There occur in biological evolution periods of crisis and transition when there is a rapid, almost explosive branching out in all directions, often resulting in a radical change in the dominant trend of development. The same kind of thing seems to have happened in the evolution of thought at critical periods like the sixth century B.C. or the seventeenth A.D. After these stages of "adaptative radiations", when the species is plastic and malleable, there usually follow periods of stabilization and specialization along the new lines – which again often lead into dead ends of rigid over-specialization. When we look back at the grotesque decline of Aristotelian scholasticism, or the blinkered singlemindedness of Ptolemaic astronomy, we are reminded of the fate of those "orthodox" marsupials, like the koala, who changed from tree-climbers into tree-clingers. Their hands and feet turned into hooks, their fingers no longer served to pluck fruit and explore objects but degenerated into curved claws with the sole purpose of fixing the animal to the bark of the tree to which it hangs on for dear life.
To quote a last analogy, we find "faulty linkages" in evolution which remind one of certain ideological mésalliances. The central nerve chain of an invertebrate such as the lobster runs beneath its alimentary canal, whereas the main portion of its rudimentary brain is placed above it, in its forehead. In other words, the lobster's gullet, from mouth to stomach, has to pass through the midst of its brain ganglia. If its brain were to expand – and expand it must if the lobster is to grow in wisdom – its gullet would be squeezed and it would starve. In spiders and scorpions something like this did actually happen: their brain mass has so compressed their alimentary tube that only fluid food can pass through: they had to become blood-suckers. Mutatis mutandis, something on these lines happened when the stranglehold of Neoplatonism prevented man from taking in any solid empirical food for thought, and forced him to feed throughout the Dark Ages on a liquid diet of other-worldliness. And did not the stranglehold of mechanistic materialism in the nineteenth century produce the opposite effect, spiritual starvation? In the first case, religion had entered into a misalliance with a nature-rejecting ideology; in the second, science became allied to an arid philosophy. Or again, the stranglehold of the dogma of uniform motion in perfect circles turned the Copernican system into a kind of crustacean ideology. The analogies may seem far-fetched, which indeed they are, but all they are meant to demonstrate is the fact that such faulty linkages of a self-defeating nature occur in the realms of both biological and mental evolution.
2. Separations and Reintegrations
The process of evolution may be described as differentiation of structure and integration of function. The more differentiated and specialized the parts, the more elaborate co-ordination is needed to create a well-balanced whole. The ultimate criterion of the value of a functional whole is the degree of its internal harmony or integratedness, whether the "functional whole" is a biological species or a civilization or an individual. A whole is defined by the pattern of relations between its parts, not by the sum of its parts; and a civilization is not defined by the sum of its science, technology, art and social organization, but by the total pattern which they form, and the degree of harmonious integration in that pattern. A physician has recently said that "the organism in its totality is as essential to an explanation of its elements as its elements are to an explanation of the organism." This is as true when we talk about the supra-renal gland as it is when we talk of the elements of a culture – Byzantine art, or medieval cosmology, or utilitarian ethics.
Conversely, a diseased state of an organism, a society or culture, is characterized by a weakening of the integrative controls, and the tendency of its parts to behave in an independent and self-assertive manner, ignoring the superior interest of the whole, or trying to impose their own laws on it. Such states of imbalance may be caused either by the weakening of the coordinating powers of the whole through growth beyond a critical limit, senescence, and so forth; or by excessive stimulation of an organ or part; or its cutting off from communication with the integrative centre. The isolation of the organ from central control leads, according to circumstances, to its hyper-activity or degeneration. In the realm of the mind, the "splitting off" of thoughts and emotions, of some aspect of the personality, leads to similar results. The term schizophrenia is directly derived from this splitting-off process; "repressed" and "autonomous" complexes point in the same direction. In the obsessional neuroses, in the "fixed ideas" and "fixed behaviour patterns", we see parts of the personality dissociating themselves from the whole.
