CHAPTER III

THE ART OF THINKING

I

HERBERT SPENCER pointed out, in his early essay on “The Genesis of

Science,” that science arose out of art, and that even yet the

distinction is “purely conventional,” for “it is impossible to say when

art ends and science begins.” Spencer was here using “art” in the

fundamental sense according to which all practice is of the nature of

art. Yet it is of interest to find a thinker now commonly regarded as so

prosaic asserting a view which to most prosaic people seems fanciful. To

the ordinary solid man, to any would-be apostle of common sense,

science—and by “science” he usually means applied science—seems the

exact opposite of the vagaries and virtuosities that the hard-headed

_homme moyen sensuel_ is accustomed to look upon as “art.”

Yet the distinction is modern. In classic times there was no such

distinction. The “sciences”—reasonably, as we may now see, and not

fancifully as was afterwards supposed—were “the arts of the mind.” In

the Middle Ages the same liberal studies—grammar, logic, geometry,

music, and the rest—could be spoken of either as “sciences” or as

“arts,” and for Roger Bacon, who in the thirteenth century was so

genuine a man of science, every branch of study or learning was a

“scientia.” I am inclined to think that it was the Mathematical

Renaissance of the seventeenth century which introduced the undue

emphasis on the distinction between “science” and “art.” “All the

sciences are so bound together,” wrote Descartes, the banner-bearer of

that Renaissance, in his “Règles pour la Direction de l’Esprit,” “that

it is much easier to learn them all at once than to learn one alone by

detaching it from the others.” He added that we could not say the same

of the arts. Yet we might perhaps say of arts and sciences that we can

only understand them all together, and we may certainly say, as

Descartes proceeded to say of the sciences alone, that they all emanate

from the same focus, however diversely coloured by the media they pass

through or the objects they encounter. At that moment, however, it was

no doubt practically useful, however theoretically unsound, to

overemphasise the distinction between “science,” with its new

instrumental precision, and “art.”[26] At the same time the tradition of

the old usage was not completely put aside, and a Master of “Arts”

remained a master of such sciences as the directors of education

succeeded in recognising until the middle of the nineteenth century. By

that time the development of the sciences, and especially of the

physical sciences, as “the discovery of truth,” led to a renewed

emphasis on them which resulted in the practical restriction of the term

“art” to what are ordinarily called the fine arts. More formally,

science became the study of what were supposed to be demonstrable and

systematically classifiable truths regarding the facts of the world; art

was separated off as the play of human impulses in making things. Sir

Sidney Colvin, in the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” after discussing the

matter (which Mill had already discussed at length in his “Logic” and

decided that the difference is that Science is in the Indicative Mood

and Art in the Imperative Mood), concluded that science is “ordered

knowledge of natural phenomena and of the relations between them,” or

that “Science consists in knowing, Art consists in doing.” Men of

science, like Sir E. Ray Lankester, accepted this conclusion. That was

as far as it was possible to go in the nineteenth century.

But the years pass, and the progress of science itself, especially the

sciences of the mind, has upset this distinction. The analysis of

“knowing” showed that it was not such a merely passive and receptive

method of recognising “truth” as scientists had innocently supposed.

This is probably admitted now by the Realists among philosophers as well

as by the Idealists. Dr. Charles Singer, perhaps our most learned

historian of science, now defines science, no longer as a body of

organized knowledge, but as “the process which makes knowledge,” as

“knowledge in the making”; that is to say, “the growing edge between the

unknown and the known.”[27] As soon as we thus regard it, as a _making_

process, it becomes one with art. Even physical science is perpetually

laying aside the “facts” which it thought it knew, and learning to

replace them by other “facts” which it comes to know as more

satisfactory in presenting an intelligible view of the world. The

analysis of “knowing” shows that this is not only a legitimate but an

inevitable process. Such a process is active and creative. It clearly

partakes at least as much of the nature of “doing” as of “knowing.” It

involves qualities which on another plane, sometimes indeed on the same

plane, are essentially those involved in doing. The craftsman who moulds

conceptions with his mind cannot be put in a fundamentally different

class from the craftsman who moulds conceptions with his hand, any more

than the poet can be put in a totally different class from the painter.

It is no longer possible to deny that science is of the nature of art.

So it is that in the fundamental sense, and even, it will have to be

added, in a sense that comprehends the extravagancies of wild variations

from the norm, we have to recognise that the true man of science is an

artist. Like the lunatic, the lover, the poet (as a great physician, Sir

William Osler, has said), the student is “of imagination all compact.”

It was by his “wonderful imagination,” it has been well pointed out,

that Newton was constantly discovering new tracks and new processes in

the region of the unknown. The extraordinary various life-work of

Helmholtz, who initiated the valuation of beauty on a physiological

basis, scientifically precise as it was, had, as Einstein has remarked,

an æsthetic colouring. “There is no such thing as an unimaginative

scientific man,” a distinguished professor of mechanics and mathematics

declared some years ago, and if we are careful to remember that not

every man who believes that his life is devoted to science is really a

“scientific man,” that statement is literally true.[28] It is not only

true of the scientific man in the special sense; it is also true of the

philosopher. In every philosopher’s work, a philosophic writer has

remarked, “the construction of a complete system of conceptions is not

carried out simply in the interests of knowledge. Its underlying motive

is æsthetic. It is the work of a creative artist.”[29] The intellectual

lives of a Plato or a Dante, Professor Graham Wallas from a different

standpoint has remarked, “were largely guided and sustained by their

delight in the sheer beauty of the rhythmic relation between law and

instance, species and individual, or cause and effect.”[30]

That remark, with its reference to the laws and rhythm in the universe,

calls to mind the great initiator, so far as our knowledge extends back,

of scientific research in our European world. Pythagoras is a dim

figure, and there is no need here to insist unduly on his significance.

