The Act of Creation (98 page)

Hubris
is temporarily submerged by humility. Galileo was the first
of a race of modern experimental scientists convinced of the infallibility
of their 'exact empirical methods'; in fact he created the type. It
comes as a surprise to hear him talk about things 'not only unknown but
unimaginable'. But this ultimate modesty, derived from a sense of wonder
close to mysticism, is found in all great scientists -- even if hidden by
an arrogant façade, and allowed to express itself only on rare
occasions.
About Kepler I have said enough, in this book and elsewhere, to show
that mysticism was the mainspring of his fantastically laborious life --
starting with the analogy between God the Father and the Sun, continued
in his lifelong conviction that the universe was built around the frames
of the five Pythagorean solids, and that the planetary motions were
regulated by the laws of musical harmony. But his mystic convictions,
and the disarmingly child-like streak in his character, did not prevent
him from casting horoscopes for money -- however much he despised himself
for it; from indulging in naïve snobbery, and quarrelling like a
fish-wife with the overbearing Tycho. His vanity had a perverse twist:
he was very proud of himself when his astrological forecasts of a cold
spell and an invasion by the Turks came true; but towards his real
discoveries he was completely indifferent, and he was astonishingly
devoid of professional jealousy. He naïvely expected the same of
other astronomers; and when Tycho's heirs delayed publication of his
priceless collection of observational data, Kepler simply stole the
material to put it to proper use -- his ethics did not include respect
for private property in Urania's domains.
When Kepler had completed the foundations of modern astronomy by his
Third Law, he uttered a long Eureka cry:

The heavenly motions are nothing but a continuous song for several
voices (perceived by the intellect, not by the ear); a music which,
through discordant tensions, through sincopes and cadenzas, as it
were (as men employed them in imitation of those natural discords),
progresses towards certain pre-designed, quasi six-voiced clausuras,
and thereby sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time. It is,
therefore, no longer surprising that man, in imitation of his creator,
has at last discovered the art of figured song, which was unknown to
the ancients. Man wanted to reproduce the continuity of cosmic time
within a short hour, by an artful symphony for several voices, to
obtain a sample test of the delight of the Divine Creator in His works,
and to partake of his joy by making music in the imitation of God. [12]

Here we have the perfect union of the two drives: the vain-glorious ego
purged by cosmic awareness --
ekstasis
followed by
katharsis
.
Newton, Monster and Saint
From the end of the seventeenth century onward the scene becomes too
crowded for a systematic inquiry into individual motivations; however, I
have said enough to suggest the basic pattern -- and though the character
of the times changed, that pattern remained essentially the same.
Look at Newton, for instance: he has been idolized and his character
bowdlerized to such an extent (above all in the Victorian standard
biography by Brewster) that the phenomenal mixture of monster and saint
out of which it was compounded was all but lost from sight. On the
one hand he was deeply religious and believed -- with Kepler and Bishop
Usher -- that the world had been created in 404 B.C.; that the convenient
design of the solar system -- for instance, all planetary orbits lying
in a single plane -- was proof of the existence of God, who not only
created the universe but also kept it in order by correcting from time to
time the irregularities which crept into the heavenly motions -- and by
preventing the universe from collapsing altogether under the pressure of
gravity. On the other hand, he fulminated at any criticism of his work,
whether justified or not, displayed symptoms of persecution mania, and
in his priority fight with Leibniz over the invention of the calculus
he used the perfidious means of carefully drafting in his own hand the
findings, in his own favour, of the 'impartial' committee set up by the
Royal society. To quote M. Hoskin:

No one supposes that the committee set up by the Royal Society of which
Newton had then been president for several years, was impartial. But
we can only realize the extent of Newton's share in its conclusions
when we examine a much-corrected draft summary of what were to be the
findings of the committee. The draft is written in Newton's own hand,
and it is fascinating to watch Newton debating with himself whether the
committee ought to say 'We are satisfied that he [Newton] had invented
the method of fluxions before' 1669, or whether it would sound better
if they said 'We find that he invented the method of fluxions before'
1669; or deciding that to say 'We are satisfied that Mr. Newton was
the first author of this method' was too terse, and that several more
lines of explanation ought to be inserted before the conclusion 'for
which reason we reckon Mr. Newton the first inventor'. [13]

