In this great change something has been won and something lost. I take it to be part and parcel of the same great process of Internalisation18 which has turned genius from an attendant daemon into a quality of the mind. Always, century by century, item after item is transferred from the object’s side of the account to the subject’s. And now, in some extreme forms of Behaviourism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we ‘go from that’ is a dark question.
EPILOGUE
The best in this kind are but shadows.
SHAKESPEARE
I have made no serious effort to hide the fact that the old Model delights me as I believe it delighted our ancestors. Few constructions of the imagination seem to me to have combined splendour, sobriety, and coherence in the same degree. It is possible that some readers have long been itching to remind me that it had a serious defect; it was not true.
I agree. It was not true. But I would like to end by saying that this charge can no longer have exactly the same sort of weight for us that it would have had in the nineteenth century. We then claimed, as we still claim, to know much more about the real universe than the medievals did; and hoped, as we still hope, to discover yet more truths about it in the future. But the meaning of the words ‘know’ and ‘truth’ in this context has begun to undergo a certain change.
The nineteenth century still held the belief that by inferences from our sense-experience (improved by instruments) we could ‘know’ the ultimate physical reality more or less as, by maps, pictures, and travel-books, a man can ‘know’ a country he has not visited; and that in both cases the ‘truth’ would be a sort of mental replica of the thing itself. Philosophers might have disquieting comments to make on this conception; but scientists and plain men did not much attend to them.
Already, to be sure, mathematics were the idiom in which many of the sciences spoke. But I do not think it was doubted that there was a concrete reality about which the mathematics held good; distinguishable from the mathematics as a heap of apples is from the process of counting them. We knew indeed that it was in some respects not adequately imaginable; quantities and distances if either very small or very great could not be visualised. But, apart from that, we hoped that ordinary imagination and conception could grasp it. We should then have through mathematics a knowledge not merely mathematical. We should be like the man coming to know about a foreign country without visiting it. He learns about the mountains from carefully studying the contour lines on a map. But his knowledge is not a knowledge of contour lines. The real knowledge is achieved when these enable him to say ‘That would be an easy ascent’, ‘This is a dangerous precipice’, ‘A would not be visible from B’, ‘These woods and waters must make a pleasant valley’. In going beyond the contour lines to such conclusions he is (if he knows how to read a map) getting nearer to the reality.
It would be very different if someone said to him (and was believed) ‘But it is the contour lines themselves that are the fullest reality you can get. In turning away from them to these other statements you are getting further from the reality, not nearer. All those ideas about “real” rocks and slopes and views are merely a metaphor or a parable; a pis aller, permissible as a concession to the weakness of those who can’t understand contour lines, but misleading if they are taken literally.’
And this, if I understand the situation, is just what has now happened as regards the physical sciences. The mathematics are now the nearest to the reality we can get. Anything imaginable, even anything that can be manipulated by ordinary (that is, non-mathematical) conceptions, far from being a further truth to which mathematics were the avenue, is a mere analogy, a concession to our weakness. Without a parable modern physics speaks not to the multitudes. Even among themselves, when they attempt to verbalise their findings, the scientists begin to speak of this as making ‘models’. It is from them that I have borrowed the word. But these ‘models’ are not, like model ships, small-scale replicas of the reality. Sometimes they illustrate this or that aspect of it by an analogy. Sometimes, they do not illustrate but merely suggest, like the sayings of the mystics. An expression such as ‘the curvature of space’ is strictly comparable to the old definition of God as ‘a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’. Both succeed in suggesting; each does so by offering what is, on the level of our ordinary thinking, nonsense. By accepting the ‘curvature of space’ we are not ‘knowing’ or enjoying ‘truth’ in the fashion that was once thought to be possible.
It would therefore be subtly misleading to say ‘The medievals thought the universe to be like that, but we know it to be like this’. Part of what we now know is that we cannot, in the old sense, ‘know what the universe is like’ and that no model we can build will be, in that old sense, ‘like’ it.
Again, such a statement would suggest that the old Model gave way simply under the pressure of newly discovered phenomena—as a detective’s original theory of the crime might yield to the discovery that his first suspect had an unassailable alibi. And this certainly happened as regards many particular details in the old Model, just as it happens daily to particular hypotheses in a modern laboratory. Exploration refuted the belief that the tropics are too hot for life; the first nova refuted the belief that the translunary realm is immutable. But the change of the Model as a whole was not so simple an affair.
The most spectacular differences between the Medieval Model and our own concern astronomy and biology. In both fields the new Model is supported by a wealth of empirical evidence. But we should misrepresent the historical process if we said that the irruption of new facts was the sole cause of the alteration.