But there is not the slightest doubt about the nature of that

significance in its bearing on the point before us. Dim and legendary as

he now appears to us, Pythagoras was no doubt a real person, born in the

sixth century before Christ, at Samos, and by his association with that

great shipping centre doubtless enabled to voyage afar and glean the

wisdom of the ancient world. In antiquity he was regarded, Cicero

remarks, as the inventor of philosophy, and still to-day he is estimated

to be one of the most original figures, not only of Greece, but the

world. He is a figure full of interest from many points of view, however

veiled in mist, but he only concerns us here because he represents the

beginning of what we call “science”—that is to say, measurable knowledge

at its growing point—and because he definitely represents it as arising

out of what we all conventionally recognise as “art,” and as, indeed,

associated with the spirit of art, even its most fantastic forms, all

the way. Pythagoras was a passionate lover of music, and it was thus

that he came to make the enormously fruitful discovery that pitch of

sound depends upon the length of the vibrating chord. Therein it became

clear that law and spatial quantity ruled even in fields which had

seemed most independent of quantitative order. The beginning of the

great science of mechanics was firmly set up. The discovery was no

accident. Even his rather hostile contemporary Heraclitus said of

Pythagoras that he had “practised research and inquiry beyond all other

men.” He was certainly a brilliant mathematician; he was, also, not only

an astronomer, but the first, so far as we know, to recognise that the

earth is a sphere,—so setting up the ladder which was to reach at last

to the Copernican conception,—while his followers took the further step

of affirming that the earth was not the centre of our cosmic system, but

concentrically related. So that Pythagoras may not only be called the

Father of Philosophy, but, with better right the Father of Science in

the modern exact sense. Yet he remained fundamentally an artist even in

the conventional sense. His free play of imagination and emotion, his

delight in the ravishing charm of beauty and of harmony, however it may

sometimes have led him astray,—and introduced the reverence for Number

which so long entwined fancy too closely with science,—yet, as Gomperz

puts it, gave soaring wings to the power of his severe reason.[31]

One other great dim figure of early European antiquity shares with

Pythagoras the philosophic dominance over our world, and that is the

Platonic Socrates, or, as we might perhaps say, the Socratic Plato. And

here, too, we are in the presence of a philosopher, if not a scientist,

who was a supreme artist. Here again, also, we encounter a legendary

figure concealing a more or less real human person. But there is a

difference. While all are agreed that, in Pythagoras we have a great and

brilliant figure dimly seen, there are many who consider that in

Socrates we have a small and dim figure grown great and brilliant in the

Platonic medium through which alone he has been really influential in

our world, for without Plato the name of Socrates would have scarcely

been mentioned. The problem of the Pythagorean legend may be said to be

settled. But the problem of the Socratic legend is still under

discussion. We cannot, moreover, quite put it aside as merely of

academic interest, for its solution, if ever reached, would touch that

great vital problem of art in the actual world with which we are here

throughout concerned.

If one examines any large standard history of Greece, like Grote’s to

mention one of the oldest and best, one is fairly sure to find a long

chapter on the life of Socrates. Such a chapter is inserted, without

apology, without explanation, without compunction, as a matter of

course, in a so-called “history,” and nearly every one, even to-day,

still seems to take it as a matter of course. Few seem to possess the

critical and analytical mind necessary for the examination of the

documents on which the “history” rests. If they approached this chapter

in a questioning spirit, they might perhaps discover that it was not

until about half a century after the time of the real Socrates that any

“historical” evidence for the existence of our legendary Socrates begins

to appear.[32] Few people seem to realise that even of Plato himself we

know nothing certain that could not be held in a single sentence. The

“biographies” of Plato began to be written four hundred years after his

death. It should be easy to estimate their value.

There are three elements—one of them immeasurably more important than

the other two—of which the composite portrait of our modern Socrates is

made up: Xenophon, Plato, the dramatists. To the contribution furnished

by the first, not much weight is usually attached. Yet it should really

have been regarded as extremely illuminating. It suggests that the

subject of “Socrates” was a sort of school exercise, useful practice in

rhetoric or in dialectics. The very fact that Xenophon’s Socrates was so

reminiscent of his creator ought to have been instructive.[33] It has,

however, taken scholars some time to recognise this, and Karl Joël, who

spent fifteen of the best years of his life over the Xenophontic

Socrates, to discover that the figure was just as much a fiction as the

Platonic Socrates, has lately confessed that he thinks those years

rather wasted. It might have been clear earlier that what Plato had done

was really just the same thing so far as method was concerned, though a

totally different thing in result because done by the most richly

endowed of poet-philosophers, the most consummate of artists. For that

is probably how we ought to regard Plato, and not, like some, as merely

a great mystificator. It is true that Plato was the master of irony, and

that “irony,” in its fundamental meaning, is, as Gomperz points out,

“pleasure in mystifying.” But while Plato’s irony possesses a

significance which we must always keep before us, it is yet only one of

the elements of his vast and versatile mind.

It is to the third of these sources that some modern investigators are

now inclined to attach primary significance. It was on the stage—in the

branch of drama that kept more closely in touch with life than that

which had fallen into the hands of the prose dialecticians and

rhetoricians—that we seem to find the shadow of the real Socrates. But

he was not the Socrates of the dramatic dialogues of Plato or even of

Xenophon; he was a minor Sophist, an inferior Diogenes, yet a remarkable

figure, arresting and disturbing, whose idiosyncrasies were quite

perceptible to the crowd. It was an original figure, hardly the

embodiment of a turning-point in philosophy, but fruitful of great

possibilities, so that we could hardly be surprised if the master of

philosophic drama took it over from real life and the stage for his own

purposes.

