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1

FOREWORD
BY PROFESSOR SIR CYRIL BURT

From time immemorial the gift of creativity has been venerated
almost as if it were divine. There is more than a grain of truth in
the romance of old Euhemerus, which relates how the gods and
demigods of the ancient myths were really 'men of pre-eminent
accomplishments deified out of flattery or gratitude'. Prometheus, the
discoverer of fire, Vulcan, the first of the smiths, Hermes, the inventor
of writing, Aesculapius, the founder of the most ancient school of
medicine each was welcomed into the classical Pantheon, much as
today an outstanding scientist is elected to the Royal Society. In the
Middle Ages the scientific pioneers the leading alchemists, anatomists,
and physicists were almost as frequendy suspected of owing dieir
miraculous knowledge and skill to the devil rather than to the deity.
Even as late as the nineteenth century relics of the old superstitious awe
still lingered on, translated into the biological jargon of the day. These
intellectual prodigies, it was argued, were plainly endowed, not with
supernatural, but certainly with superhuman powers: they must there-
fore be either congenital sports or members of a rare anthropological
species. Cynics, like Nordau and Lombroso, retorted that the much-
vaunted superman was nothing but an unbalanced pathological freak,
suffering from a hypertrophied cerebrum, or else the victim of some
mental degeneracy, akin no doubt to the 'sacred disease* of epilepsy.
'After all,* it was said, 'who could be more original than a lunatic,
and what is more imaginative than a dream?' Perhaps the so-called
genius is just a 'sleepwalker' whose dreams have hit upon the truth.

As Mr, Koestler has so clearly indicated in his earlier volumes, in
Insight and Outlook, and again in The Sleepwalkers, each of these views
once we have allowed for naivetes resulting from the system of
thought in which it appeared brings out an important aspect of the
problem. It is therefore curious, as he goes on to observe, that not until
the close of the nineteenth century were any systematic attempts made

13

FOREWORD

to investigate the matter scientifically. By collecting pedigrees,
measuring abilities, and applying statistical techniques, Sir Francis
Galton proved, or thought he could prove, that the most important
element in genius was simply an exceptionally high degree of the all-
round mental capacity which every human being inherits 'general
intelligence'. And, reviving a proposal that originated with Plato, he
contended that the surest way to manufacture geniuses would be to
breed them, much as we breed prize puppies, Derby winners, and
pedigree bulls.

Galton, however, in his later years came to lay almost equal stress
on certain supplementary qualitites, which he believed were likewise
very largely the outcome of innate disposition. Of these 'special
aptitudes' the most important was what he called 'fluency* that is,
'an unusual and spontaneous flow of images and ideas': the creative
mind seemed 'always pullulating with new notions'. He added two
further characteristics^-'receptivity' and 'intuition or insight', i.e.
what James has called 'sagacity' and T. S. Eliot 'sense of fact'
characteristics that are said to distinguish the 'useful inventiveness' of
the genius from the 'useless fancies of the eccentric and the crank'.
McDougall, Galton' s most enthusiastic follower, discerned a fourth
and still more elusive characteristic which he described as 'productive*
or 'deviant association'. (What all these terms really cover is still a
problem for intensive inquiry.) And then finally, as they all insist,
there is also a motivational ingredient which Galton described by the
somewhat ambiguous label 'zeal': the enthusiasm of the genius over
his problems keeps him working late into the night long after the
clerks and the factory-workers have gone home to their evening
relaxations.

Galton's view, or rather the oversimplified version of it which
appears in the popular textbooks, has of late been vigorously challenged
by psychologists and educationists in America. To begin with, as
might be expected in a democracy founded on the thesis that 'all men
are created equal', many of them insist that genius is 'not born but
made'. 'Give me', said Professor Watson* the aposde of behaviourism,
'half a dozen healthy infants and my own world to bring them up in,
and I will guarantee to turn each one of them into any kind of man you
please artist, scientist, captain of industry, soldier, sailor, beggar-man,
or thief.' We may willingly grant that without the necessary environ-
ment and the appropriate training even those who are most richly
endowed by nature will fail to bring their gifts to full fruition. Heredity

FOREWORD

15

at best can provide only the seed; the seed must be planted in suitable
soil, tended, watered, and cultivated before it can mature and blossom.
But the question then arises what kind of soil is needed? What sort
of a world would Watson have provided? What type of training or
what special brand of education can we ourselves supply to develop
these latent potentialities to the utmost?

On all these points there is a conflict of doctrine which Mr. Koesder's
arguments should do much to resolve. And there is a further point of
disagreement. According to what has been called the British view, and
contrary to the traditional notion, the difference between the creative
genius and the plain man is not qualitative but merely quantitative:
the so-called genius owes his outstanding achievements merely to the
fortunate concurrence of a variety of factors, partly innate and partly
environmental, all quite ordinary in themselves, but in his case develo-
ped to an exceptional degree. During the past few years, however, an
alternative view has been put forward in America, which maintains
that there are two distinct types of intellectual ability, differing not in
degree but in kind. The commoner intelligence tests, it is argued
those, for example, which are in regular use in our 11-plus examina-
tion measure only one rather superficial type of ability. There is a
second, which Professor Guilford, as a result of his researches on 'high-
level personnel', has suggested should be christened 'creativity'; and
this in his opinion is 'far more fundamental'. As to what exactly is the
nature of this second capacity we are still left rather in the dark. If you
look up this useful word in the earlier editions of the Oxford English
Dictionary you will fail to find it; and yet during the last two or three
years it has attained something of the status of a glamour term among
both English and American educationists.

At the moment, therefore, the views of professional psychologists
regarding 'the act of creation seem mainly to be in a state of bewildered
confusion; and there is a crying need for an entirely fresh examination
of the subject from top to bottom. However, psychologists are by no
means the only people to maintain that 'creativity' (or whatever we
like to term it) is in some sense or other an 'individual property'. In
most civilized countries the importance attached to its results has been
recognized by the laws of patent and of copyright. Both in war and in
peace rewards have been offered and bestowed for what are known as
'original inventions'. And the various legal arguments to which these
proprietary rights have led may furnish some preHminary notion of
what such phrases are intended to convey. First, there must be the

16 FOREWORD

basic idea or conception; secondly, the idea must be embodied in
concrete and articulate form a literary, musical, or dramatic work,
the specifications for a machine, a manufacturing process, or a material
product; thirdly, the outcome as thus embodied must be new; and
finally a point which, curiously enough, is often forgotten in psycho-
logical and educational discussions it must have value; the novelty
must be a useful novelty.

If there is such a thing as creativity as thus defined, then it is clear that
dvilization must owe much, if not everything, to the individuals so
gifted. The greater the number and variety of genuinely creative minds
a nation can produce and cultivate, the faster will be its rate of progress.
However, the pastime of debunking the 'cult of great men', which
became so popular when Spencer and Buckle were laying the founda-
tions of social and political theory, has once again become fashionable;
and in these egalitarian days it requires some courage to pick up a pen
and defend the concept of 'creative genius' against the onslaughts of
the scientific sceptic. It is, so the critics assure us, not the gifted indi-
vidual, but the spirit of the age and the contemporary trends of
society what Goe the called the Zeitgeist that deserve the credit for
these cumulative achievements; had Julius Caesar's grand-nephew
succumbed to the illness which dogged his early youth, another
son of Rome would have reorganized the State, borne the proud title
of Augustus, and been duly deified. Had Copernicus, Kepler, and
Newton fallen victims to the plague, one of their contemporaries would
sooner or later have hit upon the scientific laws now coupled with their
names. Certainly, Aut Caesar aut nullus is not an axiom to which the
modern historian would subscribe either in these or any other in-
stances. Yet to build up an empire on the ruins of a republic, to devise
the theories which govern modern astronomy, would still have needed
the vigour and the brain of an individual genius. And can anyone
believe that, if William Shakespeare, like his elder sisters, had died in the
cradle, some other mother in Stratford-upon-Avon or Stratford-atte-
Bow would have engendered his duplicate before the Elizabethan
era ended?

However, it is scarcely profitable to discuss the relative importance
of genetic constitution and social environment until we have first
determined in what precisely the 'act of creation really consists. Here,
as it seems to me, is one of the greatest gaps in the psychology of today.
It is not an issue that can be satisfactorily solved by the tools and
techniques which present-day psychologists commonly employ

FOREWORD

17

mental testing, experimental research, planned observations on men
and animals. What is really needed is a systematic study carried out by
one of those rare individuals who himself happens to possess this
peculiar gift of creativity. And here, I venture to suggest, Mr. Koestler
enjoys an advantage which few, if any, of the professional psycholo-
gists who have touched upon the subject can genuinely claim. This
does not mean that the book is just based on the author's 'introspec-
tive reflections' about his methods of working as an essayist or novelist;
on the contrary, he has been at pains to keep personal introspection,
as the phrase is commonly understood, out of his chapters. The ground
which he has covered and the evidence which he offers for his main
conclusions are very much wider and more varied. He has in fact
undertaken a new and comprehensive analysis of the whole problem;
and is, so I believe, the first to make such an attempt.

The impartial reader will scarcely need any independent witness to
testify in advance that Mr. Koestler is admirably equipped for the
task. Although most widely known as a creative artist in the field of
general literature, he received his early training as a scientist at the
University of Vienna. In the course of travels in both hemispheres he
has visited most of the more progressive places of learning where
psychological research is being carried out. His knowledge of the
relevant literature, both psychological and non-psychological, is
unusually extensive and fully up to date. Moreover, he has enjoyed
the intimate friendship of some of the most original investigators in
contemporary branches of science, from nuclear physics to experi-
mental neurology; and he has thus been able to watch the daily
workings of their minds.

He begins with human creativity as exemplified in art, science, and
literature; and to these fascinating topics the first half of his book is
devoted. But he holds that creativity is by no means a peculiarly human
gift; it is merely the highest manifestation of a phenomenon which is
discernible at each successive level of the evolutionary hierarchy, from
die simplest one-celled organism and the fertilized egg to the adult
man and the highest human genius. It is, to adopt his phraseology, an
Actualization of surplus potentials' of capacities, that is to say, which
are untapped or dormant under ordinary conditions, but which, when
the conditions are abnormal or exceptional, reveal themselves in
original forms of behaviour. This 'actualization he seeks to trace
through morphogenesis, neurogenesis, and regeneration, and the
various departures from simple instirictive behaviour in lowlier

18

FOREWORD

creatures, up to the more 'insightful* forms of learning and of problem-
solving exhibited by animals and man. At every stage, so he maintains,
much the same 'homologue principles', derived from the hierarchical
nature of the basic part-whole relation, can be seen to operate. This
is of necessity the most technical and the most controversial part of his
work, but it is also the most original and iUuminating. The outcome
is a wide and an entirely novel synthesis; and Mr. Koestlers book will
at once take its place as a classic among recent contri butions to the
science of the human mind.

Technicalities are unavoidable, particularly when we pass from
first-hand observation to explanatory interpretations couched in pre-
cise biological, neurological, or psychological terms. Mr, Koestler
has overcome the problem by relegating the more erudite and specu-
lative parts of his exposition to the second half of his book; and in his
prefatory remarks he suggests that those who feel more at home in the
Arts and Humanities than in the Sciences can skip the more technical
chapters. I hope, however, that all such readers will disregard this
advice as merely a symptom of the authors own modesty. Psychology,
more than any other branch of study, requires us to break down the
barriers between the two cultures. In my youth psychology was
regarded as a department of philosophy; and in my own university
the only way of studying it was by registering as an Arts student and
taking a degree in what were traditionally styled the Humaner
Letters. But the true student of humanity must study, not the Humani-
ties only, but the relevant branches of science as well. However, I
suspect that my advice will turn out to be superfluous: most readers
on reaching the end of Book One will find themselves so intrigued
that they will be unable to resist pushing on to the next.

On the other hand, the specialist may perhaps feel tempted to turn
to the second half first of all: for, now that the pendulum has swung in
the opposite direction, the royal road to psychology usually starts
from elementary science. And, since the science taught in the pre-
Imiinary stages is not only elementary but too often out of date, the
intending psychologist is still more severely penalized. A scientific
training may suffice for studying the behaviour of rats and robots.
The student of human nature is nowadays too apt to forget that most
of what we know about the mind of man is to be learnt from the
writings not of scientists but of men of letters the poets and the
philosophers, the biographers and the historians, the novelists and the
literary critics. I teH my own students to read Pope's Essay on Man as

FOREWORD

19

well as Skinner's textbook on Science and Human Behaviour. But
indeed the modern psychologist, like the youthful Bacon, needs to
'take all knowledge for his province'.

Many of those who find Mr. Koestler's arguments completely
convincing on all essential points may nevertheless be inclined, as I
myself, to query minor details here and there. My own hesitations
arise, not so much from definable objections, but rather from doubts
requiring further information or factual evidence which is at present
unobtainable. Indeed, the most valuable feature of Mr. Koestler's book
is that it suggests so many problems and provisional hypotheses for
direct scientific inquiry in a deplorably neglected field. In particular it
would be highly instructive to note how far the views he has indepen-
dently reached resemble those already outlined, in their own cum-
bersome language, by earlier British writers such as Bain, Ward,
Stout, and McDougall, and, more important still, where precisely they
differ.

Meanwhile, his theory of the creative process carries with it a
number of practical corollaries of first importance to the teacher and
the social and educational reformer. Most of the earlier discussions of
creativity were based on accounts of the intellectual processes of
creative adults. It is, however, with the work of children in our
schools that we ought really to begin. Viewed in the light of Mr.
Koesders analysis, three salient questions call urgently for special
investigation. How can we best detect the individuals who are en-
dowed by nature with creative ability of this or that specific type?
How are they to be trained and educated? And what are the existing
social and scholastic barriers which hide or hinder the emergence of
creative talent? Educational psychologists have of late woken up to
the fact that the kind of examinations and intelligence tests which they
still habitually employ tend to select the efficient learner and the
verbal reasoner rather than inaiitive observers or constructive and
critical thinkers. "With most of the mechanically scored tests handed
out year by year, the child who gives an original answer, or hits on an
alternative solution which the psychologist has missed (by no means
a rare occurrence), is automatically marked wrong. Even when by
some happy chance our methods of selection have picked out a
potential inventor or a budding genius, we still have no notion how he
should be encouraged and instructed so as to develop to the utmost
his unusual latent powers. The problem has at last been recognized;
but the remedy is still to seek. During the past year or two there have

20

FOREWORD

been an increasing number of conferences and papers, especially in
the United States, devoted to 'the identification of creative individuals'
and 'the cultivation of creative talents'. There has, too, been a small but
growing amount of experimental research. Nevertheless, apart from
a few unconvincing speculations, varying with the prepossessions of
each writer, there is as yet no sound psychological basis either for the
theorise or the practitioner. Mr. Koestler's eclectic survey is thus as
timely in its appearance as it is far-reaching in its implications. It
supplies a fertile set of premisses from which the practical teacher
as well as the psychological research-worker can reap a rich harvest of
fruitful ideas.

But his book is not merely a highly original contri bution to present-
day psychology. It is also a richly documented study in the history of
scientific discovery and an essay in the analysis of literary and artistic
creation. It will, therefore, present an irresistible challenge, and should
appeal, not only to psychological or educational specialists, but also to
every cultivated reader who is interested in 'the proper study of
mankind'.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

The first part of this book proposes a theory of the act of creation
of the conscious and unconscious processes underlying
scientific discovery, artistic originality, and comic inspiration.
It endeavours to show that all creative activities have a basic pattern in
common, and to outline that pattern.

The aim of Book Two is to show that certain basic principles operate
throughout the whole organic hierarchy from the fertilized egg to
the fertile brain of the creative individual; and that phenomena analo-
gous to creative originality can be found on all levels.

Anyone who writes on a complex subject must learn that he cannot
aim one arrow at two targets. Book One is aimed at the general reader;
some of the chapters in Book Two presuppose a closer acquaintance
with current trends in biology and experimental psychology, and are
rather technical. There is an unavoidable difference in style between the
two parts: in the first I avoided pedantry at the cost of occasional lapses
into a loose terminology; in the second this was not possible. Readers
who find certain passages in the second part too technical can safely skip
them and pick up the thread later on without losing sight of the general
idea. Its leitmotifs are restated on various levels throughout the book.

It may seem a presumptuous undertaking to inquire into the bio-
logical origins of mental creativity when we are still unable to define
the chemistry of a simple muscle twitch. But often in the history of
ideas we find two opposite methods at work: the 'downward* approach
from the complex to the elementary, from the whole to its component
parts, and the 'upward' approach from part to whole. The emphasis on
cither of these methods may alternate according to philosophical
fashion, until they meet and merge in a new synthesis. It would have
been as impossible to build theoretical physics on a foundation of its
elementary particles (which turn out to be more and more bafBing)
as it has proved impossible to build a theory of psychology on 'ele-
mentary reflexes' and 'atoms of behaviour'. Vice versa, without the

21

22

THE ACT OF CREATION

assumption that complex matter consisted of atomic parts, whatever
they are, physics and chemistry could not have evolved.

I have tried to combine both methods by choosing as my starting
point a phenomenon which is at the same time complex and simple,
in which a subde intellectual process is signalled by a gross physiological
reflex: the phenomenon of laughter. Humour is an elusive thing, so is
the rainbow; yet the study of coloured spectra provided clues to the
elementary structure of matter.

A preliminary outline of this theory was published in 1949 under the
title Insight and Otttlook, It was intended as the first of two volumes, and
its preface contained the optimistic sentence: * Volume Two is in
preparation and will, it is hoped, appear twelve months after the first/

The twelve months have grown into fifteen years. Partly because I
became involved with other subjects; but mainly because I felt dis-
satisfied with that first attempt, and felt the need to base the theory on
a broader foundation. I kept returning to it in between other books,
but each time the broadening process necessitated an excursion into some
related field and, as often happens, these excursions acquired a momen-
tum of their own. One chapter on 'man's changing vision of the
universe* grew into a separate book of more than six hundred pages; 1
so did another chapter, on Eastern mysticism. 2 And when at last I
felt ready to write that long-postponed second volume I found that I
had to scrap the first and begin again at the beginning. The whole
theoretical framework had to be revised and even the terminology
changed. Readers acquainted with Insight and Outlook will notice,
however, that I have taken over, or paraphrased, passages from it
which seem to have weathered the time; to avoid tedium I have omitted
quotation marks. I have also incorporated into the text extracts from
lectures given at English and American universities, with the kind
permission of the authorities concerned*

Summaries appear at irregular intervals at the ends of chapters or
sections where I felt that they might be helpful* Asterisks refer to text
notes, index numbers to source references.

I have no illusions about the prospects of the theory I am proposing:
it will suffer the inevitable fate of being proven wrong in many, or
most, details, by new advances in psychology and neurology. What I
am hoping for is that it will be found to contain a shadowy pattern of
truth, and that it may stimulate those who search for unity in the
diverse manifestations of human thought and emotion.

author's preface

23

I am deeply indebted to Professor Sir Cyril Burt, and to Professor
Holger Hyden, University of Go thenburg, for reading the manuscript,
for their corrections, criticisms and encouragement; to Professor
Dennis Gabor, Imperial College, London, Dr. Alan McGlashan, St.
George's Hospital, and Professor Michael Polanyi, Oxford, for many
stimulating discussions on the subject of this book. My grateful thanks
are further due to Dr. J. D. Cowan, Imperial College, for his criticism
from the standpoint of Communication Theory; to Dr. Rodney
Maliphant for surveying the literature on the psycho-physiology of
weeping; to Dr. Christopher Wallis for compiling a bibliography on
the same subject; and to Miss Edith Horsley for her patient and careful
editorial work.

London, December 1963

BOOK ONE
THE ART OF DISCOVERY
AND THE DISCOVERIES OF ART

PART ONE

THE JESTER

I

THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER
The Triptych

The three panels of the rounded triptych shown on the frontis-
piece indicate three domains of creativity which shade into
each other without sharp boundaries: Humour, Discovery, and
Art. The reason for this seemingly perverse order of arrangement the
Sage flanked by the Jester and the Artist on opposite sides will become
apparent as the argument unfolds.

Each horizontal line across the triptych stands for a pattern of
creatiye^ac!iyity_which. is represented on all three panels; for instance:
comic comparison objective analogy poetic image. The first is
intended to make us laugh; the second to make us understand; the
third to make us marvel. The logical pattern of the creative process is
the same in all three cases; it consists in the discovery of hidden similari-
ties. But the emotional climate is different in the three panels: the comic
simile has a touch of aggressiveness; the scientist's reasoning by
analogy is emotionally detached, i.e. neutral; the poetic image is sym-
pathetic or admiring, inspired by a positive kind of emotion. I shall
try to show that all patterns of creative activity are tri-valent: they can
enter the service of humour, discovery, or art; and also, that as we
travel across the triptych from left to right, the emotional climate
changes by gradual transitions from aggressive to neutral to sym-
pathetic and ldentdficatory^-or, to put it another way, from *ah
absurd through an abstract to a tragic or lyric ykw of existence. This
may look like a basketful of wild generalizations but is meant only as a
first indication of the direction in which the inquiry will move.

The panels on the diagram meet in curves to indicate that there are
no clear dividing lines between them. The fluidity of the boundaries
between Science and Art is evident, whether we consider Architec-
ture, Cooking, Psycho therapy, or the writing of History. The mathe-
matician talks of 'elegant' solutions, the surgeon of a 'beautiful'

27

28

THE ACT OP CREATION

operation, the literary critic of 'two-dimensional' characters. Science
is said to aim at Truth, Art at Beauty; but the criteria of Truth (such
as verifiability and refutability) are not as clean and hard as we tend to
believe, and the criteria of Beauty are, of course, even less so. A glance
at the chart on p. 332 will indicate that we can arrange neighbouring
provinces of science and art in series which show a continuous gradient
from 'objective' to 'subjective', from 'verifiable truth' to 'aesthetic
experience'. One gradient, for instance, leads from the so-called exact
sciences like chemistry through biochemistry to biology, then through
medicine which is, alas, a much less exact science to psychology,
through anthropology to history, through biography to the biographi-
cal novel, and so on into the abyss of pure fiction. As we move along
the sloping curve, the dimension of 'objective verifiability' is seen to
cUminish steadily, and the intuitive or aesthetic dimension to increase.
Similar graded series lead from construction engineering through
architecture and interior design to the hybrid 'arts and crafts' and
finally to the representative arts; here one variable of the curve could
be called 'utility', the second 'beauty'. The point of this game is to
show that regardless of what scale of values you choose to apply, you
will move across a continuum without sharp breaks; there are no
frontiers where the realm of science ends and that of art begins, and
the uomo universale of the Renaissance was a citizen of both.

On the other side of the triptych the boundaries between discovery
and comic invention are equally fluidas the present chapter will show
although at first sight this is less obvious to see. That the Jester
should be brother to the Sage may sound like blasphemy, yet our
language reflects the close relationship: the word 'witticism' is derived
from *wit' in its original sense of ingenuity, inventiveness.* Jester and
savant must both 'live on their wits'; and we shall see that the Jester's
riddles provide a useful back-door entry, as it were, into the inner
workshop of creative originality.

The Laughter Reflex

Laughter is a reflex. The word reflex, as Sir Charles Sherrington said,
is a useful fiction. However much its definitions and connotations
,, differ according to various schools it has in fact been the central
fead^pund of psychology for the last fifty years no one is likely
io; 4u#|^ w|th the statement that we are the more justified to call an

THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER

29

organism's behaviour 'reflex* the more it resembles the action of a
mechanical slot-machine; that is to say, the more instantaneous,
predictable, and stereotyped it is. We may also use the synonyms
'automatic', 'involuntary', etc., which some psychologists dislike;
they are in fact implied in the previous sentence.

Spontaneous laughter is produced by the co-ordinated contraction
of fifteen facial muscles in a stereotyped pattern and accompanied by
altered breathing. The following is a description abridged from Sully's
classic essay on the subject.

Smiling involves a complex group of facial movements. It may
suffice to remind the reader of such characteristic changes as the
drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, the
raising of the upper lip, which partially uncovers the teeth,
and the curving of the furrows betwixt the corners of the
mouth and the nostrils (the naso-labial furrows). To these must be
added the formation of wrinkles under the eye, which is a further
result of the first movement . . . and the increased brightness of the
eyes.

These facial changes are common to the smile and the laugh,
though in the more violent forms of laughter the eyes are apt to lose
under their lachrymal suffusion the sparkle which the smile brings.

We may now pass to the larger experience of the audible laugh.
That this action is physiologically continuous with the smile has

already been suggested How closely connected are smiling and

moderate laughing may be seen by the tendency we experience
when we reach the broad smile and the fully open mouth to start the
respiratory movements of laughter. As Darwin and others have
pointed out, there is a series of gradations from the faintest and most
decorous smile up to the full explosion of the laugh,

. . . The series of gradations here indicated is gone through, more
or less rapidly, in an ordinary laugh. . . . The recognition of this
identity of the two actions is evidenced by the usages of speech. We
see in the classical languages a tendency to employ the same word for
the two. . . . This is particularly clear in the case of the Latin ridere,
which means to smile as well as to laugh, the form subridere being rare
(Italian, ridere and sorridere; French rire and sourire; German lachen
and lacheln).

We may now turn to the distmguishing characteristics oflaughing;
that is, the production of the familiar series of sounds .*

30

THE ACT OF CREATION

But these do not concern us yet. The point to retain is the con-
tinuity of the scale leading from the faint smile to Homeric laughter,
confirmed by laboratory experiments. Electrical stimulation of the
zygomatic major, the main lifting muscle of the upper lip, with currents
of varying intensity, produces expressions ranging from smile to
broad grin to the facial contortions typical of loud laughter. 2 Other
researchers made films of tickled babies and of hysterics to whom
tickling was conveyed by suggestion. They again showed the reflex
swifdy increasing from the first faint facial contraction to paroxysms
of shaking and choking as the quicksilver in a thermometer, dipped
into hot water, rapidly mounts to the red mark.

These gradations of intensity not only demonstrate the reflex
character of laughter but at the same time provide an explanation for
the rich variety of its forms from Rabelaisian laughter at a spicy joke
to the rarefied smile of courtesy. But there are additional reasons to
account for this confusing variety. Reflexes do not operate in a vacuum;
they are to a greater or lesser extent interfered with by higher nervous
centres; thus civilized laughter is rarely quite spontaneous. Amusement
can be feigned or suppressed; to a faint involuntary response we may
add at will a discreet chuckle or a leonine roar; and habit-formation
soon crystallizes these reflex-plus-pretence amalgams into characteris-
tic properties of a person.

Furthermore, the same muscle contractions produce different
effects according to whether they expose a set of pearly teeth or a
toothless gap producing a smile, a simper, or smirk. Mood also super-
imposes its own facial patternhence gay laughter, melancholy smile,
lascivious grin. Lastly, contrived laughter and smiling can be used as a
conventional signal-language to convey pleasure or embarrassment,
friendliness or derision. We are concerned, however, only with
spontaneous laughter as a specific response to the comic; regarding
which we can conclude with Dr. Johnson that 'men have been wise
in very different modes; but they have always laughed in the same
way*.

The Paradox of Laughter

I have taken pains to show that laughter is, in the sense indicated above,
a true reflex, because here a paradox arises which is the starting point
of our inquiry , Motor reflexes, usually exemplified in textbooks by

THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER

31

knee-jerk or pupillary contraction, are relatively simple, direct res-
ponses to equally simple stimuli which, under normal circumstances,
function autonomously, without requiring the intervention of higher
mental processes; by enabling the organism to counter disturbances of
a frequently met type with standardized reactions, they represent
eminently practical arrangements in the service of survival. But what
is the survival value of the involuntary, simultaneous contraction of
fifteen facial muscles associated with certain noises which are often
irrepressible? Laughter is a reflex, but unique in that it serves no
apparent biological purpose; one might call it a luxury reflex. Its only
utilitarian function, as far as one can see, is to provide temporary
relief from utilitarian pressures. On the evolutionary level where
laughter arises, an element of frivolity seems to creep into a humour-
less universe governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the survival
of the fittest.

The paradox can be put in a different way. It strikes us as a reasonable
arrangement that a sharp light shone into the eye makes the pupil
contract, or that a pin stuck into one's foot causes its instant with-
drawal because both the 'stimulus' and the response' are on the same
physiological level. But that a complicated mental activity like the
reading of a page by Thurber should cause a specific motor response
on the reflex level is a lopsided phenomenon which has puzzled philoso-
phers since antiquity.

There are, of course, other complex intellectual and emotional activi-
ties which also provoke bodily reactions frowning, yawning, sweat-
ing, shivering, what have you. But the effects on the nervous system
of reading a Shakespeare sonnet, working on a mathematical problem,
or listening to Mozart are diffuse and indefinable. There is no clear-
cut predictable response to tell me whether a picture in the art gallery
strikes another visitor as 'beautiful'; but there is a predictable facial
contraction which tells me whether a caricature strikes him as 'comic*.

Humour is the only domain of creative activity where a stimulus on a high
level of complexity produces a massive and sharply defined response on the
level of physiological reflexes. This paradox enables us to use the res-
ponse as an indicator for the presence of that elusive quality, the
comic, which we are seeking to define as the tell-tale clicking of the
geiger-counter indicates the presence of radioactivity. And since the
comic is related to other, more exalted, forms of creativity, the back-
door approach promises to yield some positive results. We all know
that there is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous; the more

32

THE ACT OF CREATION

surprising that Psychology has not considered the possible gains which
could result from the reversal of that step.

The bibliography of Greig's Psychology of Laughter and Comedy,
published in 1923, mentioned three hundred and sixty-three tides of
works bearing partly or entirely on the subject from Plato and
Aristode to Kant, Bergson, and Freud. At the turn of the century
T. A. Ribot summed up these attempts at formulating a theory of the
comic: 'Laughter manifests itself in such varied and heterogeneous
conditions . . . that the reduction of all these causes to a single one
remains a very problematical undertaking. After so much work spent
on such a trivial phenomenon, the problem is still far from being
completely explained/ 3 This was written in 1896; since then only two
new theories of importance have been added to the list: Bergson s
Le Rire and Freud's Wit and its Relations to the Unconscious, I shall have
occasion to refer to them.*

The dimculty lies evidendy in the enormous range of laughter-
producing situations from physical tickling to mental titillation of
the most varied kinds. I shall try to show that there is unity in this
variety; that the common denominator is of a specific and specifiable
pattern which is of central importance not only in humour but in all
domains of creative activity. The bacillus of laughter is a bug difHcult to
isolate; once brought under the microscope, it will turn out to be a
yeast-like, universal ferment, equally useful in making wine or vinegar,
and raising bread.

The Logic of Laughter: A First Approach

Some of the stories that follow, including the first, I owe to my late
friend John von Neumann, who had all the makings of a humorist:
he was a mathematical genius and he came from Budapest.

Two women meet while shopping at the supermarket in the
Bronx, One looks cheerful, the other depressed. The cheerful one
inquires:

"What's eating you?'

'Nothing's eating me.*

'Death in the family?' -

*No, God forbid!*

THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER

33

'Worried about money?'

'No . . . nothing like that.'

'Trouble with the kids?'

'Well, if you must know, it's my little Jimmy.'

'What's wrong with him, then?'

'Nothing is wrong. His teacher said he must see a psychiatrist/
Pause. 'Well, well, what's wrong with seeing a psychiatrist?'
'Nothing is wrong. The psychiatrist said he's got an Oedipus
complex.'

Pause. 'Well, well, Oedipus or Shmoedipus, I wouldn't worry so
long as he's a good boy and loves his mamma.'

The next one is quoted in Freud's essay on the comic.

Chamfort tells a story of a Marquis at the court of Louis XIV who,
on entering his wife's boudoir and finding her in the arms of a
Bishop, walked calmly to the window and went through the motions
of blessing the people in the street.

'What are you doing?' cried the anguished wife.

'Monseigneur is performing my % functions,' replied the Marquis,
'so I am performing his.'

Both stories, though apparently quite different and in their origin
more than a century apart, follow in fact the same pattern. The
Chamfort anecdote concerns adultery; let us compare it with a tragic
treatment of that subject say, in the Moor of Venice. In the tragedy
the tension increases until the climax is reached: Othello smothers
Desdemona; then it ebbs away in a gradual catharsis, as (to quote
Aristotle) 'horror and pity accomplish the purgation of the emotions*
(see Fig. i, a, on next page).

In the Chamfort anecdote, too, the tension mounts as the story pro-
gresses, but it never reaches its expected climax. The ascending curve
is brought to an abrupt end by the Marquis* unexpected reaction,
which debunks our dramatic expectations; it comes like a bolt out of
the blue, which, so to speak, decapitates the logical development of the
situation. The narrative acted as a channel directing the flow of emo-
tion; when the channel is punctured the emotion gushes out like a
liquid through a burst pipe; the tension is suddenly relieved and
exploded in laughter (Fig. i, b):

THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER

35

I said that this effect was brought about by the Marquis' unexpected
reaction. However, unexpectedness alone is not enough to produce a
comic effect. The crucial point about the Marquis* behaviour is that
it is both unexpected and perfectly logical but of a logic not usually
applied to this type of situation. It is the logic of the division of labour,
the quid pro quo, the give and take; but our expectation was that the
Marquis' actions would be governed by a different logic or code of
behaviour. It is the clash of the two mutually incompatible codes, or
associative contexts, which explodes the tension.

In the Oedipus story we find a similar clash. The cheerful woman's
statement is ruled by the logic of common sense: if Jimmy is a good
boy and loves his mamma there can't be much wrong. But in the
context of Freudian psychiatry the relationship to the mother carries
entirely different associations.

The pattern underlying both stories is the perceiving of a situation or
idea, L, in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference,
M 1 and M 2 (Fig. 2). The event L, in which the two intersect, is made
to vibrate simultaneously on two different wavelengths, as it were.
While this unusual situation lasts, L is not merely linked to one
associative context, but bisociated with two.

I have coined the term 'bisociation* in order to make a distinction
between the routine skills of thinking on a single 'plane*, as it were,
and the creative act, which, as I shall try to show, always operates on

Figure 2

3

THE ACT OF CREATION

more than one plane. The former may be called smgle-minded, the
latter a double-minded, transitory state of unstable equilibrium where
the balance of both emotion and thought is disturbed. The forms which
this creative instability takes in science and art will be discussed later;
first we must test the validity of these generalizations in other fields of
the comic.

At the time when John "Wilkes was the hero of the poor and
lonely, an ill-wisher informed him gleefully: 'It seems that some of
your faithful supporters have turned their coats.' 'Impossible,'
Wilkes answered. 'Not one of them has a coat to turn.'

In the happy days of La Ronde, a dashing but penniless young
Austrian officer tried to obtain the favours of a fashionable courtesan.
To shake off this unwanted suitor, she explained to him that her
heart was, alas, no longer free. He replied politely: 'Mademoiselle, I
never aimed as high as that.'

'High' is bisociated with a metaphorical and with a topographical
context. The coat is turned first metaphorically, then literally. In
both stories the literal context evokes visual images which sharpen the
clash.

A convict was playing cards with his gaolers. On discovering that
he cheated they kicked him out of gaol.

This venerable chestnut was first quoted by Schopenhauer and has
since been roasted over and again in the literature of the comic. It can
be analysed in a single sentence: two conventional rules ('offenders
are punished by being locked up' and 'cheats are punished by being
kicked out'), each of them self-consistent, collide in a given situation
as the ethics of the quid pro quo and of matrimony collide in the
Chamfort story. But let us note that the conflicting rules were merely
implied in the text; by making them explicit I have destroyed the story's
comic effect.

Shortly after the end of the war a memorable statement appeared
in a fashion article in the magazine Vogue:

Belsen and Buchenwald have put a stop to the too-thin woman
age, to the cult of undernourishment.*

THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER

37

It makes one shudder, yet it is funny in a ghastly way, foreshadow-
ing the 'sick jokes' of a later decade. The idea of starvation is bi-
sociated with one tragic, and another, utterly trivial context. The
following quotation from Time magazine 5 strikes a related chord:

REVISED VERSION

Across the first page of the Christmas issue of the Catholic Universe
Bulletin, Cleveland's official Catholic diocesan newspaper, ran this
eight-column banner head:

It's a boy in Bethlehem.

Congratulations God congratulations Mary congratulations
Joseph/

Here the frames of reference are the sacred and the vulgarly pro-
fane. A technically neater version if we have to dwell on blasphemy
is the riposte which appeared, if I remember rightly, in the New
Yorker:

'We wanted a girV

The samples discussed so far all belong to the class of jokes and
anecdotes with a single point of culmination. The higher forms of
sustained humour, such as the satire or comic poem, do not rely on
a single effect but on a series of minor explosions or a continuous state
of mild amusement. Fig. 3 is meant to indicate what happens when a

Figure 3

38

THE ACT OP CREATION

humorous narrative oscillates between two frames of reference say,
the romantic fantasy world of Don Quixote, and Sancho's cunning
horse-sense.

Matrices and Codes

I must now try the reader's patience with a few pages (seven, to be
exact) of psychological speculation in order to introduce a pair of
related concepts which play a central role in this book and are indis-
pensable to all that follows. I have variously referred to the two planes
in Figs. 2 and 3 as 'frames of reference', 'associative contexts', 'types of
logic', 'codes of behaviour', and 'universes of discourse'. Henceforth I
shall use the expression 'matrices of thought' (and 'matrices of be-
haviour') as a unifying formula. I shall use the word 'matrix' to denote
any ability, habit, or skill, any pattern of ordered behaviour governed
by a ' code of fixed rules. Let me illustrate this by a few examples on
different levels.

The common spider will suspend its web on three, four, and up to
twelve handy points of attachment, depending on the lie of the land,
but the radial threads will always intersect the laterals at equal angles,
according to a fixed code of rules built into the spider's nervous system;
and the centre of the web will always be at its centre of gravity. The
matrix the web-building skill is flexible: it can be adapted to en-
vironmental conditions; but the rules of the code must be observed
and set a limit to flexibility. The spider's choice of suitable points of
attachment for the web are a matter of strategy, depending on the en-
vironment, but the form of the completed web will always be poly-
gonal, determined by the code. The exercise of a skill is always under
the dual control (a) of a fixed code of rules (which may be innate or ac-
quired by learning) and (b) of a flexible strategy, guided by environ-
mental pointers the 'lie of the land'.

As the next example let me take, for the sake of contrast, a matrix
on the lofty level of verbal thought. There is a parlour game where
each contestant must write down on a piece of paper the names of all
towns he can think of starting with a given letter say, the letter *L\
Here the code of the matrix is defined by the rule of the game; and the
members of the matrix are the names of all towns beginning with 'U
which the participant in question has ever learned, regardless whether
at the moment he remembers them or not. The task before him is to
fish these names out of his memory. There are various strategies for

THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER

39

doing this. One person will imagine a geographical map, and then scan
this imaginary map for towns with *L\ proceeding in a given direction
say west to east. Another person will repeat sub-vocally the syllables
Li, La, Lo, as if striking a tuning fork, hoping that his memory circuits
(Lincoln, Lisbon, etc.) will start to vibrate' in response. His strategy
determines which member of the matrix will be called on to perform,
and in which order. In the spider's case the 'members' of the matrix
were the various sub-skills which enter into the web-building skill:
the operations of secreting the thread, attaching its ends, judging the
angles. Again, the order and manner in which these enter into action
is determined by strategy, subject to the 'rules of the game' laid down
by the web-building code.

All coherent thinking is equivalent to playing a game according to a
set of rules. It may, of course, happen that in the course of the parlour
game I have arrived via Lagos in Lisbon, and feel suddenly tempted to
dwell on the pleasant memories of an evening spent at the night-club
La Cucaracha in that town. But that would be not playing the game',
and I must regretfully proceed to Leeds. Drifting from one matrix to
another characterizes the dream and related states; in the routines of
disciplined thinking only one matrixes active at a time.

In word-association tests the code consists of a single command, for
instance 'name opposites'. The subject is then given a stimulus word
say, 'large' and out pops the answer: 'small'. If the code had been
'synonyms', the response would have been 'big' or 'tall', etc. Associa-
tion tests are artificial simplifications of the thinking process; in actual
reasoning the codes consist of more or less complex sets of rules and
sub-rules. In mathematical thinking, for instance, there is a great array
of special codes, which govern different types of operations; some of
these are hierarchically ordered, e.g. addition multiplication ex-
ponential function. Yet the rules of these very complex games can
be represented in 'coded' symbols: x + y, or x.y or x y or x^/y, the
sight of which will 'trigger off' the appropriate operation as
reading a line in a piano score will trigger off a whole series of very
complicated finger-movements. Mental skills such as arithmetical
operations, motor skills such as piano-playing or touch-typing, tend
to become with practice more or less automatized, pre-set routines,
which are triggered off by 'coded signals' in the nervous system
as the trainer's whistle puts a performing animal through its paces.

This is perhaps the place to explain why I have chosen the ambiguous
word 'code' for a key-concept in the present theory. The reason is

40

THB ACT OF CREATION

precisely its nice ambiguity. It signifies on the one hand a set of rules
which must be obeyed like the Highway Code or Penal Code; and
it indicates at the same time that it operates in the nervous system
through coded signals' like the Morse alphabet which transmit
orders in a kind of compressed 'secret language'. "We know that not
only the nervous system but all controls in the organism operate in
this fashion (starting with the fertilized egg, whose 'genetic code'
contains the blue-print of the future individual. But that blue-print in
the cell nucleus does not show the microscopic image of a little man;
it is 'coded' in a kind of four-letter alphabet, where each letter is
represented by a different type of chemical molecule in a long chain;
see Book Two, I).*

Let us return to reasoning skills. Mathematical reasoning is governed
by specific rules of the game multiplication, differentiation, integra-
tion, etc. Verbal reasoning, too, is subject to a variety of specific codes:
we can discuss Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo 'in terms of (a) historic
significance, (b) military strategy, (c) the condition of his liver, (d) the
constellation of the planets. We can call these 'frames of reference* or
'universes of discourse' or 'associative contexts' expressions which I
shall frequently use to avoid monotonous repetitions of the word
'matrix'. The jokes in the previous section can all be described as
universes of discourse colliding, frames getting entangled, or contexts
getting confused. But we must remember that each of these ex-
pressions refers to specific patterns of activity which, though flexible,
are governed by sets of fixed rules.

A chess player looking at an empty board with a single bishop on it
does not see the board as a uniform mosaic of black and white squares,
but as a kind of magnetic field with lines of force indicating the bishops'
possible moves: the board has become patterned, as in Fig. 4 a; Fig. 4 b
shows the pattern of the rook.

When one thinks of 'matrices' and 'codes' it is sometimes helpful to
bear these figures in mind. The matrix is the pattern before you, rep-
resenting the ensemble of permissible moves. The code which governs
the matrix can be put into simple mathematical equations which con-
tain the essence of the pattern in a compressed, 'coded' form; or it can
be expressed by the word 'diagonals'. The code is the fixed, invariable
factor in a skill or habit; the matrix its variable aspect. The two words
do not refer to different entities, they refer to different aspects of the
same activity. When you sit in front of the chessboard your code is
the rule of the game determining which moves are permitted, your

42

THE ACT OF CREATION

matrix is the total of possible choices before you. Lastly, the choice of
the actual move among the variety of permissible moves is a matter
of strategy, guided by the He of the land the 'environment* of other
chessmen on the board. We have seen that comic effects are produced
by the sudden clash of incompatible matrices: to the experienced chess
player a rook moving bishop wise is decidedly 'funny'.

Consider a pianist playing a set-piece which he has learned by heart.
He has incomparably more scope for 'strategy* (tempo, rhythm,
phrasing) than the spider spinning its web. A musician transposing a
tune into a different key, or improvising variations of it, enjoys even
greater freedom; but he too is still bound by the codes of the diatonic
or chromatic scale. Matrices vary in flexibility from reflexes and more
or less automatized routines which allow but a few strategic choices,
to skills of almost unlimited variety; but all coherent thinking and
behaviour is subject to some specifiable code of rules to which its
character of coherence is due even though the code functions partly
or entirely on unconscious levels of the mind, as it generally does. A
bar-pianist can perform in his sleep or while conversing with the
barmaid; he has handed over control to the automatic pilot, as it were.

Hidden Persuaders

Everybody can ride a bicycle, but nobody knows how it is done. Not
even engineers and bicycle manufacturers know the formula for the
correct method of counteracting the tendency to fall by turning the
handlebars so that 'for a given angle of unbalance the curvature of
each winding is inversely proportional to the square of the speed at
which the cyclist is proceeding'. 6 The cyclist obeys a code of rules
which is specifiable, but which he cannot specify; he could write on
his number-plate Pascal's motto: 'Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne
connait point! Or, to put it in a more abstract way:

The controls of a skilled activity generally function below the level
of consciousness on which that activity takes place. The code is a
hidden persuader.

This applies not only to our visceral activities and muscular skills,
but also to the skill of perceiving the world around us in a coherent
and meaningful manner. Hold your left hand six inches, the other
twelve inches, away from your eyes; they will look about the same
size, although the retinal image of the left is twice the size of the right.

THE LOGIC -OF LAUGHTER

43

Trace the contours of your face with a soapy finger on the bathroom
mirror (it is easily done by closing one eye). There is a shock waiting:
the image which looked life-size has shrunk to half-size, like a head-
hunter's trophy. A person walking away does not seem to become a
dwarf as he should; a black glove looks just as black in the sunlight
as in shadow though it should not; when a coin is held before the eyes
in a tilted position its retinal projection will be a more or less flattened
ellipse; yet we see it as a circle, because we know it to be a circle; and it
takes some effort to see it actually as a squashed oval shape. Seemg is
believing, as the saying goes, but the reverse is also true: knowing is
seeing. 'Even the most elementary perceptions', wrote Bartlett, 7 'have
the character of inferential constructions.' But the inferential process,
which controls perception, again works unconsciously. Seeing is a
skill, part innate, part acquired in early infancy.* The selective codes
in this case operate on the input, not on the output. The stimuli im-
pinging on the senses provide only the raw material of our conscious
experience the dooming, buzzing confusion' of William James;
before reaching awareness the input is filtered, processed, distorted,
interpreted, and reorganized m a series of relay-stations at various levels
of the nervous system; but the processing itself is not experienced by
the person, and the rules of the game according to which the controls
work are unknown to him.