The old astronomy was not, in any exact sense, ‘refuted’ by the telescope. The scarred surface of the Moon and the satellites of Jupiter can, if one wants, be fitted into a geocentric scheme. Even the enormous, and enormously different, distances of the stars can be accommodated if you are prepared to make their ‘sphere’, the stellatum, of a vast thickness. The old scheme, ‘with Centric and Eccentric scribl’d o’re’, had been tinkered a good deal to keep up with observations. How far, by endless tinkerings, it could have kept up with them till even now, I do not know. But the human mind will not long endure such ever-increasing complications if once it has seen that some simpler conception can ‘save the appearances’. Neither theological prejudice nor vested interests can permanently keep in favour a Model which is seen to be grossly uneconomical. The new astronomy triumphed not because the case for the old became desperate, but because the new was a better tool; once this was grasped, our ingrained conviction that Nature herself is thrifty did the rest. When our Model is in its turn abandoned, this conviction will no doubt be at work again. What models we should build, or whether we could build any, if some great alteration in human psychology withdrew this conviction, is an interesting question.
But the change of Models did not involve astronomy alone. It involved also, in biology, the change—arguably more important—from a devolutionary to an evolutionary scheme; from a cosmology in which it was axiomatic that ‘all perfect things precede all imperfect things’1 to one in which it is axiomatic that ‘the starting point (Entwicklungsgrund) is always lower than what is developed’ (the degree of change can be gauged by the fact that primitive is now in most contexts a pejorative term).
This revolution was certainly not brought about by the discovery of new facts. When I was a boy I believed that ‘Darwin discovered evolution’ and that the far more general, radical, and even cosmic developmentalism which till lately dominated all popular thought was a superstructure raised on the biological theorem. This view has been sufficiently disproved.2 The statement which I have just quoted about the Entwicklungsgrund was made by Schelling in 1812. In him, in Keats, in Wagner’s tetralogy, in Goethe, in Herder, the change to the new point of view has already taken place. Its growth can be traced far further back i
n Leibniz, Akenside, Kant, Maupertuis, Diderot. Already in 1786 Robinet believes in an ‘active principle’ which overcomes brute matter, and la progression n’est pas finie. For him, as for Bergson or de Chardin, the ‘gates of the future are wide open’. The demand for a developing world—a demand obviously in harmony both with the revolutionary and the romantic temper—grows up first; when it is full grown the scientists go to work and discover the evidence on which our belief in that sort of universe would now be held to rest. There is no question here of the old Model’s being shattered by the inrush of new phenomena. The truth would seem to be the reverse; that when changes in the human mind produce a sufficient disrelish of the old Model and a sufficient hankering for some new one, phenomena to support that new one will obediently turn up. I do not at all mean that these new phenomena are illusory. Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes.
An interesting astronomical change in our Model is going on at present. Fifty years ago, if you asked an astronomer about ‘life on other worlds’, he was apt to be totally agnostic about it or even to stress its improbability. We are now told that in so vast a universe stars that have planets and planets that have inhabitants must occur times without number. Yet no compulsive evidence is to hand. But is it irrelevant that in between the old opinion and the new we have had the vast proliferation of ‘science fiction’ and the beginnings of space-travel in real life?
I hope no one will think that I am recommending a return to the Medieval Model. I am only suggesting considerations that may induce us to regard all Models in the right way, respecting each and idolising none. We are all, very properly, familiar with the idea that in every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe. But there is a two-way traffic; the Model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind. We must recognise that what has been called ‘a taste in universes’ is not only pardonable but inevitable. We can no longer dismiss the change of Models as a simple progress from error to truth. No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s knowledge. Hardly any battery of new facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical.
It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts—unprovoked as the nova of 1572. But I think it is more likely to change when, and because, far-reaching changes in the mental temper of our descendants demand that it should. The new Model will not be set up without evidence, but the evidence will turn up when the inner need for it becomes sufficiently great. It will be true evidence. But nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her. Here, as in the courts, the character of the evidence depends on the shape of the examination, and a good cross-examiner can do wonders. He will not indeed elicit falsehoods from an honest witness. But, in relation to the total truth in the witness’s mind, the structure of the examination is like a stencil. It determines how much of that total truth will appear and what pattern it will suggest.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: THE MEDIEVAL SITUATION
1 See Before Philosophy, J. A. Wilson, etc. (1949).
2 Ed. F. Madden, 3 vols. (1847).
3. In Lydgate’s trans. (E.E.T.S. ed. F. J. Furnivall, 1899), 3415 sq.
4. De Gen. Animalium, 778a; Polit. 1255b.
5. There is a tradition that Hipparchus (fl. 150 B.C.) detected one (see Pliny, Nat. Hist. II, XXIV). The great Nova in Cassiopeia of Nov. 1572 was a most important event for the history of thought (see F. R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England, Baltimore, 1937, p. 154).
6. Metaphys. 1072b. Cf. Dante, Par. XXVIII, 42.
7. De Mundo, 392a. Whether this essay is Aristotle’s or merely of the Aristotelian school does not matter for my purpose.
CHAPTER 2: RESERVATIONS
1. The text of Aristotle in Latin translations (themselves often of Arabic translations) begins to be known in the twelfth century.
2. Ia XXXII, Art. I, ad secundum.
3. A. O. Barfield, Saving the Appearances (1957), p. 51.
4. Cf. the maxim (quoted in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection) heterogenea non comparari possunt.