To make clear to myself the possible way—I am far from asserting it was

the actual way—in which our legendary Socrates arose, I sometimes think

of Chidley. Chidley was an Australian Sophist and Cynic, in the good

sense of both these words, and without doubt, it seems to me, the most

original and remarkable figure that has ever appeared in Australia, of

which, however, he was not a native, though he spent nearly his whole

life there. He was always poor, and like most philosophers he was born

with a morbid nervous disposition, though he acquired a fine and robust

frame. He was liable not only to the shock of outward circumstances but

of inward impulses; these he had in the past often succumbed to, and

only slowly and painfully gained the complete mastery over as he gained

possession of his own philosophy. For all his falls, which he felt

acutely, as Augustine and Bunyan as well as Rousseau felt such lapses,

there was in him a real nobility, an even ascetic firmness and purity of

character. I never met him, but I knew him more intimately, perhaps,

than those who came in contact with him. For many years I was in touch

with him, and his last letter was written shortly before his death; he

always felt I ought to be persuaded of the truth he had to reveal and

never quite understood my sympathetic attitude of scepticism. He had

devoured all the philosophic literature he could lay hold of, but his

philosophy—in the Greek sense, as a way of life, and not in our modern

sense as a system of notions—was his own: a new vision of Nature’s

simplicity and wholeness, only new because it had struck on a new

sensibility and sometimes in excessive and fantastic ways, but he held

his faith with unbending devotion, and never ceased to believe that all

would accept the vision when once they beheld it. So he went about the

streets in Sydney, clad (as a concession to public feeling) in bathing

drawers, finding anywhere he could the Stoa which might serve for him,

to argue and discuss, among all who were willing, with eager faith, keen

mind, and pungent speech. A few were won, but most were disturbed and

shocked. The police persistently harassed him; they felt bound to

interfere with what seemed such an outrage on the prim decency of the

streets; and as he quietly persisted in following his own course, and it

was hard to bring any serious charge against him, they called in the aid

of the doctors, and henceforth he was in and out of the asylum instead

of the prison. No one need be blamed; it was nobody’s fault; if a man

transgresses the ordinary respectable notions of decency, he must be a

criminal, and if he is not a criminal, he must be a lunatic; the social

organisation takes no account of philosophers; the philosophic

Hipparchia and her husband must not nowadays consummate their marriage

in public, and our modern philosophers meekly agree that philosophy is

to have nothing to do with a life. Every one in the case seems to have

behaved with due conventional propriety, just as every one behaved

around the deathbed of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilitch. It was Chidley’s deathbed

they were preparing, and he knew it, but he unflinchingly grasped the

cup they held out to him and drank it to the dregs. He felt he could do

no other. There was no fabled hemlock in it, but it was just as deadly

as though it had been accompanied by all the dramatic symbolisation of a

formal condemnation to death, such as had really been recorded (Plato

well knew) in old Athenian annals. There was no Plato in Sydney. But if

there had been, it is hard to conceive any figure more fit for the ends

of his transforming art. Through that inspiring medium the plebeian

Sophist and Cynic, while yet retaining something of the asperity of his

original shape, would have taken on a new glory, his bizarreries would

have been spiritualised and his morbidities become the signs of mystic

possession, his fate would have appeared as consecrated in form as it

genuinely was in substance, he would have been the mouthpiece, not only

of the truths he really uttered, but of a divine eloquence on the verge

of which he had in real life only trembled, and, like Socrates in the

hands of Plato, he would have passed, as all the finest philosophy

passes at last, into music.[34] So in the end Chidley would have entered

modern history, just as Socrates entered ancient history, the Saint and

Martyr of Philosophy.[35]

If it should so be that, as we learn to see him truly, the figure of the

real Socrates must diminish in magnitude, then—and that is the point

which concerns us here—the glory of the artist who made him what he has

become for us is immensely enhanced. No longer the merely apt and

brilliant disciple of a great master, he becomes himself master and

lord, the radiant creator of the chief figure in European philosophy,

the most marvellous artist the world has ever known. So that when we

look back at the spiritual history of Europe, it may become possible to

say that its two supreme figures, the Martyr of Philosophy and the

Martyr of Religion, were both—however real the two human persons out of

which they were formed—the work of man’s imagination. For there, on the

one hand, we see the most accomplished of European thinkers, and on the

other a little band of barbarians, awkwardly using just the same Greek

language, working with an unconscious skill which even transcends all

that conscious skill could have achieved, yet both bearing immortal

witness to the truth that the human soul only lives truly in art and can

only be ruled through art. So it is that in art lies the solution of the

conflicts of philosophy. There we see Realism, or the discovery of

things, one with Idealism, or the creation of things. Art is the

embodied harmony of their conflict. That could not be more exquisitely

symbolised than by these two supreme figures in the spiritual life of

Europe, the Platonic Socrates and the Gospel Jesus, both alike presented

to us, it is so significant to observe, as masters of irony.

There has never again been so great an artist in philosophy, so supreme

a dramatist, as Plato. But in later times philosophers themselves have

often been willing to admit that even if they were not, like Plato,

dramatists, there was poetry and art in their vocation. “One does not

see why the sense for Philosophy should be more generally diffused than

that for poetry,” remarked Schelling, evidently regarding them as on the

same plane. F. A. Lange followed with his memorable “History of

Materialism,” in which the conception of philosophy as a poetic art was

clearly set forth. “Philosophy is pure art,” says in our own days a

distinguished thinker who is in especially close touch with the

religious philosophy of the East. “The thinker works with laws of

thought and scientific facts in just the same sense as the musical

composer with tones. He must find accords, he must think out sequences,

he must set the part in a necessary relation to the whole. But for that

he needs art.”[36] Bergson regards philosophy as an art, and Croce, the

more than rival of Bergson in popular esteem, and with interesting

points of contact with the French philosopher, though his standpoint is

so different, has repeatedly pointed out—as regards Nietzsche, for

instance, and even as regards a philosopher to whom he is so closely

related as Hegel—that we may read philosophy for its poetic rather than

its historic truth. Croce’s position in this matter is not, indeed, easy

to state quite simply. He includes æsthetics in philosophy, but he would

not regard philosophy as an art. For him art is the first and lowest

stratum in the mind, not in rank, but in order, and on it the other

strata are laid and combine with it. Or, as he elsewhere says, “art is

the root of our whole theoretic life. Without root there can be neither

flower nor fruit.”[37] But for Croce art is not itself flower or fruit.

The “Concept” and other abstractions have to be brought in before Croce

is satisfied that he has attained reality. It may, perhaps, indeed, be

permitted, even to an admirer of the skill with which Croce spreads out

such wide expanses of thought, to suggest that, in spite of his anxiety

to keep close to the concrete, he is not therein always successful, and

that he tends to move in verbal circles, as may perhaps happen to a

philosopher who would reduce the philosophy of art to the philosophy of

language. But, however that may be, it is a noteworthy fact that the

close relationship of art and philosophy is admitted by the two most

conspicuous philosophers of to-day, raised to popular eminence in spite

of themselves, the Philosopher of Other-worldliness and the Philosopher

of This-worldliness.

If we turn to England, we find that, in an age and a land wherein it was

not so easy to make the assertion as it has now more generally become,

Sir Leslie Stephen, in harmony, whether or not he knew it, with F. A.

