III
Yet what we consider our highest activities arise out of what we are accustomed to regard as the lowest. That is, indeed, merely a necessary result of evolution; bipeds like ourselves spring out of many-limbed creatures whom we should now regard as little better than vermin, and the adult human creature whose eyes, as he sometimes imagines, are fixed on the stars, was a few years earlier merely a small animal crawling on all fours. The impulse of the philosopher, of the man of science, of any ordinary person who sometimes thinks about seemingly abstract or disinterested questions—we must include the whole range of the play of thought in response to the stimulus of curiosity—may seem at the first glance to be a quite secondary and remote product of the great primary instincts. Yet it is not difficult to bring this secondary impulse into direct relation with the fundamental primary instincts, even, and perhaps indeed chiefly, with the instinct of sex. On the mental side—which is not, of course, its fundamental side—the sexual instinct is mainly, perhaps solely, a reaction to the stimulus of curiosity. Beneath that mental surface the really active force is a physiologically based instinct urgent towards action, but the boy or girl who first becomes conscious of the mental stimulus is unaware of the instinct it springs from, and may even disregard as unimportant its specific physiological manifestations. The child is only conscious of new curiosities, and these it persistently seeks to satisfy at any available or likely source of information, aided by the strenuous efforts of its own restlessly active imagination. It is in exactly the same position as the metaphysician, or the biologist, or any thinker who is faced by complex and yet unsolved problems. And the child is at first baffled by just the same kind of obstacles, due, not like those of the thinker, to the silence of recalcitrant Nature, but to the silence of parents and teachers, or to their deliberate efforts to lead him astray.
Where do babies come from? That is perhaps for many children the earliest scientific problem that is in this way rendered so difficult of solution. No satisfying solution comes from the sources of information to which the child is wont to appeal. He is left to such slight imperfect observations as he can himself make; on such clues his searching intellect works and with the aid of imagination weaves a theory, more or less remote from the truth, which may possibly explain the phenomena. It is a genuine scientific process—the play of intellect and imagination around a few fragments of observed fact—and it is undoubtedly a valuable discipline for the childish mind, though if it is too prolonged it may impede or distort natural development, and if the resulting theory is radically false it may lead, as the theories of scientific adults sometimes lead, if not speedily corrected, to various unfortunate results.
A little later, when he has ceased to be a child and puberty is approaching, another question is apt to arise in the boy’s mind: What is a woman like? There is also, less often and more carefully concealed, the corresponding curiosity in the girl’s mind. Earlier this question had seemed of no interest; it had never even occurred to ask it; there was little realisation—sometimes none at all—of any sexual difference. Now it sometimes becomes a question of singular urgency, in the solution of which it is necessary for the boy to concentrate all the scientific apparatus at his command. For there may be no ways of solving it directly, least of all for a well-behaved, self-respecting boy or a shy, modest girl. The youthful intellect is thus held in full tension, and its developing energy directed into all sorts of new channels in order to form an imaginative picture of the unknown reality, fascinating because incompletely known. All the chief recognised mental processes of dogma, hypothesis, and fiction, developed in the history of the race, are to this end instinctively created afresh in the youthful individual mind, endlessly formed and re-formed and tested in order to fill in the picture. The young investigator becomes a diligent student of literature and laboriously examines the relevant passages he finds in the Bible or other ancient primitive naked books. He examines statues and pictures. Perhaps he finds some old elementary manual of anatomy, but here the long list of structures with Latin names proves far more baffling than helpful to the youthful investigator who can in no possible way fit them all into the smooth surface shown by the statues. Yet the creative and critical habit of thought, the scientific mind generated by this search, is destined to be of immense value, and long outlives the time when the eagerly sought triangular spot, having fulfilled its intellectual function, has become a familiar region, viewed with indifference, or at most a homely tenderness.
That was but a brief and passing episode, however permanently beneficial its results might prove. With the achievement of puberty, with the coming of adolescence, a larger and higher passion fills the youth’s soul. He forgets the woman’s body, his idealism seems to raise him above the physical: it is the woman’s personality—most likely some particular woman’s personality—that he desires to know and to grasp.
A twofold development tends to take place at this age—in those youths, that is to say, who possess the latent attitude for psychic development—and that in two diverse directions, both equally away from definite physical desire, which at this age is sometimes, though not always, at its least prominent place in consciousness. On the one hand there is an attraction for an idealised person—perhaps a rather remote person, for such most easily lend themselves to idealisation—of the opposite (or occasionally the same) sex, it may sometimes for a time even be the heroine of a novel. Such an ideal attraction acts as an imaginative and emotional ferment. The imagination is stimulated to construct for the first time, from such material as it has come across, or can derive from within, the coherent picture of a desirable person. The emotions are trained and disciplined to play around the figure thus constructed with a new impersonal and unselfish, even self-sacrificing, devotion. But this process is not enough to use up all the energies of the developing mind, and the less so as such impulses are unlikely by their very nature to receive any considerable degree of gratification, for they are of a nature to which no adequate response is possible.
