The Act of Creation (34 page)

Chap. XVII
). Some scientific controversies
are decided by cumulative weight of evidence; others are resolved by
a synthesis embracing both competing theories; but still others are
pseudo-controversies reflecting differences in emphasis and fashions
of thought -- and the latter are often as subjective and emotional as
fashions in art.

 

 

Lastly, a distinction should be made between progress in the precision
of scientific statements and their explanatory power. The latter depends
on the type of question the statement is meant to answer; and history
shows that the questions change with the changing values in different
periods and cultures.

 

 

 

NOTES

 

 

To
p. 228
. See
Appendix I
.

 

 

To
p. 230
. Bronowski (1961), p.27. Cf. also:
'The most fortunate moments in the history of knowledge occur when facts
which have been as yet no more than special data are suddenly referred
to other apparently distant facts, and thus appear in a new light'
(Wolfgang Köhler, 1940, p.89).

 

 

To
p. 234
. The French theoretical astronomer,
Leverrier, had predicted the existence of an eighth planet from
disturbances in the motion of the seventh planet, Uranus. The planet
was discovered by the German astronomer Galle on 24 September 1846.

 

 

To
p. 244
. In his Presidential Address to Section
1 of the British Association, Cambridge, 1938, C. G. Darwin said of
D. C. Miller's experiments: 'We cannot see any reason to think that this
work would be inferior to Michelson's work, as he had at his disposal
not only all the experience of Michelson's work, but also the very great
technical development of the intervening period, but in fact he failed
to verify the exact vanishing of the aether drift. What happened? Nobody
doubted relativity. There must therefore be some unknown source of error
which had upset Miller's work.'

 

 

To p. 249
. It took two thousand years until
Archimedes and Euclid were rediscovered. It took four hundred years until
the Occamites' work on impetus was appreciated. In the hectic nineteenth
century, it took thirty-five years until the significance of Mendel's work
was recognized. In 1845 J. J. Waterston wrote a paper on the molecular
theory of gases wh!ch partly anticipated Maxwell: 'The referee of the
Royal society to whom the paper was submitted said: "The paper is nothing
but nonsense," and the work lay in utter oblivion until exhumed forty-five
years later. Waterston lived on, disappointed and obscure for many years
and then mysteriously disappeared leaving no sign. As Trotter remarks,
this story must strike a chill upon anyone impatient for the advancement
of knowledge. Many discoveries must have thus been stillborn or smothered
at birth. We know only those that survived' (Beveridge, op. cit., p. 108).

 

 

There may be thousands of relevant bits of information lying dormant
in hundreds of technical journals on dusty library shelves which, if
remembered, would act as Open Sesames.

 

 

 

 

 