Lange, wrote to Lord Morley (as he later became) in the last century: “I

think that a philosophy is really made more of poetry than of logic; and

the real value of both poetry and philosophy is not the pretended

reasoning, but the exposition in one form or other of a certain view of

life.” It is, we see, just what they have all been saying, and if it is

true of men of science and philosophers, who are the typical

representatives of human thinking, it is even true of every man on earth

who thinks, ever since the day when conscious thinking began. The world

is an unrelated mass of impressions, as it first strikes our infant

senses, falling at random on the sensory mechanism, and all appearing as

it were on the same plane. For an infant the moon is no farther away

than his mother’s breast, even though he possesses an inherited mental

apparatus fitted to coördinate and distinguish the two. It is only when

we begin to think, that we can arrange these unrelated impressions into

intelligible groups, and thinking is thus of the nature of art.[38]

All such art, moreover, may yet be said to be an invention of fictions.

That great and fundamental truth, which underlies so much modern

philosophy, has been expounded in the clearest and most detailed manner

by Hans Vaihinger in his “Philosophie des Als Ob.”

II

HANS VAIHINGER is still little known in England;[39] and that is the

more remarkable as he has always been strongly attached to English

thought, of which his famous book reveals an intimate knowledge. In

early life he had mixed much with English people, for whom he has a deep

regard, and learnt to revere, not only Darwin, but Hume and J. S. Mill,

who exerted a decisive influence on his own philosophic development. At

the beginning of his career he projected a history of English

philosophy, but interest in that subject was then so small in Germany

that he had regretfully to abandon his scheme, and was drawn instead,

through no active effort on his part, to make the study of Kant the

by-product of his own more distinctive work, yet it was a fitting study,

for in Kant he saw the germs of the doctrine of the “as if,” that is to

say, the practical significance of fiction in human life, though that is

not the idea traditionally associated with Kant, who, indeed, was not

himself clear about it, while his insight was further darkened by his

reactionary tendencies; yet Vaihinger found that it really played a

large part in Kant’s work and might even be regarded as his special and

personal way of regarding things; he was not so much a metaphysician,

Vaihinger remarks, as a metaphorician. Yet even in his Kantian studies

the English influence was felt, for Vaihinger’s work has here been to

take up the Neo-Kantism of F. A. Lange and to develop it in an empirical

and positivistic direction.

There was evidently something in Vaihinger’s spirit that allied him to

the English spirit. We may see that in his portrait; it is not the face

of the philosophic dreamer, the scholarly man of the study, but the

eager, forceful head of the practical man of action, the daring

adventurer, the man who seems made to struggle with the concrete things

of the world, the kind of man, that is to say, whom we consider

peculiarly English. That, indeed, is the kind of man he would have been;

that is the kind of life, a social life full of activity and of sport,

that he desired to lead. But it was impossible. An extreme and lifelong

short-sightedness proved a handicap of which he has never ceased to be

conscious. So it came about that his practical energy was, as it were,

sublimated into a philosophy which yet retained the same forceful

dynamic quality.

For the rest, his origin, training, and vocation seem all to have been

sufficiently German. He came, like many other eminent men, out of a

Swabian parsonage, and was himself intended for theology, only branching

off into philosophy after his university career was well advanced. At

the age of sixteen he was deeply influenced, as so many others have

been, by Herder’s “Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit”; that not only

harmonised with his own tendency at the time towards a mixed theism and

pantheism, but it first planted within him the conception of evolution

in human history, proceeding from an animal origin, which became a

fundamental element of his mental constitution. When a year later he

came across Darwin’s doctrines he felt that he knew them beforehand.

These influences were balanced by that of Plato, through whose “Ideas”

he caught his first glimpse of an “As-If world.” A little later the

strenuous training of one of his teachers in the logical analysis of

Latin syntax, especially in the use of the conjunctions, furnished the

source from which subsequently he drew that now well-known phrase. It

was in these years that he reached the view, which he has since

definitely advocated, that philosophy should not be made a separate

study, but should become a natural part and corollary of every study,

since philosophy cannot be fruitfully regarded as a discipline by

itself. Without psychology, especially, he finds that philosophy is

merely “a methodic abstraction.” A weighty influence of these days was

constituted by the poems and essays of Schiller, a Swabian like himself,

and, indeed, associated with the history of his own family. Schiller was

not only an inspiring influence, but it was in Schiller’s saying, “Error

alone is life, and knowledge is death,” that he found (however

unjustifiably) the first expression of his own “fictionalism,” while

Schiller’s doctrine of the play impulse as the basis of artistic

creation and enjoyment seemed the prophecy of his own later doctrine,

for in play he saw later the “as if” as the kernel of æsthetic practice

and contemplation.

