, whether in the furnace or kitchen stove.

Paracelsus

There is a special
mystery and fascination about man’s relation to fire, the only one of the four Greek elements that no animal inhabits (not even the salamander). Modern physical science is much concerned with the invisible fine structure of matter, and that is first opened by the sharp instrument of fire. Although that mode of analysis begins several thousand years ago in practical processes (the extraction
of salt and of metals, for example) it was surely set going by the air of magic that boils out of the fire: the alchemical feeling that substances can be changed in unpredictable ways. This is the numinous quality that seems to make fire a source of life and a living thing to carry us into a hidden underworld within the material world. Many ancient recipes express it.

Now the substance of cinnabar
is such that the more it is heated, the more exquisite are its sublimations. Cinnabar will become mercury, and passing through a series of other sublimations, it is again turned into cinnabar, and thus it enables man to enjoy eternal life.

This is the classic experiment with which the alchemists in the Middle Ages inspired awe in those who watched
them, all the way from China to Spain. They took
the red pigment, cinnabar, which is a sulphide of mercury, and heated it. The heat drives off the sulphur and leaves behind an exquisite pearl of the mysterious silvery liquid metal mercury, to astonish and strike awe into the patron. When the mercury is heated in air it is oxidised and becomes, not (as the recipe thought) cinnabar again, but an oxide of mercury that is also red. Yet the recipe
was not quite mistaken; the oxide can be turned into mercury again, red to silver, and the mercury to its oxide, silver to red, all by the action of heat.

It is not an experiment of any importance in itself, although it happens that sulphur and mercury are the two elements of which the alchemist before
AD
1500 thought the universe was composed. But it does show one important thing, that fire
has always been regarded not as the destroying element but as the transforming element. That has been the magic of fire.

I remember Aldous Huxley talking to me through a long evening, his white hands held into the fire, saying, ‘This is what transforms. These are the legends that show it. Above all, the legend of the Phoenix that is reborn in the fire, and lives over and over again in generation
after generation.’ Fire is the image of youth and blood, the symbolic colour in the ruby and cinnabar, and in ochre and haematite with which men painted themselves ceremonially. When Prometheus in Greek mythology brought fire to man, he gave him life and made him into a demigod – that is why the gods punished Prometheus.

In a more practical way, fire has been known to early man for about four
hundred thousand years, we think. That implies that fire had already been discovered by
Homo erectus
; as I have stressed, it is certainly found in the caves of Peking man. Every culture since then has used fire, although it is not clear that they all knew how to make fire; in historical times one tribe has been found (the pygmies in the tropical rain forest on the Andaman Islands south of Burma)
who carefully tended spontaneous fires because they had no technique for making fire.

In general, the different cultures have used fire for the same purposes: to keep warm, to drive off predators and clear woodland, and to make the simple transformations of everyday life – to cook, to dry and harden wood, to heat and split stones. But, of course, the great transformation that helped to make our
civilisation goes deeper: it is the use of fire to disclose a wholly new class of materials, the metals. This is one of the grand technical steps, a stride in the ascent of man, which ranks with the master invention of stone tools; for it was made by discovering in fire a subtler tool for taking matter apart. Physics is the knife that cuts into the grain of nature; fire, the flaming sword, is the
knife that cuts below the visible structure, into the stone.