Here is pettiness on a heroic scale -- combined with a heroic vision of
the universe worked out in minute detail: in other words, the mixture
as before.
The Mysticism of Franklin
As we move on into the eighteenth century the towering genius of Benjamin
Franklin sticks out of it like his lightning rod. Printer, journalist,
pamphleteer, politician, wire-puller, diplomat, and statesman; pioneer
of electricity, founder of the physics of liquid surfaces, discoverer of
the properties of marsh gas, designer of the "chevaux de frise" which
halted the advance of the British fleet on the Delaware, inventor of
bifocal spectacles and of improved fireplaces, advocate of watertight
bulkheads on ships and of chinmey-shafts for the ventilation in mines --
the list could be continued. And yet this 'first civilized American',
as one of his biographers called him [14], for all his incomparable
clarity of thought and lucidity of style, had formed his metaphysical
outlook at the age of sixteen when he read a book by Tryon, a member of
the group of British Pythagoreans. The members of this sect were chiefly
known for their vegetarianism because, like the ancient Brotherhood,
they believed in the transmigration of souls and wished to avoid the
risk of feasting on some reincarnation of a human being. Franklin became
a convert to vegetarianism and believed in transmigration to the end of
his life. At the age of twenty-two he composed a Pythagorean epitaph for
himself; at the age of eighty-four, the year of his death, he ordered
that it should appear, unchanged, on his tomb. It reads:

The Body
Of
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Printer
(Like the Cover of an Old Book
Its Contents Torn Out
And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding)
Lies Here, Food for Worms.
But the Work Shall Not Be Lost
For It Will (As He Believed) Appear Once More
In a New and More Elegant Edition
Revised and Corrected
By
The Author

His conviction that souls are immortal, that they cannot be destroyed and
are merely transformed in their migrations led him, by way of analogy,
to one of the first clear formulations of the law of the conservation
of matter. The following quotations will make the connection clear:

The power of man relative to matter seems limited to the dividing it,
or mixing the various kinds of it, or changing its form and appearance
by differing compositions of it, but does not extend to the making or
creating of new maker, or annihilating the old.

This was written when he was seventy-eight. The following was written
one year later:

I say that when I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of
water wasted, I cannot suspect the annihilation of souls, or believe
that He will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready made
that now exist, and put Himself to the continual trouble of maklng new
ones. Thus finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I shall;
in some shape or other, always exist.