In a society or culture the degree of integration between its parts, or fields of endeavour, is equally decisive. But here the diagnosis of dis-integrative symptoms is vastly more difficult and always controversial, because there exists no criterion of normality. I believe, nevertheless, that the story outlined in this book will be recognized as a story of the splitting-off, and subsequent isolated development, of various branches of knowledge and endeavour – sky-geometry, terrestrial physics, Platonic and scholastic theology – each leading to rigid orthodoxies, one-sided specializations, collective obsessions, whose mutual incompatibility was reflected in the symptoms of double-think and "controlled schizophrenia". But it is also a story of unexpected reconciliations and new syntheses emerging from apparently hopeless fragmentation. Can we derive some positive hints from the conditions under which these apparently spontaneous cures occur?
3. Some Patterns of Discovery
In the first place, a new synthesis never results from a mere adding together of two fully developed branches in biological or mental evolution. Each new departure, each reintegration of what has become separated, involves the breaking down of the rigid, ossified patterns of behaviour and thought. Copernicus failed to do so; he tried to mate the heliocentric tradition with orthodox Aristotelian doctrine, and failed. Newton succeeded because orthodox astronomy had already been broken up by Kepler and orthodox physics by Galileo; reading a new pattern into the shambles, he united them in a new conceptual frame. Similarly, chemistry and physics could only become united after physics had renounced the dogma of the indivisibility and impermeability of the atom, thus destroying its own classic concept of matter, and chemistry had renounced its doctrine of ultimate immutable elements. A new evolutionary departure is only possible after a certain amount of de-differentiation, a cracking and thawing of the frozen structures resulting from isolated, over-specialized development.
Most geniuses responsible for the major mutations in the history of thought seem to have certain features in common; on the one hand scepticism, often carried to the point of iconoclasm, in their attitude towards traditional ideas, axioms and dogmas, towards everything that is taken for granted; on the other hand, an open-mindedness that verges on naïve credulity towards new concepts which seem to hold out some promise to their instinctive gropings. Out of this combination results that crucial capacity of perceiving a familiar object, situation, problem, or collection of data, in a sudden new light or new context: of seeing a branch not as part of a tree, but as a potential weapon or tool; of associating the fall of an apple not with its ripeness, but with the motion of the moon. The discoverer perceives relational patterns or functional analogies where nobody saw them before, as the poet perceives the image of a camel in a drifting cloud.
This act of wrenching away an object or concept from its habitual associative context and seeing it in a new context is, as I have tried to show, an essential part of the creative process. 1 It is an act both of destruction and of creation, for it demands the breaking up of a mental habit, the melting down, with the blowlamp of Cartesian doubt, of the frozen structure of accepted theory, to enable the new fusion to take place. This perhaps explains the strange combination of scepticism and credulity in the creative genius. 2 Every creative act – in science, art or religion – involves a regression to a more primitive level, a new innocence of perception liberated from the cataract of accepted beliefs. It is a process of reculer pour mieux sauter, of disinteg
ration preceding the new synthesis, comparable to the dark night of the soul through which the mystic must pass.
Another pre-condition for basic discoveries to occur, and to be accepted, is what one might call the "ripeness" of the age. It is an elusive quality, for the "ripeness" of a science for a decisive change is not determined by the situation in that particular science alone, but by the general climate of the age. It was the philosophical climate of Greece after the Macedonian conquest that nipped in the bud Aristarchus' heliocentric concept of the universe; and astronomy went on happily with its impossible epicycles, because that was the type of science that the medieval climate favoured.
Moreover, it worked. This ossified discipline, split off from reality, was capable of predicting eclipses and conjunctions with considerable precision, and of providing tables which were by and large adequate to the demand. On the other hand, the seventeenth century's "ripeness" for Newton, or the twentieth's for Einstein and Freud, was caused by a general mood of transition and awareness of crisis, which embraced the whole human spectrum of activities, social organization, religious beliefs, art, science, fashions.
