Art and. Scientific THougnt
Art and
Thought
Historical Studies towards a Modem
Revision of Their Antagonism - BY
3VLAJRTIN TOHNSON \VITBt -A. FORE-
*
WORD BY VS/ALTER r>E LA. IVIA.IUB
Columbia University Press
Hew York 1949
Published, by Faber and Faber Limited, London, 1944
Published in the United States of America by
Oolumbia University Press, 19-49
JRINTEE> IN OREAX BRIXAIN
ItESERVED
Foreword by Walter de la Mare
My only excuse for attempting to say a few words con
cerning this book is an intense interest in its contents.
But this alone might certainly not have persuaded me
against my better judgment if Dr. Martin Johnson
had not wished me to do so, although he was well aware of the in
adequacy of his envoy. There is not a shred of modesty in this con
fession. How could there be? since the most unusual and arresting
feature of the studies that follow is their range, their substance and
authority, their insight and sensibility, and their method. Even
more unusual is the angle, the standpoint, of their survey that of a
man of science who is also a devotee of music, painting, and poetry.
Once upon a time a dainty dish, in the shape of $ pie, was set
before a king. It contained twenty-four heart-entrancing black
birds. 1 Hardly less rare must be a book written in the service of so
many of the Muses, a treatise vitally and richly concerned with so
many of the arts and their science; and, above all, with what may
be called an aesthetic contemplation of Science itself. In only one
direction here can I profess to be more than a dilettante a term
however, which (as with amateur in its relation to love) need
not exclude a genuine delight.
Dr. Martin Johnson mentions the many talks we have had
together, most of them before any of these chapters had first ap
peared in print. They ranged in every direction; poetry being my
centre, my headquarters, so to speak; the complete ambit of science
his. Cardinal Newman once remarked that any fool can ask un
answerable questions; Dr. Samuel Johnson, that a gentleman
refrains. What matter? We are as God made us; and friends don t
mind. He became my most indulgent Enquire Within , undis-
tressed by his friend s lifelong habit not only of indiscriminate in
terrogation but of insisting on arguing in relation to what that
friend knew practically nothing about. How many times, I wonder,
did I attempt to compel him to concede that no Universe of
any dimensions can be of much account without a comprehen
sive consciousness capable of the completest appreciation of it in
1 And this by no means inappropriately reminds me of another pie which was
served up to an actual king Charles I by the Duke of Buckingham. The
removal of its crust revealed Jeffery Hudson, precisely eighteen inches high.
There are statures in intellect.
5
Foreword by Walter de la Mare
every detail. That, he most patiently reiterated, is not the con
cern of Science. With these talks in view, he refers to his Socratic
questioner.
But then! Socrates was not only heretical but dangerous in the
eyes of his enemies on account of a wisdom to which they were
blind (as may be certain devotees either of the arts or of the sciences
in respect tothe main thesis of this book) . Andno one but agentleman
nonpareil could have been the subject of the Phaedo. His method
indeed was to reveal how hazy was the knowledge and how vague
were the sentiments of those whom he catechised, while being him
self perfectly assured that he knew the right answers, which he
thereupon elucidated. My own feeble and precarious situation was
precisely the reverse of this. And especially, needless to say, in
respect to the Muse called Urania.
Like any other novice (and this book is by no means intended
solely for the expert) I could lapse into a momentary daydream
over photographs of the nebulae of Andromeda or of Coma
Berenices; could even hazard a mere guess whether its myriads of
suns in their assembly suggested the spiral or the concentric; could
intelligently enquire whether any such spiral was in process of
winding up or of unwinding; and could faintly realise the difficulty
occasioned by the varying stellar distances in unimaginable light
years for any rapt student considering them on earth. But little
further. I had no objection, rather the reverse, to abiding the cru
cial questions, mathematical, metaphysical, thus involved, as too
Dr. Johnson magnanimously abided my own little simplicities,
though in a different sense! But here there is less reason even for
modesty; much more for shame and reproof. And it is here that
we approach one of the paramount intentions of this book.
Nowadays there is little excuse for staying ignorant, though
there is immeasurably more excuse than there used to be for woe
fully failing in any aspiration to become omniscient. There is still
less for remaining unconcerned, for being inertly insistent on the
practical, the materialistic, the prosaic, or for deliberately confining
the mind in minute compartments of that astonishing ship called
Human Destiny compartments which, even if they have the merit
of being watertight, can hardly avoid being also rather airless.
To an extraordinary degree, lovers and practitioners of the arts
(and, as Dr. Johnson points out, an imaginative and proficient
scrutiny and appreciation either of a picture, of a song, a symphony,
or a poem entails an art that is also in itself creative) it is aston
ishing how many of those who ardently delight in these things
6
Foreword by Walter de la Mare
may yet be comparative strangers to the aims, methods, ideals and
to the art of Science. Contrariwise, and with less excuse perhaps,
how few minds and intellects devoted to science seem to pay even
so much as lip service to the arts. The happy marriage in a true
mind between knowledge and that poetic experience which is the
wellspring of all the arts was once unquestioned by Leonardo no
less than by the ancient Chinese. Nowadays between Science and
this poetic experience there is danger of a definite divorce. An in
creasing cleavage between them is rapidly becoming an abyss. To
attempt to bridge this gulf is one of the purposes of this book. The
fact that there is this cleavage is unquestionable. A writer in the
current issue of the Queen s Quarterly, for example, insists on it as
crucial in his Canadian university. That Lord Wavell, on the other
hand, a master in the art and science of war, during the late War,
should have published an anthology consisting of poems he has
committed to memory may- be greeted by many as a strange if not
unseemly paradox. No less so that Russia refuses to permit the
most precious of her artists to risk their lives in battle not for love
of their beaux yeux, not assuredly with these artists 5 approval, but
because they arfe especially precious to her, and may prove of
sovereign value in her future. In this resembling her men of
science.
None the less in what degree poets and other artists have been,
should be, and are students of science; and to what extent intimacy
with pure science would aid their inspiration, are fascinating
problems. Robert Bridges, I have read somewhere, became a
doctor of medicine in the belief that the practice of this profession
is the best discipleship to poetry. William Butler Yeats said of Mr.
Walter Turner: I think of him as the first poet to read a mathema
tical equation, a musical score, a book of verse with equal under
standing. He seems to ride in an observation balloon, blue heaven
above, earth beneath, an abstract pattern,* a statement very excep
tional regarding poets but certainly no less true of the author of
this book both as a man of science and as a student of the arts.
Rossetti s reference to the necessity of fundamental brainwork in
the writing of poetry is now a valuable byword. That brainwork
indeed is the exercise of the science of this particular art. Is it of a
different order when it is exercised in relation to the study and
methods of science? Most poets have to some extent at least shared
the curiosity of Sir Thomas Browne, himself a poet in the medium
of prose, even though in much they may prefer to remain the
victims of Vulgar Error. Sir Thomas Browne s scientific opinions,
7
Foreword by Walter de la Mare
it is true, were often of small value*. He held that the earth was
stationary and could not possibly move; he believed in witchcraft;
and he was persuaded that it was possible to restore a flower to its
first beauty after it had been burnt to ashes.
Mere superstitions or not, here are involved two kinds of truth,
namely, the validity of fact and an innate conviction of the truth
of the imagination, of that insight which is an irresistible but by no
means impeccable mentor. Instinctive preferences of course may be
of little value the carking wish, for example, that this world were
stationary and not a vertiginous ball infested with inhumanities and
hurtling through space. Of no more substance and efficacy may be
the haunting conviction that the phenomena intrinsic in witchcraft,
whether in relation to the human mind or to the powers of dark
ness, are not dismissible with a shrug of the shoulders, but rather
with a shudder of the heart; or the enchanting aspiration that a time,
or that a no-time may actually arrive when (every flower being itself
a repetitive miracle) it may be possible to restore a specimen daisy
or lotus to its first beauty after it has been burnt to ashes. Even
a child may be cremated.
Does this ingenuousness merely imply that a certain type of
mind prefers within certain limits to remain mystified which is
not quite the same thing as remaining mistified? That poor thing,
yet one s own one s imagination may it legitimately keep open
house to the wonders of life and of the world and yet remain
guilelessly devoid of any desire to circumscribe them within the
cage of fact? As a man is, said Blake, so he sees. As the eye is
formed, such are its powers. You certainly mistake, when you say
that the visions of fancy are not to be found in the world. To me,
this world is all one continued vision. Wordsworth, again, with
whose ideals William Blake was by no means in harmony, de
clared that poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it
is^the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all
science . The disciples of Urania long ago discarded that eye as the
unaided means of contemplating the remoter heavens. How far
then is it not merely natural but safe for the man of imagination to
preclude himself from their abstruser discoveries? The inconceiv
ably remote and the exquisitely minute are much the same thing
in effect to the contemplative mind. And it is not the number of
light years severing the observer from some scarcely imaginable
nebula that so much concerns the imagination as the active power
to be pacified by the serene beauty of the Evening Star, or elated
by the global brilliance of a drop of dew. Mere knowledge of
8
Foreword by Walter de la Mare
course is no more necessarily a means to wisdom than the taxider
mist s stuffing is to the revivification of some lovely song bird. An
indigestible repletion of knowledge will constrict or stupefy, may
even stultify the mind, and stifle impulse.
The word Science like so many other words in heedless use
is as wide in amplitude as it is vague in reference. As signifying a
method, it is exact. In respect to its matter it is universal. Crowned
with a capital letter it is both nebulous and arbitrary. It is rapidly
becoming the monarch of all it surveys, and now dominates subjects
or serfs largely ignorant of its powers, its virtues, or even its aims.
It threatens to become a dangerous autocracy, and to its professors
a shibboleth. Here, in respect to its real underst&nders, the answer
to a nonsense riddle for once comes true c the higher it goes the
fewer*.
None the less, any science is within the range of every man who
has the requisite intelligence, the means of ascertainment, the
assiduity, and above all the time. He should be ashamed to have
neglected its most generous hospitality; since what he can thus attain
may be of sovereign value, and, in the attaining of it, also a match
less discipline. Talent can achieve of it as much as, but no less than,
the mere opportunities of but one lifetime will permit. Poetry, any
art, on the other hand, is essentially different. Mere endeavour
will neither achieve its creation nor win the secret of its power and
beauty. It does not age; it is never superseded; it is a universal
language, acquirable in its fullness only by a genius commensurate
with it. No true poem is the outcome of a purely ratiocinative pro
cess. That process is not only rational, it is also preter-rational. So
too with mysticism. So too with every individual religious sense
and conviction. "Differences , as Dr. Martin Johnson declares, are
apt to arise only e as soon as we attempt to name, and define, the
"object of our worship". As with poetry, the experience relating
to these is unique in every case; and per se is therefore beyond and
outside of the investigations of Science, which is solely concerned
with the ascertainable that may be subjected to limitless check and
ratification.
Nevertheless Science instructs, and at its best combines that
instruction with the giving of delight. This is emphatically true also
of poetry; except that the delight, the impassioned joy it may sur
render, may be declared to be of greater value than its instruction,
although by its means both are within the reach only of those who
are innately familiar with its half-secret language. There is no half-
secret language in Science. Indeed, the artist in his work may shun
A2 M.T.
Foreword by Walter de la Mare
and refuse to teach openly, to point his moral (as may also the man of
Science), not necessarily because an obvious lesson would ruin his
work. That might quite easily be disproved. But because it might
destroy and defeat the wisdom and ethic inherent in his work. And
this is of its very essence. A c Song of Innocence*, a still life by
Chardin, an aria of Mozart s, a worked fragment of Chinese jade
are interfused through and through with a meaning of a simple yet
profound order which is wholly incommunicable in other terms.
Nor is it the text of man s mortality that is the mainspring of
Holbein s woodcuts in the "Dance of Death . Their sovereign
efficacy is the conviction in every line that in the intensity of his
realisation of his theme he has himself called the tune. The state
ment that God is love, or that the Word was made flesh is mere
knowledge until it is transmuted into wisdom. Neither statement is
even true in. any intrinsic degree until each is given the truth that
is in us. The domain of faith and the domain of proof are . . . .
both essential but different constituents of our mental outlook.
Any proof, again, of the beauty, and even of the significance, of a
fine poem is unattainable. These also at least trespass into the
domain of faith. Nevertheless and not loosely speaking both
artist and man of science (as this book reveals so much more fully,
profoundly and variously than I can hope to suggest) may be said
to create the form of what they believe in. Their secret sharers
must have faith in what they themselves create out of the created,
through insight and divination. Proof derived from experience,
knowledge, analysis, comparison, may follow this. It cannot pre
cede it. Ours is the heritage of the child calling out in fear of the
dark, the divine answer is for each of us alone**
The poet, whether in his innocence or ignorance, will rap
turously emulate the engaging cow of the old nursery rhyme that
jumped over the moon when he reads that in the physicist s view
matter has taken upon itself some of the aspects of empty space,
fantastic nightmare though this may be, for the materialists, if any
still survive . For equally private if not satisfactory reasons he may
joy to read that the finality of the views current in the nineteenth
century is a lost vision; and we can only be grate&l for release
from the nightmare of a knowledge so complete as to be unin
teresting . Not by any means that Dr. Martin Johnson would him
self approve of even a novice s emotionalism. That indeed is the
veritable bugbear of all men of science. But if, as Mr. George
Hamilton maintains, the making of a poem is the outcome of an
act of contemplation, so too, I assume, in excelsis, with the outcome
Foreword by Walter de la Mare
of the pursuit of pure science. And even the groping tyro should be
able, however faindy, to realise that a sort of blissful and celestial
Nirvana if this is not a contradiction in terms may be the
sovereign if inexplicable recompense of both.
Reason has moons, but moons not hers.
Lie mirrored on her sea,
Confounding her astronomers,
But, O! delighting me.
ii
Author s Preface
These groups of short studies, and the discussions which
lipk them, are put forward in a belief that likenesses and
not only contrasts exist between the two traditionally
antagonistic attitudes, the logical or scientific on the
one hand and the imaginative or poetic and artistic on the other.
It is conceivable that comparison between the two might benefit
both; for the tradition of isolation and antagonism is a recent
consequence of modern centuries of specialisation, and it now
shows signs of giving way to a spasmodic intercourse between the
sciences and the arts which is sometimes enthusiastic but usually
bewildered. Such intercourse is apt at present to be the contact
between strangers speaking different languages; science at least is
vastly more complex than when Leonardo da Vinci and the medi
eval orientals practised arts and philosophies indiscriminately, so
that the current epoch calls for definitions and mutual recognitions
to replace those which through centuries of disuse have fallen out
of phase, if not out of date. It will be of some interest to see where
there has been any alteration in the fundamental approach of the
scientist to nature.
There is even a reason for raising such discussion during a war
whose minor consequences include a severe shortage of paper and
printers, and whose other consequences have certainly diverted
the energies of author and most readers into channels more im
mediately urgent than the academic; for it is particularly among
the scientific trainees for war-time technology that questions are
most urgently being asked. They insist upon enquiring what con
tribution a scientific outlook will make towards those human
orientations which are also influenced by poetry, music, and the
arts.
In larger issue a similar problem overhangs already the educa
tional plans for Reconstruction: science is officially patronised
during war-time as the source from which convenient or necessary
inventions may be expected, but will it remain in peace-time a*
mere minister to material ease and facilitated communications?
Or can it become a clue to our insight into the meaning of human
nature s environment, and achieve an influence upon education in
the widest sense comparable with that of studies which used to
monopolise the title humane 9 ? In the future such questions will
12
Author s Preface
have a vital urgency, when a peace is to be won in addition to a
war. So there need be no hesitation in responding to the hint*
given by various of the younger students of science, among whom
enthusiasm for the arts has lately been showing at the very least
as striking a vitality as among the professed followers of more
obviously literary studies.
Several of these essays are reprinted, with some revision where
desirable with respect to the different public and form of publica
tion, from older papers by the author in journals of science and
art. The Jade, the Sculpture, the Beethoven, have thus appeared
in Apollo, to whose editor thanks are due. A brief and compressed
summary of the Leonardo conclusions appeared in The Burlington
Magazine of Fine Arts. A slightly more technical version of the
Bagdad Mathematicians appeared in The Observatory. The essay
on the Chinese Instruments was in proof form for Isis when the
Germans invaded its printing works in May 1940, and the editor
welcomes publication elsewhere since the lost issues can only be
resuscitated as he says in Belgium, God knows when . 1
Some few of the essays, in particular the Leonardo group and
the Peking Instruments, were specialist investigations originally
undertaken for their own sake, before the war, and are adapted
here because of the light which they cast on essential features
of the relatedness between scientific and imaginative mentality,
which is the main thesis: none of the essays is specialist in the sense
of requiring previous acquaintance with any branch of science,
history, or art. Any of them can be read separately, or the several
introductions and conclusion can be read together before turning
to the separate studies which illustrate the argument in detail.
Specific acknowledgments have been, and will be, made at the
appropriate points in the book. There are one or two more general
debts: first of all to Mr. Walter de la Mare. For years he has per
mitted me, indeed generously encouraged me, to argue frequently
with him the philosophy of science and of art. Without his Socratic
persistence in propounding novel and disconcerting questions, and
in teaching me to query all assumptions underlying his own trade
and mine, this book would not exist. He must not, of course, be
saddled with the opinions therein: but I am hoping most of all that
I have not touched with too clumsy a hand his own most exquisite
poetry and thought.
For generosity in regard to photographic material I am indebted
1 Since the first edition, 1944, the essay lost in the European War has been
resurrected by the editor of Isis and published in that journal.
Author s Preface
to the Royal Library at Windsor, to Sir Kenneth Clark, to Messrs.
Jonathan Cape, to the Victoria and Albert Museum, to the late
Dr. Mingana, and to certain French publishers now placed by war
beyond reach of my requests or my thanks. Professor Thomas
Bodkin and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts have given unfailing
kindness and help to a scientist intruding in their domain.
There is also a debt to many students, mainly of science or of
medicine, in Birmingham University, who have repaid my at
tempts to interest them in the study of Physics by talking to me
about their enthusiasms in art, music, or poetry. Finally, a techni
cal assistant in this laboratory, Miss Constance Reading, has given
valuable secretarial help during the editing of much that was in the
form of pre-war essays and notebooks.
Contents
Foreword by Walter de la Mare page 5
Author s Preface 1 2
Introduction 19
PART ONE
Features of Resemblance and of Contrast between
the Arts and the Sciences
1. Introduction 23
2. Scientific criteria in the communication of feeling by
imaginative art 26
3. The communication of measurement in modern physi
cal science 35
PART TWO
Examples of Imaginative Stimulus through Structure
and Symbolism
4. Introduction 43
5. An approach to Beethoven s final music for string
quartet 47
6. Ancient Chinese carvings in Jade, and their appeal to
the modern Western mind 55
7. From Byzantine manuscripts and ivories to the Gothic
sculpture of Ghartres 65
8. After seeing the Russian Ballet Tetrouchka* 7 1
9. Fantasy and a real world, in the poetry of Walter de la
Mare 75
Contents
PART THREE
Historical Failure to maintain a Balance between the
Scientific and the Imaginative
10. Introduction p a ge 86
n. The Persian and Arab artist-mathematicians of medi
eval Bagdad oo
12. Greek, Moslem and Chinese design in the Mongol
scientific instruments of A.D. 1279 103
13. Conflicts between the logical and the mystical mind,
from ancient Chinese to recent Europeans 1 18
14. Symbolism as a future clue to conciliation between
science, religion and art I2 8
PART FOUR
Leonardo da Vinci as Scientist in Art: his fantastic Drawings
and the Prototype of Scientific Uneasiness in an Unscientific Community
15. Introduction I37
16. The problem of Leonardo s imaginative drawings 140
17. The nature and evolution of Leonardo s scientific mind 15 1
18. Sources of fantasy in a scientific mind 172
19. Scientific reaction to irrational environment 178
Conclusion IQI
Bibliography
illustrations
1. GREEN JADE HORSE FROM THE HAN DYNASTY
Victoria and Albert Museum photograph facing page 62
2. BROWN AND WHITE JADE TSUNG between pages 64 and 6*
Victoria and Albert Museum photograph
3. JADE EMBLEM OF HEAVEN, AND DRAGON RING
Victoria and Albert Museum photograph between pages 64 and 6*
4* SYMBOLIC BLADES OF JADE facing page 6*
Victoria and Albert Museum photograph
[Descriptions of plates 1-4 on pp. 63-4]
5-9. COLOSSI FROM THE TWELFTH-CENTURY WEST PORTAL
AT CHARTRES
between pages 66 and 67, 68 and 69, 70 and 71
[Descriptions pp. 67-9]
Photographs by Tel of Paris
10. PYTHAGORAS MINIATURE FROM THE TWELFTH-
CENTURY DECORATION AT CHARTRES facing page 71
Photograph by Hornet qfChartres
11. EPICYCLIC ORBITS IN A MEDIEVAL ARABIC MS. 142
[Description p. 102]
By courtesy of the late Dr. Mingana
12. PROFILE OF A LADY 143
[Silver point drawing at Windsor]
Copyright H.M. The King
13. DISSECTED FOOT OF MONSTER 144
[Ink upon silver point drawing at Windsor]
Copyright H.M. The King
14. FANTASTIC BETROTHAL . between pages 144 and 145
[Silver point drawing at Windsor]
Copyright H.M. The King
15. STUDY FOR THE LAST SUPPER between pages 144 and 145
[Red chalk and ink drawing at Windsor]
Copyright HM, The King
17
Illustrations
l6. CATASTROPHIC FANTASIES facing page 145
[Ink upon black chalk drawing at Windsor]
Copyright H.M. The King
DIAGRAM OF GRAECO-MOSLEM AND MODERN PLANETARY
THEORIES page 101
18
Introduction
What conceivable connection can cast into a single
volume essays concerned with sculpture, music,
poetry, and on the other hand even the briefest
reference to the modern electrical theory of matter
and the time-space framework of scientific measurement? Incon
gruity might seem still worsened by adding a few studies on
ancient Chinese instruments and on the migrations of early
mathematical knowledge through the medieval East, not to speak
of attempts towards novel insight into Leonardo da Vinci and
Spinoza those enigmatic giants who bestride the gaps between
science, art, and philosophy in the comparative simplicity of pre-
modern knowledge.
But the selection is not the rambling hobby of a scientist reliev
ing the intensity of experimental work by occasional trespass into
lesser-known byways of art and archaeology. Stimulated by a fact
of experience, namely that the author 5 ? students and colleagues in
Faculties of Science and Medicine have taught him more about
the arts than much official art-criticism, these studies are collected
in the hope of seeing just how there arise the contrasts and subtle
similarities which make so many scientists turn for recreation t6
the arts and which might well make suitably expounded science
a valuable item in the educational programme for the arts. Such
recreation is much more than idle pastime, and becomes at times
of hard work an intellectual and spiritual necessity. In any recon
structed system of education the poet and the artist will have to
explain to the scientist, and the scientist to the artist, what each is
trying to do: this win require something more penetrating than
the mere popularisation of salient facts of scientific discovery, for
which there are booksful of exposition already in plenty. It will
require a mutual realisation of likenesses and differences between
the logical and the imaginative in our response to human environ
ment. A tentative approach to such problems is offered in the
present thesis that the sciences and even the most fantastic arts are
essentially essays in Communication of Pattern, Form, or Structure
of mental images. The scrutiny of this common feature may well be
of greater significance than any hasty decision as to whether the
scientist s work is to UNCOVER pre-existing pattern in nature, or,
like the artist, to CREATE his patterns. Such decision belongs to
Introduction
metaphysics and not to the logic of science or to art criticism, and
in these essays it is not attempted. Trespass over the boundary of
this colossal ambiguity has occasioned the wreck of most modern
accounts of science written for the non-scientific. In fact, if any
academic label of study were unfortunately to be attached to the
present enquiries, I would claim to be discussing not the philoso
phy of science and art so much as their psychology. I ask, for
instance, how the artist and scientist have faced their respective
obligations, where in history have there been misfits between their
ambitions andfulfilment, and under whatfuture conditions they may
regard one anothers* labours with some degree of mutual respect.
Such a sequence of .questions determines the somewhat un
orthodox structure of this book. In Part I is developed the view
that the artist, sensitive to impressions from nature and human
nature, only acquires his significance for society by communica
ting his vision through a Pattern or Formal Structure which his
technique can impose upon some selected medium. Whether
musical sound, material shape, manipulated colour, or verbal
imagery, the character of the medium itself matters little and the
resemblance of his work of art to any scene or sound or object
matters little, compared with this essential function of becoming a
channel of communication. Someone s imagination must become
aroused to the individual re-creating of the artist s vision. In caring
so little for any likeness between a work of art and either nature or
history, we recollect that the entities of greatest interest in modern
physics may also be far removed from recognition in direct sense-
experience, though for different reasons. But unsuspected com
patibility of aim between artistic and scientific endeavour also
arises from the fact that modern physics is an attempt to bring
order into the chaotic structures of individual knowledge. Relati
vity* means recognition that laws of nature must be restated in
universally communicable form and that science must be emanci
pated from the biasing significance of any particular observer.
In this may be seen both the likeness and the contrast between
science and imaginative art: each communicates by employing a
technique of ideas not completely describable in terms of sense-
experience, but the one labours to make its communications
capable of identification or correlation by all possible individuals,
while the other insists that each individual must translate the
original vision into something peculiarly of his own creation.
Applications within the physical sciences are scarcely contro
versial, and little is required here beyond pointers which may be
20
Introduction
followed into an enormous literature, popular or technical. But in
art there has been less agreement among practitioners, critics, and
theorists. It is perhaps in the extremes of imaginative, even
fantastic, art that the principles become self-evident, and Part II
as a sequel to Part I is intended to discuss instances selected from
widely separated epochs. These instances are particularly drawn
from byways seldom explored, and have been chosen for their
emphasis on the arousing of imaginative response: in all of them
this feature will be found of vastly greater importance than any
direct copying of nature practised in the more representational arts.
A natural sequel would concentrate the remainder of the book
into pleas for the official encouragement hitherto lacking of
scientific studies among students of arts and artistic enthusiasms
among students of science. But that would imply a too facile
optimism and a shirking of the most difficult intellectual problem
of the age. Both by historical accident and by the misfit of incom
patible temperament, the contacts between science and art have
brought one or the oilier to contempt or frustration. The resulting
danger to any plans for future combined education is not easy to
see or avoid in the welter of current scientific progress and artistic
fashion. It is a main purpose in Parts III and IV to investigate
such danger of misfit, and to realise the circumstances of it in the
history of early communities which encouraged science with art
and philosophy, and also in the history of one individual who was
supremely scientist and artist.
In Part III the uneasy partnership is examined in some histori
cal phases seldom studied. In recent centuries the combination of
artist and scientist in one personality has been mere occasional
freak, and we have to go back to an incredibly simpler science and
a less sophisticated art if the logical and the imaginative are to be
seen clearly as in embryo. Classical times have been overstudied,
with bias from non-scientific and non-artistic preconceptions, and
it is arguable that the simplest and most enlightening periods of
history for my purpose are ancient Chinese only nowadays
dawning on the West as important to civilisation together with
the remarkable renaissance of the medieval Moslem world. This
latter, during the twilight and dawn of European thought, prepared
the knowledge without which modern science would certainly have
been delayed and perhaps crippled at birth. If these essays do a
little towards undermining the popular academic fallacy that
Bagdad and Persia merely sat quiescent upon the debris of classical
art and science, a useful secondary purpose will be fulfilled.
21
Introduction
But the same studies also reveal the inhibiting paralysis which
sets in when aesthetic convention is allowed to control scientific
decision. At the present day the onset of this paralysis is more
subtle and is occasionally complicated by a toxic effect of pseudo-
scientific convention upon art.
In the case of Leonardo da Vinci there occurred no such poison
ing of one discipline by the other: he is the simplest and therefore
most illuminating historical example of the scientific attitude
carried to an extreme and then exposed in a draughtsman s
technique. He has long been known to be the classic instance of
combined artist and scientist, but my interpretation of the com
bination is not along conventional lines: I find that there was a
bondage to social environment, upon him and upon those who
might have learnt from him, which stands as a warning for ever.
The aspect of his art with, which I deal, the drawings and illustra
tions to MSS., express more fully perhaps than any known histori
cal document the implication of disillusion forced upon a scientific
philosopher in an unscientific civilisation. The effect upon his art
is a novel topic for investigation, for which I develop a tentative
beginning. (Part IV.)
It is an even more unconventional novelty to regard the
philosopher Spinoza as involved in any problem of aesthetic. But
I have set him beside the other tragedies of misfitting the scientific
to the imaginative, because I wish to suggest that, in common with
the Orientals, his choice of medium for expression was an artistic
one where it ought to have been a purely rational decision.
These discussions cannot be completely dissociated from the
troubled relations between science and religion, and in a final
essay of Part III I suggest some bridges over traditional chasms,
by way of scientific approach to a religious experience which is
strictly comparable with that of the artist.
There have been failures and tragedies enough, in the arts,
sciences, philosophies, and religions, through misreading of the
extent and limitation of their common principles; but the con
clusion from the entire set of essays implies not only warning from
the past but hope for the future. Even the disappointing history of
philosophers in the twentieth century, trying to absorb the results
of physical science while physicists try to philosophise, might have
been less disastrous if the mentality of ancient and medieval and
early modern practitioners of arts and sciences had been carefully
regarded.
PART ONE
Features of Resemblance and of Contrast
between the Arts and the Sciences
Chapter 1
Introduction
Fact and fancy, exercise of the reason and of the imagina
tion, training towards the logical and towards the vision
ary, surely these are pairs implying not merely antithesis
but antagonism? It is important to decide whether the
hostility so often suggested by these contrasts is inevitable, or
whether it is a superficiality; suspicions grow with lack of acquain
tance when educational economics confines the individual to
scientific or to literary training, and any trespassing across the
border between the two becomes a serious offence. It is conceivable
that the scientist with artistic enthusiasms and the artist reading or
enquiring in science are merely indulging in the piquancy of
unfamiliar flavours. But it is also conceivable that the scientist and
the artist, each at his own work, are in some real sense pursuing
the same aim and by methods having more in common than is
usually admitted.
The possibility that there is territory common to both might
develop from two observations; firstly, the distinction between
scientific knowledge and random opinion is that the former
requires a pattern or logical structure rendering it universally com
municable, so that it becomes subject to acceptance or rejection by
all who abide by an agreed canon of argument. It will be shown
that recognition of this in quantitative discussion is the basis of the
physics of Relativity, Now criticism and appreciation in the arts
will be found also to depend upon a notion of communicability ,
but with certain differenqes of interpretation. The second possi
bility of common aims and methods arises from the insistence by
modern physics upon objects* such as electrons and atomic nuclei,
which have no direct resemblance to the objects of perception by
our senses: for at the same time the whole tendency of modernism
in the arts has been towards freeing the artist from the primitive
23
Art and Science
duty of producing a photographic copy of natural objects acces
sible to sense perception.
These two directions of possible resemblance are discussed
together in Part I, and give rise to criteria for the judgment of
important but disputed tendencies in art, and also for the under
standing of recent trends in physical science. It becomes profitable
to regard art and science as each attempting to communicate
mental images through patterns and structures and forms, in the
qualitative domain of feeling and in the quantitative domain of
measurement respectively.
That a work of art should have a form of its own, not tied to
being a copy of what we see or touch in nature, suggests that a
first approach to the character of imaginative or fantastic art might
start from this tendency to redraw the world independently of any
direct evidence of the senses. Such a practice might well be
ascribed also to the modern physical sciences. For characteristi
cally in physics we habitually assert that our sense-experiences of
bulk matter, such as finding that it has colour and smell and carries
sound and heat, and is impenetrable, all cover *a real world of
electromagnetic forces acting in the almost vacuous spacing of
atomic structure. Matter in many of its most material aspects is a
mere consequence of the way in which an animal s nervous
mechanism is constrained by its electrochemistry to function. The
criterion distinguishing scientific knowledge from guesswork or
quackery is therefore not any accessibility of its objects to direct
sense-perception. Actually a scientific theory is a mental construct,
subject primarily to indirect justification: it becomes acceptable if
tested to the utmost rigour by its capacity to predict mathemati
cally some new experimental result, which anyone anywhere
equipped with the appropriate laboratory apparatus and mathema
tical language must be able to verify or to refute by repetitions all
yielding the same answer. Thus the test of validity of the scientist s
pattern* of ideas is that its form must render it communicable.
This is a more penetrating as well as a more practical test than any
which ask whether scientific entities are discovered or are
created , or are imaginary* or are real alternatives relevant to
metaphysics but irrelevant to science and also to art.
Has this test of communicability any counterpart for the
imaginative arts? I suggest that it has, and that legitimate fantasy
in art is distinguishable from mere caprice according to whether it
has a definite pattern or form capable of communicating a coher
ent state of mind from artist to public: a test comparable with the
24
Introduction
sifting of genuine science from quackery. I propose to develop this
thesis by approach from the direction of the arts and then of the
sciences, with detailed example in the studies of Part II, before
turning attention in Parts III and IV to the way in which his
torical facts reveal failure in various civilisations to apply the
appropriate criteria and limitations effectively.
Chapter 2
Scientific Criteria in the Communication of
Feeling by Imaginative Art
I
Whether we owe our deepest appreciation of the arts
to their unrivalled consolation in hard times, or to
the insight into human nature which we demand
from the artist in good and bad times alike, the
attitude in which we approach any picture or music or poetry can
be decisive in permitting or preventing the full realisation of its
powers. The approach commonly fails through uncertainty as to the
effort demanded from our individual imaginations; this uncertainty
afflicts especially those who possess a ready enjoyment of some one
form of art, perhaps musical or literary or decorative, but who
almost pride themselves on their inexperience of other arts. In the
end they are tragically inhibited by the attempt to make familiar
decisions of their musical or poetic or pictorial judgment apply in
the unfamiliarity of a new domain. The interplay of imagination
and common sense in this judgment becomes capricious and
wasteful in the dramatic enthusiast s anxiety for story* in music or
ballet, in the pathetic search for meaning 5 which often interrupts
delight in the verbal impressionism of poetry or fine prose, in die
recurring antagonisms between symbolism and realism and now
surrealism of painter or sculptor, and in many futile disputes of
function for decorative arts and crafts. It is farther unfortunate
that any contact between more imaginative and less imaginative
phases of art is prejudiced by attachment to the various theories of
aesthetic developed with extraneous, often metaphysical, aims; so
I shall attempt here to be independent of much philosophical pre
conception by using such distinctions only in the very broadest
sense which might be acceptable in all possible theories.
In attempting to resolve any ambiguities associated with the
imagination in art, it will be well to deal mainly in examples from
the more abstract, even fantastic, arts: for it is with regard to these
that a critic s respect for obvious fact leads him to suspect all use of
the imagination as implying descent into a world of delusion.
26
Communication of Feeling
Other kinds may indeed escape the need for much enquiry, since
they depend less upon artist s or beholder s imagination and more
upon the precise representation of familiar objects from our material
environment: even the narrowest definition of fact permits the
critic to approve the direct copying of nature by skilled crafts
manship. But when the picture or sculpture or poem has no
longer any obvious link with sense experience, a creative imagina
tion is required of the beholder or reader in interpreting a work in
which similar imagination has been employed by the artist. It is in
such cases that enquiry becomes necessary as to whether the com
munication between the two imaginations has significance for
human intelligence and well-being, or whether on the other hand
it is shirking the duties of realism.
When a picture or a sculpture or a poem has been con
structed with free use of the imagination it will probably be
stigmatised as fantasy: the critic s attitude in using this term may
be either contemptuous or enthusiastic, but his intention will go
astray unless he has cleared his mind with regard to the traditional
antagonisms between the fantastic and the real. At the present
time of unprecedented human suffering, it becomes especially
urgent to re-examine such traditions: for in the dark of experience
men call for the exquisite consolation of the imaginative arts, and
yet shrink in pride and honesty from any mere narcotic. Is
imaginative or fantastic art only a base attempt to escape from the
painful world by creation of an unreal refuge, enabling cowards to
shirk for awhile the things they dread by wandering in a maze of
images sufficiently intriguing to obliterate reality? Or does the
metaphorical moonshine of such imagination illuminate real
mental depths and heights, so that the adventitious and the
momentary cease to monopolise our attention? Can it even permit
the more permanent to emerge, if only from a subconscious not
entirely disreputable, until we learn to see things sub specie aeterni-
tatis? According to our several philosophical prejudices, such
vision of eternal truth might be regarded either as glimpse into our
own internal potentialities, or as insight into the nature of the
external world: on either alternative there is available an illumina
tion which it is a main task of life and of science to attain.
II
The answer to these questions and uncertainties, and the
resolving of these ambiguities, can only lie in the discovery of
27
Art and Science
criteria for testing the legitimacy of imaginative art. What can
justify its title to be at least as realist as the more frankly descrip
tive or the almost photographic copying of nature? This requires
first a more precise delimitation of non-representational elements
in art, and of the creative share of the artist s public in the success
of his communication. Examples from well-known phases of art
history might then illustrate principles for guarding against the
descent of fantasy into mere caprice and escapism.
It is not difficult to recognise at once a separation, already
hinted, between representational and non-representational types
of art: the latter I prefer to, call imaginative and are commonly
called fantastic. Suppose that any artist is adequately sensitive in
his perception of the contrasts between pathos and delight in
ordinary life and in its more catastrophic occasions; then there are
broadly two ways along which his vision may be communicated,
to reappear as insight glimpsed by those who appreciate his works.
It is the necessity of this communication between artist and public
which imposes the broad distinction between representational and
imaginative, although these vague and unsatisfying terms permit
the distinction to fluctuate disconcertingly. In representational
arts, an object or a situation is depicted or described, and makes
up the content of a picture or a shape or a poem, and the work as
a piece of communication can be judged according to the plausi
bility with which this content is made recognisable; for instance an
etching of a tree or a painting of a sunset is expected to look like
tree or sunset. On the other hand, non-representational or
symbolic or abstract arts, which depend upon fantasy of the
imagination, require more collaboration from the observer or
hearer or reader because the apparent content 5 no longer
measures the ultimate significance of a work. Here the artist s
attitude of mind is not adequately communicated to us until in
our own responding imagination there arises a new creation which
may bear profound significance but need not resemble any appar
ent content. Indeed where pattern and form supersede apparent
content the latter may be trivial or nonsensical, the frailest of
vehicles for the beauty or terror conveyed by the pattern in which
it is arranged. For response is aroused more by the manner than
the matter in this kind of art.
The latent significance carried to the appreciative mind may
vary from one individual to another, even in response to a single
work of art: for the imagination exercised by the public is itself a
mental activity altering with temperament and mood. The final
28
Communication of Feeling
image on any occasion will therefore not be unique, and may not
be easy to reproduce or describe. But it may well generate an
attitude of mind whose shadowy elusiveness in no way prevents it
from being a main source of behaviour and of happiness, confer
ring upon the relevant work of art every title of realism. These
varying results in such creative* appreciation of a work of art will,
of course, reach their strongest by utilising knowledge of the history
and environment of the artist and his period; but even the most
unlearned, if cherishing the germ of sensitivity with which we are
all endowed, can labour towards creating in himself a new mental
imagery under stimulus of an artist s work and of the appreciations
thereof by previous individuals. Hence a consequence of each
man s confession of personal insight true function of the critic
is that the whole company gathered through many generations
around a single great work may differ widely in the images they
each create, no one impression being slavishly accepted as unique
or authoritative.
I have demanded individual acts of creative imagination on the
part of the beholder of a picture or a sculpture or the reader of a
poem; it will be urged against any such view that it licences every
one to read an interpretation INTO, and not merely IN, the work of
an artist who has said his say and ought to be protected from such
interference with his intentions. The accusation may be both true
and not entirely damning. Above the welter of historical theories as
to the meaning of aesthetic appreciation, I deliberately insist that
beholder, reader, or hearer, has a creative duty second only to that
of the artist. Unless the beholder s imagination is employed at its
fullest sensitivity to play that creative part, the labour of the artist
himself is sterilised, and only one side has been constructed towards
that bridge by which a state of mind is to be shared between
painter, poet, or musician, and his public.
In this view, the essence of art is not mere self-expression, but a
genuine communion between even a long-dead craftsman and his
kindred spirits in any subsequent epoch. This communion, or act
of co-operation embodied in all sensitive response to a painting or
carving or poem or symphony, calls for loving care of others
beyond the original artist: without necessarily describing ourselves
as pantheists, we can discover here the fellowship of one original
worker with a whole family of spiritual descendants down the ages.
Their appreciation exercises a joint trusteeship over an enlighten
ment which began perhaps centuries ago and must not be allowed
to lapse.
Art and Science
III
The transmission of ideas by means of formal pattern is strongly
reminiscent of a process which is the essence of modern science.
Indeed communication by pattern or structure in imaginative art
has likenesses and differences which may now be noticed, relative to
communication by the mathematical form of a scientific theory. It
differs by the great variety of the private mental images stimulated
by a single work of art, compared with the identity of all identically
planned experiments whereby different observers verify a single
scientific theory. But however many the fantastic images stimu
lated by the picture or poem, they may all be as remote from direct
sense-experience as is the physicist s atom or electron. They may
have equal claim to reality 5 through their practical significance
for human destiny and understanding; they must each submit to
test of their legitimacy through their usefulness in communicating
some coherent state of mind.
IV
This unorthodox comparison between scientific and purely
aesthetic communication is able to provide a first clue towards
criteria distinguishing good fantasy in art from bad. Science as a
crowning intellectual achievement is essentially disciplined; but it
is not always easy to realise the need for an equally severe discipline
in the domain of the imaginative arts. Imagination and intellect,
however, are not always in antithesis to one another. Reason
implies not only a capacity for logical sequence of argument, but
also a sensitivity to balance and contrast a trained intuition
without untrained intuition s arrogant claims to short-circuit the
discipline of the intellect When the imagination thus becomes
disciplined, and undertakes the severest obligations inherent in
perfecting the pattern of an art-form, it has taken the essential
step towards security against the weaknesses of fantasy. Structure
as disciplined as that of a mathematical argument is capable of
transfiguring the merest nonsense into divine nonsense.
Actually the imaginative life of the visionary is no idle relaxa
tion, and if he can attain a purification of technique sufficient to
communicate coherence through his fantastic carving or drawing
or verse-making, he will also have redeemed his soul from the
cowardice of escapism. One recalls as symbolic of such discipline
30
Communication of Feeling
the many years of struggle attributed in legend to the carver of one
simple ornament of Jade in ancient China. Without this struggle
with the intractable medium of expression, fantasy becomes chaos,
as pitiful as the faking of the mathematical proof in a scientific
theory; whereas even nonsense-art delicately wrought may claim
an imaginative significance so far above any apparent content that
complete absence of meaning* from its glorious trivialities need be
no loss.
The second test to be met by imaginative art arises naturally
from the second danger to which it is subject. If the risk of descend
ing to mere caprice is only escaped by sheer craftsmanship s
honesty of patterning, the other risk of shirking the responsibilities
of realism is only escaped by the artist s possession of an acutely
sympathetic humanity. Since I have insisted that the artist in
fantasy must demand creative action in the imaginative response
of his public, he fails grossly if he lives out of touch and out of
sympathy with the human situation of that public. This is a failing
which would again reduce his work to a mere narcotic, the
selfishness of a retreat from reality by way of dream. It will be
found that this essential quality of humanity in the artist is not
necessarily a function of any apparent content of a picture or
poem, but must be judged solely by the effect it produces: many
fantasies in the inanimate, for instance Chinese and some Euro
pean landscape painting, are vehicles of the profoundest human
feeling.
These abstract principles of imaginative art must be scrutinised
according to any light which they may cast upon familiar experi
ence in various phases of art.
Instrumental music shows the most obvious dependence upon
that quality of pattern which we have attributed to the non-
representational arts as their means of stimulating imaginative
response. The total absence of Apparent content 5 in abstract
compositions for chamber instruments or orchestra leaves such
work free from the perplexities of distinguishing superficial from
symbolic significance. Very few would, nowadays claim that
programme music , or the imitation of verbal or pictorial de-
scriptiveness, is anything but a mongrel of doubtful heredity.
