The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  Thus the progress of science is neither continuous, nor cumulative in the strict sense. Its discoveries are often forgotten or ignored, and rediscovered later on. Its history echoes with controversies which prove that the same bundle of 'objective data' and even the same 'crucial experiment' can be interpreted in more than one way. No experimental test can provide the scientist with absolute certainty; and the difference in the 'verifiability' between various types of scientific and artistic statements is a matter of degree (see also below, 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 whi
ch 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 philo-sophia, the love of knowledge. It was one of the many key concepts they coined and which are still basic units in our verbal currency. The cliché about the ' mysteries of nature' originates in the revolutionary innovation of applying the word referring to the secret rites of the worshippets of Orpheus, to the devotions of stargazing. 'Pure science' is another of their coinages; it signified not merely a contrast to the 'applied' sciences, but also that the contemplation of the new mysteria was regarded as a means of purifying the soul by its immersion in the eternal. Finally, 'theorizing' comes from Theoria, again a word of Orphic origin, meaning a state of fervent contemplation and participation in the sacred rites (thea spectacle, theoris spectator, audience). Contemplation of the 'divine dance of numbers' which held both the secrets of music and of the celestial motions became the link in the mystic union between human thought and the anima mundi. Its perfect symbol was the Harmony of the Spheres -- the Pythagorean Scale, whose musical intervals corresponded to the intervals between the planetary orbits; it went on reverberating through 'soft stillness and the night' right into the poetry of the Elizabethans, and into the astronomy of Kepler.

  It was indeed this sublimated form of Orphic mysticism which, through the Pythagorean revival in Renaissance Italy, inspired the scientific Revolution. Galileo, Descartes, and Newton all regarded God as a kind of 'chief mathematician' of the Universe. 'Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself', [6] wrote Kepler; and the other giants echoed his conviction. The 'oceanic feeling' of religious mysticism had been distilled into differential equations; the mind of th
e "anima mundi" was reflected in the rainbow colours of the spectroscope, the ghostly spirals of distant galaxies, the harmonious patterns of iron-filings around a magnet. In all the 'great and generous minds', from Nicolas of Cusa down to Einstein, we find this feeling of awe and wonder, an intellectual ecstasy of distinctly religious flavour. Even those who professed to be devoid of it based their labours on an act of faith: the belief that there is a harmony of the spheres -- that the universe is not a tale told by an idiot, but governed by hidden laws waiting to be discovered and uttered. 'The mystic believes in an unknown God, the thinker and scientist in an unknown order; it is hard to say which surpasses the other in nonrational devotion' (L. L. Whyte). [7] In a similar vein, Butterfield wrote on the pioneers of the scientific revolution: 'The aspiration to demonstrate that the universe ran like a piece of clockwork . . . was itselfinitially a religious aspiration. It was felt that there would be something defective in Creation itself -- something not quite worthy of God -- unless the whole system of the universe could be shown to be interlocking, so that it carried the patttern of reasonableness and orderliness. Kepler, inaugurating the scientist's quest for a mechanistic universe in the seventeenth century, is significant here -- his mysticism, his music of the spheres, his rational deity demand a system which has the beauty of a piece of mathematics.' [8]