The symptom that a particular branch of science or art is ripe for a change is a feeling of frustration and malaise, not necessarily caused by any acute crisis in that specific branch – which might be doing quite well in its traditional terms of reference – but by a feeling that the whole tradition is somehow out of step, cut off from the mainstream, that the traditional criteria have become meaningless, divorced from living reality, isolated from the integral whole. This is the point where the specialist's hubris yields to philosophical soul-searching, to the painful reappraisal of his basic axioms and of the meaning of terms which he had taken for granted; in a word, to the thaw of dogma. This is the situation which provides genius with the opportunity for his creative plunge under the broken surface.
4. Mystic and Savant
The most disturbing aspect of this story of separations and reintegrations, the one to which I have been constantly harping back, concerns the mystic and the savant.
At the beginning of this long journey, I quoted Plutarch's comment on the Pythagoreans: "The contemplation of the eternal is the aim of philosophy, as the contemplation of the mysteries is the aim of religion." For Pythagoras, as for Kepler, the two kinds of contemplation were twins; for them philosophy and religion were motivated by the same longing: to catch glimpses of eternity through the window of time. The mystic and the savant jointly satisfied the dual urge of allaying the self's cosmic anxiety and of transcending its limitations; its dual need for protection and liberation. They provided reassurance by explanation, by reducing threatening, incomprehensible events to principles familiar to experience: lightning and thunder to temperamental outbursts of man-like gods, eclipses to the greed of moon-eating pigs; they asserted that there was rhyme and reason, a hidden law and order behind the seemingly arbitrary and chaotic flux, even behind the death of a child and the eruption of a volcano. They jointly satisfied man's basic need and voiced his basic intuition, that the universe is meaningful, ordered, rational and governed by some form of justice, even if its laws are not transparent.
Apart from reassuring the conscious mind by investing the universe with meaning and value, religion acted in a more direct manner on the unconscious, pre-rational layers of the self, providing it with intuitive techniques to transcend its limitations in time and space by a mystical short-circuit, as it were. The same duality of approach – the rational and the intuitive – characterizes, as we saw, the scientific quest. It is therefore a perverse mistake to identify the religious need solely with intuition and emotion, science solely with the logical and the rational. Prophets and discoverers, painters and poets, all share this amphibial quality of living both on the contoured drylands and in the boundless ocean. In the history of the race as of the individual, both branches of the cosmic quest originate in the same source. The priests were the first astronomers; the medicine-men were both prophets and physicians; the techniques of hunting, fishing, sowing and reaping were imbued with religious magic and ritual. There was division of labour and diversity of method in the symbols and techniques, but unity of motive and purpose.
The first separation, insofar as our knowledge of history goes, occurred between Olympian religion and Ionian philosophy. The Ionians' polite atheism reflected the degeneration of the State Religion into an elaborate and specialized ritual, its loss of cosmic consciousness. The Pythagorean synthesis was made possible by the loosening up of that rigid theological structure through the mystic revival which Orphism brought in its wake. A similar situation occurred in the sixteenth century, when the religious crisis shook up medieval theology, and enabled Kepler to build his new model of the universe ad majorem gloriam Dei – that short-lived Neo-Pythagorean union of mystic inspiration and empirical fact.
Throughout the Dark Ages, the monasteries had been oases of learning in a desert of ignorance, and the monks the guardians of the dried-up wells. There was dearth, but no quarrel between theology and philosophy: both agreed that vulgar Nature was no worthy object of knowledge. It was an age of double-think, of a culture divided from reality, but the partition was not between theologian and scientist, because the latter did not exist.
The later medieval cosmology of the Great Chain of Being was a highly integrated one. It is true that the "Venus riding on the third epicycle" of the Divine Comedy could not be represented by a mechanical model; but here again the dividing wall stood not between religious and natural philosophy, but between mathematics and physics, physics and astronomy, as the Aristotelian doctrine demanded. It is also true that the Church was partly responsible for this state of affairs because she had allied herself with Aristotle, as she had before with Plato; but it was not an absolute alliance, as the example of the Franciscans and the Ockhamist schools prove.