When we discover Mozart to be the most intimately lovable of
musicians, one reason is perhaps that even in his vocal and
dramatic work the pattern of melody and harmony and counter-
Si
Art and Science
point is the real channel of communication, rather than any image
tied to the words or the apparent content. Most dramatic music,
on the contrary, and many stage arts except Ballet which alone is
emancipated from the tyranny of the spoken word, tend to rdy on
the representational or the imitation of life, and not to make fall
use of fantasy.
The music of Bach is also instructive in its almost total depend
ence upon pattern, whether accompanied or not by any apparent
content of words. When once we outgrow the primitive delusion
that a fugue is MERE formalism, we find in Bach a profundity of
feeling offering imaginative stimulation unsurpassed in any phase
of art. When he does attach a verbal content, the effect is still
carried by the pattern: when in the B Minor Mass we are over
whelmed by conviction that the composer of Sanctus* and *Dona
nobis pacem 5 knew with terrible intimacy the implication of the
words, the intention and the achievement would be almost as clear
if we omitted those few verbal phrases whose repetition makes up
the vocal score. It is even possible to outgrow the apparent content
of a work of art: the gross programme-building of Strauss and
Wagner is better forgotten, leaving us free to delight in the pattern
of orchestral colour of which they were such unsurpassed masters.
In the greatest of all string quartets, in A minor opus 132, the
ethereal canzona gains in ecstasy and strength if we omit
Beethoven s verbal labels concerning sickness and health. Perhaps
the most perfect examples of unfettered stimulation of imagination
by formal pattern are to be found in the instrumental music of
Mozart and of Brahms: in the Finale of that structural masterpiece
the Symphony in G Major (K.55i), Mozart brings to one single
mood both of the two most formal patterns of musical technique,
the fugue and the sonata form, with effects far more emotionally
powerful than if their appeal were either verbal or were merely an
ingenuity of intricate weaving. In the more sophisticated of cen
turies, the subtle excursions into change of rhythm and key enable
the codas in works by Brahms to confer an unearthly transfigura
tion upon the very complex structures preceding them: the sacrifi
cial nobility with which he ends the battling Finale to the Third
Symphony in F, the tender apotheosis which ends the first move
ment of the Second Symphony in D, the mysterious and elf-like
end to the Scherzo of the Third String Quartet in B flat, are as
compelling as movements in the final quartets of Beethoven.
In painting, it is possible that the first experiments by Leonardo
da Vinci on die effects of illumination mark an emergence from
32
Communication of Feeling
the merely representational stage, although the impulse towards
fantasy can be traced back to the Byzantine and beyond to classical
vase-painting, and had been temporarily lost. The outlying shadows
in a portrait by Rembrandt may subtly suggest far more than
its shape, and although Vermeer s subjects seem confined to an
apparent content of domestic commonplace, he galvanises our
imagination by the effect of light itself shining upon an object rather
than by the object. Fantasy more openly and less subtly begins to
dominate painting with the Baroque of the late Venetians and the
Spaniards, who exploited the tremendous effect upon the observer
of allowing any apparent content to peer suggestively out of a
dimness which obliterates most features of the superficially e real 5 ;
and yet no-one would deny to their most fantastic symbolisms the
property of the starkest realism. But only in recent years have some
critics recognised that direct representation is not the main function
of the painter; it was the French Impressionists and not the English
Pre-Raphaelites who stimulated Clive Bell and Roger Fry to a
first theorising about the significance of Form.
It is to decoration and the plastic arts that fantasy contributes
the most. The future text-book of all imaginative art may well be
based upon certain symbolic sculptures which range from the
bird-headed gods of ancient Egypt to the soporific carving of
Epstein s "Night*, and it must include at its climax the grim dis
torted stone watchers on Chartres Cathedral which join Byzantine
fantasy to the Gothic. About this subject I have written in detail
in another chapter. But the laws connecting pattern and human
significance are seen at their simplest and most convincing in the
decorative arts of the ancient Chinese, of which carving in Jade is
the quintessence. Significant form is here based upon rhythmic
contrasts between angularity and curvature, the simplest element
of all design: it confers a power, rarely anywhere equalled, upon
those uncanny masters in the linking of material shape and colour
to an attitude of mind. The ritual Jade carvings of two and three
thousand years ago exhibit in their stark austerity such a com
mand over this linkage, that the most modern arts might well
learn from them in all humility.
Another of the decorative arts, as seldom explored, is that of
manuscript book-illumination perfected in medieval Europe and
Persia; it too is peculiarly vivid in the emergence of an imagina
tive appeal independent of any apparent or verbal content. The
geometrical patterning of a Celtic Gospel from the eighth century,
the more naturalistic but still extremely formal and rhythmic
B 33 J- S - T -
Art and Science
decoration of a French Book of Hours from the fifteenth century,
are as abstract in their demands for imaginative creativeness in our
approach and as exquisitely repaying as the ancient Chinese
arts, and they are as independent of particular religious or mytho
logical tradition. Our kinship with the artist is not through accept
ance of the conventions of his time or race or any apparent content
of his work, but through that imagination which responds to his
insight into the most general pathos and exhilaration of human
destiny.
34
Chapter 3
The Communication of Measurement in
Modern Physical Science
I
Contacts between science and philosophy, or between
science and religion, or between science and technology
and craftsmanship, have never been impossible
although they have not always been friendly. Contact
between science and the more imaginative or even fantastic arts
would seem unattainable. Such strange juxtaposition, however, I
have already shown intention to suggest. For the arts of fantasy
can only form an integral part of legitimate human endeavour if
they imply that the imagination of an artist, expressed in a formal
pattern of sound or words or material structure or design, acts by
stimulating a responding imagination to definite and coherent
purpose. Further, I have insisted that any scenes or material
objects described in those arts need bear no simple relationship to
the experienced sequence of our sense impressions of the external
world. For instance, a fairy tale, or the music of the spheres 5 or
the light that never was, on land or sea* are legitimate concern for
this kind of communication by stimulus of the imagination, just
as the facade of a commercial edifice might be the concern of a
craftsman in the more obviously utilitarian arts, and murder may
be the concern of a novelist or dramatist who scorns any imputa
tion of fantasy. Now much of the concern of the modern physical
scientist, atoms, electrons, atomic nuclei, electron-waves, etc., is
essentially not of a nature to be directly known to sight, touch, or
hearing. These things are as far from being objects of direct
sense-perception as anything imagined by the most fantastic of
artists. If the latter justifies himself by the coherence of the com
municated ideas to which his patterns give rise, where is he
resembling and where is he differing from, the physicist whose
view of the universe is a deliberately woven structure of ideas
which also radically diveiges from sense perception?
Without any move towards competing with the popularised
versions of modern physics now filling so many works of deservedly
.35
Art and Science
wide circulation, I will develop here very briefly the suggestion
that pattern 5 and communicability* characterise the main lines
of advance in the physical sciences of today. Elaboration of these
two notions in understanding the imaginative axis might gain from
explicit recognition that they also underlie atomic, electronic, and
nuclear science, electrodynamics, and theory of relativity; while
on the other side, the principle of Know Thyself might result in a
recognition of aesthetic affinities by no means unhealthy to those
of us who are working scientists*
II
Modern physics might well be regarded as study of the structure
of matter and of the behaviour of radiation. A criterion for success
ful pursuit of the former study demands that analysis of material
structures into atoms and molecules, and of these into nuclei with
groups of associated electrons, must be capable of giving rise to
verifiable prediction of the bulk properties of matter, mechanical,
thermal, chemical, and electrical. Criteria for theories as to the
behaviour of radiation are that the phenomena of light, colour,
radio, X-rays, heat radiation, must become explainable by some
single mechanism; the only mechanism so far successful has been
the propagation of electric and magnetic quantities with a unique
and universal speed which is accurately measurable. This speed
exceeds that of the fastest material particles, as a limit towards
which the latter can only approach. Within the scope of these two
most general schemes, the structure of matter has been a prime
example of pattern 9 since a Russian in last century arranged
all the then known chemical species or elements into a two-
dimensional framework. Written down in a table of horizontal
rows and vertical columns, the chemical elements were found to
repeat certain properties periodically, much as the harmonic
properties of the notes on a piano keyboard repeat themselves at
intervals of octaves. To form the gross substances which we dis
tinguish by touch, smell, taste, etc., the affinities for chemical
combining of atomic species are found to wax and wane with
precise regularity throughout the periods of this table. The whole
assemblage of empirically periodic patterns is now understood as
manifesting the way in which successive electrons can become
associated with atomic nuclei of definite mass: these additions
proceed until one after another their possible federations into
electrically and mechanically stable groups or sub-patterns are
36
Communication of Measurement
exhausted. On a larger scale, chemically combined substances
build a still more complex structure, capable this time of direct
sense-detection, since there are only a strictly limited number of
possible ways of electrically attaching aggregates of atoms and
molecules to one another. Hence arises the visible structure of all
crystals, with the certainty of prediction that a given association of
atoms will at all places and all times, from the remotest geological
to the present-day, exhibit the identical angle of inclination of
each reflecting face to its neighbour.
Pattern in the structure of matter persists further down the scale
of smallness beyond the atom, and has been investigated in the
last two decades. We have been able- to elucidate many of the
nuclei of atoms around which the electronic grouping of the
chemical order is built. Even the individual atom is far too small
ever to come within the possibilities of sense perception, since a
ten-millionth of a millimetre is too small a fraction of the wave
length of light for image-formation in any microscope for human
vision. The electron itself is smaller by a thousand-fold. But the
atomic nucleus, which is c sun* to the planetary* electron, has a
complex structure which the genius of Rutherford s school has made
progress in unravelling with precision and an approach to certainty.
The extremely small in nature is clue to the extremely large: we
even enquire why certain stars, far more massive than the sun,
behave as they do in the ordered sequence which they present to
our telescopes. The answer can be correlated with the statistical
assessment of the structures of atomic nuclei in the interior of these
stars, and thus the stage of energy liberation through which they
are passing. In fact pattern of a homogeneous kind insists upon
intruding, from the smallest inferred structures to the most
massive and most distant in the sky.
On the other side of physics, the properties of radiation are
linked not only between themselves but also with the material
structures determined by the grouping of electrons in the periodic
table of the chemical elements^ The frequency of vibration, or the
pitch*, in the optical or X-ray spectrum of a hitherto unknown
element, can be predicted from the position of the gap which its
absence has left in the known pattern; so the missing chemical
possibilities become filled in as they respond to computed ex
pectations, whether finally run to earth in a terrestrial laboratory
or in the photographed spectrum of light from a distant star.
Throughout these parallel studies of matter and of radiation
there has recently been running a strange duality, crossing and
37
Art and Science
recrossing what used to be the rigid boundary separating matter
and radiation as the two subjects of physical science. The electron
and the atom and the nuclear particles had seemed to be the bricks
out of which the material universe was inevitably built, and radi
ation seemed to play the part of communicator between them,
always propagated with the unique speed of light and of other
electromagnetic waves. But lately it has become evident that the
wave-pattern of light is also a characteristic of the motion of
so-called material particles; further, that the property of acting as
a minute projectile is not confined to electrons but is indisputably
found in a beam of radiation impinging on a metal plate. So the
complacent distinction between matter and radiation in the
dictionary of early twentieth-century days has given place to a
healthy agnosticism, which regards matter as only intermittently
free from properties previously ascribed solely to radiation, and vice
versa. Matter is thus forced to take upon itself some of the aspects
of empty space fantastic nightmare for the materialists if any still
survived. There is no doubt that both matter and radiation
represent incompletely understood ways of approaching the same
thing, although thing* is a word too ambiguous for comfort: a
better term for conveying the status of the subject of physical
discourse might be analysed substratum of experience or pattern
invoked in attempting to account for experience in measurable
quantities . But the ultimate pattern recedes the more diligently
we approach: the finality of the views current in the nineteenth
century is a lost vision, and we can only be grateful for release
from the nightmare of a knowledge so complete as to be un
interesting.
Ill
It is not difficult to see this notion of pattern in any portion of
the range of physical enquiry, from atomic dimensions of mil-
lionths to astronomical dimensions of millions. But the other
character, with respect to which affinity of interest was detectable
between artist and scientist, was communicability . Science is
distinct from charlatanism because a known solution to a question
is verifiable, and in its common language of experiment or calcu
lation can be handed across the world as rigorously as from
individual teacher to taught. As counterpart, communication by
imagery from artist to responding reader or listener or beholder
was the essential feature of art, but was variable from individual to
individual.
38
Communication of Measurement
The dominance of communicability in physical science was not
explicitly realised until Einstein propounded principles of Relati
vity in 1905 and 1915. It now seems possible that the full implica
tions did not dawn upon the philosophy of science until the work
of Milne in 1935.
Essentially, the significance of these developments in the
foundations of science is a recognition that no statement reporting
any course of events is correctly formulated until the following
condition is satisfied: we must know exactly what modification it
will require in order to be equally true for some other observer
stationed anywhere or moving in any direction with any speed.
Knowledge is only of value to science if precisely communicable in
a form which can be made independent of the separate behaviour
of separated colleagues even if the separation be as wide as the
universe.
A simple example may serve to indicate the scope of this
fundamental requirement. A set of observers both see and hear
distant gunfire: shots fired at, say, ten-second intervals will produce
sensations of sound at such intervals and sensations of sight of flash
at similar intervals. But whereas an observer at the gun sees and
hears almost simultaneously, an observer some miles away will
experience his own version of the events delayed by a small fraction
of a second for travel of the light wave and by several seconds for
the far slower travel of the sound wave. There will be one distance
at which an observer hears the first shot at the same instant that he
sees tKe second shot. There will be a shorter distance at which
another observer hears the first shot at mid-moment between
seeing the first and second shots, and a longer distance at which an
observer does not hear the first shot until after seeing the second
shot. So the relations of simultaneity and of succession, foundations
of the temporal experience of any individual, become interchanged
according to the position of differing observers of the same set of
distant events. Provided that the differently situated colleagues,
whose scientific knowledge is to be guaranteed by its communica
bility, are stationary with respect to the objects of their common
discourse and with respect to each other, the principles required in
order to correlate their experiences are simple. They only need to
make adjustment by computations depending on the speed of the
tidings which reach them by sound or light. For the high speed of
light (186,000 miles per second), astronomical distances and the
motion of astronomical bodies, including the earth, are relevant:
sight of a solar event takes about eight minutes to reach us, but
39
Art and Science
events on an outer planet, when that planet is on the far side of the
solar system, take several hours to reach us. A sequence of changes
affecting sun and one planet will appear to a particular observer
to have been completed in the sun before being begun in the
planet, but in another part of the solar system the contrary would
be true. The outbreak of a new* star or catastrophe to an old
star occasionally takes place at distances whence light has taken
thousands of years to arrive here: with no event in the life-time of
even our early scientific ancestors was the outbreak simultaneous,
and yet in our own terrestrial sequence we say it occurs today.
What is the dating of such events in the ordered and communi
cable sequence controlled by any space-time framework upon
which the pattern of science can be woven?
IV
Einstein s Relativity arose out of the more complex situation
brought about when these time delays are not the only considera
tion, and the differing observers have their own finite velocities
relative to the objects which they discuss and relative to one
another. Einstein s discovery might be paraphrased by saying that
differing observers will, according to their own velocities, assign
different spatial lengths 9 and different temporal duration* to any
one set of events. In fact Einstein and Minkowski replaced the
older fixed temporal and spatial relations in the physical pattern
of events by intervals ; an interval then dissects itself into tem
poral and spatial components according to the individual move
ments of each different observer, no particular dissection or
assignment of time or length having intrinsic right over the others
to be considered true*. It is with respect to such intervals , not to
space or time alone, that laws of nature can become communi
cable. For the pattern of scientific knowledge appeared to Einstein
not as a pattern of two different kinds of quantity, each having
absolute existence in its own right as time without space and space
without time; but as an infinitely variable partitioning of intervals
into the space-like and the time-like*
It was not at first realised that this apparent complication was,
in fact, a simplification of science; the epoch-making gain comes
from the increase in communicability as a physical meaning is at
last given to the transformation* discovered long before by the
Dutchman Lorentz. Lorentz had been able to find the precise
mathematical formulae by which one observer s motion alters his
40
Communication of Measurement
estimates of length and time compared with those imposed by the
motion of other observers: but before Einstein it had not been
realised that these formulae actually represent the way in which
one partition of interval having a given degree of spatial and
temporal character may always be replaced by some equivalent.
The equivalents, as seen by Einstein, are simply different sets of
partitions with more spatial and less temporal character or with
more temporal and less spatial character, according to the motion of
any observer. The resulting abolition of Absolute 5 time and space>
or more strictly the abolition of our belief that the space-like or time-
like have unique absolute meaning, gives rise to the name rela
tivity . But by the second quarter of our century it was possible to see
that relativity was logically the requirement that scientific pattern
should present natural law in completely communicable form.
In the last ten years a new method of analysing the way for laws
of nature to become communicable has been developed by E. A.
Milne, and if accepted it will possibly supersede the Einstein
theory. This would not imply that Einstein was wrong in his
generation, but that three decades of comment and criticism have
enabled the older relativity to fulfil the function of all good science
that of making way for a better version: for no scientific theory
is a creed but a good scientific theory may serve as stepping stone
to a better.
Milne s work might be described, in terms of my view of pattern
and communicability, by saying that he has discovered how the
ordered sequence of sensations as events localised AT THE OBSER
VER can adequately be utilised as a temporal foundation for
scientific knowledge. Distance, velocity, and the Lorentz trans
formation, together with much electrical and optical and mech
anical physics can then be traced as patterns built by combining
the time-observations of different individuals. Einstein s merger
of space and time into the single concept interval* appears in this
later work to be a device for computation, which must not blur the
ultimate significance of time as the primary characteristic of all
measurable experience. Although Milne s researches are of the
present day and in the controversial stage, some recognition of the
primacy of our experience of events in a time-sequence seems likely
to play a main part in future attemps to trace the origin of the
patterns which are physical science. The feat of explaining the
larger mysteries, such as the form and motion of the great spiral
nebulae, appears by this means to acquire its first possibility of a
rational fit into the biggest pattern of all*
BZ 41
Art and Science
These developments are all situated in the shadowy border-line
between physics and the logic and Theory of Knowledge which
enquires of physics its rationality. They are entirely independent
of metaphysical views as to whether the scientist is creating
pattern, like the imaginative artist, or discovering patterns which
are inherent in external nature and complete without his interven
tion. At the level of my present discussion, more akin to a logic and
a psychology of science and of art than to a philosophy of either,
the metaphysical ambiguity passes us by and leaves us with this
certaintly alone, namely that the work of scientist and artist alike
is the presentation of Form, Pattern, Structure, in material or in
mental images. For the work of either to fulfil its function it must
be communicable: the hearer, reader, or beholder of the work of
art must in the end find coherence and feeling from the images
aroused in his own mind, and the verifier of the scientific theory
must be able to reproduce in his own mathematics and experi
ments the measurable facts communicated. The most obvious
divergence between art and science is that any number of respond
ing personalities to a work of art will find themselves creating any
number of differing emotional patterns: on the other hand the
numerical verification of a scientific theory is unique, all the
different scientific minds converging upon identity. They invoke
this identity as the only test that the communication of the pattern
of electrons or atoms or time and space measurements is valid. The
identity is possible because the subject of physical science is con
fined to the measurable, whereas the subject of the arts is qualita
tive, not quantitative. With this distinction guarded, the physicist
and the imaginative artist might learn to see in one another the
reflection each of his own aim, discipline, and method.
PART TWO
Examples of Imaginative Stimulus through
Structure and Symbolism
Chapter 4
Introduction
The five essays following are intended as providing back
ground and examples for illustration of the foregoing
discussion of imaginative art. In Part I this subject was
brought into contact with scientific notions of Pattern
and Form and the criteria of Communicability. A distinction was
developed between imaginative and representational arts; this
suggests that in these five studies we need care little what concrete
object is resembled by the shape of a carving or what narrative is
told in a poem or drama, compared with a more important deci
sion as to what such structures, visual or verbal, can convey in
stimulating the imagination of beholder or reader by means of
their Form. It is, therefore, no accident that the most abstract of
Beethoven s music is placed in the same category with arts in
which things* may sometimes seem to be represented but in which
the stimulation of a state of mind is of greater moment.
The essay on Beethoven illustrates the least disputable applica
tion of these principles from Part I; for the dependence upon
structural features is complete, and no subject matter 9 intrudes
with any programme of representation from history or external
nature. A confession of one hearer s feelings in imaginative re
sponse is no more than an incitement to infinite variety in the
response of all other hearers. This essay,, like some of its fellows,
draws upon the unfamiliar in art-history although the artist has
been for a time the most popular of musicians. For it concerns
not the works for which he is best known but the final phase of his
activity, in which he appears in a character seldom recognised by
most of his admirers. Beethoven s last quartets afford much insight
into a view of art as pattern communicating with the hearer s
imaginative powers. I am making the unusual assertion that this
phase of Beethoven s music is not only eminently hearable, but
43
Structure and Imagination
carries the ordinary listener far further into the enjoyment of
abstract form than the better-known work of this and other com
posers, while yet not abating but rather intensifying the element of
feeling which has sometimes been falsely regarded as an antithesis
to formality.
The plastic arts offer at first sight less facility for demonstrating
the principles of imaginative stimulus by structure and form, for
they degenerate so readily into the mere representing of objects.
So two extreme examples are here selected, which may serve to
bring craftsmanship in material nearer to the spirit of craftsman
ship in sound, through recognition that images conveyed are not
necessarily to be identified with objects pictured. The distinction
between any thing pictured and the image roused in the beholder
may be illustrated by the way in which the second in the set of
essays elects to approach the little-known subject of ancient
Chinese carving in Jade. By investigating from Chinese archae
ology and philosophy the intellectual and spiritual background of
the artist, and then enquiring in what way these miniature sculp
tures have succeeded in appealing so vividly to the modern Western
mind, we uncover an instance of mental attitude communicated
across centuries almost independently of the particular representa
tions fancied by the craftsman: animal, plant, mythical figure, or
abstract geometrical design, can alike be the channel of closely
similar communication. The ancient world saw in these carvings
the dignity of the earth, the majesty of the heavens, the nobility of
human character, so that contemporaries endowed Jade with the
magic in which they believed. But for our love of 4iie exquisite
material no magic is needed, beyond uncanny fellowship with the
long-dead craftsman whose exploitation of a sense of form causes
our imagination to be roused again to his own conviction of
undying values.
The far leap to the sculpture and architecture of Chartres
Cathedral (third essay) is not a transition of mere caprice. The
subject is one on which much both of technical and of religious
character has been written; this essay is not an addition to either
bibliography, but belongs to the present thesis because it attempts
to connect the more memorable of the Chartres carvings with a far
older formal tradition, the Byzantine. Modern critics are at last
recognising that the Byzantine is not a mere decadence of classical
art, and it is the imaginative and non-representational character of
the Romanesque in its descent from the Byzantine which I am here
claiming as important to the meaning of modern art and even of
44
Introduction
science. There is little in all European medieval enterprise which
better illustrates the communication of an attitude of mind
through disciplined patterns in which the abstract and the pictorial
are everywhere interchangeable: we no more need to be adherents
of the church under whose auspices Chartres was built, than we
need to believe in the mythology of the carvers of Jade, and the
archaeological guesses as to the identity of human figures repre
sented are almost irrelevant in assessing the significance of the work
to a receptive imagination.
Communication by form instead of by representation of external
nature was perhaps not hard to recognise in abstract music, but is
most difficult of ail to accept in any literary art. After endeavour
ing to trace the principle in the more symbolic of ancient and
medieval carvings, the possibility must be faced of extending it
into arts where story* is unavoidable. Transition may usefully be
made through considering a type of stagecraft in which c story* is
utilised but subordinated to structure, and both story and structure
have symbolic significance. Ballet, along the lines taught to
Europe by the Russians (fourth essay), has been much over
written in the recent years of its fashionable success. The air of
appealing to a transient craze has had the disadvantage of pre
venting any rational fit into place between musical, dramatic, and
pictorial arts. But taking one example of extreme intensity and
power, we here suggest that Ballet fulfils its most valuable function
when it is non-representational, or when any reality* with which
it elects momentarily to flirt is only a cloak for symbolic convey
ance of a hint to fire the beholder s own imagination. Thus all good
Ballet is at the same time fantastic and also strictly formal, how
ever soberly concrete the little dramas of its -stage mechanism.
Tetrouchka is unique in the devastating frankness with which it
defies the convention of c real story , and reinforces from an unex
pected quarter my thesis concerning the work of the imagination.
The verbal arts of poetry in verse or prose must, at first con
sideration, stand at the opposite extreme from music in the classifi
cation of representational and imaginative arts. For a sequence of
words is expected to c make sense . So the ultimate significance of a
poem becomes shackled by the mere apparent meaning of its
words as they are determined by their explanation in any diction
ary, whereas the imagination of a listener to music may come
closer to the composer s mind because this bondage of apparent
meaning is absent. It is clear that any inclusion of literature within
the scope of the present view of imaginative arts must impose a
45
Structure and Imagination
wide liberty upon poetry, of conveying by implication and stimulus
to imaginings a significance not limited to the dictionary* mean
ings of its wordsi This responsibility has been honestly accepted by
very few out of the enormous number of imaginative poets, and
the liberty so often descends to licence that critics are uneasy. They
feel themselves on guard against nonsense and moonshine ; and
are very ready to scent escapism in the faery or fantastic. The final
essay discusses the extreme case of a contemporary, Walter de la
Mare, as illustrating the criteria which can justify the use of verse
as fantastic stimulus to imagination through its exploitation of
formal structure.
The purpose of Part II will be fulfilled if these five essays not
only emphasise features common in arts so widely scattered that
readers familiar with any one of them may find novelty in another,
but if their treatment and grouping reinforces the thesis of Part I.
For the meaning given there to Imaginative art* in its relation to
science is not convincing unless it facilitates the appreciation of
ancient and modern works from music to very different arts and
poetry.
46
Chapter 5
An Approach to Beethoven s Final Music
for String Quartet
During the last three years of Beethoven s troubled life
he ceased to compose for orchestra or piano the works
by which he is generally known, and returned to the
writing of string quartets. For fourteen years previously
he had i*ot attempted this intensely expressive form of composition,
and his final development of it shows a Beethoven so altered that
he seems almost to have passed into a new sphere of existence.
Five quartets arc the entire legacy from this remarkable phase; in
some respects they are as isolated from his earlier work as from
that of other composers, and they may well demand for their
appreciation a special approach, though not necessarily a more
learned approach. In fact, when listeners or players are inclined
to dismiss these late quartets as unintelligible, it is often through
the very difficulty of fitting them into the judgments already
applied to his sonatas and symphonies. It may even have been
obsession with the earlier works of Beethoven that drove a be
wildered critic to label the final quartets dark with excessive light*.
Certainly they are difficult enough to play, and, like all of the
most permanent, they are not likely to yield lasting satisfaction to
the listener until repeatedly heard; but the excellence of modern
gramophone records has removed this bar to appreciation, and has
allowed us to discover that nothing in the whole range of music
more generously repays frequent rehearing. To accept the legend
that these works are unintelligible is at least to disregard their
extraordinary diversity; for no one who has ever taken the trouble
to recognise sincere* music (whether light music or profound, gay
or severe, classical or modern) need fail to find somewhere in them
his own particular delight. Perhaps their secret is that under this
diversity the only unity is of the vision to which their composer
had attained, a vision with which we all are acquainted, but in
fleeting moments only, and which we need to fix as permanent
basis for the endurability of stormy existence. Recall that those
47
Structure and Imagination
final years 1824-27 were, for Beethoven, almost unrelievedly
clouded by total deafness, family disappointment, poverty, loneli
ness, frustration and despair: yet these five quartets contain some
of the most exhilarating music ever written, albeit with a baffling
mysteriousness about its flavour. This flavour is only partly due to
the fact that Beethoven had lately become very preoccupied with
styles and idioms resurrected, from centuries earlier and as foreign
to contemporaries as to ourselves. For we are arrested by the new
suspicion of his having confronted decisively his destiny. He has a
new air of mastery and penetrating insight even more provoking
than that technical mannerism of combining the archaic and the
revolutionary: it is perhaps this air which makes the composer of
the final quartets unfamiliar and disquieting to those who know
the groping Beethoven of the orchestral and piano works. The
situation is subtle enough and allows room for many fresh indi
vidual attempts at discussion, including perhaps the present claim
that these quartets are by no means inaccessible to the enjoyment
of Everyman in music : although the claim in this instance is
bound to lack the solidity of expert musical learning, and must
rest only upon the convictions of one untrained amateur, who
merely owes much and because he loves much may possibly be
forgiven much that would appear crude to the experienced. *
If it is a novel confession that these quartets have contained a
direct appeal to the ordinary listener, my classification of them is
also unlikely to be orthodox. In fact the discussion may share with
technical analyses little except the fact that no natural sequence
can be made out of the published numerical order of these works,
an order which appears to be fortuitous. It is well known now that
the quartet in Eb Opus ivy came first, Opus 132 in A minor
next, then Opus 130 in Bb with the fugal ending nowadays called
Opus 133, then the Opus 131 in C# minor, and lastly the Opus 135
in F, with the alternative shorter ending for 130 written after all
the others.
II
Any one of these quartets, except perhaps the 135, is able during
a fine performance to persuade us that it is the greatest, but we find
in the end that recollections of the 132 tend to emerge the most
enduring. Accordingly I will suggest some comparisons with the
131, which Beethoven himself is alleged to have regarded as his
best quartet. 132 in A minor has a singleness of structure depending
essentially upon its first and last movements and their contrast to
48
Beethoven Quartets
what lies between. Both these have a spontaneous and romantic
fluency and a most infectious insistence upon rhythm: a critic has
used the picturesque description * wildly regretful". The two form
the perfect prelude and aftermath to the longest, the central slow
movement, the Canzona of tense devotional feeling which pro
cesses in all the stateliness of the ancient Lydian mode revived by
Beethoven for this occasion. Beethoven s judgment outside his art
was not always on a par with his musical intuition, and here, as in
most places where he heads a composition with words we may
deplore the programme . But in deciding to ignore the verbal
label we might well retain in mind the one word Heiliger, since not
even the awesome Sanctus of Bach s great Mass conveys more
intimate revelation that a composer knew the tremendous impli*
cation of Holiness. The very simple solemnity of the chorale
is heightened by the weirdness with which the medieval note-
sequence strikes a modern ear, and twice the slowest portion
reaches a point which would become unendurable if it were not
broken by a recurring passage of exhilarating brilliance in drama
tic contrast. The music seems to insist with overwhelming convic
tion that a man has met the greatest ordeal and caught a glimpse
of some inward tranquillity with unshakable foundation. If
emotionally and spiritually this is the highest peak of Beethoven s
achievement, it shares with the rest of the quartet a sense of basing
its appeal on subtle uses of rhythm; for instance, towards the end
of the Canzona there appears an interpolated note to each phrase,
imparting a lilt which strangely intensifies the solemn ecstasy as
the volume of sound dies gradually: Fainter and fainter sounds
the heavenly choir as it retreats, till nothing is left but the soft
sighing of the wind one critic has written by no means a mere
picturesque exaggeration of the poetic impression. The few bars
of mysterious introduction to the first movement and the short
passionate declamatory movement before the Finale and even the
more detached Scherzo each play an essential part in balancing
the Ganzona against the powerful swing of the romantic first and
last movements. It is arguable that their perfect sequence marks
this quartet as the masterpiece, even on the technical ground of
the composer s achievement in combining such forceful and
original rhythmic contrasts.
The Opus 131 in C# minor breaks up still more radically the
traditional pattern of movements. It has seven, and each passes
into the next without a break, although two are not more than
brief connecting links of a page-length in the score. Its musical
49 .
Structure and Imagination.
claim to greatness is often made out from the way in which each of
these movements builds up towards and from a centre of gravity;
but this architectural character we do not find more striking than
in the 132, nor does the long central slow movement approach the
Canzona in intensity and fervour. In fact the profundity of the
131 lies in the first two and last movements rather than in a centre.
The character throughout is more diverse than in 132, although
so skilfully balanced as not to seem heterogeneous. One might
imagine that the composer was obsessed with a hard-won serenity s
foundation in a multiplicity of conflicts, rather than any final
attainment of tranquillity. The work begins with a slow fugue
whose austerity is at first repellent, but which after many hearings
exerts a fascination difficult to forget. Wagner found it melancholy
but his opinion does not ring true; the fugue marches with a sense
of inevitability and discipline but also of exaltation and nobility of
character. At length its grave and measured meditation hangs
arrested upon a single prolonged note, out of which rushes the
second movement in a torrent of cascading tune. The monastic
solemnity of the fugue is most exquisitely offset by this rapid second
movement in which each instrument chases its fellows up and down
ethereal flights whose exhilaration might well recall the dive of
swallows. Both these movements glow bright with the glory of
otherworldly vision that touched Beethoven in those last years.
After a short connecting movement there begins the long set of
variations which form the main slow movement; the magic of its
demure opening statement over pizzicato cello again offsets
perfectly the preceding few passionate phrases, and is one of the
most memorable moments in these quartets. But the feeling is of a
descent to earth, as surely as the corresponding central movement
in 132 was an ascent to heaven. After the variations, another fast
movement of extreme simplicity shows how Beethoven can re
capture the gayest and most carefree mood, although its gossamer
texture belongs to its period rather than to any revival of youthful
jollity such, as we shall find in the Finale of 130. In contrast, the
short connecting movement before the Finale is of the most tragic
intensity, and as passionate in its outcry as anything that the
composer ever wrote: it leads into the tremendous battle-ground
of the Finale, a movement achieving what was more crudely
attempted many years before in the fateful conflicts of the G minor
symphony, Few composers can have expressed such a whirlwind
violence within the miniature texture of the string quartet per
haps only Brahms in his quartet in G minor. But twice interpolated
50
Beethoven Quartets
at the height of the frenzied march are a few bars of long-held notes,
with the hesitant change of time which is a queer characteristic
of the profoundest moments throughout this quartet; this passage
with its downward rush of one instrument against soaring rise of
another is perhaps the most exhilarating of all the mysteries in
these last quartets. It is an unforgettable culmination of the ecstasy
which surges up and breaks through the tragedy of Beethoven,
an apotheosis scarcely excelled in the whole range of music. After
each appearance of this magical interlude the music flings itself
back on the battling main tune; finally there is a coda in which the
most forceful chords seem to assert a determined challenge, and
after a brief slowing to a softened reminiscence it ends as tempestu
ously as it began.
Ill
The Opus 127 in Eb is often recommended as the easiest or
perhaps the least difficult 5 of the last quartets, and experts point to
features in which it is less revolutionary and nearer to the earlier
works, although it antedates the last of all by less than three years
and probably overlaps its next successor. Certainly it presents the
traditional four movements only, and they are of orthodox
sequence in character, steady and formal, slow and meditative^
delicate and rapid, shining and tuneful, for each of the four in
turn. But this by no means reduces it to the commonplace or even
the normal. In our own recollection it stands as the composer s last
work of untroubled peacefulness: the subsequent quartets may
seem to suggest a happiness only attainable through storm and
conflict, as in the 131, or through the monastic concentration of
the quietist, as in the 132, but the happiness of the 127 is idyllic
and carefree. It is the happiness of a child, of the experiencing of
spring or of summer sunshine in a cloudless sky. Not even in the B b
symphony is anything nearly so radiant to be heard. Consider
only the breathless chords at the opening, and the overflowing
excitement of the solo violin s trill which then dissolves into the
graciously flowing tune. Both this movement and the equally
happy Finale are full of repetitions so gratuitous as to suggest a
spontaneous delight of the composer at his own craftsmanship,
unable to quit the phrases which he can only have written to his
own most exquisite joy. It is perhaps the greatest miracle of these
later works that such manifest mood of the carefree should shine
forth from the mind of a totally deaf musician. The lengthy medi-
Structure and Imagination
tation of the slow movement is again unclouded by the tension of the
other quartets, and even the curious wistfulness of the third move
ment does not modify the impression that its airy delicacy is only
a gossamer transcription of the same innocent mood. At the end of
the Finale, however, there comes a change, and the sunshine gives
way to a hint of the mysteriousness which dominates the subse
quent works: de Marliave speaks of a C fr6missement d elves 5 and it
suggests a spirit from the magic shadews of a forest rather than any
ghost of dismay or grief or even questioning. But even this ecstasy
of tiptoe peering is still childlike, and before the end there recurs
the multiple repetitioning of phrases which already in this work
had betrayed the composer s reluctance to let the lovely moment
escape.
Opus 130 in Bb I find the least among these giants, not by any
inferiority in structure or sincerity or mood, but because it seems
less of a unity. Characteristically this work is the only one which
I often split up and play in fragments of one movement, whereas
in the other three great quartets any detached portion seems
lost without the entire composition. In fact the movements of
130 might have been separate little tone-poems, and one is not
astonished to learn that the infectious dance section was originally
intended for another composition, and also that Beethoven was
readily persuaded to abandon the enormous fugue (afterwards
published as Opus 133) as too long for the Finale of this work. The
alternative Finale was written after all the quartets were finished,
and is sometimes considered rather unworthy, but it only conveys
a pleasing reminder of the early Beethoven jolly, capricious, and
boisterous. It is the younger Beethoven familiar in many of the
works for piano or orchestra, who was as irrepressibly perky as
Haydn. That after-thought 3 of a Finale is not the only point at
which otlxer composers occur to our mind in hearing this particular
quartet: is it a heresy to suggest that the massive and rather por
tentous first movement contains glimpses of the rich tone colour
ing which we imagined only Brahms could impart to string
chamber music? And surely the Andante Scherzando with its
irresistible appeal of delicately changing rhythms the gem of the
whole quartet is the most graceful interlacing of grave and gay
ever conceived by anyone but Mozart himself? It has nevertheless
a flavour of the whimsical and belongs to the nineteenth century, or
even the twentieth, more than to the days of the greatest of all
musicians. The tiny Presto might be an exercise by some unknown,
writing to extend the virtuosity of a violinist, and sounds more like
52
Beethoven Quartets
a delightful piece reserved for an encore in a solo recital than part
of a long quartet. Even more isolated from the remainder of the
work is its one tragic moment, the slow Cavatina: it is probably the
most desolate of all Beethoven s writings, and has a simplicity
which is quoted even by those who avoid these late quartets. This
lovely fragment is only excelled by the similar but happier short
slow movement of the last quartet of all, the Opus 135 in F, which
movement we often find to be the only memorable portion of
that work. The 135 seems otherwise capricious, diabolically skilful,
even suspect of cynicism, the perkiness of the early Beethoven
become self-conscious.
IV
I suggest that any attitude to these late quartets will be con
fused unless we decide whether we are to talk about musical skill
or about the wider concern of human response to environment.
When we judge them as monuments of composition, we feel they
lack the uncanny perfection which leaves us aghast at the set of
quartets which Mozart dedicated to Haydn and which nothing
ever surpassed, a perfection the more striking because attained
with a simplicity which makes Beethoven at his very greatest look
clumsy. Further along musical history, all Beethoven s art appears
like that of monochrome drawing in comparison with the rich
colouring of Brahms s quartets, which miraculously possesss much
of his symphonic variety of tone even when there axe but four
instruments to combine. I cannot escape the feeling that Beethoven
was not as finished a musician as Mozart or even Brahms or Bach;
but these final quartets do compel a conviction that nowhere
among musicians was there ever one who more intimately knew
the loneliness which confronts humanity, and at the same time
became aware of a divine serenity which can at great price be
attained. Somehow Beethoven must have caught the heavenly
vision which passes understanding, and the claim upon us of his
last quartets is that they repay constant companionship by trans
mitting a trace of that vision.
A critic s longest life s labour would be well expended if he
could see and convey more precisely the situation of Beethoven
among his works, but acquaintance with much more than music
would be needed and the mind t>f the specialist is often narrow.
One question in particular recurs to me with insistence, but is not
likely to be solved: Beethoven s last quartets are works of vision
53
Structure and Imagination
and have vital relevance to the destiny of those who listen to them,
but was Beethoven himself possessed of the conquering tranquillity
of that vision or did he only realise that it was a consummation
which others would be able to attain? Did the deaf and dis
appointed invalid experience the exaltation of climbing those
ethereal heights, or was he limited to making known his discovery
that for some listeners such exaltation would come within reach?
It is possible that, like other artists, he could only save others but
not himself, for example Rembrandt who painted the very char
acter which was lacking in his own nature. The contrast between
Beethoven s music and his disastrous and wretched human rela
tionships leaves this suspicion only too well founded.
54
Chapter 6
Ancient Chinese Carvings in Jade, and their
Appeal to the Modern Western Mind
I
Books and articles on jade carvings and other Oriental
crafts are commonly issued for collectors, antiquaries, art
critics, or scientific anthropologists, with the assumptions
that a specialist outlook will be both necessary and also
sufficient for appreciating works of so remote a civilisation. Each
assumption may be wrong. An expert bound by Western tradition
may find more difficult than an unprejudiced stranger the task of
realising the intentions which depended upon the mental back
ground of so distant a craftsman. On the other hand, I propose to
suggest that this barrier is not impenetrable, and that neither
artist or connoisseur or scientific investigator, nor the untrained
enquirer, need regard as inaccessible the mind of those who
created and loved the art of jade. Perhaps there is an insight dis
covering strange kinship where worship gave rise to fine workman
ship. Consider that during three thousand years, while our own
ancestors have been preoccupied with phases of civilisation
ranging from druidical rites to railways, there have never been
lacking some Chinese who regarded jade as possessing peculiar
magic and as conferring character and nobility upon those who
cherished it To the modern Western mind the interpretation
might well be different but the facts unaltered; there is only no
longer any need to invoke a supernatural explanation. For in
contemplating and handling these stones we are not merely
soothed by the marvel of their subtle colours, their lustre, and their
touch, but we begin to realise our relationship with the distant
artist who believed his years well spent in their carving; the
imagining of an imperturbable poise and a serenity, which the
exquisite things seemed to stimulate at the other side of the world
hundreds or thousands of years ago, is created again in a living
English mind. By nothing more mysterious than this inheritance,
the piece of jade becomes a talisman to convey the permanence of
55
Structure and Imagination
loving skill and taste, an ennobling and consoling reminder in the
modern whirlwind as it was under the most war-scarred and
bloodstained of Chinese dynasties.
II
The most familiar jade to be seen in modern England consists of
small and highly ornamental objects for domestic use, commonly
in the various shades of bright green which characterise one
variety of one only among the minerals classified as jade . There
are bowls, cups, vases, etc., and personal ornaments such as
pendants, and more rarely the wine-vessels, libation cups, incense
burners, etc., of the traditional household devotions. There are
many intriguing little sculptures carved in realistic or in conven
tionalised form the dragon, the tiger, horses, birds, fishes and
insects. The sight of all these in museums or in the windows of
antique dealers is apt to be misleading: we conclude too hastily
that all jade is a stone of vitreous lustre and greenish colours
ranging up to an emerald brilliance, apparently chosen by
Orientals for those minor occasions on which Europeans might use
glass or porcelain or copper or silver and various precious stones.
But that conclusion would miss the profoundest significance of
jade and of the Chinese regard for it. The makers of those fanciful
green ornaments were often merely trifling with their skill; while
the product sinks to the European taste of recent centuries, the
taste which has chosen to import a species of Oriental art and to
accept it indiscriminately as pretty. On the whole, this phase is not
such as to have roused strong feeling in its original craftsmen or its
later dilettante owners. Examples were made in thousands in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and are camp-followers to the
fine art which culminated in the reign of Chien-Lung ( 1 736-1 795) .
That art was sincere though often over-florid, and the finest of its
jade epitomises one of the master-periods of all decorative tech
nique. The carving demonstrates, once for all, how the severity of
geometrically set angles and straight lines may be combined with
skilfully conventionalised curves of animal or plant life. But it tends
to lack the dignity of the simpler and older designs, which used a
different kind of jade, often not green at all, long before the first
Ming emperors of the fourteenth century A.D. These older jades,
which I shall refer to as archaic, have only recently been studied in
the West, and mainly through the researches of Dr. Laufer into the
connection between art and magical beliefs.