Thus it happens in adolescence that this new stream of psychic energy, emotional and intellectual, generated from within, concurrently with its primary personal function of moulding the object of love, streams over into another larger and more impersonal channel. It is, indeed, lifted on to a higher plane and transformed, to exercise a fresh function by initiating new objects of ideal desire. The radiant images of religion and of art as well as of science—however true it may be that they have also other adjuvant sources—thus begin to emerge from the depths beneath consciousness. They tend to absorb and to embody the new energy, while its primary personal object may sink into the background, or at this age even fail to be conscious at all.
This process—the process in which all abstract thinking is born as well as all artistic creation—must to some slight extent take place in every person whose mental activity is not entirely confined to the immediate objects of sense. But in persons of more complex psychic organisation it is a process of fundamental importance. In those of the highest complex organisation, indeed, it becomes what we term genius. In the most magnificent achievements of poetry and philosophy, of art and of science, it is no longer forbidden to see the ultimate root in this adolescent development.
To some a glimpse of this great truth has from time to time appeared. Ferrero, who occupied himself with psychology before attaining eminence as a brilliant historian, suggested thirty years ago that the art impulse and its allied manifestations are transformed sexual instinct; the sexual impulse is “the raw material, so to speak, from which art springs”; he connected that transformation with a less development of the sexual emotions in women; but that was much too hasty an assumption, for apart from the fact that such transformation could never be complete, and probably less so in women than in men, we have also to consider the nature of the two organisms through which the transformed emotions would operate, probably unlike in the sexes, for the work done by two machines obviously does not depend entirely upon feeding them with the same amount of fuel, but also on the construction of the two engines. Möbius, a brilliant and original, if not erratic, German psychologist, who was also concerned with the question of difference in the amount of sexual energy, regarded the art impulse as a kind of sexual secondary character. That is to say, no doubt,—if we develop the suggestion,—that just as the external features of the male and his external activities, in the ascending zoölogical series, have been developed out of the impulse of repressed organic sexual desire striving to manifest itself ever more urgently in the struggle to overcome the coyness of the female, so on the psychic side there has been a parallel impulse, if of later development, to carry on the same task in forms of art which have afterwards acquired an independent activity and a yet further growth dissociated from this primary biological function. We think of the natural ornaments which adorn male animals from far down in the scale even up to man, of the additions made thereto by tattooing and decoration and garments and jewels, of the parades and dances and songs and musical serenades found among lower animals as well as Man, together with the love-lyrics of savages, furnishing the beginnings of the most exquisite arts of civilisation.
It is to be noted, however, that these suggestions introduce an assumption of male superiority, or male inferiority—according to our scheme of values—which unnecessarily prejudices and confuses the issue. We have to consider the question of the origin of art apart from any supposed predominance of its manifestations in one sex or the other. In my own conception—put forward a quarter of a century ago—of what I called auto-erotic activities, it was on such a basis that I sought to place it, since I regarded those auto-erotic phenomena as arising from the impeded spontaneous sexual energy of the organism and extending from simple physical processes to the highest psychic manifestations; “it is impossible to say what finest elements in art, in morals, in civilisation generally, may not really be rooted in an auto-erotic impulse,” though I was careful to add that the transmutation of sexual energy into other forms of force must not be regarded as itself completely accounting for all the finest human aptitudes of sympathy and art and religion.[42]
It is along this path, it may perhaps be claimed,—as dimly glimpsed by Nietzsche, Hinton, and other earlier thinkers,—that the main explanation of the dynamic process by which the arts, in the widest sense, have come into being, is now chiefly being explored. One thinks of Freud and especially of Dr. Otto Rank, perhaps the most brilliant and clairvoyant of the younger investigators who still stand by the master’s side. In 1905 Rank wrote a little essay on the artist[43] in which this mechanism is set forth and the artist placed, in what the psycho-analytic author considers his due place, between the ordinary dreamer at one end and the neurotic subject at the other, the lower forms of art, such as myth-making, standing near to dreams, and the higher forms, such as the drama, philosophy, and the founding of religions, near to psycho-neurosis, but all possessing a sublimated life-force which has its root in some modification of sexual energy.
It may often seem that, in these attempts to explain the artist, the man of science is passed over or left in the background, and that is true. But art and science, as we now know, have the same roots. The supreme men of science are recognisably artists, and the earliest forms of art, which are very early indeed,—Sir Arthur Evans has suggested that men may have drawn before they talked,—were doubtless associated with magic, which was primitive man’s science, or, at all events, his nearest approximation to science. The connection of the scientific instinct with the sexual instinct is not, indeed, a merely recent insight. Many years ago it was clearly stated by a famous Dutch author. “Nature, who must act wisely at the risk of annihilation,” wrote Multatuli at the conclusion of his short story, “The Adventures of Little Walter,” “has herein acted wisely by turning all her powers in one direction. Moralists and psychologists have long since recognised, without inquiring into the causes, that curiosity is one of the main elements of love. Yet they were only thinking of sexual love, and by raising the two related termini in corresponding wise on to a higher plane I believe that the noble thirst for knowledge springs from the same soil in which noble love grows. To press through, to reveal, to possess, to direct, and to ennoble, that is the task and the longing, alike of the lover and the natural discoverer. So that every Ross or Franklin is a Werther of the Pole, and whoever is in love is a Mungo Park of the spirit.”