CHAPTER 3: SELECTED MATERIALS: THE CLASSICAL PERIOD
1. Mathematikes Suntaxeos, Greek text and French trans. M. Halma (Paris, 1913).
2. Cicero, De Republica, De Legibus, text and trans. by C. W. Keyes (Loeb Library, 1928).
3. In the sense of Latin statio, i.e. ‘post’.
4. De Mundi Universitate, II, Pros. V, p. 44, ed. Barach and Wrobel (Innsbruck, 1876).
5. Eternal Life, I, iii.
6. i.e. doctrine, theorem.
7. Inferno, IV, 88.
8. See E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (London, 1953). Unfortunately the translations of Latin quotations in the English version of this book are not to be relied on.
9. Convivio, IV, xxviii, 13 sq.
10. Pt. I, 2, M. 3, subs. 2.
11. Pt. II, M. 2, 6, subs. 3.
12. Pt. III, 2, M. 1, subs. 2.
13. Pharsalia, VI, 507 sq.
14. Qua niger astriferis connectitur axibus aer.
15. Quodque patet terras inter lunaeque meatus.
16. Se lumine vero Implevit.
17. Quanta sub nocte iaceret Nostra dies. I think this might mean either ‘How dark, compared with the aether, our terrestrial day is’, or ‘Under how huge an abyss of nocturnal phenomena (stars, see 11, 12, 13) our terrestrial day takes place’. Much more probably the former, see below, p. III.
18. The Allegory of Love, pp. 49 sq.; ‘Dante’s Statius’, Medium Aevum, XXV, 3.
19. In Lydgate’s version, 3344 sq.
20. Passages which can be quoted from Cicero, Chalcidius, and doubtless many others, show only a momentary (metaphorical, not allegorical) personification of Natura—such a personification as any important abstract noun is likely to undergo.
21. At whose pronouncèd name earth never failed To tremble, who alone dares see unveiled The Gorgon’s face.
22. Cf. Phaedrus, 242b–c.
23. P. L. III, 461.
24. Timaeus, 38e.
25. For another, and very different, sense of genius, see my Allegory of Love, Appendix I.
26. Confessions, VII, ix.
27. On this, see A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Harvard, 1957).
CHAPTER 4: SELECTED MATERIALS: THE SEMINAL PERIOD
1. S. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (1898), cap. 1.
2. Confessions, VII, ix.
3. Apology, II, xiii.
4. Platonis Timaeus interprete Chalcidio, ed. Z. Wrobel (Lipsiae, 1876).
5. Op. cit. LV, p. 122.
6. CXXVI, p. 191.
7. CLXXVI, p. 225.
8. CXXXII, p. 195; CCC, p. 329.
9. CXXXII, p. 195.
10. De Civitate, VIII, 14–X, 32.
11. Chalcidius CCLXXVI, p. 306.
12. CLXXVI, p. 226.
13. CCXXXV–CCXCV, pp. 319–27.
14. LXXVI, p. 144.
15. CCCIV, p. 333.
16. CCCII, p. 330.
17. CXCVIII, p. 240.
18. CXXVII, p. 191.
19. CCLIII, p. 285.
20. Macbeth, II, i, 7.
21. CCLVI, p. 289.
22. LIX, p. 127.
23. LXXIII, p. 141.
24. LXXV, p. 143.
25. LXXVI, p. 144.
26. CC, p. 241.
27. CCLXIV, p. 296.
28. CCLXV, p. 296.
29. CCLXVII, p. 298.
30. CXXXVI, p. 198.
31. CXX
XII, p. 195.
32. CXXX, p. 193.
33. CXXXVII, p. 199.
34. CXXXI, p. 194.
35. CCLV, p. 288.
36. CXXXII, p. 269.
37. Ibid.
38. De Planctu Naturae, Prosa, III, 108 sq. in Wright, Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets.
39. Chalcidius, LXV, p. 132.
40. CCL, p. 284.
41. CCLXXXVI, pp. 316 sq. Cf. Aristotle, Physics, 192a.
42. Chalcidius, p. 317.
43. II, ix, p. 52.
44. Chalcidius, CXXIX, p. 193.
45. Wright, op. cit. VII, ii, 4, p. 384.
46. CCIII, p. 243.
47. Timaeus, 43a.
48. Trans. W. H. Stahl, Macrobius: On the Dream of Scipio (Columbia, 1952).
49. I, ix.
50. II, xii. This is an old Greek semi-pun on σωµα and σηµα.
51. II, xii.
52. I, xvi.
53. Acts XV. 34.
54. Authorship disputed.
55. Sancti Dionysii . . . opera omnia . . . studio Petri Lanselii . . . Lutetiae Parisiorum (MDCXV).
56. See Dante, Par. XXVIII, 133–5.
57. C. T. Prol. 624.
58. Essay on Man, I, 278.
59. Original . . . of Satire, ed. W. P. Ker, vol. II, pp. 34 sq.
60. P.R. I, 447.
61. Urn Burial, V.
62. Summa Theol. IIIa, Qu. xxx, Art. 2.
63. I Met. I, 5; p. 128 in the Stewart and Rand’s text with I.P.’s translation (Loeb Library, 1908).