56
Chinese Jade
It was after the thirteenth century A.D. that a newer stone largely
replaced the original material with which the ancient magic had
first been associated. However, the dark and subtly veined jades
of two and three thousand years ago are not unconnected with the
bright greens of the last half-dozen centuries: the continuity may
be traced by examining both archaic and modern objects which
were not merely ornamental but were designed in terms of religious
ritual for the welfare and safety of individual and community. The
making of sacrificial vessels and furniture for the domestic altar
was always strongly controlled by tradition, requiring that they
should be carved from a stone which possessed many qualities of
the original jade. Similarly in royal and public institutions and
State ceremonies, the symbolic insignia had to be of a material
which in some way might inherit the archaic dignity or sanctity.
For this reason^ even among the most flamboyant shapes which the
modern Chinese carved in his Burmese green or white, there
persisted ideas and intentions traceable to another jade from a
different region and an older world.
We begin to regard those archaic jades with new understanding
when we recognise that they were intended as symbols of some
primitive belief, and were only unconsciously works of art. Among
the most characteristic are ceremonial axe-heads, stone swords,
and the six strange objects associated with reverence to heaven,
earth, and the north, south, east, and west. These were made of
jade from the time of the Chou dynasty (i 122-249 B.C.) or earlier.
Their stark austerity of design, and the variegated and subtle
dimness of their material, produce a very different impression from
the lavishly decorated ceremonial objects of a later age. In the
older dynasties, an aimless skill in technique had not yet tempted
the craftsman into mere display, such as the imitation of bronze
vessels or even of metal chainwork by cutting from a single block
of jade, which seems to have been a frequent exercise of virtuosity
in later times. Indeed, of the archaic symbols of heaven and earth
and the universe the two most impressive consist merely of a large
circular disc with a perforated centre, and a cylinder enclosed in a
nearly rectangular prism. While so many works of art can express
no more than the ephemeral characteristics of their time, there
appears an age-resisting perfection in these very ancient objects of
jade, unforgettably refreshing as varying illumination lights up
the blue and red and yellow veins in the dark green or grey or
black stone surface. As survivors from a craft still in its unsophisti
cated stages, it is possible that they would not have appealed to
57
Structure and Imagination
the West before this twentieth century; but in our contemporary
reaction against the flamboyantly over-decorated we have reached
a position to appreciate their simplicity. It is the Homeric simpli
city, which so many centuries between have failed to maintain.
The austere shapes carved before the second century B.C. seem as
perfectly adapted as their sombre colours to the quiet profundity
of thought and dignity of character expressed in the poetry and
philosophy of that period. Perhaps nothing but ancient Egyptian
sculpture impresses so sternly our current and tardy realisations
that the greatest art may also be the simplest.
Ill
In enjoying the actual craftsmanship, one soon begins to ask
whether the Chinese were unique in cherishing so long the art of
jade carving, and why their tastes in material and design fluctu
ated around the original purposes inherited from antiquity. These
questions need first some enquiry as to what jade really is, and
whence it was obtainable at the various historical epochs we have
mentioned.
Jade, so-called, may be any of at least three mineral species.
These are all included in the large class of silicates of lime,
magnesia, soda, and alumina, which contain impurities of iron,
chromium, etc., and are classified as pyroxenes and amphiboles.
They occur in various igneous rocks. Jadeite, a pyroxene, is a
sodium-aluminium silicate, owing its many shades of green and
other colours to the impurities. It has a vitreous lustre when
polished, and is more often granular than fibrous in structure.
Nephrite, the other mineral most commonly known as jade, is a
calcium-magnesium silicate with its colouring again due to traces
of iron and other oxides. These colours are often darker and more
subtle than those of the vivid jadeite, but there are varieties
known as sea-green, lettuce-green, grass-green, moss-green,
spinach-green, and the green of the feather of a kingfisher s wing.
The delicate gradations shade into one another as the proportion
of some metallic oxide becomes greater. An endless sequence also
occurs in reds, purples, browns, and greys. Nephrite is an amphi-
bole, of an oily lustre rather than vitreous and of a more fibrous
texture than jadeite. In fine-grained structure both these jade
minerals form oblique rhombic prisms, but the pyroxene has a
cleavage angle of 87 deg. compared with 56 deg. in the amphibole.
Some of the blackest jade belongs to a third mineral, chloro-
58
Chinese Jade
melanite. The main crystalline differences are probably due to
pyroxene-bearing rocks having more rapidly solidified from their
liquid origins.
The three jade minerals are sometimes difficult to distinguish
from sillimanite, which is of purer composition, from certain
felspars which are softer, from emerald, which is more transparent,
and from green garnet, which is denser. In the more extreme
colourings they may even be confused with blue lapis-lazuli and
turquoise, green malachite, and a red-brown pyroxene called
rhodonite. The dull waxy fracture of both jadeite and nephrite is a
fairly convincing test.
In speculating on the Chinese artist s choice of materials, it is
significant that only the very earliest jade carvings were from a
stone indigenous to China. Nephrite occurs mainly in Turkestan
and also in Siberia, New Zealand, and Alaska, while jadeite is
chiefly found in Upper Burma and also in Tibet, and possibly
Mexico and South America. There are rarer European occur
rences, chiefly in Alpine regions; these have, after much argument
and research, been definitely proved to be native and not imported.
Transported materials have given rise to occasional finds of jade
objects among prehistoric remains in Germany, France, Belgium,
Italy, Switzerland, England, and in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
The archaic jades of China before the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-
A.D. 220) seem to have been carved from genuinely native nephrite,
probably obtained near the capital of the Chou dynasty (i 122-249
B.C.). But from that time until the thirteenth century A.D. most
Chinese jade was Turkestan nephrite, sought for especially in the
boulder-carrying rivers of Khotan and Yarkand, which flow from
the Kuen Lun mountains. On the other hand, from the thirteenth
century onwards Chinese jade was often Burmese jadeite imported
from the Kachin region by Yunnun traders, and later particularly
from Mogaung. This last is the source of the green stone of common
Western acquaintance with jade.
IV
We thus have to recognise that at least one race treasured the
traditions of using jade for two thousand years after having ceased
to obtain any supplies of it within the bounds of their own country.
Their arduous and costly importations of nephrite from Turkestan
and jadeite from Burma must be contrasted with the compara
tively meagre use of the material in countries where it was locally
59
Structure and Imagination
available. Most primitive peoples pass through a stage of making
stone implements, and many have discovered the jade minerals to
be conveniently tough and suitable for grinding into durable
shapes. Examples of such usage occur in the several regions which
we have mentioned as sources of jadeite or nephrite, and in other
places where the material became available through glacial trans
portation or the migrations of culture along primitive trade routes.
But except in New Zealand, where nephrite had considerable
popularity for the carving of miniature figures and amulets, and
in Mexico, where votive tablets suggest that jadeite was chosen for
ritual purposes, the jade minerals seem not to have been particu
larly revered outside China. They have merely shared temporary
and local fluctuations of favour with marble, jasper, rock-crystal,
emerald, amethyst, topaz, chalcedony, onyx, agate, etc. For
instance, in ancient Babylonia, the cylindrical seal used for com
mercial and State intercourse is found in all these stones, and
among them in jade, but without any sign of the latter being
specially regarded.
This is essential in understanding the Chinese, for the vexed
question of possible contact in culture migration must not be
neglected. TTiere have been suggestions that the early Chinese
civilisations show evidence of being derived from Western or
nearer Eastern sources: the Sumerian cities of Babylonia, the
proto-dynastic Egyptians, the less-known civilisations of the Indus
Valley, have all been regarded by some authority at some time as
parent cultures. But while it is true that nephrite or jadeite has
been known in India, Egypt, and Babylonia, we cannot avoid the
fact that these civilisations show no deliberate choice of jade over
other materials for purposes associated with reverence to nature
and the powers of personality. Within China, on the other hand,
the earliest jades that have survived their three or four thousand
years from the Shang-Yin dynasty already begin to suggest that
exclusive regard for these minerals; the philosophical, religious
and artistic attitude of the Chinese was already concentrating its
symbolisms upon jade in a manner quite different from anything
that we meet in primitive civilisations of earlier or later time.
Hence, whatever conclusions may emerge as to pioneer acquisition
of the stone itself, the aesthetic discovery seems to remain Chinese.
With regard to a culture diffusion in the opposite direction,
from Chinese to non-Chinese, the finds in Central America and in
Europe have again been argued as possibly indicating that other
peoples copied faintly the Far Eastern devotion to this material.
60
Chinese Jade
V
The foregoing facts raise an-intriguing problem when we ask
what impulse maintained this thirty centuries of enthusiasm for
jade carving. We can only reach die fringe of this question at
present, but if certain suggestive directions were explored, the
enquiry might contribute not merely to the understanding of one
minor Chinese art. For in finding the relevant mentality to be
common in the East but rare or absent in the West we approach
some of the most widespread links between the arts and the beliefs
of mankind.
To begin with there are elements common to Chinese and to
other primitive religious imaginations. Notably there is the pro
tective property ascribed to. certain objects such as charms,
amulets, the tiny coverings made to close the eyes of the dead, and
other intimate possessions of personal and sacred significance.
These notions of magical protection were nowhere more highly
developed than among the Chinese, with the possible exception of
the ancient Egyptians. But in China such traditions were rein
forced by an acute sensitivity to the material beauty of the jade
minerals. This created a combination of appeals which no, other
substance in no other civilisation has been able to command.
Another characteristic might be classified as poetical or perhaps
philosophical rather than religious, and appears more intensely
among the Chinese than in the matter-of-fact Egyptians; it is the
tendency to associate material symbols with phases of human
temperament and morality. From regarding carved jade as such a
symbol, it was a short step for the Chinese to maintain that con
templating or handling jade conferred upon the owner something
of the purity, steadfastness, nobility, and serenity, of which each
little sculpture hadhecome an emblem or embodiment.
In understanding any ethical aspects of the minor arts, it must
be remembered that the Chinese revered the dignity of supreme
craftsmanship and the patience of prolonged effort, as among the
intrinsically good qualities of a life well lived. This appreciation
became almost instinctive when trained, and the Chinese shared
it with other peoples in other ages, for instance, the illuminators of
manuscripts in the European monastic times and in Persia. But the,
status of these little carvings was enhanced by a uniquely Chinese
addition to the visual aesthetic judgment the appreciation of
tactile and auditory values in an artist s material. Whether the
jade was the oily nephrite or the icy jadeite, to handle and feel
61
Structure and Imagination
central perforation; some, like the present example, are decorated
in low relief, some are plain and have nothing to distract from the
sole beauty of dim shadings in dark grey, green, and purple. The
Dragon ring may be an extreme form of Pi in which the relief
decoration entirely submerges the original shape. The Kuei or
pointed blade is more often than not decorated with cross-hatching
or (as here) with circular grains; various of its uses have been
traced, including that of talisman given by the emperor to his
bride.
Of the two remaining objects, the black knife is possibly a jade
talisman used in conveying imperial orders to subordinate officials,
while the curved knife is probably an emblem for ritual purposes
only. The combination of straight lines slightly diverging in the
shaft with the faint curvature along the blade is typical of the
effective use of the most simple elements of design, a skill in which
the earliest carvers of jade seem to have something new to astonish
all subsequent ages of decorative art.
PLATE i. JADE HORSE FROM THE HAN DYNASTY
Victoria and Albert Museum photograph
PLATE 2. BROWN AND WHITE JADE TSUNG
Victoria and Albert Museum photograph
PLATE 3. JADE DRAGON RING
AND EMBLEM OF HEAVEN
Victoria and Albert Museum photograph*
PLATE 4. SYMBOLIC BLADES OF JADE
Victoria and Albert Museum photographs
Chapter J
From Byzantine Manuscripts and Ivories to
the Gothic Sculpture of Chartres
Cathedrals of Northern France have often shocked any
Anglo-Saxon visitor who had been contented with the
more kindly dignity of English Gothic. The fantastic
skeleton of flying buttresses at Amiens, Beauvais, Le
Mans, or Bourges, associated with the monstrous height of the
Continental Gothic, together with the overpowering forest of a
thousand statues covering the later fa$ades at Reims and Rouen
and elsewhere, might create an impression of disquiet or even of
nightmare, when compared with cathedrals nearer home. In the
end it is possible to be left unsatisfied by monstrosity, and perhaps
Chartres outlasts some others in recollection for the very reason
that its most significant portions were built long before any taste
for the Flamboyant had developed; also the urge to outdo some
neighbour in size or complexity had not yet become a serious
motive when its last rebuilding was planned, so that a singleness
in purpose adds to an impression of strength conveyed by the
restrained dimensions and decorations of the main fabric* Never
theless it is a striking and even intimidating experience to run the
gauntlet of the strange sculptures which cluster round the oldest or
more Romanesque doorway at Chartres; years afterwards one
remains haunted by the cold enigmatic questioning with which the
faces of the colossi seem to look down from the West front upon a
modern mortal venturing between their ranks.
I propose in this note to draw attention, more pointedly than
in most accounts, towards an association of such feeling with the
artistic ancestry of these colossi which are among the oldest large
sculptures in any French cathedral. There are hints seeking the
peculiar strength of this art in a development of Byzantine from
Syrian, Persian, and Celtic decoration, and I shall suggest that
these hints might well be followed up more closely. It may turn out
that the Romanesque aspect of Chartres is not to be regarded only
as crude germ of the later medieval or Gothic, but as an immortal
vision from the earlier or Dark 9 ages, exhibiting a spirit which
survived and outshone the terrors of a stormy thousand years,
c 6 5 J - S T -
Structure and Imagination
Apart from its sculpture, and its unrivalled glass of 175 lights
from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Chartres Cathedral is
remarkable for a general austerity in its architecture strangely
mingled with an occasional intensity suggesting the emotion of a
fanatic. In fact, the present writer was sent there by a shrewd
Hungarian scientist who said to him: c lf I were to revisit Paris for
only three days I would always go away and spend one of them at
Chartres without doubt that place was built by a madman/ It is
true that the buttresses, more soberly massive in relation to the
general anatomy than usual, have a disturbing uncanniness in odd
features such as their .fantastic wheel-spoke supports. It is true
that the delicate filigree gallery running behind suggests the
queerest revulsion from those enormous austere projections of
stone. It is true that one is left aghast at the audacity of mixing a
motif of clustering vertical lines in the truncated towers above the
South porch. Throughout the building runs a weird harmony in
discord, suggesting that those who completed the main structure
at various stages possessed an almost pathological insight into the
dreams of their earlier masters. Neglecting some post-Renaissance
reliefs in the interior, and the famous solitary sixteenth-century
angels who dominate the surrounding country from the roof, the
sculpture consists mainly of two kinds, (a) The several hundred
figures of very Romanesque appearance decorating the West portal;
these survive from the twelfth-century building that perished
in the fire of 1194 and were probably carved between mo and
1 190. (b) The 705 figures of the North porch and the 783 figures of
the South porch; these are of rapidly matured Gothic character
and were probably carved between 1205 an< ^ Z 27O. This sculpture
of the two porches shares with figures from other French cathe
drals some of the most gracious genius of the thirteenth-century
Gothic, and for that reason is less startling; I will briefly touch
upon some of its features before turning to the earlier Romanesque
of the West front, which is quite unique, and which raises such
intriguing problems of the spirit of modern and of pre-Gothic art.
In the sculpture of the thirteenth-century porches, a perfect
naturalism comes within sight for the first time since ancient
Greece: the superbly characterised figures Jiave no longer the
exaggerated head and slender elongated body of the earlier
Romanesque, when an effigy was as verily a decorated pillar as a
human representation. The new conception was of statues in their
own right, and their draperies flow in human lines instead of con
ventional parallels. Nothing surpasses them before Michelangelo
" 66
PLATE 5 - COLOSSI FROM THE XHra CENTURY
WEST PORTAL AT CHARTRES
Photograph by Tel of Paris
PLATE 6. COLOSSI FROM THE XII CENTURY
WEST PORTAL AT CHARTRES
Photograph by Tel of Paris
Sculpture ofChartres
or since the Athens of Pheidias. Less well known are the hun
dreds of tiny scenes running round the inside of these porches,
for instance the woman opening a book in charming grace of
diligence and care, and the calm symbolic Deity in the act of
creating Adam. Scores of legends and symbols, of all the virtues
and vices, and the terrific crises of martyrs 5 life and death, are
recounted in these minor sculptures which border both porches,
and between are tiny miniature reliefs of a vivacity and grace
unsurpassed in any age; while, dwarfing them, each colossal saint
or apostle or legendary knight has a portrait individuality which
reinforces the little effigy of his life s adventure carved in miniature
between his feet and the column at which he stands. Not all the
figures cany calm and grace: among the carved stories are some of
the most sinister devilries even of the medieval imagination. For
instance a fiend, carrying over his shoulder a woman whose hair
trails behind his monstrous clawed feet, is outdone in sheer malice
by his neighbour who with ironic gentleness is leading away a
queenly figure by a paw laid along her cheek.
In contrast to this throng of perfectly proportioned creatures
from the thirteenth century, vivid in their anatomical realism how
ever preposterous in their legend, the strange figures carved before
1194 on the West portal are at first repellent in their apparently
uncouth and conventional stiffness. But they are very far from
lifeless: on the contrary, when in pursuit of certain suggestions we
trace this earlier artiack to Oriental traditions and try to realise
the attitude of mind of the pre-Gothic sculptors, their curiously
convincing power may be found to have very human origin. We
begin to appreciate an artistic vitality which expressed itself
through symbolic and formal rather than representational
technique, but which can be as compelling as the more naturalistic
arts of classical, Gothic, Renaissance, or modern times. We illus
trate these groups of colossi from the twelfth-century West door,
together with one typical from the hundreds of minor figures, here
Pythagoras bending intently over the mathematics which absorbed
him.
It matters little who were those colossal kings and queens.
Possibly they were intended as~the traditional ancestors of Christ.
But the artist or artists had an uncanny sense of timeless watchful
ness, as strong as had also been expressed in the tomb sculptures of
ancient Egypt. The calmness of Egyptian monuments may suggest a
uniformly cruel superiority to the affairs of ordinary mortals, while
the calm of the Romanesque colossi at Chartres suggests instead
Structure and Imagination
a wide variety of very ordinary temperaments become power
ful through having learnt to overcome a hard world: they remain
sympathetic because that learning was only attained by a discipline
of self-mastery. There are nineteen surviving of these colossi,
though originally there must have been twenty-four; they range
from pensive to petulant, contemplative to threatening, but each
contributes his or her intense personality to the unescapable
question: Can you endure the. terror we have known and attain
the Vision Splendid which only our strength of mind can give?*
Between these colossi are countless tiny figures representing
zodiacal and calendar sequences, symbols of arts and sciences,
biblical and legendary heroes. Almost hidden by the statues are
the carved shafts with myriad minute figures climbing among
stone leaves and branches. Under the feet of the larger statues are
symbolic monstrosities such as the ape with a toad on its chest and
a dog under its foot while a dragon stretches its head towards the
toad, or a little queen whose hands caress the plaits of her hair and
the tail of a serpent. Above all these is the huge relief of the Christ,
of whom this unusually austere countenance has been called the
most haunting image of Him that exists .
A clue to the impression created by these earlier sculptures is
provided in several hints from the literature which we list in the
bibliography: a purpose of this note is to urge a closer investigation
of such hints by all those who recollect Chartres or who have loved
other medieval masterpieces in this and other countries. We
recognise that the carvings of the West front are earlier than most
accepted Gothic, nearly a century before the North and South
porches and still further ahead of the best-known cathedral statues
of here and abroad: I have so far adopted the safe term of
Romanesque for them, as tibiey can be compared with their few
predecessors and contemporaries which lead the Romanesque
towards the Gothic among the decorations at Saint Denis, Vezelay,
Autun, and Cluny. But Romanesque can be a grossly misleading
term unless its peculiar non-Roman constituents are scrutinised.
Although it is an exaggeration to think of a Cluniac style as
postulated by Viollet-le-duc, there is no doubt that a spirit in
religious art spread from the South and East as far as Chartres
while the twelfth-century church was being built there, and that in
an important centre for that spread the Abbots of Cluny owed
much to exchanging missions with Antioch. Craftsmen in ivory
and book-illumination were spreading northwards and westwards
in Europe from a Constantinople which had trafficked much with
68
PLATE 7. COLOSSI FROM THE XHra CENTURY
WEST PORTAL AT CHARTRES
Photograph by Tel of Paris
PLATE 8. COLOSSI FROM THE XHxn CENTURY
WEST PORTAL AT CHARTRES
Photograph by Tel of Paris
Sculpture of Chartres
the intellectual Renaissance of Bagdad. Textiles from Persia had
been influencing profoundly the Byzantine carving which had
developed most exquisitely in ivory diptychs and plaques and
caskets, and Byzantine illuminated MSS. from the ninth to twelfth
centuries have much in common with Persian art and even with
the amazing Celtic offshoots which spread a radiance from Ireland
to St. Gall. There are in the available literature many photo
graphs of the Byzantine ivories, Celtic MSS., and Persian designs
which inspired so much of European art, and some of their winged
monsters are obviously of the same genus with the huge flying
creatures surrounding the Christ on the West portal of Chartres.
But some of the Rhenish developments of Byzantine art were no
further north-east of Chartres than the Cluniac Romanesque with
Syrian ancestry was south-east of it, and we need no longer be
astonished that, as one commentator has said, the pre-Gothic
sculpture of Chartres is as Eastern as a Gregorian chant. Perhaps
we shall some day decide that it links the Oriental to the Gothic as
surely as archaic Greek statues link the ancient Egyptian to the
classical: though it is possibly undesirable that the Byzantine and
Romanesque should become as artificially fashionable as was once
the fate of the pre-classical Greek.
In detail, the enlarged heads and thin elongated bodies of these
colossi are not merely ascribable to incompetence or even mainly
to the deliberate blending of sculpture with architectural struc
ture; their distortions belong to the tangled artistic history which
I have quoted. They are as Byzantine as the long parallel-line
foldings of their draperies, the pearled borders of their mantles,
the extraordinarily interwoven complexities of their pedestals.
Above all there is the haunting irony of expression which gives the
age-long dignity of the Byzantine 5 and which came only from that
unprecedented mingling of severe classical with enigmatic Oriental
temperament. In truth the Byzantine artist was preoccupied with
spirit and not with physique, and he gained in mystery and tense
strength of mind what he lost in never attempting the naturalism
of the Greek or the Gothic or later art: his crudity is at least as
honest as that of the ultra-modern. A writer listed in our biblio
graphy has even suggested that the Byzantine, being non-repre
sentational art concerned rather with the ideas invoked by a
symbol than with portraiture of a living object, is the real com
panion to the significant form of Clive Bell or Roger Fry or of
carvings by Eric Gill. The suggestion provides a novel starting
point for the present-day to re-examine the despised arts of the
69
Structure and Imagination
Dark Ages; the queer* flluminations of Oriental MSS., or carvings
of ivory screens and caskets, may take upon themselves a share of
the ethereal and the sublime when followed to their logical con
clusion in those supermen and women of the West portal at
Chartres. In the thousand years between classical and Gothic,
human nature was as hard driven as at the present moment in
struggling to survive the darkness of a perilous passage in history,
and the art of that age shows traces from which much might be
derived for the mid-twentieth century.
70
PLATE 9. COLOSSI FROM THE XIIxH CENTURY
WEST PORTAL AT CHARTRES
Photograph by Tel of Paris
PLATE 10. PYTHAGORAS MINIATURE FROM THE
XIlTH CENTURY DECORATION AT CHARTRES
Photograph by Houvet ofChartres
Chapter 8
After seeing the Russian ballet
Petrouchka
Petrouchka is a fantasy expressing a certain tragic situation
which arises from time to time in the history of most indivi
duals. There are few modern people who do not occasion-
^ ally suffer acutely from the disease which Petrouchka
symbolises, the disease of possessing an over-sensitive consciousness
of ugliness and deficiency without the strength or the wit necessary
for escape. A subtle combination of musical, dramatic, and pictorial
arts, woven into that formal pattern which makes up a Ballet, is able
to expound this tragedy very simply and very completely. Its simpli
city penetrates more deeply than any literary representation tied
by the inadequacy of words, and its emotional expression in
orchestration, dancing, gesture, and colour has the intensity found
only in Russian art.
Ballet being an art without words, it is not forced to obscure the
universal application of this tragedy by insisting upon the acciden
tal circumstances of any one human being. It thus is enabled to
exploit to the full the advantages of an art which can surrender
itself to the fantastic. In fact Petrouchka is an outstanding example
of the symbolic nature of the creatures represented in a genuine
Ballet. They are themselves the types, not mere individuals, and
appropriately in Petrouchka the chief characters are puppets, of
whom the most vivid and significant can. thus symbolise the
momentary or occasional experiences of any person. Both sides of
a common aesthetic paradox are thereby fulfilled, a work of
fantasy and imagination being also a work of a brutal realism. As
in other classic examples of this peculiar art, the humans in the ,
story are only minor characters forming a background or a comic
relief, and against that background an animated doll suffers at the
hands of his fellows and of the magician master who is his devil.
According to this plan the tragedy of the too-sensitive automa
ton has to play itself out in the midst of a cheerful comedy of the
simple-minded Russia of 1830. The scene is a fair in old St.
Petersburg, with street performers of every kind competing in
their attempts to entertain a crowd. The movement of every group
Structure and Imagination
in this crowd exhibits Michel Fokine s inventive genius at its best,
and the continuous blend of dancing and posing to Stravinsky s
intricate orchestral score is apparently haphazard but exquisitely
shaped in its subtle rhythms. When the popular carnival is at its
height we notice that attendants are drawing the crowd s attention
to a little canvas booth which evidently covers some sort of show;
presently a very old man in fantastic garb, posturing with a flute
outside this tiny theatre, marshals the spectators and clears a
space, and the canvas is drawn back. His show consists of three
little boxes, in each of which is a life-sized doll, the crude and
savage Blackamoor , the Dancing Girl of a painted and gaudy
prettiness, and Petrouchka, a lanky and cadaverous creature whose
permanently strained expression contrasts with the blank and
unintelligent stare of the other two puppets. He alone has un
fortunately been endowed with something like a soul. In response
to the old magician s incantation, the three dolls emerge. They
display in a desperately agile set of movements the crude and
mechanical kind of life which their maker has succeeded in con
juring up for the delight of the street mob.
The second scene is behind the stage of the old charlatan s little
theatre. The dolls are being put back in their boxes, and we see the
unhappy Petrouchka thrown and kicked into his cell and left to
solitude as the door is shut on him. There begins one of the most
difficult of all parts for a great dancer to play; he must express, by
every frantic leap and posture and contortion of a wooden and
doll-like awkwardness, the desperation and loathing with which
he reacts to his slavery. The senseless damage in his attempts to
escape, or to destroy the mocking portrait of the magician on the
wall, convey with Stravinsky s music a spiritual devastation beyond
words, and for which any other art than Ballet would be inade
quate and futile. We then see the Dancing Girl, and it soon be
comes obvious that any attraction to Petrouchka which she might
have felt is turned to terror and repulsion by his mad attempts to
reach in her the only consolation he can imagine. The scene in the
cell of the Blackamoor is quite different; this more bestial creation
is not worried by the highly developed sensitivity which tortures
Petrouchka. He is obsessed merely by a coconut with which he
first plays lazily and contentedly. In a primitive reversion of mood
he becomes suddenly uneasy and then terrified, ending by wor
shipping his coconut as the only deity he can find. This involves a
set of movements contrasting extremely with those of Petrouchka
but equally demanding of the dancer s skill; he passes from a
72
Petrouchka
sensuous rolling on his back, swinging his toy on his feet with the
music, to an agitated capering which works him up to attack the
fetish with fury, and finally to the rhythmic prostration with which
he is driven to appease the mystery which seems to defy him. The
Dancing Girl comes in, trying to escape from the uncomfortable
longings of Petrouchka, and she becomes fascinated by the mon
strous negro. After a long time, even the latter s dull imagination
is caught by her dances and he joins her in a grotesque attempt to
imitate her gracefulness. The fantastic pas de deux is interrupted by
Petrouchka, who has at last managed to break out of his celL His
awkwardness and self-conscious misery is driven to an insane pitch
by the sight of the other two together, but he is easily thrown out
by the brute strength of the negro.
In the final scene of the Ballet we return to the crowd in front of
the marionette theatre, but it is now a late evening of falling snow
and the revellers dance with a more violent gaiety in keeping
themselves warm. The cheap and simple entertainers are joined by
a man exhibiting a dancing bear. The coachmen and nursemaids
and other humble folk dancing together are reinforced by a crew of
late wanderers from some fancy-dress party, grotesque in enormous
animal heads and masks.
Suddenly the canvas of the magician s little theatre bursts open
and the three dolls rush out; the negro and the Dancing Girl have
tired of Petrouchka s discontent, and the former chases him into
the crowd and cuts him down with his monstrous toy scimitar. The
revellers are instantly stricken to immobility and then rush in
horror to where the dying Petrouchka is struggling to explain.
They crowd round him as Stravinsky s music beats out the last
frightful gesticulations for his awkward wooden limbs. In Ballet
the crowd is the silent counterpart of a Greek chorus, and at this
point their movements express perfectly the vaguely sympathetic
stupidity of the human herd. Not quite certain whether a murder
has been done or whether these creatures were only the marion
ettes which they had applauded earlier in the day, they send for
the town guard and drag out the magician. The old reprobate
mocks their bewilderment and picks up the corpse to demonstrate
that it is only wood and sawdust.
But after the mob has drifted away, subdued and a little uneasy,
the magician starts to trudge back to his deserted theatre dragging
the broken Petrouchka behind him. A change in the music ex
presses the misgiving which suddenly seizes him as to whether the
doll which he animated was nothing but an automaton. Misgiving
c2 73 J-S.T.
Structure and Imagination
gives way to terror as a climax in the orchestra accompanies the
appearance of a second Petrouchka above the roof of his canvas
building, a threatening and vengeful ghost of the smashed figure
which the old man is dragging. He drops his burden and scuttles
away, and the gesticulating monstrosity on the roof is appeased
and soon lolls over the canvas as immobile as the broken doll left
lying on the deserted stage.
74
Chapter p
Fantasy and a Real World, in the Poetry of
Walter de la Mare
It is a common assumption, in many fields of human enterprise,
that fantasy implies a lack of realism. For poetry, more simply
than for other arts, it may be possible to resolve some of the
uncertainties in the use of these two very ambiguous terms.
In attempting to decide whether realism may or may not be
credited to a poem called fantastic, the purpose may be better
served by regarding the means through which we are enabled
to appreciate certain phases of the art of writing, rather than
by formulating definitions which would inevitably be very
complex.
Consider what happens as soon as we come to criticise a poem
whose structure or rhythm or symbolism plays a large part in the
total stimulus to^ the reader s imagination. The case becomes
interesting when this significance inherent in structure is strong
compared with the significance inherent in any mere superficial
meaning of the words of the poem: for this superficial meaning
could have been obtained from a paraphrase of verbal equivalents
which might be entirely devoid of imaginative stimulus. In
extreme instances some absurdly impossible subject-matter may
still exert a strong effect upon the reader through the manner and
structure of the verse, just as it also might through the manner in
which an imaginative picture of the same subject was painted.
When the contents of a poem thus appear to lose all contact with
sense-experience, the term fantasy becomes applicable. In many
poems such fantasy degenerates all too easily into mere caprice:
but there are others in which a profound significance for human
liberty or bondage, or terror or exaltation, may be genuinely and
vividly conveyed by the form and structure, even though piece
meal analysis of each sentence might yield mere triviality. .Even
nonsense verses might convey through their structure, as can a
piece of music, a genuine significance for human feeling, and
whenever this occurs the property of realism cannot be denied to
such fantasy.
75
Structure and Imagination
I proceed to consider the imaginative poetry of Walter de la
Mare as an example of verbal fantasy which has in some quarters
been dismissed with contemptuous reference to moonshine and
dreaming. It is an example which gains in understanding when
we attempt to resolve this ambiguity between the fantastic and
the real, and which itself can help us to discover some of the
criteria which confer legitimacy upon other arts of imaginative
character.
Commentators who accept uncritically the antithesis between
realism and fantasy have implied that de la Mare, like the ostrich
in legend, tries to evade facts by refusing to face them, and is an
escapist who hides from a painful world by creating unreal worlds
of the imagination. "An opiate giving sleep and visions, but which
does not give vision and does not awaken 5 is a description by which
so responsible a critic as I. A. Richards stigmatises the work of this
poet. He suspects in de la Mare c an impulse to turn away, to seek
shelter in dream, not to stay out in the wind and c a reluctance to
bear the blast 9 of the modern intellectual environment. Mr.
Richards modern intellectual environment may not be quite the
same as mine, although he too is apt to claim for it a scientific
origin. I propose to adopt a more scientific, a strictly empirical,
criterion; because it is not science but a particular metaphysical
interpretation of science which seems to have interested Mr.
Richards. When a form of art exhibits preoccupation with dream
or other fantasy, I suggest that it is most relevant to ask whether
our sympathetic understanding of the more acute crises in human
feeling has been heightened by that art, and our impulse towards
practical courage in such crises thereby stimulated. If this test a
severe one is satisfied, the ambiguity to which I referred is
resolved, and the art is essentially realist in the effect of its struc
ture or its symbolism upon the imagination, however trivial or
nonsensical might be the dictionary meaning of the verbal medium
through which the pattern enforces its real impression.
The quotations which I now select from de la Mare may in this
way suggest that the course of his genius has not been a retreat
from profound feeling, but more truly a pilgrimage entering at
every stage into the most inescapable of life s uncertainties. To
begin with, it is the part of the sternest realism to see an alternating
succession of fear and tranquillity as a common feature in human
experience. Here are two poems by de la Mare in which these two
fundamental states of mind are inherent: each example is as truly
a fantasy as is a piece of abstract music or a symbolic carving
76
Fantasy and a Real World
or the work of some painter obsessed by light rather than by
material objects.
Who, now, put dreams into thy slumbering mind?
Who, with bright Fear s lean taper, crossed a hand
Athwart its beam, and stooping, truth maligned,
Spake so thy spirit speech should understand,
And with a dread He s dead awaked a peal
Of frenzied bells along the vacant ways
Of thy poor earthly heart; waked thee to steal,
Like dawn distraught upon unhappy days,
To prove naught nothing? Was it Time s large voice
Out of the inscrutable future whispered so?
Or but the horror of a little noise
Earth wakes at dead of night? or does love know
When his sweet wings weary and droop, and even
In sleep cries audibly a shrill remorse?
Or, haply, was it I who out of dream
Stole but a little way where shadows course,
Called back to thee across the eternal stream?
The second poem suggests that tranquillity, as well as terror, can
be conveyed as convincingly by fantasy as by description of some
actual situation.
Sweep thy faint strings, Musician,
With thy long lean hand;
Downward the starry tapers burn,
Sinks soft the waning sand;
The old hound whimpers couched in sleep,
The embers smoulder low;
Across the walls the shadows come and go.
Sweep softly thy strings, Musician,
The minutes mount to hours;
Frost on the windless casement weaves
A labyrinth of flowers :
Ghosts linger in the darkening air,
Hearken at the open door;
Music hath called them, dreaming, home once more.
The mood is supremely quietening, but the verse is too perfect in
pattern to dull the edge of a reader s sensitivity, so it is far from
77
Structure and Imagination
being merely soporific. It is matched by the beginning of the same
poet s Sleeping Beauty:
The scent of brambles fills the air.
Amid her folded sheets she lies,
The gold of evening in her hair,
The blue of morn shut in her eyes. . . .
Or by the end of Nod, his fantastic shepherd with sheep-dog
Slumber-Soon:
. .-. His are the quiet steeps of dreamland,
The waters of No More Pain.
His ram s bell rings neath an arch of stars,
Rest, rest, and rest again.
An art which communicates fear as vividly as tranquillity offers no
channel of easy escape from reality. Further, the poet s imagina
tion can scarcely be shirking the hard or sordid, for instance, when
his imagery has conjured up the prisoner on trial for life, listening
to overwhelming evidence :
Voice after voice in smooth impartial drone
Erects horrific in his darkening brain
A timber framework, where agape, alone
Bright life will kiss good-bye the cheek of Cain . . .
Vision of death, as in the earlier quotation Dream of _ death,
conveys something no less real in poignancy than an actual de
scription of civilisation s brutality:
No flower grew where I was bred,
No leafy tree
Its canopy of greenness spread
Over my youthful head.
My woodland walk was gutter stone.
Nowhere for me
Was given a place where I alone
Could to myself be gone.
In leafless Summer s stench and noise
I d sit and play
With other as lean-faced girls and boys,
And sticks and stones for toys -
78
Fantasy and a Real World
Homeless, till evening dark came down;
And street lamp s ray
On weary skulking beggary thrown
Flared in the night-hung town.
Then up the noisome stairs I d creep
For food and rest,
Or, empty-bellied, lie, and weep
My wordless woes to sleep:
And wept in silence shaken with fear
But cautious lest
Those on the mattress huddled near
Should, cursing, wake and hear . . .
Thus sometimes a sober report of material fact plays an equal part
with fantasy, in no way superior as regards realism since both fact
and imagination can equally be expressed by saying
. In the forests of the mind
Lurk beasts as fierce as those that tread
Earth s rock-strown wilds, to night resigned ...
Another pair of quotations reinforces our decision that the imagin
ary, the symbolic, or the fantastic, may be vehicles of realist com
munication from poet to reader not inferior to those arts which
confine themselves to the mundane or material. Take a supposed
story by de la Mare, of actual captivity:
. . . Last dusk, at those high bars
There came, scarce-heard,
Claws, fluttering feathers,
Of deluded bird
With one shrill, scared, faint note
The silence stirred.
Rests in that corner,
In puff of dust, a straw-
Vision of harvest fields
I never saw,
Of strange green streams and hills,
Forbidden by law. ...
This carries as sharp but no sharper poignancy than another poem
79
Structure and Imagination
of captivity of which the purely metaphorical significance is given
away by the last word in the second line:
Why did you flutter in vain hope, poor bird,
Hard-pressed in your small cage of clay?
3 Twas but a sweet, false echo that you heard,
Caught only a feint of day.
Still is the night all dark, a homeless dark.
Burn yet the unanswering stars. And silence brings
The same sea s desolate surge sans bound or mark
Of all your wanderings.
Fret now no more; be still. Those steadfast eyes,
Those folded hands, they cannot set you free;
Only with beauty wake wild memories
Sorrow for where you are, for where you would be.
The genuine realist s mingling of disquiet and peacefulness is
always present in any sensitive reactions to the major phenomena
of nature. It is in accord with the balance already noticed between
fact and fantasy that these reactions may be conveyed by the
imagery of a fairy tale as vividly as by any description of sense-
experience. Everyone must re-create in his own separate imagina
tive idiom the impressions to which a fantasy may give rise, but
the beauty and the subtle intimidations of an early morning will
probably be a common background to most recollections of the
next poem.
I heard along the early hills,
Ere yet the lark was risen up,
Ere yet the dawn with firelight fills
The night-dew of the bramble cup,
I heard the fairies in a ring
Sing as they tripped a lilting round
Soft as the moon on wavering wing.
The starlight shook as if with sound.
As if with echoing, and the stars
Prankt their bright eyes with trembling gleams:
While red with war the gusty Mars
Rained upon earth his ruddy beams.
He shone alone, low down the West,
While I, behind a hawthorn bush,
80
Fantasy and a Real World
Watched on the fairies flaxen-tressed
The fires of the morning flush
Till, as a mist, their beauty died,
Their singing shrill and fainter grew;
And daylight tremulous and wide
Flooded the moorland through and through:
Till Urdon s copper weathercock
Was reared in golden flame afar,
And dim from moonlit dreams awoke
The towers and groves of Arroar.
The mysteriousness of dusk in a deserted estate has aroused in
most people an equally intimate mingling of the uneasy and the
reposeful, and that subtle mood is relived by many readers of the
following fantasy.
From out the wood I watched them shine
The windows of the haunted house,
Now ruddy as enchanted wine,
Now dark as flittermouse.
There went a thin voice piping airs
Along the grey and crooked walks
A garden of thistledown and tares,
Bright leaves, and giant stalks.
The twilight rain shone at its gates,
Where long leaved grass in shadow grew:
And black in silence to her mates
A voiceless raven flew.
Lichen and moss the lone stones greened,
Green paths led lightly to its door,
Keen from her lair the spider leaned,
And dusk to darkness wore.
Amidst the sedge a whisper ran,
The West shut down a heavy eye,
And like last tapers, few and wan,
The watch stars kindled in the sky.
Finally the sea also yields up its sense of populating the imagina-
tion.with a crowd of thronging life: this piece of fantasy also shows
the flicker of impishness characteristic of its author, a valuable
81
Structure and Imagination
safeguard against the portentousness which lies in wait for the
unwary experimenter in the symbolic arts.
Down by the waters of the sea
Reigns the King of Never-to-be.
His palace walls are black with night;
His torches star and moon s light.
And for his time-piece deep and grave
Beats on the green unhastening wave.
Windswept are his high corridors;
His pleasance the sea-mantled shores;
For sentinel a shadow stands
With hair in heaven, and cloudy hands;
And round his bed, king s guards to be,
Watch pines in iron solemnity.
His hound is mute; his steed at will
Roams pastures deep in asphodel,
His Queen is to her slumber gone;
His courtiers mute lie, hewn in stone;
He has forgot where he did hide
His sceptre in the mountain side.
Grey-capped and muttering, mad is he,
The childless King of Never-to-be;
For all his people in the deep
Keep, everlasting, fast asleep:
And all his realm is foam and rain,
Whispering of what comes not again.
The repeated and yet subtly variegated rhythm emphasises the
element of form and pattern, which needs in fantasy to be even
more rigorously disciplined than in representational arts. It must,
in fact, be as hardly wrought and^as delicate in perfection as the
mathematical formulation of physical science: for if intimacy with
human feeling is" the pre-requisite without which fantasy cannot
attain realism, severe discipline in the mode of expression is the
only salvation from mere caprice, and without it the images
stimulated can only flicker and fade.
Fairy tales such as we have quoted from de la Mare are for the
child-like but the child-like of all ages; it seems to be a law of
nature that any vision of reality aroused by fantasy is like the
kingdom of heaven only accessible to a certain simplicity of
mind, The tragedy of outgrowing this in superficiality and
82
Fantasy and a Real World
sophistication is the subtlest to which the whole of humanity is
condemned: perhaps it is the only tragedy of old age, for this poet
has expressed the dignity and charm of the elderly, in the following
as much as in Nod :
A turn of head, that searching light,
And was it fancy? a faint sigh :
I know not what; there leapt the thought,
We are old, now she and I.
Old, though those eager clear blue eyes,
And lines of laughter along the cheek,
Far less of time than time s despite
To one who loves her speak . . .
But he is extremely sensitive to the grown-up inability to catch the
youthful vision, although his own insight retains more of the child
like clarity and honesty than has been given to most of us.
I search in vain your childlike face to see
The thoughts that hide behind the words you say;
I hear them singing, but close shut from me
Dream the enchanted woods through which they stray.
Cheek, lip, and brow I glance from each to each.
And watch that light-winged Mercury, your hand ;
And sometimes when brief silence falls on speech
I seem your hidden self to understand.
Mine a dark fate. Behind his iron bars
The captive broods, with ear and heart astrain
For jingle of key, for glimpse of moon or stars,
Grey shaft of daybreak, sighing of the rain.
Life built these walls. Past all my dull surmise
Must burn the inward innocence of your eyes.
Even when the child-like perceptiveness is not outworn or thrown
away, its vision is fragile, and is vulnerable to the crudity of
sophisticated disturbance. Possibly the poet has this in mind in an
early fantasy:
Bring not bright candles, for his eyes
In twilight have sweet company ;
Bring not bright candles, else they fly
His phantoms fly gazing aggrieved on thee.
Structure and Imagination
Bring not bright candles, startle not
The phantoms of a vacant room
Forking above a child that dreams
Deep, deep in dreams hid in the gathering gloom.