IV
As soon as we begin to think about the world around us in what we vainly call a disinterested way—for disinterest is, as Leibnitz said, a chimera, and there remains a superior interest—we become youths and lovers and artists, and there is at the same time a significant strain of sexual imagery in our thought.[44] Among ourselves this is not always clear; we have been dulled by the routine of civilisation and the artificial formalities of what is called education. It is clear in the mythopœic creation of comparative primitive thought, but in civilisation it is in the work of men of genius—poets, philosophers, painters, and, as we have to recognise, men of science—that this trait is most conspicuously manifested. To realise this it is sufficient to contemplate the personality and activity of one of the earliest great modern men of science, of Leonardo da Vinci. Until recent times it would have seemed rather strange so to describe Leonardo da Vinci. He still seemed, as he was in his own time, primarily a painter, an artist in the conventionally narrow sense, and as such one of the greatest, fit to paint, as Browning put it, one of the four walls of the New Jerusalem. Yet even his contemporaries who so acclaimed him were a little worried about Leonardo in this capacity. He accomplished so little, he worked so slowly, he left so much unfinished, he seemed to them so volatile and unstable. He was an enigma to which they never secured the key. They failed to see, though it is clearly to be read even in his face, that no man ever possessed a more piercing concentration of vision, a more fixed power of attention, a more unshakable force of will. All that Leonardo achieved in painting and in sculpture and in architecture, however novel or grandiose, was, as Solmi, the highly competent Vincian scholar has remarked, merely a concession to his age, in reality a violence done to his own nature, and from youth to old age he had directed his whole strength to one end: the knowledge and the mastery of Nature. In our own time, a sensitive, alert, widely informed critic of art, Bernhard Berenson, setting out with the conventional veneration for Leonardo as a painter, slowly, as the years went by and his judgment grew more mature, adopted a more critical attitude, bringing down his achievements in art to moderate dimensions, yet without taking any interest in Leonardo as a stupendous artist in science. We may well understand that vein of contempt for the crowd, even as it almost seems the hatred for human society, the spirit of Timon, which runs across Leonardo’s writings, blended, no doubt inevitably blended, with his vein of human sweetness. This stern devotee of knowledge declared, like the author of “The Imitation of Christ,” that “Love conquers all things.” There is here no discrepancy. The man who poured a contemptuous flood of irony and denunciation over the most sacred social institutions and their most respectable representatives was the same man—the Gospels tell us—who brooded with the wings of a maternal tenderness over the pathos of human things.
When, indeed, our imagination plays with the idea of a future Overman, it is Leonardo who comes before us as his forerunner. Vasari, who had never seen Leonardo, but has written so admirable an account of him, can only describe him as “supernatural” and “divine.” In more recent times Nietzsche remarked of Leonardo that “there is something super-European and silent in him, the characteristic of one who has seen too wide a circle of things good and evil.” There Nietzsche touches, even though vaguely, more nearly than Vasari could, the distinguishing mark of this endlessly baffling and enchanting figure. Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy. But it is usually a measurable angle. We cannot measure the angle at which Leonardo stands; he strikes athwart the line of our conventional human thought in ways that are sometimes a revelation and sometimes an impenetrable mystery. We are reminded of the saying of Heraclitus: “Men hold some things wrong and some right; God holds all things fair.” The dispute as to whether he was above all an artist or a man of science is a foolish and even unmeaning dispute. In the vast orbit in which Leonardo moved the distinction had little or no existence. That was inexplicable to his contemporaries whose opinions Vasari echoes. They could not understand that he was not of the crowd of makers of pretty things who filled the workshops of Florence. They saw a man of beautiful aspect and fine proportions, with a long curled beard and wearing a rose-coloured tunic, and they called him a craftsman, an artist, and thought him rather fantastic. But the medium in which this artist worked was Nature, the medium in which the scientist works; every problem in painting was to Leonardo a problem in science, every problem in physics he approached in the spirit of the artist. “Human ingenuity,” he said, “can never devise anything more simple and more beautiful, or more to the purpose, than Nature does.” For him, as later for Spinoza, reality and perfection were the same thing. Both aspects of life he treats as part of his task—the extension of the field of human knowledge, the intension of the power of human skill; for art, or, as he called it, practice, without science, he said, is a boat without a rudder. Certainly he occupied himself much with painting, the common medium of self-expression in his day, though he produced so few pictures; he even wrote a treatise on painting; he possessed, indeed, a wider perception of its possibilities than any artist who ever lived. “Here is the creator of modern landscape!” exclaimed Corot before Leonardo’s pictures, and a remarkable description he has left of the precise effects of colour and light produced when a woman in white stands on green grass in bright sunshine shows that Leonardo clearly apprehended the plein-airiste’s problem. Doubtless it will prove possible to show that he foresaw still later methods. He rejected these methods because it seemed to him that the artist could work most freely by moving midway between light and darkness, and, indeed, he, first of painters, succeeded in combining them—just as he said also that Pleasure and Pain should be imaged as twins since they are ever together, yet back to back because ever contrary—and devised the method of chiaroscuro, by which light reveals the richness of shade and shade heightens the brightness of light. No invention could be more characteristic of this man whose grasp of the world ever involved the union of opposites, and the opposites both apprehended more intensely than falls to the lot of other men.