XI
SCIENCE AND EMOTION
Three Character-Types
Let me revert for a moment to our starting point, the triptych of
creative activities.
In folklore and popular literature the Artist is traditionally represented
as an inspired dreamer -- a solitary figure, eccentric, impractical,
unselfish, and quixotic.
His opposite number is the earthy and cynical Jester -- Falstaff or
Sancho Panza; he spurns the dreamer, refuses to be taken in by any
romantic nonsense, is wide-awake, quick to see his advantage and to
get the better of his fellows. His weapons range from the bludgeon of
peasant cunning to the rapier of irony; he always exercises his wits at
the expense of others; he is aggressive and self-asserting.
In between these antagonistic types once stood the Sage who combined the
qualities of both: a sagacious dreamer, with his head in the clouds and
his feet on the solid earth. But his modern incarnation, the Scientist,
is no longer represented by a single figure in the waxworks of popular
imagination; instead of one prototype, we had better compose three.
The first is the Benevolent Magician, whose ancestry derives from
the rain-making Shamans and the calendar-making Priest-Astronomers
of Babylon. At the dawn of Greek science we find him assuming the
semi-mythical figure of Pythagoras, the only mortal who could hear with
ears of flesh the music made by the orbiting stars; and from there onward,
every century created its own savant-shamans whom it could venerate --
even throughout the Dark Ages of science. The first millennium was seen in
by Sylvester II, the 'Magician Pope', who reinstated the belief that the
earth was round. The Jews had their Maimonides, the Arabs their Alkhazen,
Christendom the Venerable Bede, before St. Thomas Aquinas and Albert
the Great revived the study of nature. From the Renaissance on there
is an uninterrupted procession of magicians whose names were legends,
admired and worshipped by a public which had only the vaguest notion of
their achievements: Paracelsus, Tycho on his Sorcerer's Island, Galileo
with his telescope, Newton who brought the Light, Franklin who tamed the
thunderbolt, Mesmer who cured by magnetism; Edison, Pasteur, Einstein,
Freud. The popular image of the Magician has certain features in common
with that of the Artist: both are unselfishly devoted to lofty tasks --
which frequently overlapped in the
uomo universale
of the
Renaissance.
The second archetype is the 'Mad Professor' who, in contrast to the
former, practises black instead of white magic for the sake of his own
aggrandizement and power. Eudoxus jumped into the crater of Etna to
gain immortality; Paracelsus's rival, Agrippa, was allied to the devil
in the shape of an enormous black poodle; the Anatomists were allied
to body-snatchers for their sinister purposes. The alchemists distilled
witches' brews; electric rays became a favourite delusion in persecution
manias; vivisection, and even compulsory vaccination, became symbols of
the scientist's blasphemous presumption and cruelty. The Mad Professor
-- either a sadist or obsessed with power -- looms large in popular
fiction from Jules Verne's Captain Nemo and H. G. Wells' Dr. Moreau to
Caligari, Frankenstein, and the monsters of the horror-comics. He is a
Mephistophelian character, endowed with caustic wit; he spouts sarcasm,
a sinister jester plotting to commit some monstrous practical joke on
humanity. His place in the waxworks is next to the malicious satirist's,
as the Benevolent Magician's is next to the imaginative Artist's.
The last of the three figures into which the popular image of the
scientist has split occupies the centre space and is of relatively
recent origin: the dry, dull, diligent, pedantic, uninspired, scholarly
bookworm or laboratory worker. He is aloof and detached, not because he
has outgrown passion but because he is devoid of temperament, desiccated,
and hard of hearing -- yet peevish and petulant and jealous of anybody
who dares to interfere with his crabbed little world. This imaginary
type probably originates with the Schoolmen of the period of decline,
whom Erasmus lampooned: 'They smother me beneath six hundred dogmas;
they are surrounded with a bodyguard of definitions, conclusions,
corrolaries, propositions explicit and propositions implicit; they are
looking in utter darkness for that which has no existence whatsoever.'
Swift satirized the type in
Gulliver in Laputa
; then Goethe in his
Famulus
Wagner: 'Mit Eifer hab' ich mich der Studien beflissen
-- Zwar weiss ich viel, doch möcht' ich alles wissen'. 'Thanks
to my diligence, my wisdom is growing -- If I but persevere I shall be
all-knowing.' His modern incarnations are the Herr Professor of German
comedy, and the mummified dons of Anglo-Saxon fiction. At his worst,
he incarnates the pathological aspects in the development of science:
rigidity, orthodoxy, snowblindness, divorce from reality. But the patience
and dogged endurance of the infantrymen of science are as indispensable
as the geniuses who form its spearhead. 'The progress of science',
Schiller wrote, 'takes place through a few master-architects, or in any
case through a number of guiding brains which constantly set all the
industrious labourers at work for decades.' [1] That the industrious
labourers tend to form trade unions with a closed-shop policy and
restrictive practices, is an apparently unavoidable development. It
is no less conspicuous in the history of the arts: the uninspired
versifiers, the craftsmen of the novel and the stage, the mediocrities
of academic painting and sculpture, they all hang on for dear life to
the prevailing school and style which some genius initiated, and defend
it with stubbornness and venom against heretic innovators.
Thus we now have five figures facing us at our allegorical Madame
Tussaud's. They are from left to right: the malicious Jester; the Mad
Professor with his delusions of grandeur; the uninspired Pedant; the
Benevolent Magician; and the Artist.
At the moment only the three figures in the centre concern us. If
we strip them of the gaudy adornments which folklore and fiction
bestowed upon them, the figure of the Black Magician will turn out to
be an archetypal symbol of the
self-assertive element
in the
scientist's aspirations. In mythology, this element is represented by
the Promethean quest for omnipotence and immortality; in science-fiction
it is caricatured as a monstrous lusting for power; in actual life, it
appears as the unavoidable component of competitiveness, jealousy, and
self-righteousness in the scientist's complex motivational drive. 'Without
ambition and without vanity', wrote the biologist Charles Nicolle, 'no
one would enter a profession so contrary to our natural appetites.' [2]
Freud was even more outspoken: 'I am not really a man of science, not an
observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am by temperament
nothing but a conquistador . . . with the curiosity, the boldness,
and the tenacity that belong to that type of person.' [3]
The unassuming figure of the Pedant in the centre of the waxworks is an
indispensable stabilizing element; he acts as a restraining influence
on the self-asserting, vainglorious conquistadorial urges, but also as
a sceptical critic of the inspired dreamer on his other side.
This last figure, the White Magician, symbolizes the
self-transcending
element
in the scientist's motivational drive and emotional make-up;
his humble immersion into the mysteries of nature, his quest for the
harmony of the spheres, the origins of life, the equations of a unified
field theory. The conquistadorial urge is derived from a sense of power,
the participatory urge from a sense of oceanic wonder. 'Men were first led
to the study of natural philosophy', wrote Aristotle, 'as indeed they are
today, by wonder.'[4] Maxwell's earbest memory was 'lying on the grass,
looking at the sun, and
wondering
'. Einstein struck the same
chord when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder,
'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know the deep
shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead for he
has already closed his eyes upon life'. [5]
This oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious
mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake; it is their common
denominator and emotional bond.
Magic and Sublimation
The creative scientist in actual life hardly resembles any of these single
wax-figures -- the Conquistador, the Pedant, or the inspired Dreamer; he
contains ingredients of all of them in varying proportions, melted down as
it were, and recast according to a personal formula. I have said already
(
p. 87 f.
) that by calling science the 'neutral art'
I did not mean that the scientist operates 'dispassionately' -- as
the cliché goes; but on the contrary, that he is motivated by
a particular blend of passions into which both the self-asserting
and participatory drives enter, but in a highly sublimated state,
complementing each other. A modicum of ambition or vanity or financial
need, or even aggression, is indispensable to the most 'disinterested'
scientist or explorer -- but the conquistadorial appetite must have
undergone a great amount of refinement if it is to find its satisfaction
in the publication of a paper, representing years of labour, in the
columns of a technical journal. Except for the chosen few who attain
popular fame, the vast majority of scientists spend their lifetime
working in obscurity, and for paltry rewards. In his private life, the
scientist can indulge his ego; but in his work, ambition and vanity are
denied all but the most indirect and tortuous outlets, in conformity
with the complex rules of the game. The compensation for this sacrifice
is in the game itself -- in that 'enchantment of the soul' which makes
interest disinterested, as it were.