Bring not bright candles to those eyes
That between earth and stars descry.
Lovelier for the shadows there,
Children of air, palaces in the sky.
Perhaps the ancient Chinese possessed, more fully than any
other artists, a skill in exploiting the imaginative; and from any
study of Chinese craftsmanship in the minor arts we learn that the
child-like and the profound are not so far apart as immature
sophistication might suggest. So from the world of nature as fairy
tale de la Mare makes no very drastic transition when his verses
begin to symbolise the same world as inescapable fate:
. . . Very old are we men;
Our dreams are tales
Told in dim Eden
By Eve s nightingales;
We wake and whisper awhile
But, the day gone by,
Silence and sleep like fields of amaranth lie.
Here again the fantastic is the most direct and convincing of com
munications. The continuity of life, together with its discontinuity
for each individual, is subject-matter for any realist, but the
implications of the responsibility thus imposed upon any genera
tion are most penetratingly expressed in fantasy. For responsibility
towards the past,
. . . Even if thine own self have
No haven for defence;
Stand not the unshaken brave
To give thee confidence?
Worse than all worst twould be.
If thou, who art thine all,
Shatter ev n their reality
In thy poor fall.
Fantasy and a Real World
A realist s responsibility towards the present:
For all the grief I have given with words
May now a few clear flowers blow,
In the dust, and the heat, and the silence of birds,
Where the friendless go.
For the thing unsaid that heart asked of me
Be a dark, cool water calling calling
To the footsore, benighted, solitary,
When the shadows are falling,
O, be beauty for all my blindness,
A moon in the air where the weary wend,
And dews burdened with loving-kindness
In the dark of the end.
A final quotation suggests responsibility also towards a future; the
sense of contact between every artist and every appreciator of art
throughout history can even give rise to this faint ghost of a creed,
emblem of all fantasy that has attained a genuine realism:
. . . Look thy last on all things lovely,
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing;
Since that all things thou wouldst praise
Beauty took from those who loved them
In other days.
PART THREE
Historical Failure to maintain a Balance
between the Scientific and the Imaginative
Chapter 1O
Introduction
In Part I, I have discussed some of the contrasts and likenesses
between the aims and methods of physical scientists and
imaginative artists. The scientists were found to be correlating
the concepts which arise from measurement, into patterns
capable of communication. Any final form of the pattern was
required to be independent of individual behaviour of differing
observers. The artists were likewise building forms and patterns in
their several media of expression, but in order to communicate
stimulus towards a creative response which must differ from one
individual to another. In Part II, I traced this element of imagina
tive response through a somewhat unfamiliar variety of artistic
achievements. The most obvious sequel would be td call at once for
scientists and artists to regard each others labours with a new
interest and sympathy which might well grow to enthusiasm, and
to call for a planning of future education towards that end.
Unfortunately both the history of civilisation and the tempera
ment of certain historical figures must be disillusioning, if we
expect any success from throwing science and art together without
warnings against the mixing of inflammable materials. To super
pose science and art profitably requires not only recognition of the
restricted similarities in aim and method already discussed, but
the confronting of dangers from which only historical investigation
of past misfits can be an adequate guard.
There have been eras in which an educated man could only live
up to his standard if he were at the same time a poet and a philoso
pher and an experimental or mathematical researcher. In certain
Oriental civilisations this effort towards synthesis was not merely
a measure of the primitive state of the relevant sciences, and
an encyclopedic mind was genuinely cultivated. The net result
in advancement of science was often amazingly productive in
86
Introduction
quantity but poor in quality. There results the stigma that trespass
between art and science implies dilettante ^blindness to great
responsibilities, and we shall not escape it unless we confront and
understand the reasons for these early failures.
In the case of Leonardo da Vinci there was an additional mal
adjustment, equally relevant to the present day. His peculiar
temperament, in some aspects epitome of all misfits between science
and society, calls for a detailed investigation ab initio which
occupies the whole of Part IV. But Part III is concerned with a
more widely dispersed range in the historical relations of science,
art, philosophy, and religion, in such environments as were
capable of fostering their coincidence down to the present era.
The history of science, like that of any other major human
activity, may be investigated for its own sake. This is not my
present purpose. The following studies do indeed cast a light upon
scientific stagnation in civilisations which regarded science highly
and encouraged scientists with a policy of generous if capricious
reward; we have to notice why the resultant progress was small
compared with the progress of fewer scientists in civilisations far
more contemptuous of them. But the Moslem and Chinese
workers and writers can also serve a more intriguing purpose, as
miniature model of the strength and weakness of the scientific and
artistic minds when these mutually interpenetrate; medieval
Oriental history may be found to reveal certain warnings as to lack
of equilibrium between the logical and the imaginative, warnings
no less serious for today because of the primitive stage of science
from which they come.
The Chinese epitomise the tragedy of scientific conservatism; to
exhibit this in detail, an investigation is included of those works of
art which were astronomical instruments in A.D. 1279. When the
Far East was faced with problems which invited rapid advance, it
responded with an attitude of mind more suited to conferring
imperishable dignity and nobility upon decorative arts which I
have discussed elsewhere in this book. The misapplication brought
centuries of stagnation, from which the Chinese scientists might
have been saved by consenting to utilise the Moslem contacts
obtained at great cost. There are few tragedies of culture more
exasperating than the final sterility of those continent-wide pil
grimages of which I give some account below. It becomes possible
to see why most ancient Chinese science, superior all over the
world in qualities which depended on the patience of its artist-
technologists, remained obstinately stationary until the impact of
8?
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
a younger and livelier European science caught its frozen dignity
in the seventeenth century.
The Moslem researchers, deliberately ignored by the Chinese
in spite of painfully won acquaintance, came from a scientific
culture more youthful which had flourished amazingly but briefly
after the ninth century. Some novel aspects of the story are
told in the essay on the Bagdad mathematicians. These hundreds
of scientific writers in Arabic, Persian, Syriac, and Hebrew, known
to the Renaissance in Latin version, are also to be written down as
a historic failure to achieve what lay open to them: the warning is
once more against lack of balance between logic and imagination.
It was not the deliberate conservatism of the Chinese which
restricted the multitudinous advances of the Moslems to mere
detail, where radical reconstruction was urgent^ but an equally
crippling blindness with an aesthetic basis. The scientific pattern
inherited from the Greeks was aesthetically satisfying so long as
general and communicable laws of nature were not sought; so
the labour of centuries and many hundreds of treatises were
expended in tinkering with an ever-growing complexity in the
interpretation of nature as a system of circles.
These Oriental civilisations represent diligence of scientific
activity, sterilised through exploiting unwisely and uncritically the
kinship between logical and imaginative senses of design and
pattern, and through failing to recognise the communicability
which is the essence of modern science. In modern science and
philosophy and art we pass to the other extreme of refusing to
allow contact between the imaginative and the logical. A first step
towards learning the lesson of the medieval would be to see the
place of science in relation to other mental disciplines, and for this
purpose the by-ways of non-European history are more illuminat
ing than much conventional history of post-Newtonian science.
Between the Renaissance and the modern era there is in the
philosophy of Spinoza a most unsuspected parallel to the Oriental
misfitting of logic and imagination. Spinoza, more than any other
character in history, foreshadows that compound of mystic and
logician which must some day reconcile the scientific with the
imaginative true superman to come. But his work has had little
direct influence outside the academic circles of philosophic history,
because he bound himself to a geometrical formality of exposition
without restricting his subject of discourse to topics susceptible of
such treatment. The aesthetic attraction of the Euclidean form of
argument was as fettering a chain to his ideas as the aesthetic
88
Introduction
appeal of Ptolemaic astronomy was a millstone about the neck of
the Moslem scientists. The novelty of regarding him as an artist,
with a philosophy ruined by compression into scientific instead of
imaginative form, is highly unorthodox: the essay here included
on Spinoza is intended to drag his memory out of its imprisonment
in academic circles, and to suggest reflection on the limitations of
scientific technique for philosophy.
Critique of the past with no constructive contribution for the
future is always invidious, and so a final essay in Part III concerns
Symbolism: through recognition of the large part played by sym
bolism in our intellectual pursuits, there may conceivably come
some day a reconciliation between aesthetic, scientific, and
religious attitudes to experience.
Chapter 1 1
The Persian and Arab Artist-mathematicians
of Medieval Bagdad
I
There have been scattered moments of history in which
science and art have flourished not only side by side but
together within the same personalities. The individual
instance of Leonardo da Vinci is of such importance to~
understanding the scientist s and artist s reaction to environment
that it is investigated in detail in some later chapters. The Euro
pean Renaissance contains many other examples, but compared
with Leonardo these tend to illustrate only less vividly the con
trasts which are in him outstanding; so it will be useful to look
further eastwards, where the European tradition of specialisation
and of divorce between imaginative and logical enthusiasm never
penetrated, and where a man was a mathematician and a poet and
possibly a prince without being an aberration. The facts of history
in these regions are little known to conventional western study,
and much of the following essay is necessarily a first exposure of
bare fact: the suggestions just now put forward in the introduction
to Part III are a focus towards which my tale of the Bagdad
mathematicians may serve to converge supporting evidence.
The peculiar scientific mentality relevant to contact with the
arts was found scattered over various Oriental civilisations; for
instance in the Alexandrian culture which inherited the Greek
tradition and joined to it an infiltration of Babylonian learning, in
occasional flickerings throughout the Byzantine centuries, and in
several of the great Chinese dynasties. But the example unequalled
in its opportunities though defective in fulfilment was the early
renaissance in which Greek, Persian, and Hindu elements were
suddenly synthesisedf under the Moslem culture centred at Bagdad.
The combined scientific, philosophical, poetic, and artistic impulse
lasted from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, including trans-
plantings to Moorish Spain and also to the Mongol empire after
the sack of Bagdad, but its most vital inspiration came from the
court of the Caliphs in the first two or three centuries of this period,
90
Bagdad Mathematicians
Astronomy and mathematics predominated in these years, since
the Bagdad scientists were primarily lovers of pattern and design
in the sense which we have been attributing to the typical artistic
temperament, but many aspects of experimental science including
medicine were also vigorously pursued.
In assessing the historical contacts between science and art, this
Moslem renaissance provides a remarkable microcosm exhibiting
the rare interpcnetration of the two kinds of attitude to experience:
in this case the contact was disastrous. For it seems to have been
mainly aesthetic attachment to an outworn kinematics that must
be blamed, when we condemn Bagdad for persisting in fantastic
elaboration of the Ptolemaic error when the latter might have been
superseded. The condemnation of these remarkable geniuses is not
that they were poets as well as astronomers (like Omar Khayydm a
century or so later) but that they were blinded by the exquisite
miniature pattern of a geometry; a combination of perfect circles
seemed a noble structure adequate to the dignity of the heavens.
It fitted many facts with considerable precision, but the non-
circular conies 5 were later found by Europeans to fit the facts
better and also to yield a general mechanics. The Moslems were
so engrossed in the fascinating complexity of circles rolling upon
circles, that the chance of representing everything by a single
figure so imperfect as an ellipse escaped notice. The conies re
mained to them a set of models with no relevance to the material
universe.
Among the mathematical writers whom I shall mention, many
were also poets or philosophers or both: the nature and quality of
their poetry I am not attempting to discuss, but the fact that it
accompanied a laborious but sterile science is important today,
when interpenetration of science with other preoccupations is
alternately urged upon us and despised.
II
The observatories at Bagdad were founded about AJX 820 and
A.D. 980, and showed a sense of organisation beyond that of any
Syrian, Greek, or Babylonian predecessors. They were the first
institutions of astronomical .research to correlate library resources
with observing facilities on a large scale. Between A.D. 760 and
1000 they collected, translated, and edited the astronomical know
ledge of the entire world, excepting China. From Bagdad after the
tenth century it diffused throughout Moslem Africa, Persia, Spain;
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
and from Spain it played its part in stimulating the beginnings of
modern European astronomy. It will be a novel but profitable
enterprise to ask what was actually read and written at Bagdad by
those first ancestors of any modern observatory staff. The present
attempt at answering this question is based on the researches of
Sarton, Suter, Wolf, Deslambres, S6dillot, Dreyer, and others too
numerous for detailed acknowledgement here.
The historical background to the development of the Bagdad
institutes of astronomy was as follows. The city had seen much
intercourse between Persian, Syrian, Byzantine, and Hindu
astronomers since its foundation in 762 under the Caliph Al
Mansur, and about 820 the yth Caliph Al Mamun organised the
House of Wisdom 5 or combined observatory and library. The
first achievements of this were a redetermination of the obliquity
of the ecliptic as 23 33 , a comprehensive set of planetary tables,
and the measurement of a terrestrial distance to correspond with a
degree, from which a value of 20,400 miles was obtained for the
earth s circumference. Succeeding Caliphs tolerated astronomers
and sometimes encouraged them, but by the middle of the ninth
century the more practical patrons were private individuals. A
temporary revival of royal astronomical enterprise, under the
Buwayid princes from Persia, led to a second Bagdad observatory
being founded about 980. These institutions seem to have lasted
until the sack of Bagdad by the Mongols in 1258, but their greatest
activity ended with the tenth century and thereafter was surpassed
in Egypt and Spain. After 1258 the magnificent astronomical
library no doubt formed the nucleus of the Mongol library at
Maragha in Persia, said to have contained 400,000 stolen books.
Ill
If we classify the Bagdad writings as (a) translations of earlier
astronomy and (b] manuscripts of contemporary research, the first
stage of enquiry is to know what literature was available from
which (0) could be evolved.
The majority of the astronomical manuscripts in existence when
Bagdad was founded (762) were either Greek, or derived from
Greek and bearing traces of the outlook of writers in Sanskrit,
Syriac, or Persian through whose civilisations the Greek ideas had
been transmitted. The Greek who most influenced all later astro
nomy, himself owing much to the Babylonians, was Hipparchus
(second century B.C.), buthis work exerted its greatest effect through
Bagdad Mathematicians
the writings of Ptolemy (second century A.D.). There had been
various Greek editions of Ptolemy, notably by Pappus and by
Theon, but together with the mathematical and physical succes
sors to Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Menelaus, and Diophantus
these required diffusing beyond their original repository in the
school of Alexandria. A valuable channel for tHs diffusion was
opened by Proclus (c. 410-85); he carried Ptolemaic traditions to
Byzantium and Athens and taught Ammonius, whose brother
Heliodorus was an astronomical observer between 498 and 509
and probable author of an introduction to Ptolemy s greatest
work, the Syntaris or * Almagest 5 . Three other pupils of Proclus
and Ammonius helped to link Greek with Arab astronomical
literature, namely Philoponus whose treatise on instruments is now
available in Dr. Gunther s Astrolabes , and Damascius and
Simplicius who dominated the academy at Athens until Justinian
closed it in 529. From then until 533 these two were exiled in
Persia; they were hospitably entertained at the court of King
Nushirwan, and if only we knew whom they met there and with
whom they discussed their own commentaries on the older Greek
scientists, we could complete the connection between ancient
astronomy and Bagdad, for some of the earliest of the Caliph s
astronomers were Persians.
The Syrian version of Greek astronomy has been even less
explored, but one striking example is Bishop Severus Sebokht s
treatise on the astrolabe, about 662, based exclusively on Greek
sources, and now in Dr. Gunther s book. Sebokht also wrote on the
zodiac and on eclipses, but his greatest importance is his mention
of the Hindu numerals, since the scientific achievements of Bagdad
were only made possible by the fusion of Greek ideas with the less
clumsy Sanskrit numerical notation. Apart from that notation,
Hindu astronomy is undoubtedly of Greek origin, since even
the Sanskrit constellation names are Greek words in disguise, as
expounded in the Siddhantas and especially in the writings of
Aryabhata (c. 500), Varahamihira (c. 550) and Brahmagupta
(<?. 630).
The more important of theTersian and Syrian channels supply
ing Greek astronomical manuscripts to Bagdad have been corre
lated in Dr. O Leary s Arabic Thought ; they include, in addition
to those I have mentioned, the pagan Harranian settlements where
classical tradition survived longer than anywhere else in the East,
and the scientific schools at Jundishapur and elsewhere frequented
by Nestorian refugees. The final state of Bagdad science reached,
93
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
just before the observatory was founded and before Ptolemy s
works were read there, can be very clearly seen in Dr. Mingana s
recent edition of the Book of Treasures of Job of Edessa, while the
older pre-Hindu Greek and Egyptian notations of the Byzantine
world appear in the Akhmim mathematical papyrus and in the
papyrus recently edited by Michigan observatory.
IV
With the literature of Greek astronomy scattered in the
manner I have described, it is clear that the first task of organised
science in Bagdad was to translate into Arabic from these Byzan
tine, Syriac, Persian, and Sanskrit derived manuscripts. I shall in
this section regard Bagdad observatory as a bureau of translators,
as it mainly was in its earlier years; its own later researches only
become intelligible against such a background.
The first translations were probably made under the Ummayid
Caliphs of Damascus before Bagdad was founded, but no details
survive. In 767 or 773 occurred a significant event in the scientific
life of the new city, the arrival at Al Mansur s court of a Hindu
with a compendium of his people s astronomy^ probably in the
form given to the Siddhantas by Brahmagupta 150 years before.
The first Bagdad writer known to have profited by this was Yaqub
ibn Tariq, a Persian, in his memoirs on the sphere, on trigono
metry, on Hindu astronomical tables, and on the calendar, all
before 778. Actual translation from the Siddhantas into Arabic
seems to be first due to the younger Al Fazari about 773. Ibn
Naubakht, Persian librarian to Harun al Rashid the 5th Caliph,
is perhaps the first astronomical translator into Arabic from
Persian, thus opening another of the channels which I described as
carrying Greek ideas. Direct translation from Greek science seems
to have begun in Harun s reign (786-809) with, the Euclid of Al
Hajaj ; the latter also translated Ptolemy s Almagest in 827-8 under
Al Mamun the 7th Caliph, who founded the House of Wisdom
about then. This was not the first Arabic edition, but the earliest
reliable one, and the translator probably utilised a Syriac version
made by Sergius of Resaina in the sixth century. About this time
Al Batriq translated Ptolemy s Tetrabiblos , and before the death
of Mamun in 833 a number of other translations were added,
notably from Persian by Al Farrukhan and from Greek by Al
Kindi, together with commentaries by Al Abbas on Euclid and by
Al Farghani and Al Farrukhan on Ptolemy. But by the middle of
94
Bagdad Mathematicians
the ninth century the influence of the Caliphs had weakened and
left the encouragement of science to private individuals; the most
famous of these were the three sons of Musa, who devoted their
wealth to acquiring Greek manuscripts and employing a staff of
translators, much as Mamun had earlier sent his missions to obtain
Greek books from Leon the emperor of Byzantium.
The time of the Musa brothers was the greatest age of astrono
mical translators in Bagdad. The first to mention is Hunain ibn
Ishaq, 809-77, who spent his early years at Jundishapur where all
the older scientific cultures met, and then was in Bagdad until his
death. His method was to translate from Qreek to Syriac and then
to supervise pupil translators from Syriac into Arabic. His son Ishaq
ibn Hunain translated astronomy and mathematics from Aristotle,
Euclid, Ptolemy, Menelaus, Archimedes, Autolycus and Hypsicles.
Thabit ibn Qurra, 826-90 i,~was the leader of this school and em
ployed the same method of a Syriac intermediary between Greek
and Arab astronomy. He revised Ishaq s work and himself trans
lated from Apollonius, Archimedes, Euclid, Theodosius, Ptolemy,
and Eutocius. Other translators for the Musa family were At
Himsi, responsible for several books of Apollonius, and Yusuf al
Khuri. The latter seems responsible for Archimedes lost work on
triangles, revised later bjr a son of Thabit in the tenth century.
Qusta ibn Luqa, a Greek Christian in Bagdad, translated from
Diophantus, Theodosius, Autolycus, Hypsicles, Aristarchus, and
Heron; it is seen that by this time the minor authors were being
added and the scientific outlook broadened.
In addition to these translations, the observatory at Bagdad had
also been accumulating commentaries. Ibn Sinan, 908-46, grand
son of Thabit, wrote on the Almagest and on books upon conies. Al
Farabi wrote on Euclid. Al Mahani wrote on Archimedes famous
Sphere and cylinder and on Euclid. Al Nairizf s commentaries on
Ptolemy and Euclid survived into Europe through a Latin version
made by Gerard of Cremona. Ibn Luqa wrote commentaries on
Euclid in addition to his translations. This part of.the observatory
routine was not allowed to stagnate even when research had
largely replaced translation; e.g. in the later years of Bagdad we
find Abul Path, the Persian, writing commentaries on the Conies
of Apollonius, improving the editions of Books 1-4 previously due
to Al Himsi and of Books 5-7 previously due to Thabit. Even, the
most original observers and mathematical discoverers, such as Al
Battani and Abul Wafa, added to the standard editions of the
older astronomy.
95
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
It was against this background of painfully inherited astrono
mical knowledge that new developments in observation and in the
mathematical treatment of astronomical data were being made in
Bagdad, as follows.
Atthe very beginningin 762, the Persian AINaubakht, father of the
translator whom I have mentioned, worked with the Jew Mashallah
as astronomers in addition to being surveyors for the foundation of
the new city. The only writing now ascribed to the former is the
astrological *Kitab al Ahkam , but a treatise by Mashallah is the
earliest Bagdad text-book to be used later in Europe; it was trans
lated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona in the twelfth century
under the title T)e scientia motus orbis and was printed in 1504.
Another father of a translator mentioned above, Al Fazari, is said
to have been the first constructor of astronomical instruments in
Bagdad, before the observatory was organised, and wrote books on
the astrolabe, on armillary spheres, and the calendar.
The greatest of Mamun s reign was probably Al Khwarizmi,
who died about 850, one of the founders of algebra; he constructed
the first Moslem astronomical tables, including primitive uses of
sine and tangent, and also took part in the Caliph s degree meas
urement. His tables and a treatise on arithmetic reached Europe
in a twelfth-century Latin version. His great contemporary Al
Farghani, who worked on distances and diameters of planets and
the size of the earth, wrote an Elements of astronomy 5 which also
had a great European vogue in later centuries. Al Hasib, or
Habash the computer*, observed 825-35 and was author of three
sets of astronomical tables, one in the Hindu and the others in the
Moslem manner. He is the first known to have determined time by
altitudes, in an eclipse of 829, a method rediscovered in Europe
600 years later. Other contributors in Mamun s reign were Mansur
the Persian together with sons of Habash the Computer and of this
Mansur, and Sanad ibn AH the author of tables and of a work on
specific gravity; at this stage of Bagdad observatory development
it is significant that the last three mentioned were all designers of
instruments, as technique was not yet stabilised. Another case of
the family inheritance which characterised these astronomers was
Al Marwarrudhi, who began by solar observation at Damascus
and Bagdad and had an astronomer son and a grandson who wrote
treatises on instruments and tables. Such links with older cities
were not confined to Damascus, since another contemporary, Al
96
Bagdad Mathematicians
Nahawandi, was associated with Jundishapur. The last great
worker of Mamun s age is Al Kindi, who in addition to his transla
tions wrote an important work on geometrical and physiological
optics, which had great influence in later Europe when translated
by Gerard of Cremona under the title T>e aspectibus 5 .
After Mamun s time research continued at his observatory. The
brothers Musa, whom I described as patrons of the succeeding
*age of translators , were also actual observers, credited with the
first remeasurement of the maximum latitude of the Moon, and
were authors of c The book of the balance 5 and c The book of meas
uring spheres 5 . We find also Al Mahani writing a series of lunar
and solar eclipse observations and planetary conjunctions, 853-66,
Ahmad ibn Yusuf writing a geometry which influenced the
European founders of mechanics through the later diffusion from
Bagdad, although he actually worked in Egypt, and Al Nairizi
writing a treatise on atmospheric phenomena and also the best
extant treatise on the astrolabe. Even the great translators, Thabit,
Hunain, and Ibn Luqa, contributed original work also, the first-
named having a bad reputation in modern days for his erroneous
theory of c Trepidation of the equinoxes*; Hunain wrote on tides,
meteors, and the rainbow; Ibn Luqa s work c De sphaera solida*
reappears in the thirteenth century in the Spanish encyclopedia of
astronomy Libros del Saber 5 . Al Sarakhsi was a pupil of Al Kindi,
Mamun s translator, but was tutor to one of the Caliphs and was
executed. The titles of some astronomical MSS. at this time are
picturesque; Ibn al Adami s tables were completed after his death
in 920 as The arrangement of the pearl necklace 9 , while astrono
mical tables in Persian by Ibn Amajur were called The pure 5 ,
c The wonderful 5 ; treatises by Al Balkhi had the intriguing titles
"The excellence of mathematics 5 and c The figures of the climates 5 .
The greatest of this age was probably Al Battani, c. 850-929,
who seems to have worked mainly at Raqqa on the Euphrates, but is
also reported at Antioch, Damascus, and Bagdad. He found that the
longitude of the Sun s apogee had increased 16 47 since Ptolemy s
time; this has been taken as implying his discovery of the motion of
the solar apsides. He reports precession as 54^-5 and the inclination
of the ecliptic as 23 35 when 23 34 54" would be correct for his
date. His chief contributions to the Bagdad library were probably
the *De scientia stellarum 5 and c De numeris stellarum et motibus 5
which we possess in twelfth -century Latin form, and which to
gether with the works of Al Faighani of Bagdad were among the
greatest influences on the European renaissance.
D 97 J.S.T.
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
By the end of Al Battanfs generation the encouragement of
astronomy, left since Mamun s reign mainly in the hands of
individuals such as the Musa, had dwindled; I mentioned in the first
paragraphs the revival under the Persian prince Sharaf al Dawla,
who built a new observatory in his palace gardens at Bagdad.
The greatest of the corps of astronomers associated with this new
observatory was Abul Wafa, 940-98. He wrote much new geo
metry, but above all he is the greatest uigonometrician of Bagdad.
We possess later adaptations of his tables, which included tangents,
secants, and cosecants, some of them correct to many places of
decimals. He discovered many of the equations inter-connecting
the different trigonometrical functions. He wrote an arithmetic,
and his Kitab al KamiP or Complete book 5 became a standard
simplification of the Almagest.
Another writer under these new Persian governors of Bagdad
was Ibn al Alam, whose astronomical tables were used for the suc
ceeding two centuries. Al Sufi, 903-86, was a friend and teacher of
the governing prince, and author of a Book of fixed stars , one of
the chief works of Bagdad to influence subsequent science. The
principal instrument designer -for the new observatory was prob
ably Al Saghani, author of writings on the trisection of angles,
while the director seems to have been Al Kuhi, .who specialised
in Archimedean and Apollonian problems, e.g., concerning equa
tions of higher than second degree.
A feature of this last age of Bagdad enterprise was the production
of encyclopedic works; the Book of Creation 5 of Ibn Tahir syn-
thesises the whole body of Arab, Persian, and Jewish research, and
we know also of the following three compendia, (i) The 51 tracts
on the classification of the^ sciences and their relation to other
aspects of culture, edited by the Brethren of Sincerity*, a secret
society established about 983 at Basra, (ii) The Keys of the
sciences 5 , of about 976. (iii) The Fihrist 5 or biographical index of
all Moslem astronomers and writers, compiled about 988 by one
known as the Bookseller of Bagdad 5 . These works represent the stage
reached after two and a half centuries at Bagdad had established a
systematic use of Greek astronomy together with a large mass of
original observations, tables, theories, and new mathematics.
Two last names stand out before the decline of Bagdad astro
nomy and mathematics, and indicate that the problem of choosing
a notation still survived; Al Karkhi, who died about 1020, despised
and avoided the Hindu numerals, while his contemporary Al
Nasawi expounded them.
98
Bagdad Mathematicians
After this the great Moslem scientists are found in other centres
than Bagdad. For instance, Al Zarkali and Al Betrugi worked in
Spain, and Al Haitham and Ibn Yunus in Afnca; and then came
the great Mongol and Persian observatories of the thirteenth and
fifteenth centuries, when Europe too was beginning to develop
at last an astronomy of its own, but Bagdad itself was no longer the
world s centre of astronomical research.
VI
I add a brief critical note on the methods by which (a) inclina
tion of the ecliptic, (b) precession, (c) longitude of the Sun s
apogee, were measured and represented in the MSS. which I
have been discussing.
(0) In Mamun s Caliphate, inclination of the ecliptic was
obtained from a pillar or Gnomon surrounded by concentric
circles, the vertical and horizontal being secured by plumb-line and
water level. Contact of the pillar s shadow with one of the circles
at two points before and after noon gave an angle whose bisection
determined the meridian. Zenith distances of the Sun were obtained
from the radii of the circles and the height of the pillar, in one case
reported as 180 feet. To obtain the inclination of the ecliptic and
geographical latitude, the maximum and minimum of solar
meridian zenith distances were derived by plotting around the
time of solstices. It is difficult to credit the shadow method with
giving 23 35 within a few seconds of the correct value, and it is
likely that early in the tenth century the more refined method was
developed, of which we have details in Al Khujandi s Inclination
and latitude* of 994 A.D. A later version of this MS. has been
translated into French, and describes the erection, levelling, and
orientation of the large sextants and quadrants which came into
use under Sharaf al Dawla. A solar image was formed on the cir
cumference by illumination of a pinhole aperture at the centre, and
an artificial solar disc marked with perpendicular axes was fitted
to the image to determine the exact coincidence between centre of
disc and scale division. Very large instruments were built at this
time, the sextant of Al Khujandi having a radius of 60 feet, with
each minute divided into ten parts. He obtained 23 32 21*, an
error of 2 , which suggests that the greater accuracy of Al Battani,
Abul Wafa and others was fortuitous since their smaller instru
ments could not have been so subdivided in scale.
(b) Precession measurements depended on the accuracy with
99
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
which the difference between Tropical year and Sidereal year
could be observed. About 20 minutes* difference corresponds to a
precession of 50*, and in the tenth century at Bagdad this was
recorded with precision, but with a reliability difficult to assess as
we know little of the methods by which the heliacal risings were
utilised to obtain the Sidereal year. One of the most tragic blun
ders of the Moslems was a belief, based on the varied reported
values, that precession had a periodic fluctuation.
(c) The artificial solar disc on Al Khujandi s giant sextant would
afford a means, with the accuracy of his scale, of tracing the solar
apogee by the changing solar diameter, but I have not found any
writer of that age to suggest this. It is more likely that longitude of
solar apogee* was simply an angle on a diagram, whose value had
to be adjusted (together with a numerical value of eccentricity) to
account for the observed unequal intervals between solstices and
equinoxes. The accompanying figure indicates the way in which
this and associated quantities on a typical Bagdad diagram would
correspond to those of a modern heliocentric ellipse. There are
three ways of representing the apparent relation of Sun to Earth,
and Dreyer in his Planetary Systems* remarks on their formal
equivalence to an accuracy of one minute of arc; (i) the modern
ellipse, fig. A, (ii) the Graeco-Moslem geocentric system in which
the Sun or planet moves in a small epicycle* (p) round the circum
ference of a deferent* (d) at whose centre is the observer. This
system is shown dotted in fig. B. (iii) The alternative Graeco-
Moslem geocentric system in which the Sim or planet moves in an
eccentric* (#) whose centre is displaced from the observer. This
system is shown in fall line in fig. B. The Sun O 3 earth e 9 apogee A,
perigee P, equinoxes EE, solstices SS, and mean and true anoma
lies M, T, are lettered similarly in the ancient and modern dia
grams. The angle between EE and AP diminishes by about 61" per
annum, due to the 50* precession and 1 1 * motion of apogee* So far
as the Moslems were concerned, AP could be defined as the line
joining the centres of d and x since they knew nothing of elliptic
orbits, and by fitting* the inequality of the seasons they deter
mined the longitude of this line in the tenth century; but in com
paring with Greek data and noting that a change had taken place
they used an inaccurate precession and also took Ptolemy s epoch
as his own whereas it was probably that of Hipparchus, so that
their discovery of the motion of the apsides was only qualitative.
By the kindness of the late Dr. Mingana I was allowed to select
a hitherto unpublished example from his unrivalled collection of
100
Bagdad Mathematicians
s
cu
-
i
*f*H
O :
101
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
to demand careful and detailed investigation. The tale, when com
plete, may turn out to exemplify rather than to contradict the
conservatism which blighted the fruits of all Chinese scientific
diligence.
Since Dreyer s paper, little but photographs and abstracts of
the work of Wylie and of Yule has been published; meanwhile the
two instruments have undergone sundry transplantations, Chatley
in 1938 recording them in Nanking. I suggest two reasons for re-
examining on a new basis the disturbing implication of these
Mongol instruments, and discussing whether for centuries an
isolated Oriental technique was really in advance of our Western
astronomical ancestors. Firstly, the study of early apparatus is
nowadays capable of not only a historical but an anthropological
stage; it has become essential to follow up the reconstruction of old
knowledge by asking whence that knowledge evolved or through
what migrations of culture it had been transmitted. In particular
it must now be recognised that many local astronomical discoveries
originate spontaneously anywhere, such as the recording of lunar
and solar cycles, but that others such as arbitrary technical
devices can only be regarded as descending from earlier practices
current elsewhere. The two Mongol equatorials offer uniquely
profitable material for developing such a stage in the study of the
scientific past. My second reason for this new investigation is the
vast body of facts concerning the migration of astronomical and
mathematical knowledge over the medieval Moslem world: many
of these facts have been collected subsequent to the work of
Dreyer, Wylie, and Yule. This migration played an indispensable
part in the origins of European astronomy, and the real status of
Chinese science will only be discovered if it becomes possible to
assess the corresponding part played by Moslem astronomy in the
less susceptible Far East.
II
The Yule-Wylie Identification of the Instruments
The two surviving equatorials may be very briefly described,
and associated with the equipment of a particular observatory, as
follows. The first, (a) is a skeleton globe about six feet in diameter
with eighteen foot base and observing platform, comprising a set
of concentric bronze circles of similar size but varying orientation,
with diametral tube for sighting a star whose angular position is to
104
Chinese Astronomers
be read by means of scales on the circles. In general purpose it is
not unlike the armillary spheres or spherical astrolabes which were
the chief observing equipment of the Greeks, the Moslems, and the
pre-telescopic Europeans: in technical details it differs from all
other known examples, by features which I compare in a later
section. The second, (b) is a compound of three circles not con
centric, the two larger of which lie in planes respectively parallel
and perpendicular to the polar axis. The upper and lower ends of
the latter are massively supported. Diameter and base are of the
.same order of magnitude as in the other instrument. Mountings of
each survive, heavily ornamented in the dragon fashion, together
with accessories where they are of bronze, but certain fine wires for
sighting, mentioned in early sources, have perished. The Royal
Astronomical Society s library now possesses a number of photo
graphs from which it appears that in the second instrument the
Declination and Right Ascension were obtained in exactly the
manner of the English mounted 9 equatorial telescopes of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and three hundred years
before Tycho Brahe made possible a similar technique in Europe.
By combining (a) and (b} many of the standard measurements of a
modern observatory are available, definition oif image lacking only
lenses.
It is important to enquire with what other apparatus these con
tributed to the working resources of a standard observatory in
1279. There is a valuable hint from the clue given by Yule to
Wylie, as follows.
Wylie s account translates the detailed description of (4) from
the Yuen-she or chronicle written in the fourteenth century for the
early Ming dynasty, while Yule s account utilises the statements of
Ricci the Jesuit astronomer. In 1599 Ricci saw at Nanking two
instruments precisely similar to these, accompanied by two others
of which no counterpart exists now; the latter were (c] a globe
about six feet in diameter with meridians and parallels, (d) a
gnomon about twelve feet high with water levels in ajnarble base
and graduated on slab and style for reading solstitial and equinoc
tial shadow lines. From the recent investigations of Henri Bernard,
it seems that Ricci failed to realise that the star groupings associ
ated with these instruments were equatorial and not just the zodiac
of Moslem-European tradition. A puzzle arose from Riccf s report
that these Nanking instruments had a polar elevation of 36, as
Nanking is at latitude 32 and Peking at 40% but the scheme into
which all these equatorials fit is clarified on Yule s theory. Yule
02 105 J.S.T.
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
found that in 1233 Ye-Lu-Chu-Tsai built two colleges, one at
Yen-king (Peking) and the other at Ping-yeng (lat. 36). It appears
that, about 1279, each was equipped with this ensemble of four
instruments, of which Ricci saw the set which in the scientific
decadence of the Ming had been removed to Nanking; while the
present survivors are all that remain of the duplicate set. This
allows the supplementing of the survivors by Ricci s description,
since his report and the Yuen-she agree when they speak of -the
corresponding instruments.
The problem of local invention or transmitted design of these
works of art and science can now be attempted, beginning with an
enquiry as to what contacts with Western astronomy were open to
the designers, or to Chinese of earlier date whose records might be
locally available.
Ill
Contemporary Contact with Western Astronomy
The instruments of 1279 were built under the direction of
Kuo-Shou-Ching (123 1-131 6) ,a hydraulic engineer and trigono-
metrician, who was commissioned by the Khan Kubilai in 1276 to
reoiganise the astronomical and calendar service of the Mongol
empire. At that epoch, maintenance of a single authority from the
Pacific across Asia almost into Europe enabled the Khans to draw
upon the entire heritage of the world s previous science for all techni
cal requirements. For instance Arab engineers were in the Mongol
service in 1270, and Central Asiatic craftsmen were widely used.
In state-organised science Kubilail maintained two astronomical
boards of experts, one Moslem and one Chinese, with independent
instruments: I refer later to the peculiar ignoring of the former in
official time-keeping, but so far as nominal constitution and
membership went, foreign contributors were encouraged. It is
even recorded that a prominent member of the state mathematical
council was a Byzantine, and within the same generation a Russian
and an Italian are mentioned as being at court.
A significant individual instance of foreign knowledge accessible
to the associates of Kuo is Cha-Ma-Ii-Ting. This name is accepted
as a Chinese version of Jamal-al-din, a Persian who in 1267 sub
mitted to the Khan a Moslem calendar system to cover 10,000 years,
together with seven Persian astronomical instruments including
an armillary sphere. We have no evidence as to any particular
observatory at which Jamal was trained, but this is a less serious
1 06
Chinese Astronomers
deficiency in view of the widespread pooling of West Asiatic science
in that generation; during the preceding forty years all the Moslem
scientific institutions from Samarkand to Bagdad were ransacked
in the overrunning of Asia by the Mongol conquest, and their
culture sifted and integrated at Maragha. The 400,000 books
ascribed to the new Maragha observatory, built in 1259, represent
this enforced centralisation of Arab-Persian astronomy. Of the
staff at Maragha, Nasir-al-din-al-Tusi the director edited the
most essential Greek mathematicians and astronomers and also
researched in planetary theory and trigonometry, Al-Urdi the
instrument designer had built- apparatus in Damascus, Al-
Maghribi had Syrian and possibly Spanish experience, Al-Shirazi
had worked in Iraq and Egypt, Al-Futi the observatory s librarian
had been captured at the sack of Bagdad itself, and Abul-Faraj the
lecturer had worked at Antioch, Bagdad, Mosul, and Tabriz.
Although communication between eastern and western territories
of the Mongol empire was inevitably slow, this range of the workers
at Maragha indicates the contemporary interdependence of nearly
every scientific centre of importance among those descended from
the Greek. It conveys something of the universality of experience
opened to the central government at Peking when admitting into
astronomical society such western visitors as JamaL
There are other names which also emerge among the uncertain
ties in scientific history of that age. In 1263 Isa the Mongol is
reported as director of the astronomical council at Peking; as
he was a Nestorian his intellectual background was at least as
Western as that of Jamal, and indeed he is traced journeying in
Persia, but not until 1284 after the building of the two instruments
of Kuo. Another individual of possible importance to the designs
of Kuo is Chau-Ju-Kua, who about 1266 is said to have brought
to China a personal acquaintance with Hindu astronomy. The
annotations to the Western Asiatic journeyings of Chau-Ju-Kua
(Hirth and Rockhill, 1911) make it clear that Bagdad of the mid-
thirteenth century, with its unrivalled repositories of Graeco-
Moslem astronomy, was not unknown to the intellectual Chinese
at the transition from Sung to Mongol dynasties. It was the culture
of this transition which formed the educational background of Kuo
when he designed the instruments which I am discussing.
Besides such importations from the West there was a little
scientific export from China: Al-Maghribi, writing in 1264 a
treatise on Chinese astronomy, had a Chinese colleague with him
at Maragha observatory. Chinese scholars were widely used by the
107
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
Mongols as envoys, such as Chang-Ti sent by Mangu Khan to
Bagdad in 1259. It is not to be believed that the metropolitan
science at Peking, so precisely organised by imperial patronage,
can have remained less aware of foreign ideas than were the out
lying dependencies of the same government. The years in which
Kuo designed his instruments were a time of closer acquaintance
with Western astronomy than perhaps any until the present
century. I shall indicate later the extent to which intellectual
conservatism inhibited the fall use of this acquaintance.
IV
Contact with earlier Western Astronomy
In designing his instruments at Peking, Kuo was not dependent
solely upon those of the same generation whom we have shown to
be associated with Western science. Maragha observatory was only
twenty years older than the new institution ordered by Kubilai for
Peking, and although Jamal and Isa were probably familiar with
its innovations we can only regard the latter as additions to what
had been collected from the many conquered Moslem centres. It
is desirable to enquire at what earlier date the Chinese were likely
to have been introduced to the predecessors of Maragha astron
omy, and .to watch for any changes in. Chinese designs accompany
ing such introduction. That the pre-Maragha astronomical culture
was already known to the masters of Kuo in the generation before
he worked, may be suggested as follows. It is instructive to take
the list of observatories at which standard determinations of the
ecliptic angle were made by the Moslems (Schirmer, 1926) and
to compare with this list the itineraries of two astronomically
minded Chinese travellers to the West and back some time before
the commissioning of Kuo. Ye-Lu-Chu-Tsai (1190-1243) the
mathematician who finally became chief general confidant to the
Khans, and who founded the two colleges mentioned, accompanied
Genghis to Western Asia, 1219-24 (Bretschneider, vol. I). Follow
ing his Persian travels he formulated his own theory for calendar
reform. During the journey the troops are said to have collected
from Persian, Arab, and Syrian spoils the instruments and books
in which he was interested. His influence at the Mongol court in
later life was unprecedented, and his presence alone was sufficient
to ensure an open mind towards Western science. The other
relevant individual is Chang-Chun. This monk was sent across
108
Chinese Astronomers
Asia by order of Genghis in 1220 and returned after several years
to Peking, where he was regarded as a supreme intellectual and
spiritual adviser. There may be seen in Waley s annotated trans
lation (1931) the notes made by the secretary of Chang-Chun
during the journey. Not only did he carry out astronomical
observations en route but utilised opportunities of acquaintance
with local science. Thus while halted at Samarkand he correlated
with the local astronomers their time measurements and degrees of
partiality for the eclipse of 23rd May 1221 and formulated the
detailed physics underlying the measurements.
I have assembled these facts to indicate that the designers of the
instruments of 1279 were extremely unlikely to be ignorant of the
state reached by Moslem astronomy in their own and the immedi
ately preceding generations. But prior to the Mongol unification
of China and Western Asia about 1220, Chinese astronomers had
been far more isolated. For estimating the earlier foreign influences
relevant to the instruments of 1279 it is enough to mention very
briefly that the Sung dynasty (960 until the Mongol conquest) was
a period in which a minimum of outside contact was allowed,
until in its last days there occurred the interchanges which I have
been discussing. In the T ang dynasty (618-906) incidental
scientific contacts may have occurred from time to time through
Moslem and Byzantine trade, and there are glimpses such as are
afforded by Sir Aurd Stein s find of 15,000 books stored at a centre
of Chinese culture in eastern Turkestan. These books include
Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Persian works dating from the ninth and
tenth centuries at an age when scientific writing in these languages
was important. There are also the famous Buddhist journeys in the
seventh century bringing intellectual intercourse to China from
India and Persia; it is certain that Chinese mathematicians knew
of the Hindu numerals in the sixth or seventh century, but also
that these had little effect compared with the far greater impulse
which they gave to the Moslem astronomical renaissance of ninth-
- century Bagdad. In the fifth and sixth centuries Chinese were in
Persia, but we can at present only speculate as to whether they met
the six Greek scientists exiled from Athens and resident at the
Persian court during A.D. 529-33, and also whether they utilised
the great repository of Greek science at Jundishapur. But there is
no doubt at all that in the Alexandrian era there was considerable
contact between Chinese of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220)
and Greek culture in Bactria; for instance traffic along the silk
route was not limited to material merchandise. A case has also
109
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
been made out for Chinese acquaintance with Babylonian astro
nomy before the time when the latter was stimulating the origin of
Greek astronomy. Bezold (1920) assessed some of the available
evidence connecting Chinese Han astronomers with Babylon of the
second century B.C., with possible earlier connections between the
Chou dynasty and die Babylonian scientific culture of the Assyrian
library of Assurbanipal; it seems clear that by 523 B.C. at the latest
the Chinese possessed some acquaintance with Babylonian stellar
observations, and Bezold even contemplated intercourse in the
second millennium B.C. The Chinese who built equatorials which
were already old when reported by Szu-Ma-Tsien about 100 B.C.
may have learnt as directly as the Greeks themselves from the great
Babylonian pioneers of astronomy, Kidinnu and Naburiannu,
whose remarkable work has now become known through the
studies of the late Dr. Fotheringham.