The examples I mentioned refer to the so-called Visual constancies 9
which enable us to recognize that the size, brightness, shape of objects
remain the same even though their retinal image changes all the time;
and to 'make sense 1 out of our sensations. They are shared by all people
with normal vision, and provide the basic structure on which more
personal 4 frames of perception* can be built. An apple looks different to
Picasso and to the greengrocer because their visual matrices are different-
Let me re.turn once more to verbal thinking. When a person dis-
,cusses, saj, the problem of capital punishment he may do so 'in terms
. of 1 social utility or religious morality or psychopathology. Each of
these universes of discourse is governed by a complex set of rules, some
of which operate on conscious, others on unconscious levels. The latter
are axiomatic beliefs and prejudices which are taken for granted and
implied in the code. Further implied, hidden in the space between the
words, are the rules of grammar and syntax. These have mostly been
learned not from textbooks but 'by ear', as a young gypsy learns to
fiddle without knowing musical notation. Thus when one is engaged
in ordinary conversation, not only do the codes of grammar and

44

THE ACT OF CREATION

syntax, of courtesy and common-or-garden logic function uncon-
sciously, but even if consciously bent on doing so we would find it
extremely difficult to define these rules which define our thinking. For
doing that we need the services of specialists the semanticists and
logicians of language. In other words, there is less difference between
the routines of thinking and bicycle-riding than our self-esteem would
make us believe. Both are governed by implicit codes of which we are
only dimly aware, and which we are unable to specify.*

Habit and Originality

Without these indispensable codes we would fall off the bicycle, and
thought would lose its coherence as it does when the codes of normal
reasoning are suspended while we dream. On the other hand, thinking
which remains confined to a single matrix has its obvious limitations.
It is the exercise of a more or less flexible skill, which can perform
tasks only of a kind already encountered in past experience; it is not
capable of original, creative achievement.

We learn by assimilating experiences and grouping them into
ordered schemata, into stable patterns of unity in variety. They enable
us to cope with events and situations by applying the rules of the
game appropriate to them. The matrices which pattern our percep-
tions, thoughts, and activities are condensations of learning into habit.
The process starts in infancy and continues to senility; the hierarchy of
flexible matrices with fixed codes from those which govern the
breathing of his cells, to those which determine the pattern of his
signature, constitute that creature of many-layered habits whom we
call John Brown. When the Duke of Wellington was asked whether
he agreed that habit was man's second nature he exclaimed: 'Second
nature? It's ten times nature!'

Habits have varying degrees of flexibility; if often repeated under
unchanging conditions, in a monotonous environment, they tend to
become rigid and automatized. But even an elastic strait-jacket is still
a strait-jacket if the patient has no possibility of getting out of it.
Behaviourism, the dominant school in contemporary psychology, is
inclined to take a view of man which reduces him to the station of that
patient, and the human condition to that of a conditioned automaton.
I believe that view to be depressingly true up to a point. The argument
of this book starts at the point where, I believe, it ceases to be true.

THE LOGIC OP LAUGHTER

45

There are two ways of escaping our more or less automatized
routines of thinking and behaving. The first, of course, is the plunge
into drearning or dream-like states, when the codes of rational thinking
are suspended. The other way is also an escape from boredom,
stagnation, intellectual predicaments, and emotional frustration but
an escape in the opposite direction; it is signalled by the spontaneous
Hash of insight which shows a familiar situation or event in a new
light, and elicits a new response to it. The bisociative act connects
previously unconnected matrices of experience; it makes us 'under-
stand what it is to be awake, to be living on several planes at once* (to
quote T. S. Eliot, somewhat out of context).

The first way of escape is a regression to earlier, more primitive
levels of ideation, exemplified in the language of the dream; the
second an ascent to a new, more complex level of mental evolution.
Though seemingly opposed, the two processes will turn out to be
mtamately related.

Man and Machine

When two^ independent matrices of perception or reasoning interact
with each other the result (as I hope to show) is either a collision ending
in laughter, or their fusion in a new intellectual synthesis, or their con-
frontation in an aesthetic experience. The bisociative patterns found in
any domain of creative activity are tri-valent: that is to say, the same
pair of matrices can produce comic, tragic, or intellectually challenging
effects.

Let me take as a first example 'man' and 'machine' . A favourite
trick of the coarser type of humour is to exploit the contrast between
these two frames of reference (or between the related pair 'mind' and
'matter'). The dignified schoolmaster lowering himself into a rickety
chair and crashing to the floor is perceived simultaneously in two in-
compatible contexts: authority is debunked by gravity. The savage,
wistfully addressing the carved totem figure 'Don't be so proud, I
know you from a plum-tree' expresses the same idea: hubris of mind,
earthy materiality of body. The variations on this theme are inex-
haustible: the person slipping on a banana skin; the sergeant-major
attacked by diarrhoea; Hamlet getting the hiccoughs; soldiers march-
ing like automata; the pedant behaving like a mechanical robot; the
absent-minded don boiling his watch while clutching the egg, like a
machine obeying the wrong switch. Fate keeps playing practical jokes

46 THE ACT OF CREATION

to deflate the victim's dignity, intellect, or conceit by demonstrating
his dependence on coarse bodily functions and physical laws by
degrading him to an automaton. The same purpose is served by the
reverse technique of making artefacts behave like humans: Punch and
Judy, Jack-in-the-Box, gadgets playing tricks on their masters, hats in
a gust of wind escaping the pursuer as if with calculated malice.

In Henri Bergson's book on the problem of laughter this dualism
of subde mind and inert matter ('the mechanical encrusted on the
living') is made to serve as an explanation of all forms of the comic;
whereas in the present theory it applies to only one variant of it among
many others. Surprisingly, Bergson failed to see that each of the
examples just mentioned can be converted from a comic into a tragic
or purely intellectual experience, based on the same logical pattern
i.e. on the same pair of bisociated matrices by a simple change of
emotional climate. The fat man slipping and crashing on the icy pave-
ment will be either a comic or a tragic figure according to whether the
spectator's attitude is dominated by malice or pity: a callous schoolboy
will laugh at the spectacle, a sentimental old lady may be inclined to
weep. But in between these two there is the emotionally balanced
attitude of the physician who happens to pass the scene of the mishap,
who may feel both amusement and compassion, but whose primary
concern is to find out the nature of the injury. Thus the victim of the
crash may be seated in any of the three panels of the triptych. Don
Quixote gradually changes from a comic into a puzzling figure if,
instead of rehshing his delusions with arrogant condescension, I become
interested in their psychological causes; and he changes into a tragic
figure as detached curiosity turns into sympathetic identification as I
recognize in the sad knight my brother-in-arms in the fight against
windmills. The stock characters in the farce the cuckold, the miser,
the stutterer, the hunchback, the foreigner appear as comic, intel-
lectually challenging, or tragic figures according to the different
emotional attitudes which they arouse in spectators of different mental
age, culture, or mood.

The 'mechanical encrusted on the living' symbolizes the contrast
between man's spiritual aspirations and his all-too-solid flesh subject
to the laws of physics and chemistry. The practical joker and the clown
specialize in tricks which exploit the mechanical forces of gravity and
inertia to deflate his humanity. But Icarus, too, like the dinner guest
whose chair collapsed, is the victim of a practical joke the gods,
instead of breaking the legs of his chair, have melted away his wings.

THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER

47

The second appeals to loftier emotions than the first, but the logical
structure of the two situations and their message is the same: whatever
you fancy yourself to be you are subject to the inverse square law like
any other lump of clay. In one case it is a comic, in the other a tragic
message. The difference is due to the different character of the emotions
involved (malice in the first case, compassionate admiration in the
second); but also to the fact that in the first case the two frames of
reference collide, exploding the tension, while in the second they
remain juxtaposed in a tragic confrontation, and the tension ebbs away
in a slow catharsis. The third alternative is the reconciliation and syn-
thesis of the two matrices; its effect is neither laughter, nor tears, but
the arousal of curiosity: just how is the mechanical encrusted on the
living? How much acceleration can the organism stand, and how does
zero gravity affect it?

According to Bergson, the main sources of the comic are the mecha-
nical attri butes of inertia, rigidity, and repetitiveness impinging on life;
among his favourite examples are the man-automaton, the puppet on
strings, Jack-in-the-Box, etc. However, if rigidity contrasted with
organic suppleness were laughable in itself, Egyptian statues and Byzan-
tine mosaics would be the best jokes ever invented. If automatic
repetitiveness in human behaviour were a necessary and sufficient
condition of the comic there would be no more amusing spectacle
than an epileptic fit; and if we wanted a good laugh we would merely
have to feel a person's pulse or listen to his heart-beat, with its mono-
tonous tick-tack. If we laugh each time a person gives us the impres-
sion of being a thing' 8 there would be nothing more funny than a
corpse.

In fact, every one of Bergson's examples of the comic can be trans-
posed, along a horizontal line as it were, across the triptych, into the
panels of science and art. His homme-automate, man and artefact at the
same time, has its lyric counterpart in Galatea the ivory statue which
Pygmalion made, Aphrodite brought to life, and Shaw returned to
the comic domain. It has its tragic counterpart in the legends of Faust's
Homunculus, the Golem of Prague, the monsters of Frankenstein; its
origins reach back to Jehovah manufacturing Adam out of adamah,
the Hebrew word for earth. The reverse transformation life into
mechanism has equally rich varieties: the pedant whom enslavement
to habit has reduced to an automaton is- comic because we despise him;
the compulsion-neurotic is not, because we are puzzled and try to
understand him; the catatonic patient, frozen into a statue, is tragic

48

THE ACT OF CREATION

because we pity him. And so again back to mythology: Lot's wife
turned into a pillar of salt, Narcissus into a flower, the poor nymph
Echo wasting away until nothing is left but her voice, and her bones
changed into rocks.

In the middle panel of the triptych the homme-automate is the focal,
or rather bi-focal, concept of all sciences of life. From their inception
they treated, as the practical joker does, man as both mind and machine.
The Pythagoreans regarded the body as a musical instrument whose
soul-strings must have the right tension, and we still unwittingly refer
to our mortal frame as a kind of stringed guitar when we speak of
'muscle tone \ or describe John as 'good tempered'. The same bifocal
view is reflected in the four Hippocratic 'humours' which were both
liquids of the body and moods of the spirit; and spiritus itself is, like
pnewna, ambiguous, meaning also breath. The concept of catharsis
applied, and still does, to the purgation of either the mind or the bowels.
Yet if I were to speak earnesdy of halitosis of the soul, or of laxatives
to the mind, or call an outburst of temper a humourrhage, it would
sound ludicrous, because I would make the implicit ambiguities
explicit for the purpose of maliciously contrasting them; I would tear
asunder two frames of reference that our Greek forbears had managed
to integrate, however tentatively, into a unified, psychosomatic view
which our language still reflects.

In modern science it has become accepted usage to speak of the
'mechanisms' of digestion, perception, learning, and cognition, etc.,
and to lay increasing or exclusive stress on the automaton aspect of the
homme-automate. The mechanistic trend in physiology reached its
symbolic culmination at the beginning of the century in the slogan
'Man a machine* the programmatic tide of a once famous book by
Jacques Loeb; it was taken over by behaviouristic psychology, which
has been prominent in the Anglo-Saxon countries for half a century.
Even a genial naturalist like Konrad Lorenz, whose King Solomons
Ring has delighted millions, felt impelled to proclaim that to regard
Newton and Darwin as automata was the only permissible view for
*the inductive research worker who does not believe in miracles'. 9
It all depends, of course, on what one's definition of a miracle is:
Galileo, the ideal of all 'inductive research workers', rejected Kepler's
theory that the tides were due to the moon's attraction as an 'occult
fancy'. 10 The intellectual climate created by these attitudes has been
summed up by Cyril Burt, writing about 'The Concept of Con-
sciousness' (which behaviourists have banned, as another 'occult

THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER

49

fancy', from the vocabulary of science): 'The result, as a cynical on-
looker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having first
bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now, as
it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness.' 11

I have dwelt at some length on Bergsons favourite example of the
comic, because of its relevance to one of the leitmotifs of this book.
The man-machine duality has been epitomized in a laconic sentence
'man consists of ninety per cent water and ten per cent minerals'
which one can regard, according to taste, as comic, intellectually
challenging, or tragic. In the first case one has only to think of a
caricature showing a fat man under the African sun melting away into
a puddle; in the second, of the 'inductive research worker' bent over
his test-tube; in the third, of a handful of dust.

Other examples of Bergsons man-automaton need be mentioned
only briefly. The puppet play in its naive Punch and Judy version is
comic; the sophisticated marionette theatre is a traditional form of
art; life-imitating contraptions are used in various branches of science
and technology: from the dummy figures of dressmakers to the
anatomical models in medical schools; from the artificial limbs of the
orthopaedist to robots imitating the working of the nervous system
(such as Grey Walter's electronic tortoises). In the metaphorical sense
the puppet on strings is a timeless symbol, either comic or tragic, of
man as a plaything of destiny whether he is jerked about by the
gods or suspended on his own chromosomes and glands. In the neutral
zone between comedy and tragedy philosophers have been tireless in
their efforts to reconcile the two conflicting aspects of the human
puppet: his experience of free will and moral responsibility on the one
hand; the strings of determinism, religious or scientific, on the other.

An extreme variant of the puppet motif is Jack-in-the-Box, symbol
of the stubborn, mechanical repetitiveness, but also of the indestruc-
tibility, of life. Its opposite number is the legendary monster who
instantly grows a new tentacle or head when the hero has cut it off;
or the old woman in Raskolnikof 's dream who, after each stroke of
the axe on her skull, turns round and laughs in his face. In the bio-
logical sciences Jack-in-the-Box is a familiar figure, represented in all
processes of the trigger-release type the muscle-twitch, the epileptic
fit, the 'sign-releasers' of the animal kingdom, whose symbolic
message activates the springs of hopping mad or tenderly amorous,
innate behaviour patterns.

NOTES

To p. 28. 'Wit' stems from witan, understanding; whose roots go back
(via videre and eeSco) to the Sanskrit veda, knowledge. The German Wltz means
both joke and acumen; it comes from wissen, to know; Wissenschaft science, is
a close kin to Fiirwitz and Aberwitz presumption, cheek, and jest. French teaches
the same lesson. Spirituet may either mean witty or spiritually profound; to
amuse comes from to muse \a-muser), and a witty remark is a jeu d* esprit a
playful, mischievous form of discovery.

The word 'jester', too, has a respectable ancestry. The chansons degeste played a
prominent part in medieval literature from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.
They were epics centred on heroic events; their name is derived from the Latin
gesta : deeds, exploits. With the coming of the Renaissance, satire tended to re-
place the epics of chivalry, and in the sixteenth century the heroic 'geste' turned
into *jest\

To p. 32. A critical discussion of both theories can be found in Appendix I
of Insight and Outlook.

To p. 40. The choice of the term 'matrix* is less easy to explain. In an
earlier version I used 'field' and 'framework', but 'field' is too vague, and 'frame'
too rigid. 'Matrix' is derived from the Latin for womb and is figuratively used
for any pattern or mould in which things are shaped and developed, or type is
cast. Thus the exercise of a habit or skill is 'moulded' by its matrix. In mathematics,
matrices are rectangular arrays of numbers capable of all sorts of magic; they can
be subjected to various transformations without losing their identity i.e. they
are both 'flexible' and 'stable'. Also, matrices have a constant attached to them,
called their 'determinant', which remains unaffected by any of these trans-
formations. But the analogy between 'determinant' and 'code' is extremely loose
and in more than one respect misleading.

To p. 43. Congenitally blind patients, who acquire vision after surgical
operations at a mature age, have great difficulties in recognizing patterns and
faces, and in orienting themselves in space. Cf. Senden (1932), quoted by Hebb
(1949).

To p. 44. The dual concepts of matrices and codes were designed with one
eye on psychology, the other on physiology. Their theoretical implications in
this wider context are discussed in Book Two.

The reader versed in experimental psychology will have been reminded by
now of such old fnends from the Wurzburg School as Aufgabe, Einstellung,
Bewusstseinstage; and of their Anglo-Saxon relatives: 'determining tendency',
'expectancy*, 'task', 'schema' and 'set*. He will probably also remember that
J.J. Gibson in a famous article (quoted by Humphrey, 1951, p. 105) listed some
forty different meanings in which the word 'set' was used. I hope to show that
'matrices' and 'codes' are concepts at the same time more precise, and of more
general validity, than Aufgaben or 'sets'.

50

II

LAUGHTER AND EMOTION

The sudden bisociation of an idea or event with two habitually
incompatible matrices will produce a comic effect, provided
that the narrative, the semantic pipeline, carries the right kind
of emotional tension. When the pipe is punctured, and our expectations
are fooled, the now redundant tension gushes out in laughter, or is
spilled in the gentler form of the sou-rire.

Aggression and Identification

Laugher, as the cliche has it, is 'liberating*, i.e. tension-relieving.
Relief from stress is always pleasurable, regardless whether it was
caused by hunger, sex, anger, or anxiety. Under ordinary circum-
stances such relief is obtained by some purposeful activity which is
appropriate to the nature of the tension. When we laugh, however, the
pleasurable relief does not derive from a consummatory act which
satisfies some specific need. On the contrary: laughter prevents the
satisfaction of biological drives, it makes a man equally incapable of
killing or copulating; it deflates anger, apprehension, and pride* The
tension is not consummated it is frittered away in an apparently
purposeless reflex, in facial grimaces, accompanied by over-exertion
of the breathing mechanism and aimless gestures. To put it the other
way round: the sole function of this luxury reflex seems to be the dis-
posal of excitations which have become redundant, which cannot be
consummated in any purposeful manner.

But why has the excitation suddenly become 'redundant*; and why is
it discharged in laughter and not, say, in weeping which is an equally
'purposeless* activity? The answer to the second half of the question

51

52

THE ACT OF CREATION

seems obvious: the kind of excitation exploded in laughter has a
different quality or chemical composition, as it were, from the emo-
tions which overflow in tears. But the very obviousness of this answer
is deceptive, for the attempt to define this difference in 'quality and
composition* necessitates a new approach to the theory of human
emotions.

At first sight there seems to be a bewildering variety of moods in-
volved in different types of humour. The practical joke is frankly
aggressive; the lavatory jokes of children are scatological; blue jokes
are sexual; the Charles Addams type of cartoon and the 'sick* joke
play on feelings of horror and disgust; the satirist on righteous in-
dignation. Moreover, the same type of semantic pipeline can be made
to carry different types of fluid under varying degrees of pressure: for
instance, 'they haven't got a coat to turn' and 'I never aimed as high
as that' are both bisociations of metaphorical and direct meaning
jokes of the same logical pattern but with different emotional colour-
ing. The more sophisticated forms of humour evoke mixed, and some-
times contradictory, feelings; but whatever the mixture, it must con-
tain one ingredient whose presence is indispensable: an impulse, how-
ever faint, of aggression or apprehension. It may be manifested in the
guise of malice, derision, the veiled cruelty of condescension, or merely
as an absence of sympathy with the victim of the joke a 'momentary
anaesthesia of the heart', as Bergson put it. I propose to call this
common ingredient the aggressive-defensive or self-asserting tendency
the reasons for choosing this clumsy term will be seen later on. In
the subtler types of humour this tendency is so faint and discreet that
only careful analysis will detect it, like the presence of salt in a well-
prepared dish- which, however, would be tasteless without it.

It is the aggressive element, the detached malice of the parodist,
which turns pathos into bathos, tragedy into comedy. It may be com-
bined with affection, as in friendly teasing; in civilized humour aggres-
sion is sublimated and often unconscious. But in jokes which appeal to
children and primitives cruelty and boastful self-assertion are much in
evidence, and the same is true of the historically earlier forms and
theories of the comic. 'As laughter emerges with man from the mists of
antiquity it seems to hold a dagger in its hand. There is enough brutal
triumph, enough contempt, enough striking down from superiority
in the records of antiquity and its estimates of laughter to presume that
original laughter may have been wholly animosity/ 1 In the Old
Testament there are (according to Mitchell 2 ) twenty-nine references to

LAUGHTER AND EMOTION

53

laughter, out of which thirteen are linked with scorn, derision,
mocking, or contempt, and only two are 'born out of a joyful and
merry heart'. A survey among American schoolchildren between the
ages of eight and fifteen led to the conclusion (which could hardly have
surprised anybody) that 'mortification or discomfort or hoaxing of
others very readily caused laughter, while a witty or funny remark
often passed unnoticed'. 3

Among the theories of laughter that have been proposed since the
days of Aristotle, the 'theory of degradation' appears as the most
persistent. For Aristotle himself laughter was closely related to ugliness
and debasement; for Cicero 'the province of the ridiculous ... lies in
a certain baseness and deformity'; for Descartes laughter is a mani-
festation of joy 'mixed with surprise or hate or sometimes with both';
in Francis Bacon's list of laughable objects, the first place is taken by
'deformity'. The essence of the 'theory of degradation' is defined in
Hobbes's Leviathan:

The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising
from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by com-
parison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.

Bain, one of the founders of modern psychology, followed on the
whole the same theory: 'Not in physical effects alone, but in everything
where a man can achieve a stroke of superiority, in surpassing or
discomforting a rival, is the disposition of laughter apparent.' 4

For Bergson laughter is the corrective punishment inflicted by society
upon the unsocial individual: 'In laughter we always find an unavowed
intention to humiliate and consequently to correct our neighbour.' 5
Max Beerbohm found 'two elements in the public's humour: delight
in suffering, contempt for the unfamiliar'. McDougall believed that
'laughter has been evolved in the human race as an antidote to sym-
pathy, a protective reaction shielding us from the depressive influence
of the shortcomings of our fellow men.' 6

Thus on this one point there is agreement among the theorists,
ancient and modern; and not only agreement but exaggeration. One
has only to think of Aristophanes or Calderon; A Midsummer Night's
Dream or Chateaubriand's Maximes et Pensies, to realize that the aggres-
sive charge detonated in laughter need not be gunpowder; a grain of
Attic salt is enough to act as a catalyst. Furthermore, we must remember

54

THE ACT OF CREATION

that aggression and self-defence, rage and fear, hostility and appre-
hension, are as pairs of twins in their psychology and physiology. One
of the typical situations in which laughter occurs is the moment of the
sudden cessation of danger, real or imaginary; and rarely is the character
of laughter as a discharge-mechanism for redundant tensions more
strikingly manifested than in the sudden change of expression on the
small child's face from anxious apprehension to the happy laugh of
relief.

Whatever the composition of the emotional charge which a narra-
tive carries, it will produce a comic effect only if an aggressive-defensive
tendency, however sublimated, is present in it. You may be deeply
moved by a persons predicament, and yet unable to suppress a smile
at its ludicrous aspect; and the impression of the 'ludicrousness' of
another persons behaviour always implies an assertion conscious
or unconscious of your own superiority; you smile at his ex-
pense.

The emotions which dominate on the opposite side of the triptych
do not concern us as yet; but I must briefly mention them for the sake
of contrast. Listening to Mozart, watching a great actor's performance,
being in love or some other state of grace, may cause a welling up of
happy emotions which moisten the eye or overflow in tears. Com-
passion and bereavement may have the same physical effect. The
emotions of this class, whether joyous or sad, include sympathy,
identification, pity, admiration, awe, and wonder. The common
denominator of these heterogeneous emotions is a feeling of participa-
tion, identification, or belonging; in other words, the self is experienced
as being a part of a larger whole, a higher unity which may be Nature,
God, Mankind, Universal Order, or the Anitna Mundi; it may be an
abstract idea, or a human bond with persons living, dead, or imagined.
I propose to call the common element in these emotions the partici-
patory or self-transcending tendencies. This is not meant in a mystical
sense (though mysticism certainly belongs to this class of emotion); the
term is merely intended to convey that in these emotional states the
need is felt to behave as a part of some real or imaginary entity which
transcends, as it were, the boundaries of the individual self; whereas
when governed by the self-assertive class of emotions the ego is ex-
perienced as a self-contained whole and the ultimate value.

As a rule our emotions are complex mixtures in which both ten-
dencies participate. Thus the emotion called 'love' whether sexual
or maternal usually contains an aggressive or possessive, self-asserting

LAUGHTER AND EMOTION

55

component, and an identificatory or self-transcending component. If
emotions were represented by different colours, then the two opposite
tendencies would appear as brightness values (black-white mixtures)
superimposed on them.

The subject will be discussed in more detail later (Chapters XI-XV);
readers irritated by these repeated anticipatory excursions may find
some excuse for them in the consideration that the painful vivisection
of the comic, in which they are asked to participate, is not an end in
itself, but a means to uncover the pattern which unites the apparently
so heterogeneous creative activities in humour, art, and discovery.

The Inertia of Emotion

The first to make the suggestion that laughter is a discharge mechanism
for 'nervous energy* seems to have been Herbert Spencer. His essay on
the 'Physiology of Laughter* (i860) starts with the proposition:
'Nervous energy always tends to beget muscular motion; and when it
rises to a certain intensity always does beget it Emotions and sensa-
tions tend to generate bodily movements, and . . . the movements are
violent in proportion as the emotions or sensations are intense.'
Hence, he concludes, 'when consciousness is unawares transferred
from great things to small' the 'liberated nerve force' will expend itself
along the channels of least resistance, which are the muscular move-
ments of laughter.

The details of Spencer's theory (parts of which Freud incorporated
into his own) 7 have become obsolete; but its basic thesis that 'emotion
tends to beget bodily motion' has not only been confirmed, but has
become so much of a commonplace in contemporary neurophysiology
that the need to qualify it is often forgotten. For there exist, of course,
emotional states looking at the sea, or engaging in religious contem-
plation which, on the contrary, tend to promote relaxation and
bodily passivity. The title of Walter B. Cannon's pioneer work, which
had a decisive influence on the modern approach to the problem of
emotions Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage ought to
have acted as a warning that the emotions- which mobilize the body
into action all belong to an important, but nevertheless limited, cate-
gory that which enters the service of the self-assertive tendencies.
Cannon himself warnedwith little success against the lumping
together of all emotions into a kind of red rag drenched with

56

THE ACT OF CREATION

adrenalin.* However, for the moment we are concerned only with
precisely this limited category the aggressive-defensive type of
emotion which enters into the comic.

"When the Marquis in the Chamfort story rushes to the window, our
intellect turns a somersault and enters with gusto into the new game;
but the piquant expectations which the narrative carried, including
perhaps an unconscious admixture of sadism, cannot be transferred to
the other, the quid-pro-quo matrix; they are disposed of through
channels of least resistance. When Othello, on the point of strangling
Desdemona, breaks into hiccoughs and is transformed into a poor,
sodden ham, our thoughts are again capable of performing the jump
from one associative context into another, but our tension, now de-
prived of its logical justification, must somehow be worked off. In a
word, laughter is aggression (or apprehension) robbed of its logical
raison d'etre; the puffing away of emotion discarded by thought.

To give another example: one of the popular devices of sustained
humour is impersonation. Children imitating adults, the comedian
impersonating a public figure, men disguised as women and women as
men in all these cases the impersonator is perceived as himself and
somebody else at the same time. While this situation lasts the two
matrices are bisodated in the spectator's mind; and while his intellect
is capable of swiftly oscillating from one matrix to the other and back,
his emotions are incapable of following these acrobatic turns; they are
spilled into the gutters of laughter as soup is spilled on a rocking ship.

What these metaphors are meant to convey is that the aggressive-
defensive class of emotions has a greater inertia, persistence, or mass momentum
than reason. This assumption is tacidy shared by most psychological
theories, but it needs to be explicidy stated in order to appreciate its
consequences. The most important among these is that quite fre-
quently our emotions are incapable of keeping step with our reason
and become divorced from reason. In psychopathology this pheno-
menon is taken for granted, but its significance in less extreme situa-
tions is generally overlooked although both common experience
and neurophysiology ought to make it obvious. Emotions of the self-
asserting type involve a wide range of bodily changes, such as in-
creased secretion of the adrenal glands, increase of blood sugar,
acceleration of heart rate, speedier clotting of the blood, altered
breathing, inhibition of digestive activity, changes in electric skin
resistance, sweating, 'goose-pimples' which make the hair of the skin
stand on end, dilation of the pupils, muscle tension, and tremor. The

LAUGHTER AND EMOTION

57

joint effect of these so-called emergency reactions is to put the whole
organism into a state of readiness for come what may; sweating, for
instance, disposes of the heat generated by fight or flight, and the
abundance of blood sugar in the circulation provides the muscles with
excess energy. Hence the remarkable feats of force of which people
are capable in danger; but more important from our point of view is
the lowering of the threshhold of motor responses the increased
excitability of the muscles by nervous impulses, and the resulting
tendency to violent movement, to 'work off', or at least 'shake off', the
physiological effects of emotion. The chief mediators of this general
mobilization of the resources of the body are the so-called sympathetic
division of the autonomous nervous system, and the hormones secreted
by the medulla of the suprarenal glands: adrenalin and nor-adrenalin,
the 'humours' of fear and anger. Since these nervous and glandular
processes are interrelated, it is convenient to refer to them jointly as
activities of the sympathico-adrenal system. (To avoid confusion, I
must underline that the sympathetic nervous system has nothing to do
with the friendly emotion of sympathy; rather, as I have just said, with
its opposites: rage and fear. However, by a lucky coincidence the
initials of Sympathico-adrenal system are the same as those of the
Self-^issertive emotions which are aroused by it.)

It follows from the above that these emotions involve incom-
parably heavier machinery, acting on the whole body, than the pro-
cess of thinking which, physiologically speaking, is confined to the
roof of the brain. The chemical and visceral states induced by the
action of the sympathico-adrenal system tend to persist; once this
massive apparatus is set in motion it cannot be called off or 'change
its direction at a moment's notice. Common observation provides
daily, painful confirmation of this. We are literally 'poisoned* by our
adrenal humours; reason has little power over irritability or anxiety;
it takes time to talk a person out of a mood, however valid the argu-
ments; passion is blind to better judgement; anger and fear show
physical after-effects long after their causes have been removed. If we
could change our moods as quickly as we jump from one thought to
another we would be acrobats of emotion.

Thinking, in its physiological aspect, is based on electro-chemical
activities in the cerebral cortex and related regions of the brain, in-
volving energy transactions which are minute compared to the massive
glandular, visceral, and muscular changes that occur when emotions
are aroused. These changes are governed by phylogenetically much

58

THE ACT OF CREATION

older parts of the brain than the roof-structures which enable man to
think in verbal symbols. Behaviour at any moment is the outcome
of complex processes which operate simultaneously on several levels of
the nervous system, from the spinal cord to our latest acquisition, the
pre-frontal lobes. There is probably no formal thinking without some
affective colouring; but it is nevertheless legitimate to distinguish
between form and colour in our case between the logical pattern of a
comic narrative and the emotive charge which it carries.

The sympathico-adrenal system might be compared to the body of
a piano which gives resonance to the cortical strings of thought. When
all is well the huge wooden box lends depth and colour and warmth
to the vibrations of the strings. But if you play a humorous scherzo
with full pedal on, the resonating body is unable to follow the swift
modulations of the chords thought and emotion have become dis-
sociated. It bjmotion des erted by tho ughLsMd&is disc ha rged in laughter.
For e motion, c jwjng^ to its greatgLmas&uiicunentum, is unable to
follow th e sudden switch oj jdejts,to a HifFfTcat type of logic o r a new
~ru!e of the game; less nimble than tho ught, it tends to persist in a straight
line.^Ariel leads CaEGaiTbn tjy r lKe nose: she jumps on a branch,
he crashes into the tree.

It could be objected that the faint emotive charge of a joke, the slight
malice or salaciousness which it arouses, would not be sufficient to
bring the massive sympathico-adrenal machinery into action. The
answer lies in the anachronistic character of our autonomous responses
to stimuli which carry an echo, however faint, of situations that held
a threat or promise in the remote past of the species; which once were
biologically relevant, though they no longer are. These reactions lag
by many rnillermia behind the conditions in which we live: we jump
at a sudden sound; we develop gooseflesh in response to a screeching
noise, to make our long-lost body hair bristle at the attack of some
extinct beast; we sweat before an examination to dispose of the
excessive heat our bodies might develop in the impending struggle
with the examiner. I like to call these innate, anachronistic responses
the over-statements of the body. One of the remarkable things about them
is that they can be triggered off by certain stimuli in minute, quasi-
homeopathic doses.

To sum up, the grain of salt which must be present in the narrative
to make us laugh turns out to be a drop of adrenalin.

The Mechanism of Laughter

In the first chapter I discussed the logic of humour; in the previous
section its emotional dynamics. Fitting the two together, we can now
expand the formula on page 35 as follows: The sudden bisociation of a
mental event with two habitually incompatible matrices results in an
abrupt transfer of the train of thought from one associative context to
another. The emotive charge which the narrative carried cannot be so
transferred owing to its greater inertia and persistence; discarded by
reason, the tension finds its outlet in laughter.

But that still leaves the question open why the excess energy should
be worked off in the particular form of laughter and not, say, by
flapping one's arms or wiggling one's toes. The somewhat tentative
answer is that the muscular contractions and breathing actions in
laughter seem to offer natural channels of least resistance for the over-
flow. To quote Freud:

According to the best of my knowledge, the grimaces and
contortions of the corners of the mouth that characterize laughter
appear first in the satisfied and over-satiated nursling when he
drowsily quits the breast. . . . They are physical expressions of the
determination to take no more nourishment, an 'enough' so to
speak, or rather a 'more than enough*. . . . This primal sense of
pleasurable saturation may have provided the link between the smile
that basic phenomenon underlying laughter and its subsequent
connection with other pleasurable processes of de-tension. 8

In other words, the muscle-contractions of the smile, as the earliest
manifestations of relief from tension, would thereafter become
channels of least resistance.

The peculiar breathing in laughter, with its repeated, explosive ex-
halations, seems designed to 'puff away' surplus tension in a kind of
respiratory gymnastics; and the vigorous gestures and slapping of
thighs obviously serve the same function. Often these massive reactions
seem to be quite out of proportion to the feeble stimuli which provoke
them particularly when we do not like the type of joke which causes
such- hilarity in others:

A thousand Edinburgh schoolchildren burst into laughter when
David Oistrakh, the Russian violinist, snapped a string while playing

59

<5o

THE ACT OF CREATION

Schubert's Fantasy in C Major during a recital of a city housing
estate yesterday. Their studious attention broke when Mr. Oistrakh
guest of honour at the Edinburgh Festival held up the violin and
looked with consternation at his accompanist. 9

Let us try to understand what those brats found so funny. Firstly,
there is the familiar pattern of the practical joke which the laws of
physics play on the artist, suddenly revealing that his magic strings
are made of common cat-gut 'I know you from a plum-tree'. The
'consternation on Oistrakh' s face is the consternation of the man
slipping on the banana skin; exaltation is debunked by the sudden
impact of triviality. But all this does not account for that unexpected,
barbaric outburst of hilarity which schoolmasters know only too well
unless one realizes that what I call, somewhat abstracdy, 'the
emotional charge of the narrative' contains here a mass of resentment,
mosdy perhaps unconscious, at having to sit still and listen 'with
studious attention* to that Russian with the unpronouncable name; a
repressed emotion, tending to beget fidgety motions, until the tension
snaps with the string, releasing the outburst, instantly transforming the
hushed class into a horde of savages.

In other words, all discussions of the comic remain bloodless abstrac-
tions unless we bear in mind that laughter is a phenomenon of the
trigger-release type, where a minute cause can open the tap of sur-
prisingly large stores of energy from various sources: repressed sadism;
repressed sex; repressed fear; even repressed boredom. Here is a list
of 'occasions for laughter' recorded by American undergraduates in
reply to a questionnaire:

A pillow fight in the dormitory

A girl friend tore her dress

I fell during skating

A dog came in during a lecture

A mispronounced word in rhetoric class

Being teased about my corpulence

Lizzie trying to do a fairy dance

My opponents in a bridge game bidding four spades when I held

two aces and the king, jack and five of spades
An article by a priest on the sex life of H. G. Wells. 10

This ought to be enough to make one realize that laughter may be

LAUGHTER AND EMOTION

61

entirely mirthless and humourless;* it can be contrived as a means of
social communication or in lieu of a rude noise. It can also serve to
cover up sexual or sadistic gloating, as in the forced, tumescent laughter
of the spectators at a strip-tease or in the jolly manifestations of
English popular humour at public hangings in the last century.

Surprisingly, Bergson believed that one can only laugh in the
presence of others presumably because this fitted his theory of
laughter as an act of social correction ('one has no taste for the comic
when one feels isolated. It seems that laughter needs an echo. Our
laughter is always the laughter of a group.'). 11 No doubt, collective
giggling fits do occur in dormitories at girls' schools, and no doubt one
laughs with more gusto in company than alone. But the infectiousness
of emotive manifestations is a well-known phenomenon in group
behaviour, which equally applies to hysteria, panic, even to infectious
coughing of theatre audiences; it is not a specific characteristic of
laughter, and contri butes nothing to its explanation.

Lastly, laughter or smiling frequendy occur in response to stimuli
which in themselves are not comic, but merely signs or symbols for
comic stimuli, or even symbols of symbols Chaplin's boots, Groucho
Marx's cigar, caricatures of celebrities reduced to a few visual hints,
catch-phrases and allusions to familiar situations. The analysis of these
oblique cases often requires tracing back a long and involved thread of
associations to its source, which is not much fun; yet the procedure is
essentially the same as the literary critic's or the art historian's when
they try to analyse the evocative power of a poetic image or a land-
scape. The task is made more complicated by the fact that the effect of
such comic symbols the sight of Colonel Blimp on a cartoon, the
appearance of FalstafT on the stage appears to be instantaneous; there
seems to be no time for first accumulating and then discharging ten-
sion. But in these cases memory serves as an accumulator, a storage
battery whose electric charge can be sparked off any time: the smile
which greets Papageno strutting on to the scene is derived from a
mixture of memories and expectations. All of which goes to show that
to find the explanation why we laugh may be a task as delicate as
analysing the chemical composition of a perfume, with its multiple
ingredients some of which are never perceived, while others,
sniffed in isolation, would make us wince.

The Importance of not being Earnest

Discussing the problem of man's innate aggressive tendencies,
Aldous Huxley once said:

On the physiological level I suppose the problem is linked with the
fact that we carry around with us a glandular system which was
admirably well adapted to life in the Paleolithic times but is not very
well adapted to life now. Thus we tend to produce more adrenalin
than is good for us, and we either suppress ourselves and turn
destructive energies inwards or else we do not suppress ourselves
and we start hitting people. 12

A third alternative, which Huxley overlooked, is to laugh at
people. There are, of course, other outlets for tame aggression:
sport, politics, book-reviewing, and so forth; but these are conscious,
voluntary activities, whereas laughter is a spontaneous, physiological
reflex, a gift of nature included in our native equipment as part of the
evolutionary package deal. Not only the functions of our glands, but
the whole autonomous nervous system and the emotion-controlling
centres in the mid-brain, are much older than the Paleolithic Age,
and reflect conditions at a stage of human evolution when the struggle
for existence was more deadly than at present and when any unusual
sight or sound had to be answered by jumping, bristling, fight, or
flight. As security and comfort increased in the species, the afFect-
generating emergency mechanisms of the sympathico-adrenal system
gradually became an anachronism. But organs and their functions do
not atrophy at the rate at which they become redundant; and thus the
biological evolution ofhomo sapiens (if it has not stopped altogether)
lags dangerously behind his mental evolution. One consequence of
this is that our brains have become 'divided houses of faith and reason,
of thinking at odds with emotions; another, that our emotive respon-
ses have become 'over-statements of the body* out of all proportion
with the reactions biologically required or socially permitted and
cannot be worked off through their original channels. Fortunately, at
some point along the evolutionary line, the luxury reflexes of laughter
and weeping emerged as overflow mechanisms for the disposal of at
least part of our redundant emotions. They are obviously twin re-
flexes: laughter serving the disposal of aggressive emotions cast off
by the intellect, while crying (to anticipate once more) facilitates the
overflow of participatory emotions accepted by the intellect.

62

LAUGHTER AND EMOTION

63

It follows that two conditions had to be fulfilled before homo Helens,
the laughing animal, could emerge: first a relative security of existence,
which called for new outlets for excess energies; second and more
important, a level of evolution had to be reached where reasoning had
gained a certain degree of autonomy from the 'blind* urges of emotion;
where thought had acquired that independence and nimbleness which
enable it to detach itself from feeling and to confront its glandular
humours with a sense of humour. Only at this stage of 'cortical emanci-
pation could man perceive his own emotions as redundant, and make
the smiling admission 'I have been fooled'.

Beneath the human level there is neither the possibility nor the
need for laughter; it could arise only in a biologically secure species
with redundant emotions and intellectual autonomy.* The sudden
realization that one's own excitement is 'unreasonable' heralds the
emergence of self-criticism, of the ability to see one's very own self
from outside; and this bisociation of subjective experience with an ob-
jective frame of reference is perhaps the wittiest discovery of homo
sapiens.

Thus laughter rings the bell of man's departure from the rails of
instinct; it signals his rebellion against the smglemindedness of his
biological urges, his refusal to remain a creature of habit, governed by
a single set of 'rules of the game'. Animals are fanatics; but 'O / How
the dear litde children laugh / When the drums roll and the lovely
Lady is sawn in half. . . ,' 13

NOTES

To p. 56. Criticizing a paper read by a neurologist to a learned society, he
remarked: 'The author spoke of emotions in very general terms. . . . There are
features which he mentioned which I could recognize as characteristic of major

emotions, as anger and rage; but after all, love is an emotion I think that

when we discuss emotion we ought to specify the sorts of emotion we have in
mind* (Cannon, 1929).

To p. 61. The article in which this list appeared is characteristic of the
behaviourist approach; it ennumerated three 'basic principles' of laughter: (a)
'as an expression of joy', (b) 'laughter makes for group cohesion through homo-
geneity of feeling within the group', (c) 'laughing can be used as a weapon in
competitive situations*. The word 'humour' was not mentioned in the article;
laughing at 'jokes, antics, etc.*, was mentioned only in passing, as obviously nor
a phenomenon worthy of the psychologists' attention.

To p. 63. Some domesticated animals dogs, chimpanzees seem to be
capable of a humorous expression and to engage in teasing activities. These may
be regarded as evolutionary forerunners of laughter.

Ill

VARIETIES OF HUMOUR

The tools have now been assembled which should enable the
reader to dissect any specimen of humour. The procedure to
be followed is: first, determine the nature of M 2 and M 2 in
the diagrams on pages 35 and 37 by discovering the type of logic, the
rules of the game, which govern each matrix. Often these rules are
implied, as hidden axioms, and taken for granted the code must be
de-coded. The rest is easy: find the 'link* the focal concept, word, or
situation which is bisociated with both mental planes; lastly, define
the character of the emotive charge and make a guess regarding the
unconscious elements that it may contain. In the sections which follow
I shall apply this technique to various types of humour.

Pun and Witticism

Our spacemen, Mrs. Lamport fears, are 'heading for the "lunar
bin".' The ageing libertine, she tells us, 'feels his old Krafft Ebbing*.
The Reverend Spooner had a great affection, or so he said, for 'our
queer old dean'.

One swallow, the proverb says, does not make a summer nor
quench the thirst. Elijah's ravens, according to Milton, were 'though
ravenous taught to abstain from what they brought*. Not so Napoleon,
who, shortly after his coronation, confiscated the estates of the house
of Orleans, which caused a contemporary to remark: *C*est le premier
vol de Vaigle* Equally to the point was Mr. Paul Jenkin's discovery re-
garding the pros and cons of Britain's entry into the Common Market:
'The Cons were pro, while Lab has turned con.'

The pun is the bisociation of a single phonetic form with two

64

VARIETIES OF HUMOUR

<55

meanings two strings of thought tied together by an accousric knot.
Its immense popularity with children, its prevalence in certain forms
of mental disorder ('punning mania') , and its frequent occurrence in
the dream, indicate the profound unconscious appeal of association
based on pure sound. Its opposite number is the rhyme. In between
these two, on the central panel, the bisociation of sound and sense
assumes a playful form in word games like Lexicon, anagram, and
crossword puzzle; and a serious form in comparative philology and
paleography, the deciphering of ancient inscriptions (pp. 186-7).

Whether the two meanings associated with the pun are derived from
the same root as in 'lunar bin'; or are homonyms as vol = flight and
vol = theft, is irrelevant provided the two derivations have drifted
apart far enough to become incompatible. In fact, there is a con-
tinuous series stretching from the pun through the play of words
(Jen de mots) to the play of ideas (jett a" esprit). Let me quote a few more
examples of the latter.

'The super-ego is that part of the personality which is soluble in
alcohol/ The concept 'soluble' is bisociated (a) with the context of the
chemical laboratory and (b) with the (metaphorical) dissolution of
one's high principles in one's cups. The first few words of the sentence
arouse perhaps a mild irritation with the Freudian jargon or appre-
hension, as the case may be; which is then tittered away through the
now familiar mechanism.

Here is another sample from this game of definitions: 'What is a
sadist? A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.' The link-concept
is 'kindness', bisociated with two diametrically opposed meanings;
moreover the whole definition is open to two different interpretations:

(a) the sadist does a kindness to the masochist by torturing him;

(b) the sadist is torturing the masochist by being kind to him.

In both cases the sadist must go against his own nature, and the
definition turns out to be in fact a variant of the logical paradox about
the Cretan who asserts that all Cretans are liars. But we can get around
it by deciding that in either interpretation 'kind' should be understood
both literally and metaphorically at the same time; in other words, by
playing simultaneously two games governed by opposite rules. We
shall see that such reversals of logic play a considerable part in scientific
discovery (pp. 191-9). They are also a recurrent motif in poetry and
literature. One of my favourite Donne quotations is a line from the
Litany: 'For O, for some, not to be martyrs is a martyrdom.'

I have given examples of the bisociation of professional with

66 THE ACT OF CREATION

commonsense logic, of metaphorical with literal meaning, of contexts
linked by sound affinities, of trains of reasoning travelling, happily
joined together, in opposite directions. The list could be extended
beyond the limits of patience. In fact any two matrices can be made to
yield a comic effect of sorts, by finding an appropriate link between
them and infusing a drop of adrenalin. Take as a random example
two associative contexts centred on the unpromising key-words
< alliteration , and 'hydrotherapy*. (The example actually originated in
a challenge following a discussion; I am merely quoting it, with
apologies, to show that in principle it can be done):

Gossip Column Item: Lady Smith-Everett, receiving me in her
sumptuous boudoir, explained that she had always suffered from 'the
most maddening rashes' until she met her present physician, a former
professor of psycho-hydrotherapy at the University of Bucharest. By
employing a new test which he invented, the Professor discovered
that she had 'a grade 4 allergy' against sojourning in spas and
holiday resorts with the initial letter C. No more visits to Capri and
Carlsbad for Lady S-E.!

It is not even necessary that the two matrices should be governed
by incompatible codes. One can obtain comic effects by simply con-
fronting quantitatively different scales of operations, provided that
they differ sufficiently in order of magnitude for one scale to become
negligible compared with the other. The result is the type of joke made
according to the formula: the mountains laboured, the birth was a
mouse.

With an added twist you get this kind of dotty dialogue between a
nervous bus-passenger and the conductor:
'What's the time?'
'Thursday.'

*Good Lord! I must get off.'

This is a serial affair in which not two but three matrices are suc-
cessively involved, each with a different scale of measurement, M x
has a grid of hours and minutes; M 2 of days of the week. The two differ
in fact only in quantity but provide qualitatively different frames of
reference; the third matrix has spatial instead of temporal co-ordinates
where to get off, not when. It would be impossible to orientate one's
behaviour with reference to these three different grids at the same
time; yet that is precisely what the tri-sociated passenger is trying to do .