Yet it is noteworthy that Leonardo constantly speaks of the artist’s function as searching into and imitating Nature, a view which the orthodox artist anathematises. But Leonardo was not the orthodox artist, not even, perhaps, as he is traditionally regarded, one of the world’s supreme painters. For one may sympathise with Mr. Berenson’s engaging attempt—unconvincing as it has seemed—to “expose” Leonardo. The drawings Mr. Berenson, like every one else, admires whole-heartedly, but, save for the unfinished “Adoration,” which he regards as a summit of art, he finds the paintings mostly meaningless and repellent. He cannot rank Leonardo as an artist higher than Botticelli, and concludes that he was not so much a great painter as a great inventor in painting. With that conclusion it is possible that Leonardo himself would have agreed. Painting was to him, he said, a subtle invention whereby philosophical speculation can be applied to all the qualities of forms. He seemed to himself to be, here and always, a man standing at the mouth of the gloomy cavern of Nature with arched back, one hand resting on his knee and the other shading his eyes, as he peers intently into the darkness, possessed by fear and desire, fear of the threatening gloom of that cavern, desire to discover what miracle it might hold. We are far here from the traditional attitude of the painter; we are nearer to the attitude of that great seeker into the mysteries of Nature, one of the very few born of women to whom we can ever even passingly compare Leonardo, who felt in old age that he had only been a child gathering shells and pebbles on the shore of the great ocean of truth.
It is almost as plausible to regard Leonardo as primarily an engineer as primarily a painter. He offered his services as a military engineer and architect to the Duke of Milan and set forth at length his manifold claims which include, one may note, the ability to construct what we should now, without hesitation, describe as “tanks.” At a later period he actually was appointed architect and engineer-general to Cæsar Borgia, and in this capacity was engaged on a variety of works. He has, indeed, been described as the founder of professional engineering. He was the seer of coming steam engines and of steam navigation and transportation. He was, again, the inventor of innumerable varieties of ballistic machines and ordnance, of steam guns and breech-loading arms with screw breech-lock. His science always tended to become applied science. Experience shows the road to practice, he said, science is the guide to art. Thus he saw every problem in the world as in the wide sense a problem in engineering. All nature was a dynamic process of forces beautifully effecting work, and it is this as it were distinctive vision of the world as a whole which seems to give Leonardo that marvellous flair for detecting vital mechanism in every field. It is impossible even to indicate summarily the vast extent of the region in which he was creating a new world, from the statement, which he set down in large letters, “The sun does not move,” the earth being, he said, a star, “much like the moon,” down to such ingenious original devices as the construction of a diving-bell, a swimming-belt, and a parachute of adequate dimensions, while, as is now well known, Leonardo not only meditated with concentrated attention on the problem of flight, but realised scientifically the difficulties to be encountered, and made ingenious attempts to overcome them in the designing of flying-machines. It is enough—following expert scientific guidance—to enumerate a few points: he studied botany in the biological spirit; he was a founder of geology, discovering the significance of fossils and realising the importance of river erosion; by his studies in the theories of mechanics and their utilization in peace and war he made himself the prototype of the modern man of science. He was in turn biologist in every field of vital mechanism, and the inaugurator before Vesalius (who, however, knew nothing of his predecessor’s work) of the minute study of anatomy by direct investigation (after he had found that Galen could not be relied on) and post-mortem dissections; he nearly anticipated Harvey’s conception of the circulation of the blood by studying the nature of the heart as a pump. He was hydraulician, hydrographer, geometrician, algebraist, mechanician, optician.[45] These are but a few of the fields in which Leonardo’s marvellous insight into the nature of the forces that make the world and his divining art of the methods of employing them to human use have of late years been revealed. For centuries they were concealed in notebooks scattered through Europe and with difficulty decipherable. Yet they are not embodied in vague utterances or casual intuitions, but display a laborious concentration on the precise details of the difficulties to be overcome; nor was patient industry in him, as often happens, the substitute for natural facility, for he was a person of marvellous natural facility, and, like such persons, most eloquent and persuasive in speech. At the same time his more general and reflective conclusions are expressed in a style combining the maximum of clarity with the maximum of concision,—far, indeed, removed from the characteristic florid redundancy of Italian prose,—which makes Leonardo, in addition to all else, a supreme master of language.[46]
Yet the man to whom we must credit these vast intellectual achievements was no abstracted philosopher shut up in a laboratory. He was, even to look upon, one of the most attractive and vivid figures that ever walked the earth. As has sometimes happened with divine and mysterious persons, he was the natural child of his mother, Caterina, of whom we are only told that she was “of good blood,” belonging to Vinci like Ser Piero the father, and that a few years after Leonardo’s birth she became the reputable wife of a citizen of his native town. Ser Piero da Vinci was a notary, of a race of notaries, but the busiest notary in Florence and evidently a man of robust vigour; he married four times and his youngest child was fifty years the junior of Leonardo. We hear of the extraordinary physical strength of Leonardo himself, of his grace and charm, of his accomplishments in youth, especially in singing and playing on the flute, though he had but an elementary school education. Except for what he learnt in the workshop of