V
Observatories capable of Influencing the Designers of 1279
From the foregoing assessment of foreign contacts open to the
assistants and predecessors of Kuo, a reasonable distinction be
tween technique relevant and irrelevant to the instruments of 1 279
can now be made. Although it seems likely that the earlier Chinese
astronomers were acquainted with Babylonian ideas, too little is
known about the equipment of either to be able to trace copies.
But since certain obvious modes of recording angular position by
means of great circles of a sphere will evolve inevitably in the most
isolated of scientific communities, it is not so serious a loss that no
data survive concerning the most primitive instruments. It is only
when the choice of coordinates and the graduating of scales
becomes characteristic of particular schools that similarity between
widely separated local techniques can imply transmission of design.
Accordingly it is after Babylonian astrology had stimulated the
genuine scientific impulses of the Greeks, and through Hipparchus
a systematic observational method had been developed at Alexan
dria, that the details become available which are relevant to the
Chinese problem of 1279.
It is also, significantly, this late Greek age which reached a
maximum intercourse with the Chinese.
The Alexandrian equipment, as it was in A.D. 140, may be
summarised sufficiently as follows from Gunther. (i) Circle in
no
Chinese Astronomers
equatorial plane; (2) vertical circle in meridian, the two constitut
ing the so-called equinoctial and solstitial armillae for observing
coincidences with shadows; (3) mural quadrant; (4) Ptolemaic
rule or jointed oblique arm on vertical hinge; (5) astrolabe for
celestial latitude and longitude, i.e. using an ecliptic coordinate
system; (6) armillary sphere, which according to Tannery had
nine circles and hence was probably capable of equatorial meas
urements although these were not in use until much later; (7)
gnomon in hemisphere such as was associated with Aristarchus of
Samos.
The decay of observational astronomy, which persisted until the
revival at Bagdad in the ninth century, means that occasional
post-Han acquaintance with Western science can have provided
the Eastern designers with nothing beyond this Alexandrian
equipment for the next 600 years. If Chinese envoys at the Persian
court did carry home any products of meetings with Greek
mathematicians in A.D. 530, accounts of Alexandrian methods
such as the treatise of Theon represent the most that they can have
acquired. The same can be said of Buddhist infiltrations culminat
ing in the seventh century, whose main scientific function was the
transmission of the Hindu numeral system with little observational
background.
It is remarkable that the greatest of all pre-modern eras of
research, the Moslem period whose initial stages at Bagdad alone
are represented by nearly a hundred astronomical authors, can
have influenced Chinese science so little prior to the thirteenth
century. Without those earlier Moslems the origins of European
science would have been crippled, but the isolationist policies of
the Sung dynasty left the Chinese much more dependent upon
their own and other pre- Moslem tradition. The intensely active
observatories of Damascus, Antioch, Bagdad, Rey, Cairo,
Morocco, and in Moorish Spain Cordova, Seville, Toledo, only
begin to become significant for Chinese astronomy shortly before
the final coordination of their products into the body of learning
centred at Maragha: that last stage I have shown to be accessible
enough to Peking.
This peculiar feature of Oriental scientific history simplifies
greatly the possible antecedents of the Peking instruments: only
the equipment from Maragha is required, as representing the
final expression of all foreign technique which reached Chinese
astronomers just at its culmination.
Such estimate of the instrumental resources at Maragha is now
in
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
available through Seemann s translation of the MS. attributed to
Al-Urdi himself, the chief designer of that observatory, as follows.
(a) Eleven-foot mural quadrant; (b) armillary sphere of four great
circles and a small circle of latitude carrying an alidade or line for
sighting; (c) and (d) solstitial and equinoctial rings similar to (i)
and (2) of Alexandria, but of 2^-metre diameter compared with
the Greek 1 6-inch; (e) Hipparchus apparatus for obtaining solar
and lunar image diameters; (/) double quadrant; (g) Ptolemaic
rule developed from (4) of the Greeks but very much larger with a
limb of 17! feet; (K) and (j) scales for instrumental determination
of trigonometrical functions.
It will be noticed at once that the principal developments since
the Alexandrian age are, firstly, the graphical and instrumental
methods for solving trigonometrical problems, required by the
great Moslem expansion of that subject, and, secondly, the much
increased accuracy through size of apparatus. At Maragha was
probably attained the optimum combination of size with stability,
a maximum in sheer size alone having been passed when Al-
Khujandi built a sixty-foot sextant at Rey about A.D. 994. There
after the temptation to rely on size alone in primitive instruments
only reappears in the eighteenth century in India (Jaipur), where
there still exist gigantic observatory constructions: these were
inspired by the pre-telescopic Moslems of fifteenth-century
Samarkand, but were built centuries too late to compete with the
science of post-Renaissance Europe.
I proceed to compare the Peking designs with the Greek and
Persian equipments, which I have shown to be the only alien
predecessors whose influence is likely to be relevant to the question
of their origin.
VI
Contrasts between the Peking Instrumental Designs and those of
Alexandria and Maragha
(i) As regards ensemble, the evidence which I have utilised from
Ricci and from the Yuen-she through Wylie and Yule is to be
compared with Seemann s translation of Al-Urdi and the accounts
of Alexandria. The Mongol instruments exhibit a simplicity which
is not primitive, but implies a practised skill in economy of effort,
and in this sense compares favourably with the Graeco- Moslem
tendency to rely on separate instruments for each single coordinate
112
Chinese Astronomers
to be measured: neither Alexandria nor Maragha exhibit any
device so complete and effective and yet simple as the instrument
of Kuo which I denoted as (b) . Actually our present-day equatorial
mounting has made no further essential advance. Where the
Greeks and Moslems had the greatest advantage was in matters
dependent upon their respective supremacies in theoretical
reasoning, and therefore in apparatus designed to facilitate that
particular aspect of their genius. For instance the principal superi
ority of Moslem (not Greek) instruments lay in their adaptability
to direct solution of geometrical and trigonometrical problems, the
Chinese never having reached the precision or the complexity of
analysis requiring that part of the Arab-Persian equipment which
could be called mathematical machinery 5 .
It is significant in this respect to notice the distinction intro
duced by the Erlangen school of scientific historians. Other
writers had used indiscriminately the terms spherical astrolabe*
and < armillary sphere*, but Seemann s monograph (1925) on the
former insists that this instrument proper did not exist among the
Greeks and could arise only from the Moslem genius in trigono
metry. The instruments more suitably classed as armillary spheres,
and discussed exhaustively in Nolte s monograph (1922) from the
same school, served observational purposes rather than those of
projective geometry, and alone appear in Greek and Chinese as
well as Moslem science. The Greek rather than Moslem affinities
of the Peking instruments are again emphasised when Ghatley
reports that the Chinese had always neglected the problem-
solving facilities of the fully developed astrolabe.
(2) It was from the first realised by investigators of the 1279
instruments, that their division of the circle into 365 J degrees each
of 100 minutes distinguished them from all Graeco-Moslem-
European notation, which seems to have been always unanimous
in retaining the 360-60-60 angular system which is probably
Babylonian in origin.
(3) In minor technical details also, the Mongol instruments
were unique. The alidade, which seems to have been a hollow
cylinder with cross-wires now perished, was a device more akin to
modern telescopic usage than the sighting devices of the Moslem
astronomers; these usually consisted of two parallel but laterally
displaced radials, often with external sights. Sighting across the
circles of the Peking instruments was also facilitated by the bronze
hoops being doubled with an observing space between, allowing
strength of structure with accuracy of setting.
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
(4) Ricci mistook several features of Chinese astronomy by
failing to realise its universal reliance upon equatorial coordinates
in place of the ecliptic. The latter had served the entire Graeco-
Moslem world and all Europe, until Tycho Brahe on building
instruments of both types had realised for all future astronomy the
great advantage of the equatorial. Since Bernard s discussion now
corrects Ricci in this, the Chinese discovery can stand as a striking
feature of their isolated development of their own genius so many
centuries in advance of European practice.
(5) The accounts of the Mongol instruments mention very
briefly a 28-fold zodiac or constellation belt and also 1 2-fold and
24-fold star groupings. At the time when these were reported, little
was yet known about a matter which has occasioned some contro
versy. Henri Bernard s study (1935) has resolved Ricci s confusion
between Chinese equatorial and Moslem ecliptic divisions, and
thus has made more possible the use of these star groupings as
important criteria in the ancestry of instruments. The 28-fold
grouping appears as a lunar zodiac in Hindu and other systems,
and the several alternatives have been suggested of a Hindu origin
with transmission to China, Chinese origin with transmission to
India, or of the different civilisations receiving the system from
some common source, probably Babylonian. But it is not difficult
to prove that any such migrations must be very ancient compared
with the times of which I write. There were in particular four
groups determined by four stars in Hydra, Scorpio, Aquarius, arid
Taurus; these have been identified as the foundation of the 28-fold
system from the time of the Han dynasty, and probably were then
taken over from a much older system, about whose origin the
following is the present state of enquiry. It was first suggested that
the four stars must have been originally chosen as culminating at
6 p.m. at the solstices and equinoxes. On this hypothesis the group
system must have been originally selected about 2200 B.C. But
since at only one of these tropical dates could the culmination have
been visible, Schlegel reinterpreted the natural origin as the date
when these stars had respectively a heliacal rising at the spring
equinox, a noon culmination at the summer solstice, heliacal
setting in autumn, and midnight culmination in winter. This gave
the unlikely date of 15,000 B.C., so de Saussure avoided the diffi
culty of invisible culmination by combining lunar and circumpolar
stellar observation as a likely means by which the times of culmina
ting were computed about 2000 B.C. Chatley, however, has shown
(1938) that reasonable hypotheses concerning dusk culmination
1*4
Chinese Astronomers
on the four tropical dates can also imply a very likely origin of the
system at about 1 100 B.C., at the beginning of the Ghou dynasty.
For our present purpose the important fact is that any of the
above solutions of the controversy ensures that neither Moslems
nor historical Hindus gave to the Chinese their star groupings. It
is not, however, possible to decide whether these were indigenous
or due to a Babylonian contact: the paper of Bezold to which I
referred previously is suggestive rather than conclusive as to the
scope of the undoubted contacts prior to the Han dynasty.
The 28-fold star grouping differs from the Greek, Moslem, and
European, both in not being properly a system of constellations
and in being equatorial. The groups contain any number of
stars from two upwards, and are divided by individuals making
unequal intervals in hour-angle and Right Ascension. Any star s
position is determined by the time interval between its own
meridian passage and that of a primary star in the nearest of
the 28 groups. Zinner s comprehensive comparison of all early
astronomical systems emphasises that Chinese measurements
referred to the equator until the Jesuits arrived in the seventeenth
century, and that the ecliptic in the Graeco-Moslem sense as a
coordinate circle was scarcely ever used. Confusion with a zodiac,
however, arises because the Chinese frequently regrouped the 28,
sometimes into 12 unequal groups, sometimes into 12 equal
divisions of the equator; the latter grouping of course bore spurious
resemblance to the European system although still equatorial.
VII
Earlier Chinese Examples
Following any discussion of these features in which the designers
of 1279 declined to utilise their ready acquaintance with Moslem
technique, it would be of the greatest interest to trace a purely
indigenous ancestry of Chinese instrumental types. But the de
struction of predecessors in the Mongol conquest, and the close
isolation of the Sung civilisation, leave scarcely any detailed
evidence. The few fragmentary data which are relevant may be
summarised as follows.
Immediate precursors of the instruments of 1279 were armillary
spheres built in 1050 and some rather uncertain later dates. Of
these designs the meagre traces of description extant suggest a
close similarity to those of Kuo. It appears that the latter s new
"5
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
observatory equipment is not to be taken as a radical innovation,
but as largely occasioned by removal of the Sung capital, the
previous instniments having incorrectpole elevation for the latitudes
of the two new colleges founded by Ye-Lu-Chu-Tsai. In fact
Chinese astronomical apparatus of the ring and sphere type is
reported in the tenth, eighth, seventh, fifth, third, second and first
centuries A.D. and the first and second centuries B.C. The brief
details of the records imply the same fundamental principles as in
the thirteenth century. Before then one hears with certainty only
of the Gnomon, of which a specimen eight feet high is mentioned
as used before 2000 B.C. But the shadow of a vertical, and the
remarkable variety of astronomical information which it can
aiford, is probably common to all primitive scientific cultures, and
so conveys nothing about the transmission of knowledge from one
civilisation to another.
It is, however, significant that in the eighth century A.D. in
China a sphere is reported as designed for using ecliptic coordin
ates in contrast to the usual Chinese equatorial system. About the
same time a 36o-degree and Go-minute circle is mentioned. Since
Buddhist immigrations had introduced the Hindu numerals
shortly before this time, we have definite signs that the science of
the Nearer East was at least given temporary trial before being
rejected for reversion to the older Chinese conventions.
VIII
Conclusions
It is a commonplace, not always capable of proof, that early
Chinese science was diligent in original discovery but liable to
freeze into conventions persisting unalterable over many centuries.
In this chapter I have scrutinised a particular instance of this, in the
contrast between some remarkable astronomical instruments and
certain foreign designs to which their builders had ample oppor
tunity of access. It is possible thus to test Chinese conservatism at
an epoch when in some specific points of observatory technique its
ancient conventions were still superior to the rest of the world, and
when in other points it missed an opportunity only seized by the
European astronomers of the Renaissance.
I have therefore examined some contrasts between these instru
ments and the conventions of Babylonia, Alexandria, India, and
Moslem Persia and Syria, describing those observatory equipments
shown capable of influencing the Mongol designers of 1279. The
116
Chinese Astronomers
result suggests that just at the era of readiest availability of western
astronomical methods Kuo-Shou-Ching deliberately set aside the
latter and reverted to a technique which had already been in use in
Chinese astronomy for twelve centuries. I have distinguished
certain features in which the Chinese methods were inferior to the
contemporary Persian, and other features more close to present-
day practice and antedating by 400 years the introduction of the
latter from Europe. The surviving instruments of 1279 must
therefore be accepted as quite independent of the great Moslem
scientific age. Their nearest possible foreign affinities are among
the Alexandrian Greeks known to the Han dynasty ten centuries
before. They contain, however, certain notions which the Chinese
seem to have retained from pre-Greek times, and which if in
fluenced by any external source must be Babylonian.
At the time of construction of the instruments in 1279, contrast
between retention of ancient Chinese methods and rejection of
acknowledged Moslem science reaches its extreme in the dupli
cated astronomical boards, Persian and Chinese. Each appears to
have had its own calendar system and instruments, but the records
of the dynasty suggest that the Moslems fulfilled only a formal
duty: they seem little more than embodiment of a convention
perhaps maintained for political reasons and ignored in actual
scientific work. If the two had genuinely combined when the
Mongol rule offered unique opportunity, Chinese science might
not have decayed to the level in which the Ming authorities failed
to realise that a 36 pole elevation was unsuited to an observatory
at latitude 32.
So .this enquiry into certain instruments surviving from the
thirteenth century provides testimony to Chinese inventiveness:
but the further enquiry into the ancestry of the instruments
provides also a damning indictment of scientific conservatism. The
modern world, struggling against similar intellectual vices in a
scientific environment infinitely more complex, will only profit by
such lessons in its early history if it recognises that conservatism is
often accompanied by a meticulous precision in detail of observa
tion and calculation. Conservatism may even be accompanied by
capacity for real originality, sterilised by hesitation to follow the
progressive instincts. All these features appear in the remarkable
episode of the Mongol equatorials, where habits of mind productive
of the best in art, craftsmanship, and moral philosophy, show
how tragic may be their maladjustment to the needs of scientific
research,
117
Chapter 13
Conflicts between the Logical and the Mystical
Mind, from Ancient Chinese to Recent
Europeans
I
In spite of some subtle similarities, the judgment which we
employ in assessing the validity of a scientific theory must
differ from our attitude to a work of art with imaginative
appeal. Sensitive and exploratory minds for thousands of
years have approached the major problems of existence either
imaginatively or scientifically; occasionally, as in the Moslem and
the Chinese civilisations, there was an unprofitable oscillation
between the two attitudes, which is a lasting warning as well as
inspiration in the history of culture. Since then there has grown up
a recognised antithesis between the mystical and the logical. This
antithesis is very similar to that between aesthetic and scientific,
and may often be treated by interchangeable terms since the
imaginative underlies both mysticism and art. On the one hand
there are claims to acquire true knowledge about our environment
by an intuition, the chain of mental antecedents to which is un-
traceable and seemingly a kind of short-circuit . On the other
hand are claims based on strictly verifiable proof, the chain of
whose antecedents must be traceable and must be agreed upon by
all concerned. Systems of religion, claiming ultimately to depend
upon the intuitive, have often ceded their vantage by pretending
to be supported by the logical: no modern science claims anything
but logical support: the arts are as frankly imaginative: but sys
tems of philosophy have often simultaneously made logical claims
while utilising the intuition of the mystic, with or without certain
shame-faced attempts at concealment.
It seems time that this possibility of dishonesty should be re
moved, and philosophical speculation judged as having an aesthetic
and not solely a logical aspect. But in abandoning claims which
belong exclusively to the latter, the former s title to be realistic and
118
Logical and Mystical Minds
not mere wishful thinking must satisfy instead the rigorous criteria
of discipline and humanity which I have elsewhere shown may be
learnt from the imaginative arts.
This possibility will be unwelcome in some philosophical camps:
many progressive philosophers, especially the Cambridge school
with the exception of McTaggart, have resolved otherwise the
ambiguity between the logical and the imaginative. They have
explicitly abandoned all attempt to formulate theories at large
about the universe and human destiny, recognising that in the past
such theories have been as easy to demolish as fascinating to
construct; so they have pared down their historical heritage to a
logical critique of scientific concepts. It happens that many of these
logicians are temperamentally impatient of trying to see the
universe whole , and our somewhat queer watertight compart
ments in education encourage students of the logical to dismiss the
use of the imagination as suspected of trafficking in mystical
delusion. But already the pendulum has swung too far: when we
rightly shun the sentimentality in recent grafts of Oriental mysti
cism upon Western commercialism, we waste our inheritance if
we also despise the honestly logical mystics who saw the scope and
limits of intellectual enterprise, such as Plato, Spinoza, and
McTaggart.
In search of equilibrium between these extremes, I propose here
to offer data towards the possibility that philosophical systems of
various scattered epochs have aesthetic value; I also suggest that
this does not necessarily imply that the systems are wholly delusive.
For the novelty of seeing such a suggestion without prejudice
arises from certain discussions in which I have tried to find the
common ground underlying the distinctions between science
and imaginative art, and have admitted the genuineness of in
sight afforded by each, whether quantitative in the one case or
qualitative in the other. Elaborated in some detail in accompany
ing essays was the following tentative point of view: imaginative
art is a communication from artist to public through the medium
of a pattern or structure in music, painting, sculpture, decoration,
poetry, and requires a creative response on the part of the hearer
or the beholder to develop coherent imagery. Though ultimately
derived from that of the artist, this imagery will vary from individ
ual to individual. Science is also essentially the communication of
ideas by means of pattern, but here the different recipients must be
come capable of correlating precisely and quantitatively the mental
images aroused in each; for the truth of a scientific theorem exists
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
in the identity of images verifiable by experiment and calculation
on the part of different observers using comparable mathematics
and equipment.
I shall consider in the light of these likenesses and differences
some widely dispersed examples of imaginative insight which have
been concealed under an unnecessary and misleading cloak of
pretended logic. First there are the ancient Chinese philosophers
whose thought primitively foreshadowed the systems of more
sophisticated civilisations. Then there is Spinoza, hybrid between
logician and mystic, whose position in philosophy has flickered
between the dominating and the negligible because philosophers
have vacillated over the status of the imaginative. Finally the same
principles might throw light on certain recent thinking, .
II
In the last six centuries B.C. and the first two centuries A.D. the
intellectual and religious development of Chinese civilisation
crystallised into certain lasting patterns. The importance of these
is not destroyed by subsequent degeneration of the resulting insti
tutions and habits into mere formalism and magical superstition.
Interpenetrating with some of these developments there grew up
traditions of art whose lesson to modern Western culture is scarcely
yet beginning to be learnt. Taken at its face value, the flood of
translated Chinese philosophy recently appearing in Europe and
America can only present a bewildering melange of nonsense
interspersed with common-sense or even commonplace. To reduce
to the comprehensible by absorption of the mental background,
demands pursuit of endless verbal allusiveness in a language where
multiple implication makes ambiguity almost inevitable; it is a
task enormous and seldom attempted, though the writings of
Arthur Waley have made a beginning for English readers. Perhaps
the most striking pioneer has been I. A. Richards, whose study of
Mencius on the Mind opens the way to a mode of treatment
which might yield new understanding out of ancient and medieval
thought from Plato to the Neo-Platonists: it might even be applied
to Spinoza and to moderns as far down as McTaggart yesterday.
For we have been too accustomed to expecting a Western writer
to expose his whole significance in a single dictionary-meaning of
each word or sentence, and we miss what value we might capture
until we approach the Orientals in themanner of Richards, with
120
Logical and Mystical Minds
painstaking research into all of an author s possible implications
and underlying mental attitude.
The facts, so far as they can be extracted from much overlaid
prejudice, are as follows. The complex interwoven fabric of the
Chinese attitude to nature and human nature was derived from
three main strands.
(a) The most fundamental was perhaps the visionary mysticism
associated with the name of Lao-Tzu, which later hardened into
Taoism and degenerated into magic, but which originally grew
from a number of scattered schools of thought between the sixth
and fourth centuries B.C. Chuang-Tzu and Lieh-Tzu are authors
much quoted in the later Taoist literature and possibly were
actual teachers in the third or fourth century B.C., but whether the
somewhat legendary Lao-Tzu wrote the collection of sayings called
the Tao Te Ching is now doubtful: it is not in any case a very
voluminous canon for its extremely widespread historical conse
quences. These schools all shared a common tendency to regard
material considerations as superficial and some sort of spiritual life
as^ the more permanent reality. A rigid self-discipline was prac
tised, which enabled superiority over many of life s vicissitudes to
be attained with a success not exceeded in the religious enthusi
asms of subsequent ages and other countries. But traditional tales
of the Taoist control over external as well as internal nature are
obviously picturesque exaggerations of the familiar miracle* type.
The philosophic basis is clearly the earliest historical example of
what was called Pantheism in later civilisations, the insistence that
we partake, in common with all things, of an all-pervading spirit
ual nature through which is available the help and sympathy of
superhuman as well as subhuman life*.
() Chinese philosophy is a complete scale-model of the natural
contrasts in human intellect; so it is not surprising that parallel
with such mysticism from the earliest centuries of Taoism there
ran the severe practical code of public duty associated with the
name of Kon Fu Tzu (Confucius) which has often been described
by the ignorant West as a religion. There were also frequent intel
lectual movements which can only be called cross-breeds between
Taoism and Confucianism, and involved partial revivals of the
nature-worship which had solidified centuries earlier into a
Dualism or ascription of natural phenomena to the interaction of
Yin and Yang. These twin principles, crudely misdescribed as
Male and Female by European commentators, appear in the arts
and ceremonies which survived from the third millennium B.C.
121
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
Mencius, living in the fourth or third century B.C., represents some
of the systematic philosophising which developed out of the more
personal teaching of Confucius two centuries before him. Reactions
against each of these, the visionary and the practical, led not only
to cross-bred systems of morality or of mysticism, but to extremist
offshoots such as the violently legalist and the violently hedonist
and the violently pacifist sects or schools of thought which flicker
in and out of Chinese history. But the two strands of Taoism and
Confucianism divide between them a large proportion of what
man has always tried to express in his many attempts at religion,
and they maintained a hold even in extremely debased form until
the present century.
(c) Compared with these indigenous ways of approaching the
universal problems of worship and conduct, the third constituent,
Buddhism, was an import from India during the Han dynasty
(206 B.C.-A.D. 52 20). This ultimately exercised as great an influence
over Chinese arts and sciences as Taoism and Confucianism. But
even the earliest immigration of Buddhist teachers, and the many
subsequent arduous pilgrimages westwards in search of Buddhist
scriptures, failed to prevent the Chinese temperament from in
stantly modifying the somewhat humourless Indian flavour.
Finally, in the sixth century AJD., there was completed a still more
radical transfiguration of the foreign element, and the Chan type
of Buddhism thereafter appears as a grafting of Taoist monastic
ideals on to a rationalised Buddhist foundation. The austere
mystical convincement of a spiritual universe, the self-discipline
conferring harmony and power over that universe, were softened
by the more personal Chinese version; there spread the legend of
the saints who attain enlightenment but who renounce heaven to
yield themselves to the service of suffering humanity. Typical is
the embodiment of the spirit of compassion in Kwan Yin, the
madonna and child familiar in miniature Chinese carving. The
theory of reincarnation from the original Hindu Buddhism also
appears in the Chinese version, but Nirvana is no longer a mere
negative attainment or annihilation.
Such was the philosophic and religious background to a strange
intermingling of arts and science. In other chapters I have stressed
the warning which must be inferred from the paralysis of science
in Oriental civilisations when misfitted to aesthetic conventions.
But philosophy must take account also of aspects of experience
which are not susceptible of quantitative and scientific description:
it will be a task of a coming generation to see where more adequate
122
Logical and Mystical Minds
adjustment can be reached between the logical, the aesthetic, and
the mystical. For this task the combination of crudity and pro
fundity in Chinese thought offers invaluable data.
Ill
If Western historians had not dismissed Oriental thought as
inaccessible and, when partially accessible, as primitive, we would
not have failed to see in the ancient Chinese the prototype of most
religions which employ monastic practice or mystical or pantheis
tic ideals. Such ideals permeate much Christian Catholicism as
well as miniature experiments in mystical worship as practised for
instance by the Quakers. Nor would we have failed to recognise in
the long history of Western philosophy, running from Plato to the
present day through the Neo-Platonists and Giordano Bruno, a
strain with remarkable similarity to ancient Chinese thought. The
rarity of contact between East and West, and their historic
tendency to mutual contempt, precludes our demanding culture-
migrations to explain this likeness: but it does suggest that there
are some extremely widespread roots in the human mind, which
exhibit life and vitality in many environments and many stages of
history. Their vitality appears sometimes in attempts at logic,
sometimes in attempts at the mystical approach to enlightenment,
and sometimes expresses either or both in some form of art. Much
that is of vital importance to human happiness, and must be
omitted from a philosophy confined to analysing scientific con-
ceptSj requires a radical but not unphilosophical revision of the
rash barriers erected by our education between the scientific, the
artistic, and the religious. But a rigorous scrutiny, far stricter than
needed in the past isolation of these three aspects of human enter
prise, will be needed to avoid the misfits to which I have drawn
attention in this and other essays.
As tentative suggestion of the cross-classifications required, take
the case of Spinoza, the Dutch excommunicated Jew of Spanish
descent; I propose the novelty of regarding him as primarily an
artist with a perversely scientific style, rather than as exclusively a
philosopher7The ambiguity which has tickled or irritated subse
quent generations from his own seventeenth century until now,
indicates our ineptitude at recognising under scientific theorems a
religious and an artistic instinct which would have been at home
in an early Chinese dynasty. For some have called Spinoza an
atheist, and others have called him the most God-seeing man in
123
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
nature concerning its destiny. I find one step wrong in this turn
taken by modern English philosophers, not that they recognise the
weakness of constructive logic, but that they infer from that weak
ness that no access whatever is possible to the major mysteries:
centuries of artificial separation between science and the aesthetic
attitude have lost to them the possibility that the imaginative may
offer clue to the real.
The last, and greatest, of those who proposed by logic alone to
create Jiew knowledge of human destiny was McTaggart, the
twentieth-century counterpart of Spinoza, though he himself
would not have recognised the kinship as clearly as within a few
years after his death a spectator might see it. The interpretation of
what Time must mean has emerged, since Spinoza, as the focal
point of philosophy, and McTaggart alone of all his intellectual
ancestry explains why Time becomes so important to us although
some part of our ultimate aim must be to supersede it by aeterni-
tas*. His elegant conception of the past-present-future sequence
and the before-and-after sequence with a real but timeless se
quence underlying them, is perhaps the most ingenious logical
pattern ever constructed in philosophic history. Needless to say, it
carries within it the inherent weakness of this artist s vulnerable
medium of expression: for McTaggart is surely an artist as was
Spinoza and as were the ancient Chinese. Logical demolition of
his entire system has already been carried out with rigour by
Broad in his three volumes of commentary. And yet, like the work
of all imaginative artists, we have not disposed of its significance
for communicating an image to the receptive mind by saying it
cannot be proved true 5 . What escapes the net of our very imperfect
intellectual equipment is not always delusive, though the criteria
for imaginative forms of expression must subject it to as drastic a
critique as the laws of logical validity of proof. If formulations not
scientifically expressible can pass the most rigorous test of being
good art, a revision of categories and an abandonment of hasty
claims may yet allow philosophy to recognise both, the aesthetic
and the logical, without withholding from either any title of real*
conferred upon the other.
V
I have submitted in earlier chapters that much primitive science
was ruined by overestimating the legitimacy of any mutual
influence between logical and imaginative judgments. It is argu-
126
Logical and Mystical Minds
able that the acutest problem now facing contemporary philosophy
is to escape an inversion of the same fate, and to utilise scientific
method without abandoning tasks to which that method is
inadequate.
In ancient and medieval and early modern cultures, scientific
method had not clearly emerged from among other intellectual
tools, and no distinction was drawn between its applicability to
one and smother phase of experience. Today there is the opposite
danger that philosophers often despise those aspects of experience,
the ethical and aesthetic and religious, which are too closely
grained to become detectable in the analysis that we have per
fected for the physical sciences. To avoid the blindness of that
arrogance we must learn to distinguish the occasions on which we
are philosophising 3 in the sense of analysing scientific concepts,
and those other occasions on which we are philosophising in the
sense of recognising that the modern mind is both logical and
imaginative but neither exclusively.
In the next chapter I am concerned with one particular applica
tion of this distinction, but it is of infinitely wider importance. It
might possibly in the fiiture cut across some traditional academic
compartments of study, and allow a revaluation of Plato, Spinoza,
McTaggart, and the early Oriental mystics.
127
Chapter 14
Symbolism as a Future Clue to Conciliation
between Science, Religion, and Art
Introduction
In a troubled age, when the needs of public safety must absorb so
large a proportion of available effort, we may well take thought
to eliminate some of the wasteful sources of disharmony in
human relationship. One of the most disastrous of thesehas been
the habit of treating our divergent beliefs about nature as if one of
them were right and every other were wrong. Throughout history
there has been no cruelty more merciless than that practised by
orthodox religionists upon heretics or unbelievers, and when we
have emerged from such barbarism there still survives the sour
suspicion with which religious and scientific, the mystical and the
logical temperaments, tend to regard one another. Even between
closely neighbouring religious bodies, toleration of unfamiliar
beliefs is a new and rare virtue, not always distinguishable from a
mere softened contempt; so it is not likely that the more subtle
possibilities of sympathetic agreement between a scientific and a
religious outlook will be easy to recognise, and indeed any such
possibility is commonly ignored and peace only maintained by an
aloofness of mistrust. But if the method of scientific observation
itself were utilised to discover what similarity of foundation may
underlie a great variety of religions, the results might contribute to
mutual respect so long as they were presented without the tradi
tional hostility. In searching for such foundations, I suggest that
most manifestations of the religious attitude to nature are attempts
at symbolising a certain kind of experience: the suggestion arises
from considering, as follows, certain phenomena which are acces
sible to observation by anyone.
II
The Fact of Worship
2. In a scientific approach, indeed upon any rational plan, it is
important to separate the facts from their diverging possibilities of
128
Symbolism
interpretation. The facts here relevant are so widespread or even
universal, that ecclesiastical organisations have not been willing to
recognise them as essentially religious, since such recognition
would abolish the monopoly claimed by any one historic church.
Nor have they been regarded as facts of religion by those thinkers
who are hostile to all ecclesiastical organisations and who strangely
arrogate to themselves a monopoly of the title rationalist . Once
these two kinds of prejudice are relaxed, there may be uncovered
a wide territory of experience which is shared by many who as
believers or unbelievers have been artificially and unnecessarily
separated. I propose first to consider the meaning of the term
worship ; in the poverty of language this word serves to describe
a group of psychological facts transcending many of the differences
between theist and non-theist, and it denotes an attitude more
fundamental than c belief and unbelief .
3. It happens to nearly everyone occasionally to find himself
appreciating a situation not solely according as it gratifies in
stincts of self-respect or sex or domination, and not solely because
it offers escape from fear of insecurity or want. The recollection
and anticipation of these experiences is cherished profoundly and
intimately to a degree not adequately expressed by the label of
Good, True, or Beautiful, and devotion to them is as reckless of
gain and as unquestioning as a parent s devotion to an invalid
child. In fact, response to such moments of illumination has an
intensity not accounted for by arguable judgment and not publicly
justifiable, and it constitutes an attitude which we can only de
scribe as worship . Any kind of experience which evokes this
attitude we can suitably call holy or sacred . In terms of this fact
of experience we invert any definition implied by tradition and we
say that The Holy is that which someone worships . Obviously
these words must not be limited to the belongings of any religious
institution, for some of the most memorable of such occasions are
encountered in contemplating works of art or natural beauty or
personalities of a historical past or contemporaries to whom we
have given affection, honour, and devotion.
4. From the point of view of a spectator, concerned with an
external view of these facts in the Natural History of human be
haviour, the thing which is worshipped is the actual experience
itself, or the bare commonplace that to each of us those sacred
moments do occur. But we are all worshippers at times, including
those of us who are also scientists, and we have spent several
thousand years trying to give a name and a description to somc-
E 129 J- S - T -
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
thing which most men have elected to consider as outside ourselves
the object* of the worship. To worship, and to treat some
portions of our experience as holy, belongs inevitably and un
deniably to all of us, whether we choose to call ourselves Christians
or atheists or anything else whatever, and in this sense none of us
escapes being religious: differences between us arise, however, as
soon as we enter that age-long competition to give a name to the
Object of our worship. Some avoid this competition and call
themselves agnostic; it would be a mistake to imagine that these
are necessarily irreligious merely because they refuse to become
theological.
Ill
Symbolism
5. One degree further of general agreement might well become
possible, whatever interpretation we elect to give or to withhold
when the c object of worship 5 is discussed: I suggest that much un-
happiness and bewilderment might be eliminated, if both the
scientific spectator and the worshipper were to recognise that
through all those ages we have been searching for mental pictures
or symbols 3 to maintain in our recollection this elusive experience
of sacredness. From time to time, these attempts to symbolise the
common experience become conventionalised into systems of
religion, the organisers of which are forced to undertake the
impossible task of giving precise and unambiguous meaning to
deity.
6. If we thus recognise that all men tend to hold before their
attention some symbol of the experience they find sacred, the
differences between the interpretations of worship for the orthodox,
for the agnostic, and for the atheist become more simple: they
reduce to differing implications of the word symbol . Although it
is highly irrational to call oneself an atheist, meaning I have
proved that there is no God , since such proof is obviously more
than anyone can honestly claim to achieve, there are many who
are not convinced that the symbol is anything but mere symbol
and a figment of the imagination. The not dishonourable name of
agnostic is here applicable. But there are many others to whom our
symbols are an attempt to grasp a divine personality towards
which we struggle in the universal dimness of human frailty of
intellect. These others venture a deliberate willingness to trust the
possibility of being given closer insight as the individual and the
130
Symbolism
race progresses: an act of faith achieved by many of the strongest
characters of history and of today. I shall later suggest that both the
attitude of faith and the attitude that nothing behind the symbol
can be proved, are each legitimate: they can even be found in the
same person, so long as the domain of faith and the domain of
proof are recognised to be both essential but different constituents
of our mental outlook.
IV
Consequences of the Recognition of Symbolism
7. Before enquiring further whether such paradox might not
serve to heal the historic incompatibility between the scientific and
the religious, consider some general consequences of admitting
that religious expressions are symbolic of the common experience
of worship. Recognition of this fact will certainly account for the
infinite variety of our gods,, from the nature-spirits pictured by
primitive man to the impersonal Absolute of the sophisticated, and
not excluding the many shades of divinity recorded in the literature
of Christianity and other highly organised religions. Recognition
of the universal tendency to symbolise may also restrain us from
foolishly concluding that any gods other than our own are false
gods: for the symbols or images occupying different minds will vary
greatly even when they represent experiences which are not so
dissimilar. But of one certainty we must definitely be convinced
by this variety in our ways of describing God: that the terms in
which we picture or symbolise our object of worship are essentially
individual and incommunicable and private to the temperament
of each experient, and are even modified from the occasion of
one experience to that of another. No universally accepted and
scientifically demonstrable account of deity will ever be pro
pounded. This is not such a privation as our ancestors feared in the
days when they imagined that to prove the existence 3 of God was an
act of piety; perhaps we have acquired the humility to recognise
that he would be scarcely divine if he were so completely within
the grasp of our primitive logic. It is healthy to admit in theory
what we have all accepted in practice, that we need not await a
perfected theology before worshipping, any more than we await a
conscious reason before committing ourselves to the intimate
adventures of aesthetic inspiration or human affection.
8. The religious portion of any man s character, thus freed from
obligations to argue its faith save with its own sense of honesty,
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
also loses the right to be exclusive and the call to proselytise. In
early ages, conformity was judged by ritual, and in later ages by
creeds; but if the present suggestion is correct, religions differ
chiefly as individual temperaments find one or another mental
picture better for facilitating the maintenance of that subtle and
indefinable sense of holiness. Differing accounts of God are then no
longer mutually incompatible, and belief becomes not the under
writing of an authoritative doctrine, but the earnest attempt of
each of us to create the most vivid of those mental pictures or
symbols. For without our efforts to symbolise, the most sacred
aspects of common experience would fade too soon from the
scattered attention of us ordinary mortals. This lays upon us the
obligation to play each his own part as creator as well as worship
per: God made in our own image 5 implies not a blasphemy
but a universal command, which we can none of us escape
without courting the death of the spirit by atrophy of its main
function.
9. In contrast to the most tragic feature of religious history, the
more honestly we recognise as our aim the pursuit of our own
particular symbolisms, the less shall we be tempted to attack
the different symbols created by others. It was an error of short
sightedness to suppose that science would ever destroy the religious
spirit, but it does destroy the intolerance commonly exhibited by
followers of any one religious institution towards -followers of any
other. For if science without a touch of mysticism is blind to many
aspects of nature, mysticism untempered by scientific logic is un
balanced and undisciplined and is apt to degenerate into cruelty,
forgetful that all symbols have equal right to devotion, and rest
equally upon no proof but individual creativeness.
10. In using the word create I deliberately ascribe" to the
religious attitude the prerogative of the artist. Not all of us are
privileged to exercise in music or words or colour or material
structure the faculty of weaving such a pattern of ideas as can rouse
the imagination, but inasmuch as everyone is at some time
religious he is also in those moments the artist. So it is as true to
say that the artist in each of us fashions the symbol or image of
God as that God the artist makes man in his own image. Actually
the imagination has been too little recognised for its part in
worship, and has been curiously despised even when recognised
perhaps through the rather primitive psychology which classified
the imaginative as necessarily the antithesis of the real. This
classification, fortunately, we outgrow as soon as we regard the
132
Symbolism
penetrating insight into human fears and hopes shown by the most
imaginative of artists in any age from the ancient Chinese to
de la Mare today.
V
Status of the Symbolic and tfa Real
11. We now confront the divergence of interpretation to which
the notion of symbolism has led. I have called the idea of God a
man-created symbol held in our minds to represent or to explain
the fact that we all find ourselves worshipping. But do we thereby
imply any suggestion that there is nothing more behind the notion
of deity than a figment in the brain of the worshipper? The non-
theistic interpretation follows such a suggestion by being impressed
with the impossibility of proving an existence inaccessible to sense-
perception, and by forgetting that the faithfulness and affection
of our every human friend is equally improvable. On the other
hand the theistic interpretation is wise to admit the implication
of the theory of symbolism, that the reality of each symbol is
individual, incommunicable, and therefore not publicly provable.
The theist must be willing to hazard his courage as an act of faith,
just as we all plunge into the unknown and unguaranteed in every
venture ofJauman friendship.
12. The question of the real external existence of the object
worshipped is therefore in one sense unanswerable, and in another
sense can be answered by the courage and enterprise of each
individual worshipper. In any scientific sense of communicable
proof it is unanswerable either by affirmation or by denial and we
are all agnostics, neither theism nor atheism being capable of
logical guarantee: but in the privacy of each of our personal
experiences it is legitimately answerable with innumerable shades
of meaning according to the metaphysical temperament of each
one of us. Our individual convincement need not be diminished
when we discover that none of the answers is likely to carry con
viction to anyone else, unless to someone of identically similar
mental background. We crave for public proof only if there is risk
that God the Symbol be regarded as "mere 3 symbol; but this risk
only arises when we make futile rebellion against the limitation of
our nature which restricts us to approaching such abstractions as
sacredness through the medium of symbols only. This is a limita
tion which neither the most faithful in devotion need want to
penetrate nor the most arrogant in missionary zeal can claim to
133
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
override. In Biblical phrase we are only able to see through a glass
darkly/ and much of the cruelties in the history of intolerance
would have been avoided by taking this phrase seriously. Those
other Biblical phrases, that the kingdom of heaven yields only to a
childlike approach, are perhaps another form of the same warning;
when we were children, imagination and "reality 9 had not the
artificial separation which arises in the sophistication of civilised
life, and we need to outgrow the first arrogance of that sophistica
tion before we can regain the early vision of the imagination. This
regained, we shall perhaps cease pretending to probe the unseen
linkage between the symbol which we create in our mind and a
deity of whom we are not to be given demonstrable perception in
this life.
13. The reality associated with any religion has a further
meaning when judged by its practical consequences. For instance,
the most important historical example of symbolisation seems to
me the new choice that Jesus made when he pictured the indefin
able object of worship as Our Father , and whenever this particu
lar symbol has been sincerely regarded there have been profoundly
practical consequences, because a God expressed by Fatherhood
demands a brotherhood of fellow-men. This example of symbolism,
in addition to its great practical importance, serves also to remind
us that there is nothing derogatory in referring to any description
of deity as a symbol or mental image. For the description chosen
by Jesus, that God is only knowable as The Father, is surely a
symbol, since no-one has ever suggested that this term with its
connotation of biological race-propagation and social legal
contract is to be taken literally. But the countless millions who have
always taken it as symbol have not thereby deprived themselves of
the resulting comfort or foolishly despised it as mere symbol. To
accept the symbol imaginatively instead of literally does not
prevent it being an approach to a reality with which we may later
in our evolution become more closely acquainted. To certain
temperaments and races, for example Chinese, the Way and
Power * of Taoism or the Path of Buddhism have differently
symbolised the same universal sacred elements in experience, and
religions based thereon must no more be despised for their subse
quent degradation than Christianity is to be rejected because
Christians so frequently fail to carry out the logical consequences
of brotherhood.