VARIETIES OF HUMOUR

67

Let me repeat: any two universes of discourse can be used to fabri-
cate a joke. Lewis Carroll sent the following contri bution to a philo-
sophical symposium:

'Yet what mean all such gaieties to me
"Whose life is full of indices and surds?
X* + 7 X+53
= II/3'

The universes of verbal and mathematical symbols are linked by
pure sound-affinity with rhyme but without reason. When T. E.
Lawrence joined the ranks as Private Shaw, Noel Coward wrote to
him that famous letter beginning 'Dear 338171 (may I call you 338?)'.

Man and Animal

In the previous chapter I discussed the bisociation of man and
machine; related to it is the hybrid man-animal. Disney's creatures
behave as if they were human without losing their animal appearance,
they live on the line of intersection of the two planes; so do the car-
toonist's piggy or mousy humans. This double-existence is comic,
but only so long as the confrontation has the effect of a slighdy de-
grading exposure of one or the other. If sympathy prevails over malice
even poor Donald Duck's misfortunes cease to be laughable; and as you
move over to the right-hand panel of the triptych, the man-animal
undergoes a series of transformations: from the cloying lyricism of
Bambi to the tragedy of Orwell's Boxer; from the archetypal menace
of the werewolf to the Metamorphosis of Kafka's hero into a filth-
devouring cockroach. As for science, the importance of learning about
man by the experimental study of animal physiology need not be
stressed; in psychology it has been rather overstressed to the point
where the salivary reflexes of dogs came to be regarded as paradig-
matic for human behaviour.

Impersonation

The various categories of the comic shade into each other: Disney's
ariimals acting like humans could as well be classified under the

68

THE ACT OF CREATION

heading 'imitation, impersonation, and disguise'. The impersonator is
two different people at one time. If the result is degrading, the spec-
tator will laugh. If he is led to sympathize or identify himself with the
impersonated hero, he will experience that state of split-rnindedness
known as dramatic illusion or the magic of the stage. Which of the
two possibilities will occur depends of course partly on the actor, but
ultimately 'a jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never
in the tongue / Of him that makes it'. 1 The same 'narrative', a
Victorian melodrama or a Chinese opera, acted in both cases in pre-
cisely the same way, will make some spectators giggle, others weep.
The same dramatic devices may serve either a comic or a tragic purpose:
Romeo and Juliet are the victims of absurd coincidences, Oedipus's
marriage to his mother is due to mistaken identity; Rosalind in As
You Like It and Leonora in Fidelio are both disguised as men, yet in
one case the result is drama, in another comedy. The technique of
creating character-types is also shared by both: in the classical form of
tragedy, whether Greek, Indian, or Japanese, characterization is often
achieved by standardized masks; in the comedy, down to Moliere,
by the creation of types: the miser, the glutton, the hypocrite, the
cuckold. In the centre panel (where impersonation appears in the
form of empathy, the act of self-projection which enables one to
understand others, see below pp. 187-8) the classification of character-
types has been the aim of incessant efforts from the 'four tempera-
ments' of the Greeks, to Kretschmer, Jung, Sheldon, and so on.

The Child-Adult

Why are puppies droll? Firstly, their helplessness, trustingness, attach-
ment, and puzzled expression make them more 'human' than grown-
up dogs; in the second place the ferocious growl of the puppy strikes
us as an impersonation of adult behaviour (like the little boy with
stuck-on beard and bowler-hat, pretending to be the family doctor);
thirdly, the puppy's waddling and tumbling makes it a choice victim
of nature's practical jokes; furthermore, its bodily disproportions, the
huge padded paws, wrinkled brow, and Falstaffian belly, give it the
appearance of a caricature; and so on. The delighted laughter which
greets the puppy's antics seems so simple to explain; but when we try
to analyse it we find several interlocking causes; and while the word
'delighted' indicates a pure emotion, free from the ugly taint of

VARIETIES OF HUMOUR

69

aggressiveness, the grain of self-satisfied condescension, the conviction
of our own superiority is nevertheless present, even if we are not
aware of it.

A simple shift of emphasis will move the bisociation of child and
adult into the centre panel where it becomes a concern of pedagogues
and psychiatrists. A further shift to the right, and the relation will be
reversed, the child will be seen as an adult in disguise, immersed in the
hidden tragedies of the nursery and boarding school an inexhaustible
subject of the autobiographical novel.

The Trivial and the Exalted

Parody is the most aggressive form of impersonation, designed not only
to deflate hollow pretence but also to destroy illusion in all its forms;
and to imdermine pathos by harping on the trivial, all-too-human
aspects of the victim. Stage props collapsing, wigs falling off, public
speakers forgetting their lines, dramatic gestures remaining suspended
in the air the parodist's favourite points of attack are all situated on
the line of intersection between two planes: the Exalted and the
Trivial.

The artist reverses this technique by conferring on trivial experiences
a new dignity and wonder: Rembrandt painting the carcass of a
flayed ox, Manet his skinny, insipid Olympia; Hemingway drawing
tragedy out of the repetitive, inarticulate stammer of his characters;
Chekhov focussing the reader's attention on a fly crawling on a lump
of sugar while Natasha is contemplating suicide.

When 'consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to
small' which Spencer regarded as the prime cause of laughter the
result will be either a comic or an aesthetic experience, depending on
whether the persons emotions are of the type capable of participating
in the transfer or not. The artist, reversing the parodist's technique,
walks on a tightrope, as it were, along the line where the exalted and
the trivial planes meet; he 'sees with equal eye, as God of all, / A hero
perish or a sparrow fall*. The scientist's attitude is basically similar in
situations where he suddenly discovers the connection between a
banal event and a general law of nature Newton's apple or the
boiling kettle of James Watt.

* When F. W. H. Myers became interested in people's attitudes to
religion he questioned an elderly widow on what she thought about

70

THE ACT OF CREATION

the whereabouts of her departed husband's soul. She replied: 'Oh well,
I suppose he is enjoying eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk
about such unpleasant subjects.' I would call this an illustration of the
peaceful coexistence of the tragic and trivial planes in our humble
minds. Equally convincing is this statement made by a schoolboy to
his mathematics master:
'Infinity is where things happen which don't.' 2

Caricature and Satire

The political cartoon, at its best, is a translation into visual imagery of
a witty topical comment; at its worst, a manipulation of symbols
John Bull, Uncle Sam, the Russian bear which, once comic, have
degenerated into visual cliches. The symbols trigger off memories
and expectations; the narrative content of the cartoon is taken in by
visual scanning, with possibly a delayed-action effect due to the time
needed for 'seeing the joke*. The analysis of such mixed forms is a
lengthy affair.*

The portrait caricature, on the other hand, relies for its effects on
purely visual means. Its method recalls the distorting mirrors at fun-
fairs, which reflect the human form elongated into a candle-shape, or
absurdly compressed, or as a vague phantom with wavy outlines. As
a result we see ourselves and yet something else; our familiar shapes
being transformed as if the body were merely an elastic surface that
can be stretched in all directions.

The mirror distorts by exaggerating mechanically in one spatial
direction at the expense of others; the caricaturist distorts by exaggera-
ting features which he considers characteristic of his victim's appearance
or personality. His second main trick is over-simplification: he mini-
mizes or leaves out features which are not relevant for his purpose. A
prominent nose, for instance, such as General de Gaulle's, can be
exploited to the extent that the rest of the face shrinks to insignificance:
the part has been detached from the whole and has become a nose an
sick The product of the clever caricaturist's distortions is something
physiologically impossible, yet at the same time visually convincing
he has superimposed his frame of perception on our own. For a
caricature is comic only if we know something of the victim, if we
have a mental image, however vague, of the person, or type of person,
at which it is aimed even if it is an Eskimo, a cave-man, or a Martian

VARIETIES OF HUMOUR

71

robot. The unknown cannot be distorted or misrepresented. The
caricature of the more ferocious type is the rape of an image, an optical
debunking of the victim; in its gender form, a semi-afFectionate kick
at the heel of Achilles.

Thus the malicious pleasure derived from a good caricature origin-
ates in the confrontation of a likeness, distorted according to the
artist's rules of the game, with reality or our image thereof. But it is a
rather harmless form of malice because we know that the caricaturist's
monster with the cucumber nose or enormous belly is a biological im-
possibility, that it is not real Illustrations of elephantiasis and patholo-
gical obesity are not comic because these distortions of the human
shape are known to be real, and therefore arouse pity. The knowledge
that the deformities of the caricature are merely pretence acquits us of
all charitable obligations and allows us to laugh at the victim's expense.

The exaggeration and simplification of features selected according to
his judgement of what is to be considered relevant is a technique
shared by both the caricaturist and the artist who calls it stylization.
(Needless to say, a caricature is also a form of art; but for convenience'
sake I am using throughout this book the term 'art' to refer to its non-
comic varieties.) Stylization has been carried to extreme length in a
number of ancient and modern art forms without destroying the
aesthetic effect: that is to say, without sliding from art into caricature.
The elongated skulls of certain Egyptian sculptures reflect a con-
temporary practice of deforming the princely babies' heads, but they
obviously exaggerate the result. Nevertheless it would hardly occur to
one to call Tutankhamen an egghead because one feels that the
sculptor exaggerated not with a hostile but with a worshipful intent,
and this attitude is communicated to the spectator. Once more the
polarity between comic and aesthetic experience is seen to derive from
the polarity between the self-assertive and self-transcending tendencies.

This still holds true even when communication between artist and
spectator breaks down. In the eyes of the Philistine all experimental art
is ludicrous, because the PhiHstine's attitude is aggressive-defensive.
When Picasso shuffles round the eyes and limbs of his figures in a
manner which is biologically impossible and yet has a visual logic of
its own, he juxtaposes the seen and the known he is walking, pre-
cariously balanced, on the borderline between two universes of ex-
perience, each governed by a different code. The conservative-minded
spectator, unable to follow, suspects the artist of pulling his leg by
deliberately distorting the human shape as the caricaturist does; and

72

THB ACT OP CREATION

so the two-faced woman with three breasts becomes in his eyes a
caricature. The ambiguity is perhaps most strikingly illustrated in
some of the character-studies by Leonardo, Hogarth, and Daumier.
The passions reflected in them are so violent, the grimaces so ferocious,
that it is impossible to tell whether they were meant as portraits or
caricatures, and the distinction becomes a purely theoretical one. If
you feel that such distortions of the human face do not really exist,
that Daumier, deliberately exaggerating, merely pretended that they
exist, then you are absolved from horror and pity and can laugh at his
grotesques. But if you feel that this is indeed what Daumier saw in
those de-humanized faces, then you are looking at a work of art. The
humorist thrives on deformity; the artist deforms the world to re-
create it in his own image.

The technique of exaggerating the relevant and simplifying or
ignoring the irrelevant aspects of reality is shared not only by the
artist and caricaturist but is equally indispensable to the scientist. The
motivations of each of the three differ, of course, and with them their
criteria of relevance. The humorist's motives are aggressive, the
artist's participatory, the scientist's exploratory. The scientist's criteria
of relevance are 'objective' in the sense of being emotionally neutral,
but they still depend on the particular aspect of reality in which he
is interested. Every drawing on the blackboardwhe ther it is meant
to represent the wiring diagram of a radio set or the circulation of the
blood, the structure of a molecule or the weather over the Adantic
is based on the same method as the cartoonist's: selective emphasis on
the relevant factors and omission of the rest. A map bears the same
relation to a landscape as a character-sketch to a face; every chart,
diagram, or model, every schematic or symbolic representation of
physical or mental processes, is an unemotional caricature of reality.
At least, 'unemotional' in the sense that the bias is not of an obvious
kind; although some models of the universe as a rigid, mechanical
clockwork which, once wound up, must follow its unalterable course,
or of the human mind as a slot-machine, have turned out to be crude
caricatures inspired by unconscious bias.

The satire is a verbal caricature which distorts characteristic features
of an individual or society by exaggeration and simplification. The
features picked out for enlargement by the satirist are, of course, those
of which he disapproves: 'If Nature's inspiration fails', wrote Juvenal,
* indignation will beget the poem.* The comic efFect of the satire is
derived from the simultaneous presence, in the reader's mind, of the

VARIETIES OP HUMOUS

73

social reality with which he is familiar, and of its reflection in the
distorting mirror of the satirist. It focusses attention on abuses and
deformities in society of which, blunted by habit, we were no longer
aware; it makes us suddenly discover the absurdity of the familiar
and the familiarity of the absurd.

The same effect is achieved if, instead of magnifying objectionable
features in customs and institutions, the satirist projects them by means
of the allegory onto a different background, such as an animal society
e.g. Aristophanes, Swift, Orwell. In either case we are made suddenly
conscious of conventions and prejudices which we have unquestion-
ingly accepted, which were tacidy implied in the codes in control of
our thinking and behaviour. The confrontation with an alien matrix
reveals in a sharp, pitiless light what we failed to see in following our
dim routines; the tacit assumptions hidden in the rules of the game are
dragged into the open. The bisociative shock shatters the frame of
complacent habits of thinking; the seemingly obvious is made to yield
its secret.

'In this world of perfect justice, rich and poor alike have the right to
sleep under bridges/ Anatole France's classic epigram is a confrontation
of abstract democracy with the brutal facts of life; it conjures up the
image of a well-dressed bourgeois making use of his constitutional
rights to doss down, in the name of Liberte, Egalite, and Fratemite,
under the arches of the Pont de la Concorde. In its higher reaches the
satirist's art merges into the social scientist's quest for truth; Brave New
World and 1984 are extrapolations of present trends into the future;
Gulliver s Travels and Erewhon, on the other hand, follow the method
of the anthropologist, who deepens our understanding of our own
society by confronting it with the equally 'self-evident* beliefs and
customs of exotic civilizations.

Thus, as we travel across the triptych, satire shades into social science;
and this, in turn, branches out into the tragic allegory Plato's Cave
and Kafka's Casde or into poetic Utopia. The artistic hazards of the
latter are perhaps due to a conflict of emotions. Writers of Utopias are
motivated by revulsion against society as it is, or at least by a rejection
of its values; and since revulsion and rejection are aggressive attitudes,
it comes more naturally to them to paint a picture of society with a
brush dipped in adrenalin than in syrup or aspirin. Hence the contrast
between Huxley's brilliant, bitter Brave New World and the goody-
goody bores on his Island.

The satirist's most effective weapon is irony. Its aim is to defeat the

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THE ACT OF CREATION

opponent on his own ground by pretending to accept his premisses,
his values, his methods of reasoning, in order to expose their implicit
absurdity. 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than
others/ Irony purports to take seriously what it does not; it enters into
the spirit of the other person's game to demonstrate that its rules are
stupid or vicious. It is a subtle weapon, because the person who wields
it must have the imaginative power of seeing through the eyes of his
opponent, of projecting himself into the others mental world. The
psychiatrist who goes patiently along with the patient's fantasies, the
teacher who adapts his language to the level of comprehension of the
child, the dramatist who speaks through his characters' voices, employ
the same procedure with the opposite intent and effect.

The Misfit

Both Cicero and Francis Bacon gave deformity a high place on their
lists of causes for laughter. The princes of the Renaissance collected
midgets, hunchbacks, monsters, and Blackamoors for their merriment.
We have become too civilized for that kind of thing, but children still
jeer and laugh at people with a limp or a stammer, at foreigners with a
funny pronunciation, at people oddly dressed at any form of appear-
ance or behaviour which deviates from the familiar norm. The more
backwoodish a social group, juvenile or adult, the stricter its concep-
tion of the normal, and the readier it will ridicule any departure from it.

Consider for a moment the curious fact that to a civilized person a
stutterer causes sympathetic embarrassment, whereas a person of
normal speech giving an imitation of stuttering makes us laugh. So
does the youngster in love who stutters only under the effect of a
momentary surge of emotion. Again, a person with a foreign accent
is accepted with tolerance, but the imitation of a foreign accent is
comic. The explanation is that we know the imitator's stutter or mis-
prononunciation to be mere pretence; this makes sympathy both un-
necessary and impossible, and enables us to be childishly cruel with a
clear conscience. We have met the same phenomenon (page 71) in
our attitude towards the bodily deformities imputed by the caricaturist
to his victim.

The tolerant acceptance of physical or mental malformations in
our fellow creatures, though of relatively recent origin, has become
deeply engrained in Western society; we are no longer aware of the

VARIETIES OF HUMOUR

75

fact that it requires a certain imagination and a good deal of empathy
to recognize in a dwarf, or a 'thick-lipped Blackamoor', a human
being which, though different in appearance, exists and feels as one-
self does. In the small child this kind of projective mechanism is
absent or rudimentary. Piaget, among others, has strikingly shown
how late the child accords to its fellow beings a conscious ego like its
own. The more a person deviates from the familiar norm of the
child's surroundings, the more difficult it is for the child to project into
him life and feelings, to grant him the faculty of having experiences
like his own. The same applies to the attitudes shown by tribal or
parochial societies to foreigners, slaves, members of the lower classes'
(almost inevitably treated as comic figures in literature up to and in-
cluding Dickens); as well as to criminals, the mentally disordered and
physically deformed. The creature who does not 'belong' to the
tribe, clan, caste, or parish is not really human; he only aspires or
pretends to be 'like us'. To civilized man, a dwarf is comic only if he
struts about pretending to be tall, which is he not; in the primitive's
eye the dwarf is comic because he pretends to be human, which he is
not. The Greek word 'barbarian' means both foreigner and stutterer
(bar-bar-ous); the uncouth, repetitive, barking sounds he uttered
were a grotesque imitation of true human speech. Bodily and func-
tional deformities are laughable to the uncouth mind for the same
reasons as impersonation and caricature.

The Paradox of the Centipede

However, an additional factor enters into the comic effect of some dis-
orders of behaviour such as stuttering, mispronunciation, misspelling:
one might call it the bisociation of structure and function, or of part
and whole. The stammering barbarian was a comic figure to the Greeks
for reasons just mentioned; but the comedian's stage-stutter is funny in
a different way. When he struggles with a consonant, trying to take
the same hurdle again and again, eyes bulging and face convulsed, we
become suddenly aware of the complicated motions of lips and tongue
required to produce the sound 'M'; our attention becomes focussed
on these physiological details torn from their functional context and
placed under a magnifying glass, as it were. Much the same happens
when the gramophone needle gets stuck in a groove, and the soprano's
voice keeps repeating the same word on the same quaver. The part has

76

THE ACT OF CREATION

become detached from the whole and monopolizes attention as if it
existed in its own right, as an independent structural entity, regardless
of its function in the larger context from which alone its meaning is
derived. In one of Silone's novels an innocent peasant boy from the
Abruzzi drifts into a crowd in front of Mussolini's new forum, and
cannot understand why everybody keeps chanting in a chorus: 'Ce-du,
ce~du, ce-du, ce-du . . / The isolated quaver or consonant which has made
a declaration of independence, the syllables *du and *ce* torn from
their context, are examples of the conflict which can arise between part
and whole, structure and function, when to put it in a different way
the dependent part pretends to be an independent whole and forces
our attention to regard it as such.

When we exercise a well-practised skill the parts must function
smoothly and automatically they must never occupy the focus of
attention. This is true whether the skill in question is riding a bicycle,
playing the violin, ennunciating the letter *M', or forming sentences
according to the rules of grammar and syntax. The code which
controls the performance functions, as we repeatedly saw, on a
lower level of consciousness than the performance itselfon the
fringes of awareness or, in completely automatized skills, even beyond
the fringe. The moment attention is focussed on a normally auto-
matized part-function such as ennunciating consonants, the matrix
breaks down, the needle gets stuck, and the performance is paralysed
like the centipede who was asked in which order he moved his hundred
legs, and could walk no more.

The paradox of the centipede is a consequence of the hierarchic
organization of the nervous system which demands that the highest
centres should be occupied with the task in hand conceived as a whole,
and leave the execution of the component sub-tasks and sub-sub-tasks
to the sub-centres, etc., on lower levels of the nervous system. A
brigadier does not give orders to, and concentrate his attention on,
individual soldiers during action; if he does the action goes haywire.
The paradox of the centipede will be seen to play an important part
in discovery and the theory of thinking in general; in humour, apart
from the examples mentioned, it accounts for the comic effect of
the 'self-conscious* (in fact, detail-conscious) behaviour of the person
who does not know what to do with his hands; and also explains
why the comedian's clothes, and some foreign or bygone fashions, are
funny. Conventional articles of apparel are perceived as parts of a
person's appearance as a whole, whereas the comedian's checked

VARIETIES OF HUMOUR

77

trousers and the Victorian lady's busde disrupt the unity and force
attention on textiles and starched draperies leading an independent
life. Except when we are in a romantic mood: then a historical costume
on the stage is no longer seen detached from its wearer but attaches him
to the period.

Since I mentioned mispronunciation, I must add the obvious remark
that if the maltreated word assumes a different meaning, we get the
involuntary pun; and even if it does not, mispronunciation can be
funny if it follows its own logic which exposes the absurdities of con-
ventional spelling. Try on an innocent foreigner the sequence: a
coughing plough and a soughing trough; then see what happens.

Displacement

A car dealer is boosting a new sports model to a prospective client:

'You get into this car at midnight and at 4 a.m. you are in
Grimsby/

The customer is indignant: 'And what am I to do in the middle of
the night in Grimsby}*

The question is perfecdy logical, but irrelevant to the subject under
discussion, which is the speed of the car. The link-concept is * Grimsby
at 4 a.m.' which in one context plays the accidental part of an im-
provised example, in the second an essential part. This sudden shift
of emphasis or displacement of attention to a seemingly irrelevant
aspect of a bisociated concept is frequently found not only in humour,
but also in art and discovery (Chapters VIII, XXIII). It is related to the
paradox of the centipede, but instead of displacing attention from the
whole to the part it is displaced from a dominant to a previously neg-
lected aspect of the whole, showing it in a new light.

In the Ballad of Reading Gaol there are two unforgettable lines:

How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

The broken heart has become such a cliche that its physical implica-
tions splitting apart and creating a gap are never thought of. Wilde
shifts our attention to that forgotten physical image; he lets salvation
enter through the aching gap, like a thief in the night. When the White

78

THE ACT OF CREATION

Queen complains: 'It's a poor sort of memory which only works
backwards,' she is putting her finger on an aspect of reality the
irreversibility of time which we normally take for granted; her
apparently silly remark carries metaphysical intimations, and appeals
to our secret yearning for the gift of prophecy matters which would
never occur to Alice, that little paragon of stubborn common sense.

Coincidence

It was once usual to classify comedies into those relying on situations,
manners, or characters. In his discussion of the first, Bergson came
closest to the essence of humour: 'A situation is always comic', he
wrote, 'if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which
are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted
in two quite different meanings.' One feels like crying 'Fire', but a
couple of pages further on Bergson has dropped the clue and gone
back to his hobby: the interference of two independent series in a given
situation is merely a further example of the 'mechanization of life'.

In fact the crossing of two independent causal chains through
coincidence, mistaken identity, confusion of time and occasion, is the
most clean-cut example of bisociated contexts. The chance-coincidence
on which they are hinged is the dens ex machina, the intervention of
providence in both tragedy and comedy; and, needless to say, lucky
hazards play an equally conspicuous part in the history of scientific
discovery.

Nonsense

One type of comic verse lives on the bisociation of exalted form with
trivial content. Certain metric forms, such as hexameter and Alexan-
drine, arouse expectations of pathos, of the heroic and exalted; the
pouring of homely, trivial contents into these epic moulds 'beautiful
soup, so rich and green' creates a comic effect of the same type as the
parody. The rolling dactyls of the first line of the limerick, carrying,
instead of Hector and Achilles, a young lady from Stockton as their
passenger, make her already appear ridiculous, regardless of the calami-
tics which are sure to befall her. In this atmosphere of malicious ex-
pectation whatever witticism the text has to offer will have a much
enhanced effect.

VARIETIES OF HUMOUR 79

Instead of an epic mould, a soft, lyrical one will equally do:

. . . And what could be moister
Than tears from an oyster?

Another variant is what one might call the pseudo-proverb: 'The
rule is: jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today.* Two
logically incompatible statements have been telescoped into a line
whose rhythm and syntax gives the impression of being a popular
adage or golden rule of life. Sometimes the trick is done by the sub-
stitution of a single word in a familiar text: 'One should never work
between meals.' The homely, admonitory structure lulls the mind
into bored acquiescence until the preposterous subterfuge is discovered.
Oscar Wilde was a master of this form: 'In married life three is com-
pany and two none'; 'the only way to get rid of a temptation is to
yield to it', etc., etc. My own favourite coinage is: 'One should not
carry moderation to extremes/

Nonsense humour as Max Eastman has pointed out is only
effective if it, pretends to make sense: 'It's a fact the whole world knows
That Pobbles are happier without their toes.' Even with rhymed
gibberish the illusion of meaning is essential. 'The slithy toves' that
'gyre and gimble in the wabe' evoke sound associations which suggest
some kind of action even though we are unable to say what exactly the
action is perhaps some small creatures gyrating and gambolling on a
brilliant day in the web of some flowery bush. The meaning varies
with the person as the interpretation of the ink blots in a Rohrschach
test; but without this illusory meaning projected into the phonetic
pattern, without the simultaneous knowledge of being fooled, and of
fooling oneself, there would be no enjoyment of *the jabberwock with
eyes of flame' who 'came whiffling through the tulgey wood / And
burbled as it came'.

Tickling

The harmless game of tickling has resisted all attempts to find a unitary
formula for the causes of laughter; it has been the stumbling block
which made the theorists of the comic give up, or their theories break
down.

It was at one time believed that the laughter caused by tickling is a
purely mechanical reflex in response to a purely physical stimulation.

8o

THE ACT OF CREATION

But as Darwin has pointed out the response to tickling is
squirming, wriggling, and straining to withdraw the tickled part
activities which may or may not be accompanied by laughter. The
squirming response was interpreted by Darwin and Crile as an innate
defence mechanism to escape a hostile grip on vulnerable areas which
are not normally exposed to attack: the soles of the feet, the neck,
arm-pits, belly, and flank. If a fly settles on the belly of a horse a kind of
contractile wave may pass over the skin the equivalent of the
squkming of the tickled child. But the horse does not laugh when
tickled, and the child not always. As Gregory has put it:

A child fingers the pepper-pot, waves pepper into its nose, and
sneezes violently. Touch it under the arm-pits, or finger its waist,
and it wriggles vigorously. It sneezes to dislodge the pepper from its
nose, and its wriggle suggests a sneeze to relieve its whole body. The
violent squirm of the tickled child so obviously tries to avoid the
tickling hand that, when the truth is perceived, it is difficult to
understand how tickling and laughter could ever be identified or
confused. 3

Thus tickling a child will call out a wriggling and squirming
response. But the child will laugh only and this is the crux of the
matter if an additional condition is fulfilled: it must perceive the
1 tickling as a mack attack, a caress in a mildly aggressive disguise. This
; explains why people laugh only when tickled by others but not when
they tickle themselves. (The question why this should be so was once
put to a B.B.C. Brains Trust which, after some humming, hawing,
and giggling, decided that it was one of the insoluble mysteries of
human nature.) Not only must there be a second person to do the
tickling, but her expression and attitude must be mock-aggressive as
mothers and nurses instinctively know. Battle cries like peekaboo*
and 'bow-wow' pay guaranteed dividends, like the comedian's
imitation of the lion's roar. As in every attack, the element of surprise
plays an important part: the expert tickler's tactics never let the victim
guess when and where the next pressure or pincer movement will occur.
Experiments in tickling on babies under one year old showed that
babies laughed fifteen times more often when tickled by their mothers
than when they were tickled by strangers. For naturally the mock-
attack will make the baby laugh only if it knows that it is a mock-
attack; and with strangers one never knows. Even with its own mothf

VARIETIES OF HUMOUR

8l

there is an ever-so-slight feeling of uncertainty and apprehension, the
expression of which alternates with laughter in the baby's behaviour;
and it is precisely this element of apprehension between two tickles
which is relieved in the laughter accompanying the squirm. The rule
of the game is let me be just a little frightened so that I can enjoy the
relief.

Thus the mechanism is essentially the same as in comic impersona-
tion: the tickler impersonates an aggressor, but is simultaneously known
not to be one. It is probably the first situation encountered in life which
makes the infant live on two planes at once, the first delectable ex-
perience in bisociation a foretaste of pleasures to come at the panto-
mime show, of becoming a willing victim to the illusions of the stage,
of being tickled by the horror-thriller.

In adolescence, erotic elements enter into the game, and tickling
assumes the role of a sexual mock-attack acknowledged with
giggles which betray their origin in infantile apprehensions. Some
homosexuals claim to be extremely ticklish and display a tendency to
squirming and wriggling as an expression of mock-fright. But these
are secondary developments which partly iUuminate, partly confuse
the original pattern the tickled child's laughter is a discharge of
apprehensions recognized as unfounded by the intellect.

The Clown

Most of the comic techniques I have discussed can be found in the
repertory of the circus clown the classic incarnation of the coarser
type of humour. His face is a richly exaggerated caricature of stupidity,
sometimes with an infectious grimace of laughter painted on it; in
each piece of his apparel form battles against function; each of his
movements is a parody of grace. He is the victim and perpetrator of
preposterous practical jokes; he is both human and inert matter, for to
survive all the slaps, whacks, and cracks, his skull must be made of
ebony. He is the image in the distorting mirror, the clumsy imper-
sonator of acrobats, ballet dancers, and fairies: Caliban imitating Ariel.
He is a collection of deformities, bodily and functional; he stumbles
over obstacles and words; he is timid, gauche, eccentric, and absent-
minded. Above all, he is the man of gigantic efforts and diminutive
accomplishments: the midwife who aids the mountain to deliver the
mouse.

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THE ACT OF CREATION

The clown's domain is the coarse, rich, overt type of humour: he
leaves nothing to be guessed, he piles it on. A good deal of the enjoy-
ment he causes is a mild gloating, the discharge of sadistic, sexual,
scatalogical impulses by way of the purifying channels of laughter.
One means of producing and prolonging this effect is repetition. The
clown and the clowning kind of music-hall comedian will tell, or act
out, a long-drawn narrative in which the same type of flash, the same
pattern, the same situation, the same key-words, recur again and
again. Although repetition diminishes the effect of surprise, it has a
cumulative effect on the emotive charge. The logical pattern is the
same in each repeat, but new tension is easily drawn into the familiar
channel. It is as if more and more liquid were being pumped into the
same punctured pipeline.

Originality, Emphasis, Economy

I have discussed the logic of humour and its emotive dynamics, and
have tried to indicate how to analyse a joke. But nothing has been said
so far about the criteria which decide whether it is a good, bad, or
indifferent joke. These are, of course, pardy a matter of personal taste,
partly dependent on the technique of the humorist; only the second is
our concern.

There are, I shall suggest, three main criteria of comic technique:
originality, emphasis, and economy. In the light of the previous
chapters we shall expect them to play also a significant part in the
techniques of scientific theorizing and artistic creation.

An art dealer (this story is au thentic) bought a canvas signed
'Picasso' and travelled all the way to Cannes to discover whether it
was genuine. Picasso was working in his studio. He cast a single look
at the canvas and said: 'It's a fake'.

A few months later the dealer bought another canvas signed
Picasso. Again he travelled to Cannes and again Picasso, after a single
glance, grunted: It's a fake.'

'But cher mattre' expostulated the dealer, 'it so happens that I saw
you with my own eyes working on this very picture several
years ago.'

Picasso shrugged: 'I often paint fakes.'

VARIETIES OP HUMOUR

83

One measure of originality is its surprise effect. Picasso's reply
as the Marquis' in the Chamfort story is truly unexpected; with its
perverse logic, it cuts through the narrative like the blade of the
guillotine.

But creative originality is not so often met with either in art or in
humour. One substitute for it is suggestiveness through emphasis.
The cheap comedian piles it on; the competent craftsman plays in a
subtler way on our memories and habits of thought. Whenever in the
Contes Drolatiques Balzac introduces an abbe or a monk, our associa-
tions race ahead of the narrative in the delectable expectation of some
venal sin to be committed; yet when the point of the story is reached
we still smile, sharing the narrator's mock-indignation and pretended
surprise. In other words, anticipations of the type of joke or point to
come do not entirely destroy the comic effect, provided that we do not
know when and how exactly it will strike home. It is rather like a
game: cover my eyes and I shall pretend to be surprised. Besides, the
laughter provoked by spicy jokes is, as already said, only partly
genuine, partly a cloak to cover publicly less demonstrable emotions
regardless whether the story in itself is comic or not.

Suggestive techniques are essential; they create suspense and fac-
ilitate the listener's flow of associations along habit-formed channels.
A comic idea of a given logical pattern can be transposed into any
number of different settings; local colour and dialect help to establish
the atmosphere. The most effective stories are regional: Scottish,
Marseilles, Cockney; the mere mention of 'a man from Aberdeen'
establishes the matrix, the desired frame of mind. Thus suggestiveness
depends firstly on the choice of relevant stimuli as the biologist would
say. Next, all non-essential elements should be omitted, even at the
price of a certain sketchiness, otherwise attention will be sidetracked,
the tension frittered away: this is the technique of simplification. In
the third place the effect is increased by certain emphatic gestures,
inflections, a stress on dialect and slang: in a word, by exaggeration.
We have met these three related factors: selection, exaggeration,
simplification, in the technique of the caricature (and of the portrait
and blue-print); taken together they provide the means of high-
lighting aspects of reality considered to be significant. It is not sur-
prising that the same techniques enter into the artist's and humorist's
efforts to communicate with his audience.

However, except in the coarsest type of humour and the trashiest
forms of art, ^suggestion. through emphasises not enough; and it can

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THE ACT OF CREATION

defeat its own purpose. It must be compensated by the opposite kind
of virtue: the exercise of economy, or, more precisely: the technique of
implication,

Picasso's *I often paint fakes' is at the same time original, emphatic,
and implicit. He does not say: * Sometimes, like other painters, I do
something second-rate, repetitive, an uninspired variation on a theme,
which after a while looks to me as if somebody had imitated my
technique. It is true that this somebody happened to be myself, but
that makes no difference to the quality of the picture, which is no
better than if it were a fake; in fact you could call it that an uninspired
J Picasso apeing the style of the true Picasso.'

None of this was said; all of it was implied. But the listener has to
, work out by himself what is implied in the laconic hint; he has to make
an imaginative effort to solve the riddle. If the answer were explicitly
given, on the lines indicated in the previous paragraph, the listener
would be both spared the effort and deprived of its reward; there would
be no anecdote to tell.

To a sophisticated audience any joke sounds stale if it is entirely
explicit. If this is the case the listeners thoughts will move faster than
tie narrator's tale or the unfolding of the plot; instead of tension it
will generate boredom. 'Economy' in this sense means the use of
hints in lieu of statements; instead of moving steadily on, the narrative
jumps ahead, leaving logical gaps which the listener has to bridge by
his own effort: he is forced to co-operate.

The operation of bridging a logical gap by inserting the missing
links is called interpolation. The series A, C, E, . . . K, M, O shows a
gap which is filled by interpolating G and I. On the other hand, I can
extend or extrapolate the series by adding to it R, T, V, etc. In the more
sophisticated forms of humour the listener must always perform either
or both of these operations before he can 'see the joke'. Take this
venerable example, quoted by Freud:

The Prince, travelling through his domains, noticed a man in the
cheering crowd who bore a striking resemblance to himself. He
beckoned him over and asked: 'Was your mother ever employed
in my palace?'

'No, Sire,' the man replied. 'But my father was.'

The logical pattern of the story is quite primitive. Two implied
codes of behaviour are brought into collision: feudal lords were

VARIETIES OF HUMOUR

85

supposed to have bastards; feudal ladies were not supposed to have
bastards; and there is a particularly neat, quasi-geometrical link pro-
vided by the reversible symmetry of the situation. The mild amuse-
ment which the story oiFers is partly derived from the malicious
pleasure we take in the Prince's discomfiture; but mainly from the
fact that it is put in the form of a riddle, of two oblique hints which the
listener must complete under his own steam, as it were. The dotted
lines in the figure below indicate the process (the arrow in M 1 may be
taken to represent the Prince's question, the other arrow, the reply).

I i 1

4

1

I

\-vntarpo(k
extmpodi

in*

MM/

dm/

H F "P

1111111 |T II Mill llli

JiJi

Figure 5

Incidentally, Wilde has coined a terser variation on the same theme:
'Lord Illingworth: "You should study the Peerage, Gerald. ... It is the
best thing in fiction the English have ever done." '

Nearly all the stories that I have quoted show the technique of
implication the hint, the oblique allusion in varying degrees: the
good litde boy who loves his mama; the man who never aimed as
high as that; the kind sadist, etc. Apart from inter- and extrapolation
(there is no need for our purposes to make a distinction between them)
a third type of operation is often needed to enable one to 'see the joke':
transformation, or reinterpretation, of the given data into some analogous
terms. These operations comprise the transformation of metaphorical
into literal statements, of verbal hints into visual terms, and the in-
terpretation of visual riddles of the New Yorker cartoon type. A good

86

THE ACT OF CREATION

example ('good', I am afraid, only from a theoretical point of view)
is provided by another story, quoted from Freud:

Two shady business men have succeeded in making a fortune and
were trying to elbow their way into Society. They had their portraits
painted by a fashionable artist; framed in gold, these were shown at
a reception in the grand style. Among the guests was a well-known
art critic. The beaming hosts led him to the wall on which the two
portraits were hanging side by side. The critic looked at them for a
long time, then shook his head as if he were missing something. At
length he pointed to the bare space between the pictures and asked:
'And where is the Saviour?'

A nice combination of transformation with interpolation.

Economy, in humour as in art, does not mean mechanical brevity
but implicitness. Implicit* is derived from the Latin word for 'folded
in'. To make a joke like Picasso's 'unfold', the listener must fill in the
gaps, complete the hints, trace the hidden analogies. Every good joke
contains an element of the riddle it may be childishly simple, or
subtle and challenging which the listener must solve. By doing so,
he is lifted out of his passive role and compelled to co-operate, to
repeat to some extent the process of inventing the joke, to re-create
it in his imagination. The type of entertainment dished out by the mass
media makes one apt to forget that true recreation is re-creation.

Emphasis and implication are complementary techniques. The first
bullies the audience into acceptance; the second entices it into mental
collaboration; the first forces the offer down the consumer s throat;
the second tantalizes, to whet his appetite.

In fact, both techniques have their roots in the basic mechanisms of
communicating thoughts by word or sign. Language itself is never
completely explicit. Words have suggestive, evocative powers; but
at the same time they are merely stepping stones for thought Economy
means spacing them at intervals just wide enough to require a signi-
ficant effort from the receiver of the message; the artist rules his sub-
jects by turning them into accomplices.

NOTE

To p. 70. C the analysis of an Osbert Lancaster cartoon in Insight and
Outlook, p. 80 f.

IV

FROM HUMOUR TO DISCOVERY
Explosion and Catharsis

Primitive jokes arouse crude, aggressive, or sexual emotions by
means of a minimum of ingenuity. But even the coarse laughter
in which these emotions are exploded often contains an additional
element of admiration for the cleverness of the joke and also of
satisfaction with one's own cleverness in seeing the joke. Let us call this
additional element of admiration plus self-congratulation the intellec-
tual gratification offered by the joke.

Satisfaction presupposes the existence of a need or appetite. Intellec-
tual curiosity, the desire to understand, is derived from an urge as
basic as hunger or sex: the exploratory drive (see below, XI, and
Book Two, VIII). It is the driving power which makes the rat learn
to find its way through the experimental maze without any obvious
incentive being offered in the form of reward or punishment; and also
the prime-mover behind human exploration and research. Its 'detached*
and 'cttsmtejrested' character the scientists' self-transcending absorption
hi the riddles of nature is, of course, often combined with ambition,
competition, vanity. But these self-assertive tendencies must Be restrained
and highly sublimated to find fulfilment in the mostly unspectacular
rewards of his slow and patient labours. There are, after all, more direct
methods of asserting one's ego than the analysis of ribonucleic acids.

When I called discovery the emotionally 'neutral' art I did not mean
by neutrality the absence of emotion which would be equivalent to
apathy but that nicely balanced and sublimated blend of motivations,
where self-assertiveness is harnessed to the task; and where on the other
hand heady speculations about the Mysteries of Nature must be
submitted to the rigours of objective verification.

We shall see that there are two sides to the manifestation of emotions
at the moment of discovery, which reflect this polarity of motivations.

87

88

THE ACT OF CREATION

One is the triumphant explosion of tension which has suddenly become
redundant since the problem is solved so you jump out of your bath
and run through the streets laughing and shouting Eureka! In the
second place there is the slowly fading after-glow, the gradual catharsis
of the self-transcending emotions a quiet, contemplative delight in
the truth which the discovery revealed, closely related to the artist's
experience of beauty. The Eureka cry is the explosion of energies which
must find an oudet since the purpose for which they have been
mobilized no longer exists; the carthartic reaction is an inward un-
folding of a kind of 'oceanic feeling*, and its slow ebbing away. The
first is due to the fact that T made a discovery; the second to the fact
that a discovery has been made, a fraction of the infinite revealed. The
first tends to produce a state of physical agitation related to laughter;
the second tends towards quietude, the 'earthing' of emotion, some-
times a peaceful overflow of tears. The reasons for this contrast will be
discussed later; for the time being, let us remember that, physiologically
speaking, the self-assertive tendencies operate through the massive
sympadiico-adrenal system which galvanizes the body into activity
whereas the seltranscending emotions have no comparable trigger-
mechanism at their disposal, and their bodily manifestations are in
every respect the opposite of the former: pulse and breathing are
slowed down, the muscles relax, the whole organism tends towards
tranquillity and catharsis. Accordingly, this class of emotions is devoid
of the inertial momentum which makes the rage-fear type of reactions
so often fall out of step with reasoning; the participatory emotions do
not become dissociated from thought. Rage is immune to understand-
ing; love of the self-transcending variety is based on understanding,
and cannot be separated from it.

Thus the impact of a sudden, bisociative surprise which makes
reasoning perform a somersault will have a twofold effect: part of the
tension will become detached from it and exploded while the remain-
ing part will slowly ebb away. The symbols

Figure 6 ~
on the triptych are meant to refer to these two modes of the discharge

FROM HUMOUR TO DISCOVERY

8 9

of tension: the explosion of the aggressive-defensive and the gradual
catharsis, or 'earthing', of the participatory emotions.

'Seeing the Joke' and 'Solving the Problem*

The dual manifestation of emotions at the moment of discovery is
reflected on a minor and trivial scale in our reactions to a clever joke.
The pleasant after-glow of admiration and intellectual satisfaction,
gradually fading, reflects the cathartic reaction; while the self-con-
gratulatory impulse a faint echo of the Eureka cry supplies added
voltage to the original charge detonated in laughter: that 'sudden
glory* (as Hobbes has it) 'arising out of our own eminency'.

Let our imagination travel once more across the triptych of creative
activities, from left to right, as it were. We can do this as we have seen,
by taking a short-cut from one wing to another, from the comic to the
tragic or sublime; or alternatively by following the gradual transitions
which lead from the left to the centre panel.

On the extreme left of the continuum the infra-red end of the
emotive spectrum we found the practical joke, the smutty story, the
lavatory humour of children, each with a heavy aggressive or sexual or
scatalogical load (which may be partly unconscious) ; and with a logical
structure so obvious that it required only a minimum of intellectual
effort to 'see the joke*. Put into a formula, we could say that the ratio
A : I where A stands for crude emotion, and I for intellectual stimu-
lation is heavily loaded in favour of the former.

As we move across the panel towards the right, this ratio changes, and
is ultimately reversed. In the higher forms of comedy, satire, and irony
the message is couched in implicit and oblique terms; the joke gradually
assumes the character of an epigram or riddle, the witticism becomes a
challenge to our wits:

'Psychoanalysis is the disease for which it pretends to be the cure/

'Philosophy is the systematic abuse of a terminology specially
invented for that purpose/

'Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive. What they
conceal is vital/

Or, Heine's description of a young virgin:

'Her face is like a palimpsest beneath the Gothic lettering of the
monk's sacred text lurks the pagan poet's hahveffaced erotic verse/
The crude aggression of the practical joke has been sublimated into

90

THE ACT OF CREATION

malicious ingenuity; gross sexuality into subtle eroticism. Incidentally,
if I had not mentioned that the last quotation was by Heine, whose
name combined with 'virgin arouses ominous expectations, but had
pretended instead that it was from a novel by D. H. Lawrence, it would
probably have impressed the reader as profoundly poetic instead of
malicious a short-cut from wing to wing, by reversal of the charge
from minus to plus. Again, imagine for a moment that the quotation
occurred in an essay by a Jungian psychologist and it will turn into an
emotionally neutral illustration of 'the intrusion of archetypes into
perception.

In cases like this the wording of the narrative (or the picture on the
canvas) can remain unaltered, and its transformation from a comic into
a poetic or intellectually enlightening message depends entirely on the
subjective attitude of the percipient.* However, the lines of correspon-
dence across the panels are meant to indicate more general patterns of
creative activity. Thus, as we move from coarse humour towards the
neutral zone, we find the bisociation of sound and meaning first exempli-
fied in the pun, then in word games (ranging from the crossword
puzzle to the decyphering of the Rosetta stone); lastly in alliteration,
asonance, and rhyme. The mind-matter theme we found expressed in
countless variations on all three panels; and each variation of it the
puppet on strings or Jack-in-the-Box was again seen as tri-valent.
Impersonation is used both in comedy and tragedy; but in between them
the medicine man in his mask, the cassocked priest in the confessional,
the psychiatrist in the role of the father, each impersonate a person or
power other than himself. The distorting mirror, with its emphasis on
one significant aspect to the exclusion of others, is used alike in the
caricature and in the scientist's diagrams and schemata; when Clavdia in
the Magic Mountain offers her lover an X-ray portrait of her chest as a
souvenir we hardly know on which of the three panels we are. Nor can
we draw a sharp line between social satire and sociological discovery:
Animal Farm and 1 984 taught a whole generation more about the nature
of totalitarianism than academic science did. One last example:

In i960 an anecdote in the form of an imaginary dialogue circulated
in the satellite countries of the East:

*Te51 me, Comrade, what is capitalism?'

'The exploitation of man by man/

'And what is Communism?'

'The reverse.'

FROM HUMOUR TO DISCOVERY

91

The double entendre on reverse* 'it pretends to be the opposite, but it
comes down to the same, only the exploiting is done by a different
gang' casts a new, sharp light on a hoary problem; it has the same
power of sudden iMumination as an epigram by Voltaire.

Similar borderline cases are brain-twisters, logical paradoxes,
mathematical games. Even chess problems can be both 'witty* and
'funny' if they contain some sudden reversal of logic, an ironical twist,
or an affront to chess common sense; the connoisseur will smile, or even
laugh, when he is shown the solution, and the tension suddenly snaps.
His laughter may signify 'how stupid of me not to have seen it* or 'not
to have seen it at once' or 'how clever of me', etc. To distinguish
between these cases would be splitting hairs, for the basic process is the
same: the tension has been dissociated from its original purpose and
must find some other oudet. When the string of the guitar snaps it
gives out a twang for precisely the same reason.