the many-sided but then still youthful Verrocchio, he was his own schoolmaster, and was thus enabled to attain that absolute emancipation from authority and tradition which made him indifferent even to the Greeks, to whom he was most akin. He was left-handed; his peculiar method of writing long raised the suspicion that it was deliberately adopted for concealment, but it is to-day recognised as simply the ordinary mirror-writing of a left-handed child without training. This was not the only anomaly in Leonardo’s strange nature. We now know that he was repeatedly charged as a youth on suspicion of homosexual offences; the result remains obscure, but there is some reason to think he knew the inside of a prison. Throughout life he loved to surround himself with beautiful youths, though no tradition of license or vice clings to his name. The precise nature of his sexual temperament remains obscure. It mocks us, but haunts us from out of his most famous pictures. There is, for instance, the “John the Baptist” of the Louvre, which we may dismiss with the distinguished art critic of to-day as an impudent blasphemy or brood over long, without being clearly able to determine into what obscure region of the Freudian Unconscious Leonardo had here adventured. Freud himself has devoted one of his most fascinating essays to a psychoanalytic interpretation of Leonardo’s enigmatic personality. He admits it is a speculation; we may take it or leave it. But Freud has rightly apprehended that in Leonardo sexual passion was largely sublimated into intellectual passion, in accordance with his own saying, “Nothing can be loved or hated unless first we have knowledge of it,” or, as he elsewhere said, “True and great love springs out of great knowledge, and where you know little you can love but little or not at all.” So it was that Leonardo became a master of life. Vasari could report of him—almost in the words it was reported of another supreme but widely different figure, the Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier—that “with the splendour of his most beautiful countenance he made serene every broken spirit.” To possess by self-mastery the sources of love and hate is to transcend good and evil and so to possess the Overman’s power of binding up the hearts that are broken by good and evil.
Every person of genius is in some degree at once man, woman, and child. Leonardo was all three in the extreme degree and yet without any apparent conflict. The infantile strain is unquestioned, and, apart from the problem of his sexual temperament, Leonardo was a child even in his extraordinary delight in devising fantastic toys and contriving disconcerting tricks. His more than feminine tenderness is equally clear, alike in his pictures and in his life. Isabella d’Este, in asking him to paint the boy Jesus in the Temple, justly referred to “the gentleness and sweetness which mark your art.” His tenderness was shown not only towards human beings, but to all living things, animals and even plants, and it would appear that he was a vegetarian. Yet at the same time he was emphatically masculine, altogether free from weakness or softness. He delighted in ugliness as well as in beauty; he liked visiting the hospitals to study the sick in his thirst for knowledge; he pondered over battles and fighting; he showed no compunction in planning devilish engines of military destruction. His mind was of a definitely realistic and positive cast; though there seems no field of thought he failed to enter, he never touched metaphysics, and though his worship of Nature has the emotional tone of religion, even of ecstasy, he was clearly disdainful of the established religions, and perpetually shocked “the timid friends of God.” By precept and by practice he proclaimed the lofty solitude of the individual soul, and he felt only contempt for the herd. We see how this temper became impressed on his face in his own drawing of himself in old age, with that intent and ruthless gaze wrapped in intellectual contemplation of the outspread world.
Leonardo comes before us, indeed, in the end, as a figure for awe rather than for love. Yet, as the noblest type of the Overman we faintly try to conceive, Leonardo is the foe, not of man, but of the enemies of man. The great secrets that with clear vision his stern grip tore from Nature, the new instruments of power that his energy wrought, they were all for the use and delight of mankind. So Leonardo is the everlasting embodiment of that brooding human spirit whose task never dies. Still to-day it stands at the mouth of the gloomy cavern of Nature, even of Human Nature, with bent back and shaded eyes, seeking intently to penetrate the gloom beyond, with the fear of that threatening darkness, with the desire of what redeeming miracle it yet perchance may hold.
V
That Leonardo da Vinci was not only supremely great in science, but the incarnation of the spirit of science, the artist and lover of Nature, is a fact it is well to bear in mind. Many mistakes would be avoided if it were more clearly present to consciousness. We should no longer find the artists in design absurdly chafing under what they considered the bondage of the artists in thought. It would no longer be possible, as it was some years ago, and may be still, for a narrow-minded pedagogue like Brunetière, however useful in his own field, to be greeted as a prophet when he fatuously proclaimed what he termed “the bankruptcy of science.” Unfortunately so many of the people who masquerade under the name of “men of science” have no sort of title to that name. They may be doing good and honest work by accumulating in little cells the facts which others, more truly inspired by the spirit of science, may one day work on; they may be doing more or less necessary work by the application to practical life of the discoveries which genuine men of science have made. But they themselves have just as much, and no more, claim to use the name of “science” as the men who make the pots and dishes piled up in a crockery shop have to use the name of “art.”[47] They have not yet even learnt that “science” is not the accumulation of knowledge in the sense of piling up isolated facts, but the active organisation of knowledge, the application to the world of the cutting edge of a marvellously delicate instrument, and that this task is impossible without the widest range of vision and the most restless fertility of imagination.