The argument seems to indicate that what one might call the principle of
the 'conservation of souls' was derived from that of the 'conservation
of matter'. But in fact it was the other way round. As Kepler had
transformed the Holy Trinity into the trinity of Sun -- Force -- Planets,
so in Franklin's case, too, a mystical conviction gave birth, by analogy,
to a scientific theory. And could there be a more charming combination of
man's vanity with his transcendental aspirations than to pray for a 'more
elegant, revised, and corrected edition' of one's proud and humble self?
The Fundamentalism of Faraday
The nineteenth-century landscape is crowded with giants; I shall
briefly comment on four of them. In the physical sciences Faraday and
Maxwell are probably the greatest: Einstein, who ought to know, has put
them on a par with Galileo and Newton; and Crowther, who wrote short
biographies of both, makes the fine distinction of calling Faraday 'the
greatest physicist of the nineteenth century' and Maxwell 'the greatest
theoretical physicist of the nineteenth century'. To these let me add,
from the biological sciences, Darwin and Pasteur, to make up a foursome.
Faraday, whom Tyndall described as 'the great mad child', was the
most inhuman character of the four: the son of a sectarian blacksmith,
self-taught, with a passionate temperament which was denied all human
outlets except religion and science. This was probably the cause of the
protracted episode of mental disorder, comparable to Newton's, which
began when he was forty-nine. Characteristic of the coyness of science
historians is the Encyclopaedia Britannica's reference to Faraday's
clinical insanity: 'In 1841 he found that he required rest, and it was
not till 1845 that he entered on his second great period of research.'
At thirty, shortly after his marriage -- which remained childless
-- Faraday joined an extreme fundamentalist, ascetic sect, the
'Sandemanians', to which his father and his young wife belonged, and
whose services he had attended since infancy. The Sandemanians considered
practically every human activity as a sin -- including even the Victorian
virtue of saving money; they washed each other's feet, intermarried,
and refused to proselytize; on one occasion they suspended Faraday's
membership because he had to dine, by royal command, with the Queen at
Windsor, and thus had to miss the congregation's Sunday service. It took
many years before he was forgiven and re-elected an EIder of the sect.
In his later years Faraday withdrew almost completely from social
contacts, refusing even the presidency of the Royal Academy because of
its too worldly disposition. The inhuman self-denials imposed by his creed
made Faraday canalize his ferocious vitality into the pursuit of science,
which he regarded as the only other permissible form of divine worship.
The Metaphysics of Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell was of an altogether different, balanced, and
happy disposition. In his case, too, religious belief became a spur to
scientific activity, but in more subtle ways. He was a double-faced
giant: he completed the classical edifice of the Newtonian universe,
but he also inaugurated the era of what one might call the 'surrealistic'
physics of the twentieth century.
As Kepler had embraced the Copernican system 'for physical or if you
prefer, metaphysical reasons', so Maxwell confessed that the theories
of his later period were formed 'in that hidden and dimmer region where
Thought weds Fact. Does not the way to it pass through the very den
of the metaphysician, strewed with the remains of former explorers and
abhorred by every man of science?'
The metaphysician in Maxwell had by that time long outgrown the crude
materialism of mid-nineteeath-century science, and its equally crude forms
of Christianity. Maxwell's religions beliefs were conceived in symbolic,
almost abstract, terms; they compared to Faraday's fundamentalist creed
as his abstract equations of the electro-magnetic field compare with the
lines of force which to Faraday were 'as real as matter'. The connection
between Maxwell's religions and scientific views is indeed just as
intimate as in the case of Franklin or Kepler. I have mentioned before
how, once he had arrived at his twenty general equations, Maxwell kicked
away the scaffolding from under him -- the physical model of vortices
in the ether -- and thus inaugurated the post-Newtonian era in physics,
with its renunciation of all models and representations in terms of
sensory experience.
There is a characteristic passage in one of his letters to his wife:
'I can always have you with me in my mind -- why should we not have our
Lord always before us in our minds. . . . If we had seen Him in the flesh
we should not have known Him any better, perhaps not so well.' In another
letter to his wife, he says that he had been re-reading Ephesians VI. This
is not a very inspiring chapter, dealing with relations between parents
and children, masters and servants; yet Maxwell comments: 'Here is more
about family relations. There are things which have meanings so deep
that if we follow on to know them we shall be led into great mysteries
of divinity. If we reverence them, we shall even see beyond their first
aspect a spiritual meaning. For God speaks to us more plainly in these
bonds of our life than in anything that we can understand.'
J. G. Crowther -- who, as an adherent of the Marxist philosophy of history
can hardly be accused of mystic inclinations -- remarks on this curious
passage: 'Here Maxwell accepts material relationships with the belief
that acquaintance with them will lead to spiritual understanding. He
proceeds from the contemplation of material relationships to spiritual
truth, from the model of the electro-magnetic field to the equations. The
influence of the New Testament is seen also in his interpretation of
self-sacrifice. During the last years of his life, his wife was an
invalid. He nursed her personally with the most assiduous care. At one
period he did not sleep in a bed for three weeks, though he delivered
his lectures and superintended the laboratory as usual. The modernity of
Maxwell's science, and the antiquity of his sociology and religion appear
incongruous. But it may be noted that though his views on sociology and
religion were antique, they were superior to those of nearly all his
scientific contemporaries. He at least thought about these problems,
and if he was unable to find modern answers to them, he learned enough
of them to avoid the intellectual philistinism of his time.'