At the age of eighteen Vaihinger proceeded to the Swabian University of

Tübingen and here was free to let his wide-ranging, eager mind follow

its own impulses. He revealed a taste for the natural sciences and with

this the old Greek nature philosophers, especially Anaximander, for the

sake of their anticipations of modern evolutionary doctrines. Aristotle

also occupied him, later Spinoza, and, above all, Kant, though it was

chiefly the metaphysical antinomies and the practical reason which

fascinated him. As ever, it was what made for practice that seemed

mostly to concern him. Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, the

official German idealists, said nothing to him. He turned from them to

Schopenhauer, and thence he drew the pessimisms, the irrationalism, and

the voluntarism which became permanent features of his system of

thought. The irrationalism, as he himself points out, was completely

opposed to all early influences on him, but it lay in his own personal

circumstances. The contrast between his temperamental impulse to

energetic practical action in every direction, and the reserve,

passivity, and isolation which myopia enforced, seemed to him absolutely

irrational and sharpened his vision for all the irrationality of

existence. So that a philosophy which, like Schopenhauer’s, truthfully

recognised and allowed for the irrational element in existence came like

a revelation. As to Vaihinger’s pessimism, that, as we might expect, is

hardly of what would be generally considered a pessimistic character. It

is merely a recognition of the fact that most people are over-sanguine

and thereby come to grief, whereas a little touch of pessimism would

have preserved them from much misery. Long before the Great War,

Vaihinger felt that many Germans were over-sanguine regarding the

military power of their Empire, and of Germany’s place in the world, and

that such optimism might easily conduce to war and disaster. In 1911 he

even planned to publish anonymously in Switzerland a pamphlet entitled

“Finis Germaniæ,” with the motto “Quos Deus vult perdere, prius

dementat,” and was only prevented by a sudden development of the

eye-trouble. Vaihinger points out that an unjustified optimism had for a

long time past led in the politics of Germany—and also, he might have

said, of the countries later opposed to her—to lack of foresight,

over-haste, and arrogance; he might have added that a very slight touch

of pessimism would also have enabled these countries, on both sides, to

discover the not very remote truth that even the victors in such a

contest would suffer scarcely less than the conquered. In early life

Vaihinger had playfully defined Man as a “species of ape afflicted by

megalomania”; he admits that, whatever truth lies behind the definition,

the statement is somewhat exaggerated. Yet it is certainly strange to

observe, one may comment, how many people seem to feel vain of their own

ungratified optimism when the place where optimism most flourishes is

the lunatic asylum. They never seem to pause to reflect on the goal that

lies ahead of them, though there must be few who on looking back cannot

perceive what terrible accidents they might have foreseen and avoided by

the aid of a little pessimism. When the gods, to ruin a man, first make

him mad, they do it, almost invariably, by making him an optimist. One

might hazard the assertion that the chief philosophic distinction

between classic antiquity and modern civilisation is the prevalence in

the latter of a facile optimism; and the fact that of all ancient

writers the most popular in modern times has been the complacently

optimistic (or really hedonistic) Horace is hardly due to his technical

virtuosity. He who would walk sanely amid the opposing perils in the

path of life always needs a little optimism; he also needs a little

pessimism.

Reference has been made to Vaihinger’s devouring appetite for knowledge.

This, indeed, was extraordinary, and of almost universal range. There

seem to have been few fields with which he failed to come in touch,

either through books or by personal intercourse with experts. He found

his way into all the natural sciences, he was drawn to Greek archæology

and German philosophy; he began the study of Sanscrit with Roth. Then,

realising that he had completely neglected mathematics, he devoted

himself with ardour to analytic geometry and infinitesimals, a study

which later he found philosophically fruitful. Finally, in 1874, he may

be said to have rounded the circle of his self-development by reading

the just published enlarged and much improved edition of F. A. Lange’s

“History of Materialism.” Here he realised the presence of a spirit of

the noblest order, equipped with the widest culture and the finest

lucidity of vision, the keenest religious radicalism combined with

large-hearted tolerance and lofty moral equilibrium, all manifested in a

completed master-work. Moreover, the standpoint of F. A. Lange was

precisely that which Vaihinger had been independently struggling

towards, for it brought into view that doctrine of the place of fiction

in life which he had already seen ahead. It is not surprising that he

should generously and enthusiastically acclaim Lange as master and

leader, though his subsequent work is his own, and has carried ideas of

which Lange held only the seeds to new and fruitful development.[40]

It was in 1876-77 that Vaihinger wrote his book, a marvellous

achievement for so youthful a thinker, for he was then only about

twenty-five years of age. A final revision it never underwent, and there

remain various peculiarities about the form into which it is cast. The

serious failure in eyesight seems to have been the main reason for

delaying the publication of a work which the author felt to be too

revolutionary to put forth in an imperfect form. He preferred to leave

it for posthumous publication.

But the world was not standing still, and during the next thirty years

many things happened. Vaihinger found the new sect of Pragmatists coming

into fashion with ideas resembling his own, though in a cruder shape,

which seemed to render philosophy the “meretrix theologorum.” Many

distinguished thinkers were working towards an attitude more or less

like his own, especially Nietzsche, whom (like many others even to-day)

he had long regarded with prejudice and avoided, but now discovered to

be “a great liberator” with congenial veins of thought. Vaihinger

realised that his conception was being independently put forward from

various sides, often in forms that to him seemed imperfect or vicious.

It was no longer advisable to hold back his book. In 1911, therefore,

“Die Philosophie des Als Ob” appeared.

The problem which Vaihinger set out to solve was this: How comes it

about that with consciously false ideas we yet reach conclusions that

are in harmony with Nature and appeal to us as Truth? That we do so is

obvious, especially in the “exact” branches of science. In mathematics

it is notorious that we start from absurdities to reach a realm of law,

and our whole conception of the nature of the world is based on a

foundation which we believe to have no existence. For even the most

sober scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing

Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of

categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or

labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they

are told the “name” of a thing. Fiction is, indeed, an indispensable

supplement to logic, or even a part of it; whether we are working

inductively or deductively, both ways hang closely together with

fiction; and axioms, though they seek to be primary verities, are more

akin to fiction. If we had realised the nature of axioms, the doctrine

of Einstein, which sweeps away axioms so familiar to us that they seem

obvious truths, and substitutes others which seem absurd because they

are unfamiliar, might not have been so bewildering.

Physics, especially mathematical physics, Vaihinger explains in detail,

has been based, and fruitfully based, on fictions. The infinite,

infinitely little or infinitely great, while helpful in lightening our

mental operations, is a fiction. The Greeks disliked and avoided it, and

“the gradual formation of this conception is one of the most charming

and instructive themes in the history of science,” indeed, one of the

most noteworthy spectacles in the history of the human spirit; we see

the working of a logical impulse first feeling in the dark, gradually

constructing ideas fitted to yield precious service, yet full of

hopeless contradictions, without any relation to the real world. That

absolute space is a fiction, Vaihinger points out, is no new idea.

Hobbes had declared it was only a _phantasma_; Leibnitz, who agreed,

added that it was merely “the idolum of a few modern Englishmen,” and

called time, extension, and movement “_choses idéales_.” Berkeley, in

attacking the defective conceptions of the mathematicians, failed to see

that it was by means of, and not in spite of, these logically defective

conceptions that they attained logically valuable results. All the marks

of fiction were set up on the mathematician’s pure space; it was

impossible and unthinkable: yet it proved useful and fruitful.

The tautological fiction of “Force”—an empty reduplication of the fact

of a succession of relationships—is one that we constantly fall back on

with immense satisfaction and with the feeling of having achieved

something; it has been a highly convenient fiction which has aided

representation and experience. It is one of the most famous, and also,

it must be added, one of the most fatal of fantasies. For when we talk

of, for instance, a “life-force” and its _élan_, or whatever other

dainty term we like to apply to it, we are not only summarily mingling

together many separate phenomena, but we are running the risk that our

conception may be taken for something that really exists. There is

always temptation, when two processes tend to follow each other, to call

the property of the first to be followed by the other its “force,” and

to measure that force by the magnitude of the result. In reality we only

have succession and coexistence, and the “force” is something that we

imagine.