Of such more genuine men of science—to name one whom by virtue of several common interests I was sometimes privileged to come near—was Francis Galton. He was not a professional man of science; he was even willing that his love of science should be accounted simply a hobby. From the standpoint of the ordinary professional scientific man he was probably an amateur. He was not even, as some have been, a learned amateur. I doubt whether he had really mastered the literature of any subject, though I do not doubt that that mattered little. When he heard of some famous worker in a field he was exploring, he would look up that man’s work; so it was with Weismann in the field of heredity. And, as I would note with a smile in reading his letters, Galton was not able to spell Weismann’s name correctly.[48] His attitude in science might be said to be pioneering much like that of the pioneers of museums in the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, men like Tradescant and Ashmole and Evelyn and Sloane: an insatiable curiosity in things that were only just beginning, or had not yet begun, to arouse curiosity. So it was that when I made some personal experiments with the Mexican cactus, mescal (Anhalonium Lewinii), to explore its vision-producing qualities, then quite unknown in England, Galton was eagerly interested and wanted to experiment on himself, though ultimately dissuaded on account of his advanced age. But, on this basis, Galton’s curiosity was not the mere inquisitiveness of the child, it was coördinated with an almost uniquely organised brain as keen as it was well-balanced. So that on the one hand his curiosity was transformed into methods that were endlessly ingenious and inventive, and on the other it was guided and held in check by inflexible caution and good sense. And he knew how to preserve that exquisite balance without any solemnity or tension or self-assertion, but playfully and graciously, with the most unfailing modesty. It was this rare combination of qualities—one may see it all in his “Inquiries into Human Faculty”—which made him the very type of the man of genius, operating, not by profession or by deliberate training, but by natural function, throwing light on the dark places of the world and creating science in out-of-the-way fields of human experience which before had been left to caprice or not even perceived at all. Throughout he was an artist and if, as is reported, he spent the last year of his life chiefly in writing a novel, that was of a piece with the whole of his marvellous activity; he had never been doing anything else. Only his romances were real.
Galton’s yet more famous cousin, Charles Darwin, presents in equal purity the lover and the artist in the sphere of Nature and Science. No doubt there were once many obtuse persons to whom these names seemed scarcely to fit when applied to Darwin. There have been people to whom Darwin scarcely seemed a man of genius, merely a dry laborious pedestrian student of facts. He himself even—as many people find it difficult to forget—once lamented his indifference to poetry and art. But Darwin was one of those elect persons in whose subconscious, if not in their conscious, nature is implanted the realisation that “science is poetry,” and in a field altogether remote from the poetry and art of convention he was alike poet and artist. Only a man so endowed could from a suggestion received on reading Malthus have conceived of natural selection as a chief moulding creative force of an infinite succession of living forms; so also of his fantastic theory of pangenesis. Even in trifling matters of experiment, such as setting a musician to play the bassoon in his greenhouse, to ascertain whether music affected plants, he had all the inventive imagination of poet or of artist. He was poet and artist—though I doubt if this has been pointed out—in his whole attitude towards Nature. He worked hard, but to him work was a kind of play, and it may well be that with his fragile health he could not have carried on his work if it had not been play. Again and again in his “Life and Letters” we find the description of his observations or experiments introduced by some such phrase as: “I was infinitely amused.” And he remarks of a biological problem that it was like a game of chess. I doubt, indeed, whether any great man of science was more of an artist than Darwin, more consciously aware that he was playing with the world, more deliciously thrilled by the fun of life. That man may well have found “poetry and art” dull who himself had created the theory of sexual selection which made the whole becoming of life art and the secret of it poetry.[49]
It is not alone among biologists, from whose standpoint it may be judged easier to reach, since they are concerned with living Nature, that we find the attitude of the lover and the artist. We find it just as well marked when the man of genius plays in what some might think the arid field of the physicist. Faraday worked in a laboratory, a simple one, indeed, but the kind of place which might be supposed fatal to the true spirit of science, and without his researches in magnetic electricity we might have missed, with or without a pang, those most practical machines of our modern life, the dynamo and the telephone. Yet Faraday had no practical ends in view; it has been possible to say of him that he investigated Nature as a poet investigates the emotions. That would not have sufficed to make him the supreme man of science he was. His biographer, Dr. Bence Jones, who knew him well, concludes that Faraday’s first great characteristic was his trust in facts, and his second his imagination. There we are brought to the roots of his nature. Only, it is important to remember, these two characteristics were not separate and distinct. In themselves they may be opposing traits; it was because in Faraday they were held together in vital tension that he became so potent an instrument of research into Nature’s secrets. Tyndall, who was his friend and fellow worker, seems to have perceived this. “The force of his imagination,” wrote Tyndall, “was enormous,”—he “rose from the smallest beginnings to the greatest ends,” from “bubbles of oxygen and nitrogen to the atmospheric envelope of the earth itself,”—but “he bridled it like a mighty rider.” Faraday himself said to the same effect: “Let the imagination go, guarding it by judgment and principles, but holding it in and directing it by experiment.” Elsewhere he has remarked that in youth he was, and he might have added that he still remained, “a very lively imaginative person and could believe in the ‘Arabian Nights’ as easily as in the ‘Encyclopædia’.” But he soon acquired almost an instinct for testing facts by experiment, for distrusting such alleged facts as he had not so tested, and for accepting all the conclusions that he had thus reached with a complete indifference to commonly accepted beliefs. (It is true he was a faithful and devout elder in the Sandemanian