But this tension is no longer comparable to the emotions aroused in
the grosser types of humour. The intellectual challenge, which in the
coarse joke played such a subsidiary part, now dominates the picture;
the A : I ratio has been reversed. There may be vanity and competitive-
ness in rising to the challenge; but they are sublimated and held in
balance by a self-forgetting absorption in the problem.

As we cross the fluid boundary leading into the central panel of the
triptych, the task of 'seeing the joke* becomes the task of 'solving the
problem*. And when we succeed we no longer roar with laughter as at
the clowns antics; laughter gradually shades into an amused, then an
admiring smile reflecting the harmonic balance of opposites, the
sudden glory and quiet glow of intellectual satisfaction.

The Creation of Humour

Up to now I have been discussing the effects of humour on the
audience: the reader, listener, spectator. Let me turn from the con-
sumer's reactions to the processes which go in on the mind of the
producer the inventor of the joke, the creator of humour.

Humour depends primarily on its surprise effect: the bisociative
shock. To cause surprise the humorist must have a modicum of
originality the ability to break away from the stereotyped routines of
thought. Caricaturist, satirist, the writer of nonsense-humour, and even
the expert tickler, each operates on more than one plane. Whether his

92

THE ACT OF CREATION

purpose is to convey a social message, or merely to entertain, he must
provide mental jolts, caused by the collision of incompatible matrices.
To any given situation or subject he must conjure up an appropriate
or appropriately inappropriate intruder which will provide the jolt.

The first schoolboy to have the idea of sawing through the legs of
the master's chair must have been a genius (such practices were not
uncommon in my school-days in Hungary). His habitual outlets for
aggression being barred by the heavy penalties they would entail, he
must have been labouring under a creative stress which initiated his
search for an original solution of his problem. A chance observation
like the fall of Newton's apple may have provided the link to a
different frame of reference, where the object of his resentment was
merely a mass subject to the pull of gravity. Now all he had to do was
to transfer the scene of operations from the blocked matrix M 2 to this
auxiliary matrix M 2 . If this sounds facetious let us remember that
Bergson's theory of humour is based on this single facet.

In all forms of malicious wit there is an aggressive tendency at work
which, for one reason or another, cannot be satisfied by the usual
methods of reasoned argument, physical violence, or straight invective.
I shall call a matrix 'blocked' when its rules of the game' prove in-
applicable to the existing situation or problem in hand; when none of
the various ways of exercising a skill, however plastic and adaptable
that skill is, leads to the desired goal. The young officer in the Viennese
anecdote, resenting the courtesan's pretentious reply, is in the same
position as the frustrated schoolboy: he cannot reply: 'Come off the
high horse, I know that cash is all that matters to you,' without incur-
ring the penalties of vulgarity. Chamfort's Marquis cannot kill the
Bishop it would be an unpardonable lack of savoir-faire. Picasso
cannot tell the dealer that he is an insufferable bore who does not know
a Kokoschka from a Klee; that would be unkind.

But how do they discover the inspired reposte which saves the
situation? It sounds a simple question, but if psychology knew the
answer to it there would be no point in writing this book.

As a first step let us note a trivial fact: the officer's mental leap from
the metaphorical to the literal plane indicates a phenomenon already
discussed: the displacement of attention to a seemingly irrelevant feature
in this case from the poetic connotations of the lady's heart to its
concrete spatial location. (We remember that Wilde used a similar
displacement effect for a different purpose in 'How else but through a
broken heart . . .'). The Marquis achieves his aim to kill by ridicule

FROM HUMOUR TO DISCOVERY

93

by transferring his attention from the glaringly obvious consideration
that the Bishop is usurping his privileges, to an irrelevant side-line that
he is doing another man's job; as if the issue were a demarcation dispute
between the Boilermakers' and the Shipwrights' Unions on who should
drill the holes.

Thus in some of the cases we have discussed, the solution is arrived
at by a kind of 'thinking aside', a shift of attention to some feature of
the situation, or an aspect of the problem, which was previously
ignored, or only present on the fringes of awareness. The humorist
may stumble on it by chance; or, more likely, guided by some intuition
which he is unable to define. This gives us a first intimation of un-
conscious processes intervening in the creative act. The humorist's
achievement, represented on the neat diagrams in previous chapters,
appears as an exercise in pure intellectual geometry: 'Construct two
planes inclined at a given angle and generate two curves which intersect
in a given point.' In actual fact, however, the bisociative act, in humour
as in other branches of creativity, depends in varying degrees on
assistance from fringe-conscious or unconscious processes. Picasso's
illuminating grunt was certainly inspired by a process of this kind. On
the other hand, the mediocre cartoonist and other professional crafts-
men of the comic operate mostly with the same familiar matrices, fixed
at a given angle, as it were, governed by familiar rules of the game; and
their task is reduced to devising new links puns, gags, pegs for
parody. It is a mechanized kind of bisociative technique, which also has
its practitioners in science and art.

Paradox and Synthesis

There is an obvious contrast between the emotive reactions of creator
and consumer: the person who invents the joke or comic idea seldom
laughs in the process. The creative s tress under which he labours is not
of the same kind as T fe~emot Ions aroused in te~aucUence. He is
cngage3 in an intellectual exercise, a feat of mental acrobatics; even if
motivated by sheer venom it must be distilled and sublimated. Once he
has hit on the idea and worked out the logical structure, the basic
pattern of the joke, he uses his tricks of the trade suspense, emphasis,
implication to work up the audience's emotions; and to make these
explode in laughter when he springs his surprise-effect on them.
Now the humorist may also experience surprise at the moment

94

THE ACT OF CREATION

when the idea hits him particularly if it was generated by the un-
conscious. But there is a basic difference between a shock imposed from
outside and a quasi seladniinistered shock. The humorist has solved
his problem by joining two incompatible matrices together in a para-
doxical synthesis. His audience, on the other hand, has its expectations
shattered and its reason affronted by the impact of the second matrix
on the first; instead of fusion there is collision; and in the mental dis-
array which ensues, emotion, deserted by reason, is flushed out in
laughter.

In the humorist's mind no such divorce occurs; he has nothing to
laugh about. At most he may, at the moment of inspiration, hit his
desk: 'I have got it.' But the creative stress which is relieved in such
minor gestures, symbolic of victory, of opposition vanquished, is of a
sublimated nature quite unlike the more primitive emotions puffed
away in the massive laughter of the audience. The contrast is further
illustrated in situations where a person fails to find the solution of a
brain-teaser and, on being told it, starts hitting, not the desk, but his
own benighted head. The redundant tension is worked off in a sym-
bolic gesture of self-punishment again a more specific oudet for
energies harnessed to intellectual tasks, than the laughter-channels of
least resistance.

The less suggestive and the more implicit the joke, the more will the
consumer's reactions approximate the producer's whose mental
effort he is compelled to re-create. When the witticism is transformed
into epigram, and teasing into challenge, the overflow reflex for
primitive emotions is no longer needed, and de-tension assumes more
individualized and sophisticated forms; the roar of Homeric laughter is
superseded by Archimedes's piercing cry or Kepler's holy ravings.

The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a
momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices,
i Scientific discovery, as we shall presendy see, can be described in very
similar terms as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previ-
ously believed to be incompatible. Until the seventeenth century the
Copernican hypothesis of the earth's motion was considered as
obviously incompatible with commonsense experience; it was accord-
ingly treated as a huge joke by the majority of Galileo's contemporaries.
One of them, a famous wit, wrote: 'The disputes of Signor Galileo
have dissolved into alchemical smoke. So here we are at last, safely
back on a solid earth, and we do not have to fly with it as so many ants
crawling around a balloon.* 1

PROM HUMOUR TO DISCOVERY

95

The history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted
with howls of laughter because they seemed to be a marriage of in-
compatibles until the marriage bore fruit and the alleged incompati-
bility of the partners turned out to derive from prejudice. The humorist,
on the other hand, deliberately chooses discordant codes of behaviour
or universes of discourse to expose their hidden incongruities in the
resulting clash. Comicdiscovery is paradox stated scientific discovery
is paradox resolved.

gut here again we find, instead of a cleiu:.j3iyiding line, ^continuous
transitions. The paradoxes of Achilles and the Tortoise, or of the Cretan
Liar, have, during two millennia, tickled philosophers and teased
mathematicians into creative efforts; and Juvenal's 67 Natura negaujacit
indignatio versum remains as true as ever.

Summary

I have started this inquiry with an analysis of humour because it is
the only domain of creative activity where a complex pattern of
intellectual stimulation elicits a sharply defined response in the nature
of a physiological reflex.

The pattern underlying all varieties of humour is 'bisociative'
perceiving a situation or event in two habitually incompatible associa-
tive contexts. This causes an abrupt transfer of the train of thought from
one matrix to another governed by a different logic or 'rule of the
game'. But certain emotions, owing to their greater inertia and per-
sistence, cannot follow such nimble jumps of thought; discarded by
reason, they are worked off along channels of least resistance in
laughter.

The emotions in question are those of the self-assertive, aggressive-
defensive type, which are based on the sympathico-adrenal system and
tend to beget bodily activity. Their counter-parts are the participatory
or self-transcending emotions compassion, identification, raptness
which are mediated by physiological processes of a different type, and
tend to discharge not in laughter but in tears. As a rule our emotions
are a rnixture of both; but even in the more subtle or affectionate
varieties of humour, an element of aggression a drop of adrenalin
must be present to trigger off the reaction. Laughter is a luxury reflex
which could arise only in a creature whose reason has gained a
degree of autonomy from the urges of emotion, and enables him to

96

THE ACT OF CREATION

perceive his own emotions as redundant to realize that he has been
fooled.

After applying the theory to various types of the comic, I discussed
the criteria of the humorist's technique: originality or unexpectedness;
emphasis through selection, exaggeration and simplification; and
economy or implicitness which calls for extrapolation, interpolation
and transposition.

The term 'matrix' was introduced to refer to any skill or ability, to
any pattern of activity governed by a set of rules its 'code'. All
ordered behaviour, from embryonic development to verbal thinking,
is controlled by 'rules of the game', which lend it coherence and
stability, but leave it sufficient degrees of freedom for flexible strategies
adapted to environmental conditions. The ambiguity of the term 'code'
('code of laws' 'coded message*) is deliberate, and reflects a character-
istic property of the nervous system: to control all bodily activities by
means of coded signals.

The concept of matrices with fixed codes and adaptable strategies,
proposed as a unifying formula, appears to be equally applicable to
perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills and to the psychological
structures variously called 'frames of reference*, 'associative contexts',
'universes of discourse', mental 'sets', or 'schemata', etc. The validity of
the formula will be tested in the chapters which follow, on various
levels from morphogenesis to symbolic thought.

Matrices vary from fully automatized skills to those with a high
degree of plasticity; but even the latter are controlled by rules of the
game which function below the level of awareness. These silent codes
can be regarded as condensations of learning into habit. Habits are the
indispensable core of stability and ordered behaviour; they also have a
tendency to become mechanized and to reduce man to the status of a
conditioned automaton. The creative act, by co nnecting previous ly
unrelated dimensions of ex perience, enaTfl eTnim to attain to a higher
lev^rc7m"ental evo IuttonTiris ; an ."act of liberation the defeat of habit
byS3g!naTity? fE ~~~ """"* *

NOTES

To p. po. This, of course, equally applies to pictures. The same Rubens
nude will call forth different responses from a schoolboy, an art critic, and a nun.
In the National Gallery in Vienna there was once to be seen an admirable Leda of
the Venetian school, which bore the inscription: Nackend Weib von boser Gam
Gebissen (Naked Wench Bitten by Angry Goose).

FROM HUMOUR TO DISCOVERY

97

To. p. 96. As this book was nearing completion, Professor Burt kindly
brought to my attention a paper he wrote on "The Psychology of Laughter' for
a seminar of his post-graduate students, in which he had come to somewhat
similar conclusions:

'Laughter may be regarded as providing a safety-valve for the overflow of
emotional energy, instinctively excited by the perception of some specific situa-
tion which automatically tends to stimulate the instinct, but which on closer
examination is seen not to require energetic action. . . . Every stimulus to laughter
thus involves a double-entendre: there is first the superficial or manifest meaning
which tends to arouse an emotion appropriate to some serious situation (and
thus momentarily disturbing equilibrium), and secondly the deeper or latent
meaning (which contradicts the first impression); and the outlet of laughter is
provided to give immediate relief to the superfluous emotional excitement. . . .*
(Burt, 1945).

PART TWO

THE SAGE

V

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

The Chimpanzee and the Stick

That animals can display originality and inventiveness has been
asserted since Aesop, but experimentally demonstrated for the
first time by the German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler. In
19 1 8 Kohler published The Mentality of Apes, an account of his experi-
ments with chimpanzees on TenerifFe, which has since become a classic.
Here is a characteristic description of an animal discovering the use of
tools (my italics):

Nueva, a young female chimpanzee, was tested 3 days after her
arrival (nth March, 1914). She had not yet made the acquaintance of
the other ammals but remained isolated in a cage. A little stick is
introduced into her cage; she scrapes the ground with it, pushes the
banana skins together in a heap, and then carelessly drops the stick
at a distance of about three-quarters of a metre from the bars. Ten
minutes later, fruit is placed outside the cage beyond her reach. She
grasps at it, vainly of course, and then begins the characteristic
complaint of the chimpanzee: she thrusts both lips especially the
lower forward, for a couple of inches, gazes imploringly at the
observer, utters whimpering sounds, and finally flings herself on to
the ground on her back a gesture most eloquent of despair, which
may be observed on other occasions as well. Thus, between
lamentations and entreaties, some time passes, until about seven
minutes after the fruit has been exhibited to her she suddenly casts
a look at the stick, ceases her moaning, seizes the stick, stretches it out
of the cage, and succeeds, though somewhat clumsily, in drawing the
bananas within arm's length. Moreover, Nueva at once puts the end of
her stick behind and beyond her objective. The test is repeated after an
hour's interval; on this second occasion, the ariimal has recourse to

xox

102

THE ACT OF CREATION

the stick much sooner, and uses it with more skill; and at a third
repetition, the stick is used immediately, as on all subsequent
occasions. 1

It is obvious that Nueva was not led to her discovery by any process
of conditioning, or trial and error. Her behaviour from the moment
when her eyes fell on the stick was, in Kohler's words, 'unwaveringly
purposeful' : she seized the stick, carried it without hesitation to the bars,
stretched it out of the cage, and placed it behind the banana a
smooth, integrated sequence of actions, quite different from the erratic,
hit-and-miss behaviour of rats trying to find their way through a maze,
or cats trying to get out of a puzzle-box. It was an original, self-taught
accomplishment, which had no precedent in the chimpanzee's past. The
process which led to her discovery can be described as a synthesis of two
previously unconnected skills, acquired in earlier life. In the first place,
Nueva had learned to get at bananas outside her cage by squeezing an
arm or foot through the bars; the ensemble of variations of this simple
skill constitutes matrix number one. She had also acquired the habit
matrix number two of scraping the earth with a stick and of pushing
objects about with it. But in this playful activity the stick was never
used for any utilitarian purpose; to throw, push, or roll things about is
a habit common to a variety of young animals. Nueva's discovery
consisted in applying this playful habit as an auxiliary matrix to get at
the banana. The moment of truth occurred when Nueva's glance fell
on the stick while her attention was set on the banana. At that moment
the two previously separate matrices fused into one, and the 'stick to
play with* became a 'rake to reach with' an implement for obtaining
otherwise unobtainable objects.

Like many other discoveries, Nueva's seems a simple and obvious
one but only after the fact. A dog, for instance, will carry a stick
between his teeth, but he will never learn to use it as a rake. Moreover,
chimpanzees are not the only species which finds it difficult to apply a
'playful* technique to a utilitarian purpose with which it had not been
connected in previous experience; a number of discoveries in the
history of human science consisted in just that. Galileo astonished the
world when he turned the telescopic toys, invented by Dutch opticians,
to astronomic use; the invention of the steam engine as a mechanical
toy by Hero of Alexandria in the second century B.C. had to wait two
thousand years before it was put to practical use; the geometry of conic
sections which Apollonius of Perga had studied in the fourth century

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

103

B.C. just for the fun of it, gave Kepler, again two thousand years later,
his elliptical orbits of the planets; the passion for dice of the Chevalier
de Mere, made him approach Pascal for advice on a safe gambling
system, and thus was the theory of probability born, that indispensable
tool of modern physics and biology, not to mention the insurance
business. 'It is remarkable', wrote Laplace, 'that a science which began
with considerations of play has risen to the most important objects of
human knowledge.' Thus at the very start of our inquiry we hit on a
pattern the discovery that a playful or Vart pour Van technique
provides an unexpected clue to problems in a quite different field
which is one of the leitmotifs in the history of science.

Nueva's discovery was the use of tools; the next one to be described
is the making of tools. Its hero is Sultan, the genius among Kohler's
chimpanzees:

(17.2. 1914) Beyond some bars, out of arm's reach, lies an objective
[a banana]; on this side, in the background of the experiment room,
is placed a sawn-off castor-oil bush, whose branches can be easily
broken off. It is impossible to squeeze the tree through the railings, on
account of its awkward shape; besides, only one of the bigger apes
could drag it as far as the bars. Sultan is let in, does not immediately
see the objective, and, looking about him indifferently, sucks one of
the branches of the tree. But, his attention having been drawn to the
objective, he approaches the bars, glances outside, the next moment
turns round, goes straight to the tree, seizes a thin slender branch,
breaks it off with a sharp jerk, runs back to the bars, and attains the
objective. From the turning round upon the tree up to the grasping
of the fruit with the broken-off branch, is one single quick chain of
action, without the least 'hiatus', and without the slightest movement
that does not, objectively considered, fit into the solution described. 2

Had Sultan known Greek he would certainly have shouted Eureka!
Kohler comments:

For adult man with his mechanized methods of solution, proof is
sometimes needed, as here, that an action was a real achievement, not
something self-evident; that the breaking off a branch from a whole
tree, for instance, is an achievement over and above the simple use of a
stick, is shown at once by animals less gifted than Sultan, even when
they understand the use of sticks beforehand. 3

104

THE ACT OF CREATION

It has been said that discovery consists in seeing an analogy which
nobody had seen before. Solomon discovered the analogy between the
Shulamite's neck and a tower of ivory. Sultan discovered that a
twisted branch on a tree with leaves on it had something in common
with a straight, lifeless bamboo-pole lying on the ground. What they
had in common was very little: let us say that both looked 'hardish' and
longish', but that is all. The branch, which previously was part and
parcel of the tree, was wrenched out of its visual context both
figuratively and literally speaking and made into a part of another,
functional, context.

The now familiar shift of awareness to the previously unimportant
'pole-like* aspect of the branch was very prettily demonstrated by
another of Kohler's chimpanzees, Koko. It took Koko much longer
to make the same discovery as Sultan; and when at last he had broken
off a branch from the tree to use it as a stick, and marched with it
towards the banana outside the cage, he:

eagerly picked off one leaf after the other, so that only the long, bare
stem was left . . . The pulling off of the leaves is both correct and
incorrect; incorrect because it does not make the stem any longer,
correct because it makes its length show up better and the stem thus
becomes optically more like a stick. . . . There can be no doubt that
Koko did not pull off the leaves in play only; his look and his move-
ments prove distinctly that throughout the performance his attention
is wholly concentrated on the banana; he is merely concerned now
with preparing the implement. Play looks quite different; and I have
never seen a chimpanzee play while (like Koko in this case) he was
showing himself distinctly intent upon his ultimate purpose. 4

Before the chimpanzee actually broke off the branch there must
have been a moment when he perceived it as a member of both matrices
at the same time still a part of the tree but already a detached tool. Thus
one could say that Sultan had seen a visual pun: a single form (the
branch) attached to two different functions.

The act of discovery has a disruptive and a constructive aspect. It
must disrupt rigid patterns of mental organization to achieve the new ,
synthesis. Sultan's habitual way of looking at the tree as a coherent, j
visual whole had to be shattered. Once he had discovered that branches
can be made into tools he never again forgot it, and we may assume
that a tree never again looked the same to him as before. He had lost

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

105

the innocence of his vision, but from this loss he derived an immense
gain: the perception of 'branches' and the manipulation of 'tools' were
now combined into a single, sensory-motor skill; and when two
matrices have become integrated they cannot again be torn asunder.
This is why the discoveries of yesterday are the commonplaces of today,
and why we always marvel how stupid we were not to see what pos^
factum appears to be so obvious.

Archimedes

Let me illustrate the last point by a human discovery which has much
in common with Sultan's: the Principle of Archimedes. I must tell the
story in a somewhat simplified form.

Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse and protector of Archimedes, had been
given a beautiful crown, allegedly of pure gold, but he suspected that
it was adulterated with silver. He asked Archimedes's opinion.
Archimedes knew, of course, the specific weight of gold that is to
say, its weight per volume unit. If he could measure the volume of the
crown he would know immediately whether it was pure gold or not;
but how on earth is one to determine the volume of a complicated
ornament with all its filigree work? Ah, if only he could melt it down
and measure the liquid gold by the pint, or hammer it into a brick of
honest rectangular shape, or . . . and so on. At this stage he must have
felt rather like Nueva, flinging herself on her back and uttering
whimpering sounds because the banana was out of her grasp and the
road to it blocked.

Blocked situations increase stress. Under its pressure the chimpanze e
reverts to erratic and repetitive! random a ttemp ts ; in Archimedes's ca se
we can imagine his th oughts movin g round in circles w itHn the frame
o f his geometricalTaiowle d ge; and finding all approaches to th e target
Socked, returning again and again to the starting point. This
frustrating situation, familiar to everybody trying to solve a difficult
problem, may be schematized as in the following diagram, where 'S'
represents the starting point, the loops are trains of thought within the
blocked matrix, and "T represents the target (that is: a method of
measuring the volume of the crown') which, unfortunately, is
located outside the plane of the matrix.

One day, while getting into his bath, Archimedes watched absent-
rnindedly the familiar sight of the water-level rising from one smudge

Figure 7

on the basin to the next as a result of the immersion of his body, and
it occurred to him in a flash that the volume of water displaced was
equal to the volume of the immersed parts of his own body which
therefore could simply be measured by the pint. He had melted his
body down, as it were, without harming it, and he could do the same
with the crown.

Once more, as in the case of the chimpanzee, the matter is childishly
simple after the fact but let us try to put ourselves in Archimedes's
place. He was in the habit of taking a daily bath, but the experiences
and ideas associated with it moved along habit-beaten tracks: the
sensations of hot and cold, of fatigue and relaxation, and a pretty slave-
girl to massage his limbs. Neither to Archimedes nor to anybody else
before him had it ever occurred to connect the sensuous and trivial
occupation of taking a hot bath with the scholarly pursuit of the
measurement of solids. No doubt he had observed many times that the
level of the water rose whenever he got into it; but this fact, and the
distance between the two levels, was totally irrelevant to him until it
'suddenly became bisociated with his problem. At that instant he
realized that the amount of rise of the water-level was a simple measure
of the volume of his own complicated body.
The discovery may now be schematized as follows (Figure 8):
M x is the same as in the preceding diagram, governed by the habitual
rules of the game, by means of which Archimedes originally tried to
solve the problem; M 2 is the matrix of associations related to taking a
bath; m 2 represents the actual train of thought which effects die
connection. The Link L may have been a verbal concept (for instance:

106

II

1

1 III

1 1?

IL

-T rr

. :

a

11/

Z^C^ Kid

III

III

fl

ii' 1

! liil

Figure 8

'rise of water-level qw
equally well have been a visual impression in which the water-level
was suddenly seen to correspond to the volume of the immersed parts
of the body and hence to that of the crown whose image was
constandy lurking on the fringe of his consciousness. The essential
point is, that at the critical moment both matrices M t and M 2 were
simultaneously active in Archimedes's mind though presumably on
different levels of awareness. The creative stress resulting from the
blocked situation had kept the problem on the agenda even while the
beam of consciousness was drifting along quite another plane. With-
out this constant pressure, the favourable chance-constellation would
have passed unnoticed and joined the legion of man's missed
opportunities for a creative departure from the stale habits of thought
which numb his mental powers.

The sequel to the discovery is well known; because of its picturesque A
appeal I shall occasionally refer to discovery in its psychological aspect
as the 'Eureka process' or 'Eureka act'.

Let us look at Archimedes's discovery from a different angle.
When one climbs into a bath one knows that the water-level will
rise owing to its displacement by the body, and that there must be as
much water displaced as there is body immersed; moreover, one
mechanically estimates the amount of water to be let into the bath
because of this expectation. Archimedes, too, must have known all this

107

io8

THE ACT OF CREATION

but he had probably never before verbalized, that is, consciously
formulated that bit of knowledge. Yet implicitly it was there as part of
his mental equipment; it was, so to speak, included in the code of
rules of bath-taking behaviour. Now we have seen that the rules which
govern the matrix of a skill function on a lower level of awareness than
the actual performance itself whether it is playing the piano, carrying
on a conversation, or taking a bath. We have also seen that the
bisociative shock often has the effect of making such implicit rules
explicit, of suddenly focussing awareness on aspects of experience
which had been unverbalized, unconsciously implied, taken for
granted; so that a familiar and unnoticed aspect of a phenomenon like
the rise of the water-level is suddenly perceived at an unfamiliar and
significant angle. Discovery often means simply the uncovering of
something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye
by the blinkers of habit.

This equally applies to the discoveries of the artist who makes us see
familiar objects and events in a strange, new, revealing light as if
piercing the cataract which dims our vision. Newton's apple and
Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.

Chance and Ripeness

Nearly all of Kohler's chimpanzees sooner or later learned the use of
implements, and also certain methods of making implements. But a dog,
however skilful in carrying a stick or a basket around, will never learn
to use the stick to get a piece of meat placed outside its reach. We might
say that the chimpanzees were ripe to discover the use of tools when a
favourable chance-opportunity presented itself such as a stick lying
around just when needed. The factors which (among others) constitute
ripeness for this type of discovery are the primates' manual dexterity
and advanced oculo-motor co-ordination, which enable them to
develop the playful habit of pushing objects about with branches and
sticks. Each of the separate skills, whose synthesis constitutes the new
discovery, was well established previously and frequently exercised. In
a similar way Archimedes's mental skill in manipulating abstract
concepts like volume and density, plus his acute powers of observation,
even of trivia, made him 'ripe' for his discovery. In more general terms:
the statistical probability for a relevant discovery to be made is the
greater the more firmly established and well exercised each of the still

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

109

separate skills, or thought-matrices, are. This explains a puzzling but
recurrent phenomenon in the history of science: that the same discovery
is made, more or less at the same time, by two or more people; and it
may also help to explain the independent development of the same
techniques and similar styles of art in different cultures.

Ripeness in this sense is, of course, merely a necessary, not a sufficient,
condition of discovery. But it is not quite such an obvious concept as
it might seem. The embittered controversies between different schools
in experimental psychology about the nature of learning and under-
standing can be shown to derive to a large extent from a refusal to take
the factor of ripeness seriously. The propounders of Behaviouristic
psychology were wont to set their animals tasks for which they were
biologically ill-fitted, and thus to prove that new skills could be
acquired only through conditioning, chaining of reflexes, learning by
rote. Kohler and the Gestalt school, on the other hand, set their
chimpanzees tasks for which they were ripe or almost ripe, to prove that
all learning was based on insight. The contradictory conclusions at
which they arrived need surprise us no more than the contrast between
the learning achievements of a child of six months and a child of six
years. This is a necessarily over-simplified description (for a detailed
treatment see Book Two, XII); the only point I wish to make is that
the more ripe a situation is for the discovery of a new synthesis, the
less need there is for the helping hand of chance.

Archimedes's eyes falling on the smudge in the bath, or the
chimpanzee's eyes falling upon the tree, are chance occurrences of such
high probability that sooner or later they were bound to occur; chance
plays here merely the part of triggering off the fusion between two
matrices by hitting on one among many possible appropriate links. We
may distinguish between the biological ripeness of 'a species to form a new
adaptive habit or acquire a new skill, and the ripeness of a culture t o
make and to exploit a ne w discovery. Hero's steam e ngine could^
o bviously fee exploitednToTrn duscrial purposes on
technological and social conditions mack k bo^
Lastly (or firstly), there is the personal factor the role of the creative
individual in achieving a synthesis for which the time is more or less ripe.

The emphasis is on the 'more or less*. If ripeness were all as
Shakespeare and the Marxist theory affirm the role of Renins, in
history would be r educed from hero to mi3w ife. who assists th e
inevitable birt h; and the act of cre atio n would be merely a consumma-
ttonoT the preordained. But the old controversy whether individuals

110

THE ACT OF CREATION

make or are made by history acquires a new twist in the more limited
field of the history of science. The twist is provided by the phenomenon
of multiple discoveries. Historical research into this curious subject is
of fairly recent origin; it came as a surprise when, in 1922, Ogburn and
Thomas published some hundred and fifty examples of discoveries and
inventions which were made independently by several persons; and,
more recently, Merton came to the seemingly paradoxical conclusion
that 'the pattern of independent multiple discoveries in science is . . .
the dominant pattern rather than a subsidiary one'. 5 He quotes as an
example Lord Kelvin, whose published papers contain 'at least thirty-
two discoveries of his own which he subsequendy found had also been
made by others'. The 'others' include some men of genius such as
Cavendish and Helmholtz, but also some lesser lights.

The endless priority disputes which have poisoned the supposedly
serene atmosphere of scientific research throughout the ages, and the
unseemly haste of many scientists to establish priority by rushing into
print or, at least, depositing manuscripts in sealed envelopes with
some learned society point in the same direction. Some among them
Galileo and Hooke even went to the length of publishing half-
completed discoveries in the form of anagrams, to ensure priority
without letting rivals in on the idea. Kohlers chimpanzees were of a
more generous disposition.

Thus one should not underestimate ripeness as a factor facilitating
discoveries which, as the saying goes, are 'in the air' meaning, that
the various components which will go into the new synthesis are all
lying around and only waiting for the trigger-action of chance, or the
catalysing action of an exceptional brain, to be assembled and welded
together. If one opportunity is missed, another will occur.

But, on the other hand, although the infinitesimal calculus was
developed independendy by Leibniz and by Newton, and a long line
of precursors had paved the way for it, it still required a Newton or a
Leibniz to accomplish the feat; and the greatness of this accomplish-
ment is hardly diminished by the fact that two among millions, instead
of one among millions, had the exceptional genius to do it. We are
concerned with the question how they did it the nature of creative
originality and not with the undeniable, but trivial consideration that
if they had not lived somebody else would have done it some time; for
that leaves the same question to be answered, to wit, how that someone
else did it. I shall not presume to guess whether outstanding individuals
such as Plato and Aristode, Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus,

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

III

Aquinas, Bacon, Marx, Freud, and Einstein, were expendable in the
above sense, so that the history of ideas in their absence would have
taken much the same course or whether it is the creative genius who
determines the course of history. I merely wish to point out that some
of the major break-throughs in the history of science represent such
dramatic tours de force, that 'ripeness* seems a very lame explanation,
and chance* no explanation at all. Einstein discovered the principle of
relativity 'unaided by any observation that had not been available for at
least fifty years before*; 6 the plum was overripe, yet for half a century
nobody came to pluck it. A less obvious example is Everist Galois, one
of the most original mathematicians of all times, who was killed in an
absurd duel in 1832, at the age of twenty. In the night before the duel
he revised a paper to the Academie des Sciences (which had previously
rejected it as unintelligible); then, in a letter to a friend, he hurriedly
put down a number of other mathematical discoveries. 'It was only
after fifteen years, that, with admiration, scientists became aware of the
memoir which the Academy had rejected. It signifies a total transforma-
tion of higher algebra, projecting a full light on what had been only
glimpsed thus far by the greatest mathematicians . . .' 7 Furthermore, in
the letter to his friend, Galois postulated a theorem which could not
have been understood by his contemporaries because it was based on
mathematical principles which were discovered only a quarter century
after his death. It must be admitted,* another great mathematician
commented, 'first, that Galois must have conceived these principles in
some way; second, that they must have been unconscious in his mind
since he makes no allusion to them, though they by themselves
represent a significant discovery.* 8

This leads us to the problem of the part played by unconscious
processes in the Eureka act.

Pythagoras, according to tradition, is supposed to have discovered
that musical pitch depends on the ratio between the length of vibrating
chords the starting point of mathematical physics by passing in
front of the local blacksmith on his native island of Samos, and
noticing that rods of iron of different lengths gave different sounds
under the blacksmith's hammer. Instead of ascribing it to chance, we *
suspect that it was some obscure intuition which made Pythagoras stop
at the blacksmith's shop. But how does that kind of intuition work?
Here is the core of the problem of discovery both in science and in art.

Logic and Intuition

I shall briefly describe, for the sake of contrast, two celebrated discov-
eries of entirely different kinds: the first apparently due to conscious,
logical reasoning aided by chance; the second a classic case of the
intervention of the unconscious.

Eighteen hundred and seventy-nine was the birth-year of immun-
ology the prevention of infectious diseases by inoculation. By that
time Louis Pasteur had already shown that cattle fever, rabies, silkworm
disease, and various other afflictions were caused by micro-organisms,
and had firmly established the germ theory of disease. In the spring of
1879 he was fifty-seven at that time Pasteur was studying chicken
cholera. He had prepared cultures of the bacillus, but for some reason
this work was interrupted, and the cultures remained during the whole
summer unattended in the laboratory. In the early autumn, however,
he resumed his experiments. He injected a number of chickens with the
bacillus, but unexpectedly they became only slightly ill and recovered.
He concluded that the old cultures had been spoilt, and obtained a new
culture of virulent bacilli from chickens afflicted by a current outbreak
of cholera. He also bought a new batch of chickens from the market
and injected both lots, the old and the new, with the fresh culture. The
newly bought chicks all died in due time, but, to his great surprise the
old chicks, who had been injected once already with the ineffective
culture, all survived. An eye-witness in the lab described the scene
which took place when Pasteur was informed of this curious develop-
ment. He 'remained silent for a minute, then exclaimed as if he had
seen a vision: "Don't you see that these animals have been vaccinated?' 9

Now I must explain that the word vaccination was at that time
already a century old. It is derived from v acca, cow. Some time in the
1760s a young medical student, Edward Jenner, was consulted by a
Gloucester dairymaid who felt out of sorts. Jenner thought that she
might be suffering from smallpox, but she prompdy replied: 'I cannot
take the smallpox because I have had the cow-pox/ After nearly
twenty years of struggle against the scepticism and indifference of the
medical profession, Jenner succeeded in proving the popular belief that
people who had once caught the cow-pox were immune against
smallpox. Thus originated Vaccination' the preventive inoculation of
human beings against the dreaded and murderous disease with material
taken from the skin sores of afflicted catde. Although Jenner realized
that cow-pox and smallpox were essentially the same disease, which

112

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

113

became somehow modified by the organism which carried it, he did
not draw any general conclusions from his discovery. 'Vaccination'
soon spread to America and became a more or less general practice in
a number of other countries, yet it remained limited to smallpox, and
the word itself retained its exclusively bovine connotations.

The vision which Pasteur had seen at that historic moment was, once
again, the discovery of a hidden analogy: the surviving chicks of the
first batch were protected against cholera by their inoculation with the
'spoilt* culture as humans are protected against smallpox by inoculation
with pox bacilli in a modified, bovine form.

Now Pasteur was well acquainted with Jenner's work. To quote one
of his biographers, Dr. Dubos (himself an eminent biologist): 'Soon
after the beginning of his work on infectious diseases, Pasteur became
convinced that something similar to "vaccination" was the best ap-
proach to their control. It was this conviction that made him per-
ceive immediately the meaning of the accidental experiment with
chickens.'

In other words, he was 'ripe' for his discovery, and thus able to
pounce on the first favourable chance that offered itself. As he himself
said:jFortune favours the prepared mind.' Put in this way, there seems
to be nothing very awe-inspiring in Pasteur's discovery. Yet for about
three-quarters of a century Vaccination had been a common practice
in Europe and America; why, then, did nobody before Pasteur hit on
the 'obvious' idea of extending vaccination from smallpox to other
diseases? Why did nobody before him put two and two together?
Because, to answer the question literally, the first 'two* and the second
'two' appertained to different frames of reference. The first was the
technique of vaccination; the second was the hitherto quite separate
and independent research into the world of micro-organisms: fowl-
parasites, silkworm-bacilli, yeasts fermenting in wine-barrels, invisible
viruses in the spittle of rabid dogs. Pasteur succeeded in combining
these two separate frames because he had an exceptional grasp of the
rules of both, and was thus prepared for the moment when chance
provided an appropriate link.

He knew what Jenner knew not that the active agent in Jenner's
'vaccine* was the microbe of the same disease against which the subject
was to be protected, but a microbe which in its bovine host had under-
gone some kind of 'attenuation'. And he further realized that the
cholera bacilli left to themselves in the test-tubes during the whole
summer had undergone the same kind of 'attenuation' or weakening.

114

THE ACT OF CREATION

as the pox bacilli in the cow's body. This led to the surprising, almost
poetic, conclusion, that life inside an abandoned glass tube can have
the same debilitating effect on a bug as life inside a cow. From here
on the implications of the Gloucestershire dairymaid's statement
became gloriously obvious: 'As attenuation of the bacillus had oc-
curred spontaneously in some of his cultures [just as it occurred
inside the cow], Pasteur became convinced that it should be possible
to produce vaccines at will in the laboratory. Instead of depending upon
the chance of naturally occurring immunizing agents, as cow-pox was
for smallpox, vaccination could then become a general technique
applicable to all infectious diseases.' 9

One of the scourges of humanity had been eliminated to be
replaced in due time by another. For the story has a sequel with an
ironic symbolism, which, though it does not strictly belong to the
subject, I cannot resist telling. The most famous and dramatic applica-
tion of Pasteur's discovery was his anti-rabies vaccine. It was tried for
the first time on a young Alsatian boy by name of Josef Meister, who
had been savagely bitten by a rabid dog on his hands, legs, and thighs.
Since the incubation period of rabies is a month or more, Pasteur hoped
to be able to immunize the boy against the deadly virus which was
already in his body. After twelve injections with rabies vaccine of
increasing strength the boy returned to his native village without
having suffered any ill effects from the bites. The end of the story is
told by Dubos: 'Josef Meister later became gatekeeper at the Pasteur
Institute in Paris. In 1940, fifty-five years after the accident that gave
him a lasting place in medical history, he committed suicide rather
than open Pasteur's burial crypt for the German invaders.' 9 * He was
evidently predestined to become a victim of one form of rabidness
or another.

Now for a discovery of a diametrically opposite kind, where
intuition plays the dominant part. The extracts which follow are from
a celebrated lecture by Henri Poincare at the Societi de Psychologie in
Paris, and concern one of his best-known mathematical discoveries: the
theory of the so-called 'Fuchsian functions'. To reassure the reader I
hasten to quote from Poincare's own introductory remarks:

I beg your pardon; I am about to use some technical expressions,
but they need not frighten you for you are not obliged to understand
them. I shall say, for example, that I have found the demonstration

MOMENTS OB TRUTH

115

of such a theorem under such circumstances. This theorem will
have a barbarous name unfamiliar to many, but that is unimportant;
what is of interest for the psychologist is not the theorem but
the circumstances. . . .

And now follows one of the most lucid introspective accounts of
the Eureka act by a great scientist:

For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any
functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was
then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table,
stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations, and
reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank
black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them
collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable com-
bination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a
class of Fuchsian functions, those which come from the hypergeo-
metric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a
few hours.

Then I wanted to represent these functions by the quotient of two
series; this idea was perfecdy conscious and deliberate, the analogy
with elliptic functions guided me. I asked myself what properties
these series must have if they existed, and I succeeded without diffi-
culty in forming the series I have called theta-Fuchsian.

Just at this time I left Caen, where I was then living, to go on a
geologic excursion under the auspices of the school of mines. The
changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having
reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or
other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came
to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have
paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define
the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean
geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as,
upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation
already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to
Caen, for conscience' sake I verified the result at my leisure.

Then I turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical
questions apparently without much success and without a suspicion
of any connection with my preceding researches. Disgusted with my
failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of

Il6 THE ACT OF CREATION

something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to
me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness, and
immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeter-
minate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-
Euclidean geometry.

Returned to Caen, I meditated on this result and deduced the
consequences. The example of quadratic forms showed me that there
were Fuchsian groups other than those corresponding to the hyper-
geometric series; I saw that I could apply to them the theory of
theta-Fuchsian series and that consequendy there existed Fuchsian
functions other than those from the hypergeometric series, the ones
I then knew. Naturally I set myself to form all these functions. I made
a systematic attack upon them and carried all the outworks, one after
another. There was one, however, that still held out, whose fall
would involve that of the whole place. But all my efforts only served
at first the better to show me the difficulty, which indeed was
something. All this work was perfectly conscious.

Thereupon I left for Mont-Valcrien, where I was to go through
my military service; so I was very differendy occupied. One day,
going along the street, the solution of the difficulty which had
stopped me suddenly appeared to me. I did not try to go deep into
it immediately, and only after my service did I again take up the
question. I had all the elements and had only to arrange them and
put them together. So I wrote out my final memoir at a single stroke
and without difficulty.

I shall limit myself to this single example; it is useless to multiply
them. In regard to my other researches I would have to say
analogous things . . .

Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a
manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this
unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me
incontestable. . . . 10

Similar experiences have been reported by other mathematicians.
They seem to be the rule rather than the exception. One of them is
Jacques Hadamard: 11

. . . One phenomenon is certain and I can vouch for its absolute
certainty: the sudden and immediate appearance of a solution at the
very moment of sudden awakening. On being very abruptly

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

117

awakened by an external noise, a solution long searched for appeared
to me at once without the slightest instant of reflection on my part
the fact was remarkable enough to have struck me unforgettably
and in a quite different direction from any of those which I had
previously tried to follow.

A few more examples. Andre Marie Ampere (1775-18 3 6), after
whom the unit of electric current is named, a genius of childlike
simplicity, recorded in his diary the circumstances of his first
mathematical discovery:

On April 27, 1802, he tells us, I gave a shout of joy ... It was seven
years ago I proposed to myself a problem which I have not been able
to solve directly, but for which I had found by chance a solution, and
knew that it was correct, without being able to prove it. The matter
often returned to my mind and I had sought twenty times unsuccess-
fully for this solution. For some days I had carried the idea about
with me continually. At last, I do not know how, I found it, together
with a large number of curious and new considerations concerning
the theory of probability. As I think there are very few math-
ematicians in France who could solve this problem in less time, I have
no doubt that its publication in a pamphlet of twenty pages is a good
method for obtaining a chair of mathematics in a college. 12

The memoir did in fact get him a professorship at the Lycee in
Lyon. It was called Considerations of the Mathematical Theory of Games of
Chance, and demonstrated, among other things, that habitual gamblers
are, in the long run, bound to lose.

Another great mathematician, Karl Friedrich Gauss, described in a
letter to a friend how he finally proved a theorem on which he had
worked unsuccessfully for four years:

At last two days ago I succeeded, not by dint of painful effort but
so to speak by the grace of God. As a sudden flash of light, the

enigma was solved For my part I am unable to name the nature

of the thread which connected what I previously knew with that
which made my success possible. 13

On another occasion Gauss is reported to have said: 'I have had my
solutions for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at

n8

THE ACT OF CREATION

them/ Paraphrasing him, Polya a contemporary mathematician
remarks: 'When you have satisfied yourself that the theorem is true,
you start proving it.' 14

We have seen quite a few cats being let out of the bag the mathe-
matical mind, which is supposed to have such a dry, logical, rational
texture. As a last example in this chapter I shall quote the dramatic case
of Friedrich August von Kekule, Professor of Chemistry in Ghent,
who, one afternoon in 1865, fell asleep and dreamt what was probably
the most important dream in history since Joseph's seven fat and seven
lean cows:

I turned my chair to the fire and dozed, he relates. Again the
atoms were gambolling before my eyes. This time the smaller
groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered
more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish
larger structures, of manifold conformation; long rows, sometimes
more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snakelike
motion. But look ! What was that? One of the snakes had seized
hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes.
As if by a flash of Hghtning I awoke ... Let us learn to dream,
gentlemen. 15

The serpent biting its own tail gave Kekule the clue to a discovery
which has been called 'the most brilliant piece of prediction to be
found in the whole range of organic chemistry' and which, in fact, is
one of the cornerstones of modern science. Put in a somewhat
simplified manner, it consisted in the revolutionary proposal that the
molecules of certain important organic compounds are not open
structures but closed chains or 'rings' like the snake swallowing its
tail.

Summary

When life presents us with a problem it will be attacked in accordance
with the code of rules which enabled us to deal with similar problems
in the past. These rules of the game range from manipulating sticks to
operating with ideas, verbal concepts, visual forms, mathematical
entities. When the same task is encountered under relatively un-
changing conditions in a monotonous environment, the responses will
become stereotyped, flexible skills will degenerate into rigid patterns,

MOMENTS OF TRUTH

119

and the person will more and more resemble an automaton, governed
by fixed habits, whose actions and ideas move in narrow grooves. He
may be compared to an engine-driver who must drive his train along
fixed rails according to a fixed timetable.

Vice versa, a changing, variable environment will tend to create
flexible behaviour-patterns with a high degree of adaptability to
circumstances the driver of a motor-car has more degrees of freedom
than the engine-driver. But novelty can be carried to a point by life
or in the laboratory where the situation still resembles in some respects
other situations encountered in the past, yet contains new features or
complexities which make it impossible to solve the problem by the
same rules of the game which were applied to those past situations.
"When this happens we say that the situation is blocked though the
subject may realize this fact only after a series of hopeless tries, or never
at all. To squeeze the last drop out of the metaphor: the motorist is
heading for a frontier to which all approaches are barred, and all his
skill as a driver will not help him short of turning his car into a
helicopter, that is, playing a different kind of game.

A blocked situation increases the stress of the frustrated drive. What
happens next is much the same in the chimpanzee's as in Archimedes's
case. When all hopeful attempts at solving the problem by traditional
methods have been exhausted, thought runs around in circles in the
blocked matrix like rats in a cage. Next, the matrix of organized,
purposeful behaviour itself seems to go to pieces, and random trials
make their appearance, accompanied by tantrums and attacks of
despair or by the distracted absent-mindedness of the creative obses-
sion. That absent-mindedness is, of course, in fact smgle-mindedness;
for at this stage the 'period of incubation the whole personality,
down to the unverbalized and unconscious layers, has become saturated
with the problem, so that on some level of the mind it remains active,
even while attention is occupied in a quite different field such as
looking at a tree in the chimpanzee's case, or watching the rise of the
water-level; until either chance or intuition provides a link to a quite
different matrix, which bears down vertically, so to speak, on the
problem blocked in its old horizontal context, and the two previously
separate matrices fuse. But for that fusion to take place a condition must
be fulfilled which I called 'ripeness'.

Concerning the psychology of the creative act itself, I have men-
tioned the following, interrelated aspects of it: the displacement of
attention to something not previously noted, which was irrelevant in

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THE ACT OF CREATION

the old and is relevant in the new context; the discovery of hidden
analogies as a result of the former; the bringing into consciousness of
tacit axioms and habits of thought which were implied in the code and
taken for granted; the un-covering of what has always been there.