We must not, therefore, treat our imagination with contempt as was

formerly the fashion, but rather the reverse. The two great periods of

English Philosophy, Vaihinger remarks, ended with Ockham and with Hume,

who each took up, in effect, the fictional point of view, but both too

much on the merely negative side, without realising the positive and

constructive value of fictions. English law has above all realised it,

even, he adds, to the point of absurdity. Nothing is so precious as

fiction, provided only one chooses the right fiction. “Matter” is such a

fiction. There are still people who speak with lofty contempt of

“Materialism”; they mean well, but they are unhappy in their terms of

abuse. When Berkeley demonstrated the impossibility of “matter,” he

thought he could afford to throw away the conception as useless. He was

quite wrong; it is logically contradictory ideas that are the most

valuable. Matter is a fiction, just as the fundamental ideas with which

the sciences generally operate are mostly fictions, and the scientific

materialisation of the world has proved a necessary and useful fiction,

only harmful when we regard it as hypothesis and therefore possibly

true. The representative world is a system of fictions. It is a symbol

by the help of which we orient ourselves. The business of science is to

make the symbol ever more adequate, but it remains a symbol, a means of

action, for action is the last end of thinking.

The “atom,” to which matter is ultimately reduced, is regarded by

Vaihinger as equally a fiction, though it was at first viewed as an

hypothesis, and it may be added that since he wrote it seems to have

returned to the stage of hypothesis.[41] But when with Boscovich the

“atom” was regarded as simply the bearer of energy, it became “literally

a hypostatised nothing.” We have to realise at the same time that every

“thing” is a “summatory fiction,” for to say, as is often said, that a

“thing” has properties and yet has a real existence apart from its

properties is obviously only a convenient manner of speech, a “verbal

fiction.” The “force of attraction,” as Newton himself pointed out,

belongs to the same class of summatory fictions.

Vaihinger is throughout careful to distinguish fiction alike from

hypothesis and dogma. He regards the distinction as, methodologically,

highly important, though not always easy to make. The “dogma” is put

forward as an absolute and unquestionable truth; the “hypothesis” is a

possible or probable truth, such as Darwin’s doctrine of descent; the

“fiction” is impossible, but it enables us to reach what for us is

relatively truth, and, above all, while hypothesis simply contributes to

knowledge, fiction thus used becomes a guide to practical action and

indispensable to what we feel to be progress. Thus the mighty and

civilising structure of Roman law was built up by the aid of what the

Romans themselves recognised as fictions, while in the different and

more flexible system of English laws a constant inspiration to action

has been furnished by the supposed privileges gained by Magna Carta,

though we now recognise them as fictitious. Many of our ideas tend to go

through the three stages of Dogma, Hypothesis, and Fiction, sometimes in

that order and sometimes in the reverse order. Hypothesis especially

presents a state of labile stability which is unpleasant to the mind, so

it tends to become either dogma or fiction. The ideas of Christianity,

beginning as dogmas, have passed through all three stages in the minds

of thinkers during recent centuries: the myths of Plato, beginning as

fiction, not only passed through the three stages, but then passed back

again, being now again regarded as fiction. The scientifically valuable

fiction is a child of modern times, but we have already emerged from the

period when the use of fiction was confined to the exact sciences.

Thus we find fiction fruitfully flourishing in the biological and social

sciences and even in the highest spheres of human spiritual activity.

The Linnæan and similar classificatory systems are fictions, even though

put forward as hypotheses, having their value simply as pictures, as

forms of representation, but leading to contradictions and liable to be

replaced by other systems which present more helpful pictures. There are

still people who disdain Adam Smith’s “economic man,” as though

proceeding from a purely selfish view of life, although Buckle,

forestalling Vaihinger, long ago explained that Smith was deliberately

making use of a “valid artifice,” separating facts that he knew to be in

nature inseparable—he based his moral theory on a totally different kind

of man—because so he could reach results approximately true to the

observed phenomena. Bentham also adopted a fiction for his own system,

though believing it to be an hypothesis, and Mill criticised it as being

“geometrical”; the criticism is correct, comments Vaihinger, but the

method was not thereby invalidated, for in complicated fields no other

method can be fruitfully used.

The same law holds when we approach our highest and most sacred

conceptions. It was recognised by enlightened philosophers and

theologians before Vaihinger that the difference between body and soul

is not different from that between matter and force,—a provisional and

useful distinction,—that light and darkness, life and death, are

abstractions, necessary, indeed, but in their application to reality

always to be used with precaution. On the threshold of the moral world

we meet the idea of Freedom, “one of the weightiest conceptions man has

ever formed,” once a dogma, in course of time an hypothesis, now in the

eyes of many a fiction; yet we cannot do without it, even although we

may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot

be broken. Many other great conceptions have tended to follow the same

course. God, the Soul, Immortality, the Moral World-Order. The critical

hearers understand what is meant when these great words are used, and if

the uncritical misunderstand, that, adds Vaihinger, may sometimes be

also useful. For these things are Ideals, and all Ideals are, logically

speaking, fictions. As Science leads to the Imaginary, so Life leads to

the Impossible; without them we cannot reach the heights we are born to

scale. “Taken literally, however, our most valuable conceptions are

worthless.”

When we review the vast field which Vaihinger summarises, we find that

thinking and existing must ever be on two different planes. The attempt

of Hegel and his followers to transform subjective processes into

objective world-processes, Vaihinger maintains, will not work out. The

Thing-in-Itself, the Absolute, remains a fiction, though the ultimate

and most necessary fiction, for without it representation would be

unintelligible. We can only regard reality as a Heraclitean flux of

happening—though Vaihinger fails to point out that this “reality” also

can only be an image or symbol—and our thinking would itself be fluid if

it were not that by fiction we obtain imaginary standpoints and

boundaries by which to gain control of the flow of reality. It is the

special art and object of thinking to attain existence by quite other

methods than that of existence itself. But the wish by so doing to

understand the world is both unrealisable and foolish, for we are only

trying to comprehend our own fictions. We can never solve the so-called

world-riddle because what seem riddles to us are merely the

contradictions we have ourselves created. Yet, though the way of

thinking cannot be the way of being, since they stand on such different

foundations, thinking always has a kind of parallelism with being, and

though we make our reckoning with a reality that we falsify, yet the

practical result tends to come out right. Just because thinking is

different from reality, its forms must also be different in order to

correspond with reality. Our conceptions, our conventional signs, have a

fictive function to perform; thinking in its lower grades is comparable

to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.

