. Jung's emphasis on the mandala as the
different question.
. Half a century earlier, the cracklings
shows, the comparison was meant in a purely metaphorical way.
. ' . . . Einstein has reported that
while he was sick in bed. Descartes is said to have made his discoveries
bed for several days till it was solved. Walter Scott wrote to a friend:
IX
THE SPARK AND THE FLAME
False Inspirations
I have discussed the genesis of the Eureka act -- the sudden shaking
together of two previously uncormected matrices; let us now turn to the
aftermath of it.
If all goes well, that single, explosive contact will lead to a lasting
fusion of the two matrices -- a new synthesis will emerge, a further
advance in mental evolution will have been achieved. On the other hand,
the inspiration may have been a mirage; or premature; or not sufficiently
impressive to be believed in.
A stimulating inquiry by the American chemists Platt and Barker
showed that among those scientists who answered their questionnaire,
eighty-three per cent claimed frequent or occasional assistance from
unconscious intuitions. But at the same time only seven per cent among
them asserted that their intuitions were always correct; the remainder
estimated the percentage of their 'false intuitions' variously at ten
to ninety per cent.
A false inspiration is not an ordinary error committed in the course of
a routine operation, such as making a mistake in counting. It is a kind
of inspired blunder which presents itself in the guise of an original
synthesis, and carries the same subjective conviction as Archimedes's
cry did. Let me quote Poincaré once more:
I have spoken of the feeling of absolute certitude accompanying the
inspiration; often this feeling deceives us without it being any the
less vivid. . . . When a sudden illumination seizes upon the mind of the
mathematician, it usually happens that it does not deceive him, but it
also sometimes happens, that it does not stand the test of verification;
well, we almost always notice that this false idea, had it been true,
would have gratified our natural feeling for mathematical elegance. [1]
The previous chapters may have given the mistaken impression that the
genius need only listen to his Socratian demon and all will be well. But
the demon is a great hoaxer -- precisely because he is not bound by the
codes of disciplined thought; and every original thinker who relies,
as he must, on his unconscious hunches, incurs much greater risks to
his career and sanity than his more pedestrian colleagues. 'The world
little knows', wrote Faraday, 'how many of the thoughts and theories
which have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have been
crushed in silence and secrecy; that in the most successful instances
not a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary
conclusions have been realized.' [2] Darwin, Huxley, and Planck, among
many others, made similar confessions; Einstein lost 'two years of hard
work' owing to a false inspiration. 'The imagination', wrote Beveridge,
'merely enables us to wander into the darkness of the unknown where, by
the dim light of the knowledge that we carry, we may glimpse something
that seems of interest. But when we bring it out and examine it more
closely it usually proves to be only trash whose glitter had caught our
attention. Imagination is at once the source of all hope and inspiration
but also of frustration. To forget this is to court despair.' [3]
All through his life Kepler hoped to prove that the motions of the
planets round the sun obeyed certain musical laws, the harmonies of the
spheres. When he was approaching fifty, he thought he had succeeded. The
following is one of the rare instances on record of a genius describing
the heady effect ofa false inspiration -- Kepler never discovered that
he was the victim of a delusion:
The thing which dawned on me twenty-five years ago before I had yet
discovered the five perfect bodies between the heavenly orbits; which
sixteen years ago I proclaimed as the ultimate aim of all research;
which caused me to devote the best years of my life to astronomical
studies, to join Tycho Brahe and to choose Prague as my residence --
that I have, with the aid of God, who set my enthusiasm on fire and
stirred in me an irrepressible desire, who kept my life and intelligence
alert -- that I have now at long last brought to light. Having perceived
the first glimmer of dawn eighteen months ago, the light of day three
months ago, but only a few days ago the plain sun of a most wonderful
vision -- nothing shall now hold me back. Yes, I give myself up to
holy raving. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice. If you are angry,
I shall bear it. Behold, I have cast the dice, and I am writing a
book either for my contemporaries, or for posterity. It is all the
same to me. It may wait a hundred years for a reader, since God has
also waited six thousand years for a witness. [4]
T. H. Huxley has said that the tragedies of science are the slayings
of beautiful hypotheses by ugly facts. Against this tragedy, at least,
the artist seems to be immune. On the other hand, it is generally
believed that the scientist can at least rely on the verification of
his intuitions by experiment, whereas the artist has no such objective
tests to decide whether or not he should burn his manuscript, or slash
his canvas to pieces.
In fact, however, 'verification by experiment' can never yield absolute
certainty, and when it comes to controversial issues the data can
usually be interpreted in more than one way. The history of medicine
is full of obvious and distressing examples of this. In physics and
chemistry too, the best we can do by so-called 'crucial experiments'
is to confirm a prediction -- but not the theory on which the prediction
is based (see below,