The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

  Darwin's 'religious tastes', if the expression may be permitted, had been of an equally unsubtle nature. 'His sensibility was of that inverted order that is unable to extend to human beings the same sympathy and respect it has for animals. As a zoologist Darwin was naturally more at home in the realm of animal behaviour than of philosophy. This may be why so much of his discussion of religion, morality and aesthetics seems painfully naive.' [21] The concept of 'religious experience' did not mean to Darwin what it did to Maxwell -- the intuition of an 'unknown reality which held the secret of infinite space and enterhal time'; it meant to him believing the story told in Genesis, and also in eternal hellfire. In "The Descent of Man", he had denied that language was a unique attribute of man because animals too use sounds and gestures to communicate emotions. This confusion of sign and symbol equally pervades his discussions of religion. In his youth he had believed in the 'strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible'; later on he considered himself an atheist because he did not believe in the Tower of Babel. Neither attitude has much relevance to the unconscious, inner motivation of his work. More relevant is the fact that the kind of undefinable intuition which he had experienced in the Brazilian forest went out of his life at the same time as the 'atrophy of the higher tastes' set in. This was at the time when he made his basic discovery. The remaining forty odd years were spent on the heroic labours of its elaboration.

  Darwin, as we have seen, was like Copernicus, essentially a one-idea man. Each had his 'nuclear inspiration' early in life, and spent the rest of his life working it out -- the ratio of inspiration to perspiration being heavily in favour of the second. Both lacked the many-sidedness, that universality of interest and amazing multitude of achievement in unrelated fields of research which characterized Kepler, Newton, Descartes, Franklin, Faraday, Maxwell, and hundreds of lesser but equally versatile geniuses. It is perhaps no coincidence that both Darwin and Copernicus, after the decisive turning point when their course was set, led a life of duty, devotion to task, rigorous self-discipline, and spiritual desiccation. It looks as if the artesian wells of their inspiration had been replaced by a mechanical water supply kept under pressure by sheer power of will.

  In Darwin's case, the magnitude of this power must be measured against the handicap of forty years of chronic ill health, which also afflicted his large family. The sense of duty which kept him going became his true religion. After the publication of the Origin and the Descent, he became one of the most celebrated personalities in Europe, but he continued to lead the same rigorously scheduled life, without allowing himself to bask in the sun, without getting spoilt or distracted from his work. 'While others used the prestige of Darwinism to promote their social or political views, Darwin himself forebore doing so; [21a]' and when Marx proposed to dedicate to him the English translation of Das Kapital Darwin refused the honour.

  His last years were spent in churning out a number of technical books and papers; his very first book was called The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms. He had started this research on earthworms at twenty-eight, after his return from the voyage of the Beagle; now, after this momentous detour, he finished it at the age of seventy-two, one year before his death. It is a measure of the enormous vogue which Darwin enjoyed that the worm book, in spite of its unprepossessing title, sold eight thousand five hundred copies in the first three years after publication -- which would be quite a respectable success for a novel in our own days.

  On one occasion in his late years Darwin was asked to state his opinion on religion. He answered that while the subject of God was 'beyond the scope of man's intellect', his moral obligations were nevertheless clear: 'Man can do his duty.' On another occasion -- in an addendum to his autobiography -- he explained that, even without a belief in God, a man 'can have for his rule of life . . . only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones. . . . By degrees it will be more intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his highest impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost judge or conscience.' He never realized that statements of this kind destroyed the very foundations of any strictly materialistic and deterministic philosophy, including his own -- according to which human morality was derived from innate 'social instincts'. 'It can hardly be disputed', he wrote in his disastrous controversy against Mill, 'that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals: and why should they not be so in men?' But from what source, then, would man derive the power to follow those instincts 'which seemed to him the best ones', to obey his 'highest impulses' as opposed to his 'sensuous passions'; and even 'to act in opposition to the opinion of others'? The source of that power must evidently be the 'innermost judge, or conscience' -- concepts of a transcendental nature and quite heretical from the point of view of a purely materialist world-view.

  It has been said that Darwin's philosophizing was 'painfully naïve'. Yet his life bore witness, not to his philosophical rationalizations, but to his transcendental beliefs -- he was a croyant malgré lui. The proof is in the closing passages of his two great books:

  It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. . . . Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. [22] Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it; and I have given the evidence to the best of my ability. We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system -- with all these exalted powers -- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. [23]

  Here is humility and wonder, and a sense of participation which transcends not only the individual self but the collective pride of homo sapiens.