This leads to the paradox that the more original a discovery the more
obvious it seems afterwards. The creative act is not an act of creation
in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of
nothing; it uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already
existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the
more striking the new whole. Man's knowledge of the changes of the
tides and the phases of the moon is as old as his observation that apples
fall to earth in the ripeness of time. Yet the combination of these and
other equally familiar data in Newton's theory of gravity changed
mankind's outlook on the world.

'It is obvious', says Hadamard, 'that invention or discovery, be it in
mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas. . . .
The Latin verb cogito for "to think" etymologically means "to shake
together". St. Augustine had already noticed that and also observed
that intelligo means "to select among"/

The 'ripeness' of a culture for a new synthesis is reflected in the
recurrent phenomenon of multiple discovery, and in the emergence
of similar forms of art, handicrafts, and social institutions in diverse
cultures. But when the situation is ripe for a given type of discovery
it still needs the intuitive power of an exceptional mind, and sometimes
a favourable chance event, to bring it from potential into actual exist-
ence. On the other hand, some discoveries represent striking tours de
force by individuals who seem to be so far ahead of their time that their
contemporaries are unable to understand them.

Thus at one end of the scale we have discoveries which seem to be
due to more or less conscious, logical reasoning, and at the other end
sudden insights which seem to emerge spontaneously from the depth of
the unconscious. The same polarity of logic and intuition will be found
to prevail in the methods and techniques of artistic creation. It is
summed up by two opposite pronouncements: Bernard Shaw's 'Ninety
per cent perspiration, ten per cent inspiration, on the one hand,
Picasso's 'I do not seek I find* (je ne cherchepasje trouve), on the other.

i

VI

THREE ILLUSTRATIONS

Before proceeding further, let me return for a moment to the
^ basic, bisociative pattern of the creative synthesis: the sudden
' interlocking of two previously unrelated skills, or matrices of
thought I shall give three somewhat more detailed examples which
display this pattern from various angles: Gutenberg's invention of
printing with movable types; Kepler's synthesis of astronomy and
physics; Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

i. The Printing Press

At the dawn of the fifteenth century printing was no longer a novelty
in Europe. Printing from wooden blocks on vellum, silk, and cloth
apparendy started in the twelfth century, and printing on paper was
widely practised in the second half of the fourteenth. The blocks were
engraved in relief with pictures or text or both, then thoroughly wetted
with a brown distemper-like substance; a sheet of damp paper was laid
on the block and the back of the paper was rubbed with a so-called
frotton a dabber or burnisher until an impression of the carved relief
was transferred to it. Each sheet could be printed on only one side by
this method, but the blank backs of the sheets could be pasted together
and then gathered into quires and bound in the same manner as
manuscript-books. These 'block books' or xylographs circulated already
in considerable numbers during Gutenberg's youth.

He was born in 1398 at Mainz and was really called Gensfleisch,
meaning gooseflesh, but preferred to adopt the name of his mother's
birthplace. The story of his life is obscure, highlighted by a succession
of lawsuits against money-lenders and other printers; his claim to

121

122

THE ACT OF CREATION

priority is the subject of a century-old controversy. But there exists a
series of letters to a correspondent, Frere Cordelier, which has an
au thentic ring and gives a graphic description of the manner in which
Gutenberg arrived at his invention. 1 Whether others, such as Costa of
Haarlem, made the same invention at the same time or before
Gutenberg is, from our point of view, irrelevant.

Oddly enough, the starting point of Gutenberg's invention was not
the block-books he does not seem to have been acquainted with them
but playing-cards. In his first letter to Cordelier he wrote:

For a month my head has been working; a Minerva, fully armed,

must issue from my brain You have seen, as I have, playing-cards

and pictures of saints. . . . These cards and pictures are engraved on
small pieces of wood, and below the pictures there are words and

entire lines also engraved A thick ink is applied to the engraving;

and upon this a leaf of paper, slightly damp, is placed; then this wood,
this ink, this paper is rubbed and rubbed until the back of the paper is
polished. This paper is then taken off and you see on it the picture
just as if the design had been traced upon it, and the words as if they
had been written; the ink applied to the engraving has become
attached to the paper, attracted by its softness and by its moisture

Well, what has been done for a few words, for a few lines, I must
succeed in doing for large pages of writing, for large leaves covered
entirely on both sides, for whole books, for the first of all books, the
Bible. . . .

How? It is useless to think of engraving on pieces of wood the
whole thirteen hundred pages. . . .

What am I to do? I do not know: but I know what I want to do: I
wish to manifold the Bible, I wish to have the copies ready for the
pilgrimage to Aix la Chapelle.

Here, then, we have matrix or skill No. i: the printing from wood-
blocks by means of rubbing.

In the letters which follow we see him desperately searching for a
simpler method to replace the laborious carving of letters in wood:

Every coin begins with a punch. The punch is a little rod of steel,
one end of which is engraved with the shape of one letter, several
letters, all the signs which are seen in relief on a coin. The punch is
moistened and driven into a piece of steel, which becomes the

THREE ILLUSTRATIONS

'hollow' or 'stamp'. It is into these coin-stamps, moistened in their
turn, that are placed the little discs of gold, to be converted into
coins, by a powerful blow.

This is the first intimation of the method of type-casting. It leads
Gutenberg, by way of analogy, to the seal: 'When you apply to the
vellum or paper the seal of your community, everything has been said,
everything is done, everything is there. Do you not see that you can
repeat as many times as necessary the seal covered with signs and
characters?'

Yet all this is insufficient. He may cast letters in the form of coins,
or seals, instead of engraving the wood, yet they will never make a
clear print by the clumsy rubbing method; so long as his search remains
confined to this one and only traditional method of making an
'imprint', the problem remains blocked. To solve it, an entirely
different kind of skill must be brought in. He tries this and that; he
thinks of everything under the sun: it is the period of incubation.
When the favourable opportunity at last offers itself he is ready
for it:

I took part in the wine harvest. I watched the wine flowing, and
going back from the effect to the cause, I studied the power of this
press which nothing can resist. . . .

At this moment it occurs to him that the same, steady pressure might
be applied by a seal or coin preferably of lead, which is easy to cast
on paper, and that owing to the pressure, the lead would leave a trace
on the paper Eureka!

... A simple substitution which is a ray of light. ... To work then!
God has revealed to me the secret that I demanded of Him. ... I have
had a large quantity of lead brought to my house and that is the pen
with which I shall write.

'The ray of light' was the bisociation of wine-press and seal which,
added together, become the letter-press. The wine-press has been lifted
out of its context, the mushy pulp, the flowing red liquid, the jolly
revelry as Sultan's branch was wrenched out of the context of the
tree and connected with the stamping of vellum with a seal. From
now onward these separate skills, which previously had been as

124 THE ACT OF CREATION

different as the butchers, the baker's, and the candlestick-maker's, will
appear integrated in a single, complex matrix:

One must strike, cast, make a form like the seal of your commun-
ity; a mould such as that used for casting your pewter cups; letters in
relief like those on your coins, and the punch for producing them
like your foot when it multiplies its print. There is the Bible!

2. Gravity and the Holy Ghost

c If I have been able to see farther than others,' said Newton, 'it was
because I stood on the shoulders of giants.' One of the giants was
Johannes Kepler (1471-1530) whose three laws of planetary motion
provided the foundation on which the Newtonian universe was built.
They were the first 'natural laws' in the modern sense: precise,
verifiable statements expressed in mathematical terms; at the same
time, they represent the first attempt at a synthesis of astronomy and
physics which, during the preceding two thousand years, had developed
on separate lines.

Astronomy before Kepler had been a purely descriptive geometry
of the skies. The motion of stars and planets had been represented by
the device of epicycles and eccentrics an imaginary clockwork of
circles turning on circles turning on circles. Copernicus, for instance,
had used forty-eight wheels to represent the motion of the five known
planets around the sun. These wheels were purely fictitious, and meant
as such they enabled astronomers to make more or less precise
predictions, but, above all, they satisfied the dogma that all heavenly
motion must be uniform and in perfect circles. Though the planets
moved neither uniformly nor in perfect circles, the imaginary cog-
wheels did, and thereby 'saved the appearances'.

Kepler's discoveries put an end to this state of affairs. He reconciled
astronomy with physics, and substituted for the fictitious clockwork a
universe of material bodies not unlike the earth, freely floating and
turning in space, moved by forces acting on them. His most important
book bears the provocative tide: A New Astronomy Based on Causation
Or Physics of the Sky (1609). It contains the first and second of Kepler's
three laws. The first says that the planets move around the sun not in
circles but in elliptic orbits; the second says that a planet moves in its
orbit not at uniform speed but at a speed that varies according to its

THREE ILLUSTRATIONS

125

position, and is defined by a simple and beautiful law: the line connect-
ing planet and sun sweeps over equal areas in equal times. The
third law establishes an equally elegant mathematical correlation
between the length of a planet's year and its mean distance from the
sun.

Kepler did not start his career as an astronomer, but as a student of
theology (at the Lutheran University of Thuebingen); yet already as a
student he was attracted by the Copernican idea of a sun-centred
universe. Now Canon Copernicus's book, On the Revolutions of the
Heavenly Spheres, had been published in the year of his death, 1543;
that is, fifty years before Kepler first heard of him; and during that half
century it had attracted very little attention. One of the reasons was its
supreme unreadability, which made it into an all-time worst-seller:
its first edition of a thousand copies was never sold out. Kepler was the
first Continental astronomer to embrace the Copernican theory. His
Mysterium Cosmographicum, published in 1597 (fifty-four years after
Copernicus's death), started the great controversy Galileo entered the
scene fifteen years later.

The reason why the idea of a sun-centred universe appealed to Kepler
was repeatedly stated by himself: 'I often defended the opinions of
Copernicus in the disputations of the candidates and I composed a
careful disputation on the first motion which consists in the rotation of
the earth; then I was adding to this the motion of the earth around the
sun for physical or, if you prefer \ metaphysical reasons. 9 2 1 have emphasized
the last words because they contain the leitmotif of Kepler's quest, and
because he used the same expression in various passages in his works.
Now what were those physical or, if you prefer, metaphysical
reasons' which made Kepler prefer to put the sun into the centre of the
universe instead of the earth?

My ceaseless search concerned primarily three problems, namely,
the number, size, and motion of the planets why they are just as
they are and not otherwise arranged. I was encouraged in my daring
inquiry by that beautiful analogy between the stationary objects,
namely, the sun, the fixed stars, and the space between them, with
God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I shall pursue this
analogy in my future cosmographical work. 8

Twenty-five years later, when he was over fifty, Kepler repeated his
credo: 'It is by no means permissible to treat this analogy as an empty

126

THE ACT OF CREATION

comparison; it must be considered by its Platonic form and archetypal
quality as one of the primary causes.'

He believed in this to the end of his life. Yet gradually the analogy
underwent a significant change:

The sun in the middle of the moving stars, himself at rest and yet the
source of motion, carries the image of God the Father and Creator.
He distributes his motive force through a medium which contains
the moving bodies, even as the Father creates through the Holy
Ghost. 4

Thus the 'moving bodies' that is, the planets are now brought
into the analogy. The Holy Ghost no longer merely fills the space
between the motionless sun and the motionless fixed stars. It has
become an active force, a vis motrix, which drives the planets. Nobody
before Kepler had postulated, or even suspected, the existence of a
physical force acting between the sun and the planets. Astronomy was
not concerned with physical forces, nor with the causes of the heavenly
motions, merely with their description. The passages which I have just
quoted are the first intimation of the forthcoming marriage between
physics and astronomy the act of betrothal, as it were. By looking at
the sky, not through the eyes of the geometrician only, but of the
physicist concerned with natural causes, he hit upon a question which
nobody had asked before, The question was: 'Why do the planets
closer to the sun move faster than those which are far away? What is
the mathematical relation between a planet's distance from the sun and
the length of its year?'

These questions could only occur to one who had conceived the
revolutionary hypothesis that the motion of the planet and therefore
its velocity and the duration of its year was governed by a physical
force emanating from the sun. Every astronomer knew, of course, that
the greater their distance from the sun the slower the planets moved.
But this phenomenon was taken for granted, just as it was taken for
granted that boys will be boys and girls will be girls, as an irreducible
fact of creation. Nobody asked the cause of it because physical causes
were not assumed to enter into the motion of heavenly bodies. The
greatness of the philosophers of the scientific revolution consisted not
so much in finding the right answers but in asking the right questions;
in seeing a problem where nobody saw one before; in substituting a
'why' for a 'how*.

THREE ILLUSTRATIONS

127

Kepler's answer to the question why the outer planets move slower
than the inner ones, and how the speed of their motion is related to
their distance from the sun, was as follows:

There exists only one moving soul in the centre of all the orbits;
that is the sun which drives the planets the more vigorously the closer
the planet is, but whose force is quasi-exhausted when acting on the
outer planets because of the long distance and the weakening of the
force which it entails. 5

Later on he commented: 'If we substitute for the word "soul" the
word "force", then we get just the principle which underlies my
"Physics of the Skies". As I reflected that this cause of motion diminishes
in proportion to distance just as the light of the sun diminishes in
proportion to distance from the sun, I came to the conclusion that this
force must be substantial "substantial" not in the literal sense but . . .
in the same manner as we say that light is something substantial,
meaning by this an unsubstantial entity emanating from a substantial
body.' 6

We notice that Kepler's answer came before the question that it was
the answer that begot the question. The answer, the starting point, was
the analogy between God the Father and the sun the former acting
through the Holy Ghost, the latter through a physical force. The
planets must obey the law of the sun the law of God the mathe-
matical law of nature; and the Holy Ghost's action through empty
space diminishes, as the light emanating from the sun does, with
distance. The degenerate, purely descriptive astronomy which
originated in the period of the Greek decline, and continued through
the Dark and Middle Ages until Kepler, did not ask for meaning and
causes. But Kepler was convinced that physical causes operate between
heavenly, just as between earthly, bodies, and more specifically that
the sun exerts a physical force on the planets. It was this conviction
which enabled him to formulate his laws. Physics became the auxiliary
matrix which secured his escape from the blocked situation into which
astronomy had manoeuvred itself.

The blockage to cut a very long story short was due to the fact
that Tycho de Brahe had improved the instruments and methods of
star-gazing, and produced observational data of a hitherto unequalled
abundance and precision; and the new data did not fit into the
traditional schemes. Kepler, who served his apprenticeship under

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THE ACT OF CREATION

Tycho, was given the task of working out the orbit of Mars. He spent
six years on the task and covered nine thousand folio-sheets with
calculations in his small handwriting without getting anywhere. When
at last he believed he had succeeded he found to his dismay that certain
observed positions of Mars differed from those which his theory
demanded by magnitudes up to eight minutes arc. Eight minutes arc
is approximately one-quarter of the apparent diameter of the moon.

This was a catastrophe. Ptolemy, and even Copernicus, could afford
to neglect a difference of eight minutes, because their observations were
accurate only within a margin of ten minutes, anyway. 'But/ Kepler
wrote in the New Astronomy, 'but for us, who by divine kindness were
given an accurate observer such as Tycho Brahe, for us it is fitting that

we should acknowledge this divine gift and put it to use Henceforth

I shall lead the way towards that goal according to my ideas. For if I
had believed that we could ignore these eight minutes, I would have
patched up my hypothesis accordingly. But since it was not permissible
to ignore them, those eight minutes point the road to a complete
reformation of astronomy. . . . ,?

Thus a theory, built on years of labour and torment, was instantly
thrown away because of a discord of eight miserable minutes arc.
Instead of cursing those eight minutes as a stumbling block, he
transformed them into the cornerstone of a new science. For those
eight minutes arc had at last made him realize that the field of
astronomy in its traditional framework was weD and truly blocked.

One of the recurrent frustrations and tragedies in the history of
thought is caused by the uncertainty whether it is possible to solve a
given problem by traditional methods previously applied to problems
which seem to be of the same nature. Who can say how many lives
were wasted and good minds destroyed in futile attempts to square the
circle, or to construct a perpetuum mobile? The proof that these problems
are insoluble was in each case an original discovery in itself (such as
Maxwell's second law of thermodynamics) ; and such proofs could only
be found by looking at the problem from a point of view outside its
traditional matrix. On the other hand, the mere knowledge that a
problem is soluble means that half the game is already won.

The episode of the eight minutes arc had convinced Kepler that his
problem the orbit of Mars was insoluble so long as he felt bound by
the traditional rules of sky-geometry. Implied in those rules was the
dogma of 'uniform motion in perfect circles'. Uniform motion he had
already discarded before the crisis; now he felt that the even more

THREE ILLUSTRATIONS

129

sacred one of circular morion must also go. The impossibility of
constructing a circular orbit which would satisfy all existing observa-
tions suggested to him that the circle must be replaced by some other
curve.

The conclusion is quite simply that the planet's path is not a circle
it curves inward on both sides and outward again at opposite ends.
Such a curve is called an oval. The orbit is not a circle but an oval
figure. 8

This oval orbit was a wild, frightening new departure for him. To
be fed up with cycles and epicycles, to mock the slavish imitators of
Aristode was one thing; to assign an entirely new, lopsided, implausible
path for the heavenly bodies was quite another. Why indeed an oval?
There is something in the perfect symmetry of spheres and circles
which has a deep, reassuring appeal to the unconscious mind other-
wise it could not have survived two millennia. The oval lacks that
archetypal appeal. It has an arbitrary, distorted form. It destroyed the
dream of the 'harmony of the spheres', which lay at the origin of the
whole quest. At times he felt like a criminal, or worse: a fool. All he
had to say in his own defence was: 'I have cleared the Augean stables
of astronomy of cycles and spirals, and left behind me only a single
cartful of dung.' 9

That cartful of dung non-uniform motion in non-circular orbits
could only be justified and explained by arguments derived not
from geometsy, but from physics. A phrase kept humming in his ear
like a catchy tune, and crops up in his writings over and again: there
is a force in the sun which moves the planets, there is a force in the sun.
. . . And since there is a force in the sun, there must exist some simple
relationship between the planet's distance from the sun, and its speed.
A light shines the brighter the nearer one is to its source, and the same
must apply to the force of the sun: the closer the planet to it, the
quicker it will move. This had been his instinctive conviction; but now
he thought that he had found the proof for it. 'Ye physicists, prick your
ears, for now we are going to invade your territory.' The next six
chapters in the Astronomia Nova are a report on that invasion into
celestial physics, which had been out of bounds for astronomy since
Plato. He had found the second matrix which would unblock his.
problem.

That excursion was something of a comedy of errors which

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THE ACT OF CREATION

nevertheless ended with finding the truth. Since he had no notion of
the principle of inertia, which makes a planet persist in its tangential
motion under its own momentum, and had only a vague intuition of
gravity, he had to invent a force which, emanating from the sun,
sweeps the planet round its path like a broom. In the second place, to
account for the eccentricity of the orbits he had to postulate that the
planets were 'huge round magnets' whose poles pointed always in the
same direction so that they would alternately be drawn closer to and
be repelled by the sun. But although today the whole thing seems
cockeyed, his intuition that there are two antagonistic forces acting on the
planets, guided him in the right direction. A single force, as previously
assumed the divine Prime Mover and its allied hierarchy of angels
would never produce elliptic orbits and periodic changes of speed.
These could only be the result of some dynamic tug of war going on in
the sky as indeed there is. The concept of two antagonistic forces
provided rules for a new game in which elliptic orbits and velocities
depending on solar distance had their legitimate place.

He made many mistakes during that wild flight of thought; but as
if by miracle' as he himself remarked the mistakes cancelled out. It
looks as if at times his conscious critical faculties had been anaesthetized
by the creative impulse, by the impatience to get to grips with the
physical forces in the solar system. The problem of the planetary orbits
had been hopelessly bogged down in its purely geometrical frame of
reference, and when he realized that he could not get it unstuck he tore
it out of that frame and removed it into the field of physics. That there
were inconsistencies and impurities in his method did not matter to
"him in the heat of the moment, hoping that somehow they would
J right themselves later on as they did. This inspired cheating or,
rather, borrowing on credit is a characteristic and recurrent feature in
the history of science. The latest example is sub-atomic physics, which
may be said to live on credit in the pious hope that one day its inner
contradictions and paradoxes will somehow resolve themselves.

Kepler's determination of the orbit of Mars became the unifying
link between the two formerly separate realms of physics and astron-
omy* His was the first serious attempt at explaining the -mechanism of
the solar system in terms of physical forces; and once the example was
set, physics and cosmology could never again be divorced.

J. Darwin and Natural Selection

Charles Darwin is perhaps the most outstanding illustration of the
thesis that 'creative originality' does not mean creating or originating
a system of ideas out of nothing but rather out of the combination of
well-established patterns of thought by a process of cross-fertilization,
as it were. With a pinch of salt it could be said that Darwin's essen-
tial achievement was to combine the evolutionary philosophy of
Anaximander, who taught that man's ancestor was an aquatic animal
and that the earth and its inhabitants were descended from the same
Prime Material, with the philosophy of Empedokles who taught the
survival of the fittest among the random aggregations of organic forms.
Aristotle the naturalist believed that nature fashions organs in the order
of their necessity, whereas Aristotle the Platonist asserted that the
species are immutable and denied the continuity between homo sapiens
and the animal kingdom.

From this point onward two basic metaphysical doctrines of
opposite nature can be more or less clearly discerned throughout the
history of European thought; one might call them provided the
words are not taken too literally the 'descending' and 'ascending*
views of the universe. The former is represented by Plato, the
Neoplatonists, and by the fundamentalist trend in Christianity from
the Fathers to the Victorians; it postulates an absolute act of creation,
followed by a descent (Plato's cave, the Fall), followed by a static,
immutable, deep-freeze state of affairs, a marking of time until the
Last Judgement. The ascending or evolutionary doctrine, which had
flourished during the heroic age of Greek science and was still partially
upheld by Epicureans such as Lucretius, went into a long period of
hibernation, but awoke with renewed vigour at the dawn of the
Scientific Revolution. Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, destroyed the dogma of
immutabiHty; Newton in his Optics declared that nature was 'delighted
with transmutations'; and from there onward through Leibniz, de
Maillet, Locke to Kant (to mention only a few), the idea of a growing
'Tree of Nature', on which the species branched out from a common
root, gained increasing support among the leading spirits.

The conflict between the two doctrines came to a head a century
before the Darwin scandalin the great controversy between
Linnaeus and BufFon, who were both born in the same year, 1707. Carl
von Linne's published works amount to a hundred and eighty
volumes; the Comte de Buffons Histoire Naturelle had forty-four

131

132

THE ACT OF CREATION

quarto volumes, and took fifty years to publish. Linne, who laid down
the laws for defining genera and species, and whose system of
classification survives to this day, started as a believer in immutability;
but later in life he admitted that new species may arise as 'daughters of
Time'. BufFon attacked not only Linnaeus's classification, but the
principles underlying it; he denied the existence of rigid boundaries
between one species and another, between vegetable and animal,
between animal and man: species arose, transformed themselves, and
became extinct according to climatic and other changes in nature.
Judged by the form and organization of its body, he wrote, 'the
orangutang would approach nearer to man than to any other animal*.
A century later Darwin admitted that 'whole pages [in BufFon] are
laughably like mine'.

By the end of the eighteenth century the cumulative evidence from
'the genera] facts in the affinities, embryology, rudimentary organs,
geological history, and geographical distribution of organic beings'
(Darwin to Asa Gray) 10 led to the simultaneous appearance of
evolutionary theories in a number of European countries. It is a rather
singular instance,' he remarked elsewhere, 'of the manner in which
similar views arise at about the same time, that Goe the in Germany,
Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin in England and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in France
. . . came to the same conclusion on the origin of the species, in the
years 1794-95' 11 that is, fifteen years before Charles Darwin was born.

The second great public controversy between evolutionists and anti-
evolutionists originated in the fateful years 2 and 3 according to the
calendar of the French Revolution when the three main protagonists
in the drama were all given chairs at the University of Paris by the
Revolutionary Government. They were Lamarck, Cuvier, Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire. The climax came in 1830, when Geoffroy, the evolu-
tionist, and Cuvier, who denied evolution, confronted each other in
public debate before the French Academy of Sciences. Cuvier won the
debate and rightly so because Geoffroy had tried to demonstrate a
good cause by a badly chosen example but the outcome' mattered
less than the debate itself, which Goe the declared to be an event far
more memorable than the French Revolution. This was a quarter of a
century before Darwin submitted his first paper on evolution to the
Royal Society.

A further scandal broke in 1844 still fifteen years before the
publication of The Origin of Specieswhen Robert Chambers
published anonymously his Vestiges of Creation, an impassionate if

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133

dilettantic plea for the evolutionary doctrine. Its impact may be
gathered from a scene in Disraeli's Tancred, in which the heroine sings
the book's praises: 'You know, all is development. The principle is
perpetually going on. First, there was nothing, then there was some-
thing; then I forget the next I think there were shells, then fishes;
then we came let me see did we come next? Never mind that; we
came at last. And at the next change there will be something very
superior to us something with wings. Ah! that's it: we were fishes,
and I believe we shall be crows. But you must read it ... it is all proved
. . . You understand, it is all science; it is not like those books in which
one says one thing and another the contrary, and both may be wrong.
Everything is proved . .

The passage has that particular flavour which we have come to
associate with the Darwinian controversy. Even Tancred's rejoinder to
the enthusiastic lady: 'I do not believe I ever was a fish/ has the familiar
ring of music-hall jokes about my grandpa was an ape'. And yet, I
repeat, all this excitement pre-dates the publication of Darwin's first
paper by more than ten years.

Thus Darwin originated neither the idea nor the controversy about
evolution, and in his early years was fully aware of this. When he
decided to write a book on the subject, he jotted down several versions
of an apologetic disclaimer of originality for the preface of the future
work:

State broadly [that there is] scarcely any novelty in my theory . . .
The whole object of the book is its proof, its extension, its adaptation
to classification and affinities between species.

Seeing what von Buch (Humboldt), G. H. Hilaire [sic] and
Lamarck have written I pretend to no originality of idea (though I
arrived at them quite independently and have read them since). The
line of proof and reducing facts to law [is the] only merit, if merit
there be, in following work. 12

The remark that he had arrived at his ideas independendy from his
predecessors should not perhaps be taken at face value, for Darwin's
own notebooks are conclusive proof that he had certainly read
Lamarck, the greatest among his precursors, and a number of other
works on evolution, before he arrived at formulating his own theory.
Even so, the intended apology never found its way into the book which
it was meant to preface. In his early notebooks, not intended for

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THE ACT OP CREATION

publication, Darwin paid grateful tri bute to Lamarck as a source of
inspiration, endowed with the prophetic spirit in science, the highest
endowment of lofty genius'. Later on he called Lamarck's work
Veritable rubbish* which did the cause 'great harm' and insisted that
he had got 'not a fact or idea' from Lamarck. 13 In this respect he
resembled Copernicus and Galileo who also excelled in denying credit
where credit was due, and other great men who, at the beginning of
their career, gratefully acknowledged indebtedness to their spiritual
forbears, but later on quietly forgot or denied them. In some cases, of
which Galileo is a striking example, the motive was an overwhelming
vanity; in others, a subtler form of self-deception seemed to operate.
Once one embraces an idea and lives with it day and night, one can no
longer bear the thought that she, the idea, has formerly belonged to
someone else; to possess her completely and be possessed by her, one
must extinguish her past. That seems to have been Darwin's case; for,
throughout the decisive ten years in which the battle was fought, he
behaved like a jealous husb and about his theory; but once the battle
was won he relented and gave others their due including Lamarck,
whose ghost was never to be exorcized from the edifice that Darwin
built.

On his own account, Darwin became an evolutionist after his voyage
on the Beagle, which ended in 1836, when he was twenty-seven; but
The Origin of Species was only published twenty-three years later. It
opens with the statement:

When on board H.M.S. Beagle as naturalist, I was much struck
with certain facts in the distribution of the organic beings inhabiting
South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the
past inhabitants of that continent. These facts, as will be seen in the
latter chapters of this volume, seemed to throw some light on the
origin of species that mystery of mysteries, as it has been called by
one of our great philosophers.

After my return to England it appeared to me that ... by collect-
ing all facts which bore in any way on the variation of animals and
plants under domestication and nature, some light might perhaps be
thrown on the whole subject. My first notebook was opened in
July 1837. I worked on true Baconian principles and without any
theory, collected facts on a wholesale scale . . . After five years' work
I allowed myself to speculate on the subject and drew up some
short notes.

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135

As Darwin's own notebooks show, the last two sentences in this
account again should not be taken at face value they are pious Hp-
service to the fashionable image of the scientist collecting facts with an
unprejudiced mind', without permitting himself, God forbid, to
speculate on them. In reality, as the notebooks show, shortly after his
return from the voyage (and not 'five years later), Darwin became
committed to the evolutionary theory and then set out to collect facts
to prove it. A month after publication of The Origin, in December 1859,
he admitted this apparently forgetting what he had said m the
Preface in a letter eloquently defending the procedure of 'inventing a
theory and seeing how many classes of facts the theory would ex-
plain'. 14 In another letter he remarks that 'no one could be a good
observer unless he was an active theorizer'; and again: 'How odd it is
that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against
some view if it is to be of any service.' 15 I am stressing this point
because scientists adhering to the positivist tradition take a perverse
pride in seeing themselves in the role of rag-pickers in the dustbin of
'empirical data' unaware that even the art of rag-picking is guided
by intuition.

How, then, did Darwin become an evolutionist? The answer is in
the notebooks for 1837-8, written after his return. The five years spent
on the Beagle had taught him a wealth of lessons about living and
extinct species, and about the gradual shading of one species into
another. While the voyage lasted he did not draw any conscious
conclusions from this; much later he wrote that although 'vague
doubts occasionally flitted' across his mind, he still believed, while on
the voyage, in the doctrine of the immutability of all species. 16 Yet the
rich experiences of those five years must have sunk in, together with
the Vague doubts'. When, on his return, he read Lamarck and other
standard works on evolution, the seeds began to germinate, the
accumulated facts began to whirl through his head, then arrange
themselves into a meaningful pattern. The notebooks start with the
drawing of analogies between individuals and whole species:

If [the] individual cannot propagate he has no issue so with
species.

l species generate other species, their race is not utterly cut off-
otherwise all die.

Absolute knowledge that species die and others replace them.

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THE ACT OF CREATION

. . . The permanent variations produced by confined breeding and
changing circumstances are continued and produced according to the
adaptation [to] such circumstances and therefore . . . death of species
is a consequence . . . of non-adaptation [to] circumstances.

If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow
brethren in pain, disease, death, suffering and famine our slaves in
the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements
they may partake our origin in one common ancestor we may be
all melted away.

. . . Organized beings represent [a] tree irregularly branched . . .
[This is probably an echo of Lamarck's 'branching series irregularly
graded'.]

Species according to Lamarck disappear as collections made
perfect.

If all men were dead, then monkeys may make men, men make
angels.

Let man visit orang-outang in domestication, hear expressive
whine, see its intelligence when spoken, as if it understood every
word ... see its affection to those it knows, see its passion and rage,
sulkiness and . . . despair; let him look at savage, roasting his parent,
naked, artless, not improving yet improvable; and then let him dare
to boast of his proud preeminence.

Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the
interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider
him created from animals.

By now he is fully committed. Moreover (after all, he is only
twenty-eight) he sees himself in the future role of a hero and possible
martyr:

Mention persecution of early astronomers. Then add chief good
of individual scientific men is to push their science a few years in
advance of their age (differently from literary men). Must remember
that if they believe and do not openly avow their belief, they do as
much to retard.

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137

That was easily said, but in fact Darwin did retard the publication of
his theory by twenty years, until his hand was forced. The reasons were
chronic illness, other pressing work, and, in his own words: 'I was so
anxious to avoid prejudice, that I determined not for some time to
write even the briefest sketch of it.' To counteract prejudice' he had to
assemble and build massive pillars of fact in support of the slender
bridge of his theory. For, contrary to the pious assertions in the preface,
the bridge had come first and the pillars afterwards as was nearly
always the case in the history of scientific thought. The result proved
that this caution was justified. Without those pillars, assembled with
heroic patience and effort, the bridge would have collapsed in the
ensuing storm. Here is one of the cases where the process of elaboration,
verification, and confirmation the long donkey-work following the
brief flash of insight is more decisive than the discovery itself. That is
why Darwin is remembered, whereas Wallace, who made the same
discovery, is all but forgotten.

Given the long line of evolutionists, from Anaximander to Charles's
own grandfa ther Erasmus, wherein lies Darwin's greatness, the
originality of his contri bution? In picking up, one might say, the
disjointed threads, plaiting them into a braid, and then weaving an
enormous carpet around it. The main thread was the evolutionist's
credo that the various species in the animal and vegetable kingdom
'had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties,
from other species'. 17 Now this doctrine disposed of the idea of the
Creator putting down separately the first serpent, giraffe and walrus as
ready-made products on the earth; but it gave no explanation of the
reasons which caused the common ancestor to transform itself gradually
into serpents, walruses, and giraffes. Only Lamarck had attempted to
provide a comprehensive reason for evolution in his four 'laws'. They
said, in essence, that an animal's physical characteristics and particu-
larities of behaviour are shaped by its needs, that is, by adaptation to
its natural environment; that specialized organs grow and decline in
proportion to their use or disuse; and that these adaptive changes which
the animal acquires in its lifetime are inherited by its offspring.

Contrary to popular belief, Darwin had no objection against the last
point, the 'inheritance of acquired characteristics' decried as a mortal
heresy by necnDarv/inians. On the contrary, in his Variations of Animals
and Plants under Domestication, and in the later editions of the Origin, he
gave a series of examples of what he believed to be inherited character-
istics in the offspring, due to adaptive changes in their ancestors. But he

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THE ACT OF CREATION

refused to accept such direct adaptations as the only, or even the main
cause of evolution, because the evidence seemed to speak against it.
Evidence showed that a great variety of species lived under identical
environmental conditions; and vice versa, that the same species could
be found under widely varying conditions. If species evolved, as
Lamarck's theory proposed, by direct adaptations to the environment,
then their variety remained unexplained. Evolution was a fact; but
what caused it? What was the nature of the force which transformed
animals and plants into new shapes?

The second thread that he picked up was of almost as trivial a nature
for a country-bred English gentleman as Archimedes's daily bath:
domestic breeding. The improvement of domestic breeds is achieved
by the selective mating of favourable variations:

It seemed to me probable that a careful study of domesticated
animals and of cultivated plants would offer the best chance of
making out this complicated problem. Nor have I been disappointed;
in this and in all other perplexing cases I have invariably found that
our knowledge, imperfect though it be, of variation under
domestication, afforded the best and safest clue. I may venture to
express my conviction of the high value of such studies, although they
have been very commonly neglected by naturalists. 18 (my italics)

We might say that Darwin had discovered Evolution through
artificial selection'. Incidentally the discovery is again not quite as
original as the last sentence might suggest. Darwin's notebooks of that
period show that he had been reading and pondering Lamarck; and
twenty years earlier, in his Philosophie Zoologique, Lamarck had written:
What nature does in the course of long periods we do every day
when we suddenly change the environment in which some species of
living plants is situated . . . Where in nature do we find our cabbages,
lettuces, etc., in the same state as in our kitchen gardens? And is not
the case the same with regard to many animals which have been
altered or greatly modified by domestication? 19

Whether Darwin read this passage from Lamarck, or similar
passages, we do not know. But the question is irrelevant except for
historians who specialize in priority claims. At any rate,, Darwin now
set out to collect facts about domestic breeding patiently and indiscrim-
inately*, not only from technical journals but from 'skilful breeders and
gardeners*. A great number of the 'facts* were spurious, and some of his

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139

theorizings were as wild and fantastic as Kepler's speculations on the
broom-like sweeping force emanating from the sun:

The cat had its tail cut off at Shrewsbury and its kittens had all
short tails; but one a little longer than the rest; they all died. She had
kittens before and afterwards with tails.

My father says on authority of Mr. Wynne, the bitch's offspring is
affected by previous marriages with impure breed . . .

Dr. Smith says he is certain that when white men and Hottentots
or Negroes cross at Cape of Good Hope, the children cannot be made
intermediate. The first children partake more of the mother, the later
ones of the father.

In his book on Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication
we are further informed that a cow having lost its horn owing to an
infected wound, gave birth 'to three calves, each with a small bony
lump in place of a horn'.

A contemporary biologist has commented on Darwin's 'amiable
credulity'. 20 It is a character trait which he shared with Tycho, Kepler,
Freud, Pasteur, and a large number of other great scientists. Ernest
Jones 21 remarked in an essay about Freud that creative genius seems to
be a mixture of scepticism and naivete: scepticism regarding the
dogmas implied in traditional modes of thought, combined with the
willingness of a wide-open mind to consider far-fetched theories.
Darwin himself, as one of his biographers remarked, 'was able to give
ultimate answers because he asked ultimate questions. His colleagues,
the systematizers, knew more than he about particular species and
varieties, comparative anatomy and morphology. But they had delib-
erately eschewed such ultimate questions as the pattern of creation, or
the reasons for any particular form, on the grounds that these were not
the proper subjects of science. Darwin, uninhibited by these restrictions,
could range more widely and deeply into the mysteries of Nature. . . .
It was with the sharp eyes o the primitive, the open mind of the
innocent, that he looked at his subject, daring to ask questions that his
more learned and sophisticated colleagues could not have thought to
ask' (Himmelfarb). 28

However, the study of domestic breeding led into another cul-de-
sac; for, in the case of domestic animals, man acts as the agent of

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THE ACT OF CREATION

selection; but who or what selects the favourable variations for breed-
ing in the case of undomesticated animals or plants? 'How selection
could be applied to organisms living m a state of nature remained for
some time a mystery to me.'

The deadlock lasted a year and three months. He tried a number of
hypotheses, but none of them worked. He toyed with the idea of
some universal law, according to which species were born, matured, and
died, just as individuals do. 'There is nothing stranger in the death of a
species than in the death of individuals.' Then he assumed, by a
perverse analogy, that since nothing is preserved of an individual who
dies without leaving offspring, so a species too will die out unless it
gives rise to another species. But they were wrong guesses, and his
thoughts kept running in circles in the blocked matrix as Sultan's did
until his eyes fell on the stick.

In Darwin's case the stick was Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of
Population. It had been published in 1797 more than forty years earlier.
When Darwin read the essay among other books which he read 'for
amusement', as he said he saw in a flash the 'natural selector', the
causative agent of evolution, for which he had been searching:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can
possibly survive; and as consequently there is a frequently recurring
struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary ever so
slightly in a manner profitable to itself. . . will have a better chance
of survival, and thus be naturally selected (Darwin's italics). Thus
, favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable
ones to be destroyed. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which
to work. 23

He had found the third thread. Now the pattern of the theory was
complete: what remained to be done was its elaboration the weaving
of the huge carpet which took him most of the rest of his life.

The odd thing about the story is as others have pointed out that
Darwin had completely misunderstood Malthus. The struggle for
existence, in which Darwin discovered the causative mechanism of
evolutionary improvement, Malthus himself had regarded as a cause
of misery, frustration, and decline. The increase of population was for
Malthus an unmitigated evil and an obstacle to progress. The-essay had
actually been written as a polemic against Condorcet and Godwin, who
had argued the perfectability of the human species. Domestic breeding,

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141

Malthus retorted, could improve animals and plants only to a very
limited degree; but a carnation could never be made to reach the size
of a cabbage, and similar limits were set to human progress. Thus the
struggle for existence was for Malthus not the whiph and of evolution,
but a scourge. What Darwin found in Malthus' s essay he had read into
it himself as Kepler had read his brooms and planetary lodestones
into the skies.

Even odder is the fact that Wallace arrived at the same discover/
also by way of Malthus. Alfred Russell Wallace was even more
gullible, and at the beginning of his career even more of a dilettante
than the young Darwin. He was fourteen years younger than Darwin;
he had been educated at an indifferent grammar school and learned the
trade of land-surveying. Before he took up that occupation, he had
shown no interest in nature, and 'it took another four years for him to
advance beyond the recognition of rose and buttercup, and to learn,
from a shilling booklet published by the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge, the elementary classifications of botany'. 24

At twenty-one he became a schoolteacher of sorts. In that year he
read, among other books, Darwin's Journal of a Naturalist's Voyage on
the Beagle and Malthus's Essay on Population. But his mind did not
click. He struck up a friendship with the entymologist Henry Walter
Bates and became an expert collector of beetles. This led him to
speculate about 'the almost infinite number of specific forms [among
beetles], the endless modifications of structure, shape, colour, and
surface-markings . . . and their innumerable adaptations to diverse
environments'; he was 'bitten by the passion for species', 25 and the
secret of their origin. Like Darwin he became an evolutionist by an act
of faith; like Darwin he was searching for its cause; like Darwin he
embarked with his friend Bates on a naturalist expedition to collect
insects, shells, birds, and animals; like Darwin he wrote a book about it
(Traueb on the Amazon and Rio Negro).

The expedition lasted four years; two years later, in 1854, he
published an article in a scientific journal in which he postulated that
'every species has come into existence coincident both in space and
time with a pre-existing, closely allied species'; all species together thus
formed a 'branching tree*. But, like Darwin earlier on, he did not know
what made the tree grow: 'the question of how changes of species
could have been brought about was rarely out of my mind'. Darwin
read the paper and wrote to Wallace that he agreed with 'almost every
word* in it; he added that he himself had been working for twenty

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THE ACT OF CREATION

years on the problem and had a 'distinct and tangible idea of its
solution*.

One year later the same 'distinct and tangible idea* came to Wallace.
In his autobiography Wallace described how he was 'lying muffled in
blankets in the cold fit of a severe attack of intermittent fever at
Ternate' (an island near New Guinea) when he suddenly remembered
Malthus's essay on population which he had read 'twelve or more years
earlier'. 26

The effect was analogous to that of friction upon the specially
prepared match, producing that flash of insight which led immediately
to the simple but universal law of the 'survival of the fittest' ... 'It
suddenly flashed upon me that this self-action process [i.e. the struggle
for existence] would necessarily improve the race, because in every genera-
tion the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would
remain that is, the fittest would survive. The more I thought over it the
more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-
for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of the species.' 27
In the course of the next two evenings, 'in a few feverish hours', he
put his theory into a paper of four thousand words and sent it off to
Darwin, in the pleasant belief that it would be a surprise to him since
Darwin had not yet published his own theory, although he had put it
on paper years earlier in several versions and shown it to his friends.

'I never saw a more striking coincidence', Darwin wrote. 'If Wallace
had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made
a better short abstract.'

Luckily, both Wallace and Darwin acted with a generosity and
reasonableness rare in the annals of science; the result was the presenta-
tion on 1 July 1848 of a joint memoir by Darwin and Wallace to
the Linnean Society, under the tide 'On the Tendency of Species to
form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by
Natural Means of Selection'. Neither author was present; Wallace was
overseas, Darwin ill in bed. When the paper was read out there was
no discussion and no sign of interest. At the end of the year the
President of the Society said in his annual report: 'The year which has
passed ... has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking dis-
coveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of
science on which they bear.' 28 In November next year The Origin of
Species was published, and only then did the storm break.

Though both men were constantly ailing from real and perhaps
also from imaginary diseases, Darwin lived to be seventy-three, and

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143

Wallace ninety. Though they differed on some points of theory and
though their opponents tried to play them out against each other, they
managed to remain life-long friends; towards the end of his life Darwin
obtained a pension for Wallace from Mr. Gladstone, and Wallace was
one of Darwin's pall-bearers. At the fiftieth anniversary, in 1909,
commemorating the joint publication of the Darwin- Wallace papers,
Wallace modesdy declared that their relative contri butions 'could be
jusdy estimated as the proportion of twenty years to one week* 29
which was an exaggeration, as Wallace's later works, particularly the,
'Contri butions' and 'Darwinism' were of considerable importance.

The psychologically fascinating aspect of the story is that the same
bisociative process was triggered off in Darwin's case by reading
Malthus, in Wallace's by the buried memory of Malthus, whom he
had read many years earlier, popping into consciousness at a feverish
moment. Thus Darwin's discovery strikes one as more rational,
Wallace's as more dramatic and bizarre, and this is in keeping with the
character of the two men. If Darwin had more patience and clarity of
mind, Wallace had more fantasy and perhaps even more depth. His
remark that selection through survival of the fittest was a 'self-acting
process' anticipated the concept of negative feed-back. His conviction
that the rise of organic life, the rise of consciousness, and the rise of man
represent jumps' in the evolutionary series, due to some 'unknown
reality' which has to be added to the mechanical operation of natural
selection, had a religious flavour; yet his conclusion that 'man and his
rise now appear short in time explosively short' has been confirmed
by contemporary anthropology. If Darwin had an 'amiable credulity',
Wallace believed, among other things, in phrenology and in the cruder
forms of mesmerism and spiritualism. No wonder he had to dive
into the depths of his unconscious mind to bring up the same trophy
which Darwin spied drifting on the surface, and secured with a boat-
hook.

That both read Malthus is not much of a coincidence as his essay
was well known and discussed at the time; and had it not been
Malthus, they could have extracted the same idea from other sources
from Erasmus Darwin, for instance, or from certain passages in
Lamarck. The time was ripe; 'it was not the coincidence of discovery
that is surprising but rather the fact that the coincidence was so long
delayed*. 30 This remark by one of Darwin's biographer's is not based
on hind-sight, but on the opinion of Darwin's friends and contem-
poraries:

144 THE ACT OP CREATION

'How extremely stupid not to have thought of that,' was Huxley's
first reaction, reflecting that 'Columbus' companions had probably
felt the same way when he made the egg stand on end*. The same
thought suggested itself to the ornithologist Alfred Newton, who
did not know whether to be 'more vexed at the solution not having
occurred to me, than pleased that it had been found at all', partic-
ularly since it was 'a perfectly simple solution of the problem that
had been plaguing him for months. . . . Many of Darwin's friends
must have felt as Huxley did . . . and many of his enemies must have
agreed with Samuel Butler: 'Buffon planted, Erasmus Darwin and
Lamarck watered, but it was Mr. Darwin who said "that fruit is
ripe", and shook it into his lap/ 31

I

VII

THINKING ASIDE
Limits of Logic

In an old Alchemist's Rosarium, whose author I have forgotten, I once
saw two pieces of advice for finding the Philosopher's Stone
printed side by side:

The Stone can only be found when the search lies heavily on the
searcher. Thou seekest hard and findest not. Seek not and thou
wilst find.

The introspective reports of artists and scientists on their sources of
inspiration and methods of work often display the same contradiction.
'Saturate yourself through and through with your subject . . . and
wait' was Lloyd Morgan's advice. 'Chance only favours invention for
minds which are prepared for discoveries by patient study and persever-
ing efforts.' This was said by Pasteur, and his meaning goes here beyond
what I have called the factor of 'ripeness': he seems to regard chance as
a kind of legitimate reward, causally related to the effort an almost
mystic conception. Souriau's famous 'to invent you must think aside'
'pour inventef ilfaut penser & c$ti* quoted with approval by Poincare,
points in the same direction. The consensus, at least among mathe-
maticians, seems to be that if you strive hard enough to get to India
you are bound to get to some America or other. 'One sometimes
finds,' Fleming once said, 'what one is not looking for. For instance, the
technician who set out to find a way to synchronize the rate of fire of a
machine-gun with the revolutions of an air-screw discovered an
excellent way of imitating the lowing of a cow.'