134
Symbolism
VI
Religion as Prayer
14. If the incomparable perceptiveness of Jesus found father
hood to be the likeliest symbol of his discovery, no one need ever
doubt that the most-treasured link of human affection is open to all
of us in consequence, and that prayer to the divine Father may
become as real as communication with a loved and mortal parent.
But, as before, we must not fail to distinguish between facts which
the conscience of the individual finds real and the fewer facts
which nature permits him to demonstrate to others and therefore
to incorporate in a scientific description of his universe. Prayer
is undoubtedly the practice of the presence of God 5 , not merely
on isolated occasions when we all cry out in longing for wish-
fulfilment, but throughout a life consistently orientated towards
whatever we regard as the divine will: but the judgments made by
observer and by participating worshipper regarding this practice
must diverge. From the point of view of the external observer an
answered* prayer cannot be anything but the autosuggestive
effect that an intensely feeling personality may produce in his own
mind by meditation, together with perhaps some subtle but power
ful telepathic effects in other minds concerning whom he medi
tates. The praying worshipper, however, is equally justified in
maintaining in his own private consciousness a radically different
interpretation: he ought to remember that his experience is no
more publicly disprovable than provable, and that there exists no
scientific reason whatever to forbid him assurance of his direct
communion with something in the universe so personal as to be
understanding of his troubled hopes. It is one of the tragedies of
civilised thought that these two aspects of religious communion,
that accessible to the outside observer or scientifically describable,
and that only accessible in the very attitude of prayer, have
become confused so that the inherent impossibility of demonstra
tion has weakened the instinctive trust in prayer. Fortunately no
such weakening is necessary: wlien we all exercise our heritage of
the child calling out in fear of the dark, the divine answer is for
each of us alone, according to the faithfulness with which we create
and cherish our particular symbols or gods. It is not to be held up
for public exhibition, but this limitation is of the course of nature
and ought never to silence our praying or drive us to a needless
despair.
- 15. This Natural History of religion reveals not only the com-
Failure to Balance Science and Imagination
mon feature of symbolism which we all pursue, whether we choose
to call ourselves theists or non-theists, but also the universal dis
tribution of these instincts of prayer. For the race-memory of
communion with something more lasting than ourselves is older
than any orthodoxy; modern Catholics or Quakers who value
meditation often fail to admit that their practices are identical
with those of many ancient Chinese quietists, Buddhist monks, and
medieval Persian Sufis, as well as the Spanish and other geniuses of
Christian monasticism. All these, in the Biblical phrase, learnt to
walk with God . In more modern scientific phrase they were out
standing examples of integrated personality, and the two ways of
reporting the same phenomena need not be at all incompatible.
To the external observer the net effect is that the praying individ
ual behaves as if he were a channel though which unnatural forces
are exerted. We may some day learn that it is a contradiction in
terms to call the divine unnatural, but at present we can only
admit in dim ignorance that powers are utilised with astonishing
curative effects in mental and physical disease. Prayer and medita
tion can in fact become the most practical of all activities; this is
especially true for that most urgent and insistent "Thy will be
done 5 by means of which Thy kingdom come 5 does begin to attain
its slow painful stages towards fulfilment, when once we rid
ourselves of the fallacy which imagined that such prayers imply a
passive acquiescence. In struggling for this fulfilment, many of the
saints of all religions have in the past lived dangerously and thus
* walked with God 5 , and in honour of their example even we might
be glad to live precariously and to die without wasting energy upon
anxiety or complaint. Without any call to withdraw from any
world, the lost monastic ideal might permeate ^ach of our many
secular occupations and enable these to be carried out in the
constant mental attitude of worship and prayer, summoning up
powers beyond our understanding, through our devotion to a
symbol of something sacred, unseen and undemonstrable. In the
end we should not fail to attain the vision splendid, in spite of
whatever disaster, and even to reach the peace of God, and with
out any attempt whatever at propaganda we might be not without
some effect upon our generation.
136
PART FOUR
Leonardo da Vinci as Scientist in Art: his
fantastic Drawings and the Prototype
of Scientific Uneasiness in an Unscientific
Community
I
Chapter 1 5
Introduction
^he possibilities of common interests for science and art
hitherto discussed have depended upon similarities and
differences in aim or method; the dangers exhibited
historically arose in communities where scientific,
artistic, religious, or philosophical enterprise had been ruined by
failure to recognise these differences or to utilise the similarities
with due regard to where they begin and end. But a certain unique
example of individual personality remains to challenge any denial
that within a single character the imaginative and the scientific
could ever be synthesised: the mutual destructiveness of artistic
and logical effort seems to be in abeyance for Leonardo da Vinci,
and the intellectual balance to be as perfect as for anyone known
to history. This remarkable individual is nevertheless one of the
outstanding historical cases of frustrated allegiance, and the nature
and source of his personal, disaster may be of importance to the
future relations between art, science, and society. The following
chapters express a conviction that here was no maladjustment
between science and art, as too often supposed, but between
scientific philosophy and the habits of civilised society. It is con
ceivable that in Leonardo s tragedy may be found the clue to
the only irreconcilable left when science, imaginative art, and
religion have achieved mutual understanding.
The moral status of a scientific outlook, in a world burdened
with the misuses of technology, raises problems no less urgent than
the impact of science upon religion and philosophy. It has not yet
been widely realised that Leonardo da Vinci, to earlier genera
tions an object of curiosity as to the freakishness of cross-breeding
Ei 137 J- 5 - T -
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
between science and art, is a clear prototype of the incompatibili
ties which face the scientist in adjusting himself to an unscientific
civilisation. I am offering some reasons for believing that the
extremely imaginative phases of his art are documents of this
adjustment, and thus are highly relevant to the rising urgency of
our own intellectual and ethical predicament. To start out from an
enquiry as to the effects of Leonardo s science upon his artistic
expression, is in this case to end by discovering not only his peculiar
sensitivities but the source of his deepest feelings, and possibly of
our own,
A radical re-orientation of traditional approaches to Leonardo
will be required for understanding his significance relative to the
logic and imagination of our present battered civilisation. It is
possible that too many of the accepted commentaries on Leonardo
have been written by art critics concerned with his paintings and
later with his drawings. Analysis of his scientific achievements by
scientists and historians of science has followed more slowly. But
between these two separate preoccupations, the mutual inter
action of artistic and scientific temperaments in him has commonly
been ignored, except for scattered details and for the complaint
which descends from his contemporaries that he wasted in science
the potentialities of his artistic genius .
Today such points of view are all too narrow. Since recent
advances in communication have distributed so universally an
interest in the arts, and since the consequences of a scientific
civilisation are scarcely anywhere escapable, the meeting point of
scientific and artistic outlooks ought to constitute a subject of
enquiry of almost daily application; it offers unexplored territory
rich in data even to those who do not pretend to comparative
psychology. In Leonardo might be found the archetype of all such
data: the simplicity of the Renaissance world is capable of reveal
ing them in elemental form which would not so easily be isolated
in the complexity of modern science and the more rapidly chang
ing artistic fashions of the present day.
In the course of the present initial approach to Leonardo s
significance for current science and imaginative art, it will be
obvious that debts to many writers are too frequent for separate
acknowledgement at each point. In particular the works of Beren-
son, Sir Kenneth Clark, Holmes, McGurdy, Hind, Ravaisson-
Mollien, Mtzller-Walde,- Richter, Popp, Hildebrandt, Mtintz,
Seidlitz, Heydenreich, Sohni, Calvi, Sir^n, Thiis, Suida, and the
Reale Commissione Vinciana and of historians of science such as
Introduction
Seailles, Duhem, Grothe, Feldhaus, Hart, McMurrich, Thorndike,
Sarton, Singer, have been gratefully consulted, though not always
followed in opinion. Personal debts to Sir Kenneth Clark and to
the authorities of the Royal Library at Windsor must particularly
be recorded. The attempt to distinguish between genuine and
spurious in the many hundreds of relevant drawings, seriously
begun by Morelli, has been put on a chronological foundation by
Clark, prior to whose 1935 Catalogue any understanding of
Leonardo through the drawings would have been hopeless to
attempt.
139
Chapter 1 6
The Problem of Leonardo s Imaginative
Drawings
Effects of Technical Knowledge and of Temperament
^ I ^he adventurous and often disastrous history of the
I works of Leonardo da Vinci, and of his possessions
I after his death in 1519, has left the modern world with
JL. less than a dozen paintings. Some of these are of
doubtful authenticity. There also survive many hundreds of draw
ings and over five thousand pages of MSS. Many of the latter
are illustrated notes on scientific researches. It is a commonplace
that the artistic status of the drawings is high even when com
pared with the greatest products of the Italian Renaissance, and
that in subsequent centuries of modern science many of the most
striking advances find themselves anticipated or foreshadowed in
those remarkable note-books. The present generation, surrounded
by its own scientific achievement and now equipped with the work
of so many laborious editors of Leonardo MSS. and drawings, is
tempted to ask whether such art can have been the result of a
scientific attitude to life or whether such foreknowledge of modern
science can have been due to its author s needs and experience as
an artist. If this question could be completely answered we should
find ourselves solving one of the major perplexities of this century,
as we should begin to see some of the stages of mental and moral
evolution towards which an age of science is likely to tend.
_. The problem of interaction between Leonardo s science and
art is thus of greater practical importance than the settling of a
psychological detail in the history of the Italian Renaissance. It
may clear away much initial obstruction if we mention briefly
some reasons why this problem is by no means hackneyed; in fact
to propound it may even be thought either rash or unnecessary.
Historians of science, conscious that their equipment is inade
quate for appreciating the art of Leonardo, have often accepted
the inadequacy as excuse for ignoring the artist in him when they
try to understand the scientist. Art critics have been correspond
ingly tempted to ignore the scientific element in his character-
Problem of the Drawings
Such omissions can only mislead a modern reader interested in
Leonardo as combining scientific with artistic temperament. In
the end such a reader becomes irritated at the bewildered rever
ence with which the scientific historian dismisses Leonardo s art,
and the vague respect with which the art critic dismisses Leon
ardo s science; he decides that neither writes with sufficient con
fidence for him to assess any influence which the one product may
have exerted upon the other. He may even consider it prudent to
restrict his scrutiny to specific details in which some piece of
scientific knowledge affected Leonardo s technique in art. Ob
vious examples are his anatomical exactitude in human or animal
or plant drawings, the deplorable effects of his curiosity in the
chemistry of painters materials, the skilled engineer s grasp of
mechanical problems in his architectural designs, and the expert
geology of his scenery. Much has already been written along those
lines. But somewhere, in a scientific age, a more subtle enquiry
must be opened, into more general effects of science upon a
scientist s own perceptual and emotional development and char
acter. It is here that Leonardo offers a difficult but uniquely
promising opportunity, because this scientist had a power of ex
pressing in his thousands of sketches many aspects of his own
mental evolution.
Some tentative prolegomena towards investigating the effect of
science upon the scientist may perhaps emerge from the present
contribution.
Not all commentators on Leonardo would admit the necessity
for my enquiry, as several recognised attempts to assess his mental
peculiarities have discounted the personal reactions of his science.
For instance in the well-known psychological studies by Freud and
by R. A. Taylor, the former considered Leonardo s science as
consequent rather than as antecedent in his emotional pathology,
while Taylor considered it as a by-product of his art. The
authority of distinguished scholars such as Thorndike has even
been associated with views of Leonardo as the dilettante, implying
only secondary interests in science. Hence an essential step in my
argument is to apply the researches of S6ailles, Duhem, Feldhaus,
Hart, McMurrich, and others, to decide whether the universal
application of scientific method was a primary aim throughout
Leonardo s life, or whether it was only occasional and merely
attendant upon artistic requirements. Richter. Holmes, McCurdy,
Singer, and others Imve already recognised that Leonardo was a
supreme scientist as well as artist, but we must find whether there
141
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
is any need to go beyond them and to describe his art as the self-
expression of an inherently scientific mind. Any such view would
intensify the loneliness in which he bridges the gap between Greek
and modern, and might seriously affect the emotional conse
quences which must be attributed to his solitude. These emotional
consequences may well have been expressed in his art.
Psychological analysis of any peculiarly scientific temperament
is still in a very rudimentary state today. But there is so much in
Leonardo that is foreign to his environment and nearer to the
outlook which we are now learning to acquire in research, that a
modern scientist has no difficulty in recognising the underlying
attitude to experience. It is in this fact that I find some excuse for
suggesting that the working scientist may contribute towards
understanding the mentality of Leonardo: the contribution may
ultimately be not entirely irrelevant in understanding the art of
Leonardo.
Interpretations of Emotion in the Art of a Scientist
One dangerous ambiguity makes it especially difficult to in
terpret the artistic work of a scientist, and requires caution from
the outset. Approach to the character of any artist encounters an
uncertainty as to whether his works express mainly his own feelings
or the feelings of others observed by himself. This uncertainty is
apt to be unfairly resolved when the artist is described also as a
scientist. For it is then implied that he is more interested in causes
than impressions, and this leads to underestimating the strength of
such an artist s own feelings. Thus it is usual to picture Leonardo
as analysing a situation objectively or from outside, and such
scientific attitude is liable to be described in terms suggesting that
he was lacking in emotion himself.
In avoiding the danger of this suggestion, it is not necessary to
insist on any particular theory of aesthetic: we have no right to
pretend that honesty in observing nature is the prerogative of the
scientist alone, nor to pretend that we have decided whether art is
mainly the recording of the externally observable or mainly the
communicating of the observer s response. We only require to be
free from the common assumption that the more accurate the
observer the less capable he is of personal feeling, or that the
rational elucidation of causes need destroy emotional response to
effects.
An immediate application of this caution is called for when sub
jects treated by many other artists are compared with Leonardo s
142
F
"
r
, tJfa&d^^^V^-^^
^%y>^^l& ^*^6(*Cr
1
//. EPICYCLIC ORBITS IN A MEDIEVAL
ARABIC MS.
By courtesy of the late Dr. Mingana
r-:^? [> : ifcl
72. PROFILE OF A LADY
Silver point drawing at Windsor
Copyright H.M. The King
Problem of the Drawings
own version. For instance, among representations of the Last
Supper 5 , that by Leonardo is undoubtedly the one most in
tensely suggestive of emotion. All those violent feelings had cer
tainly been studied from a standpoint sufficiently detached to
enable him to analyse and classify them. It is indeed legitimate to
contrast him with any artist who was carried away by his own
uncontrolled feeling and unconsciously submerged in it the per
sonalities whom he depicted; for example, at two opposite ex
tremes, the gentle piety of Fra Angelico and the tense and superb
arrogance of Michelangelo are inescapable in their painting and
sculpture. But this legitimate contrast only enforces the correct
acknowledgement that Leonardo was capable of some degree of
impartiality while actually painting and drawing; it leaves un
decided two divergent alternatives, (A) that the emotions depicted,
suggested, or symbolised, had been observed by him solely as they
appeared in other people, () that those emotions had been
experienced either immediately or distantly beforehand in his own
person.
It is probably only the rare scientist among artists who ever
tempts a critic to fit him with (A) to the exclusion of () . Actually
Leonardo the complete scientist might have been an external
observer of behaviour or a violent participator or both, and so
might answer to either alternative. But Leonardo as man or as
artist becomes a quite different personality according to which
alternative is emphasised. This essay attempts to throw some light,
from his intellectual ancestry and his surroundings, upon the
ambiguity. Meanwhile the use of adjectives cold* or dispas
sionate , in describing his scientific habits, must be suspected of
begging the question.
Contrasted Types in the Drawings
Drawings have one great advantage over paintings since they
suffer less by reproduction, so that a considerable acquaintance
with Leonardo is more widely accessible than in the case of many
artists. There are available in most large English libraries the six
hundred small-size reproductions in Clark s catalogue to the great
collection of Leonardo drawings at Windsor. The smaller volumes
edited by Popp, by Hind, and by others, together with the sections
dealing with drawings in the large treatises on Leonardo by Sir^n;
Mizntz, Hildebrandt, etc., reproduce many examples from Wind
sor and from Oxford, Chatsworth, and the French and Italian
libraries. The full-size Berenson and c Grosvenor* collections and
143
Leonardo, Scientist in An
the authoritative reproductions of the Reale Commissione
Vinciana are available in far fewer libraries, and are supplemented
in such places as the national and older university institutions by
rarer reproductions going back to the eighteenth century and the
engravings of Hollar. Drawings interspersed in Leonardo s MSS.
are reproduced in the facsimile editions by Ravaisson-Mollien,
Sabachnikoff, and Calvi, available in the larger libraries, and
many are to be found also in the collections of Leonardo writings
edited by Richter and by McCurdy. Originals commonly seen in
this country are chiefly items from Windsor, and the few in the
British and the Victoria and Albert Museums.
In examining any of these collections, some basis of classification
will be^required. For the purposes of the present enquiry I propose
to devise a classification according to the nature of the feeling
which the drawings convey. Some features of a possible reclassi-
fication by date will be quoted later, as serving better the solution
of the problem than the propounding of it. The following readily
distinguish themselves in my classification, and I consider that
they include the types or moods most peculiar to Leonardo.
I. Drawings which depict an intense effort. Characteristically in
these a mental concentration is expressed by a physical action in
which animal or human anatomy is strained almost to breaking
point. Here a strict naturalism is not overstepped but is deliber
ately exploited to convey an overwhelming sense of urgency; for
instance the muscular detail is mechanically perfect, whether
the anatomy is that of a horse and rider in the agony of mortal
struggle or that of a composite creature with the wings or head of a
dragon.
II. Drawings expressing the unsdfconscious gracefulness of chil
dren and animals in their completely carefree moments. Character
istic are the remarkably large number of sketches of madonna with
the child who is clutching or teasing or struggling with a cat or a -
lamb. The amused tolerance of the girlish mother, the earnestness
of the baby, and the absurdity of the attitudes into which the group
get themselves, convey a delicately irreverent humour which is quite
foreign to the traditional sober representation of the holy family in
Leonardo s age. Sketches of kittens tumbling over each other,
various animals in the intimacies of their ablutions, etc., are other
examples from Leonardo in this mood of engaging innocence.
^ III. Allied to the type I, are the drawings of cosmic disaster, but
distinguished by more radical departure from living model. Their
tiny humans express an extremity of despair as their cities are
144
PLATE 13. DISSECTED FOOT OF A MONSTER
Ink upon silver point drawing at Windsor
Copyright H.M. The King
JT ~ "TT^Jf MS*. _ \- :^fm
?* Jf .. - -^ - " I *3fr - " ^~; ^ V- - J . *
" > x . - "* - : - n -^ ^X : :
, - - v - I * v " fcf * J -
I-;??" - 1 -. Vr ^^. ,!"i-.-;-^V"j
. p/ J *, , ^ ^
--^jv : .; -
,
PLATE 14. FANTASTIC BETROTHAL
Silver point drawing at Windsor
Copyright H.Af. The King
PLATE 75. STUDY FOR THE LAST SUPPER
Red chalk and ink drawing at Windsor
Copyright EM. The King
iff. CATASTROPHIC FANTASIES
M wpon i/ocA c^att drawing at Windsor
Copyright H.M. The King
Problem of the Drawings
overwhelmed in flood or tornado or volcanic outbreak. These
drawings curiously overlap many of his scientific diagrams, where
the curvature of water waves seems to have preoccupied him
almost to the point of obsession; the combination of emotional
expression with science becomes very striking where the human
agony is set against the careful hydraulics and meteorology of the
storm.
IV. In contrast to the violence of I and III and yet more profound
than the playfulness of type II, is the mood of unassailable serenity
in some other drawings, particularly of women s faces. One or two
of his few surviving paintings are famous for this, and there are
drawings whose eyes look steadfastly into a world where they find
nothing to shake their peace of mind and the unapproachable
superiority to fate which they seem to have attained. This air of
confident reliance on some secret knowledge is perhaps the most
subtle and intangible attitude in Leonardo s art: hence although
many imitators have attempted drawings which are superficially
of this type of expression, none has succeeded in conveying the
same profundity of character in such charm and simple dignity.
Clark, in the Windsor catalogue, has commented upon the facility
with which uncritical admirers have transferred their enthusiasm
to these imitations, some books on Leonardo being almost entirely
illustrated by spurious examples. It is a memorable experience to
examine, as can now be done at many libraries, the various copied
and imitated faces ascribed by Clark to followers of Leonardo, and
to compare them with genuine examples even in reproduction*
Under such scrutiny the vanity or petulance of faces by d Oggiono
or Salai lose entirely their spurious kinship with the supreme
serenity of the Leonardo drawing, even when the features are at
first sight of closely similar type.
V. At the other extreme are Leonardo s grotesques. Many of
these represent hideous malformations in facial anatomy, and the
expressions conveyed are sometimes of maniacal fury, sometimes of
quiescent and pathetic resignation or even of complacent acquies
cence in ugliness. The most terrifying have given rise to many
copyings, dating from the sixteenth century and later, but these
lose their horror as surely as second-hand versions of his serenity
lose their spirituality. The famous Ugly Duchess*, which Tennid
copied for "Alice in Wonderland , comes from a Windsor example
which is itself a copy whose original is lost. A lesson in catastrophic
psychology is to compare the appalling head of a man, from
Hamburg, with its counterpart at Windsor: the latter is possibly
145
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
by Melzi, Leonardo s own pupil, and resembles the original closely
in every feature except the unforgettable eyes.
I shall consider later some points in which these drawings differ
from types common to Renaissance contemporaries and predeces
sors, and from those expected along the lines of inherited Greek
aesthetics. For the present I select them as index to the problem
offered by Leonardo s drawings, so that while seeking the relation
of his science to his art we may keep in mind the facts which it is
necessary to correlate.
The Drawings as Representative
There would be little use in accepting these types of drawing as
affording insight into Leonardo s remarkable personality, unless
there were some right to assume that they are genuinely repre
sentative of him, and not a selection due to the accident of
history. This assumption is often made without any accompanying
justification. Clark s Windsor catalogue, however, and various
introductions to the MSS., have now collected and assessed
sufficient evidence from which the following conclusions may be
drawn definitely enough for my present purpose.
Of about 600 Windsor drawings, the many spurious are copies
or works of pupils, and thus are likely to be true in type even when
not in style. The collection is the major remnant of the 779 found
at Kensington Palace and first reported in 1778. Those missing
comprise almost as great a number as the entire world collections
of the larger drawings outside Windsor, and include some of the
most violently grotesque, known from Hollar s engravings of
1645-51. It seems probable that the original nearly 800 formed the
scrap-book obtained by the Earl of Arundel from Don Juan de
Espina to whom Pompeo Leoni had sold it before 1610. Leoni,,
sculptor to the Spanish court, had compiled this book out of sheets
purchased after 1570 from the son of Francesco Melzi. The latter
was the pupil and testator of Leonardo himself, and in contrast to
the succeeding generation had taken reasonable care of his master s
legacy.
It is important to recognise what a considerable portion of the
material in Leonardo s hands at his death is still available. Leoni s
holding seems to have covered most of the MS. possession left by
Leonardo, although the younger Melzi may have countenanced
some previous individual depredations. But Leoni is known to have
sold a great deal in Italy, in addition to the single compilation
which went to Spain and of which the major part is now at
146
Problem of the Drawings
Windsor. The Italian portion included the very large collection
given by Count Arconati to the Ambrosiana library of Milan in
1636, and the famous Codex Atlanticus still there contains much
of Leonardo s scientific and philosophical work. In 1796 Napoleon
took away all the Ambrosiana MSS. to Paris and only the Codex
Atlanticus was ever restored; thus a large bulk of the illustrated
MSS. belongs now to the Institut de France, including some
which have wandered but have been returned through Lord
Ashburnham.
The Codex Atlanticus and the MSS. of the Institut de France
are the largest single collections outside Windsor, but are of a
different character, their illustrations being in general small and
incidental compared with the Windsor drawings. The latter are
often large sheets of single subjects or smaller ones cut out from
their manuscript context: a minority show the feature familiar in
the French MSS., of note-book pages almost accidently entrapping
fugitive marginal sketchings where madonnas, angels, animals and
plants jostle with the gear wheels of engineering designs. The
Turin MS. c On the flight of birds and the separate Windsor
anatomical MSS. exhibit both these characters of intentional
drawing and incidental note-illustration, while the Victoria and
Albert note-books include more pages of the latter type. The
much smaller collections of more formal drawings at Oxford,
Chatsworth, the British Museum, Milan, Florence, Venice, and
in Germany and France, are often of the character of the laige
Windsor drawings and reinforce the general impressions derived
from the latter.
Hence although about 200 drawings once known to exist are
missing, the great Windsor collection and the many smaller ones
may be considered as representing not a single phase of Leonardo s
genius but a reasonably comprehensive record. This impression is
confirmed wherT their chronological distribution over his career is
studied and found to be by no means restricted to any single period.
The Problem of the Naturalist s Note-book
A first step towards understanding the Leonardo of the drawings
is to recognise that he drew not merely as a preliminary to
deliberate composition, but as the instant reaction to things
perceived. It may become necessary to add to material objects
perceived the states of mind of which he became aware by external
observation and possibly also by introspection. The clue to the
situation lies in BerensonV analysis of Florentine drawing, in
147
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
which Leonardo is exhibited as sensitive of perception but as
possessing an abnormally low estimate of the power of words, and
hence as relying upon a visual instead of a verbal notation as
means of expression.
When this is recognised, my previous classification of the
material into formal drawings and incidental illustrations appears
to cover a common psychological basis, and much of Leonardo s
art can be regarded as exhibiting the same habit of mind as his
scientific notes: both become aspects of the recording of impres
sions by an observing naturalist. The two aspects occasionally
interpenetrate. For instance, sheets of geometrical diagrams
contain fragments also of human faces; there is a notorious
instance of a tiny Leda 3 sketch between mathematical calcula
tions, and an exquisite violet with leaves and flower occurs on a
page devoted to geometry of architectural design.
It is this character which explains why so large a fraction of
Leonardo s work remains to us in the form of drawings. The
history of the MSS. and drawings, outlined in the previous section,
makes it unlikely that mere accident of survival should provide
them in hundreds or thousands of sheets compared with half a
dozen paintings and a few doubtful sculptures. The numerical
discrepancy is still more remarkable when we recollect that the
more deliberate compositions were in constant demand by con
temporaries and treasured by later collectors, while the loose
sheets were less concernedly preserved.
From another aspect also the superabundance of drawings is
unexpected unless we agree to incorporate them as part of the
naturalist s note-book. Even his notoriously unsatisfied critical
faculty does not nearly account for them all as preliminary studies
for painting. For example, in the well-known sheets of horse
studies, some might conceivably be exercises preliminary to a
considered design such as preoccupied him in connection with the
Sforza monument; but among them are most unmonumental but
perfectly natural horses, in attitudes of distortion which may
have been seen but upon which no one would choose to base a
formal study. Similarly, in the series of madonna with child and
cat, some may be trial attempts at a picture which we do not possess,
but there are some in which baby or cat or even mother are in
actions or attitudes quite unsuited for formal production. The
habit of wordlessly transferring observation or feeling on to paper
seems to have overwhelmed the use of drawing as technical
exercise.
148
Problem of the Drawings
But when we accept the drawings and the MSS. as inseparable
aspects of a single habit of scientific observation and recording, we
at once face the most intriguing and elusive problem of Leonardo s
personality. Not only are there too many sketches for the painter s
self-discipline alone, but the prevalence of fantastic transition into
non-existent monstrous types is too insistent to allow the whole
collection to be labelled unquestioningly as Observation 9 . When
a sequence of mammalian specimens suddenly develops a reptilian
tail we begin to admit that this naturalist s note-book is not con
fined to observations of any external world. The monsters in the
margins of the engineering designs raise the same question as do
the more infernal (and celestial) types which are found in my
classification of the larger drawings. Was Leonardo ALWAYS a
scientific observer, and if so what was he sometimes recording?
Were mental states as consistently seized upon as was his visual
environment, and did he sometimes unconsciously or even
deliberately find a gross parody of external nature more appropri
ate than nature itself for expressing the facts of psychological
study? Or was he just ridding himself of the consequences of
personal exaltation and despair?
There is a feature in these drawings which is apt to escape
notice, but which suggests that they are not mere arbitrary non
sense compounded accidentally out of fragments of an external
world; it reinforces any conviction that even in the most fantastic
we do not evade the pattern of Leonardo s mind. This feature is
the recurrence of closely similar expressions in creatures of super
ficially different character. Scrutiny at Windsor reveals various
examples. We see, for instance, lions jaws and human mouths in
identical muscular tension expressive of the same frenzied emotion.
In many scattered sketches the eyes of a dog, of a horse, of a man,
of a monster, exactly reproduce certain expressions which only the
self-conscious human mind could become capable of exhibiting.
In purely human physiognomy, the young man of the grotesque
Bridal Pair at Windsor has an expression whatever be the secret
of its horror identical with that of the sketch for Saint James.
Even the trees and cloud forms are twisted into shapes disturb
ingly suggestive of a human intensity in emotions similar to those
expressed in some of his faces. Thus the ancient tradition of Nature
the symbol seems not to have escaped even this most Objective of
artists, and the tradition may well have reached Leonardo through
Vitruvius, since Heydenreich has traced some parallels between
human morbid anatomy and Leonardo s architectural forms. The
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
underlying conception is not unrelated to the well-known medieval
attribution of the properties of an organism to geographical and
other inorganic entities, which reappears finally in the medical
terminology of Paracelsus and others of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries.
All these are examples of human or non-human or even inani
mate expressiveness in Leonardo drawings, which demand that we
accept them as symbolic of a self rather than as representative of
any external situation. They irresistibly point to an origin in some
mood within the artist rather than in any impression solely from
outside.
Overlapping such symbolic uses of the fantastic there are the
commoner accounts of the more peculiar of Leonardo s drawings.
Many scientists allow their minds to develop in watertight com
partments, and it is possible that Leonardo intermittently relaxed
the role of the scientific observer who records only the world that
we possess in common. The unnatural drawings have therefore
been sometimes ascribed to the recreation of a poetic imagination,
the satire of a politician, or the fervour of a religious propagandist.
But mere impishness becomes an incomplete explanation for
anyone who penetrates beyond the mild copies to which the more
appalling grotesques are often mercifully reduced. For instance the
early engravings by Hollar are apt to convey a vacant benignity
of expression until the terrible intensity seen in an original
deprives the situation of any playfulness.
Nevertheless all these elements, and others, may play some part
in Leonardo s art, and it is unlikely that any age will succeed in
correctly distributing the emphasis among them. My particu
lar contribution involves submitting the following study of the
scientific attitude which he seems to have allowed to pervade his
whole relationship to .experience: I believe that it may supply a
new due, enabling us to approach more nearly than hitherto to
the probable balance between these several elements in that
unique variety of drawings*
150
Chapter 1J
The Nature and Evolution of Leonardo s
Scientific Mind
I
The Types of his Achievements
* here are now many treatises and monographs expound
ing the detail of Leonardo s scientific researches, based
upon modern editing of the countless fragments in the
Codex Atlanticus, the MSS. of the Institut de France,
the Victoria and Albert MSS., the Windsor anatomical MSS., etc.
I am not pretending here to add to these expositions. For the
purpose of the present problem their contents are only relevant
as far as they contribute to building an estimate of Leonardo s
general state of mind and attitude to experience. We need at the
beginning to know to what extent he was permeated by the
scientific habit. We shall next need to understand how that habit
evolved in him and how it affected his art. For these psychological
aspects of Leonardo the scientist, S^ailles is perhaps the most
valuable of the assessors of his investigations, but I will abstract
as follows from many authors sufficient for the peculiar bias of the
Leonardo mind to emerge.
He was not primarily a mathematician; the note-books reveal
large numbers of geometrical diagrams, but fewer calculations or
solutions of equations, and almost all of both these were introduced
as subsidiary to mechanical problems. Many Renaissance artists
were keenly interested in geometry for the sake of perspective, and
Leonardo not outstandingly more so than others. Chemistry and
chemical metallurgy again interested him mainly as a means for
effecting the preparation of substances needed in other sciences
and arts. The mechanical and physical sciences, on the other hand,
he studied for their own sake. From one of his note-books:
Mechanics is the paradise of the mathematical sciences because in
it we come to the fruits of mathematics/ But he was not a theorist,
and when I say that he anticipated the principle of inertia of
Galileo and Newton I mean that his notes reveal its unconscious
use in attacking particular problems, rather than that he possessed
any of the generalising power of a Newton. The notion of equality
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
between action and reaction arises similarly in his notes. Mechani
cal problems in which quantitative exactitude plays the dominant
role most absorbed him, and it was these which developed his love
of recording phenomena and of reproducing their underlying
principles in apparatus of precision. In the designing of graphical
methods for kinematics, the resolving and (not quite correctly)
compounding of forces in statics, the use of work as product of
force and displacement, the applications of inclined plane motion,
of pulleys and other multiplying gear, the use of impulsive forces,
the study of centre of gravity in all kinds of geometrical structures,
the transmission of power, the reactions of load and supports, and
the strength of complex framework, together with friction and the
entire sciences of hydrostatics and hydraulics, we see Leonardo as
the pioneer of minute care in observation, checked by ingenious
control of experimental test. His researches in aerodynamics
especially show his power of natural observation in shrewd analysis
of the details of bird flight, and here his unrivalled anatomical
and physiological knowledge was combined with mechanics in
exploring the possibility of human control over the same forces in
the same medium. The lack of an internal combustion engine
prevented his aeroplanes from flying.
Outside the physical sciences the same development of acute
observation gave him the greatest pre-modern understanding in
anatomy and physiology, notably in embryology where precision
is particularly rewarded by insight into the working of cause and
effect in all branches of biology. It is typical of the same strength and
weakness already seen in his physics that exactitude of detail is of
more interest to him than generalisation; as with the principle of
inertia, his anticipation of understanding the blood circulation is
an incident rather than a deliberate conclusion.
In palaeontology and physical geography and meteorology he is
again the supreme observer of his time, and he seems the first to
have envisaged the correct explanation of stratigraphy and fossil
life in terms of successive alterations in land and sea level. It is of
interest to note the COMPARATIVE scarcity of astronomy in his
MSS., in which connection we remember that he appreciated
geometry mainly for the solution of those problems on which he
could himself experiment.
In estimating the wide range of his insight into nature and the
control of nature, we may recollect that among the later develop
ments anticipated or foreshadowed in his note-books were air
transport, submarine transport, the use of steam for motive power
15*
Leonardo s Scientific Mind
(not in vehicles, curiously enough), principles of illumination to be
inferred from lunar observation, phyllotaxis as clue to plant biology,
the dating of trees by age rings, together with many technological
devices such as the camera obscura and the taximeter, as well as
the more fundamental notions which I listed before. A single note
even suggests that he may have realised the falsity of geocentric
cosmology.
The mind of Leonardo cannot be correctly appreciated without
tracing the part played by predecessors in its formation, to which
enquiry I proceed later; but the above classification suffices to lay
down the remarkable universality of his scientific interests. This
universality includes a definite bias towards subjects in which
natural phenomena could be put through the sequence of observa
tion, recording, and human control, and a bias away from
subjects where individual study might be dominated by a priori
principle or prejudice. Subject to this bias, the antithesis of most
medieval and even Renaissance science, he. must be considered
as accepting every part of the external world as material for
investigation,
His Method, with Greek,, Oriental , and European Comparisons
If Leonardo has thus to be accepted as an encyclopedist, it must
be remembered that for pre-modern science a superficial acquaint
ance with a large number of subjects simultaneously was not
unusual. Narrow specialisation was not so necessary at that time as
it has become for us in the complexity of modern research. Leo
nardo s status is not, however, merely that he was an original
thinker when other encyclopedists were only collectors; we
understand him more nearly when we pursue the choice^ by which
he selected his favourite topics, and allow that choice to illustrate
his scientific method. He then begins to stand out even more
radically from the mass of contemporaries and predecessors.
We see signs of his attitude towards scientific methodology when
we recollect his lack of enthusiasm for subjects dominated by
broad hypotheses; he was well aw are of the tendency for hypo
thesis to degenerate into the frozen prejudice which was the bane of
medieval thought. It is this attitude which most decisively makes
Leonardo an ultra-modern among a society still medieval in much
of its intellectual outlook. We find in him the new insistence upon
the need to experiment oneself if nature is to be understood, and
upon the need to be entirely free from a priori opinion or ethical
bias as to the result of experiment.
153
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
He refers to himself as discipolo della spcrienza and writes: Anyone
who in discussion relies upon authority uses not his understanding
but his memory. 5 Again, Many will think that they may reason
ably blame me by alleging that my proofs are opposed to the
authority of certain men held in the highest reverence by their
inexperienced (i.e. not based on experiment) judgments, not con
sidering that my works are the issue of pure and simple experience,
which is the one true mistress. Again, Before making this case
a general rule, test it by experiment two or three times, and see
if the experience produces the same effect. Without experience
there can be no certainty. 9 Experiment never deceives, it is only
our judgment which deceives us. 5
His researches in aerodynamics contain examples particularly
suited to illustrating this character of his method. C A bird is an
instrument working according to mathematical law, which
instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all
its movements, but not with a corresponding degree of strength/
*In order to give the true science of the movement of birds in the
air, it is necessary to give first the science of the winds, which we
shall prove by means of the movement of the water; this science is
in itself obvious to the senses, it will serve as a ladder to arrive at
the knowledge of winged creatures in the air and the wind. 5 c Of
the bird s movement in order to speak of this subject it is neces
sary that in the first book you treat of the nature of the resistance
of the air; in the second of the anatomy of the bird and of its
feathers; in the third of the action of these feathers in various of its
movements; in the fourth the strength of the wings and tail without
beating of the wings, with the help of the wind to serve as guide in
various movements. 5 Before writing about winged creatures, make
a book about how inanimate things descend through the air
without wind and another about their descent with the wind. 5
Whence we find Leonardo considering the descent of a board of
uniform thickness placed first horizontally and then obliquely in
the air.
Such procedure in research may be contrasted with general
trends throughout the ten centuries between the Greek and
modern eras. There had been many scattered solitaries in Euro
pean science, but most of those who had been actual experimenters
had chosen chemistry with a mystical flavour which expressed
itself in alchemy. This flavour had forced the sciences to depend
essentially on a priori principle or prejudice, and rendered them
unlikely to flourish if Leonardo s empiricism and impartial analysis
154
Leonardo s Scientific Mind
were to be adopted as their method. From all such medievalism
Leonardo is separated as a conscientious investigator who lets the
facts determine his course, and who regards with misgiving any
conclusions based upon authority or uncritical tradition. A note
in one of his South Kensington MSS., 6 O speculators on perpetual
motion, go and be the companions of the searchers after gold/
conveys his opinion of pseudo-science.
Subsequent history has shown that this attitude of Leonardo is
essential to the method which characterises the modern physical
sciences, where observation, prediction, and check by controlled
experiment all depend for success upon their reduction to quanti
tative treatment. In thus aiming at mathematical form, Leonardo
was fundamentally a physicist even when engaged in biology, a
fact frequently obvious in his ingenious adaptation of animal
muscular systems to power production. In this sense he was not by
choice of subject matter more preoccupied with physical than with
biological sciences, but by his choice of method, which was always
that of mechanics*
Again we have to regard carefully a contrast, not now with
European but with Oriental predecessors. When I proceed to
trace the channels through which Leonardo was influenced, I
shall attribute much responsibility to the Moslem scientific world,
and it seems certain that although the influence was indirect his
science could never have developed if the Arabs and Persians had
not studied Greek. But it is equally important to realise that
mathematics was a collection of convenient devices to Leonardo
rather than an end in itself, and that in this and his emphasis on
experiment he stands in sharp contrast to the great line of scientists
of Bagdad, Cairo, and Moorish Spain. Astronomy was the fore
most of their physical sciences, as it was the least important for
Leonardo, since geometry was their cherished goal and not the
mere repository of experimental facts which it was for Leonardo.
Many Moslems were better geometers than Leonardo, but very
few of them approached his ability in experimenting and his
fervour in pursuing experiment as the royal road to reality.
If Leonardo s method is closer to that of the modern physical
scientist than to either European or Oriental history, it is farther
back that we have to look to find its counterpart. He seems to have
worked himself into a more intimate union with the essential spirit
of Greek science than was possible to the temperament of other
Renaissance scholars who formally utilised its results. By Greek
science I mean especially the post-classical developments of the
155
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
Alexandrian age: Leonardo s note-books reveal a significant choice
among the translated works which diffused to him through the
Oriental and European channels which I analyse later. Thus it
was not primarily the great systematiser and teacher of medieval
Europe, Aristotle, but the later Hellenistic masters, who seem to
have influenced him most. Among the latter Archimedes stands
out as his nearest kinsman in scientific method. It is perhaps
significant that another Greek, Apollonius, was the more brilliant
formal mathematician, but although Apollonius was a primary
source of inspiration to the Moslems his effect upon Leonardo was
far less than that of Archimedes. Actually the statics and hydro
mechanics on which Leonardo based his most multifarious
applications are the two branches of physical science in which
Archimedes was furthest ahead of the ancient world. It is not
only in knowledge but in means of attaining knowledge that
Archimedes is the most intimate predecessor of Leonardo and the
really modern scientific mind of antiquity. Like Leonardo, he was
not attracted by the more popular mirages of astrology, alchemy,
or even cosmology, but spent himself with devotion upon subjects
susceptible of quantitative investigation. He has probably more
right than any other individual to be called the founder of the
exact sciences, and although there were in intervening ages a few
of similar sympathies among the many Persian and Arab scientists,
there were far fewer among Europeans.
I suggest that the link from Archimedes, through intermediaries
who often ignored Archimedean methods, provides an essential
clue to Leonardo s final outlook.
Leonardo also shows affinities with Heron, Euclid, Ptolemy,
and Pappus, and the Roman Vitruvius, among physical scientists,
and with Pliny, Galen, Hippocrates, Celsus, and other biologists.
In assessing his method and temperament it is to be noticed that
aJl of these are distinguished from the more classical writers by
their empirical rather than metaphysical interests.
Was Leonardo a Psychologist?
The attempt at assessing Leonardo s scientific range and method
now requires an appendix, since most writers have confined their
attention to him as physical and biological investigator. It would
make him still more striking an anticipator of the present day if
we accounted him also a psychological investigator, and it becomes
interesting to enquire whether there is any evidence that he re
garded mental phenomena with the objective curiosity in which
156
Leonardo s Scientific Mind
he inspected the entire external world. The question might well
have been raised by historians of science, but it becomes inescap
able as soon as his science is judged relevant to the understanding
of his art.
Let us revert to the well-known phrase in his treatise on painting,
that the duty of the artist is to depict e man and the intention of his
soul . . . the latter is difficult. 5 I suggest that this is worth more
regard than has been given to it hitherto, and that future biogra
phers may even have to decide whether they suppose his own soul
was not exempt from being thus depicted consciously as well as
unconsciously. It may be that he included mental states among a
universal collection of scientific objects, and so observed things
which were no part of anyone s external world: if these were
appropriately to be expressed by drawing creatures and expres
sions which were also no part of anyone s external world, the most
fantastic drawings might no longer seem at variance with the
universality of his scientific attitude.
It is not difficult to show that there are in his MSS. many in
dications that he applied his observational and even experimental
methods to mental phenomena, notably by introspection to his own.
For instance he anticipated modern methods of the semi-conscious
implanting of suggestion. He found out how to utilise the moments
of maximum diffusion of attention, c on studying in the dark
before sleep and after waking. He understood and commented on
the sublimation-value of intellectual labour. Much of his treatise
on painting betrays shrewd self-analysis in classifying the best
sequence for developing a learner s abilities. Some of the ethical
passages in his notes are more strictly items of descriptive
psychology, and his criticisms of current ecclesiastical abuses are
often simple statements of fact, merely recording with all his usual
objectivity the state of mind which he infers from the behaviour
of church dignitaries. We even hear from outsiders of some
crude experimental psychology, such as his attempts to select
strangers of striking features to tell them jokes and so to study their
facial contortions in laughing. Again we recollect that he con
trolled by music the expressions of Mona Lisa while painting her
portrait.