  The Faith of Pasteur

  Louis Pasteur's character and life is an almost perfect illustration of ambition, pride, vanity, self-righteousness, combined with self-sacrifice, charity, humility, romanticism, and religion, to make a happy balance of opposites. At the height of his fame, Pasteur related with evident relish that at an official reception the Queen of Denmark and the Queen of Greece had broken etiquette by walking up t
o him to pay their homage. But he also spent several months every year for five years in the mountains of Cevennes, to find a cure for an epidemic disease of silkworms. When he had found its cause, and saved the French silk manufacturing industry from ruin, the Minister of Agriculture sent him for examination three lots of eggs which a famous silk-worm breeder was distributing throughout the country, ignoring Pasteur's recommendations of his method to obtain healthy strains. Pasteur replied:

  M. le Ministre -- These three samples of seed are worthless. . . . They will in every instance succumb to corpuscle disease. . . . For my part I feel so sure of what I affirm, that I shall not even trouble to test, by hatching them, the samples which you have sent me. I have thrown them into the river.

  And to a sceptical breeder, he wrote about the same time:

  M. le Marquis -- You do not know the first word of my investigations, of their results, of the principles which they have established, and of their practical implications. Most of them you have not read . . . and the others you did not understand.

  In his polemics against scientific adversaries he used the same impassioned language -- the style sometimes reminds one of Galileo. But, unlike Galileo, he engaged in controversy only after he had established his case beyond all possible doubt in his experimental laboratory, and had hardened it by countless painstaking repetitions. As a result, again unlike Galileo, he was invariably, and to his opponents infuriatingly, proven right. He even wrote an article in the Galilean dialogue style for a wine-growers trade journal. The dialogue was meant to be a report of Pasteur's conversation with the mayor of Volnay, M. Boillot -- which resulted in the conversion of M. Boillot to the Pasteurization of Burgundy wines. This epic dialogue starts with:

  Pasteur: Do you heat your wines, M. Maire? M. Boillot: No sir. . . . I have been told that heating may affect unfavourably the taste of our great wines. Pasteur: Yes, I know. In fact it has been said that to heat these wines is equivalent to an amputation. Will you be good enough, M. Maire, to follow me into my experimental cellar?

  For the next two pages M. Boillot is shown what's what. He has to taste the treated and untreated wines of a score of vintages and vineyards, until he capitulates and admits the superior quality of the pasteurized wines -- including those which came from his own vineyards:

  M. Boillot: I am overwhelmed. I have the same impression as if I were seeing you pouring gold into our country. Pasteur: There you are, my dear countrymen, busy with politics, elections, superficial reading of newspapers but neglecting the serious books which deal with matters of importance to the welfare of the country. . . . And yet, M. Maire, had you read with attention, you could have recognized that everything I wrote was based on precise facts, official reports, degustations by the most competent experts, whereas my opponents had nothing to offer but assertions without proof. M. Boillot: . . . Do not worry, Monsieur. From now on I shall no longer believe those who contradict you and I shall attend to the matter of heating the wines as soon as I return to Volnay. [24]

  Pasteur had grown up in the Arbois; he was a connoisseur of wine, and he despised beer. But after the defeat of France by the Prussians in 1871, he considered it his patriotic duty to improve the quality of French beer -- with the declared intention to produce a 'bière de la revanche', superior to the Germans' cherished national drink. He even invaded, armed with his microscope, the sacred premises of Whitbread's in London; his laconic account of that historic visit makes one appreciate the drama that took place.

  Pasteur was reverently handed two casks of the famed brew. He put a drop of one under the microscope and -- 'I immediately recognized three or four disease filaments in the microscopic field. These findings made me bold enough to state in the presence of the master-brewer, who had been called in, that these beers would rapidly spoil . . . and that they must already be somewhat defective in taste, on which point everyone agreed, although after long hesitation. I attributed this hesitation to the natural reserve of a manufacturer whom one compels to declare that his merchandise is not beyond reproach. When I returned to the same brewery less than a week later, I learned that the managers had made haste to acquire a microscope.' It was not the least of the miracles that Pasteur achieved.

  Silkworms, wine, beer -- and before that studies on the souring of milk, the turning of wine into vinegar, of vinegar into acid, of beet-sugar into alcohol. 'Louis . . . is now up to his neck in beet-juice', Madame Pasteur complained in a letter. Each of these campaigns was conducted with the same crusading zeal, the same showmanship, the same patience and precision in method. Pasteur's father had been a sergeant in the Napoleonic army; after Waterloo he had become a tanner in the Arbois. He had probably heard the Emperor's famous speech at the Pyramids: 'Soldiers, from these summits forty centuries look down upon you.' Louis Pasteur, crouching with his microscope on top of one of the gigantic vats at Whitbread's, may have spoken the same words to the awe-stricken master-brewers.