The history of discovery is full of such arrivals at unexpected
destinations, and arrivals at the right destination by the wrong boat.
Kepler set out to prove that the universe is built on simple geometrical
or musical principles and found that it was built 'on a cartload of

145

146

THE ACT OF CREATION

dung*: the elliptic orbits. He celebrated his discovery with a quotation
from Virgil's Eclogues where Truth appears as a teasing hussy: you
chase after her until you almost collapse; then when you have given
up she smilingly surrenders.

At times one almost suspects that all these references to mysterious
inspirations and sudden flashes of insight, all these protestations about
'I have no idea how I did it' and 'je ne cherche pas, je trouve, may stem
from an unconscious desire to appear as the privileged master of some
Socratic demon. Yet the evidence for large chunks of irrationality
embedded in the creative process, not only in art (where we are ready
to accept it) but in the exact sciences as well, cannot be disputed; and it
is particularly conspicuous in the most rational of all sciences: mathe-
matics and mathematical physics. From Kepler and Descartes to
Planck and de Broglie, the working methods of the great pioneers
seem to have been inspired by Einstein's jingle, improvised for the
benefit of an unknown lady who asked him for a dedication on a
photograph:

A thought that sometimes makes me hary:
Am I or are the others crazy?

In the popular imagination these men of science appear as sober
ice-cold logicians, electronic brains mounted on dry sticks. But if one
were shown an anthology of typical extracts from their letters and
autobiographies with no names mentioned, and then asked to guess
their profession, the likeliest answer would be: a bunch of poets or
musicians of a rather romantically naive kind. The themes that
reverberate through their intimate writings are: the belittling of logic
and deductive reasoning (except for verification after the act); horror
of the one-track mind; distrust of too much consistency ('One should
carry one's theories lightly', wrote Titchener); scepticism regarding
all-too-conscious thinking (It seems to me that what you call full
consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished.
This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of
consciousness Bnge des Bewusstseins, 1 Einstein). This sceptical reserve
is compensated by trust in intuition and in unconscious guidance by
quasi-religious or by aesthetic sensibilities. 1 cannot believe that God
plays dice with the world,' Einstein repeated on several occasions,
rejecting the tendency in modern physics to replace causality by
statistical probabilities. 'There is a scientific taste just as there is a

THINKING ASIDE

147

literary or artistic one*, wrote Renan. Hadamard emphasized that the
mathematician is in most cases unable to foresee whether a tentative
line of attack will be successful; but he has a 'sense of beauty that can
inform us, and I cannot see anything else allowing us to foresee. This is
undoubtedly the way the Greek geometers thought when they
investigated the ellipse, because there is no other conceivable way.*
Poincare was equally specific: f It may be surprising to see emotional
sensibility invoked a propos of mathematical demonstrations which, it
would seem, can interest only the intellect. This would be to forget the
feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms,
of geometric elegance. This is a true aesthetic feeling that all real
mathematicians know. The useful combinations [of ideas] are precisely
the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibil-
ity.' Max Planck, the father of quantum theory, wrote in his autobiog-
raphy that the pioneer scientist must have *a vivid intuitive imagination
for new ideas not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative
imagination. The quotations could be continued indefinitely, yet I
cannot recall any explicit statement to the contrary by any eminent
mathematician or physicist.

Here, then, is the apparent paradox. A branch of knowledge which
operates predominantly with abstract symbols, whose entire rationale
and credo are objectivity, verifiability, logicality, turns out to be depen-
dent on mental processes which are subjective, irrational, and verifiable
only after the event.

The Unconscious before Freud

The apparent paradox arises out of certain misconceptions about the
process of thinking and about the methods of science. Both originated
in the Age of Enlightenment, and hardened into a dogmatic creed
during the nineteenth century; the rapid expansion of thd area of
knowledge exacted its price in a temporary loss of depth. The depth-
psychologies of men like Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung bore through the
shallow crust, but each drove its shafts into one particular direction
inhabited by demons of a particular breed. The concept of the uncon-
scious acquired a mystical halo and a clinical odour; it became a kind of
Pandora's box, which sceptical psychologists asserted to be empty,
while to others it served as a stage-magician's trunk, equipped with a
trapdoor underneath and secret drawers. A good many of these violent

148

THE ACT OF CREATION

reactions originated in the mistaken belief that 'the unconscious mind'
was, like the Relativity Theory and sub-atomic physics, an invention of
the twentieth century.

In fact, however, the unconscious was no more invented by Freud
than evolution was invented by Darwin, and has an equally impressive
pedigree, reaching back to antiquity; a brief historic retrospect may
help to see it in a broader perspective and a more balanced context. The
larger part of the quotations which follow are taken from L. L.
Whyte's book on The Unconscious Before Freud (1962) a remarkable
contri bution to that neglected branch of historiography, the History
of Ideas.

I shall not bore the reader with obscure quotations from the
Upanishads, or ancient Egypt and Greece. At the dawn of Christian
Europe the dominant influence were the Neoplatonists; foremost
among them Plotinus, who took it for granted that 'feelings can be
present without awareness of them', that 'the absence of a conscious
perception is no proof of the absence of mental activity', and who
talked confidently of a 'mirror' in the mind which, when correctly
aimed, reflects the processes going on inside it, when aimed in another
direction, fails to do so but the process goes on all the same. Augustine
marvelled at man's immense store of unconscious memories 'a
spreading, limidess room within me who can reach its limitless
depth?'

The knowledge of unconscious mentation had always been there,
as can be shown by quotations from theologians like St. Thomas
Aquinas, mystics like Jacob Boehme, physicians like Paracelsus,
astronomers like Kepler, writers and poets as far apart as Dante,
Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Montaigne. This in itself is in no way
remarkable; what is remarkable is that this knowledge was lost during
the scientific revolution, more particularly under the impact of its most
influential philosopher, Rene Descartes, who flourished in the first half
of the seventeenth century.

As modem phy&ics started with the Newtonian revolution, so
modem philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian
Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world
into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with
conscious thinking. The result of this identification was the shallow
rationalism oV esprit Cartesien, and an impoverishment of psychology
which it took three centuries to remedy even in part. But it also had a
further, unexpected consequence. To quote Whyte:

THINKING ASIDE

149

Prior to Descartes and Lis sharp definition of the dualism there was
no cause to contemplate the possible existence of unconscious men-
tality as part of a separate realm of mind. Many religious and spec-
ulative thinkers had taken for granted factors lying outside but
influencing immediate awareness. . . . Until an attempt had been
made (with apparent success) to choose awareness as the defining
characteristic of mind, there was no occasion to invent the idea of
unconscious mind ... It is only after Descartes that we find, first the
idea and then the term 'unconscious mind' entering European
thought. 1

Only gradually did the reaction set in the realization that 'if there
are two realms, physical and mental, awareness cannot be taken as the
criterion of mentality [because] the springs of human nature He in the
unconscious ... as the realm which links the moments of human
awareness with the background of organic processes within which they
emerge 4 . 2

Among the first to take up the cudgels against Descartes's 'Cogito
ergo sum was the Cambridge philosopher Cudworth:

. , . Those philosophers themselves who made the essence of the
soul to consist in cogitation, and again, the essence of cogitation in
clear and express consciousness, cannot render it in any way
probable, that the souls of men in all profound sleeps, lethargies, and
apoplexies ... are never so much as one moment without expressly
conscious cogitations; which, if they were, according to the principles

of their philosophy, they must, ipso facto, cease to have any being

It is certain, that our human souls themselves are not always conscious
of whatever they have in them; for even the sleeping geometrician
hath, at that time, all his geometrical theorems some way in him; as
also the sleeping musician, all his musical skills and songs. . . . We
have all experience of our doing many animal actions non-attend-
ingly, which we reflect upon afterwards; as, also, that we often
continue a long series of bodily motions, by a mere virtual intention
of our minds, and as it were by half a cogitation. . . . 3

John Locke sided with Descartes, declaring boldly: 'It is impossible
to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive/ John Norris
(1657-1711) retorted with equal boldness:

150

THE ACT OP CREATION

We may have ideas of which we are not conscious. . . . There are
infinitely more ideas impressed on our rninds than we can possibly
attend to or perceive. . . . There may be an impression of ideas
without any actual perception of them. 4

This was written in 1690.

At about the same time the Earl of Shaftesbury wrote:

One would think, there was nothing easier for us, than to know
our own minds. . . . But our thoughts have generally such an
obscure implicit language, that it is the hardest thing in the world to
make them speak out distinctly. 5

Leibniz Newton's rival as a mathematician, and Descartes's oppo-
nent as a philosopher tried to determine quantitative thresholds of
awareness. He came to the conclusion:

Our clear concepts are like islands which arise above the ocean of

o'bscure ones. 6

We now enter the eighteenth century. Leibniz's concept of the
unconscious found many followers in Germany, among them
Christian Wolff:

Let no-one imagine that I would join the Cartesians in asserting
that nothing can be in the mind of which it is not aware. That is a
prejudice which impedes the understanding of the mind. 7

Lichtenberg, a hunch-backed genius, satirical writer, and professor
of physics at Goettingen, regarded dreams as a means to self-know-
ledge, and thoughts as products of the Id:

It thinks, one ought to say. We become aware of certain
representations which do not depend on us; others depend on us, or
at least so we believe; where is the boundary? One should say, it
thinks, just as one says, it rains. To say cogito is already too much if
one translates it by I think'.

The same protest is echoed by Lamartine: e I never think my
thoughts think for me.'

Kant is probably the driest among the great philosophers who
would have suspected him among the forerunners of Freud? :

The field of our sense-perceptions and sensations, of which we are
not conscious, though we. undoubtedly can infer that we possess
them, that is, the dark ideas in man, is immeasurable. The clear ones

THINKING ASIDE

151

in contrast cover infinitely few points which he open to conscious-
ness; so that in fact on the great map of our spirit only a few points
are iUuminated. 8

The German physician and philosopher E. Platner of whom I
confess never to have heard before was, according to Whyte, the first
to use the term Unhewusstsein, unconsciousness, and to assert that
thinking is a constant oscillation between conscious and unconscious
processes:

Consciousness is no essential part of an idea. Ideas with conscious-
ness I call apperceptions following Leibniz; ideas without conscious-
ness perceptions, or dark images. The life of the mind is an unbroken
series of actions, a continuous series of ideas of both kinds. For
apperceptions alternate with perceptions throughout life. Ideas with
consciousness are often the psychological results of ideas without
consciousness. 9

As we approach the nineteenth century, the single voices grow into
a chorus in praise of the creative faculties of the unconscious mind. It is
perhaps most audible in Germany; among those who join in are, to
mention only a few, Herder, Schelling, Hegel, Goethe, Fichte. Here,
for instance, is Goethe:

Man cannot persist long in a conscious state, he must throw himself
back into the Unconscious, for his root lives there. . . . Take for
example a talented musician, composing an important score:
consciousness and unconsciousness will be Eke warp and weft. 10

Jean-Paul Richter, an outstanding novelist (unfortunately little
known in England):

The unconscious is really the largest realm in our minds, and just
on account of this unconsciousness it is an inner Africa, whose
unknown boundaries may extend far away. Why should everything
come to consciousness that lies in the mind since, for example, that
of which it has already been aware, the whole great realm of
memory, only appears to it iUurriinated in small areas while the
entire reniaining world stays invisible in the shadows? And may
there not be a second half world of our mental moon which never
turns towards consciousness?

The most powerful thing in the poet, which blows the good and
the evil spirit into his works, is precisely the unconscious. . . . u

152

THE ACT OF CREATION

I. H. Echte (a psychologist, son of the philosopher) postulated the
existence of pre-conscious states:

Beneath active consciousness there must He consciousness in a
merely potential state, that is a middle condition of the mind, which
though not yet conscious, none the less positively carries the specific
character of Intelligence; from those conditions of preconscious
existence the true consciousness must be explained and developed
step by step. 12

in France the Cartesian spirit survived longest until the second half
of the nineteenth century in fact, when Charcot and his colleagues
revolutionized psychiatry (Freud, at one time, had studied under
Charcot). But in England the concept of the unconscious had a long
and distinguished line of ancestors, some of whom I have already
quoted. Here is Abraham Tucker, an influential philosopher, writing
around 1750:

. . . our mental organs do not stand idle the moment we cease to
employ them, but continue the motions we put into them after
they have gone out of our sight, thereby working themselves to a
glibness and smoothness and falling into a more regular and orderly
posture than we could have placed them with all our skill and
industry. 13

The term 'unconscious cerebration* was coined by W. B. Carpenter,
a nineteenth-century physician and naturalist:

. . . That action of the brain which, through unconscious cerebra-
tion, produces results w T hich might never have been produced by
thought. 14

Other characteristic English coinages are Wordsworth's 'caverns in
the mind which sun can never penetrate*, Coleridge's 'twilight realm
of consciousness', William James's 'fringe consciousness', and Myers's
'subliminal self'. In i860 Sir Thomas Laycock wrote that

no general fact is so well established by the experience of mankind or

so universally accepted as a guide in the affairs of life, as that of

unconscious life and action 16

And Maudsley, writing a few years later:

The most important part of mental action, the essential process on
which thinking depends, is unconscious mental activity. 16

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153

For the climax of this story we must return to Germany in the
second half of the nineteenth century. The pioneers of German
experimental psychology were Fechner ('Fechner 's law') and Wilhelm
Wundt. Fechner's attitude is summed up in his famous metaphor of
the mind as an iceberg, with only a fraction of it above the surface of
consciousness, moved by the winds of awareness, but mostly by hidden
under-water currents. Wundt continued where Fechner had left off:
Our mind is so fortunately equipped, that it brings us the most
important bases for our thoughts without our having the least know-
ledge of this work of elaboration. Only the results of it become
conscious. This unconscious mind is for us like an unknown being
who creates and produces for us, and finally throws the ripe fruits in
our lap. 17

At about the same time, in 1868, Erich von Hartmann published his
Philosophy of the Unconscious, which became a best-seller. From a period
novel by the popular Spielhagen we learn that in 1870 two main topics
dominated conversation in the intellectual salons of Berlin: Wagner
and the Unconscious. We are reminded of the scene in the London
salon of Disraeli's play, where the fashionable topic of Evolution is
discussed fifteen years before anybody had heard the name of
Darwin. Whyte lists six philosophical works published within ten
years after von Hartmann' s which carry the word 'unconscious' in
their tides. In the literature of the period Nietzsche was the towering
giant. He took over the unconscious Id from Lichtenberg (which
Groddeck then took over from Nietzsche, and Freud from Groddeck);
it is one of the leitmotifs in Nietzsche's work:

Where are the new doctors of the soul?. . . Consciousness is the last
and latest development of the organic, and is consequendy the most
unfinished and least powerful of these developments. Every extension
of knowledge arises from making conscious the unconsciousness. The
great basic activity is unconscious. For it is narrow, this room of
human consciousness.

Whyte concludes: 'The general conception of unconscious mental
process was conceivable (in post-Cartesian Europe) around 1700, topical
around 1800, and fashionable around 1870-1880. ... It cannot be
disputed that by 1870-1880 the general conception of the unconscious
mind was a European commonplace and that many special applications
of this general idea had been vigorously discussed for several decades.* 18

154

THE ACT OF CREATION

I have confined this digest to unconscious thinking] there is an equal
abundance in relevant quotations which refer to the motivational,
affective, and pathological aspects of the unconscious, and of the dream.
My intent was not to belitde either the greatness or the originality of
Freud that would be as stupid as trying to run down Newton because
he had 'stood on the shoulders of giants'. But while Newton was aware
of this the expression is his own Freud, curiously, was not. He never
realized how respectable the idea was on which he built his edifice.

The Mechanization of Habits

The feeling of mystery or of wary scepticism which mention of
'the unconscious' evokes is part of our mental heritage, derived from
the Cartesian tradition. The tenacity of that tradition, deeply engrained
in our thinking habits, makes us constantly forget the obvious fact
rubbed in by everyday experience that awareness is a matter of
degrees. Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to
different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of
gradations, of degrees of awareness. .We may call, as Leibniz did,
conscious events 'light', unconscious ones 'dark* provided that we
remember the infinite shadings from lighter to darker grey between
them. The dark end of the scale extends well below the human level to
an unknown limit which may possibly be some form of 'proto-
plasmic consciousness'; Bergson even asserted that 'the unconscious-
ness of a falling stone is something different from the unconsciousness
of a growing cabbage*.

In human beings we find at the bottom of the scale the self-
regulating activities which control the viscera and glands, the circula-
tion of the blood and other physiological processes of which we are
normally unaware; yet in their ensemble they may supply that
vegetative or bovine consciousness of being warmly alive and kicking.
From here on the scale of awareness ascends to the more or less
mechanical i.e. less or more conscious exercise of practised skills:
from walking along a road to picking one's way through puddles in
the rain, to climbing an exposed rock-face; from tying one's shoe-
strings to knotting a broken shoe-string; humming a tune absent-
mindedly singing it to an audience; adding up a column of figures
mechanically checking it, after a mistake has been discovered, with
great attention. At the top of the scale we find the quasi-hypnotic state

THINKING ASIDB

155

of utter concentration on a problem, or absorption in a thriller, blind
and deaf to one's surroundings.

Equally continuous gradients of awareness are found in the exercise
of perceptual and cognitive skills, the working of memory, the ebbs
and tides of emotion. We are conscious only of a fraction of the input
into our eyes, ears, and skin; yet the intake is registered nevertheless.
We are unaware of the ticking of the clock, but aware that it has
stopped. While reading we are unaware of the shape of the letters
because the skill of transforming them into words is fully automatized*
and awareness is focussed on the meaning behind the shapes a pheno-
menon known as the 'transparency' of language. We summon
memories asleep in the dormitory of the mind, while others barge in
uninvited. Oddest of all, we hold ourselves and others responsible for
forgetting something which ought to have been remembered. The
schoolboy who has left his gym-shoes at home, the maid who has
forgotten to put sugar on the breakfast tray, are held responsible for
unconscious acts of omission.

The greater mastery and ease we gain in the exercise of a skill, the
more automatized it will tend to become, because the code of rules
which controls it now operates below the threshold of awareness. But
the degree of conscious attention which accompanies the performance
depends also on a second factor: the prevailing environmental condi-
tions, the lie of the landwhe ther it is familiar, or contains unusual
features. The inexperienced driver must concentrate even on an empty
road. The experienced driver functions automatically; but he must
concentrate in heavy traffic.

We may then, somewhat paradoxically, describe awareness as that
experience which decreases and fades away with our increasing mastery
of a skill exercised under monotonous conditions. Mastery of the code
and stability of environment are the two factors which lead to the
formation of habit; and habit-formation is accompanied by a gradual
dimming and darkening of the lights of awareness. On the other hand,
we may regard this tendency towards the progressive automatization
of skills as an act of mental parsimony, as a handing-down of the
controls to lower levels in the hierarchy of nervous functions, enabling
the higher levels to turn to more challenging tasks. Thus the typist can
go on transcribing letters while t&inking of her boy friend; and the boy
friend can drive the car while discussing with her their weekend plans
thanks to the benevolent workings of the principle of parsimony,
which seems to be an essential factor in mental progress.

THE ACT OF CREATION

To revert to an earlier example: the beginner, hopefully facing a
chessboard, feels uncertain about the manner in which bishops and
rooks are permitted to move, and has to consult his textbook or his
teacher. After some practice it becomes impossible for him to move a
rook diagonally without a feeling of aesthetic and moral revulsion, of
having committed an obscenity or violated a sacred taboo: the rules
have become automatized, encoded in the circuitry of his nervous
system. At a still later stage he learns to apply certain stratagems just as
automatically: to avoid 'pins' and 'forks', not to expose the king, to
seek open rook files, etc. In games simpler than chess the same type of
situation will recur over and again, and the appropriate stratagems will
be codified in their turn. Computer engineers have actually built elec-
tronic brains in which both the rules and the stratagems of simple board
games, such as noughts and crosses, are built into the memory' of the
machine. They can beat any opponent if he blunders, and draw if he
plays a correct game. The machine illustrates the process of relegating
familiar tasks to lower levels of the mental hierarchy which function
as unawares or nearly as involuntary reflexes.

But how does all this relate to mental creativity? Only indirectly.
The intervention of unconscious processes in the creative act is a
phenomenon quite different from the automatization of skills; and our
unawareness of the sources of inspiration is of a quite different order
from the unawareness of what we are doing while we tie our shoe-
strings or copy a letter on the typewriter. In the creative act there is an
upward surge from some unknown, fertile, underground layers of the
mind; whereas the process I have described is a downward relegation of
the controls of skilled techniques.

In fact I have so far discussed only one aspect or dimension of
consciousness: let us call it the linear scale, or linear gradient of aware-
ness. At one end of the scale we found routines performed without
awareness; at the opposite end the smgle-minded, hyper-awake
concentration on a problem, where consciousness is focussed into a
narrow beam with darkness all round. But such a one-dimensional
interpretation of the varieties of consciousness, as a line running from
automatism to obsession, seems highly unsatisfactory. Consciousness
is a multi-dimensional affair, as I hope to show in the pages that follow.
The 'linear* gradient of awareness which I have discussed is only one of
these dimensions though nevertheless an important one. It is along
that gradient that learning is transformed into habit, that the control
of new skills, once mastered, slides down under its own gravity

THINKING ASIDE

157

as it were, into the basement, making room upstairs for new
acquisitions.

A pianist, after practising a piece for some time, can reel it off 'in his
sleep*, as the saying goes. The exact opposite of this process is illustrated
by the famous case of Tartini composing the Devil's Trill Sonata while
asleep. The first example shows the unconscious as a repository of
habits which no longer need being attended to'; the second, as a
breeding ground of novelties.

It is essential to bear both processes in mind and not to confuse
them. Most Behaviourists accept only the first: they regard habit-
formation as the essence of mental progress; original ideas, on this
view, are lucky hits among random tries, retained because of their
utility value just as biological evolution is held to be the outcome of
random mutations retained because of their survival value.

Among those prepared to accept the positive role of the unconscious,
there is a frequent tendency to confuse downward' and 'upward*
traffic to equate automatism with intuition. Some highly developed,
semi-automatized skills have a great amount of flexibility the result of
years of hard trairiing; but their practitioners are devoid of originality.
Tightrope walkers, acrobats, night-club pianists, and calculating
prodigies display virtuosity; a virtuoso is denned by the Oxford
Dictionary as a person skilled in the mechanical part of a fine art*.
Needless to say, virtuosity may combine in the same person with
creativity; but in itself it is no more than the highest elaboration of a
routine with fixed, automatized rules of the game and a malleable
strategy.

Such mechanical virtuosity has probably reached its highest devel-
opment in the Japanese arts inspired by Zen Buddhism: swordsmanship,
archery, Judo, calligraphic painting. The method to reach perfection
has been authoritatively described as practice, repetition, and repetition
of the repeated with ever-increasing intensity', 19 until the adept
'becomes a kind of automaton, so to speak, as far as his own
consciousness is concerned*. 20 * That is the method by which Professor
Skinner of Harvard University, a leader of the Behaviourist school,
trained pigeons to perform circus acts, intended as an explanation of
mental development in man.

i

Exploring the Shallows

We have heard conscious thoughts being compared to icebergs, or
islands in the ocean of unconscious mentation; we have heard Einstein
affirm that 'full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully
accomplished'. Let me proceed from these metaphors to a closer
analogy, which may help to dispel common illusions about the clarity
of conscious thought.

Most people with normal eyesight tend to the flattering belief that
they see the world around them at any time in sharp focus; in fact,
however, they see a blur. Only a minute fraction of tie visual field
about one-thousandth of it is seen distinctly; outside of this centre
vision becomes increasingly vague and hazy. If you gaze fixedly at a
single word in the centre of the page you are reading, and try to
prevent your gaze from straying along the line (which is not easy
because reading is an automatized skill), you will see only about, a
couple of words sharp in focus, the rest of the line on both sides trails
off into a haze. And how about the whole page, and the rest of the
room around you?

Focal vision subtends an angle of only about four degrees, less than
the angle at the point of a pin, out of a total field of a hundred and
eighty degrees. Yet we are unaware of this, because we constandy scan
the field with, mostly unconscious, movements of the eye, to bring the
blurred periphery into the narrow beam of focal vision pinpointed at
the fovea, the tiny spot at the centre of the retina which alone conveys
true and distinct sight.

This much every schoolboy learns (and forgets); but in i960
experiments at McGill University led to the rather surprising discovery
that the unconscious movements of the eye are not merely aids to
clearer vision, but a sine qua non of vision. When the subject's gaze
remained really fixed on a stationary object (by means of a mechanical
device, see Book Two, X), his vision went haywire, the image
of the object disintegrated and disappeared then reappeared after a
while but in distorted shape or in fragments. Static vision does not
exist; there is no seeing without exploring.

With due caution we can draw a limited analogy between visual
scanning and mental scamiing between the blurred, peripheral vision
outside the focal beam, and the hazy, half-formed notions which
accompany thinking on the fringes of consciousness. 'Every definite
image in the mind', wrote William James, 'is steeped and dyed in the

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159

free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations,
near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning
sense of whither it is to lead. The significance, the value of the image,
is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it'. 21

If one attempts to hold fast to a mental image or concept to hold it,
immobile and isolated, in the focus of awareness, it will disintegrate,
like the static, visual image on the fovea: a word, constantly repeated,
becomes meaningless; an idea, stripped of its hazy penumbra, vanishes
like the Cheshire Cat, Thinking is never a sharp, neat, linear process;
it could rather be compared to the progress of a boat on a lake. When
you day-dream you drift before the wind; when you read or listen to a
narrative you travel like a barge towed by a tug. But in each case the
progress of the boat causes ripples on the lake, spreading in all directions
memories, images, associations; some of these move quicker than the
boat itself and create anticipations; others penetrate into the deep. The
boat symbolizes focal awareness, the ripples on the surface are the
fringes of consciousness, and you can furnish the deeps, according to
taste, with the nasty eddies of repressed complexes, the deep-water
currents of the collective unconscious, or with archetypal coral-reefs.
When thinking is in the tow of a narrative, focal awareness must stick to
its course and cannot follow the ripples on their journey across the lake;
but it is their presence all round the horizon,on the peripheries of aware-
ness, which provides resonance, colour, and depth, the atmosphere
and feel of the story. When it comes to productive thinking, however,
the metaphor breaks down unless we equip it with an outboard
motor, a gyro-compass, servo-steering, and other paraphernalia.

The existence of an intermediary region between the 'limit case' of
sharp, narrow focal awareness and the vast unconscious regions of the
mind has been recognized for a long time. Fichte (and later Freud)
called it the pre-conscious (das Vorbewusstsein), James called it the
fringe; Polanyi 'subsidiary awareness'; the analogy with vision yielded
'peripheral awareness'; but since awareness is a matter of degrees, it
would be mistaken to draw a sharp line between pre- and unconscious
processes, between the shallows and the deep. What matters is the
distinction between the single event (the percept, or concept, or word,
or muscle-action) which for a fleeting moment occupies the focus of*
attention and the processes on the periphery which define the context,
the purpose and meaning of the former.

But how do they interact? How do pre- or unconscious processes
influence the direction of thought; how do some enter focal awareness

i6o

THE ACT OF CREATION

and sink back again into twilight and darkness; how do they assist
mental creativity? The answers we have heard up to now were of
a general nature; they all asserted that such assistance was indispensable
and did in fact occur; but they had little to say regarding the concrete
mechanism or procedure through which it was rendered. Perhaps the
most lucid attempt in this direction was made by that versatile genius
Francis Galton in a famous analogy:

When I am engaged in trying to think anything out, the process
of doing so appears to me to be this: the ideas that lie at any
moment within my full consciousness seem to attract of their own
accord the most appropriate out of a number of other ideas that are
lying close at hand, but imperfectly within the range of my
consciousness. There seems to be a presence-chamber in my mind
where full consciousness holds court, and where two or three ideas
are at the same time in audience, and an ante-chamber full of more
or less allied ideas, which is situated just beyond the full ken of
consciousness. Out of this ante-chamber the ideas most nearly allied
to those in the presence-chamber appear to be summoned in a
mechanically logical way, and to have their turn of audience. 22

The italics are mine, and are meant to register protest. Assuming the
idea in the presence-chamber of my mind is, as it happens to be, Mr.
Galton himself, I can recall six distinct occasions in the last few months
when I thought of him. He helped to ease the gloom of my last birth-
day because Galton lived to the age of eighty-nine; and the idea
'most nearly allied', which was summoned from the ante-chamber
'in a mechanically logical way', was 'Methuselah*. On another occasion
I read about the acquittal of a woman who had been tried for the
mercy-killing of her malformed baby; Galton was summoned because
he had invented the word 'eugenics'; next came, logically, the 'most
nearly allied' idea of Adolf Hider, whose S.S. men practised eugenics
after their own fashion. On yet another occasion the closest association
was 'colour-blindness' first studied by Dalton which rhymes with
Galton; and so forth. Each summons into the presence-chamber had
its own 'mechanical logic', if you wish to call it that; and the choice of
the 'most nearly allied idea', the order of precedence in the ante-
chamber, depended on what sort of logic, or rule of the game, was at
the time in control of the mind. Galton was a pioneer of the experimen-
tal method in word-association tests; but as a follower of the English

THINKING ASIDE l6l

associationist school, he failed to realize that association is always con-
trolled by a code of rules, whether the subject is aware of it or not; and
that different codes are active at different times.

Thus the famous analogy of the ante-chamber of the mind does not
get us much further; but it helps us to ckrify the problem by showing
the pitfalls of the mechanistic approach, and leading us back, as it were,
to our starting point. It was the comparison between the blurred
periphery of the visual field and the vague intimations which pass
through the twilight of the pre-conscious. We can now venture a step
further, and draw a parallel between the part-automatic visual scanning
of a landscape, and the mental scanning of a land of inner landscape
in purposive thinking. In both cases, the scanning process is controlled
by a specific, selective code that determines which features in the
landscape are relevant and which are not. Scanning a panorama
through my window purely for pleasure corresponds to the aimless
drift of thought along the most gratifying features memories,
images, pleasurable anticipations of the inner landscape. But if I
explore with my eyes the mountain before me for the safest route to
the summit, or the amount of timber it will yield; for a sign of
edelweiss, or a strategic gun-site safe from air attack, the whole visual
field will in each case become organized and patterned in different ways;
and the scanning motions of my eyes, guiding the beam of focal vision,
will automatically be governed by certain rules which I am unable to
name, and by a purposeful strategy determined by the He of the land.

In this example visual exploration and mental exploration are
actually indistinguishable; the observational data derived from looking
at the rock face, and the lessons derived from previous experience
combine into one. In other situations, the exploratory process may be
confined to the inner landscape, to the exclusion of all stimuli from
the world outside. The poet's or the mathematician's trance-like
condition while he concentrates on a problem, the vivid fantasies of
the day-dreamer, the delusions of the insane, the dreams of the sleeper,
are products of widely different games of the mind; but they all have
this in common, that the beam of focal awareness is exploring the inner
environment, and ignoring the input from the senses. The features on
which the beam alights are images of a pictorial or verbal nature,
memories in abstracted, conceptualized, or distorted shape; in a word,
they are past experiences internalized. The inner landscape may be
regarded as a kind of private, miniature model or caricature of the
world in the subject's brain-mind (see Book Two).

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Thus the objects of the scanning process are ultimately the individual's
past experiences (including his pre-natal past) incorporated in one form
or another into his mental landscape. And the rules which control the
scanning process (the pattern of 'mental eye motions 5 , as it were) are
also derived from past experiences by abstraction and generalization;
they are the results of learning compressed into the operational codes
of thinking skills.

As an example, take the parlour game 'Towns with M' (see page 38).
The moment I start playing it a fixed code takes control of my mental
processes, and their freedom is whittled down to strategic choices.
These may be based on exploring an imagined geographical map, or
on the 'tuning-fork' method. The mental map is a blurred, ha2y, and
distorted replica of what I learned in school and on travels; but as I
proceed to scan it, from west to east with the mind's eye, name after
name emerges from the misty twilight: Manchester, Munich, Moscow,
Murmansk, Michigan, etc. If, on the other hand, I apply the tuning-
fork method, Manchester will call out Mannheim, Madrid, Madras,
and so forth. All of these names were learned in the past; all of them were
members of the 'M' matrix (otherwise they could not have been
summoned on the 'wavelength' of that particular code); all of them
were unconscious or pre-conscious the moment before the beam of
focal awareness alighted on them. The beam was guided firstly by the
rule of the game (Tind towns with M, not rivers with 5'), and secondly
by strategy ('move from west to east'). The rule was fixed, the strategy
variable. A further point to note is (though it does not concern us yet)
that strategy operates by a kind of feed-back from the lie of the land:
I was searching for towns with 'M' between Munich and Moscow,
but found none: so I moved on. Other factors enter: I might have
remembered Mannheim, but did not because of an unpleasant exper-
ience there: emotional disturbances interfering with 'mechanical logic'.
Incidentally, the forming of a sentence in ordinary conversation
follows a similar pattern. Instead of scanning a map for towns with 'M',
you must scan your vocabulary for words which will fit a given
meaning.

Take an even simpler practical example. I live in London and have
to spend a day in Paris some time next week to see my French publisher.
If this were a pleasure-trip the fringes of my consciousness would at
once be crowded with half-remembered, floating images of bistros,
streets, galleries, metro stations; but, as it is a business trip, a different
code enters into action and the matrix is cluttered with timetables,

THINKING ASIDE

appointment books, galley proofs, and dustcovers, which strategic
planning must co-ordinate into the proper sequence.

Purposive thinking, even of this ordinary, humdrum kind, proceeds
in several steps. First, the code of rules appropriate to the task is 'tuned
in' by dint of analogy with similar tasks encountered in the past. As
a result, a matrix will emerge, a kind of patterned mental grid or chess-
board, which provides a preliminary selection of permissible moves, a
first guidance for the exploratory process. Next comes strategy,
dependent upon the particulars of the situation.

Each step involves processes more or less removed from focal
awareness. The code which guides the focal beam of consciousness
functions more or less unconsciously. (It could not be otherwise, for if
the beam were guided by the beam, we would be landed in the
paradox of a little man inside the brain with a little man inside his
brain, and so forth.) The codes of grammar and syntax function
unconsciously; the meaning you wish to express provides the strategy
for selecting the proper word. The words just like the towns with
*M' were lying in darkness before the beam searched them out and
lit them up for a fleeting moment; then they sink back into darkness
again.

Thus all reasoning, even of a trivial order, is steeped in unconscious
processes. But when the task is of a more complex order, thinking may
run into difficulty at each of the steps which I have outlined. A situation
may share certain features with other situations encountered in the past,
yet the code of rules which enabled us to cope with them proves
mysteriously inadequate in the new situation. Bleeding and purging the
patient proved beneficial in a number of cases, so it came to be regarded
as an all-cure; why did it not work? We can bisect an angle with
compass and ruler, so it was assumed that we can trisect angles by the
same method; but it did not work. Sound waves are propagated in thin
air, so it was assumed that light waves are propagated in a thin ether;
but the analogy provided the wrong matrix. Circles turning upon
circles yielded an adequate description of heavenly morions, until
Tycho perfected the methods of observation; the new data disrupted
the pattern, and the matrix was blocked.

When a situation is blocked, straight thinking must be superseded
by 'thinking aside* the search for a new, auxiliary matrix which will
unblock it, without having ever before been called to perform such a
task. The essence of discovery is to hit upon such a matrix as
Gutenberg hit on the wine-press and Kepler on the sun-force.

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In the trivial routines of thinking, we are exploring the shallows
on the twilight periphery of awareness, guided by a more or less
automatized scanning procedure. In creative thinking we are exploring
the deeps, without any obvious guidance. Yet some guidance there
must be unless all novelty is due to random hits produced by the
patient monkey on the typewriter.

The 'Hooked Atoms of Thought*

Let me return once more to Henri Poincare, who proposed a theory
concerning the nature of this unconscious guidance. We have heard
him describe how, on three different occasions, the solution of a
problem popped up spontaneously and ready-made, as it were, from
the depths of the unconscious. Further on in that famous lecture from
which I have quoted (pp. 114-16) he tried to give an explanation of
this phenomenon. His starting point was that mathematical discovery
consists in a 'combination of ideas'; and his description of this process
stresses the characteristic features of what I have called the bisociative
act:

Among chosen combinations the most fertile will often be those
formed of elements drawn from domains which are far apart. . . .
Most combinations so formed would be entirely sterile; but certain
among them, very rare, are the most fruitful of all.

Now these combinations are engineered by the unconscious or, as
he calls it, the Subliminal self*; but how? There are, he says, two
possibilities. The first is that the unconscious 'is capable of discernment;
it has tact, delicacy; it knows how to choose, to divine. What do I say?
It knows better how to divine than the conscious self since it succeeds
where that has failed. In a word, is not the subliminal self superior to
the conscious self? I confess that, for my part, I should hate to accept
this. . . .* So he rejects this first hypothesis in favour of the second:
the unconscious is an automaton which mechanically runs through all
possible combinations:

Figure the future elements of our combinations as something like
the hooked atoms of Epicurus. During the complete repose of the
mind, these atoms are motionless, they are, so to speak, hooked to the

THINKING ASIDE

wall. During a period of apparent rest and unconscious work,
certain of them are detached from the wall and put in motion. They
flash in every direction through the space ... as would, for example,
a swarm of gnats, or if you prefer a more learned comparison, like
the molecules of gas in the kinematic theory of gases. Then their
mutual impacts may produce new combinations.

But two objections come to his mind. Firstly, is not the number of
possible combinations infinite, and the chance of hitting on a favourable
one infinitesimal? No, he answers, because during the conscious
preparatory work which preceded the period of unconscious incuba-
tion, a first selection was already made of those atoms which are to be
unhooked from the wall; and although no satisfactory combination of
them was found, 'after this shaking up imposed upon them by our will,
these atoms do not return to their previous rest. They freely continue
to dance* until the one favourable collision in a rnillion occurs. (This
is rather like saying that the chances of the monkey on the typewriter
hitting on a Shakespeare sonnet would be considerably improved by
building a typewriter which uses whole words as keys instead of
letters.)

The second objection which occurred to Poincare is as follows:
although coundess combinations are formed 'in consequence of the
automatism of the subliminal self, only the interesting ones . . . break
into the domain of consciousness*. But, if so, what is the nature of the
mysterious sieve which rejects the useless combinations and allows only
the lucky hits to pass into consciousness? Poincare's answer is that
the selection is done by 'the aesthetic sensibility of the real creator. The
useful combinations are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best
able to charm this special sensibility*.

This is certainly a more attractive answer than Galton's, who sum-
mons ideas from the ante-chamber 'in a mechanically logical way'; yet
Poincare himself felt its unsatisfaaoriness. For it combines a mechanistic
theory about the random collision of atomic ideas in the unconscious,
with an aesthetic sensibility which resides in the conscious, and plays
the part of a deus ex machina* We do not doubt that this kind of
sensibility is present in the creative rnind, and to inquire into its nature
is precisely what we are after; but Poincare lets the matter rest just
where the problem starts.

Particularly fascinating in this lecture, delivered in 1908, is the fact
that Poincare, after acknowledging his debt to the 'subliminal self' and

I<5<5

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singing its praises, confesses that he would 'hate to accept' that it might
in some respects be superior to the conscious self, and relegates it to the
role of an automatic mixing machine in the basement. He worked by
intuition, but for all his modesty and open-mindedness he was unable
to shake off the rationalist hubris of the nineteenth century.*

Exploring the Deeps

All we have gleaned from these excursions into the history of our
subject, from Plotinus to Poincare, is firsdy, a negative insight into the
narrow limitations of conscious thinking; and on the positive side,
affirmations of the superiority of unconscious mentation at certain
stages of creative work. But regarding the reasons for this superiority,
and the process by which it manifests itself, we got merely a few vague
intimations, or else unsatisfactory mechanistic hypotheses such as
Gallon's and Poincare's. Nor, I may add here, had Freud or Jung much
to say about the specific problem how unconscious processes lead to
new discoveries.

Let us at this stage follow the advice we have so often heard repeated,
and 'think aside' by turning, for a moment, from scientists to poets.
If we were to apply Poincare's hypothesis we would come to the
conclusion that the poet has a conscious mind endowed with aesthetic
sensibility, and an unconscious mind equipped with an automatic
rhyme-computer (built on the principle of rhyming lexicons), and also
with an image computer (a kind of magic lantern with an automatic
slide-changer). Out of the hundreds of rhymes and similes produced
per minute the vast majority would, of course, be, valueless, and the
aesthetic censor in the conscious mind would have a full-time job
rejecting them until he went out of his mind.

It seems neither an economical nor an inspired procedure. Now let
us listen to Coleridge's celebrated description of the genesis of Kubla
Khan. He is speaking of himself in the third person singular:

In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had
retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton. ... In
consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been
prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the
moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the
same substance, in Purchases Pilgrimage:

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I67

'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a
stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were
enclosed with a wall/

The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep,
at least of the external senses [sic] during which time he has the most
vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from
two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition
in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel
production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation
or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to
have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and
paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here
preserved.

This, of course, is an extreme case of unconscious production even
if, in all likelihood, it did not originate in a dream, but in an intense day-
dream or hypnogogic state. (In another, and probably earlier, statement
Coleridge gives a different version: 'This fragment with a good deal
more, not recoverable, composed in a sort of Reverie brought on by
two grains of Opium, taken to check a dysentery.' The 'reverie*
version is streng thened by the words 'in a profound sleep, at least of the
external senses 9 which point towards some intermediary kind of
'waking dream'.)

But whether he was asleep or half asleep is unimportant; the point
to note is the emphasis he puts on visual images which rose up as
things'. Unfortunately, no sooner had he started on the actual writing
down of the poem than he was interrupted 'by a person on business
from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to
his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification . . . that with
the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the
rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a
stone has been cast*. This incidental metaphor suddenly sets off in its
author another chain of visual imagery which illustrates how the dream
version of 'Kubla Khan' was lost, thanks to the gentleman from
Porlock, but reconstructed later on out of the remaining fragments.
After the 'stone had been cast*:

... all the charm
Is broken all that phantom-world so fair
Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,

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And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,
Poor youth! . . .

The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo, he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms
Come trembling back, unite, and now once more
The pool becomes a mirror.

The whole poem, with its rather striking allegory, grew out of a
hackneyed metaphor, which was meant to serve only as a visual
illustration to a verbal narrative. But all at once the servant becomes
master, the illustration takes over from the text; visual association, the
logic of the eye are in command, and the words must follow their
lead. ...

We further note that the whole sequence of not less than from two
to three hundred lines' of the Kubk Khan dream itself was triggered off
by a passage read in Purchases Pilgrimage, as indifferent as the simile of
the stone cast into the stream: 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a
palace to be built', etc. But at that point his imagination caught on, the
opium took effect, visual thinking took over, and images rose up as
things'.

Thinking in pictures dominates the manifestations of the unconscious
the dream, the hypnogogic half-dream, the psychotic's hallucina-
tions, the artist's 'vision'. (The 'visionary' prophet seems to have been
a visualizer, and not a verbalizer; the highest compliment we pay to
those who trade in verbal currency is to call them 'visionary thinkers'.)

But, on the other hand, pictorial thinking is a more primitive form
of mentation than conceptual thinking, which it precedes in the
mental evolution of the individual and of the species. The language of
the primitive (and of the child) is, to borrow Kretschmer's simile, 'like
the unfolding of a picture-strip: each word expresses a picture, a
pictorial image, regardless of whether it signifies an object or an
action'. In Golding's novel The Inheritors the Neanderthal men always
say 'I had a picture' when they mean 'I thought of something'; and
anthropologists agree that for once a novelist got the picture right.

Thus the poet who reverts to the pictorial mode of thought is
regressing to an older and lower level of the mental hierarchy as we do
every night when we dream, as mental patients do when they regress
to infantile fantasies. But the poet, unlike the dreamer in his sleep,
alternates between two different levels of the mental hierarchy; the

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169

dreamer s awareness functions on one only. The poet thinks both in
images and verbal concepts, at the same time or in quick alternation;
each trouvaille, each original find, bisociates two matrices. The dreamer
floats among the phantom shapes of the hoary deep; the poet is a skin-
diver with a breathing tube.

Similar considerations apply and will be discussed in Part HI
to rhythm, metre, alliteration, assonance, rhyme. The rhythmic beat,
echoing the shaman's tom-tom, awakens archaic resonances and lulls
the mind into a waking trance' (Yeats). The rhyme appeals to the
tendency to vocal repetition in the language of primitives and children
(kala-kala, ma-ma), and to the equally deep-rooted tendency to
associate by sound punning. To conclude this anticipatory excursion:
the creative activity of the artist involves momentary regressions to
earlier stages in mental evolution, bringing forms of mentation into
play which otherwise manifest themselves only in the dream or dream-
like states.

The Word and the Vision

Let us return from poets to scientists, and to the question what
guidance the latter could possibly derive from the intervention of
unconscious processes. The answer which, by analogy, now suggests
itself is that the temporary relinquishing of conscious controls liberates the
mind from certain constraints which are necessary to maintain the disciplined
routines of thoughts hut may become an impediment to the creative leap; at
the same time other types of ideation on more primitive levels of mental
organization are brought into activity. The first part of this sentence
indicates an act of abdication, the second an act of promotion. It will
be useful to remember this dual aspect of the Eureka act; it will be seen,
later on, to correspond to the destructive-constructive character of all
great revolution in the history of thought.

The scientific counterpart of the Coleridge episode is the Kekule"
episode (p. 118). But the vision of the serpent biting its tail was only the
last one in a series, which extended over a period of seven or eight years.
This is how Kekule described one of the early but decisive quasi-
haHucinations, which led to his theory of molecular constitution he
was then living in London:

'One fine summer evening,' he relates, 'I was returning by the last
omnibus, "outside" as usual, through the deserted streets of the

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metropolis, which are at other times so full of life. I fell into a reverie,
and lo! the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. Whenever,
hitherto, these diminutive beings had appeared to me, they had
always been in motion; but up to that time, I had never been able to
discern the nature of their motion. Now, however, I saw how,
frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair; how a larger one
embraced two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three
or even four of the smaller; whilst the whole kept whirling in a giddy
dance. I saw how the larger ones formed a chain ... I spent part
of the night putting on paper at least sketches of these dream
forms/ 23

The whirling, giddy vision reminds one of the hallucinations of
schizophrenics, as painted or described by them. Kekule's case is rather
exceptional, but nevertheless characteristic in one respect: the sudden
abdication of conceptual thought in favour of semi-conscious visual
conceits.