Church, and that is not the least fascinating trait in this fascinating man.) Tyndall has insisted on both of these aspects of Faraday’s mental activity. He had “wonderful vivacity,” he was “a man of excitable and fiery nature,” and “underneath his sweetness was the heat of a volcano.” He himself believed that there was a Celtic strain in his heredity; there was a tradition that the family came from Ireland; I cannot find that there are any Faradays, or people of any name resembling Faraday, now in Ireland, but Tyndall, being himself an Irishman, liked to believe that the tradition was sound. It would only account for the emotionally vivacious side of this nature. There was also the other side, on which Tyndall also insists: the love of order, the extreme tenacity, the high self-discipline able to convert the fire within into a clear concentrated glow. In the fusion of these two qualities “he was a prophet,” says Tyndall, “and often wrought by an inspiration to be understood by sympathy alone.” His expansive emotional imagination became the servant of truth, and sprang into life at its touch. In carrying out physical experiments he would experience a childlike joy and his eyes sparkled. “Even to his latest days he would almost dance for joy at being shown a new experiment.” Silvanus Thompson, in his book on Faraday, insists (as Tyndall had) on the association with this childlike joy in imaginative extravagance of the perpetual impulse to test and to prove, “yet never hesitating to push to their logical conclusions the ideas suggested by experiment, however widely they might seem to lead from the accepted modes of thought.” His method was the method of the “Arabian Nights,” transferred to the region of facts.
Faraday was not a mathematician. But if we turn to Kepler, who moved in the sphere of abstract calculation, we find precisely the same combination of characteristics. It was to Kepler, rather than to Copernicus, that we owe the establishment of the heliocentric theory of our universe, and Kepler, more than any man, was the precursor of Newton. It has been said that if Kepler had never lived it is difficult to conceive who could have taken his place and achieved his special part in the scientific creation of our universe. For that pioneering part was required a singular blend of seemingly opposed qualities. Only a wildly daring, original, and adventurous spirit could break away from the age-long traditions and rigid preconceptions which had ruled astronomy for thousands of years. Only an endlessly patient, careful, laborious, precise investigator could set up the new revolutionary conceptions needed to replace these traditions and preconceptions. Kepler supplied this rare combination of faculties. He possessed the most absurdly extravagant imagination; he developed a greater regard for accuracy in calculation than the world had ever known. He was willing to believe that the earth was a kind of animal, and would not have been surprised to find that it possessed lungs or gills. At the same time so set was he on securing the precise truth, so patiently laborious, that some of his most elaborate calculations were repeated, and without the help of logarithms, even seventy times. The two essential qualities that make the supreme artist in science have never been so clearly made manifest as in Kepler.
Kepler may well bring us to Einstein, the greatest pioneer in the comprehension of the universe since his day, and, indeed, one who is more than a pioneer, since he already seems to have won a place beside Newton. It is a significant fact that Einstein, though he possesses an extremely cautious, critical mind, and is regarded as conspicuous for his common sense, has a profound admiration for Kepler, whom he frequently quotes. For Einstein also is an imaginative artist.[50]
Einstein is obviously an artist, even in appearance, as has often been noted by those who have met him; “he looks far more the musician than the man of science,” one writes, while those who know him well say that he is “essentially as much an artist as a discoverer.” As a matter of fact he is an artist in one of the most commonly recognised arts, being an accomplished musician, a good violinist, it is said, while improvisation on the piano, he himself says, is “a necessity of his life.” His face, we are told, is illumined when he listens to music; he loves Bach and Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner much less, while to Chopin, Schumann, and the so-called romantics in music, as we might anticipate, he is indifferent. His love of music is inborn; it developed when, as a child, he would think out little songs “in praise of God,” and sing them by himself; music, Nature, and God began, even at that early age, to become a kind of unity to him. “Music,” said Leibnitz, “is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.” It is the most abstract, the most nearly mathematical of the arts—we may recall how music and mathematics had their scientific origin together in the discovery of Pythagoras—and it is not surprising that it should be Einstein’s favorite art.[51] It is even more natural that, next to music, he should be attracted to architecture—the art which Goethe called “frozen music”—for here we are actually plunged into mechanics, here statics and dynamics are transformed into visible beauty. To painting he is indifferent, but he is drawn to literature, although no great reader. In literature, indeed, it would seem that it is not so much art that he seeks as emotion; in this field it is no longer the austerely architectonic that draws him; thus he is not attracted to Ibsen; he is greatly attracted to Cervantes as well as Keller and Strindberg; he has a profound admiration for Shakespeare, but is cooler towards Goethe, while it would seem that there is no writer to whom he is more fervently attached than the most highly emotional, the most profoundly disintegrated in nervous organisation of all great writers, Dostoievsky, especially his masterpiece, “The Brothers Karamazov.” “Dostoievsky gives me more than any scientist, more than Gauss.” All literary analysis or æsthetic subtlety, it seems to Einstein, fails to penetrate to the heart of a work like “The Karamazovs,” it can only be grasped by the feelings. His face lights up when he speaks of it and he can find no word but “ethical satisfaction.” For ethics in the ordinary sense, as a system, means little to Einstein; he would not even include it in the sciences; it is the ethical joy embodied in art which satisfies him. Moreover, it is said, the keynote of Einstein’s emotional existence is the cry of Sophocles’ Antigone: “I am not here to hate with you, but to love with you.” The best that life has to offer, he feels, is a face glowing with happiness. He is an advanced democrat and pacifist rather than (as is sometimes supposed) a socialist; he believes in the internationality of all intellectual work and sees no reason why this should destroy national characteristics.