If we accept such a keen awareness of mental states, including
his own, it constitutes a rarely recognised counterpart to his habit
of observing all physical and biological phenomena. Can we expect
that his urge to record all his findings in drawing should fail his
psychology when it served so well his physics and biology? Will an
157
Leonardo, Scientist in Ait
answer to this question make the serene and mysterious smile of his
madonnas, the maniac shriek of his deformed monstrosities, his
battles of dragons, his earthquakes and volcanic disasters, all to be
conscious or unconscious recordings of a state of mind?
It has been necessary first to isolate Leonardo s net achievement
from any considerations of its mode of growth, in order to see
its contrast against that of other individuals and movements in
scientific history; but to obtain light on his personality and charac
ter, its growth in response to external influences must next be
investigated. Although I deal more particularly with the scientific
aspects, concern with the effect upon his art makes it necessary to
compare the environments scientific and artistic in a way which
may have escaped those commentators who are interested in the
science or the art alone.
Comparisons between his Teachers and Pupils in Art and Science
The unique nature of Leonardo s art is inadequately served by
the common record, that he was the apprentice of Verrocchio in
fifteenth-century Florence but the master of the Milanese painters
of the sixteenth century. It is probable that one or two of the doubt
ful earlier paintings and the still more doubtful sculptures were
collaborated or pupil-work with Verrocchio, and it is likely that
this master introduced him to classical art by utilising him for the
sorting of relics in the possession of the Medici. It is also certain
that his sojourns at Milan greatly influenced among others Andrea
Solario, Sodoma, and Luini; in die facial types of the latter painter
some of Leonardo s mysterious serenity seems occasionally to be
caught. His fellow pupil in Verrocchio s atelier, Lorenzo di Gredi,
is probably responsible for some of the earlier work which is
attributed to Leonardo, and Milanese paintings by Ambrogio
Preda and BoltraflBo are sometimes difficult to distinguish from
his. The same can be said of many drawings by Cesare da Sesto,
Melzi, Boltraffio, Preda, and even works by Marco d Oggiono and
Bernadino de Conti. Berenson s classic study of Florentine draw
ing traces a sequence in draughtsmanship from Antonio Pollaiuolo
through Verrocchio to Lorenzo di Gredi and to Leonardo, finally
influencing through him Boltraffio, Sodoma, Solaxio, Melzi, and
Salai, the more immediate personal pupils. But no one of these,
either teachers, fellow learners, or pupils, possessed the faculty
with which I am concerned in this essay, the constant use of
draughtsmanship not merely as an exercise preliminary to painting
or sculpture but as an almost instinctive recording of impressions
158
Leonardo s Scientific Mind
from observation. In this, apart from any technical skill wherein
his pre-eminence is expounded to us by the art critics, lies his
distinction from the contemporaries in Florence and Milan and
elsewhere.
It is therefore in this sense that one of his greatest artistic
individualities is due to the habit developed in his researches. This
habit arose from being not only a scientist among artists but the
constantly and persistently investigating scientist; for of course he
was not the only painter in fifteenth-century Italy with more or
less scientific leanings. The anatomy of the Pollaiuoli and Luca
Signorelli, the zoology of Pisanello, and the reasoned naturalism
and balance in Verrocchio, differ in intensity and depth rather than
in essence from the work of Leonardo, while perspective geometry
was studied widely among contemporary artists, such as Uccello
and Piero della Francesca. But since I have enumerated some of
the subjects of his investigations, and recollect Berenson s analysis
of his medium of expression, quoted in an earlier chapter, one may
recognise that in no one but Leonardo is found this habit of using a
draughtsman s technique as a constant recording device over so
wide a range of his experience.
In science even more than in art it might be said that he
accepted technique from teachers but utilised it in a spirit which
went beyond them in its universality of application and modernity
of intellectual freedom. But in science he had fewer disciples than
in art. Artistic technique proved easier to communicate, or his
generation readier to desire the communication, than in the case
of scientific technique. Compared with the considerable array of
Milanese painters whose best work is an imitation of his style if not
of his spirit, the scientific world took little notice of him after his
death until modern times, when the discovery of his anticipations
of later work became startling. Actually^ Venturi in 1796 was the
first to draw public attention to his scientific MSS. Among con
temporaries he was not averse from discussing his investigations
with friends, of whom Luca Pacioli the pure mathematician was
possibly the closest. But this choice is itself an indication of the
scarcity of kindred spirits,, as we have seen that mathematics was
essentially a detail in means, not an end, to Leonardo, whereas to
Luca Pacioli it was the summit upon which the human reaches the
divine. The association with Luca r Pacioli is one of the rare
instances of collaboration known in Leonardo s scientific life: after
the former s publication of the first arithmetical and algebraic
text-book to be printed (1494), ke was assisted by Leonardo in
159
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
appropriate aspects of further work for De dwina Proportione, and
when political changes drove Leonardo from Milan in 1499 Luca
Pacioli travelled with him. During the same early Milanese period
of Leonardo s life there were others available for scientific dis
cussion in addition to Luca Pacioli; from the studies of Seailles and
of Hart it is possible to enumerate nearly a dozen names, but only
the Cardan family seem likely to have derived much from him.
The circle of fellow scientific investigators seems to have left to
subsequent generations far less of corporate discipleship than the -
group sometimes misleadingly called his school* of Milanese
painting. In the isolated individual instance which may be im
portant, Jerome Cardan, mathematician of the next succeeding
generation, knew something of Leonardo s experiments through his
father Fazio Cardan. The latter was a friend of Leonardo, and of
the pupil-companion of his later years, Francesco Melzi, who
inherited the MSS. In Leonardo s later Milanese period he became
very appreciative of the work of Marc Antonio della Torre, the
young anatomist of Padua, Venice, and Pavia, and their associa
tion may be accounted as the only important instance of scientific
collaboration following the earlier friendship with Luca Pacioli.
But although contemporaries learnt less science than art from
him, he was perhaps more earnest in pursuing earlier workers in
science than in art. From the earliest beginnings of the Renaissance
until his own time, a large number of individuals concerned with
particular branches of science had been turning the translated
knowledge of the Graeco- Moslem world into an embryonic
European body of learning. Just before Leonardo s time and either
read or met during his youth, Nicholas of Cusa, Konrad Kyeser,
Leon Battista Alberti, and Paolo Toscanelli, were probably the
most important. It seems likely that his introduction to Greek
science was through Giovanni Agiropulo, who taught in Florence
during the first twenty years of Leonardo s life. It was the age in
which Bessarion and his MSS. were stimulating Purbach and
Regiomontanus to take the first steps towards a European trigono
metry and astronomy. More distant influences were Albertus
Magnus, Bacon, Leonardo of Pisa, and Jordanus Nemorarius, his
thirteenth-century predecessors. But in no list of names, however
comprehensive, are all Leonardo s subjects of research to be
collected.
Since Leonardo utilised these writers not only for their own
originality but for their transmission of a Greek science even more
vital to him, his mental evolution next requires us to investigate
1 60
Leonardo 9 s Scientific Mind
some of the lesser-known aspects of the diffusion of Greek know
ledge to the Renaissance. If Leonardo had Greek affinities, what
chances were there of any personal acquaintance with the Alexan
drian works in edited or unedited versions? In a particular
instance, it is of importance to realise the kind of activity required
of him to reach contact with Archimedes, whom I classify among
the Alexandrians although most of his later life was spent at
Syracuse.
Leonardo as Inheritor of Graeco- Moslem Science
We arrive at the importance of the Oriental percolation of
Greek science to Leonardo s Italy, by contrasting his actual
finished method with that of European and Moslem and finding it
more alcin to the Alexandrian, and by recognising that much of the
function of his masters was thus transmission rather than origina
lity. What did the Arabs and Persians and Byzantines do to Greek
science, that Leonardo could acquire from them its form while
becoming truer to the spirit of the original than were these editors
and their transmitters?
The most important channel conveying Alexandrian influence
to Leonardo was opened through the collecting and editing of
Greek scientific MSS. by the Arab translators at Bagdad in the
ninth and tenth centuries. It is nowadays recognised that transla
tion from Syriac and Persian, as well as direct from Greek, played
a part in preserving the Greek spirit at Bagdad, though doubtless
complicating the accuracy of detail. This accumulation was
followed by a diffusion from Bagdad through Moslem Egypt and
Morocco to Spain. From the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries
the great libraries of Cordova and Seville and Toledo were the
centres to which European pioneers resorted for retranslating this
Greek from its Arabic versions and commentaries into Latin. The
most prolific of the translators was Gerard of Cremona in the
twelfth century; the work of Haskins reveals many others includ
ing Addard of Bath, Plato of Tivoli, Robert of Chester, Hermann
of Carinthia, Rudolf of Bruges, John of Seville, Hugh of Santalla,
Abraham ben Ezra, in Spain and in centres deriving from Spain*
Further translation was done in the thirteenth century by Alfred
the English, Michael Scot, Hermann the German, and others.
Some, such as John of Seville and Gerard himself, were heads of
translating institutions: for instance Sarton s list of eighty-seven
works under the name of Gerard obviously implies co-operative
production. The Greek scientific authors reaching Europe by this
F 161 J.S.T.
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
medium included Autolycus, Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius,
Hypsicles, Theodosius, Menelaus, Ptolemy, Diocles, among
mathematicians and physicists. Among Moslem commentators
also translated by Gerard were the Benu Musa, Al Kwarizmi,
Al Farghani, Ahmed ibn Yusuf, Al Nairizi, and Al Zarqali^ in the
physical sciences, and Al Kindi, Al Razi, Ibn Sina, etc., in the
biological sciences.
The short renaissance at Byzantium almost contemporary with
that at Bagdad led to a second and smaller infiltration of Greek
scientific MSS., which diffused more directly to Italy through
Moslem and Norman Sicily, a migration many of whose remark
able aspects are also now available from Professor Raskins studies
in medieval science. At the beginning of Leonardo s time the
capture of Constantinople by the Turks liberated a further flood
of MSS. into European exile.
Through these Spanish and Byzantine channels the teachers
and contemporaries of Leonardo were in a position to develop
something of the Hellenistic outlook. A single instance illustrates
the occasional duplicating of the one source by the other: the MS.
from which originated the first Latin version of Ptolemy s Almagest
was a Greek codex brought from Constantinople to Sicily about
1 1 60, whereas Gerard of Cremona produced a quite independent
Latin version in 1 175 from Spain, where its use had been far more
familiar and commentaries were more widely discussed than in
Byzantium or even Alexandria. It is possible that the Data and
Optica of Euclid, and the Catoptrica sometimes attributed to
Euclid but more probably by Theon, together with the Pneuma-
tica of Heron, may all have reached Europe through Sicily
independently of later Arabic editions; but it is doubtful whether
without the example of the earlier Arabs they would have excited
so much interest or passed through Sicily at all. The case of
Euclid s Elements further illustrates the duplicating of sources
of Alexandrian science; Heath has traced their descent into
Europe, beginning with the earliest translations at Bagdad. The
first Latin version of the Renaissance of which we have definite
knowledge was by Adelard of Bath, about 1 120, and was certainly
from the Arabic; the next was probably that of Gerard of Cre
mona, who translated also the commentary on the Elements by
Al Nairizi. The third, was by John Campanus about 1270, also
from Arabic. The last of these was used in the first printed edition
at Venice in 1482 in Leonardo s own time. At least two other
printings appeared before Byzantine MSS. led to alternative
162
Leonardo s Scientific Mind
editions in 1505, etc., preceding the first authoritative edition of
1533 subsequent to the death of Leonardo. Among other writers
important to Leonardo was Pappus the encyclopedic collector of
Greek science: some of his mathematics has only now survived in
Arabic. Again Heron, who next to Archimedes was perhaps the
most Leonardesque of the Greeks, was translated by Ibn Luqa in
the early Bagdad era.
The relative responsibilities of the Byzantine and the Moorish
sources of Greek influence upon Leonardo differ somewhat from
those commonly accepted for other scientists of the European
Renaissance. The differences are instructive in appreciating the
individuality of his mind. In particular we may contrast the
descent of Aristotelian and Alexandrian traditions. Aristotle,
whose logic had long been a buttress of medieval theology, became
known to the Renaissance as a systematic biologist and as a meta
physician through both Arabic and Byzantine channels. But the
Moslem editors wrapped the philosophical portions in such com
plex speculation, as cloudy as the earliest Aristotelianism of the
European Middle Ages, that most of the scholars of the Renais
sance found in the purer MSS. arriving from Constantinople a new
and precious thing. Leonardo, however, was never a genuine
Aristotelian, being as unsystematic as most pioneer experimenters,
and not at all metaphysical in tastes: so that the checking of
philosophical texts from Byzantium meant less to him than to
many contemporaries, and it is even possible that the association of
Aristotle s works with ecclesiastical subtlety detracted from their
use to him as source of biological information. On the other hand
the authors of greater interest to Leonardo were less liable to
metaphysical obscuration when passing through the hands of
Moslem editors, so that again the advantages of Byzantine over
Moorish MSS. tended to be lost on Leonardo.
I have previously pointed out some contrasts between these
more metaphysical and also more mathematical Moslems and the
experimental Leonardo, and it becomes important to recognise
the precise nature of the formers 9 additions to Greek science if we
are to assess correctly the rebirth in Leonardo of a more genuinely
Hellenistic spirit. The scientists of Bagdad, Egypt, and Moslem
Spain were codifiers and elaborators of detail in most sciences,
especially astronomy, and also were genuine inventors of new
trigonometry and algebra. They were also philosophers in the
sense of metaphysicians and logicians. But this means that they
excelled in developing the Greek sciences in just those directions
163
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
which were of comparatively minor interest to Leonardo. It is only
when their astronomical devices reached engineering proportions,
or when a rare experimental physicist such as Al Haitham appears
among them, that they could have offered to Leonardo more than
the unconscious transmission of a divine simplicity that had
characterised the Greeks and been lost meanwhile. We consider
therefore that while the High Renaissance gained from new
Byzantine sources much that the Moorish genius had obscured, on
the other hand the Alexandrian physicists, to whom the Moslems
had added mathematics rather than metaphysics, came to the
earlier Europe with Spanish commentaries more stimulating than
bare Greek MSS. But these commentaries happened to be most
highly developed in qualities too formal for Leonardo s taste. His
most outstanding individuality was to see beyond those accretions
and their effect upon his teachers, and to realise the original
simplicity and honesty of the Alexandrian spirit, and thus his
greatest gain over other readers of Graeco- Moslem science was his
virtual monopoly of the power to construct for himself a better
superstructure upon an almost purely Greek foundation.
For this reason it is the earlier Moslems who served Leonardo
the best, and the later elaborations of Greek science in Spanish,
Egyptian, Arab, and Persian hands played only a minor part in
his own development. It scarcely mattered that the greatest
scientific institutions of the thirteenth- and fifteenth-century
Persians, at Maragha and Samarkand, remained almost unknown
to Europe until long after Leonardo s time. The gift of the Moslem
culture which was most essential to him, the transmission of Greek
methods on which he could himself build afresh, had already been
fairly completed in the twelfth century and he received the major
portion of it at second hand from Europeans who long before his
time had been readers of Arabic-Latin.
My conclusion, that Leonardo gained little which was not
Hellenistic from Oriental science, is a general interpretation from
his MSS., and not to be regarded as exclusive of all exceptions; but
when for example we find him borrowing from Cardan his copy of
a work of Al Kindi, we must recall that this great Arab scientist
had based his most characteristic expositions upon Ptolemy,
Euclid, and Heron. When we admit how large a portion of
Renaissance biology was Moslem-inspired, we should do well also
to recollect that, in company with young della Torre, Leonardo
was highly critical of Moslem anatomical methods.
His efforts to make use of the Greek transmission exhibit his
164
Leonardo s Scientific Mind
character most vividly when we realise that his approach to
Alexandrian science was not a mere passive yielding to an environ
ment. I have mentioned Archimedes as Leonardo s most intimate
intellectual ancestor, and I proceed to utilise the researches of
Heiberg, Heath, Sarton, and others in reconstructing a little of the
circumstances under which Archimedean texts would have to be
sought. Somewhat similar adventurous histories can be written of
the course by which various Greek scientists reached the immediate
environment of Leonardo, and we must bear in mind as a back
ground to his note-books the facilities he had for obtaining access
to such authors.
The Pursuit of Archimedes
We owe to S&iilles the recognition of the profound likeness
between Leonardo and Archimedes, but I do not necessarily wish
to maintain the French scholar s suggestion that Archimedes was
the basis of all modern science between Leonardo and Galileo:
Archimedes never reached the almost Biblical authority which
Aristotle had exercised over the medieval mind. This was not only
because authoritarianism, even Archimedean, would be foreign to
the modernist mind, but also because of a relative scarcity of texts.
Leonardo s first realisation of Archimedes was probably through
one of the Italian predecessors whom I have named already, who
had read perhaps the Latin of Gerard of Cremona, itself from the
Arabic of Thabit s Archimedes. Thabit ibn Qurra, translating in
Bagdad from Greek to Syriac and from Syriac to Arabic with
MSS. obtained by the Caliph s agents in Byzantium, was a link
without whom the European discovery of science might have been
very different.
But after Leonardo had utilised second-hand information on
Archimedes from such as Leonardo of Pisa and Jordanus Nemora-
rius, we find his notes giving hints of pursuit of the actual writings.
It is salutary for modern scientific researchers, comfortable in their
bibliographical facilities, to realise Leonardo s conditions of any
such pursuit. There were a few great libraries in fifteenth-century
Italy, the private repositories of collectors associated with the
Medici and other great families. An important example was the
library of the Due d Urbino. There was also the papal library.
Although printing became widespread during Leonardo s time, it
is recorded that owners of some of these libraries prided themselves
on still employing manuscript copyists, with a feeling that the new
process of reproduction was undignified and almost improper. We
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
discover several points of contact at which Leonardo succeeded in
making use of these libraries by the accident of circumstance. He
seems to have profited by his presence in Urbino shortly after his
employer Gesare Borgia captured the town, as we hear of him
recognising from there an Archimedean MS. Later, a temporary
return to Florence seems to have been the means of laying his hand
on further Archimedean documents. On these in particular the
British Museum MS. of Leonardo s statics is based. In fact all his
hydrostatics and statics, in some ways the most striking develop
ments of his scientific genius, depended upon Archimedes through
Arabic and through earlier Europeans, and finally through actual
access to Latin versions thus met by the chance of political accident.
Occasionally, suggestive details of his cultivation of Archimedes
are recorded in phrases which beg someone to "borrow the
Archimedes 5 of some library-possessing ecclesiastic.
What actual MSS. were they, which formed the prize of these
spasmodic and unreliable encounters?
There still exist in Florence, Venice, and Paris, four Greek
MSS. which were used in the earliest printed edition of Archi
medes, of 1544, and were copied about 1450, 1490 and 1540, the
last date being after Leonardo s death. They all derive from a MS.
originally belonging to Leon of Constantinople and now lost,
containing many of the most important works. This MS. had been
copied during the ninth or tenth century at Byzantium from
versions by Isidorus and Eutocius of the sixth century, the copying
being a typical incident in a renaissance which seems to have
followed remarkably the great era of Bagdad. It is possible that the
demand for Greek MSS. at Bagdad may have contributed to
stimulating this vigorous revival of editorship at Byzantium, and
Leon s MS. was perhaps not unlike those which began the
Archimedean collections of the Moslems and thence descended to
Europe through Spain. In the twelfth century Leon s MS. passed
through the Norman court at Palermo, and was in the papal
library after 1266, and between then and 1550 it belonged to
several successive owners. In 1269 a Latin translation of most of
this MS. was made by the Flemish William de Moerbeke, who had
access also to portions omitted in Leon s MS. In Leonardo s time,
parallel to this Latin version there seem to have been two others
known, one by Jacopo Cassiani of about 1450 and one revised by
Regiomontanus about 1468. All other Latin copies, including
portions not otherwise extant, were derived from Arabic through
the channels which I have mentioned as the major source of Greek
166
Leonardo 9 s Scientific Mind
for European consumption. In particular, Al Mahani, Thabit ibn
Qurra, Yusuf al Khuri, and Ishaq ibn Hunain were among the
earliest scientists of Bagdad known to have produced Syriac and
Arabic versions of works by Archimedes. These passed in turn to
Spain and the translators of the twelfth century, and ultimately
became available for importation to Italy.
The extreme rarity of such occasional MSS. in Leonardo s Italy
shows us startlingly the poverty of his bibliographical facilities: it
leaves no possibility of regarding his careful discipleship of Archi
medes as the whim of a dilettante straying from art into science
when encouraged by the fashion of the time, as suggested by some
historians. Instead we see the Hellenism of his wonderful note
books being only achieved by a devotion profound enough to
survive the severest of discouragement.
When we thus regard Archimedes and Leonardo as sharing
across seventeen centuries the point of view which we now call
modern, and notice the fragmentary incompleteness of their
contact, we cannot fail to be struck by the irony of one detail.
Heiberg discovered in 1906 the lost Archimedean MS. containing
the anticipation of the integral calculus. It would have been
greeted even more enthusiastically by Leonardo if he had been
aware of its existence. It is essentially a mathematical method
based on a mechanical picture, giving his geometry an empirical
instead of a formal bias. This document would, more than any
other, have justified the Archimedean trend of Leonardo as
opposed to what might reasonably be termed the Apollonian
outlook of the Moslem transmitters of Greek science.
Chronology of the Drawings and Researches
For the initial obtaining of facts relevant in a first approach to
this problem, the various elements of Leonardo s artistic and
scientific inheritance have necessarily been treated as if they were
distinct, and I have been ignoring the ways in which each stage in
his evolution may have developed from a preceding one. But this
procedure might become misleading if, for instance, I selected
drawings from a particular period of his career as representative
of the same mentality which appears in a piece of scientific work of
later or earlier years. It is no part of this essay, concerned with one
Leonardo problem alone, to repeat in any detail the biographical
sequence which may be found in any of the published histories.
We may, however, recall that he lived in Florence from birth
(1452) until 1483, in Milan until 1499, migrated with various short
167
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
stays in Florence and elsewhere until 1506, was in Milan again
1506-1513, and after a short period in Rome was in France until
his death in 1519. The chronology of the drawings throughout
these periods is the most difficult and the most important of all
studies in his art. It was seriously attempted by Dr. Anny Popp
and brought to a state of precision by Sir Kenneth Clark in his
Windsor catalogue, where e.g. the periods of silver point, red
chalk, black chalk, pen and ink, are classified by critique of
numerous examples. Chronology of the MSS. was earlier at
tempted by various workers, including Calvi whose Manoscritti dal
punto di vista chronologico ... is perhaps the most important single
study. I abstract here certain considerations relevant to the
present problem, without any attempt to reproduce a systematic
treatment.
From Leonardo s famous testimonial 5 letter commending
himself to Ludovico Sforza, we know that by the time he left
Florence for Milan in 1483 he had already developed that part of
his scientific curiosity which showed itself in engineering and
technological invention. The earliest drawings whose chronology
is reasonably estimated date from before 1480, when he was still
under the influence of Verrocchio. These include already the
character which I described under Type I of the drawings, as
denoting anatomical expression of violent effort. For example there
are some of the dragon fight 5 studies; again the Adoration of the
Magi, one of the early unfinished paintings at Florence, has in its
background some violent horsemen whose attitude exactly recurs
in much later drawings of 1503-6. At that later time he was con
stantly preoccupied with such creations, possibly to be used in
evolving the Battle of Anghiari*. In fact various periods associated
with definite surroundings find themselves occupied with local or
specific interests, such as his activity in architectural drawing while
at Milan, and the grouping of horse studies while engaged on the
Sforza monument.
The caricatures of Type V are found over more than thirty
years, from 1478 to 1513: Clark considers the majority of those at
Windsor to lie between 1485 and 1495. A fine example of the
contrasting Type IV is the mysteriously serene Madonna group at
Burlington House, possibly from about 1500.
But perhaps the most remarkable feature of any chronological
scheme is the concentration of Type III, the drawings of cosmic
disaster, towards the end of Leonardo s life. Clark dates the
Windsor Meluge series after 1515, within a few years of his death,
168
Leonardo s Scientific Mind
though the hydraulics which constitute their basis occupied him
most of his scientific life, being found in plenty in the Paris MS. B
which is one of the earliest and dates perhaps from 1489.
In the chronology of his scientific writings it is soon found that
technological projects abound in all the MSS., including the
Codex Atlanticus whose leaves range from 1490 until 1518. But it is
of interest to note that the culmination of his enthusiasm in pure
science for its own sake is probably reached in his second Milanese
period, 1506-1513. It is unlikely that he had sources of scientific
reading other than in the Italian language until well into his first
Milanese period, 1483-1499; the notes expressing his pursuit of
first-hand Archimedean MSS., his demands for Graeco-Moslem
work to be translated, and the time he even found to spare for
grammatical study as necessary to understanding Greek writings,
belong on the whole to his later life. Early in thatjatter stage
Cesare s campaign of 1502 was taken as opportunity for first-hand
study of Archimedean MSS. at Urbino, and it was after the tem
porary return to Florence during the second Milanese period, in
1508, that he was enabled to found upon Archimedes the final
statics. It is at this stage that we have glimpses of an attempt to put
together his notes into systematic treatises, of which consummation
he had to be disappointed.
It will be consistent with the outlook which I ultimately ascribe
to Leonardo that this later pursuit of Greek scientists was not
merely a search for more teachers he never regarded even their
authority slavishly but a search for kindred spirits who were
lacking in contemporary society.
The Stages in Leonardo s Mental Evolution
In the light of the foregoing considerations, the previous chap
ters make it possible now to trace something of a sequence. The
task is the next major one consequent upon the labours of Galvi,
Clark, and others in separately elucidating the two sequences of
his art and of his science, and we must now look for the sequence in
impact of scientific temperament upon artistic production. It is, of
course, unlikely that any first attempt at this will be permanent in
its conclusions, but as a tentative beginning for basis of future
discussion of this new problem the following outline seems
definitely to emerge.
Leonardo appears to have possessed from the very earliest the
two requisites of scientific and artistic perceptiveness, respectively
an instinct for accurate observing, which he carefully trained and
PI 169 J.S.T.
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
exercised, and a sensitiveness to contrast, in particular to contrasts
in the feelings of living things. I suggest that the latter is more
probably the core of his position as artist, rather than the traditional
sensitiveness to beauty which blurs the main psychological
problem of Leonardo.
As a youth this natural quickness of perception enabled him to
master to an unprecedented standard the technique in draughts
manship which the environment of the Renaissance could bring to
him through Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo, and others whom I have
mentioned. The habit of drawing began to link his observations not
merely with artistic production but with the scientific interests
carried by the Moslems from the Greek to his Italian predecessors.
The combination expressed itself as the delight in experimental
and graphical contriving exhibited by his inventive technology
throughout the rest of his life.
But if his development had remained at that stage he would have
been merely a more encyclopedic and ingenious Verrocchio. He
would not have provided future generations with that fascinating
contrast in drawings, or afforded much insight into the modern
problem of interaction between scientific and artistic tempera
ment. It is his later development, where a purely scientific ideal
led him into the companionship of Archimedes and the Alexan
drians, that makes him unique: he began to give cause for the
complaint of contemporaries that there was no time left for art and
that paintings begun were never finished because resolved into
mere scientific experimenting. *He is working hard at geometry
and is very impatient of painting.* *In short his mathematical
experiments have so estranged him from painting that he cannot
bear to take up a brush. 5 It is doubtful whether history offers any
comparable example of progressive domination of all artistic
interests by a scientific ideal which was at that time an anachronism.
I shall attempt to show later that philosophical and religious
interests, as well as artistic, came under the same influence.
The fantastic in his art, during this evolution of the complete
scientific mind, seems to have developed from a mere plaything to
the amazing devastation of the last or catastrophic drawings. I put
forward the suggestion that the following item in his psychology
may play a more important part than hitherto realised in "linking
his final scientific temperament to its artistic expression.
His obsession by the scientific appears to have controlled him
completely by the end of the last Milanese period, and when it is
compared with the mere technology of Verrocchio s young artist-
170
Leonardo s Scientific Mind
U, we see how inevitably its growth must have been accom
panied by an increasing loneliness. When he first left Florence for
Milan there was a circle of active investigators by no means
severed from the artistic culture of the time, as exemplified by the
geometer-artist and biologist-artist contemporaries and immediate
predecessors whom I mentioned earlier. But by the time his own
researches had spread over the unprecedented field which I
outlined, he must have reached a point where conversation with
outdistanced contemporaries and second-hand contact through
them with the ancient scientists provided no longer an adequate
companionship. We have to suppose that he looked the more
urgently to the direct ancestors of his methodology, Archimedes
and the others whose manuscripts had to be sought under the
difficulties which I have described. For his method had then reached
a stage when his outlook upon nature had isolated him from his age.
Not only the range of facts of which he was sole master, but even
more the Archimedean attitude towards the possibility of under
standing nature, was rare and hopelessly in conflict with the
reliance of contemporary artists and even many scientists upon
convention and tradition and authority. He was surrounded by a
civilised community who, intellectually speaking, knew scarcely a
word of the language in which he lived and thought. He writes in
extreme bitterness of them probably after 1513: c You deceive
yourselves and others, despising the mathematical sciences in
which truth dwells, and the knowledge of the things included in
them. And then you occupy yourselves with miracles, and write
that you possess information of the things of which the human
mind is incapable and which cannot be proved by any instance
from nature. And yoti imagine that you have wrought miracles
when you spoil a work of some mind and do not perceive that you
are falling into the same error as that of a man who strips a tree of
the ornament of its branches covered with leaves mingled with the
scented blossoms or fruit. 5
In a world where even the most advanced minds commonly
ascribed natural phenomena to fantastic principles and emotion
ally coloured causes, he insisted that knowledge can only be a
product of unprejudiced observation and be proved only if reduced
to quantitative expression: there is scarcely any character in
scientific history about whom this erected a more unsurmountable
wall.
171
Chapter 1 8
Sources of Fantasy in a Scientific Mind
The Contrast with Greek Art
j\t the end of an earlier chapter a fundamental problem arose
/%from contrasts between the strict naturalism and the
/ ^fantastic in Leonardo s drawings. By using the material
JL JL subsequently recorded it may now become possible to
approach this problem with some hope of a first tentative solution.
Why did a lifetime of pilgrimage in pursuit of scientific method
entail such a startling outrage upon nature as his grotesque mon
strosities, and why did his mind finally dwell upon catastrophe in
spite of having experienced its vision of serenity?
Since I have associated his final outlook with that of Greek
science, attained initially through Moslem and Italian teachers
and later by first-hand acquaintance, the possibility cannot be
omitted that the most puzzling of his drawings are due to some
influence of Greek art. But quite a brief consideration is sufficient
to prove this inadequate. The serene and the bestial and the tem
pestuous in his drawings are all foreign to Greek aesthethic prin
ciples. The Greeks did not etherialise their women, and even the
decadence of post-classical sculpture never permitted the intrusion
of anything like his intensity of strained effort and maniac horror,
while cosmic subjects are relatively unknown in Greek art. It is
true that gracefulness can be characteristically Greek, but in
human form and not in the animal shapes so common with
Leonardo. Serenity can also be Greek, but is pre-Alexandrian and
belongs to an era with which Leonardo was .not so acquainted.
Hellenic, not Hellenistic, serenity was unselfconscious and did not
carry such disturbing suggestion of mystery when it characterised
the age of Pericles. In fact the serenity of Greek art is essentially
reposeful, at the opposite extreme from the intense spirituality of
Leonardo s expressions which sometimes even suggest the ecstasy
of martyrdom.
Even where Greek artistic affinities are discoverable they must
be ascribed to the natural evolution in him of similar character,
rather than considered as learnt from any classical model. He was
only rarely acquainted with the art of the Greeks, in spite of so
172 . ,
Fantasy in the Scientist
much familiarity with their science; except for the sculptural
traditions utilised also by Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Lippi, and other
less modern among contemporary painters, his early experience
under Verrocchio in the gardens of the Medici was probably his
only direct access to specimens. His architecture, for instance,
appears to have been as closely derived from Syrian and Oriental as
from classical types, while the paintings of others such as Mantegna
and even sometimes of Botticelli are far more deliberately Greek
than anything by Leonardo.
Hence although Greek naturalism guided his science, and
although the majority of his art belongs to the note-taking phase of
the observing naturalist, that art is infinitely less Greek than his
science. In fact naturalism in the ordinary sense might bs held to
break down entirely in the most striking of the types of drawings
which I have classified. For instance Clark decides that only a
small percentage of the so-called caricatures were drawn from
nature. Further, many of the cosmic and bestial types correspond
to nothing in external nature that he can have observed. Again,
the intensity and the grace of the other types are present in our own
experience in rare mfoments of illumination but it is notorious
that he placed in his serene faces a mystery which subsequent ages
have tried in vain to see consistently in living people.
We may retire behind the commonplace statement which credits
the poet or artist with finding in an ordinary object many aspects
to which the rest of us are blind. But it is tantalising to dismiss so
summarily the most intriguing personality of scientific and artistic
history, and the urgency of seeing where science and art can meet
in the modern world forbids us to rest content with anything less than
the most that Leonardo can teach us. If we are to see his unearthly
drawings as an understandable product of the same mind which
created the MSS., we must seek other sources for their inspiration,
At the outset of this enquiry care was taken against assuming
that the detached scientist is himself devoid of feeling, and it will
be also necessary to enquire whether Leonardo expressed any of
his feelings in the form of deliberate sermonising or e comment of
public interest 5 . The comparison with Greek aesthetics therefore next
needs supplementing by a comparison with the didactic tendencies
in art which were prevalent in medieval and renaissance times.
The Contrast with Religious or Political Didactic Art
The exercise of a preacher s sardonic humour would account
for a number of Leonardo s fantastic drawings, but not for the
173
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
prevalence and slightly varied repetition of the more extreme
caricatures: it would also fail to make any of them belong to the
universal scientific temperament which I have been at pains to
exhibit. Leonardo is an extremely bad subject upon whom to fasten
any attempt at converting a public by his drawings, unless we decided
to create a second self whose tastes were completely at variance
with the rest of him. He was never of the temperament to be a
propagandist, and seems to have avoided all institutional associa
tion, whether religious or political, throughout his career. As
example of his real indifference to political feeling there is com
monly quoted his curt and entirely dispassionate recording of the
fall and flight of his employer at Milan, which event in 1500 was
not insignificant for Leonardo himself, as it sent him into new
migration. McCurdy also points out that the burning of Milan at
another change of rulers in 1512 seems to have stirred only a
desire for sketching the spiral forms of smoke. It was long after his
day, in the eighteenth century, that some of his horrors were
adapted as personal or party satire, and malice seems strangely
absent from his own work. Altogether it appears likely that the
caricatures must be taken as abstract expressionism rather than as
Odium Theologicum on behalf of any church or state, and whatever
feelings were thus vented were not a symptom of attack on
individual enemies or public institutions. There are relatively few
detectable instances of deliberate allegory among the hundreds of
drawings, the most striking exceptions being at Oxford in the
library of Christ Church. It is significant that the examples which
point the moral most directly are also, the examples which most
lack the intensity characterising the types investigated in this
essay. Apart from these few allegories there is an air about
Leonardo s drawings which it is impossible to associate with the
didactic horrors beloved of many renaissance artists. The art of
illuminated MSS., of which monastic piety had been the potent
inspiration, was beginning to decay in the time of which I write; it
had often exhibited its by-product in many ingenious and morbid
little infernos which blaze at us from brilliant pages, but Leo
nardo s drawings bear none of the stamp of their half-concealed
sadism.
But if Leonardo was not normally the preacher or agitator, what
can have been the fundamental urge which obsessed his spirit and
reduced the conscious or unconscious recording of that internal
nature to the sketching of unnatural designs?
Fantasy in the Scientist
The Freudian Theory
A famous attempt to assign a specific psychological place to the
obsession of Leonardo has been the monograph of Freud, similar
ideas to which pervade the larger treatise by R. A. Taylor,
Leonardo the Florentine 3 . The complete lack of matrimonial
interest in Leonardo s personal history, together with the fact that
some of his faces could be regarded equally as feminine or as
masculine types, was put forward by those writers as ground for
regarding transformation of undeveloped sexual impulse as a domi
nant feature in his abnormal constitution. Weare nothere concerned
with the evidence adduced in support of such theory, notably a
particular interpretation of a single dream of Leonardo, because it
is now recognised that dream analysis is a scientific problem with
multiple solutions, each corresponding to the particular instinct
towards which the attention of the analyst is directed. For instance,
each sexual solution by a pupil of Freud has its counterpart in a
solution by, say, a pupil of Rivers, where an instinct derived from
self-preservation or other primary urge replaces the sex impulse.
The only definite ground common to the several psycho-pathologi
cal schools is the assignment of dreaming and waking symptoms to
a conflict between SOME instinct and its fulfilment. I therefore value
Freud s monograph not so much for its conclusions, which I do not
accept, but because it implies that Leonardo s personality does
indeed contain some other conflict.
Since there are scarcely any artistic, literary, or historical data
involving sex instinct in Leonardo, I consider it unscientific to
ascribe to that particular instinct a greater responsibility than
given to the investigatory 3 instinct. The latter is weak enough in
the majority of people, but it has for some rare individuals the
strength of a primary instinct, and is not necessarily the mere
sublimation of another one as demanded by the Freudian school.
It takes an a priori conviction to be able to discover traces of sex
in Leonardo s works, whereas evidence of an unusually powerful
instinct for investigating the universe calls aloud from innumer
able examples throughout his entire writings and personal history.
Seeking among possible causes of abnormality in Leonardo,
it is", most reasonable to select that which is known to have
been constantly present in him. Hence we must look for any
conflicts which involve the impulse of the investigator, and must
try to realise any barriers which other feelings or factors of en
vironment may have interposed between this impulse and its
175
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
harmonious adjustment to surroundings in the particular case of
Leonardo.
Nature Worship and Intimidation
The instinct of the investigator raises one enemy from within
himself which may cause internal conflict. Prima facie it supplies
one reason why any scientist might find himself driven to feelings
expressible in monstrous or cataclysmic art. The observer of
external nature very soon becomes aware of the inevitability of
the processes which unfold themselves before him, and if the study
becomes an obsession the vision of law may end as intimidation by
nature. Was Leonardo, at the core of his being, terrified by the
relentlessness of the forces which he was elucidating?
Making full allowance for an element of this kind, I do not
consider it the most complete account of the scientist-artist whose
personality I have been endeavouring to realise, for the following
reason.
There may commonly be felt an oppression with the merciless-
ness of natural forces and with their eternal uncontrollability by
human effort, but the feeling is a first consequence of the study of
nature and not often the final consequence. In the case of Leo
nardo, when later we consider his philosophy we find that the
oppression is even transmuted into something very like worship.
What seems to happen in many cases is that the life-long student
of natural phenomena finds that he has made his peace with the
destiny which he cannot control; he has earned his peace through
insisting upon understanding the processes by which that destiny
works itself out. The poet, or the reporter of other men s investiga
tions, is left with the full weight of nature s inevitability, but the
investigator himself has learnt tolerance of the material universe
by the intellectual agony with which he has wrung from nature a
partial understanding. It is his greatest and most spiritually abid
ing reward. In so far as Leonardo progressed towards the com
pletely scientific temperament and made the supreme spiritual
effort to grasp the detail of natural phenomena, by so much must
that intellectual drudgery have liberated K?m from the intimida
tion which would obsess him as imaginative artist. Of all the
naturalists of history Leonardo ought in the end to have come
nearest to the stage where the mental oppression of the Storm has
vanished in the overwhelming fulfilment of the instinct to enquire
as to its origin, A very trivial instance of this may be quoted from
a Leonardo MS. He was hunting prehistoric bones in a lonely
176
Fantasy in the Scientist
mountain cave, and There awakened in me two emotions, fear
and desire, fear of the dark threatening cavern and desire to see
whether there were within it any marvellous thing". The fervour of
research dwarfed the fear and he went on to study his find, ending
with a characteristically ecstatic exclamation in worship of the
Natural Law exemplified by the bones he had discovered.
Once again some source of desperation more consonant with
the psychology of his peculiarly scientific temper must be sought, if
we remain convinced that a profound feeling and not mere
impishness underlies the contrasts of serenity and horror in the
drawings. I propose to look for it next in the reactions to human
behaviour which Leonardo s work may be held to have generated
in him. We found him a keen observer of humanity, and the facts
therein may have revealed conflicts of moral law in which the
reconciliation of external nature did nothing to help him. If
human nature rather than the non-human universe disturbed him
into his moods of unquietness, we must proceed to seek an under
standing in any philosophical and religious standpoint which could
be attributed to him.
177
Chapter 1$
Scientific Reaction to Irrational Environment
The Worship of Necessity
k ny opinion as to the philosophical or the religious life
Leonardo must be carefully disentangled from two
obstructive prejudices; both of these are founded on facts
^ but also on restricted meanings of words in the description
of those facts. Firstly he is sometimes said to have been irreligious,
and secondly philosophy 5 in him is commonly considered as
confined to natural science. The former error arose in course of
controversy over the alleged adherence of the dying Leonardo
to an ecclesiastical orthodoxy which he certainly abhorred
throughout most of his life. His avoidance of the metaphysical
definitions which had delighted the Schoolmen, and which over
flowed from the Middle Ages into his time, certainly indicates
that he played no part in dialectical disputes, religious or philo
sophical; it would have been contrary to his empirical tastes to
have cared much for ontological speculation. But the fact that he
shrank from religious institutions need scarcely blind us nowadays
to impulses in h.irn which were of a profoundly religious character.
Similarly the lack of any writings to merit a prominent place in
philosophic history ought not to absolve us from appreciating a
very definite Weltanschauung of Leonardo. If these religious and
philosophical elements in him can be discovered, they may even
throw new light upon his art.
In science we found him anticipating principles of inertia, of
action and reaction, of blood circulation, etc., not by detailed
formulation but by implicit use of their consequences. Similarly in
his philosophy there are .not to be found any formulations of
principle but a large number of random remarks and notes. These
imply opinions which may be inferred from some of their conse
quences, as metaphysics commonly does carry over some of its
results into ethics and aesthetics.
If one extracts some of those philosophical notes which are not
merely facts of psychological observation a kind to which I drew
attention previously it becomes not at all difficult to trace a
Reaction of the Scientist
foundation of Leonardo s universe upon the Necessity of Natural
Law. By Necessity he seems to mean the orderliness in which effect
follows cause, and his relation to it is by no means confined to its
adoption as methodological postulate for scientific investigation.
We come to realise that the inevitability of law invoked in him an
attitude of worship which is definitely religious in its subjective
characteristics. It is important to recognise that this attitude
involves an element of ecstasy and awe which is entirely different
from the uneasiness and terror which may be ascribed to certain
phases of the scientist s evolution. For this reason the worship of
Necessity seems unlikely itself to create the feeling which underlies
the catastrophic or monstrous -drawings, although the world s
rejection of this religion may in turn have given rise to Leonardo s
horror and despair.
O marvellous Necessity, who with supreme reason constrainest
all effects to be the direct result of their causes, and by a supreme
and irrevocable law every natural action obeys thee by the
straightest possible process. O wonderful, O stupendous Neces
sity, thou by thy law constrainest all effects to issue from their
causes. Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature. Necessity is
the theme and artificer of nature, the bridle and the eternal law.*
Nature is constrained by the method of her law which lives and
works within her. Nature never breaks her own law.
Such exclamations express almost the only emotional exaltation
to be found in Leonardo s writings, and it must therefore be con
sidered astonishing that they have commonly been neglected in
attempts to understand his mind. They also form a very likely
philosophical or even religious accompaniment to the overmaster
ing urge of his practical life, the detailed elucidation of sequences
of cause and effect. Since his Necessity* seems to carry with it an
Intelligibility , there remains no doubt as to why investigation of
nature was the practice of his adoration. Applied science even
becomes a human ministration to the orderliness of nature, as
when he writes: Medicine is the restoring of harmony to elements
at variance, sickness being the discord of the elements infused
within the living body.
I shall refer below to some rather novel juxtapositions in which
Leonardo may be placed, relative to unsuspectedly kindred
philosophers. But meanwhile some ethical and aesthetic conse
quences must be scrutinised, which may have a bearing upon his
art.