Another example is Michael Faraday, one of the greatest physicists
of all time, who also was a Visionary* not only in the metaphorical but
in the literal sense. He saw the stresses surrounding magnets and
electric currents as curves in space, for which he coined the name 'lines
of forces', and which, in his imagination, were as real as if they consisted
of solid matter. He visualized the universe patterned by these lines or
rather by narrow tubes through which all forms of 'ray- vibrations' or
energy-radiations are propagated. This vision of curved tubes which
'rose up before him like things' proved of almost incredible fertility: it
gave birth to the dynamo and the electric motor; it led Faraday to
discard the ether, and to postulate that light was electro-magnetic
radiation. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Faraday is that he
lacked any mathematical education or gift, and was 'ignorant of all but
the merest elements of arithmetic'; and mathematics is of course
regarded as an indispensable tool of the physicist. In his Faraday
memorial lecture in 1881, von Helmholtz himself one of the greatest
mathematical physicists of the century remarked:

It is in the highest degree astonishing to see what a large number
of general theorems, the methodical deduction of which requires the
highest powers of mathematical analysis, he found by a kind of
intuition, with the security of instinct, without the help of a single
mathematical formula. 24

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171

Kekule's visions resemble hallucinatory flights; Faraday's, the stable
delusional systems of paranoia. Kekule's serpent reminds one of
paintings by Blake; the curves of force which crowd Faraday's universe
recall the vortices in Van Gogh's skies.

Around fifty like Newton, and at the same age Faraday had a
nervous breakdown. He had always hated writing letters and had
stopped lecturing; now he seemed to have developed an abhorrence of
language itself: 'This is to declare in the present instance, when I say I
am not able to bear much talking, it means really, and without any
mistake, or equivocation or oblique meaning, or implication, or
subterfuge, or omission, that I am not able, being at present rather weak
in the head and able to work no more.' 25 Distrust of words is a trait
often found among those who create with their eyes.

Let us leave the borderlands of pathology. Nobody could have been
further removed from it than the mild, sober, and saintly Einstein. Yet
we find in him the same distrust of conscious conceptual thought, and
the same reliance on visual imagery. In 1945 an inquiry was organized
among eminent mathematicians in America to find out their working
methods. In reply to the questionnaire which was sent to him, Einstein
wrote:

The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not
seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The physical
entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs
and more or less clear images which can be Voluntarily' reproduced
and combined.

. . . Taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play
seems to be the essential feature in productive thought before there
is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds
of signs which can be communicated to others.

The above-mentioned elements are, in any case, of visual and some
of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be
sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned
associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at
will.

According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned
elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one
is searching for.

In a stage when words intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely

172

THE ACT OF CREATION

auditive, but they interfere only in a secondary stage as already
mentioned. 26

The inquiry was organized by Jacques Hadamard, whom I have
repeatedly quoted, since he is to my knowledge the only mathematician
who has made a systematic research into the psychology of mathe-
matical creation. Of himself he said:

I distinctly belong to the auditory type; and precisely on that
account my mental pictures are exclusively visual. The reason for
that is quite clear to me: such visual pictures are more naturally
vague, as we have seen it to be necessary in order to lead me without
misleading me.

He summed up the results of the inquiry as follows:

Among the mathematicians born or resident in America . . .
phenomena are mostly analogous to those which I have noticed in
my own case. Practically all of them . . . avoid not only the use of
mental words but also, just as I do, the mental use of algebraic or any
other precise signs; also as in my case, they use vague images. . . .*
The mental pictures ... are most frequently visual, but they may
also be of another kind for instance, kinetic. There can also be
auditive ones, but even these . . . quite generally keep their vague
character. 27

It rather sounds as if mathematical discoveries were born out of the
airy nothings of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

... as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

The inquiry brought conclusive proof that among mathematicians,
verbal thinking plays only a subordinate part in the decisive phase of
the creative act; and there is a mass of evidence to show that this is also
the rule among original thinkers in other branches of science.

This is a rather startling discovery in view of the fact that language
is the proudest possession ohomo sapiens, and the very foundation on

THINKING ASIDE

173

which mental evolution could build. 'Logic' derives from logos, which
originally meant 'language', 'thought', and 'reason*, all in one. Think-
ing in concepts emerged out of thinking in images through the slow
development of the powers of abstraction and symbolization, as the
phonetic script emerged by similar processes out of pictorial symbols
and hieroglyphs. Most of us were brought up in the belief that
'thinking' is synonymous with verbal thinking, and philosophers
from Athens to Oxford have kept reasserting this belief. The early
Behaviourists went even further, asserting not only that words are
indispensable to thought, but also that thinking is nothing more than
the subliminal movements of the vocal chords, an inaudible whispering
to oneself. Yet if all thinking were verbal thinking Einstein would not
qualify as a thinker. In fact, the whole evidence points in the opposite
direction, summed up in a single sentence in Woodworth's classic
textbook of experimental psychology: 'Often we have to get away
from speech in order to think clearly/ And we heard one testimony
after another from great scientists, which show that in order to create
they had to regress at times from the word to the picture-strip, from
verbal symbolism to visual symbolism some, like Einstein, even to
the kinesthetic sensation of muscle-motions. The word 'regression is
appropriate, because the high aesthetic value which we put on visual
imagery should not obscure the fact that as vehicles of thought, pictorial
and other non-verbal representations are indeed earlier, both phylo-
genetically and ontogenetically older forms of ideation, than verbal
thinking. Kekule's 'Let us dream, gentlemen', is an invitation to regres-
sion and retreat -but a regression which prepares the forward leap, a
reader pour mieux sauter.

The Snares of Language

The necessity for this retreat derives from the fact that words are a
blessing which can turn into a curse. They crystallize thought; they
give articulation and precision to vague images and hazy intuitions.
But a crystal is no longer a fluid. 'Language is not only the foundation
for the whole faculty of thinking, but the central point also from which
proceed the misunderstandings of reason by herself.' 28 This was written
by Hamman, a German philosopher of the eighteenth century, who
had a great influence on Goethe. Roman Jakobson, a contemporary
linguist to quote one among many voices the same ancient doubt:

174

THE ACT OF CREATION

Signs are a necessary support of thought. For socialized thought
(stage of communication) and for the thought which is being socia-
lized (stage of formulation), the most usual system of signs is
language properly called; but internal thought especially when
creative, willingly uses other systems of signs which are more
flexible, less standardized than language and leave more liberty,
more dynamism to creative thought. 29

The vital importance of language as a thought-crystallizer was per-
fecdy described by little Alice who, on being admonished to think
carefully before she spoke, indignantly exclaimed: 'How can I know
what I think till I see what I say?' For it is, of course, undeniable that
in some forms of intellectual activity language is not only an indis-
pensable tool, but that the stream of language actually carries the
thought, so that the processes of ideation and verbal formulation
become indistinguishable. The same applies to certain phases in the
poet's and writer's work; but only to certain phases. The counterpart
to the little girl's predicament is the little boy's who said: 1 see what I
mean but I don't know how to say it.'

Not only scientists, painters, and musicians find it often difficult to
convert their ideas into verbal currency, but writers too. Even H. G.
Wells lamented: 'The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and
crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it.' The novelist
suffers among other things from the poverty of his vocabulary
when he tries to describe what his characters feel (as distinct from what
they think or do). He can write streams of what goes on in the cranial
cavity, but if it is a pain in the abdominal cavity, all he can say is,
'it hurts' or use some equally insipid synonym. Suffering is 'dumb';
the glandular and visceral processes which colour emotion do not
lend themselves to verbal articulation.

The scientist's trouble with language is of a different nature. He
suffers not from the poverty of his verbal tools but rather from their
over-precision, and the hidden snares in them.

Take, for example, the deceptively simple words 'Space' and 'Time'.
Before the dawn of the scientific revolution, medieval man lived hi a
closed universe with firm boundaries in space and time a few million
miles in diameter, and a few thousand yean of duration. Space taken
in itself, as an abstract concept, did not exist; it was merely an attri bute
of material bodies their length, width, and depth; empty space was
unthinkable, a contradiction in terms; and infinite space even more so.

THINKING ASIDE

175

Time, similarly, was simply the duradon of an event. Nobody in his
senses would have said that things move throuoh space or in time how
can a thing move in or through an attri bute of itself?

The over-precise meaning which these words carried had ensnared
scientific thought from Aristotle to the Renaissance. Even Galileo still
believed that a heavenly body, left to itself, would for ever continue
to move in a circular path, because a straight line would carry it towards
infinity which was unthinkable. And when he noticed that two
polished marble slabs stuck to each other with astonishing strength, he
ascribed this to nature's horror of empty space which would be created
at the moment of their separation and thus failed to discover the
phenomenon of surface-adherence.

The first thaw of these frozen word-crystals occurred in 1277, when
a council of theologians in Paris condemned the Aristotelian doctrine
that even God could not create empty or infinite space. Thus both
empty space and infinite space became at least thinkable which
previously they had not been. A few unorthodox thinkers did in fact
speculate about them; yet it took another four centuries until Space
and Time acquired a new meaning in the Newtonian universe.

For the next two hundred years after Newton Space meant the
rigid three-dimensional frame of the universe, which remained at
rest; so that the motion of a boat sailing up a river was relative measured
against the water or coast, but absohite motion measured against the
frame of Space. Time had an equally absolute nature; and that is what
to most of us the words Space and Time still mean except in our
dreams, when the rigid, Newtonian framework breaks down.

Einstein could never have transformed man's view of the universe,
had he accepted those two words as ready-made tools. 'When I asked
myself', he confided to a friend, 'how it happened that I in particular
discovered the Relativity Theory, it seemed to lie in the following
circumstance. The normal adult never bothers his head about space-
time problems. Everything there is to be thought about, in his opinion,
has already been done in early childhood. I, on the contrary, developed
so slowly that I only began to wonder about space and time when I
was already grown up. In consequence I probed deeper into the
problem than an ordinary child would have done.' 30 Modesty can
hardly be carried further; nor insight put into simpler terms.

'For me [the Relativity Theory] came as a tremendous surprise',
said Minkovsky, who had been one of Einstein's teachers, 'for in his
student days Einstein had been a lazy dog. He never bothered about

176

THE ACT OF CREATION

mathematics at all From now on "space in itself" and "time in

itself" must sink into the shade and only a union of the two will
preserve independence.* 31

The spelling of the two words had remained the same, but they now
signified something quite different from what they had signified
before.

Words are essential tools for formulating and communicating
thoughts, and also for putting them into the storage of memory; but
words can also become snares, decoys, or strait-jackets. A great
number of the basic verbal concepts of science have turned out at
various times to be both tools and traps: for instance, 'time', 'space',
'mass', 'force', weight', ether', 'corpuscle', 'wave', in the physical
sciences; 'purpose', 'will', 'sensation, 'consciousness', 'conditioning',
in psychology; 'limit', 'continuity', 'countability', 'divisibility', in
mathematics. For these were not simple verbal tags, as names attached
to particular persons or objects are; they were artificial constructs which
behind an innocent facade hid the traces of the particular kind of logic
which went into their making. As Sidney Hook has put it: 'When
Aristode drew up his table of categories which to him represented the
grammar of existence, he was really projecting the grammar of the
Greek language on the cosmos.' 32 That grammar has kept us to this
day ensnared in its paradoxes: it made the grandeur and misery of two
millennia of European thought. If Western philosophy, to quote
Popper, consisted in a series of footnotes to Plato, Western science
took a full two thousand years to liberate itself from the hypnotic
effect of Aristode, whose encyclopaedic philosophy penetrated
the very structure of our language. It determined not only what was
'science' but also what was 'common sense'. Each of the major
break-throughs in scientific thought had to be achieved not only in the
teeth of Aristotelian, Platonic, and Christian dogma, but also in the
teeth of what appeared to be self-evident and commonsensical the
implied rules of the code. Each revolution had to make a hole in the
established fabric of conceptual thought. Kepler destroyed the 'self-
evident' doctrine of uniform circular motion; Galileo the equally
commonsense notion that any moving body must have a 'mover'
which pulls or pushes it along. Newton, to his horror, had to go against
the obvious experience that action is only possible by contact; Ruther-
ford had to commit the contradiction in terms of asserting the divisi-
bility of the atom, which in Greek means 'indivisible'. Einstein des-
troyed our belief that clocks move at the same rate anywhere in the

THINKING ASIDE

177

universe; quantum physics has made the traditional meaning of words
like matter, energy, cause and effect, evaporate into thin air.

'The awkward fact', said L. L. Whyte, 'that reason, as we know it,
is never aware of its hidden assumptions has been too much for some
philosophers, and even many scientists to admit/ 33 One of the philoso-
phers who saw this clearly was Wittgenstein: 'Propositions cannot
represent the logical form: this mirrors itself in the propositions. That
which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. That
which expresses itself in. language, we cannot represent/ 34

The prejudices and impurities which have become incorporated
into the verbal concepts of a given 'universe of discourse* cannot be
undone by any amount of discourse within the frame of reference of
that universe. The rules of the game, however absurd, cannot be
altered by playing that game. Among all forms of mentation, verbal
thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most
vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered sug-
gestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code.
Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and
reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where
language ends.

NOTES

Top. 157. Zen philosophy, in the form in which it is taught by its contemporary
propounders (foremost among them Prof. D. T. Suzuki and his Western
disciples), is a welter of confusions, derived from the failure to discriminate
between automatized skills and creative originality between the 'downward*
and the 'upward' traffic to and from the unconscious. The former results in
getting the 'knack' of a skill; the latter in the sudden flash of a new insight (the
*It'). The practitioner of the various applied Zen arts was trained to act 'spontan-
eously, unthinkingly* and this led to the added confusion between the pseudo-
spontaneity displayed by the responses of a well-oiled automaton, and the.
genuine spontaneity of original inspiration. (Cf. The "It" and the Knack*,
pp. 260 seq., in my The Lotus and the Robot, i960).

To p. 166. Less understandable is the case of Spearman, who wrote a book
on the Creative Mind (1030) with only passing mention of unconscious processes,
the main reference being a sneer at Freud's preoccupation with 'subconscious
bestiality*. This was written when Spearman was Professor of Psychology at the
University of London.

To p. 172. The exceptions were G. D. BirkhofF, Norbert "Wiener (who said
that 'he happens to think with or without words'), and G. Polya.

1

VIII

UNDERGROUND GAMES

The Importance of Dreaming

To recapitulate: ordered, disciplined thought is a skill governed
by set rules of the game, some of which are explicitly stated,
others implied and hidden in the code. The creative act, in so
far as it depends on unconscious resources, presupposes a relaxing of
the controls and a regression to modes of ideation which are indifferent
to the rules of verbal logic, unperturbed by contradiction, untouched
by the dogmas and taboos of so-called common sense. At the decisive
stage of discovery the codes of disciplined reasoning are suspended
as they are in the dream, the reverie, the manic flight of thought, when
the stream of ideation is free to drift, by its dWn emotional gravity,
as it were, in an apparently 'lawless* fashion.

The laws of disciplined thinking demand that we should stick to a
given frame of reference and not shift from one universe of discourse
to another. When I am arguing about Richard III and somebody
quotes 'my kingdom for a horse' I am not supposed to shift my
attention to my chances of drawing a winner in the Grand National,
however tempting it may be. The strain of concentrating on an
abstract subject derives mainly from the efibrt to inhibit emotionally
more tempting associations outside of its field. But when concentration
flags and primitive motivations take over, thought will shift from
one matrix to another, like a ball bouncing down a mountain stream,
each time an idea (like 'horse' in the above example) provides a link
to a more attractive context.

We might say that while dreaming we constantly bisociate in a passive
way by drift as it were; but we are, of course, unaware of it because
the coherence of the logical matrices is weakened, and the codes
which govern them are dormant. Hence, while dreaming, we do not
realize their incompatability; there is no simultaneous juxtaposition of
matrices, no awareness of conflict and incongruity; that comes only on

178

UNDERGROUND GAMES

179

awakening. To put it in another way: the dream associates by methods
which are impermissible in the waking state such as affinities of
sound detached from meaning, and similarities of form regardless of
function. It makes use of 'links' which, while awake we 'would not
dream' of using except where dream-logic intrudes into humour,
discovery, and art.

It is not surprising, then, that we find all the bisociative patterns that
I have discussed prominently displayed in the dream: the pun: two
strings of thought tied together by a purely accoustic knot; the optical
pun: one visual form bisociated with two functional contexts; the
phenomenon of displacement or shift of attention to a previously un-
noticed feature; the concretization of abstract and general ideas in a
particular image; and vice versa, the use of concrete images as symbols
for nascent, unverbalized concepts; the condensation in the same link-
idea of several associative contexts; the unearthing of hidden analogies;
impersonation and double identity being oneself and something else
at the same time, where the 'something else' might belong to the
animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom. The ensemble of these and
related operations constitutes the grammar and logic of dream-
cognition. To go on with the list would be tedious, the more so as the
categories overlap; but one more trick ought to be added to the
repertory: the occasional reversal of causal sequences. This, however, is
putting the phenomenon into over-concrete terms, since 'causality*
(together with space, time, matter, identity, etc.) appear in the dream
in a semi-fluid shape like a half-melted snowman; yet even a snowman
may be standing on his head. Lastly, I must mention the obvious fact
of the dreamer's extreme gullibility. Hamlet's cloud merely resembles
a camel, weasel, or whale; to the dreamer the cloud actually becomes
a camel, a weasel, or whale without his turning a hair.

A child, watching a television thriller with flushed face and palpita-
ting heart, praying that the hero should realize in time the deadly trap
set for him, is at the same time aware that the hero is a shadow on the
screen. A day-dreamer like Thurber's Walter Mitty is aware of the
fantasies which he creates for his own benefit; but also aware, though
less intensely so, of the fact that he is creating them. He lives, like the
spectator in front of the screen, on two different levels, simultaneously
or in quick alternations by mental quantum-jumps, as it were. If he
settles for a single level then either the illusion ceases to function or
it grows into hallucinatory delusion.

The dream occupies a privileged position among these ambiguous

i8o

THE ACT OF CREATION

mental states; privileged, in that it is included in the normal daily cycle
in spite of or because of its pronounced hallucinatory, 'abnormal*
character. Dreaming is distinguished from other delusionary states by
being transitory, easily interrupted, and by being confined to the
'inner landscape', by a more or less complete shuttering of the senses
(whereas in pathological states the senses may continue to function,
but perception may be perverted). On the other hand, dreaming is
distinguished from day-dreaming in that the dreamer is aware of the
fantasies which he creates, but unaware of the fact that he is creating
them. He is the spectator passively watching the sequence of images
on one level, which he actively produces on another; he is the cinema
operator who works the projection machine, and the audience at the
same time. But while the spectacle on the screen is visible, the operator
is not. He operates in complete darkness, and there is a good reason for
it: the production is frequently childish, obscene, confusing, an affront
to logic and common sense.

There is no need to emphasize, in this century of Freud and Jung,
that the logic of the dream is not the logic of Aristotle; that it derives
from the magic type of causation found in primitive societies and the
fantasies of childhood; that it is indifferent to the laws of identity and
contradiction; that the dream's reasoning is guided by emotion, its
morality blush-making, its symbolism pre-verbal and archaic. If these
ancient codes which govern the games of the dreamer were allowed
to operate in the waking state they would play havoc with civilized
adult behaviour; they must be kept underground.

But these underground, in normal states subconscious, levels or
planes in the hierarchy of mental functions must not be confused with
the linear scale of awareness (pp. 154-7). The latter forms a con-
tinuous gradient from focal awareness, through peripheral awareness
to unawareness of a given event; whereas the levels of the mental
hierarchy form quasi-parallel (or concentric) layers, which are dis-
continuous, and are under normal conditions kept separate, as waking
is from learning. The codes which govern organic activities, auto-
matized habits, and routine skills, function unawares because they are
either inborn or have been mastered by practice; the 'underground'
codes function underground because they have been superseded by
the codes of rational thinking. In the first case we see the working of
mental economy ; in the second, of mental evolution. Automatized
codes serve the maintenance of normal functioning; underground
codes disrupt routine in a creative or destructive sense. We are con-

UNDERGROUND GAMES l8l

cerned with the creative aspect only; but I should mention in passing
that the underground layers of the mental hierarchy must not be con-
fused with repressed complexes'. The latter form a special category
within the much broader realm of subconscious phenomena. Com-
plexes originate in traumatic experiences; the underground games of
the mind reflect the facts of mental evolution.

The levels of mental organization have been compared to the
archaeological strata of ancient and prehistoric civilizations, buried,
but not irretrievably, under our contemporary towns. The analogy is
Freud's 1 but I would like to carry it one step further. Imagine for a
moment that all important written records and monuments pre-dating
the Industrial Revolution have been destroyed by some catastrophe
like the burning down of the library in Alexandria; and that know-
ledge of the past could be obtained only by archaeological excavations.
Without digging into the undergound strata, modern society, ig-
norant of the culture of the Renaissance, of Antiquity, Prehistory, and
the Age of the Dinosaurs, would be reduced to an unimaginably super-
ficial, two-dimensional existence: a species without a past and probably
for lack of comparative values without much future. An individual
deprived of his dreams, of irrational impulses, of any form of ideation
except articulate verbal thought, would be in much the same position.
Dreaming, in the literal and metaphorical sense, seems to be an essen-
tial part of psychic metabolism as essential as its counterpart, the
formation and automatization of habits. Without this daily dip into
the ancient sources of mental life we would probably all become
desiccated automata. "And without the more spectacular exploratory
dives of the creative individual, there would be no science and no art.

To sum up, there is a two-way traffic between conscious and un-
conscious. One traffic stream continually moves in a downward
direction: we concentrate on new experiences, arrange them
into patterns, develop new observational skills, muscular dexterities,
verbal aptitudes; and when these have been mastered by continued
practice, the controls are handed over to a kind of automation, and
the whole assembly is dispatched, along the gradients of awareness,
out of sight. The upward traffic stream moves in the small fluctuating
pulses from the unconscious which sustain the dynamic balance of the
mind and in the rare, sudden surges of creativity, which may lead
to a re-stracturing of the whole mental landscape.

I have illustrated this upward traffic by a number of examples. Irt

THE ACT OF CREATION

each case the creative act consisted in a new synthesis of previously un-
connected matrices of thought; a synthesis arrived at by 'thinking
aside', a temporary relinquishing of the rational controls in favour of
the codes which govern the underground games of the mind. We
have seen that the dream operates with a type of logic which is in-
admissible in the waking state, and which, for precisely that reason,
proved useful in critical situations where the matrices of conscious
thought are blocked. Thus the illogicality and apparent naivete of
visual associations, or the indifference of the dreaming mind to con-
vention and common sense, turned out to be of great value in forging
new combinations out of seemingly incompatible contexts. All the
bisociative mechanisms of the comic we found in the dream free-
wheeling as it were, without being harnessed to any obvious rational
purpose. But when the whole personality, on all its levels, becomes
saturated with the problem in hand during the period of incubation,
then the freewheeling machinery too is 'engaged* in its service and
goes into action not necessarily in the dream, but mosdy on some
intermediary, part-conscious level.

The examples in previous chapters had been meant to illustrate
various aspects of unconscious discovery. In the sections which follow
I shall try to show, a little more systematically, how the peculiarities of
subconscious ideation, reflected in the dream, facilitate the bisociative
click.

Concretization and Symbolization

The sleeper producing a Freudian dream, in which a broomstick
represents a phallus, has made an optical pun: he has connected a single
visual form with two different functional contexts. The same technique
is employed by the caricaturist who equates a nose with a cucumber,
the discoverer who sees a molecule as a snake, the poet who compares
a lip to a coral. When Jean Cocteau underwent a drug-withdrawal
cure, he drew human figures constructed out of the long, thin stalks
of opium pipes. William Harvey, watching the exposed heart-valve at
work in a living fish, suddenly visualized it as a pump but the analogy
between the gory mess he actually saw and the neat metallic gadget
existed in his mind's eye only.

These, however, are rather dramatic examples. As a rule, visual
imagery does not work in such precise fashion. The visualizer rather
feels his way around a problem and strokes it with his eye, as it were,

UNDERGROUND GAMES

I8 3

trying to fit it into some convincing or elegant shape; he plays around
with his vague forms like the couturier with his fabrics, draping and
undraping them on the model. Let me call on Einstein once more. We
remember that he described the 'physcical entities which seem to serve
as elements in thoughts' in terms of 'signs and more or less clear images
of visual, and some of muscular type'. On another occasion, he des-
cribed how the basic insight into the relativity of Time, to wit, 'the
knowledge that the events which are simultaneous for one observer
are not necessarily simultaneous for another', came to him early one
morning just as he got out of bed. But that sudden moment of truth
had been preceded 'by ten years of contemplation, of considering a
paradox which had struck me at the age of sixteen: if I pursue a ray of
light with the speed c the speed of light in a vacuum I must accept
such a ray of light as a stationary, spatially oscillating electro-magnetic
field'. 2 In other words, if you travel with the speed of light, you will
see no light you will be, roughly speaking, in the position of the
surf-rider in whose eyes the waves around him form a stationary pattern.
Yet 'intuitively it seemed clear to me that, judged by such an ob-
server, everything should follow the same laws as for a stationary
observer'. 3 hi other words, the traveller ought to see the world just
as the person sees it who remained at home on earth.

It is of course, not enough to visualize oneself as a passenger riding
on a ray of light; and the ride lasted ten years, even for Einstein. But
visual thinking enabled him to escape the snares of verbal thought, and
to brave the apparent logical contradiction that 'at the same time' for
A may mean 'at different times' for B. This apparent contradiction
derived from the axiom of absolute time, which had been built into
the codes of 'rational* meaning post-Newtonian thinking about
the physical world. In the pre-rational codes of the dream time is dis-
continuous, and the sequence of events can be reversed as in a film.
Needless to say, the relativity of psychological time has nothing to do
with the relativity of time in physics. I merely wished to point out
that to the visual thinker 'tune* loses the awesome, cast-iron character
which it automatically assumes in verbal thought. The Theory of
Relativity was an affront to conceptualized thinking, but not to
visualized thinking.

Let me take a more trivial example: a famous brain-teaser:

One morning, exacdy at sunrise, a Buddhist monk began to
climb a tall mountain. The narrow path, no more than a foot or

184

THE ACT OP CREATION

two wide, spiralled around the mountain to a glittering temple at
the summit.

The monk ascended the path at varying rates of speed, stopping
many times along the way to rest and to eat the dried fruit he
carried with him. He reached the temple shortly before sunset. After
several days of fasting and meditation he began his journey back
along the same path, starting at sunrise and again walking at variable
speeds with many pauses along the way. His average speed des-
cending was, of course, greater than his average climbing speed.

Prove that there is a spot along the path that the monk will
occupy on both trips at precisely the same time of day. 4

I used to amuse myself putting this to various friends scientists and
others. Some chose a mathematical approach; others tried to 'reason it
out* and came to the conclusion that it would be a most unlikely
coincidence for the monk to find himself at the same time of day, on
the same spot on the two different occasions. But others who evi-
dently belonged to the category of visualizers saw the solution in a
manner for which the following description of a young woman with-
out any scientific training is typical:

I tried this and that, until I got fed up with the whole thing, but
the image of that monk in his saffron robe walking up the hill kept
persisting in my mind. Then a moment came when, super-imposed
on this image, I saw another, more transparent one, of the monk
walking down the hill, and I realized in a flash that the two figures
must meet at some point some time regardless at what speed they
walk and how often each of them stops. Then I reasoned out what I
already knew: whether the monk descends two days or three days
later comes to the same; so I was quite justified in letting him
descend on the same day, in duplicate so to speak.

Now it is, of course, quite impossible for the monk to duplicate
himself, and to be walking up the mountain and down the mountain
at one and the same time. But in the visual image he does; and it is
precisely this ^difference to logical contradiction, the irrational,
dream-ike telescoping of the two images into one, which leads to the
solution.

^ We could call the double image of the monk, or Einstein's traveller
riding on a ray of light, a concretization of abstract problems as it

UNDERGROUND GAMES

sometimes occurs in dreams; and we could equally well call Kekule's
serpent which seizes its own tail 'to whirl mockingly before his eyes*,
the symbolization of a nascent, unformulated theory; these categories
overlap. The following example illustrates both; it refers to an incident
which has recently come to my knowledge:

Dr. X, a biologist, dreamed that as he was walking home from his
laboratory he was joined by the wife and two children of his colleague
Dr. Y , one a boy, the other an enchanting little girl. The little
girl seemed to take an immediate liking to X; she insisted on his
picking her up, and gave him a kiss, or rather a peck, on the cheek.
They all walked on with a feeling of friendly elation, but on arriving
at the house where X lived it had, unaccountably, become a big
railway-station hotel the girl declared peremptorily that she would
be staying with him; and as he looked at her he discovered that she was
no longer a child but an adolescent, 'almost fully developed', with a
provocative glint in her eye. Dr. Y's wife gave him a glance which
showed irony but no surprise; and the girl said to him mockingly:
'Don't worry, I am all brains' He felt both tempted and terribly em-
barrassed; at which he woke up.

The first thought that flashed through his mind was: 'She is Y's
brain-child'; and immediately the message of the dream was clear to
him. Some time earlier on Y had, in conversation, thrown out an
idea, which had taken root in X's mind, and had eventually set him
off on a line of research. The peck on his cheek had been 'the kiss of the
muse'; but by now the idea was 'almost fully developed* in fact, the
day before the dream, he had started drafting a paper on the pre-
liminary results of his research. But he had postponed telling Y about
it until he had something positive to show; and now he could neither
face owning up to Y that he had taken up his brain-child, nor could he
face stealing it (by omitting to give Y due credit in the paper). The
conversion of X's house into a railway hotel indicated that this state
of mind could not be a lasting one.

The dream solved his dilemma by producing a biological analogy
for the growth of a 'bram-child* from infancy to 'full development*.
The seminal idea had been Y's; but it was X who had done the work
and brought it to maturation; every scientist knows that it is quite a
different matter to throw out a casual suggestion which might or
might not lead somewhere and to follow it up by months of hard
work in the laboratory. The dream made him see the situation
in its proper perspective;, now all he had to do was to tell Y the

i86

THE ACT OF CREATION

simple facts of the matter, and to give due credit in his paper to Y's
paternity.

On one level of his mind X had, of course, known all this; discovery
in this case, as in many others, consisted in uncovering what had always
been there. But his knowledge had been buried under the rigid crust
of a conventional matrix, which made his conscious thoughts turn in a
vicious circle.

Punning for Profit

Charles Lamb once remarked in a letter that he wished 'to draw his
last breath through a pipe and exhale it in a pun.

The benefits which the humorist and the poet derive from two
meanings linked together by one sound are evident^ in the natural
sciences they are non-existent, for the simple reason that verbal formula-
tion, the choice of the particular words in which a theory is expressed,
is to a large extent irrelevant to its content. But in the sciences con-
cerned with language and meaning, the relations between sense and
sound play an important part. Homonyms and homophones, sound
affinities and transformations, are essential pointers in etymology and
comparative philology, in the study of the structure and development
of language. I have mentioned the 'divine pun' by which adam, man,
was created out ofadamah, earth. Eve's Hebrew name is Havvah, life;
while ahavvah is love; esh, a synonym for man, has the same root as
isk, fire; and milkhamah, war, is derived from lekhem, bread; so is the
village of Beth-lehem: the House of Bread.

Affinities of sound provide the threads which lead from contem-
porary words and concepts back to the Greek and Sanskrit womb.The
deciphering of the scripts of ancient languages is often aided by clues
such as the frequency with which a certain sign occurs, and other
'links' between sign, symbol, sound, and sense. Thus the links which,
in 1 821, enabled Champollion to break into the secret of hieroglyphics,
were the proper names Ptolemy, Cleopatra, and Alexander, which
appeared on the Rosetta Stone (and on various other documents)
bearing parallel inscriptions in Greek and in two different Egyptian
scripts. The three names, inscribed in conspicuous cartouches, pro-
vided Champollion with altogether fourteen alphabetic signs of as-
certained value certainly the greatest service which any Cleopatra
has rendered to history.

In the infantile and primitive imagination, the ties between sound

UNDERGROUND GAMES

187

and meaning are still very intimate; name and object form an almost
indivisible unity, shown in the universal practices of word magic,
incantations, and verbal spells. Related to this is the belief that the
letters contained in a word form secret connections according to cer-
tain hermeneutical rules a belief, shared by Judaism, several other
Oriental religions, and adopted by the Christian Fathers. It was thought,
for instance, that to extract their hidden meaning, certain texts in
Hebrew Scriptures should be arranged in vertical columns and read
downwards; or that the first and last letter in each word should be used
to form new words; or that the letters should be reduced to their
numerical value, and the sums so obtained should then be manipu-
lated according to the rules of mystic numberlore. Here we have the
archaic origins of the pun, the crossword puzzle, the acrostic, anagram,
and cryptogram, which have always exerted such a curious fascina-
tion in the most varied cultures from Pythagoras and Lao-Tse to
Champollion and Freud. The humorist's joke, the linguist's dis-
covery, the poet's euphony, all derive from that source.

The Benefits of Impersonation

*As far as my observations go', wrote C. G. Jung, 'I have not dis-
covered in the unconscious anything like a personality comparable to
the conscious ego. But . . . there are at least traces of personalities in the
manifestations of the unconscious. A simple example is the dream,
in which a variety of real and imaginery people enact the dream
thoughts The unconscious personates. 95

The boundaries of the self are fluid or blurred in the dream. I may
watch an execution, and the next moment become the person to be
executed. The actors on the stage are interchangeable; their cards of
identity are often reshuffled.

To be oneself and somebody else at the same time is an experience
shared by the dreamer, the Shaman impersonating the rain-god, the
patient possessed by demons. The same projective faculty is made use
of by the actor, to create the illusion in the audience that he is both
himself and Prince Hamlet; by the priest offering the eucharist in Holy
Communion; by the healer, who projects himself into the patient's
place, and at the same time acts as a father-figure.

The fluid boundaries of the self as represented in the unconscious
mind, confer on it the gift of empathy Hw/e/*/wttg--of entering into

i88

THE ACT OP CREATION

a kind of mental symbiosis with other selves. Empathy is a nicely sober,
noncommittal term for designating the rather mysterious processes
which enable one to transcend his boundaries, to step out of his skin
as it were, and put himself into the place of another. One reads the
mood of the other from such scant and crude pointers as the lifting or
lowering of the corners of the Hps, or almost imperceptible changes in
the muscles which control the eyes; but the interpretation of these
signs is not a conscious act. It belongs to the repertory of underground
games.

Empathy is at the source of our understanding how others think and
feel; it is the starting point of the art of medical diagnosis and of the
science of psychology. The medicine man, ancient and modern, has a
twofold relationship with the patient: he is trying to feel what the
patient feels, and he is, at the same time, acting a part: the exorcizer of
evil spirits himself endowed with divine powers; magician, witch,
saint, sage, hypnotist, faith-healer, confessor, father. The roles have
changed, but the principle has remained the same: to induce the patient
to an act of faith, to submission, worship, transference, catharsis.
Psycho therapy in its modern form expresses in explicit terms the
principle of ab-reaction, of the mental purge, which has always been
implied in the ancient cathartic techniques from the Dionysian and
Orphic mystery-cults to the rites of baptism and the confessional. The
psycho-analyst induces his patients to relive their conflicts in an illu-
sionary drama, where he himself impersonates the central figure half-
way between comedian and tragedian. The tragedian creates illusion,
the comedian debunks illusion; the therapist does both, in the dreams
of patients under Jungian therapy, supposed aspects of their under-
ground-personality anima, animus and 'shadow* keep appearing
under various disguises, like actors on a stage. Finally, the technique of
impersonation is used deliberately and explicidy in the form of group-
therapy known as 'psycho-drama'.

Some eminent psychiatrists among them Charcot, Freud, Jung,
and Theodor Reik -have expressed, or hinted at their belief that not
only empathy, but something akin to telepathy operates between
doctor and patient in the hothouse atmosphere of the analytical ses-
sion. But there is no need to go that far in order to realize that some of
the basic insights of medicine and psychology are derived from the
underground games which permit us to transcend the limits of per-
sonal identity while we dream or stare into the footlights of the
stage.

Displacement

We have seen that the sudden shift of attention to a seemingly irrele-
vant aspect of a phenomenon which was previously ignored or taken
for granted plays a vital part in humour, art, and discovery. In the
comic story, the abrupt displacement of emphasis ('What am I sup-
posed to do at 4 a.m. in Grimsby f) has the same effect as the matador's
nonchalant side-stepping while the bull charges at his muleta. In dis-
covery, it makes a familiar thing or idea appear under a new angle, in
an unexpected light. In the art of photography a shift in the direction
and focus of the lens may turn a trivial object into a thing of wonder.

In the waking state 'side-stepping', 'shift of emphasis', and related
expressions signify a change-over from one frame of reference to
another. But while we dream, the coherence of these frames is so
much loosened that the change is not experienced as such, and side-
stepping becomes almost the normal way of the dream's progress.
It is by virtue of its freedom from restraint that the 'dreamy' way
of thinking can benefit the creative person whether he is Archimedes
relaxing in his bath, or the chimpanzee gazing absent-mindedly at a
tree.

In one of his experiments, Carl Duncker the psychologist who
fathered the Buddhist monk problem set his experimental subjects
the task of making a pendulum. The subject was led to a table on which
had been placed, among some miscellaneous objects, a cord with a
pendulum-weight attached to its end, and a nail. All he had to do was
to drive the nail into the wall and hang the cord with the pendulum-
weight on the nail. But there was no hammer. Only fifty per cent of
the experimental subjects (all students) found the solution: to use the
pendulum-weight as a hammer.

Next, another series of students, of the same average age and in-
telligence, were given the same task under slightly altered conditions.
In the first series the weight on the table was attached to the cord, and
was expressly described to the students as a pendulum-weight'. In
the second series, weight and cord were lying separately on the table,
and the word pendulum-weight' was not used. Result: all students in
die second group found the solution without difficulty. They took in
the situation with an unprejudiced mind, saw a nail and a weight, and
hammered the nail in, then tied the cord to the nail and the weight
to the cord. But in the minds of the first group the weight was firmly
'embedded* into its role as a 'pendulum-weight' and nothing else,

189

190

THE ACT OF CREATION

because it had been verbally described as such and because visually it
formed a unit with the cord to which it was attached. Thus only half
of the subjects were able to wrench it out of that context to perform
the shift of emphasis which transformed a 'pendulum-weight' into a
'hammer as Sultan transformed a 'branch' into a 'stick.'

I have quoted only one among many experiments on similar lines.
The fact that fifty per cent of Duncker's presumably bright students
failed at this simple task is an illustration of the stubborn coherence
of the perceptual frames and matrices of thought in our minds. The
visual gestalt of weight-attached-to-cord, plus the verbal suggestion
of their venerated teacher, made that pendulum-weight stick to its
matrix like an insect caught in amber.

To undo wrong connections, faulty integrations, is half the game. To
acquire a new habit is easy, because one main function of the nervous
system is to act as a habit-forming machine; to break out of a habit is
an almost heroic feat of mind or character. The prerequisite of origin-
ality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.
Hence, once more, the importance of the Unconscious as an anaes-
thetist, who puts reason to sleep, and restores, for a transient moment,
the innocence of vision. Without the art of forgetting, the mind re-
mains cluttered up with ready-made answers, and never finds occa-
sion to ask the proper questions.

If forgetting can be an art, ignorance can be blissin the limited
sense, of course, of procuring for a certain type of mind freedom from
certain types of constraint. To Faraday, his ignorance of mathematics
was an asset; Edison benefited from his shocking ignorance of science.
As a child, 'his demands for explanations of what seemed obvious to his
elders created the belief that he was less than normally intelligent. As
his head was abnormally large, it was thought that he might have a
brain disease'. 0 At a time when his inventions were transforming the
pattern of our civilization, 'his ignorance of scientific theory raised
criticism and opposition, especially among highly trained scientists
and engineers without inventive talent'. 7 He was said to have carried
the art of forgetting to such extremes, that on one occasion, when he
had to queue at New York City Hall to pay his taxes, and an official
suddenly asked him his name, Edison could not at the moment
remember it, and lost his place in the queue.

Let me return from the laboratory of the Sorcerer at Menlo Park
to that blacksmith's workshop in Samos which, according to tradition,
was the birthplace of the first quantitative law in physics. One would

UNDERGROUND GAMES

191

expect that Pythagoras, as an acute and scientifically minded observer,
would concentrate on the techniques the men employed in the exercise
of their craft. Instead of this, his attention shifted to a phenomenon that
was totally irrelevant and adventitious to that craft the fact that
under the strokes of the hammer, iron bars of different size gave out
different sounds. The ear-splitting crashes and bangs in the workshop,
which, since the Bronze Age had yielded to the Iron Age, had been
regarded by ordinary mortals as a mere nuisance, were suddenly lifted
out of their habitual context: the 'bangs' became 'clangs' of music. In
the technical language of the communication engineer, Pythagoras had
turned 'noise' into 'information .

'The great field for new discoveries', wrote William James, 'is
always the unclassified residuum. Round about the accredited and
orderly facts of every science there ever flows a sort of dust-cloud of
exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and
seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to
attend to/ 8 The genius of Sherlock Holmes manifested itself in shifting
his attention to minute clues which poor Watson found too obvious to
be relevant, and so easy to ignore. The psychiatrist obtains his clues
from the casual remark, the seemingly irrelevant drift of associations;
and he has learned to shift the emphasis from the patient's meaningful
statements to his meaningless slips of the tongue, from his rational
experiences to his irrational dreams. The Lord Almighty seems to be
fond of the trick which Poe's character employed when he let the
secret document he open on his desk where it was too obvious to be
seen.

Standing on Ones Head

A drastic form of displacement is the sudden shift of emphasis from one
aspect of a situation to its opposite, accompanied by a kind of 'reversal
of logic (p. 65).

'The dream', wrote Freud, 'neglects in a most conspicuous manner
the logical category of opposition and contradiction. The concept
"No" does not seem to exist in the dream. It likes to compress opposites
into a unity, or to represent them as one. It takes the further liberty of
representing any given entity by its emotional opposite, so that a
priori one never knows whether a reversible entity is thought of in the
dream with a plus or a minus sign/ 9 When a patient says to the doctor:
'You think that I am now going to say something offensive, but I

192 THE ACT OB CREATION

really have no intention of doing so,' then, says Freud, *y ou c* 11 take it
for granted that he did have that intention. Or, the patient will say:
"You are asking me who that person in my dream could be. It is not
my mother." We then correct him: "In other words, it's your mother."
... At times one can obtain information about unconscious repressed
processes by a very easy method. One asks: "What do you consider
to be the most unlikely aspect of that situation? What was it that you
least intended to do?" If the patient swallows the bait, and tells one
what he can believe least, then he has almost invariably conceded the
true answer/ 10

Freud seemed to believe (following Bain and others) that the reason
for the unconscious tendency to unify opposites is the relativity of
all scales by which attri butes are measured: a 'hot' summer-day in
London is 'cold' to the visitor from the Sudan, and Gulliver is a
'giant' or a 'dwarf* according to the country he visits. He further
refers to the fact that in some ancient languages pairs of opposites are
designated by the same word: thus altus means both 'high' and 'deep',
and sacer both 'holy* and 'accursed'.

For once, however, Freud did not seem to have probed deep enough;
he did not mention the rites of the Saturnalia and other ancient festi-
vals, in which the roles of slaves and masters are reversed; nor the
constant afErmation of the unity' of opposites in most Oriental religions
and philosophies. It seems indeed that the tendency to stand things,
from time to time, on their head, has its deep, unconscious roots,
which probably reach down into the physiological peculiarities of the
nervous system.* One of its striking manifestations is the reversi-
bility of 'figure* and 'background' in visual perception about which
below.

I am not at all sure how far these considerations are relevant to a
certain pattern of discovery which recurs with curious insistence in the
biological sciences: we find, over and again, mishaps and minor
laboratory disasters which turn out to be blessings in disguise, and
spoilt experiments which perversely yield the solution by brutally
shifting die experimenter's attention from a 'plus' to a 'minus' aspect
of the problem, as it were. One might call this pattern 'discovery by
misadventure'. A classic case is that of the Abbe* Haiiy (1743-1822), a
humble teacher at the college at Lemoine, whose leisure hours were
devoted to collecting specimens of plants and minerals until a small,
embarrassing accident suddenly changed the direction of his interests
and his whole life:

UNDERGROUND GAMES

193

One day, when examining some minerals at the house of a
friend, he was clumsy enough to allow a beautiful cluster of prismatic
crystals of calcareous spar to fall on the ground. One of the prisms
broke in such a way as to show at the fracture faces which were no
less smooth than those elsewhere, but presented the appearance of a
new crystal altogether different in form from the prism. Haiiy picked
up this fragment and examined the faces with their inclinations and
angles. To his great surprise, he discovered that they are the same in
rhomboidal spar as in Iceland spar.

He wished to be able to generalize: he broke his own little collec-
tion into pieces; crystals lent by his friends were broken; everywhere
he found a structure which depended upon the same laws. u

The result was Haiiy's Traite de Mineralogie which made him a
member of the French Academy and a pioneer of the science of
crystallography.

Haiiy had a favourite pupil, Delafosse, who later became Pasteur s
teacher at the ficole Normale in Paris. Under his influence Pasteur
took up the study of crystallography; it was in this field that he made
his first important discoveries, which contained the germs of all his
later achievements. The decisive incident was again a laboratory
mishap.

Pasteur was studying his favourite mineral, Para-Tartrate, derived
from the red Tartar deposit in the vats of fermented wine. One day
one of his Tartrate solutions became affected by a mould, and spoiled.
This kind of thing frequendy happens in warm weather; the normal
reaction of chemists is to pour, with a gende oath, the turbid liquid
down the drain. Pasteur reversed the logic of the situation: he shifted
his attention to the accidental and irrelevant mould, and turned
'accident' into 'experiment' by studying the mould's action on the
Tartrate. The result was 'the first link in the chain of arguments which
led him into the study of fermentation, to the recognition that micro-
organisms play an essential role in the economy of nature, and even-
tually to his epoch-making discoveries in the field of infectious
diseases'.

In his later life Pasteur performed the same kind of mental head-stand
on at least two more momentous occasions. One I have already men-
tioned: the discovery of immunization by vaccines, which grew out of
a spoilt culture of chicken cholera. The other was the 'domestication' of
micro-organizms, their transformation from enemies into allies of man,

194

THE ACT OF CREATION

which led to industrial micro-biology and, eventually, to the anti-
biotics: microbes destroying microbes. 'In the inferior organisms,' he
wrote, 'still more than in the big animal and vegetable species, life
hinders life.' It sounds simple. But what a long way it was from the
enunciation of the principle to the discovery of penicillin ! It took more
than half a century; and it was again due to an almost ludicrous series
of misadventures. They started in 1922, when Alexander Fleming
caught a cold. A drip from his nose fell into a dish in his laboratory at
St. Mary's Hospital; the nasal slime killed off the bacilli in the culture;
Fleming isolated the active agent in the mucus, which was also present
in tears, and called it lyso2yme. That was the first step; but lysozyme
was not powerful enough as a germ-killer, and another seven years
had to pass until a gust of wind blew through the lab window a spore
of the mould penicillium notatum, which happened to setde in a culture
dish of staphylococci. But Fleming had been waiting for that stroke of
luck for fifteen years; and when it came, he was ready for it. As Lenin
has said somewhere: 'If you think of Revolution, dream of Revolution,
sleep with Revolution for thirty years, you are bound to achieve a
Revolution one day.'