Imagination is thus a constitutive part of all thinking. We may make

distinctions between practical scientific thinking and disinterested

æsthetic thinking. Yet all thinking is finally a comparison. Scientific

fictions are parallel with æsthetic fictions. The poet is the type of

all thinkers: there is no sharp boundary between the region of poetry

and the region of science. Both alike are not ends in themselves, but

means to higher ends.

Vaihinger’s doctrine of the “as if” is not immune from criticism on more

than one side, and it is fairly obvious that, however sound the general

principle, particular “fictions” may alter their status, and have even

done so since the book was written. Moreover, the doctrine is not always

quite congruous with itself. Nor can it be said that Vaihinger ever

really answered the question with which he set out. In philosophy,

however, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the

things that are met with by the way. And Vaihinger’s philosophy is not

only of interest because it presents so clearly and vigorously a

prevailing tendency in modern thought. Rightly understood, it supplies a

fortifying influence to those who may have seen their cherished

spiritual edifice, whatever it may be, fall around them and are tempted

to a mood of disillusionment. We make our own world; when we have made

it awry, we can remake it, approximately truer, though it cannot be

absolutely true, to the facts. It will never be finally made; we are

always stretching forth to larger and better fictions which answer more

truly to our growing knowledge and experience. Even when we walk, it is

only by a series of regulated errors, Vaihinger well points out, a

perpetual succession of falls to one side and the other side. Our whole

progress through life is of the same nature; all thinking is a regulated

error. For we cannot, as Vaihinger insists, choose our errors at random

or in accordance with what happens to please us; such fictions are only

too likely to turn into deadening dogmas: the old _vis dormitiva_ is the

type of them, mere husks that are of no vital use and help us not at

all. There are good fictions and bad fictions just as there are good

poets and bad poets. It is in the choice and regulation of our errors,

in our readiness to accept ever-closer approximations to the

unattainable reality, that we think rightly and live rightly. We triumph

in so far as we succeed in that regulation. “A lost battle,” Foch,

quoting De Maistre, lays down in his “Principes de Guerre,” “is a battle

one thinks one has lost”; the battle is won by the fiction that it is

won. It is so also in the battle of life, in the whole art of living.

Freud regards dreaming as fiction that helps us to sleep; thinking we

may regard as fiction that helps us to live. Man lives by imagination.

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.

Footnote 26:

It would not appear that the pioneers of the Mathematical Renaissance

of the twentieth century are inclined to imitate Descartes in this

matter. Einstein would certainly not, and many apostles of physical

science to-day (see, e.g., Professor Smithells, _From a Modern

University: Some Aims and Aspirations of Science_) insist on the

æsthetic, imaginative, and other “art” qualities of science.

Footnote 27:

C. Singer. “What is Science?” _British Medical Journal_, 25th June,

1921. Singer refuses the name of “science” in the strict sense to

fields of completely organised knowledge which have ceased growing,

like human anatomy (though, of course, the anatomist still remains a

man of science by working outwards into adjoining related fields),

preferring to term any such field of completed knowledge a

_discipline_. This seems convenient and I should like to regard it as

sound. It is not, however, compatible with the old doctrine of Mill

and Colvin and Ray Lankester, for it excludes from the field of

science exactly what they regarded as most typically science, and some

one might possibly ask whether in other departments, like Hellenic

sculpture or Sung pottery, a completed art ceases to be art.

Footnote 28:

It has often been pointed out that the imaginative application of

science—artistic ideas like that of the steam locomotive, the

flying-machine heavier than air, the telegraph, the telephone, and

many others—were even at the moment of their being achieved,

elaborately shown to be “impossible” by men who had been too hastily

hoisted up to positions of “scientific” eminence.

Footnote 29:

J. B. Baillie, _Studies in Human Nature_ (1921), p. 221. This point

has become familiar ever since F. A. Lange published his almost

epoch-marking work, _The History of Materialism_, which has made so

deep an impress on many modern thinkers from Nietzsche to Vaihinger;

it is indeed a book which can never be forgotten (I speak from

experience) by any one who read it in youth.

Footnote 30:

G. Wallas, _The Great Society_, p. 107.

Footnote 31:

Gomperz, _Greek Thinkers_, vol. I, chap. III, where will be found an

attractive account of Pythagoras’ career and position.

Footnote 32:

Always, it may perhaps be noted in passing, it seems to have been

difficult for the sober and solemn Northerner, especially of England,

to enter into the Greek spirit, all the more since that spirit was

only the spirit of a sprinkling of people amid a hostile mass about as

unlike anything we conventionally call “Greek” as could well be

imagined, so that, as Élie Faure, the historian of art, has lately

remarked, Greek art is a biological “monstrosity.” (Yet, I would ask,

might we not say the same of France or of England?) That is why it is

usually so irritating to read books written about the Greeks by

barbarians; they slur over or ignore what they do not like and, one

suspects, they instinctively misinterpret what they think they do

like. Better even the most imperfect knowledge of a few original

texts, better even only a few days on the Acropolis, than the

second-hand opinions of other people. And if we must have a book about

the Greeks, there is always Athenæus, much nearer to them in time and

in spirit, with all his gossip, than any Northern barbarian, and an

everlasting delight.

Footnote 33:

Along another line it should have been clear that the dialogues of the

philosophers were drama and not history. It would appear (Croiset,

_Littérature Grecque_, vol. III, pp. 448 _et seq._) that with

Epicharmus of Cos, who was settled in Megara at the beginning of the

fifth century, philosophic comedy flourished brilliantly at Syracuse,

and indeed fragments of his formal philosophic dialogue survive. Thus

it is suggested that Athenian comedy and sophistic prose dialogues may

be regarded as two branches drawn from the ancient prototype of such

Syracusan comedy, itself ultimately derived from Ionian philosophy. It

is worth noting, I might add, that when we first hear of the Platonic

dialogues they were being grouped in trilogies and tetralogies like

the Greek dramas; that indicates, at all events, what their earliest

editors thought about them. It is also interesting to note that the

writer of, at the present moment, the latest handbook to Plato,

Professor A. E. Taylor (_Plato_, 1922, pp. 32-33), regards the

“Socrates” of Plato as no historical figure, not even a mask of Plato

himself, but simply “the hero of the Platonic drama,” of which we have

to approach in much the same way as the work of “a great dramatist or

novelist.”

Footnote 34:

He had often been bidden in dreams to make music, said the Platonic

Socrates in _Phædo_, and he had imagined that that was meant to

encourage him in the pursuit of philosophy, “which is the noblest and

best of music.”

