Poets, Scientists and Rainbows

William Blake, letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802, in Complete Writings, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) p. 818.Google Scholar

Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber, 1992).Google Scholar

Quoted in J. L. Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) p. 52.Google Scholar

I am indebted for these quotations to E. A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1932). Unfortunately Burtt’s aim in showing the extent to which the founders of modern science were steeped in pre-scientific mysticism was to undermine the rational basis of science. Of course, rational science must begin somewhere: in irrational pre-science.Google Scholar

Quoted in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) p. 863.Google Scholar

The phrase is Maynard Keynes’ and represents the view he opposed in his essay, ‘Newton, the Man’, in the Royal Society’s volume, Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), pp. 27–34.Google Scholar

A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925) p. 11.Google Scholar

Abraham Pais, ‘Subtle is the Lord’ … The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) p. vii.Google Scholar

Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949).Google Scholar

Quoted in Donald Ault’s scrupulous, difficult, and brilliant Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) p. 8. Ault reminds us that many poets were aware of those elements in Newtonian thought that went beyond mechanical atomism and he cites Carl Grabo’s study of Shelley, linking the vision of Prometheus Unbound with the Neo-Platonic and mystical aspects of Newton’s thought.Google Scholar

R. H. Green, The Thwarting of Laplace’s Demon (London: Macmillan, forthcoming).Google Scholar

In The Explicit Animal I have attacked the belief that human consciousness can be explained in evolutionary and biological terms and the related assumptions that humanity can be reduced to an animality in turn reducible to configurations of otherwise inanimate matter. I accept the materialistic basis of organic life but not of the ‘explicitness’ that characterises the ‘species-being’ of humankind (this is alluded to later in ‘The Uselessness of Consciousness’).Google Scholar

William Blake, letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802, in Complete Writings, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) p. 818.Google Scholar

See, for example, Erich Heller, ‘Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth’, in The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) for a witty and penetrating, as well as scholarly, discussion.Google Scholar

Coleridge’s attitude to science is particularly complex. After his initial enthusiasm for the mechanistic quasi-Newtonian associationist psychology of Hartley et al., he became disillusioned with psychological atomism. Then he dreamt of reconciling the ‘mechanico-corpuscular system’ of the British Empiricists with the ‘organic’ and ‘active’ philosophical psychology of contemporary German philosophy — as part of a larger project of ‘reducing all knowledges into harmony’. However, he was also arguably — and very quotably — hostile to science: in, for example, Biographia Literaria, his philosophical chef d’oeuvre, where he deplored the fact that ‘we have purchased a few brilliant inventions at the loss of all communion with life and the spirit of nature’.Google Scholar

Professor John Beer (personal communication) has drawn my attention to another instance of the inconstancy of Coleridge’s attitude to science. A letter, in which Coleridge sets out a disparaging view of Newton’s status, is followed by another in which he begs his correspondent to destroy such a set of arrogant assertions. Professor Beer adds: ‘Needless to say the correspondent did not and the letter was preserved for posterity!’Google Scholar

Most interesting of all is Blake’s own ambivalence (and here I am again indebted to Professor Beer for pointing out the relevant passages). In Europe, Plate 13, Newton is described as ‘A mighty spirit leap’d from the land of Albion’ (Oxford, Complete Writings, p. 243). In A Descriptive Catalogue, Newton is ranked with Chaucer and Linnaeus: ‘As Newton numbered the stars and Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men’.Google Scholar

Professor Beer’s interpretation of the Newton plate reproduced on the cover of this book is that, for Blake, Newton is ‘a basically beautiful figure who has restricted his vision’. Although he is a manifestation of Urizen, who closed people’s eyes to the divine vision, by ‘contracting and bounding’, bending over the fallen world, marking out its limits with a pair of compasses, he is not thoroughly evil nor an unredeemably negative force: he is great but misguided.Google Scholar

In Blake’s system, the physics of Newton was lumped with the metaphysics and meta-science of Locke and Bacon, with the aesthetics of Reynolds, the poetics of Pope, Dryden and Dr Johnson, with the political theory of Burke and with the theology of the English State Church. Many of those who approve Blake on Newton seem judiciously to forget Blake on Pope, Burke, etc. ‘The aggregate of all this’, as Harold Bloom points out (in his Headnote to Blake in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, vol. II, p. 12. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), ‘quite unfairly but wholly unforgettably, Blake fused together as the Accuser of Sin, the spectral torturer of English man, of Albion’. ‘Unfair but unforgettable’ seems to do Blake’s version of Newton precise justice.Google Scholar

William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Third, lines 61–4. These lines are found only in the 1850 edition.Google Scholar