 

 

The sublimation of the self-assertive, aggressive-defensive impulses is
easily understood, since we all have to go through this painful process,
abdicating the tyrannic powers of infancy -- including the primitive
fantasies of omnipotence, from which the figure of the Black Magician is
derived -- and accepting the rules of the game of civilized society. But
the self-transcending, participatory emotions are also subject to the
process of sublimation, both in the history of the individual and in
the evolution of cultures. One aspect of the latter is the sublimation
of magic into art; another, of magic into science.

 

 

I have explained earlier on (
p. 54 f.
) that the term
'self-transcending' or 'participatory' tendencies is meant to refer to
those emotional states where the need is felt to behave
as a part
of some real or imaginary entity which transcends the boundaries of the
individual self (whereas when, governed by the self-assertive class
of emotion, the ego is experienced as a self-contained whole and the
ultimate value). Now obviously a person's character and pattern of
behaviour is to a large extent dependent on the nature of that higher
entity of which he feels himself to be a part. There is of course often
a multitude of such entities, some forming a hierarchy (family, tribe,
nation), others causing rival identifications; some are of the nature
of social, others of spiritual or mystical bonds. It is with the latter
that we are concerned; more precisely with the transition from one type
of mystic participation in a universe governed by sympathetic magic,
to another type of mystic communion with a universe governed by a divine
or natural order. That transformation was never completed; but even the
partial transition which the Greeks achieved had a decisive influence
on the pattern of Western culture. At the risk ofrepetitiveness I must
once more mention here the Pythagoreans, the chief engineers of that
epoch-making change. I have spoken in more detail elsewhere of the
inspired methods by which, in their religions order, they transformed
the Orphic mystery cult into a religion which considered mathematical and
astronomical studies as the main forms of divine worship and prayer. The
physical intoxication which had accompanied the Bacchic rites was
superseded by the mental intoxication derived from