There is no need to recapitulate the reinstatement by Aquinas of the Light of Reason as an active partner of the Light of Grace; nor the leading part played in the revival of learning by Dominicans and Franciscans, ecclesiastics like Bishops Oresme, Cusa or Giese; nor to dwell again on the joint impact of the recovery of the Greek texts of the Septuagint and Euclid. The reformation of religion and the renaissance of science were related processes of breaking up petrified patterns of development, and going back to their sources to discover where things had gone wrong. Erasmus and Reuchlin, Luther and Melanchton, went back to Greek and Hebrew texts, as Copernicus and his successors went back to Pythagoras and Archimedes – prompted by the same urge of reculer pour mieux sauter, of regaining a unifying vision lost by doctrinaire over-specialization. Throughout the golden age of humanism, and even the gunpowder age of the Counter-reformation, the scientists remained the sacred cows of cardinals and popes, from Paul III to Urban VIII; at the same time the Roman College and the Jesuit Order took over the lead in mathematics and astronomy.
The first open conflict between Church and Science was the Galileo scandal. I have tried to show that unless one believes in the dogma of historic inevitability – this form of fatalism in reverse gear – one must regard it as a scandal which could have been avoided; and it is not difficult to imagine the Catholic Church adopting, after a Tychonic transition, the Copernican cosmology some two hundred years earlier than she eventually did. The Galileo affair was an isolated, and in fact quite untypical, episode in the history of the relations between science and theology, almost as untypical as the Dayton monkey-trial was. But its dramatic circumstances, magnified out of all proportion, created a popular belief that science stood for freedom, the Church for oppression of thought. That is only true in a limited sense for a limited period of transition. Some historians, for instance, wish to make us believe that the decline of science in Italy was due to the "terror" caused by the trial of Galileo. But the next generation saw the rise of Toricelli, Cavallieri, Borelli, whose contributions to science were more substantial than those of any generation before or during Galileo's lifetime; the shift of the
centre of scientific activity to England and France and the gradual decline of Italian science, as of Italian painting, was due to different historical causes. Never since the Thirty Years War has the Church oppressed freedom of thought and expression to an extent comparable to the terror based on the "scientific" ideologies of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.
The contemporary divorce between faith and reason is not the result of a contest for power or for intellectual monopoly, but of a progressive estrangement without hostility or drama, and therefore all the more deadly. This becomes evident if we shift our attention from Italy to the Protestant countries of Europe, and to France. Kepler, Descartes, Barrow, Leibniz, Gilbert, Boyle and Newton himself, the generation of pioneers contemporary with and succeeding Galileo, were all deeply and genuinely religious thinkers. But their image of the godhead had undergone a subtle and gradual change. It had been freed from its rigid scholastic frame, it had receded beyond the dualism of Plato to the mystic, Pythagorean inspiration of God, the chief mathematician. The pioneers of the new cosmology, from Kepler to Newton and beyond, based their search into nature on the mystic conviction that there must exist laws behind the confusing phenomena; that the world was a completely rational, ordered, harmonic creation. In the words of a modern historian, the "aspiration to demonstrate that the universe ran like a piece of clock-work ... was itself initially a religious aspiration. It was felt that there would be something defective in Creation itself – something not quite worthy of God – unless the whole system of the universe could be shown to be interlocking, so that it carried the pattern of reasonableness and orderliness. Kepler, inaugurating the scientist's quest for a mechanistic universe in the seventeenth century, is significant here – his mysticism, his music of the spheres, his rational deity demand a system which has the beauty of a piece of mathematics." 3 Instead of asking for specific miracles as proof of God's existence, Kepler discovered the supreme miracle in the harmony of the spheres.