  And that is hardly an exaggeration, for in Pasteur's work we see clearly how the trivial by a short step can lead to the momentous, and how the two are inextricably mixed up in the scientist's mind and motives. One of the landmarks of science is the publication, in 1877, of Pasteur's book with the unprepossessing title, Etudes sur la Bière, Ses Maladies, Les Causes qui les Provoquent. Procédé pour la Rendre Inalterable . . . followed, almost as an afterthought, by . . . Avec une Théorie Nouvelle de la Fermentation. It contains the first complete statement of Pasteur's revolutionary discovery that yeast and all other agents which cause fermentation and putrefaction, are living beings of very small size -- that is, micro-organisms, germs. In a similar way, his work on the silkworms had confirmed that contagious diseases were caused by microbes of different varieties. The principles of sterilization and partial sterilization ('pasteurization'); of immunization, of antisepsis and asepsis; our knowledge of the causative agents of disease and of the general conditions which determine the organism's receptivity for those agents; lastly, the 'domestication' of microbes and their use as antibiotics -- all this grew out of Pasteur's often far-fetched researches into some specific technical problem, undertaken for apparently trivial motives.

  Yet there were other motivational factors at work which lent urgency and drive to each of these technical research projects, from the earliest (On the Turning of Milk) onward: the intuitive vision of a grand unitary design underlying all biochemical transformations, a design which embraced not only the utilization of energy by living organisms in health and disease, but also -- as we shall see in a moment -- the secret of the origin of life. And finally, each particular project -- whether it was concerned with silkworms, wine, or the inoculation of cattle against anthrax -- though carried through with consummate showmanship and a Gallic flourish, was nevertheless a crusade for the public benefit; the resulting self-gratification was no more than a delicious by-product. Through the same interaction of the trivial and monumental which led to Pasteur's intellectual triumphs, the proponent of the bière de la revanche became the greatest benefactor of mankind since Hippocrates.

  I have mentioned Pasteur's hope to discover 'the secret of life'. This is to be taken quite literally.

  The earliest discovery of Pasteur, and for him the most exciting in all his life, was the asymmetry of molecules as a specific characteristic of living organisms -- in other words, the fact that the molecules of living matter come in two varieties which, though chemically identical, are in their spatial structure like mirror images to each other -- or like right and left gloves. 'Left-handed' molecules rotate polarized light to the left, 'right-handed' molecules to the fight; life substances are thus 'optically active'. Why this should be so we still do not quite know; but it remains a challenging fact that 'no other chemical characteristic is as distinctive of living organisms as is optical activity'.

  I am on the verge of mysteries, and the veil which covers them is getting thinner and thinner. The night seems to me too long. . . . Life as manifested to us is a function of the asymmetry of the
universe. . . . The universe is asymmetrical; for, if all the bodies in motion which compose the solar system were placed before a glass, the image in it could not be superimposed upon the reality. . . . Terrestrial magnetism . . . the opposition between positive and negative electricity, are but resultants of asymmetrical actions and movements. . . . Life is dominated by asymmetrical actions. I can even imagine that all living species are primordially in their structure, in their external forms, functions of cosmic asymmetry. [25]

  These intoxicating speculations caused Pasteur to embark on a series of fantastic experiments, aiming at nothing less than the creation of life by means of imitating the asymmetric action of nature in the laboratory, using powerful magnets and all kinds of optical tricks. It was this alchemist's dream which gave birth to the 'grand design' which I have mentioned and which -- like a blue-print drawn in invisible ink -- remained the secret inspiration behind his researches. Luckily, circumstances compelled him to descend from the monumental to the trivial level: Pasteur had to give up trying to create life and had to get 'up to his neck in beet-juice'. He had been appointed Professor of Chemistry in Lille; and no sooner was he installed than Monsieur Bigo, an industrialist engaged in the production of alcohol from beet-sugar, came to consult him about certain difficulties encountered in the process. Since this was one of the main industries of the region, Pasteur embarked on the task with patriotic fervour -- it was the first in the series of this type of venture, long before the silkworms, the wine, and the beer.

  In examining the fermented juice of the beet, he found in it a component, amyl alcohol, which turned out to be optically active. Therefore its molecules must be asymmetrical; but according to the grand design, asymmetry is the privilege and secret of life; therefore fermentation came from the activity of living things, of microbes. At this point the chain reaction set in which fused the germ theory of fermentation to the germ theory of disease. Thus did the alchemist's pipe-dream give birth to modern medicine -- as Kepler's chimerical quest for the harmonies led to modern astronomy.