Footnote 35:

In discussing Socrates I have made some use of Professor Dupréel’s

remarkable book, _La Légende Socratique_ (1922). Dupréel himself, with

a little touch of irony, recommends a careful perusal of the beautiful

and monumental works erected by Zeller and Grote and Gomperz to the

honour of Socrates.

Footnote 36:

Count Hermann Keyserling, _Philosophie als Kunst_ (1920), p. 2. He

associates this with the need for a philosophy to possess a subjective

personal character, without which it can have no value, indeed no

content at all.

Footnote 37:

Croce, _Problemi d’ Estetica_, p. 15. I have to admit, for myself,

that, while admiring the calm breadth of Croce’s wide outlook, it is

sometimes my misfortune, in spite of myself, when I go to his works,

to play the part of a Balaam _à rebours_. I go forth to bless: and,

somehow, I curse.

Footnote 38:

James Hinton, a pioneer in so many fields, clearly saw that thinking

is really an art fifty years ago. “Thinking is no mere mechanical

process,” he wrote (_Chapters on the Art of Thinking_, pp. 43 _et

seq._), “it is a great Art, the chief of all the Arts.... Those only

can be called thinkers who have a native gift, a special endowment for

the work, and have been trained, besides, by assiduous culture. And

though we continually assume that every one is capable of thinking, do

we not all feel that there is somehow a fallacy in this assumption? Do

we not feel that what people set up as their ‘reasons’ for

disbelieving or believing are often nothing of the sort?... The Art

faculty is Imagination, the power of seeing the unseen, the power also

of putting ourselves out of the centre, of reducing ourselves to our

true proportions, of truly using our own impressions. And is not this

in reality the chief element in the work of the thinker?... Science

_is_ poetry.”

Footnote 39:

So far, indeed, as I am aware, I was responsible for the first English

account of his work (outside philosophical journals); it appeared in

the London _Nation and Athenæum_ a few years ago, and is partly

embodied in the present chapter.

Footnote 40:

I have based this sketch on an attractive and illuminating account of

his own development written by Professor Vaihinger for Dr. Raymund

Schmidt’s highly valuable series, _Die Deutsche Philosophie der

Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen_ (1921), vol. II.

Footnote 41:

“Most workers on the problem of atomic constitution,” remarks Sir

Ernest Rutherford (_Nature_, 5th August, 1922), “take as a working

hypothesis that the atoms of matter are purely electrical structures,

and that ultimately it is hoped to explain all the properties of atoms

as a result of certain combinations of the two fundamental units of

positive and negative electricity, the proton and electron.”

Footnote 42:

Havelock Ellis, _Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol. I.

Footnote 43:

Otto Rank, _Der Künstler: Ansätze zu einer Sexual Psychologie_.

Footnote 44:

The sexual strain in the symbolism of language is touched on in my

_Studies in the Psychology of Sex_, vol. V, and similar traits in

primitive legends have been emphasised—many would say

over-emphasised—by Freud and Jung.

Footnote 45:

Einstein, in conversation with Moszkowski, expressed doubt as to the

reality of Leonardo’s previsions of modern science. But it scarcely

appeared that he had investigated the matter, while the definite

testimony of the experts in many fields who have done so cannot be put

aside.

Footnote 46:

For the Italian reader of Leonardo the fat little volume of

_Frammenti_, edited by Dr. Solmi and published by Barbèra, is a

precious and inexhaustible pocket companion. For the English reader

Mr. MacCurdy’s larger but much less extensive volume of extracts from

the _Note-Books_, or the still further abridged _Thoughts_, must

suffice. Herbert Horne’s annotated version of Vasari’s _Life_ is

excellent for Leonardo’s personality and career.

Footnote 47:

Morley Roberts, who might be regarded as a pupil in the school of

Leonardo and trained like him in the field of art, has in various

places of his suggestive book, _Warfare in the Human Body_, sprinkled

irony over the examples he has come across of ignorant specialists

claiming to be men of “science.”

Footnote 48:

Needless to say, I do not mention this to belittle Galton. A careful

attention to words, which in its extreme form becomes pedantry, is by

no means necessarily associated with a careful attention to things.

Until recent times English writers, even the greatest, were always

negligent in spelling; it would be foolish to suppose they were

therefore negligent in thinking.

Footnote 49:

Darwin even overestimated the æsthetic element in his theory of sexual

selection, and (I have had occasion elsewhere to point out)

unnecessarily prejudiced that theory by sometimes unwarily assuming a

conscious æsthetic element.

Footnote 50:

It is probable that the reason why it is often difficult to trace the

imaginative artist in great men of supposedly abstract science is the

paucity of intimate information about them. Even their scientific

friends have rarely had the patience, or even perhaps the

intelligence, to observe them reverently and to record their

observations. We know almost nothing that is intimately personal about

Newton. As regards Einstein, we are fortunate in possessing the book

of Moszkowski, _Einstein_ (translated into English under the title of

_Einstein the Searcher_), which contains many instructive

conversations and observations by a highly intelligent and

appreciative admirer, who has set them down in a Boswellian spirit

that faintly recalls Eckermann’s book on Goethe (which, indeed,

Moszkowski had in mind), though falling far short of that supreme

achievement. The statements in the text are mainly gleaned from

Moszkowski.

Footnote 51:

Spengler holds (_Der Untergang des Abendlandes_, vol. X, p. 329) that

the development of music throughout its various stages in our European

culture really has been closely related with the stages of the

development of mathematics.

Footnote 52:

I would here refer to a searching investigation, “Goethe und die

mathematische Physik: Eine Erkenntnistheoretische Studie,” in Ernst

Cassirer’s _Idee und Gestalt_ (1921). It is here shown that in some

respects Goethe pointed the way along which mathematical physics, by

following its own paths, has since travelled, and that even when most

non-mathematical Goethe’s scientific attitude was justifiable.

Footnote 53:

See the remarkable essay, “De la Cinéplastique,” in Élie Faure’s

_L’Arbre d’Éden_ (1922). It is, however, a future and regenerated

cinema for which Élie Faure looks, “to become the art of the crowd,

the powerful centre of communion in which new symphonic forms will be

born in the tumult of passions and utilized for fine and elevating

æsthetic ends.”

Footnote 54:

O. Spengler, _Der Untergang des Abendlandes_, vol. I, p. 576.