The Prelude, Book Third, line 270. This is found in both the 1805 and 1850 editions. Grevel Lindop, in the mistaken belief that I was arguing (in an earlier version of this essay published in PN Review) that the Romantics were uniformly hostile to science, has usefully documented Romantic enthusiasm for science and technology (Lindop, ‘Newton Raymond Tallis and the Three Cultures’, PN Review, 18 (2), 1991).Google Scholar

Wordsworth at the Barbican’, in Gerald Weissman The Doctor with Two Heads and Other Essays (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990). Reading this superb essay — one of several in a brilliant book — I was tempted to echo Donatus’ cry: ‘Cursed be those who make our remarks before us!’. However, I have found Weissman strengthens my case rather than makes it superfluous. He quotes M. H. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), who reminds us of those poets such as Thomson, for whom Newtonian science was an inspiration rather than a target.Google Scholar

Though, of course, the only true paradise is paradise lost. Blake’s Ecchoing Green is a figment of the imagination. ‘Old John, with white hair’, laughing away care, ‘Sitting under the oak, Among the old folk’ hardly corresponds to the documented reality of old age in the pre-industrial organic communities of the past (see, for example, Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost, London: Methuen, 1965). Brutal and punitive attitudes to the elderly in times past have been well-documented in more recent literature (see, for example, M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth, ‘Images of Ageing’, in J. Bond, P. Coleman, S. Peace, (eds) Ageing in Society. An Introduction to Social Gerontology, 2nd ed., London: Sage, 1993). Blake’s vision of village life without fear, tyranny, bullying, illness, hunger, pain, is a poignant fantasy of a Golden Age — of a childhood in an organic community we have been taught to feel we might have had and have somehow lost. Certainly, there is little reason to assume that modern factories are necessarily more hateful places to work in than the village smithy, with a boss unconstrained by a tradition of health and safety at work and untroubled by any legislation on employees’ rights. The lot of the apprentice, the servant or the farmer’s boy was not a happy one. There would be no redress against a drunken bully; and sexual harrassment would be more than just a suggestive comment next to the xeroxing machine. A study of the period 1300–1840 (A. MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300–1840, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) has dramatically illustrated how individuals with diminished physical, financial and social resources were often neglected and despised.Google Scholar

Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber, 1992).Google Scholar

See Lindop (‘Newton, Raymond Tallis and the Three Cultures’ cited in note 5) for a fascinating brief account of some of the factors that deepened the divide between arts and science education in Victorian England. The rival claims of influential and charismatic figures such as Spencer and Huxley on behalf of science education, and Matthew Arnold on behalf of education in literature, and the wider in-fighting and position-taking (not to speak of vested interests in educational institutions), are fascinatingly set out by Lindop. His conclusion is worth quoting:Google Scholar

The structure of academic disciplines in these institutions [the new universities such as those of London and Manchester] was established by men passionately aware of the latest moves in the ideological battle between established Christianity and the world of modern learning … it is in these struggles that the battle between the Two Cultures has its roots. In a secular intellectual world, where is the source of value and authority to lie? Religion once dead, who takes over? To put it plainly: the Humanities and the Sciences believe that together they have slain Religion. Now they turn on each other and fight for succession.Google Scholar

Popper’s views are presented most rigorously in The Logic of Scientific Enquiry and most accessibly in Objective Knowledge. The latter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) contains ‘The Bucket and the Searchlight: Two Theories of Knowledge’, as an Appendix.Google Scholar

Quoted in J. L. Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) p. 52.Google Scholar

Quoted in Heilbron, ibid., p. 57.Google Scholar

Against this, Wolpert (op. cit., note 8 above) has emphasised the differences between creativity in the arts and sciences: ‘Creativity in the arts is characteristically intensely personal and reflects both the feelings and the ideas of the artist. By contrast, scientific creativity is always contrained by self-consistency, by trying to understand nature and by what is already known’. And he concludes that ‘it is only at a relatively low level that creativity in the arts and in science may be similar: a level which includes all human activities that involve problem-solving, from accountancy to tennis’.Google Scholar

There is much that I would agree with here. Certainly, the science that I am personally involved in — which is more typical of the science practised by most scientists than the ‘breakthrough’ experimentation and ‘daring’ speculation which features in the general press — operates within rather narrow constraints and even the ideas that guide it are hardly conceived within a white heat of inspiration. However, much literature of the highest order also acts within the kinds of constraints that Wolpert speaks of. But the ideas that have guided science as a whole and created the framework within which ‘humble under-gardeners’ such as myself operate, are themselves the products of intense thought and an order of inspiration not often found in ordinary problem-solving activities such as accountancy or tennis. And these are the ideas that one would wish to become common currency, even amongst humanist intellectuals.Google Scholar