Einstein is not—and this is the essential point to make clear—merely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art also is rooted. Of Max Planck, the physicist, for whom he has great admiration, Einstein has said: “The emotional condition which fits him for his task is akin to that of a devotee or a lover.” We may say the same, it would seem, of Einstein himself. He is not even to be included, as some might have supposed, in that rigid sect which asserts that all real science is precise measurement; he recognises that the biological sciences must be largely independent of mathematics. If mathematics were the only path of science, he once remarked, Nature would have been illegible for Goethe, who had a non-mathematical, even anti-mathematical, mind, and yet possessed a power of intuition greater than that of many an exact investigator.[52] All great achievements in science, he holds, start from intuition. This he constantly repeats, although he adds that the intuition must not stand alone, for invention also is required. He is disposed to regard many scientific discoveries commonly regarded the work of pure thought as really works of art. He would have this view embodied in all education, making education a free and living process, with no drilling of the memory and no examinations, mainly a process of appeal to the senses in order to draw out delicate reactions. With his end, and even for the sake of acquiring ethical personality, he would have every child learn a handicraft, joinery, bookbinding, or other, and, like Élie Faure,[53] he has great faith in the educational value of the cinema. We see that behind all Einstein’s activity lies the conception that the physicist’s work is to attain a picture, “a world-picture,” as he calls it. “I agree with Schopenhauer,” Einstein said at a celebration in honour of Planck in 1918, “that one of the most powerful motives that attract people to science and art is the longing to escape from everyday life with its painful coarseness and desolating bareness, and to break the fetters of their own ever-changing desires. It impels those of keener sensibility out of their personal existences into the world of objective perception and understanding. It is a motive force of like kind to that which drives the dweller in noisy confused cities to restful Alpine heights whence he seems to have an outlook on eternity. Associated with this negative motive is the positive motive which impels men to seek a simplified synoptic view of the world conformable to their own nature, overcoming the world by replacing it with this picture. The painter, the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, all do this, each in his own way.” Spengler has elaborately argued that there is a perfect identity of physics, mathematics, religion, and great art.[54] We might fairly be allowed to point to Einstein as a lofty embodiment of that identity.
Here, where we reach the sphere of mathematics, we are among processes which seem to some the most inhuman of all human activities and the most remote from poetry. Yet it is here that the artist has the fullest scope for his imagination. “Mathematics,” says Bertrand Russell in his “Mysticism and Logic,” “may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.” We are in the imaginative sphere of art, and the mathematician is engaged in a work of creation which resembles music in its orderliness, and is yet reproducing on another plane the order of the universe, and so becoming as it were a music of the spheres. It is not surprising that the greatest mathematicians have again and again appealed to the arts in order to find some analogy to their own work. They have indeed found it in the most various arts, in poetry, in painting, in sculpture, although it would certainly seem that it is in music, the most abstract of the arts, the art of number and of time, that we find the closest analogy. “The mathematician’s best work is art,” said Mittag-Lefler, “a high and perfect art, as daring as the most secret dreams of imagination, clear and limpid. Mathematical genius and artistic genius touch each other.” And Sylvester wrote in his “Theory of Reciprocants”: “Does it not seem as if Algebra had attained to the dignity of a fine art, in which the workman has a free hand to develop his conceptions, as in a musical theme or a subject for painting? It has reached a point in which every properly developed algebraical composition, like a skilful landscape, is expected to suggest the notion of an infinite distance lying beyond the limits of the canvas.” “Mathematics, rightly viewed,” says Bertrand Russell again, “possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.... The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.”
The mathematician has reached the highest rung on the ladder of human thought. But it is the same ladder which we have all of us been always ascending, alike from the infancy of the individual and the infancy of the race. Molière’s Jourdain had been speaking prose for more than forty years without knowing it. Mankind has been thinking poetry throughout its long career and remained equally ignorant.