179
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
Ethical and Aesthetic Consequences
Just as Leonardo had no interest in expounding metaphysical
principles, so he also avoids formal statements in ethics and
aesthetics, except as directions for particular items in practical
behaviour. But again the random notes of his MSS. soon reveal the
implicit background. He seems to have had no deliberated theory
of right and wrong nor of beauty and ugliness, but all his instincts
rose against any irrationality: he revolted against anything which
refused to share in his worship of Natural Law, and against any
behaviour which diverted living things from the course of natural
self-fulfilment set before them as the gift of Law. Blind ignorance
misleads us ... O wretched mortals, open your eyes/ And you,
O man, who will discern in this work of mine the wonderful works
of nature, if you think it would be a criminal thing to destroy it,
reflect how much more criminal it is to take the life of a man/
One here begins to see the grounds for Leonardo s view of
cruelty as a cardinal sin. It is to him an intellectual crime involving
lack of appreciation of the order of nature; it brands the sub-
scientific level of approach to nature. He looks to a future Age of
Reason in which there will be neither cruelty nor hypocrisy, the
two blasphemies against his worship of Law^ and in his own age the
worst thing that he can say of man is that it is the animal which
persecutes its own and other living species.
His very anachronistic care for animal welfare was noticed by
contemporaries in tales of his buying caged birds to set them free,
and of his refusal to eat the flesh of slaughtered animals; -if I have
rightly interpreted his philosophy, these practices represent not only
sympathy for suffering but horror at the unreason and the ugliness
of disregarding the natural freedom which is the heritage of the
living example of Law. The suggestion appears more plausible
when we re-read in the light of it his famous "prophecies*. In these
Leonardo is appalled not only at cruelty to animal life but at the
destruction of a plant s natural self-fulfilment. The remark con
cerning trees which bear nuts: Those which have done best will be
most beaten and their children will be carried off and stripped and
despoiled and their bones broken and crushed, may be not simply
a mere indulgence in childish fancy. It should be set alongside his
remark on destructive methods of obtaining the honey of bees:
Many will be robbed of their store of provision and their food,
and by an insensate folk will be cruelly immersed and drowned/
Again, concerning sheep and cattle: From countless numbers will
180
Reaction of the Scientist
be stolen their little children, and the throats of these shall be cut
and they shall be quartered most barbarously. *I see thy children
given into slavery to others without ever receiving any benefit/
Concerning beasts of burden: And in lieu of any reward for the
services they have done for them they are repaid by the severest
punishments and they constantly spend their lives in the service of
their oppressors/ The many labours shall be repaid by hunger,
thirst, blows, and goadings, "The time of Herod shall return; for
the innocent children shall be torn away from their nurses and
shall die of great wounds at the hands of cruel men. 5
These comments on the exploitation of animal and vegetable
products exhibit a profound depression and horror, whose signifi
cance is not diminished by the fact that Leonardo chooses to
express himself in a childishly fanciful form of imagery. I suggest
that the depression and the horror were very real and are the
exact correlative to the exaltation and ecstatic worship with which
he contemplated any unimpeded process of natural life. Since
traditional explanations of Leonardo s fantastic drawings have
been found to be inadequate, I consider that the fantastic aphor
isms and prophecies must no longer be omitted from any view of
Tits deepest feelings which could account also for the drawings.
That Leonardo was mad* by common standards necessitates
our taking the novel step of seeking significance in some of his
grotesque phrases, if we ever hope to appreciate his grotesque
drawings.
Since Leonardo had no systematic interest in philosophy, his
categories do not correspond to conventional distinctions; if
cruelty is the sin of impeding the freedom of living nature, it is
identically an offence against his intellectual and his aesthetic
instincts which expressed themselves in his worship^ of Natural
Law. The other cardinal sin of hypocrisy may similarly be
regarded equally as ethically or aesthetically condemned by
Leonardo. He seems to have felt that the refusal to contemplate
Nature honestly was wicked and also ugly in its illogicality, and
that the refusal to respect nature s provision for living things was
an intellectual sin as well as hideous in its cruelty.
Florentine and Milanese Philosophical Associations of Leonardo
Although Leonardo is excluded from histories of philosophy by
his complete lack of expository power, it is rash to ignore the con
temporary state of philosophy when attempting to penetrate below
the surface of his personality. The individuality of the outlook
181
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
which I have attributed to him is not fairly judged without asking
what chances he had of contact with more systematic thinkers.
The worship of Necessity and Natural Law was maintained in the
case of Leonardo by his habits of observation and experiment, and
we have found contemporaries of the Italian Renaissance con
tributing to the early growth of these scientific habits of his. But
when in later centuries a religious attitude towards Necessity and
Law, somewhat similar to that of Leonardo, played its part in
detailed systems such as that of Spinoza, the genesis of those
systems lies in metaphysical doctrines strangely foreign to the more
technological companions of Leonardo s youth. It is a novel task,
but one which cannot be escaped, to scrutinise the possibility that
Leonardo himself may have been influenced by metaphysical fore
runners of the later pantheists, in addition to his debts to the more
congenial and more scientific pioneers already discussed. Even
the speculations which he despised may have unconsciously
assisted his empirical temperament to create the emotions of the
nature-worshipper, which we have found strong in him.
The relevant items in the development of nature-mysticism are
scattered over the long history of Neo-Platonism, with its com
bination of the Hellenistic and the Oriental, and with outlying
European allies of whom Nicholas of Cusa was perhaps the most
striking personality in the early fifteenth century. Neo-Platonic
tendencies of that age must in turn be considered as affected by the
Jewish intellectual movements which led through the Kabbala, and
also many Spanish combinations of Jewish and Moslem thought;
none of these can safely be neglected in assessing the ancestry of
Spinozism or of any modern philosophy of nature.
^ Now side by side with the technological aspects of the scien
tific Renaissance in Italy, in which flourished the biological and
physical artists whom I discussed, there was in the Florence of
Leonardo s youth a school where Neo-Platonism and even Jewish
and Moslem metaphysics were discussed with sympathy. This was
the Academy started by Gosima de* Medici in 1459 and directed at
first by Marsilio Ficino. In spite of sundry falls into disfavour and
disaster it undoubtedly exercised an inescapable influence over
Florentine culture of the immediately following generation.
It is not surprising that Leonardo s empirical and anti-
authoritarian temperament leaves us no acknowledged trace of
any association with this school: he was probably irritated by it
and contemptuous of it. But it is impossible that he was unaware
of its existence, and of the ideas which formed the commonplace of
182
Reaction of the Scientist
its discussions, during the twenty-four years of its history that he
spent in the same city. However uncongenial the means by which
the ideas were derived, their reiteration in the hearing of certain
kinds of scientist might be expected to stir just those emotions
towards nature which we have quoted from Leonardo s note-books.
Therefore we cannot exclude the possibility that his outlook was
affected by second-hand contact with so lively a contemporary
circle: it may be recollected that the patron of the Academy was
actually of the family to whom Leonardo owed so laige a portion
of his life s employment.
At Rome and in other Italian cities there were lesser academies
growing up, for the discussion of Platonic or of Aristotelian meta
physics, with which Leonardo must also have made acquaintance
during his shorter periods of residence in those places; but at Milan,
where he arrived in 1483 and lived with interruptions for twenty-
three years, there was no exactly corresponding organisation at
the time. Philosophers existed there without such a direct imitation
of a classical School, and perhaps worked more individually. But
the printing press, in Italy by 1465 and at Milan itself from 1471
onwards, was beginning to spread the subjects of current discus
sion beyond local and manuscript circulation; philosophical topics
were not so limited by the pursuit of solitary MSS. as in our
previous Archimedean instance, and bibliography in the hands of
discriminating -critics such as Valla was not so hazardous. Some of
the works of Nicholas of Cusa were printed as early as 1476,
compared with the printing of Archimedes in 1544: it is possible
that Leonardo, who would seize with avidity upon the De staticis
experimentis of Nicholas, would also proceed to read the same
author s De docta ignorantia and De Visione Dei with its Neo-Platonic
mystical attitude to Reason and Nature. Nicholas was personally
acquainted with Toscanelli and other scientists associated with
Leonardo s early years, and since we recollect that Copernicus and
Kepler far later were pervaded by Neo-Platonic and Pythagorean
survivals, these may even more probably have touched Leonardo,
empirical scientist though he was.
The suggestion that Leonardo may not entirely have escaped
such influences derives encouragement when we regard the medley
of extreme empiricism with mystical superstition in his far cruder
contemporary Paracelsus. With the latter s anti-authoritarian
worship of the Light of Nature, Leonardo would have had con
siderable sympathy, if it had not come a few years too late for him.
Paracelsus- eccentric to the point of insanity is even said to have
183
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
burned the text-books on biology, Galen, and Avicenna, as demon
stration of insistence upon learning from personal experimentation
alone.
At Milan the Cardan family were perhaps the nearest philoso
phical associates of Leonardo. In recollecting my previous sugges
tion that the younger Cardan may have transmitted the little of
Leonardo s science which did descend, it is relevant to notice that
the aroma mundi, or Neo-Platonic conception of a Soul of the World,
is prominent in the writings of that philosopher shortly after
Leonardo s death.
We may in these ways compare the philosophical attitudes, both
of technologists and of mystics of the Renaissance, with the
emotional fragments which imply a philosophy in Leonardo s
note-books, It soon becomes clear that however little Leonardo
learnt from or gave to either type of thinker, he possessed to an
extreme the insistence upon experiment which was the end towards
which the technological schools were tending. It is equally clear
that he went as far as any of the mystical schools in religious
adoration of the object of natural knowledge. These comparisons
then place him at the meeting point of current intellectual ten
dencies. Around him, however isolated from him, Florence and
Milan were alive with the notions underlying religious pantheism
as well as those upon which the technique of modern science was
about to be founded: but since he comprised within himself so
much which belonged to two mutually unsympathetic types of
mind, his philosophical position intensifies, instead of relieving, the
solitude and even the conflicts of his intellectual life.
Leonardo and Anticipations of some early Modern Philosophers
Through the Cardan family, Leonardo s worship of Natural
Law may in turn have affected the many sixteenth- and seven
teenth-century philosophies which culminated in the pantheism of
Spinoza. But any such influence must have been anonymous. It is
likely enough that authors of naturalistic writings such as Giordano
Bruno had heard of Leonardo, and he was even perhaps known to
others who regarded Natural Law as a new basis for human legal-
ism, such as Grotius and Hobbes. But it is unlikely that any of
them heard of him except as an artist. His passionate invocations
of Necessity are modern discoveries from the MSS. which were
then passing through the vicissitudes of private exchange which I
outlined in an earlier chapter, But Bruno s Soul of the Universe
is a conception almost identical with that of Cardan; the latter
184
Reaction of the Scientist
was educated personally by his father, the friend of Leonardo s
testator Melzi, and as a nature-concept accessible to Reason Bruno
treats this fanciful notion in almost Leonardesque terms. If,
however, Cardan carried anything of this from the family friend
ship, it was not acknowledged by name: he refers cynically to the
man who c Was a failure at flying but an excellent painter 5 .
A sequence from Nicholas of Cusa to Bruno and from Bruno to
Spinoza has often been commented upon by historians of philoso
phy, and Leonardo published nothing whatever to insert himself
into that sequence. But if Bruno thought so highly of Nicholas who
was also Leonardo s close predecessor in De staticis experimentis, and
if the spirit of Nicholas was also in the Neo-Platonic school of
Marsilio Ficino in the Florence of Leonardo s youth, we have to
allow the possibility that Leonardo contributed to the Zeitgeist
which permeated Florence and Milan. The similarity of wording
in writings of Nicholas of Cusa, Cardan, even Paracelsus, Leo
nardo himself, Bruno, and finally Spinoza, are difficult to explain
without some community of intention among such divergent
personalities, even though it remains impossible to decide which of
these individuals had learnt consciously from any of the others.
The supremely disciplined mind of Spinoza is certainly the most
distant of these in superficial characteristics, but it should, I think,
be recognised that he gave systematic formulation to some feelings
towards nature which Leonardo had buried in random notes. I
suggest that the two worshipped the same thing, and that the
methods by which each approached the object of his worship are
not dissimilar in spite of Spinoza s Rationalist and Leonardo s
Empiricist temperament, There are remarks in Leonardo s MSS.
such as The senses are of the earth, the Reason stands apart from
them in contemplation, 5 Desire should not be of this world, 5 etc.,
which might almost have been quoted from Spinoza s classification
of knowledge underlying his Ethics. Spinoza is the classic instance
for all time of the power which the mystical mind acquires when
once it ceases to despise scientific method. Hence it seems possible
to suggest that the devoted scientist of fifteenth-century Italy and
the Gottbetrunkener pantheist of seventeenth-century Holland may
be psychologically closer to each other than their non-interseeting
paths in the history of European culture would allow. It is certain
that no two characters of history have been more closely united in
finding Necessity to be the aspect of the universe, the most com
pelling of adoration.
185
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
The Art of Serenity and of Despair
If we accept this philosophical accompaniment to Leonardo s
science, and try to appreciate his vision of an orderly and under
standable Nature, we must also admit the disillusionment that
must have been forced upon him by his surroundings. The dis
illusionment was the more bitter the deeper his devotion to the
vision. An earlier conclusion left us with a picture of his isolation,
on an intellectual plane which few scientific contemporaries were
capable or desirous of sharing. Now it is sometimes fashionable to
suppose that the atmosphere of any intellectual solitude is not
conducive to human feeling. But the ethical quotations convey
the disturbing certainty that Leonardo never attained that
detached freedom from emotion; he contemplated too often the
ugliness of cruelty in an age of unreason.
The central problem of Leonardo s art had been propounded in
the strange contrast between his fantasy and his naturalism. This
contrast would have been understandable as exhibiting the
alternations of serenity and horror in a sensitive and expressive
mind subject to continual conflict, but previously suggested sources
of such conflict seemed inadequate to his peculiar temperament.
Now that we have discovered that which evoked a religious
attitude in him, and have also realised his bitter reaction to pre
vailing blasphemy of that religion, it seems possible that we need
seek no further for the source of the severest mental conflict.
I have suggested that his feeling towards the inevitability of
Natural Law was not of the character of an intimidation, but in
stead an ecstasy of worship for that which he called Necessity and
which he passionately believed in as understandable 3 . As powerful
as any intimidation, therefore, must be reckoned his exasperation
at the unwillingness of contemporary society to share in this un
usual passion for the reign of law. His universe held out to him the
calm supremacy of the thinker who comprehends even the powers
which must destroy him, and one phase of his drawings may
reasonably be taken as expressing the mystic serenity which know
ledge in itself can occasionally afford to the rarest mind. But at the
same time he found humanity neglecting with contempt the order
liness which was holiness to him, and he w^s constantly made
aware that his ideal was being polluted by cruelty and deliberate
unreason. Comprehension of physical laws may have reconciled
him to their ruthlessness and allowed his feelings to end in worship
rather than terror, but any comprehension of psychological laws
186
Reaction of the Scientist
he may have attained did not blind him to moral evil. He seems,
in spite of his pathetic eulogies of patience, to have been unable to
teach himself a complacent acceptance of such a situation; in fact
he failed in the greatest self-adjustment to environment that he
was called upon to make. I submit that this failure constitutes as
potent a source of horror and loathing as ever condemned any
man to the stigmata of mental conflict.
Without belittling Freud s ascription of many conflicts to sex-
starvation, other instincts must be admitted which are by no means
negligible in abnormal individuals such as Leonardo. Actually
with Leonardo the aesthetic attraction of the intellectual ideal of
natural law and order seems to have reached the magnitude of the
most overmastering passion. Since this passion was of such strength
in him, beyond the experience of most men, its frustration may
well have been enough to inspire an art which contains .the most
maniacal violence and the most frightful distortions, when he .
became oppressed beyond endurance: and we now know from his
MSS. that the hideousness of unreason and of cruelty were the
sources of his most profound oppression.
Detailed interpretation is of course beyond the stage of this
initial suggestion. It may never become possible to decide whether
his outbreaks in drawing were unconscious self-expressions or
deliberate recordings from introspective observation of his own
passionate reactions to nature and to man s unnatural crimes. The
latter alternative would separate him utterly from his Greek affini
ties, as it is a modernity quite out of harmony with their unself-
conscious simplicity. I have already submitted that his habit of
drawing seems spontaneous rather than deliberate, in the sense
that it does not set out to convert in any spirit "of religious or
political didacticism.
Nor is it desirable to say whether his exasperation was much
intensified by inadequate public recognition of himself as well as of
the ideal which he worshipped: bitterness was bound to be some
what sharpened by the extreme isolation which I have described.
Some writers have tried to picture him as sublimely indifferent to
outside opinion, but a number of passages from his note-books,
drafts of letters, etc,, indicate that he was by no means oblivious of
rewards. Works of fame by which I could show to those who shall
see them that I have been 9 ; and regarding his flying-machine, The
great bird will take its flight, filling the whole world with amaze
ment and filling all records with its fame/ He was not an ascetic,
and such quotations prevent us from complacently equipping him
187
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
with the indifference to isolation which seems to have sustained
Archimedes and other historical examples of intellectual solitude.
Nor can we be blind to the psychological effects of nagging de
mands that he should produce finished works of art when impatient
to experiment both in art and in science: this situation is explicit in
contemporary accounts and in his own drafts of letters excusing
delays in the execution of commissions. He is at last constrained to
sum up a long term of employment, The Medici created and
destroyed me/ But whatever the share of this in his loneliness, any
vanity and disappointment of personal ambition play a minor part
in his notes compared with the devoted glorification of the ration
ality of natural laws, and the despairing horror at men s rejection
of any such ideal.
Whereas there can be no doubt that in some of Leonardo s
drawings we look into worlds more exalted and more debased than
our own, there can never be any proof that these worlds are his
symbols of man s struggle to understand the order of nature and of
man s perversity in polluting that order by cruelty and wilful
blindness. But those drawings do irresistibly suggest mental storms
of disillusionment and despair and loathing, together with a
recurring conviction of the possibility of self-mastery. It cannot be
irrelevant, therefore, that we discover from elucidating his mental
history that circumstances did condemn him to such storms. Any
valid interpretation of Leonardo must take account of those
features which most distinguish him from other men, and I suggest
that a foundation of his mental pathology upon his scientific life in
a hostile environment does fulfil this requirement: possibly it is the
only hypothesis which has so far made serious attempt to fulfil it.
Leonardo as Scientist in kis Philosophy and therefore in his Art
I recapitulate briefly the argument of the preceding chapters.
The essay as .a whole is concerned with a new approach to the
problem of seeing a single personality in Leonardo. I began by
recognising that it must be sought under the contrast between his
naturalistic art and his drawings of either serene or monstrous
unearthliness.
In the traditional dilemma as to whether Leonardo s art is that
of a scientist or his science that of an artist, I found it necessary to
re-assess his scientific achievements and methods and the channels
through which he was influenced by predecessors. The result
exhibits Leonardo as gradually extending a technique of scientific
observation and analysis over the whole of experience, and
188
Reaction of the Scientist
developing a method closer to that of Alexandrian Greeks such as
Archimedes than to the European and Oriental predecessors
through whom the Greek science was transmitted to him. Many
of his drawings can then be seen to partake of the character of
naturalist s notes associated with this observing technique. The
more fantastic examples, however, appear to contradict this
dominant habit in Leonardo. They also diverge sharply from the
character of Greek art and of medieval religious or satirical art. I
reconsidered the attempts which have been made to postulate an
appropriate pathological origin for the more strange of the draw
ings. Examination of the Freudian theory indicates its inadequacy.
I also found inadequate any view based on obsession by the terror
of an uncontrollable cosmos: when such terror does arise as a
by-product of scientific study, it belongs to a different stage from
that reached by Leonardo. .
Finally a more consistent account of him was sought by tracing
the philosophical outlook which his MSS. exhibit as accompani
ment to his science. He was certainly obsessed by the inevitability
of Natural Law, but towards worship rather than towards terror.
He can even be shown to have developed something approaching
the religious pantheism which culminated in the very different
philosophy of Spinoza. But whereas the forces of inanimate nature
seem not to have dismayed him, many of his notes are full of horror
at finding human nature blaspheming the sanctity of that which he
worshipped, and to this situation he seems never to have become
reconciled. It appears to be not inanimate violence hi all its im
placability but the ethical and intellectual and aesthetic tragedy ot
human failure to respect natural law, which condemned Leonardo
to an unquiet mind-even in the presence of his serenest visions. He
was not adequately comforted by realising that human delin
quency itself exemplifies some natural law which cannot be
broken, although he seems free from the pre-scientific notion of
Law as a command to be either obeyed or disobeyed at wilL When
the MSS. record those occasions of profound feeling, we are re
minded of our initial warning that a scientist is not always without
emotion, and we have to conclude that Leonardo s studies in
emouon, ana we JLUIYC uu ^v-iiv^v^v, ^ ^
psychology did hot bring the peace of understanding which came
from comprehending the vastest of physical but non-moral
phenomena.
pnenomena. *
We find in much of his philosophical fragments an expression of
this conflict between ecstatic acceptance of the Necessity of
Natural Law and revolt against the unreason and cruelty and
189
Leonardo, Scientist in Art
ugliness of human contempt for its fulfilment in the orderliness of
animal and vegetable life. I have put forward the suggestion that
the same conflict may be expressed in the contrast between celes
tial and infernal types of his more mysterious drawings.
This view would, for instance, set parallel to the drawings of
cosmic disaster such phrases from his MSS. as the following.
There shall be nothing remaining on the earth or under the earth
or in the waters that shall not be pursued and molested or
destroyed . . . O earth, what delays thee to open and hurl them
headlong into the deep fissures of thy huge abysses and caves and
no longer to display in the sight of heaven so savage and ruthless a
monster. 5
If this interpretation is correct, it brings Leonardo into more
than one previously unsuspected relationship; not only does he
foreshadow the pantheist worship of Necessity and of the ethical
and aesthetic virtues in Spinoza s intellectual ideal, but his
fundamental emotions are also reminiscent of Dante. If we rid
ourselves of their glaring but superficial differences, and exchange
obsession by Natural Law for an obsession by an anthropomorphic
legality, we find Leonardo and Dante each dominated by the
beauty of a universe in harmony with law, and by the horror of
men s vain attempts to despise law. They have in common the
genius for symbolising these feelings in their arts, pictorial and
poetic respectively; the unearthliness of each of them represents
the vision of law and of human reaction to law, a vision responsible
for the ecstasy and the despair of the artist.
190
Conclusion
y% scientific approach to experience is becoming universally
/^k available, and its consequences both in technology and in
/ ik philosophy are inevitable even if we do not always decide
A J^that they are desirable. Simultaneously, in the stress of
dangerous years, men are increasingly intent on exploring the
imaginative in arts and even religions, some with devoted enthusi
asm and some with critical scrutiny. A tangle of incompatibilities is
therefore now inherited from the traditional antagonisms between
our logical. and aesthetic reactions to experience. Throughout
the foregoing groups of essays there has frequently recurred the
suggestion that some of these antagonisms might become under
standable and even might become reconciled: the ground for such
synthesis is to regard science and art as each a mode of communica
tion of mental imagery by pattern or structure in some selected
medium. But the suggestion will only be of service to the modern
crises of feeling and of thought if there is also recognised the danger
of misreading the limits of association between science and art: the
overlap of logical and imaginative can be as disastrous today,
crippling art arid sterilising science and philosophy, as in less subtle
civilisations where primitive science and philosophy were not so
divorced from the arts.
This thesis decides the sequence of the present four groups of
essays. The function of pattern and structure and form, for instance
in sculpture, decoration, music, and poetry, emerged in Part I and
was illustrated by the five studies of Part II, When this function
can be fulfilled, the call for an artist to represent objects or scenes
of external experience is overridden by the need for his imagination
to stimulate a responding creation in the minds of the public.
This creation s independence of external fact was emphasised, and
criteria of realism were therefore transferred from any corre
spondence with outside phenomena to coherence and character in
tie imaginative consequences for the receptive mind. Hence the
significance of ancient Chinese or medieval European carving,
and of some modern poetry and stage arts, was not found in
their representational content but in properties akin to those of
the most abstract music. A detailed comparison was made between
Conclusion
application of this notion throughout the history of art and the emer
gence of c communicability of natural law* in the logical patterns of
recent physical sciences. One sharp distinction was drawn between
the communications of scientific and imaginative pattern: it wa*
decided that a single work of art must invoke different images in
different minds, whereas a scientific theory finds its validity in th*
identity or the correlation between calculations or experiment*
carried out by its means under all possible varieties of circum
stance. But it was noticed that many of the most fruitful concepts
of science are as remote from direct sense experience as those of
the most fantastic art; their legitimacy in each case lies in the
power to evoke coherent mental imagery.
Recognition of affinities between scientific and aesthetic aims or
methods carries danger as well as enlightenment. .Scientific
development can be stifled by mishandling of these affinities, as
when the aesthetic appeal of an exquisite geometry perpetuated an
obsolete astronomy: in Part III historical instances of this have
been investigated through some research into early migrations
of scientific culture. It was concluded that subtle misreadings
of the interdependence of aesthetic and logical enthusiasm have
reached even the philosophy of the twentieth century, and may be
better understood in the light of parallel mistakes made by the
artist-scientist-philosopher groups in certain medieval Oriental
civilisations.
In spite of recent revaluations and devaluations, Leonardo da
Vinci remains the prototype of modern scientific instinct, occur
ring in a personality with unprecedented artistic technique for
self-expression. But this instinct was frustrated by non-scientific
environment, and as Leonardo failed in his mental adjustment
thereto, he left us documents expressive of alternating exhilaration
and despair. Such a view offers a. novel approach to Leonardo s
enigmatic personality, and this most instructive but intimidating
character in the history of science or art is so full of suggestiveness
for our current perplexities in the social relations of science, that
Part IV is given up to its discussion in detail not hitherto available.
The importance lies in the fact that the misfits of science to society
will remain a problem, even to a coming generation which will
have learned to correlate its science, art, religion, and philosophy.
The correlation itself will have been achieved when we recognise
the universal tendency of the human mind to symbolise its experi
ences, and when we recognise that any stage in science is only a
transient foreshadowing its supersession by a further advance, and
192
Conclusion
when we recognise that realism in art can be judged only by the
human consequences of its imaginative effects. But even then we
shall still be faced with Leonardo s uncertainty in scientific
obligation to an unscientific world the ineradicable source of
loneliness for the logical mind.
193 J.S.T.
Bibliography
The following lists are, of course, brief and selected: other
authors are mentioned at the appropriate places in the text.
References are only here given when the subject (such as Oriental
archaeology) is not one of common accessibility, or where (as in
the Leonardo and Spinoza studies) the vast jungle of literature
suggests that a few pointers to the most important items may be
desirable.
ChapterG
F. Davis: Chinese Jade. 1935.
U. Pope-Hennessy: Early Chinese Jade. 1923.
B. Laufer: Jade, a Study in Archaeology and Religion. 1912.
S. C. Nott: Chinese Jade. 1936.
Royal Academy, Chinese Exhibition Catalogue. 1935-6.
H. R. Bishop: Studies in Jade. 2 vols. 1906. (London and Birming
ham possess copies of this enormous and rare work.)
Chapter 7
The accompanying illustrations are from plates published by
Tel of Paris and by Etienne Houvet at Chartres. Grateful ac
knowledgement is here made, with regret that the state of Europe
prevents any direct communication to request permission.
In addition to various works of Houvet, the following among
others have contributed to the recollection of Chartres and to
evolving the ideas of the present chapter.
Marriage: The Sculptures of Chartres Cathedral.
Headlam: The Story of Chartres.
Marcel Aubert: La Sculpture franfdse 1140-1225.
Paul Vitry: La Sculpture franfaise 1226-1270.
Herbert: Illuminated Manuscripts.
Masked: Jzwrur.
Hinks: Carolinian Art.
Talbot Rice: Byzantine Art.
Also various publications of the British Museum and the Vic
toria and Albert Museum.
194
Bibliography
Chapter n
De Lacy O Leary: Arabic Thought. 1922.
E. G. Browne: Literary History of Persia. 1902-6.
E. G. Browne: Arabian Medicine. 1921.
R. A. Nicholson: Literary History of the Arabs. 1907.
A. Mingana: Job ofEdessa. 1930.
Suter: Die Mathematiker und Astronome derAraber.
Chapter 12
G. Bezold: Szu-Ma-Tsien und die Babylon. Astr. (HirtKs Festschrift,
1920.)
H. Bernard: Ricci s Scientific Contribution to China. 1935.
E. Bretschneider: Mediaeval Researches. Vol. 1. 1888.
H. Ghatley: Ancient Chinese Astronomy. 1938.
J. L. E. Dreyer : Proc. Roy. Irish Academy, i88i> p. 468.
A. Forke: World Conception of the Chinese. 1925.
J. K. Fotheringham: Debts of Greek Astronomy to Babylonia (in Quellen
undStudien zur Geschichte d. Math. Astr. undPhys. 1933).
Gunther: Early Science in Oxford. Vol. 2.
Hirth and Rockhill : Chau-Ju-Kua. 1911.
F. Nolte: Die Armillarsphare. (Abhandl. zur Geschichte d. Naturwiss.
1922.)
G. Sarton: History of Science. Vols. I, II, etc.
L. de Saussure: U Astronomic chinoise. 1921.
O. Schirmer: Al-Khujandi, etc. (Sitzungsber. d. Physikal, Soz. zu
H. Seemann: Die Instrumente der Stemwarte zu Maragha (Sitzungsber.
1928).
H. Seemann: Das Kugelformige Astrolab. (Abhandl. zurGesch. 1925.)
D. E. Smith : History of Mathematics. 1 923.
A. Waley: Travels of an Alchemist. 1931.
A. Wylie: The Mongol Instruments. (In Chinese Researches > 1897.)
H. Yule: Note in Marco Polo, 3rd Ed., Vol. 1. 1903.
E. Zinner : Geschichte der Stemkunde. 193 1 .
(The last three contain illustrations of the instruments of 1279.)
Chapter 13
Among introductions to Chinese philosophy, those by Arthur
Waley are the clearest. To Spinoza, the best introductory volumes
are those by J. Gaird (1910), Leon Roth (1929), and Alexander
/ 195
Bibliography
Shanks (1938), together with the edition of Spinoza s letters by A.
Wolf (1928) and H. F. Hallett s study called Aeternitas (1930).
Readers wishing to pursue the anomalies which I have imputed
to current philosophy must attempt McTaggart s Nature of Exis
tence (2 vols. 1921-7) and C. D. Broad s Examination ofMcTaggarfs
Philosophy (3 vols. 1933-8).
Chapter 16
Sir Kenneth Clark s Windsor Catalogue (2 vols., 1935) and Leonardo
Essay (1939) are indispensable in studying the Leonardo drawings,
and contain critical bibliography of all previous work. Other
collected reproductions were published by Hind, Mtintz, Popp,
Siren: the rare Grosvenor and Royal Italian collections, together
with Berenson s Renaissance volumes, are the best when available.
Readers must beware of books containing drawings by Leonardo s
imitators and not distinguished as such.
Chapter 17
Of the many editions and selections from Leonardo MSS., two
recent sets supersede all earlier publications, the two vols. of
McCurdy (1938) and flbe two vols. of I. A. Richter modernising the
older work of J. P. Richter ( 1939) . Calvi s Italian study of the MSS.
is indispensable for the chronology. The best and wisest study of
Leonardo s science is still the small book by Seailles, though a
valuable English work by I. B. Hart appeared in 1925. Entirely
different theories from mine may be found in the books by Freud,
Taylor, and Thorndike.
The background of migrations of early science and its manu
scripts, developed in Chapters 1 1, 12, 17, would be indecipherable
without the many researches of C. H. Haskins, George Sarton, and
Sir T. L. Heath, whose writings are eminently readable.
196
Index
ABUL WAFA, 95, 98, 99
ADELARD of Bath, 162
Aerodynamics, 152, 154, 187
Aeternitas, 124
AGIROPULO, Giovanni, 160
Agnosticism, 130
Akhmim papyrus, 94
ALBERTI, LeonBattista, 160
ALBERTUS MAGNUS, 160
Alexandrian science, no, 117, 156,
163,164,189
Ambrosiana library, 147
APOLLONIUS, 93, 95, 156, 162, 167
Arab science, 90-102, 107-13, 155,
161-4
ARCHIMEDES, 93, 95, 156, 161, 162,
165-7, 189
Architecture, 44-5, 65-6, 173
ARISTARCHUS, of Samos, 1 1 1
ARISTOTLE, 156, 163
Armillary spheres, 1 13
Astronomy, 37, 91-102, 103-17, 152,
153
Athens, 93
Atomic physics, 23, 30, 35-8
Babylonia and science, i x o, 1 1 7
Babylonian art, 60
Bach, music of, 32, 53
Bagdad, scientists at, 90- 1 02, 155, 161
Ballet, art of, 32, 45, 7 1-4
Beethoven, music of, 32, 43, 47-54
Bell, Clive, his theories of art, 33, 69
Berenson, his art criticism, 147, 158
Biology, 152-5, 159
Blood, circulation of, 152, 178
BOLTRAFFIO, 158
BOTTICELLI, 173
BOYLE, 125
Brahms, music of, 32, 50, 52, 53
BROAD, Dr. G. D., 126
BRUNO, Giordano, 123, 184, 185
Buddhism, 122, 134, 136
Buddhist influence in science, 1 1 1 , 1 1 6
Burlington House, Leonardo drawing
at, 1 68
Byzantine art, 44, 69
Byzantine science, 162, 163, 164, 166
GAL vi, 1 68, 169
Cambridge philosophers, 1 19
Cardan family, 160, 184, 185
GHA- MA-LI-TING, 106
CHANG-CHUN, 108, 109
Chartres, Gothic at, 66-7
Chartres,Romanesqueat, 44,65,66-70
Chartres, sculptures of, 65-70
CHATLEY, Dr EL, 104, 1 13, 1 14
CHAU-JU-KUA, 167
Chemical elements, 36
CHIEN-LUNG, 56
Chinese art, 33, 44, 55-64
Chinese philosophers, 120-3, 136
Chinese science, 87-8, 103-17
Chloromelanite, 58
Chou dynasty, 57, 63, 1 10, 1 14
CHUANG-TSU, 121
GLARK,Sir Kenneth, 146, 168, 169, 173
Codex Atlanticus, 147, 151, 169
Communication in art, 29, 1 19, 191-2
Communication in science, 30, 38,
119, 191-2
Conic sections, 91,101
Confucianism, 121, 122
Constantinople, 162
Content of a work of art,, 28
COPERNICUS, 183
Christianity, 134, 136 .
Crystals, 37
Damascus, 94
DANTE, 190
DIOPHANTUS, 95
Drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, 137-
93
DREYER, Dr. J. L. E., 100, 103
Ecliptic coordinates, 103, 1 14, 1 16
Ecliptic, inclination of, 97, 99
Egyptian religion, 6 1
197
Index
Egyptian sculpture, 58
EINSTEIN, 40-1
Electromagnetism, 36
Electrons, 23, 30, 35, 36, 37
Embryology, 152
Empiricist philosophy, 185
Epicycles, astronomical use of, 100-2
Epstein s sculpture, 33
Equatorial coordinates, 103, 1 14, 1 16
Erlangen school of historians of
science, 113
EUCLID, 93, 95> 1 5^ l62
Eumorfopoulos collection of art, 63
al FARABI, 95
al FARGHANI, 94, 96, 97, 162
alFARRUKHAN,94
alFAZARi,94,9 6
Tihrist,the ,98
Florentine philosophers, 182, 184, 185
FOKINE, Michel, the dancer, 72
FOTHERINGHAM, Dr., I IO
Fra ANGELIGO, 143
French Impressionists, 33
FREUD, 141, 175* l8 7 l8 9
FRY, Roger, 33, 69
alFuTi, 107
Geocentric astronomy, 100-1
Geology, 152
GERARD of Cremona, 95, 90, 97, 101,
162
GILL, Eric, 69
Gnomon observations in astronomy,
99,1*6
Greek art, 172-3, 189
Greekscience (see Alexandrian science)
GUNTHER, Dr., 93, 1 10
j HlPPARGHUS,92, 100
HIPPOCRATES, 156
HOBBES, 184
Hollar, engravings of, 144, 146, 150
HUNAIN, the translator, 95, 97
Hydraulics, 145, 152
Hydrostatics, 152
Illuminated manuscripts, 33-4, 61,
69, *74
Imagination, 30, 31,35* I 9 l
Indian astronomy, 93
Inertia, Principle of, 151, 152, 178
ISHAQ,, the translator, 95, 167
Ivory carving, 69
Jade, Chinese carving in, 44, 55-64
Jadeite, Burmese, 57-8
JAMAL-AL-DIN, 106, 107
Jesuits in Chinese science, 1 03, 1 15
JORDANUS NEMORARIUS, 160, 165
Jundishapur, 93, 109
Han dynasty, 63, 109, 114, 117? 122
alHASiB,96
HASKINS, Professor, 161, 162
Haydn, music of, 52
HEATH, Sir T.L., 162
HEGEL, 125
Heliocentric astronomy, 100-1
HERON, 95, 156, 162, 163
Hindu numerals, 93, 94, 98, 109, 1 1 1,
116
KEPLER, 183
al KHUJANDI, 99, 100, 112
alKHURi,95
al KHWARIZMI, 96, 162
alKiNDi,94,97, 162
KUBILAI, the Mongol Khan, 106
alKuHi,98
KUO-^HOU-CHING, 1 06, 117
KWAN YIN, 122
LAO-TSU,-I2I
LAUFER, Dr. B., 56
LEIBNIZ, 125
LEON of Byzantium, 95
LEONARDO of Pisa, 160, 165
LEONARDO da Vinci:
Chronology of his drawings, 167-9
Ownership of his drawings,. 146-7
Types in his drawings, 143-6
His scientific achievements, 151-3
His scientific methods, 153-8
As a psychologist, 1567
His teachers in science, 160
Greek and Moslem influences, 155-
6, 161-7
His pupils in science, 1 59-60
198
Index
LEONARDO da Vinci:
His pupils in art, 158
His mental evolution, 169-71, 175-
7,179-84,192-3
His philosophy and religion, 180-1,
186-7
LEONI, Pompeo, 146
Libraries in the Renaissance, 165-6
Libras del Saber, 7
LIEH-TSU, 121
Logic and mysticism, i 18-27
Longitude of Sun s apogee, 97, 99, 100
LORENTZ,4O-I
LORENZO di Gredi, 158
LUINI, 158
ibnLup>,95,97
alMAGHRiBi, 107
al MAHANI, 95, 97, 167
al MAMUN, GaHph of Bagdad, 92, 94
MANTEGNA, 173
Maragha, scientific library and instru
ments at, 92, 107, 1 08, 1 1 1-12
MARC ANTONIO della Torre, 160
DE LA MARE, Walter, 75-85
DE MARLIAVE, 52
al MARWARRUDHI, 96
MASH ALL AH, 96
Mathematics, 36-4 1 , 9- ll 7> I5 1 - 6 *
i59> i 6 3, 167
Matter, 38
McCuRDY, 174
McTAGGART, 119, 120, 126
Medicine, 179
MELZI, 146, 158, 160, 185
MENCIUS, 120, 122
Meridian, 99
Meteorology, I45-5 2
MICHELANGELO, 143
Milanese painters, 159, 160
MILNE , Professor E. A, , 4 1
Ming dynasty, 56, 105, 1 1 7
MINGANA, Dr., 94, ioo
MonaLisa , 157
Mongol dynasty, 103, 1 1 7
Mongol astronomical instruments,
103-17
Moorish science in Spain, 92, 99, 1 1 1 ,
164, 167
Motion of Sun s apsides, 97^ 99> 1O
Mozart, music of, 31, 32, 52,53
Musa, the sons of, at Bagdad, 95, 97,
162
Music, 3 1-2, 43, 47-54
Mysticism and logic, 1 18-27
alNAiRizi,95,97, 162
Nanking, scientific instruments at, 1 04,
105
al NAS AWI , 98
NASIR-AL-DIN-AL-TUSI, 107
Natural Law, 177, 179, 180, 181, 184,
186, 189, 190
Neo-Platonists, 120, 123, 182, 185
Nephrite from Turkestan, 58-9
Nestorians, 93, 1 07
NEWTON, 125, 151
NICHOLAS of Cusa, 160, 183, 185
Nirvana, 122
Nuclear physics, 37
Nushirwan, scientists at the court of
King, 93, 109
D OGGIONO, Marco, 145, 158
OLDENBURG, 125
O LEARY,Dr.,93
OMAR KHAYYAM, 91
Oxford, Leonardo drawings at, 1 74
PACIOLI, Luca, 159-60
Painting:
Chinese, 124
Dutch, 33
English Pre-Raphaelite, 33
French Impressionist, 33
Italian Renaissance, 143, 158, 159,
173
Medieval, 33-4, 1 74
Spanish^ 33
Venetian, 33
Palaeontology, 152
Pantheism, 121
PAPPUS, 93, 156, 163
PARACELSUS, 150, 183
Peking Observatory, 103
Periodic table, physico-chonical, 36
Persian science, 91, 93> 94> IO 7> IIJ
110,164
Persian Sufis, 136
Photo-electricity, 38
199
Index
Physics:
Atomic and electronic, 23, 30, 36-8
Astronomical, 37
Methods of, 30, 35-42
Nuclear, 37
Relativity, 40-1
PIERO della Francesca, 159
PlSANELLO, 159
PLATO, 119, 120, 123
Poetry, Chinese, 124
Poetry, imagination in, 45-6, 75-85
POLLAIUOLO, Antonio, 158, 159
Precession, 97, 99, 100
PREDA, 158
Pre-Raphaelites, 33
Printing, 165-7, ^3
PROCLUS, 93
Ptolemaic astronomy, 9 1
Ptolemy, editions of the works of, 93,
Quakers, 123
Radiation, 36, 38
AL RASHID, HARUN the Caliph, 94
Rationalist, 185
Realism, 125
REGIOMONTANUS, 160, 166
Relativity, 40-1
REMBRANDT, 33
Representational art, defined, 28
RIGGI, 105, 1 06, 1 14
RICHARDS, I. A., 76, 120
Romanesque, 44, 65, 67, 68, 69
Royal Society, the, 125
RUTHERFORD, Lord, 37
alSAGHANI,98
SALAI, 145
Sanskrit constellation names, 93
SARTON, Dr. G., 161
Sculpture, 33, 55-64, 65-70, 148, 168
SBAIULES, 151, 160, 165
SEBOKHT, Bishop, 93
SEEMANN, 113
da SESTO, Cesare, 158
Sforza, the monument to, 148, 168
Shang-Yin dynasty, 60
Sharaf al Dawla, observatory of, 98
al SHIRAZI, 107
SlGNORELLI, Luca, 159
SODOMA, 158
SOLARIO, 158
Spherical astrolabes, 113
SPINOZA, 88, 119, 120, 123-25, 126,
184, 185, 190
Statics, 152
STEIN, Sir Aurel, 109
Strauss, music of, 32
Stravinsky, music of, 72, 73
al SUFI, 98
Sung dynasty, 107, 109, 115, 116
Symbolic art, defined, 28
Symbolism, 128-36
T ang dynasty, 109
Tao Te Cking, the, 121
Taoism, 62, 121, 122, 134
THABIT, the translator, 95, 97, 165,
167
THEON, 93, 111,162
Time, 126
TOSCANELLI, Paolo, i6o
TYGHOBRAHE, 103, 114
UCCELLO, 159
alURDi, 107
Velocity of light, 36, 39
VENTURI, 159
VERMEER, 33
VERROGGHIO, 158, 159, 168, 170
VITRUVIUS, 149
Wagner, music of, 32
WALEY, Arthur, 109, 120
Wave-mechanics of the atom, 38
Windsor drawings by Leonardo da
Vinci, 146 .
WYLIE, 103-6
X-rays, 36, 37
YE-LU-CHU-TSAI, 106, 108, 116
YULE, 103-6
ibn YUNUS, 99
i, 99, 162
Zodiac, 114-15
2OO