I am indebted for these quotations to E. A. Burtt’s Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1932). Unfortunately Burtt’s aim in showing the extent to which the founders of modern science were steeped in pre-scientific mysticism was to undermine the rational basis of science. Of course, rational science must begin somewhere: in irrational pre-science.Google Scholar

Quoted in Richard Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) p. 863.Google Scholar

The phrase is Maynard Keynes’ and represents the view he opposed in his essay, ‘Newton, the Man’, in the Royal Society’s volume, Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), pp. 27–34.Google Scholar

A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925) p. 11.Google Scholar

Ibid, p. 20.Google Scholar

Abraham Pais, ‘Subtle is the Lord’ … The Science and Life of Albert Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) p. vii.Google Scholar

Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949).Google Scholar

Not all the stories are accepted. Recently, Kekule’s version of the way the basic features of the carbon chain theory and the benzene ring came to him — recounted by Kekule in a speech on the occasion of the Benzolfest (a celebration in 1890 to honour him on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his publication of the cyclic structure of benzene) — has been questioned. In The Kekule Riddle, edited by John Wotiz (Vienna: Cache River Press, 1993), it is suggested that Kekule invented the dreams that he claimed led to his discoveries in order to support his claim to priority. It is difficult to be sure, but the message he left his audience with — ‘Let us learn to dream, gentlemen; then we shall perhaps find the truth’ — is a good one: if the ways things are is counter to our ordinary intuitions and unreflective expectations, we need to dream in order to wake out of ordinary wakefulness.Google Scholar

This is a theme to which Weber returns repeatedly. It is dealt with in his study of China; in his discussion of science as a vocation; and in his analysis of the bureaucratisation and rationalisation characteristic of the modern world. The relevant texts, along with an illuminating discussion, are available in From Max Weber, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948).Google Scholar

Weissmann, ‘Wordsworth at the Barbican’. He derives this story from M. H. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse. Google Scholar

Weissman’s interpretation of this story as an expression of hostility to Newton has been challenged by Lindop (‘Newton, Raymond Tallis and the Three Cultures’), who cites Benjamin Haydon’s Diary, the original source of the quotation. It does not, however, seem to me that the diary entry can be read in any other way than as revealing the resentment of Romantics towards Newton because ‘he had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism’.Google Scholar

Quoted in Jeremy Bernstein, Einstein (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973) p. 156.Google Scholar

In The Matter Myth (London: Penguin, Viking, 1991) John Gribbins and Paul Davies place Newton at the head of a massive movement in science towards a ‘cosmic clockwork’ view of the universe which hasGoogle Scholar

now collapsed under the triple assault of relativity, quantum indeterminacy and chaos theory.Google Scholar

Quoted in Donald Ault’s scrupulous, difficult, and brilliant Visionary Physics: Blake’s Response to Newton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) p. 8. Ault reminds us that many poets were aware of those elements in Newtonian thought that went beyond mechanical atomism and he cites Carl Grabo’s study of Shelley, linking the vision of Prometheus Unbound with the Neo-Platonic and mystical aspects of Newton’s thought.Google Scholar

Quoted in Ault, ibid., p. 8.Google Scholar

R. H. Green, The Thwarting of Laplace’s Demon (London: Macmillan, forthcoming).Google Scholar

Ernst Mach, The Science of Mechanics, translated by T. J. McCormack (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1892) p. 460.Google Scholar

See Gribbins and Davies, The Matter Myth. Google Scholar

See, for example, P. C. W. Davies and J. R. Brown, The Ghost in the Atom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

In The Explicit Animal I have attacked the belief that human consciousness can be explained in evolutionary and biological terms and the related assumptions that humanity can be reduced to an animality in turn reducible to configurations of otherwise inanimate matter. I accept the materialistic basis of organic life but not of the ‘explicitness’ that characterises the ‘species-being’ of humankind (this is alluded to later in ‘The Uselessness of Consciousness’).Google Scholar

This famous poem is quoted in Weissman, ‘Wordsworth at the Barbican’.Google Scholar

H. F. Amiel, Journal Intime, translated by Mrs Humphrey Ward (London: Macmillan, 1889) p. 21.Google Scholar

John Keats, letter to George and Tom Keats 21, 27(?) December, 1817.Google Scholar

Michael Schmidt, ‘William Blake’, in An Introduction to Fifty British Poets (London: Pan Books, 1979).Google Scholar

Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 10, lines 20–1.Google Scholar

Most notably Ault’s Visionary Physics. note 38.Google Scholar

Illustrating the truth of Johnson’s observation: ‘Such is the power of reputation justly acquired that its blaze drives away the eye from nice examination’. Johnson’s comment seems more fairly applied to the prophetic books than to Lycidas, its original target.Google Scholar

H. F. Amiel, Journal Intime, translated by Mrs Humphrey Ward (London: Macmillan, 1889) p. 21.Google Scholar