I shall have to return to Fleming in a different context. The examples
of 'discovery by misadventure', which I have just given, were taken
from biology; but the same kind of perverse- or reverse-logic can also
be found operating in other branches of science and art.

Li 1 821 Faraday invented the electric motor, and constructed a crude
model of it. For more than fifty years no attention was paid to his
invention. In 183 1 he also invented (independently from, and roughly
simultaneously with Joseph Henry) the electrical dynamo. A motor
converts electric current into mechanical motion; a dynamo converts
mechanical motion into electricity. But, curiously, the" reciprocal
nature of the two machines was not realized until 1873. By that time
huge dynamo machines, driven by steam power, were in use to gener-
ate electrical current; but Faraday's earlier invention had been for-
gotten, and electric motors did not exist.

In 1873, at an exhibition in Vienna, several dynamo machines of an
improved type were displayed. In the happy-go-lucky manner of the
Austrians, one of the technicians mistakenly connected a dynamo,
driven by a steam-engine, with a second dynamo which was at rest.
The current fed into the resting dynamo promptly set it into motion
and thus the electrical motor came into existence. Electric trains, the
electrical transmission of power, one of the foundations of modern

UNDERGROUND GAMES

195

technology, originates in the accidental reversal of the function of a
single machine.

The history of photography and the early history of radiography
seem to hinge on fluorescent screens and photographic plates which
showed effects they were not supposed to show, and vice versa. Dagu-
erre put an exposed plate into an untidy cupboard full of various
bottles of chemicals ^including some mercury. The next morning he
found to his surprise that a perfect image had developed on the plate.
He repeated the experiment, systematically eliminating one chemical
after another in the cupboard until he knew that it was mercury
vapour which had done the trick. Prior to the discovery of mercury as
an ideal developer of latent images, Daguerre had written: 'The time
required to procure a photographic copy of a landscape is from seven
to eight hours; but single monuments, when strongly lighted by the
sun, or which are themselves very bright, can be taken in about three
hours/ 12 After the discovery the time of exposure was shortened to
between three and thirty minutes.

In 1895 Wilhelm Konrad Rontgen, Professor of Physics at the
University of Wtirzburg, noticed by accident that a paper-screen
covered with barium platinocyanide became fluorescent without any
apparent cause. He had at the time a cathode-ray tube going an
apparatus used to study the conduction of electricity through gases
which was enclosed in a box of black cardboard. But in those days
there was no radiation known hard enough to penetrate black card-
board, and such a thing was in fact considered to be impossible.
Rontgen immediately accepted the impossible as true: the fluorescent
glow which he saw on the screen must be caused by rays of an unknown
kind, emitted by the tube, and capable of traversing the bhck card-
board. Within a few weeks he had demonstrated that the rays were
equally capable of traversing human flesh and showing the outline of
the bones as shadows cast upon the luminous screen. He called them
X-rays.

Some few weeks later, Henri Becquerel saw a demonstration of
Rontgen s X-rays at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences.
Becquerel's father and grandfa ther had also been professors of physics
and members of the Academy; they had taken a special interest in the
fluorescent glow which certain substances among .them uranium
compounds emit, when exposed to light. He therefore immediately
formed the wrong theory that X-rays were a normal accompani-
ment of the fluorescent glow, and he set out to prove this theory by

196

THE ACT OF CREATION

experiment. He wrapped a photographic plate into heavy black paper
to screen it from ordinary light. On top of the paper-wrapping he kid
some crystals of the uranium compound; between the crystals and the
wrapping he placed a bit of metal with holes in it. Then he placed this
whole arrangement outside his window so that the sun's rays should set
the uranium aglow with fluorescence, and thereby set the X-rays going
across the wrapper. This worked admirably: when he developed his
plates the rays had penetrated the wrapping and produced a photograph
of the holes in the metal. It was a wonderful example of an experiment
confinning a prediction based on a false hypothesis.

No sooner had he communicated his results to the Academy, when
the sky clouded over, and Becquerel put his plates and the uranium
into a dark drawer. Here the crystals were shut off from the sunlight;
hence there was no fluorescent glow; hence there could be no X-rays to
blacken the photographic plate. But when he took them out of the
drawer, the plates were blackened nevertheless. Once more the im-
possible had happened; and once more a reversal of logic brought the
solution. The fluorescent glow had been caused by the X-rays and not
the other way round. Becquerel now tried non-fluorescent uranium
compounds and found that they, too, produced rays. He tried other
fluorescent materials which did not contain uranium, and found
that they did not produce the rays. That clinched the matter: the source
of the rays, 'the radio-active agent, was the uranium itself. It was from
here that the Curies took over.

Perhaps the prettiest example of reasoning in reverse gear is the
invention of the phonograph.

As a young man Edison worked as a telegraphist. His main job was
the taking of messages from the Morse-ticker by ear; if the line was bad,
the ticking became blurred, and he had to rely on guessing. This
annoyed him all the more as, owing to an earlier accident, Edison was
partially deaf. So the young telegraphist invented a simple Morse-
signal-recording apparatus. It consisted mainly of a paper disc, which
was made to rotate like the gramophone disc of the future; on the disc
the incoming dots and dashes were recorded as indentations. But from
the telegraph company's point of view transcribing from the record
instead of doing it directly by ear from the ticker was a sheer waste of
time; Edison, then seventeen, lost his job.

Eleven years later, in the first laboratory of his own, he was working
on about fifty inventions simultaneously among them the typewriter
and an improved telegraph-recorder, on which the mcoming dots and

UNDERGROUND GAMES

197

dashes were embossed by a needle. When the message was to be sent on
to another station, the paper disc was placed on a transmitting machine
with a contact lever which moved up and down according to the
indentations on the disc. It was a gadget with the sole purpose of
recording and transmitting electrical impulses, and had nothing what-
soever to do with the production of sounds. Yet it did produce purely-
accidental sounds because the lever, while tracing the embossed dots
and dashes, was apt to rattle; and when the disc was rotated very quickly
this ratde became a hum, then something like a musical sound. A
sudden reversal of logic and the phonograph was born.

The rest was a matter of elaboration. Instead of a paper disc, Edison
proposed to use a cylinder covered with soft tin-foil; instead of attach-
ing the needle to a Morse-telegraph, he attached it to a membrane set
into vibration by the waves of sound. He made a sketch of the machine,
and gave it to one of his workmen, a certain John Kruesi. It cost
altogether eighteen dollars to build it, but Kruesi had no idea what the
contraption was for. When it was finished Edison shouted at it: 'Mary
had a Httle lamb.' Then he turned the handle of the recording cylinder:

'The rnachine reproduced perfectly. Everybody was astonished *

And that was that. To quote once more the jargon of communication
engineering: the background noise' of the vibrating lever had been
turned into 'information.

We have met the same kind of logical mirror-writing in humour a
sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist , , 'operation successful,
patient dead*. All jokes based on a tmning-the-tables technique show
the same pattern (for instance, the Prince and the Retainer story on
p. 84).

In the classical tragedy, on the other hand, it is the gods, or the stars,
who turn the tables on the mortal hero, or lure him into appointments
in Samara. They particularly like to use seemingly harmless coinci-
dences the blind gaps in the meaningful order of events as levers of
destiny. In later forms of literature, it is characters which are made to
stand on their heads, or are turned inside out like a glove. Prince
Mishkin, the 'Idiot', is revealed as a sage in reverse; saints are sinners,
sinners are saints, heroes are cowards, adults are children, and every
JekyH has something to Hyde.

In visual perception we find a parallel phenomenon in the reversible
figure-background relation. If one stares at the mosaic on the bathroom
floor, unconscious and often uncontrollable shifts in perception make
the pattern of black tiles stand out at one moment, and the pattern of

I98 THE ACT OF CREATION

white tiles at the next. A more dramatic illustration is the following,
found in many psychological textbooks:

Figure 9

Urn or profiles whichever is master for a while, will become slave
in turn, 'figure' will change into 'ground', 'noise' into 'information', in
a kind of visual saturnalia. The two perceptual matrices are reciprocal,
and their alternation seems to be determined by unconscious physio-
logical processes.

Some of the great revolutions in the history of painting entailed
almost equally brutal reversals of vision. Up to the late Venetians, the
landscape on the canvas was primarily perceived as a conventional
background against which human figures were displayed; roughly
from Giorgione onward it became possible to paint landscapes in which
the human figure played an accidental part. At different stages one fw.6s
similar reversals in the logic of the eye: from ornate drapery to personal
expression, from contours to surfaces, from naturalism to other isms of
perception. At each of these upheavals the cat without a grin was
superseded by the grin without a cat.

In the realm of music the relativity and reversibility of 'figure' and
'background* (accompaniment, counterpoint, fugue) is self-evident. It
is less obvious in modern theoretical physics, although it is implied in
one of its basic postulates: according to Niels Bohr's Principle of Com-
plementarity the dtimate constituents of the universeelectrons,

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199

protons, photons, etc. behave on some occasions as if they were
particles, that is, hard lumps of matter, on other occasions as if they
were ripples of energy without definite location. Although the two
descriptions are mutually exclusive in terms of traditional physics and
philosophy, the theory works remarkably well. As a matter of fact,
most physicists are not much bothered by the inherent contradiction,
and are quite content to believe that the wavicles', the actual stuff the
world is made of, are at one moment like the solid urn, and the next
like the empty space between the two profiles.

That the most brilliant scientists of this century should be capable of
accepting this paradox is a rather striking indication of the susceptibility
of the human mind for reversals of logic, and the unification of
opposites. The complementarity of energy and matter in quantum-
physics is not so far removed as it would seem from the dualism of
Yang and Yin, the feminine and masculine principles in Taoist philo-
sophy. I do not mean that Lao-Tse, in the sixth century B.C., foresaw
the behaviour of alpha-particles in a Wilson chamber; I mean that it is
a timeless characteristic of the unconscious mind to work in that way.

Analogy and Intuition

The great biologist Elie MechnikofF felt rather lonely one afternoon
in 1890 'when the whole family had gone to the circus to see some
extraordinary performing apes, and I remained alone with my micro-
scope'. 13 The microscope was in a laboratory of the cole Normale
which Pasteur had given him; MechnikofF was observing the life of the
mobile cells in the transparent larvae of starfish, and idly threw a few
rose-thorns among them. The thorns were prompdy surrounded by
the larvae and dissolved inside their transparent bodies they had been
gobbled up and digested. This reminded him of what happens when a
human finger is infected by a splinter: it will be surrounded by pus
which, like the starfish larvae, will attack and try to digest the intruder.
By this analogy MechnikofF discovered the organisms* main defence
mechanism against invading microbes: the 'phagocytes', cell-eaters, a
population of mobile cells among the white blood corpuscles.

The starting point of Kepler's discoveries was a supposed analogy
between the role of the Father in the Trinity and the role of the Sun in
the Universe. Lord Kelvin hit on the idea of the mirror galvanometer
when he noticed a reflection of light on his monocle. Sultan saw that a

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THE ACT OF CRBATION

branch was like a stick; Newton saw that the moon behaved like an
apple. Pasteur saw the analogy between a spoilt culture and a cow-pox
vaccine; Fleming saw the analogy between the action of a mould and
the action of a drip from his nose. Freud, on his own account, conceived
the idea of the sublimation of instincts by looking at a funny cartoon in
the Fliegende Blatter the one-time German equivalent of Punch. In the
first picture a little girl was herding a flock of goslings with a stick. In
the second she had grown into a governess herding a flock of young
ladies with a parasol. 14

Some writers identify the creative act in its entirety with the unearth-
ing of hidden analogies. 'The discoveries of science, the works of art
are explorations more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness', Bronow-
ski wrote. 15 But where does the hidden likeness hide, and how is it
found? Sultan's branch could literally be seen as a stick though even in
this case, a change of the perceptual frame was required to discover the
likeness. But in most truly original acts of discovery the 'seeing' is in
fact imagining; it is done in the mind's, and mostly the unconscious
mind's eye. The analogy between the life of one kind of microbe inside
a cow and another kind of microbe in a forgotten culture tube was not
'hidden' anywhere; it was 'created* by the imagination; and once an
analogy has been created, it is of course there for all to see just as a
poetic metaphor, once created, soon fades into a cliche.

Analogy, in logic, means a process of 'reasoning from parallel causes';
in common parlance it means that two situations or events are similar
in some respects, but not in all respects. The rub is in the words 'parallel'
and 'similar'; the latter, in particular, has bedevilled psychology ever
since the term 'association by similarity* was invented (by Bain, I
believe) as an explanation of how the mind works. A Chinaman who
collects stamps is 'similar* to a Negro in that both are males; he is
similar to a Chinese girl in that both are Chinese; and he is similar to
other stamp-coUeaors of any nationality. Mathematics began, wrote
Bertr and Russell, when it was discovered that a brace of pheasants and
a couple of days have something in common: the number two.
'Similarity* is not a thing offered on a plate (or hidden in a cupboard);
it is a relation established in the mind by a process of selective emphasis
on those features which overlap in a certain respect along one dimen-
sional gradient and ignoring other features. Even such a seemingly
simple process as recognizing the similarity between two letters V
written by different hands, involves processes of abstraction and
generalization in the nervous system which are largely unexplained.

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201

Thus the real achievement in discoveries of the type mentioned, in
this section is 'seeing an analogy where no one saw one before'. The
scientist who sets out to solve a problem looks at it from various angles,
through glasses of different colours, as it were in the jargon of the
present theory, he experiments with various matrices, hoping that one
will fit If it is a routine problem of a familiar type, he will soon discover
some aspect of it which is similar in some respect to other problems
encountered in the past, and thus allows him to come to grips with it.
Some of the mental operations involved in such routine cases we have
already encountered in discussing the solving of witty riddles (pp.
84-6): extrapolation, interpolation, transposition. These are 'rules of
the game' which enter as sub-codes into any complex mental skill. To
put it in a different way: solving a problem means bridging a gap; and
for routine problems there usually exist matrices various types of
prefabricated bridges which will do the job; though it may require a
certain amount of sweat to adjust them to the terrain.

But in original discoveries, no single pre-fabricated matrix is adequate
to bridge the gap. There may be some similarities with past situations,
but these may be more misleading than helpful, and lure the victim into
fruitless experimentation based on traditional rules of the game. Here
the only salvation lies in hitting on an auxiliary matrix in a previously
unrelated field the larvae of starfish or the Holy Ghost. One may call
the process which follows after the hit 'reasoning from a parallel case'
but the real achievement was to 'appoint', as it were, the larva as a
parallel case to the pus, and the action of the Holy Ghost as 'similar* to
the action of gravity. It is an achievement much closer to the birth of a
poetic simile than to a logical production. After all, the Walrus too was
arguing by analogy when he talked 'Of shoes and ships and sealing
wax/Of cabbages and kings/

The essence of discovery is that unlikely marriage of cabbages and
kings of previously unrelated frames of reference or universes of dis-
course whose union will solve the previously unsoluble problem. The
search for the improbable partner involves long and arduous striving
but the ultimate matchmaker is the unconscious. I have discussed
several tricks which qualify it for that role: the greater fluency and
freedom of unconscious ideation; its 'intellectual Hbertinage' as one
might call the dream's indifference towards logical niceties and mental
prejudices consecrated by tradition; its non-verbal, 'visionary' powers.
To these must be added, in our present context, the dream's tendency
towards creating unusual analogies. These may be verbal puns, or

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THE ACT OF CREATION

'optic puns' or visual symbols; but there is another type of vague and
cloudy analogy generated in the dream and half-dream, which dis-
integrates on awakening and cannot be put into words except by
muttering 'something rerninded me of something, but I don't know
what reminded me of what, and why'. Some dreams have a way of
dissolving in the wakening mind like solid crystals melting in a liquid*,
and if we reverse the process we get at least a speculative pointer to the
manner in which those 'somethings' vaguely reminding me of other
'somethings' condense into a nascent analogy. This may be a hazy,
tentative affair the dance of Poincare's unhooked atoms; and its shape
may be changing from camel to weasel, as Hamlet's cloud. The un-
conscious regions of fertile minds must be pullulating with such nascent
analogies, hidden likenesses, and the cloudy forms of things unknown.
But most clouds form and dissolve again; only a few intuitions reach
the stage of 'seeding the cloud' which results in the formation of verbal
drops; and cloud-bursts are a rarity.

Two final examples may serve to illustrate the actual process of
discovering hidden analogies. The first is related to clouds in a literal
sense Franklin's invention of the Hghtning conductor.

Benjamin Franklin became interested in electricity in 1746 when he
was forty, and began playing about with Leyden jars a kind of
electrified bottle which gave one fearful shocks. Within the next three
years he rediscovered by himself virtually everything that was known
about electricity to that date, and added several fundamental discoveries
of his own.

In 1749 he noted in his diary that he thought Hghtning and thunder
to be electrical phenomena.* He also found that when brought near to'
an electrified body, a pointed object, like a finger, will draw a much
stronger spark than a blunt one. 'To know this power of points', he
musingly wrote, 'may possibly be of some use to mankind, though we
should never be able to explain it.' He then drew an analogy between a
cloud and an electrified body, and concluded that Hghtning was an
electrical discharge phenomenon. But if that was the case, mankind
could protect itself against this cosmic scourge:

I say, if these things are so, may not the knowledge of this power of
points be of use to mankind, in preserving houses, churches, ships &
cont. from the stroke of Hghtning, by directing us to fix on the
highest parts of those edifices, upright rods of iron made sharp as a
needle, and gilt to prevent rusting, and from the foot of those rods a

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203

-wire down one of the shrouds of a ship, and down her side till it
reaches the water? Would not these pointed rods probably draw
the electrical fire silently out of a cloud before it came nigh enough to
strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible
mischief? 16

However, before he could convince mankind to put 'Franklin rods*
on their houses he had to prove his fantastically sounding notion that
thunderclouds were in fact giant Leyden jars floating in the air. He
waited for some time hopefully for the erection of a tall spire at
Philadelphia, intending to fix a pointed rod on top of it, and so to
bring down the electricity from a passing thundercloud. But the
difficulties of the project proved insurmountable; it was during this
period of impatient waiting and restless searching for a simpler method
to prove his theory that he hit on the fantastic yet at the same time
astonishingly simple idea of the kite.

How did it happen? Franklin was an expert swimmer. On his first
sojourn in London, at the age of nineteen, he swam from Chelsea to
BlackfHars, a distance of three miles, performing on the way many
feats of activity both upon and under the water and was advised by
some English gendemen, who watched him, to open a swiniming
school. He did not do that, but he devised a new method of learning to
swim: 'Choosing a place where the water deepens gradually, walk
coolly into it till it is up to your breast, then turn around, your face to
the shore, and throw an egg into the water between you and the
shore.' The learner then must 'boldly retrieve the egg* and in the act
of retrieving acquires the art of swimming.

Even earlier on he had devised another aquatic sport: as a boy he used
to drift for hours on a lake, floating on his back, and towed by the
string of a kite. He suggested that this method might be utilized by
swimmers to cross the Channel from Dover to Calais with the
judicious addendum: 'The packet-boat, however, is still preferable.'

It is easy to imagine how, in a moment of weariness and 'thinking
aside' from that wretched spire in Philadelphia, a pleasant childhood
memory rose like a bubble to the surface of his consciousness: drifting
on the lake attached to the kite in the sky. Eureka! With the enthusi-
astic assistance of his young son, Franklin fabricated a kite out of a cross
of cedar wood and a silk handkerchief. All he needed now were a few
good thunderclouds which conveniently appeared in June 1752.
Father and son sent up the kite and, with due precaution, drained the

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THE ACT OF CREATION

clouds' electric charge into a Leyden jar; 'by the electric fire thus
obtained spirits were inflamed and other experiments performed'.

Such was the excitement caused all over the world that one of
Franklin's imitators, a certain Monsieur Riehmann, was killed in St.
Petersburg by the lightning discharge he drew from a cloud. He was
worshipped as a hero and found many would-be imitators; among
them the German inventor Herr Boze. Even Joseph Priestley, one of
the great British scientists of the century, rhapsodized about 'the
sentiments of the magnanimous Mr. Boze, who with a truly philo-
sophic heroism, worthy of the renowned Empedocles, said he wished he
might die by the electric shock, that the account of his death might
furnish an article for the memoirs of the French Academy of Sciences.
But it is not given to every electrician to die the death of the justly
envied Riehmann.' 17

There are two successive Eureka processes involved in this story. In
the first, the bisociative link was what Franklin called 'the power of
points'; it gave rise to the analogy: pointed ringer discharges Leyden
jar, pointed rod discharges cloud. It may have been attained by ideation
on a relatively conscious level, probably with the aid of visual imagina-
tion. The second stroke of genius was the use of the kite to reach the
thunderbolt. It illustrates the argument I have put forward earlier in this
chapter: one can hardly say that a hidden analogy was pre-existent in the
universe between a kite used as a sail by a boy floating on a lake, and a
lightrtirtg conductor. What actually happened was that Franklin was
desperately searching for a means to make contact with a thundercloud,
thinking in habitual terms of tall spires, long iron rods, and perhaps the
Tower of Babel. But all these approaches proved impracticable, and the
matrix was blocked until in a moment of lassitude and day-dreaming
the previously unrelated memory-train of swimming, egg-retrieving,
and kite-sailing was brought to bear on it.

The last example that I shall quote in this section is a particularly
impressive illustration of the unconscious in the role of rnatchmaker. I
am referring to the discovery, in 1920, of the chemical transmission of
nerve-impulses by Otto Loewi. Since the matter is somewhat technical,
I shall give a simplified account of it.

Before Loewi's discovery it was generally believed that nervous
control of bodily functions was exercised by a direct transmission of
electrical impulses from nerve-terminal to muscle or gland. But this
theory failed to account for the fact that the same type of electric
impulse travelling down a nerve had an excitatory eflect on some

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205

organs, an inhibitory effect on others. Now certain drugs were known
to have precisely the same effect. In a discussion with a friend in 1903,
it occurred to Loewi that the chemical agents which were contained in
these drugs may also be present at the nerve-terminals; the electric
impulse would initiate chemical action, which in its turn would act on
the muscle or gland. But Loewi could not think of an experimental
method to test the idea and forgot it for the next seventeen years.

Fifteen years later, for quite different purposes, he designed an
experiment. He made preparations of two frogs' hearts which were kept
beating in salt solutions to see whether their activities gave out any
chemical substance. In the sequel he forgot all about the experiment.

Another two years passed until the critical event:

The night before Easter Sunday of that year [1920] I awoke,
turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin
paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at six o'clock in the
morning that during the night I had written down something most
important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night,
at three o'clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment
to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical trans-
mission that I had uttered seventeen years ago was correct. I got up
immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a simple
experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design. . . .

No lesser person that Walter B. Cannon, the discoverer of adrenalin,
has described this noctural design as 'one of the neatest, simplest, and
most definite experiments in the history of biology'. Loewi again
isolated two frog hearts, the first with its nerves, the second without.
He stimulated the vagus nerve of the first heart for a few minutes. The
vagus has an inhibitory effect on the heart, and its beats slowed down.
Loewi now removed the salt solution from the first heart and applied
it to the second. It slowed down just as if its own (no longer existent)

vagus had been stimulated He repeated the experiment, this time

stimulating the accelerator nerve of the first heart. When the liquid was
transferred to the second heart it accelerated He concludes:

These results unequivocally proved that the nerves do not
influence the heart directly but liberate from their terminals specific
chemical substances which, in their turn, cause the well-known
modifications of the function of the heart characteristic of the
stimulation of its nerves.

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THE ACT Of CREATION

The story of this discovery shows that an idea may sleep for
decades in the unconscious mind and then suddenly return. Further,
it indicates that we should sometimes trust a sudden intuition without
too much scepticism. If carefully considered in the daytime, I would
undoubtedly have rejected the kind of experiment I performed. It
would have seemed likely that any transmitting agent released by a
nervous impulse would be in an amount just sufficient to influence
the effector organ. It would seem improbable that an excess that could
be detected would escape into the fluid which filled the heart. It
was good fortune that at that moment of the hunch I did not think
but acted immediately.

For many years this nocturnal emergence of the design of the
crucial experiment to check the validity of a hypothesis uttered
seventeen years earlier was a complete mystery. 18

In 1955 twenty-five years after the discovery, which earned him
the Nobel Prize Loewi had to compile a bibliography:

I glanced over all the papers published from my laboratory. I
came across two studies made about two years before the arrival of
the nocturnal design in which, also in search of a substance given off
from the heart, I had applied the technique used in 1920. This
experience, in my opinion, was an essential preparation for the idea
of the finished design. In fact, the nocturnal concept represented a
sudden association of the hypothesis of 1903 with the method tested
not long before in other experiments. Most so-called 'intuitive'
discoveries are such associations suddenly made in the unconscious
mind. 1 *

Let me briefly recapitulate the three stages of this drama. The first is
the sudden emergence, during a conversation in 1903, of the hunch that
his problem could be solved by switching from a 'spark theory' to a
'soup theory* (in neurological jargon, 'spark' refers to electrical, 'soup'
to chemical transmission of nerve impulses). But a hunch of this kind
as often as not turns out to be a fallacious over-simplification; so the
idea went into the incubator for the next seventeen years, till 1920.

Act Two. In 1918, fifteen years after the hunch, Loewi performs
certain experiments for which purpose he has to design a technique
for the detection of fluids secreted by the frog's heart. He then forgets
all about it.

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207

On the night before Easter Sunday the two previously unrelated
memories meet; but their meeting place is so deep underground that
the next morning he can remember nothing, and cannot even decipher
his own scribbled note. He has to wait until the next night for another
underground excursion which takes place at 3 a.m., followed by the
rush to the laboratory.

After the event one wonders, of course, why one idea had to wait for
seventeen years, the second for two years, and then choose such a secret
place for their final rendezvous that the identity of the second was only
revealed another twenty-five years later. The first was a theory of the
transmission of nerve impulses to organs by a fluid; the second was a
technique for tracing fluids in an organ; what could be more logical
than that the twain should meet? Yet they did not meet through all
those years because mortal minds, even those of genius, are not
governed by logic but by habit, and the two ideas were embedded
each in its own habitual context. Wallace, too, had been thinking of
evolution for two years, and had read Malthus many years before the
two fused during an attack of tropical fever. It seems that encounters
of this kind can occur only when the normal rules of the game are
suspended and the unconscious match-maker enters into action. Loewi's
inability to read his own note, and other cases of 'snowblindness*
which I shall mention, indicate the stubborn resistance of habit against
such breaches of the rules and illicit liaisons.

"We are somewhat more than ourselves in sleep and the Slumber of
the Body seems to be but the Waking of the Soul', Sir Thomas Browne
wrote three centuries ago. Yet it is difficult and frustrating to write
consciously on the unconscious, rationally on the irrational. It is rather
like praising the beauties and expounding the grammar of the Sanskrit
language but a Sanskrit which you speak only in your sleep and the
comm and of which you lose when awake. Only fragments of it emerge
to the surface disjointed memories and the testimonies of creative
minds. When these fragments are pieced together, as best we can, they
do not form a coherent pattern but they do provide evidence that
such a pattern exists.

Sumtnary

The interlocking of two previously unrelated skills or matrices of
thought was again seen to constitute the basic pattern of discovery in
the illustrative cases of Gutenberg, Kepler, and Darwin-Wallace

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THE ACT OF CREATION

(Chapter VI). Gutenberg combined the techniques of the wine-press
and the seal; Kepler married physics to astronomy; Darwin connected
biological evolution with the struggle for survival.

On the question how the new synthesis comes into being, the evi-
dence indicates that verbal thinking, and conscious thinking in general,
plays only a subordinate part in the decisive phase of the creative act.
Hadamard's inquiry among leading mathematicians in America re-
vealed that 'practically all of them . . . avoid not only the use of mental
words but also ... the mental use of algebraic or any other signs'. On
the testimony of those original thinkers who have taken the trouble to
record their methods of work, this also seems to be the rule in other
branches of science. Their virtually unanimous emphasis on spontane-
ous intuitions, unconscious guidance, and sudden leaps of imagination
which they are at a loss to explain, suggests that the role of stricdy
rational thought-processes in scientific discovery has been vasdy over-
estimated since the Age of Enlightenment; and that, contrary to the
Cartesian bias in our beliefs, 'full consciousness', in the words of
Einstein, 'is a limit case*.

'Full consciousness' must indeed be regarded as the upper limit of a
continuous gradient from focal awareness through peripheral aware-
ness to total unawareness of an event. Awareness is a matter of degrees;
and only a fraction of our multi-levelled activities at any moment
enters the beam of focal consciousness. But this realisation in itself
provides no answer to the question how unconscious guidance works.

We have approached that question in several cautious steps. First, I
have tried to show that unconscious automatisms must not be con-
fused, as they often ate, with unconscious intuitions. To be able to
recite the lines of Kubla Khan 'in one's sleep* is not the same thing as
conceiving them in a dream; it is, in fact, the result of the opposite
process. The formation and gradual automatization of habits of all
kinds, of muscular, perceptual, tmnking skills, follows the principle of
economy. Once a new skill has been mastered, the controls begin to
function automatically and can be dispatched underground, out of
sight; and under stable conditions strategy too will tend to become
stereotyped. I called this the 'downward' stream of mental traffic.

The next step led us to inquire how in ordinary, routine thinking we
explore the 'shallows' of our minds operating on the twilight peri-
pheries of awareness, as it were. Galtons oft-quoted metaphor of the
ante-chamber, from which the 'most closely allied' idea is summoned
to the presence-chamber of the mind in a 'mechanically logical way',

UNDERGROUND GAMES

209

proved to be inadequate, because the order of precedence was seen to
depend firstly, on the specific rules of the game in which the mind is
engaged at the time, and secondly, on strategic considerations depen-
dent on the he of the land. Purposive thinking, then, may be compared
to the scanning of a landscape with the narrow beam of focal vision
whether it is a panorama, a chessboard, or an 'inner landscape*. Those
features which are relevant to the purpose of the operation will stand
out as 'members' of the matrix, while the rest sinks into the background.
Thus the first act in skilled routine-thinking and problem-solving is the
'turdng-in of the code appropriate to the task, guided by some obvious
similarity with situations encountered in the past. This leads to the
emergence of a matrix which provides a preliminary selection of
possible moves; the actual moves depend on strategy, guided by feed-
back, and distorted by emotional interferences.

However, the problems which lead to original discoveries are
precisely those which cannot be solved by any familiar rule of the game,
because the matrices applied in the past to problems of similar nature
have been rendered inadequte by new features or complexities in the
situation, by new observational data, or a new type of question. The
search for a clue, for Poincare's 'good combination which will
unlock the blocked problem, proceeds on several planes, involving
unconscious processes at various levels of depth.

In a general way this simultaneous activity on various levels, during
the period of incubatioii, in itself creates a state of receptivity, a readi-
ness of the 'prepared mind' to pounce on favourable chance-constella-
tions, and to profit from any casual hint (Gutenberg and the wine-
press, Archimedes, Pasteur, Darwin, Fleming). In discoveries of this
type, where both rational thinking and the trigger-action of chance
play a noticeable part, the function of the unconscious seems to be
mainly to keep the problem constantly on the agenda, even while
conscious attention is occupied elsewhere. In this context the word
'unconscious* refers primarily to processes (such as perceptions and
memories) which occur fairly low down on the gradient of awareness.

But in other types of discovery the unconscious plays a more
specific, guiding role by bringing forms of ideation into play which
otherwise manifest themselves only in dreaming and related states.
Their codes function more or less permanently 'underground', because
they govern the type of thinking prevalent in childhood and in primi-
tive societies, which has been superseded in the norm al adult by techni-
ques of thought which are more rational and realistic or are considered

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THE. ACT OF CREATION

as such. These ancient, quasi-archaeological layers in the mental hier-
archy form a world apart, as it were, glimpses of which we get in the
dream; their existence is a kind of historic record, which testifies to the
facts of mental evolution; and they must not he confused with auto-
matized skills which, once mastered, function unawares, for reasons of
mental economy. (It would perhaps be preferable to call these 'archeo-
logicaT strata of the mind the swfc-conscious', to distinguish them from
processes of which we are merely wfl-consrious because they happen
to rank low on the linear scale of awareness. But the Freudian connota-
tions of the word subconscious would probably lead to confusion of a
different kind.)

The period of incubation represents a reculerpour mieux sauter. Just as
in the dream the codes of logical reasoning are suspended, so 'thinking
aside' is a temporary liberation from the tyranny of over-precise verbal
concepts, of the axioms and prejudices engrained in the very texture of
specialized ways of thought. It allows the rnind to discard the strait-
jacket of habit, to shrug off apparent contradictions, to un-learn and
forgetand to acquire, in exchange, a greater fluidity, versatility, and
gullibility. This rebellion against constraints which are necessary to
maintain the order and discipline of conventional thought, but an
impediment to the creative leap, is symptomatic both of the genius and
the crank; what distinguishes them is the intuitive guidance which only
the former enjoys.

Though Poincare was doubtless one of its beneficiaries, I have quoted
his hypothesis regarding the nature of that guidance the automatic
mixing machine in the basement as an example of a mechanistic
explanation. In fact, however, the underground games of the mind were
seen to be of a highly sophisticated, visionary and witty nature, al-
though its rules are not those of formal logic. The dreamer constandy
bisociates innocently as it were frames of reference which are
regarded as incompatible in the waking state; he drifts effortlessly from
matrix to matrix, without being aware of it; in his inner landscape, the
bisociative techniques of humour and discovery are reflected upside
down, like trees in a pond. The most fertile region seems to be the
marshy shore, the borderl and between sleep and full awakening
where the matrices of disciplined thought are already operating but
have not yet sufficiently hardened to obstruct the dreamlike fluidity of
imagination.*

I have discussed various bisociative devices in which the matchmaking
activities of the unconscious manifest themselves: the substitution of

UNDERGROUND GAMES

vague visual images for precise verbal formulations; symbolization,
conaetization, and impersonation; mergers of sound and sense, of form
and function; shifts of emphasis, and reasoning in reverse gear; guidance
by nascent analogies. In day-dream ing, and in most dreams of ordinary
mortals, these activities are free-wheeling or serving intimately per-
sonal ends; in the inspired moments of artists and scientists they are
harnessed to the creative purpose.

The moment of truth, the sudden emergence of a new insight, is an
act of intuition. Such intuitions give the appearance of miraculous
flashes, or short-circuits of reasoning. In fact they may be likened to an
immersed chain, of which only the beginning and the end are visible
above the surface of consciousness. The diver vanishes at one end of the
chain and comes up at the other end, guided by invisible links.

Habit and originality, then, point in opposite directions in the two-
way traffic between conscious and unconscious processes. The conden-
sation of learning into habit, and the automatization of skills constitute
the downward stream; while the upward traffic consists in the minor,
vitalizing pulses from the underground, and the rare major surges of
creation.

NOTES

To p, 192. Jung's emphasis on the mandala as the symbol of the coincidencia
oppositorum concerns the reconciliation of opposites in the fully integrated person
which is an altogether different question.

To p. 202. Half a century earlier, the cracklings and sparks produced by
rubbing a piece of amber had been compared to lightning and thunder by Wall,
a friend of Boyle's; but as the context shows, the comparison was meant in a
purely metaphorical way.

To p. 210. \ . . Einstein has reported that his profound generalization con-
necting space and time occurred to him while he was sick in bed. Descartes is
said to have made his discoveries while lying in bed in the morning and both
Cannon and Poincare report having got bright ideas when lying in bed unable to
sleep the only good thing to be said for insomnia! It is said that James Brindley,
the great engineer, when up against a difficult problem, would go to bed for
several days till it was solved. Walter Scott wrote to a friend:

4 "The half-hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious
to any task which was exercising my invention. ... It was always when I first
opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me." ' (Beveridge, W. I. B.,
1950, pp. 73-4).

IX

THE SPARK AND THE FLAME

False Inspirations

I have discussed the genesis of the Eureka act the sudden shaking
together of two previously unconnected matrices; let us now turn
to the aftermath of it.
If all goes well that single, explosive contact will lead to a lasting
fusion of the two matrices a new synthesis will emerge, a further
advance in mental evolution will have been achieved. On the other
hand, the inspiration may have been a mirage; or premature; or not
sumciendy impressive to be believed in.

A stimulating inquiry by the American chemists Piatt and Barker
showed that among those scientists who answered their questionnaire
eighty-three per cent claimed frequent or occasional assistance from
unconscious intuitions. But at the same time only seven pe* cent among
them asserted that their intuitions were always correct; the remainder
estimated the percentage of their 'false intuitions' variously at ten to
ninety per cent.

A false inspiration is not an ordinary error committed in the course
of a routine operation, such as making a mistake in counting. It is a kind
of inspired blunder which presents itself in the guise of an original
synthesis, and carries the same subjective conviction as Archimedes' s
cry did. Let me quote Poincare once more:

I have spoken of the feeling of absolute certitude accompanying
the inspiration; often this feeling deceives us without it being any

the less vivid When a sudden iHumriiiation seizes upon the mind

of the mathematician, it usually happens that it does not deceive him,
but it also sometimes happens, mat it does not stand the test of
verification; well, we almost always notice that this false idea, had it
been true, would have gratified our natural feeling for mathematical
elegance. 1

2X2

THE SPARK AND THE FLAME 213

The previous chapters may have given the mistaken impression that
the genius need only listen to his Socratian demon and all will be well.
But the demon is a great hoaxer precisely because he is not bound by
the codes of disciplined thought; and every original thinker who relies,
as he must, on his unconscious hunches, incurs much greater risks to his
career and sanity than his more pedestrian colleagues. 'The world little
knows', wrote Faraday, 'how many of the thoughts and theories which
have passed through the mind of a scientific investigator have been
crushed in silence and secrecy; that in the most successful instances not
a tenth of the suggestions, the hopes, the wishes, the preliminary
conclusions have been realized.' 2 Darwin, Huxley, and Planck, among
many others, made similar confessions; Einstein lost 'two years of hard
work' owing to a false inspiration. 'The imagination, wrote Beveridge,
'merely enables us to wander into the darkness of the unknown where,
by the dim light of the knowledge that we carry, we may glimpse
something that seems of interest. But when we bring it out and
examine it more closely it usually proves to be only trash whose
glitter had caught our attention. Imagination is at once the source of
all hope and inspiration but also of frustration. To forget this is to court
despair/ 3

All through his life Kepler hoped to prove that the motions of the
planets round the sun obeyed certain musical laws, the harmonies of the
spheres. When he was approaching fifty, he thought he had succeeded
The following is one of the rare instances on record of a genius des-
cribing the heady effect of a false inspiration Kepler never discovered
that he was the victim of a delusion:

The thing which dawned on me twenty-five years ago before I had
yet discovered the five perfect bodies between the heavenly orbits;
which sixteen years ago I proclaimed as the ultimate aim of all
research; which caused me to devote the best years of my life to
astronomical studies, to join Tycho Brahe and to choose Prague as
my residence that I have, with the aid of God, who set my en-
thusiasm on fire and stirred in me an irrepressible desire, who kept
my life and intelligence alert that I have now at long last brought
to light. Having perceived the first glimmer of dawn eighteen
months ago, the light of day three months ago, but only a few days
ago the plain sun of a most wonderful vision- nothing shall now
hold me back. Yes, I give myself up to holy raving. If you forgive
me, I shall rejoice. If you are angry, I shall bear it. Behold, I have

214

THE ACT OF CREATION

cast the dice, and I am writing a book either for my contemporaries,
or for posterity. It is all the same to me. It may wait a hundred
years for a reader, since God has also waited six thousand years for a
witness. 4

T. H. Huxley has said that the tragedies, of science are the slayings of
beautiful hypotheses by ugly facts. Against this tragedy, at least, the
artist seems to be immune. On the other hand, it is generally believed
that the scientist can at least rely on the verification of his intuitions by
experiment, whereas the artist has no such objective tests to decide
whether or not he should burn his manuscript, or slash his canvas to
pieces.

In fact, however, Verification by experiment' can never yield
absoulte certainty, and when it comes to controversial issues the data
can usually be interpreted in more than one way. The history of
medicine is full of obvious and distressing examples of this. In physics
and chemistry too, the best we can do by so-called 'crucial experiments'
is to confirm a prediction but not the theory on which the prediction
is based (see below, pp 270-6); and scientific controversies about the
interpretation of experimental results have been just as passionate and
subjective as controversies between theologians or art critics. If a hunch
is drastically contradicted by experiment, it will of course be aban-
doned. But, by and large, scientists are inclined to trust their intuitions;
and if confronted with experiments which give ambiguous or diver-
gent results, either to declare as Einstein once did- that 'the facts are
wrong*; oras Hobbes did that 'the instance is so particular and
singular, that 'tis scarce worth our observing' ; or to resort to the standard
phrase that the unfavourable experimental result is due 'to unknown
sources of error' hoping that some day, somehow, it will all work out.
Modern theoretical physics lives to a large extent on that hope. Thus
veriflability is a matter of degrees, and neither the artist, nor the
scientist who tries to break new ground, can hope ever to achieve
absolute certainty.

Premature Linkages

I have mentioned discoveries which were the happy outcome of a
comedy of errors. No less frequent are those tragedies in the history of
thought, where the right kind of intuition begets wrong results- faulty
integrations, premature births.

THE SPARK AND THE FLAME

215

The first attempt to describe physical reality by mathematical relations
was made in the sixth century B.C. by the Pythagorean Brotherhood
a religious, scientific, and political Order which wielded great power in
the south of Italy. They succeeded in explaining musical quality by
quantitative laws, and believed that ultimately 'all things are numbers'.

But they translated this prophetic intuition into a premature synthesis
between 'things' and 'numbers', based on the assumption that a line
consisted of a definable number of tiny dots, a plane of a definable
number of these lines, and so on. They soon discovered, however, that
the length of a line such as the diagonal of a square cannot be defined
by any countable number of dots; one can draw the diagonal in a jiffy,
but to write down the number defining its length one would have to
use an infinite series of decimals. To make the scandal worse, numbers
of this kind could be shown to be neither even nor odd or both.
Pythagoreans called these numbers arrketos, unspeakable (we call them,
more politely, irrational numbers), and tried to keep their existence
secret, because they were convinced that their assertion of a harmonious
mathematical order behind the untidy world of appearances was true
and correct; when a member of the Brotherhood, Hippasos, let the
secret leak out, he was reportedly put to death. The failure of this
premature attempt at a synthesis brought the quantitative approach to
nature into discredit. The physics of Aristotle, which ruled Europe for
two thousand years, paid no attention to quantity or measurement;
physics remained divorced from mathematics until the scientific
revolution in the seventeenth century a.d. brought them together
again.

Another premature synthesis, which I have already mentioned, was
the Keplerian cosmology, in which the sun sweeps the lazy planets
round their orbits with invisible heavenly brooms. But, in this case, the
error was a fertile one: physics and astronomy, once 'shaken together'
even though in the wrong way, could never again be separated.
Equally fertile was the alchemists' right intuition, supported by wrong
arguments, of the transmutability of chemical elements. On the other
hand, the phrenology of Franz Josef Gall had the opposite effect. Gall
thought that every mental faculty is seated in a definite region on the
surface of the brain, and that a person's abilities and character could be
assessed by the bumps on his skull. It was the first, premature, and naive
attempt to correlate psychology with brain-physiology. Though
phrenology was highly fashionable around a.d. 1800, it brought such
discredit in its wake that for a century or more psychologists would

216

THE ACT OP CREATION

have nothing to do with, speculations ahout the structure and function
of the brain.

Thus the premature integration of matrices which are not yet suffici-
ently consolidated has in some cases a wholesome effect, by stimulating
more mature attempts in the same direction; while in other cases it acts
as a deterrent and carries the stigma of superstition or 'un-scientific
thinking*. Taken in a wider sense, the category of premature intuitions
accommodates the whole body of folk-wisdom -herbal knowledge,
weather-lore, psychosomatic healing by hypnosis, suggestion, shock,
and abreaction down to Jenner's diarymaid who 'would not take the
pox\ We have learned to recognize in these intuitive insights and
techniques the forerunners of our more mature discoveries and re-
discoveries; and we thus arrive at a progression in several stages. In the
first stage the two matrices which will participate in the ultimate
synthesis are tentatively and inadequately joined together by the logic
of the unconscious. In the second the haphazard connection is severed
again, and a reaction may set in which keeps them apart for a consider-
able time. In the final stage, after the definite merger, the previously
separate matrices become mentally inseparable, and we marvel at our
former blindness.

Sncwblindness

*The mind', wrote 'Wilfred Trotter, 'likes a strange idea as little as
the body likes a strange protein and resists it with similar energy. It
would not perhaps be too fanciful to say that a new idea is the most
quickly acting antigen known to science. If we watch ourselves honestly
we shall often find that we have begun to argue against a new idea even
before it has been completely stated/ 5

I shall not dwell on the martyrology of genius; the title of this section
refers to that remarkable form of blindness which often prevents the
original thinker from perceiving the meaning and significance of his
own discovery. Jealousy apart, the anti-body reaction directed against
new ideas seems to be much the same whether the idea was let loose
by others or oneself. The defence mechanisms which protect habits
against the instrusion of novelty accounts both for our mental inertia
and mental stability.

Copernicus was an orthodox believer in the physics of Aristode, and
stubbornly clung to the dogma that all heavenly bodies must move in
perfect circles at uniform velocities. In the fourth chapter of the Third

THE SPAM AND TH2 FLAME

217

Book of the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, the original manuscript
of the book contains the following lines:

It should be noticed, by the way, that if the two circles have
different diameters, other conditions remaining unchanged, then the
resulting movement will not be a straight line but . . . what mathe-
maticians call an ellipse, (my italics)

This is actually not true, for the resulting curve will be a cycloid
resembling an ellipse but the odd fact is that Copernicus had hit on the
ellipse which is the form of all planetary orbits had arrived at it for the
wrong reasons and by faulty deduction and having done so, promptly
dropped it: the passage is crossed out in the manuscript, and is not
contained in the printed edition of the Revolutions. The history of human
thought is full of triumphant eurekas; but only rarely do we hear of the
anti-climaxes, the missed opportunities, which leave no trace.

Kepler, too, nearly threw away the elliptic orbits; for almost three
years he held the solution in his hands without seeing it His conscious
mind refused to accept the 'cartload of dung' which the underground
had cast up. When the battle was over, he confessed: 'Why should I
mince my words? The truth of Nature, which I had rejected and
chased away, returned by stealth through the backdoor, disguising
itself to be accepted. Ah, what a foolish bird I have been!* 6

Poor Kepler, he was even more foolish than he thought: he actually
discovered universal gravity then rejected it. In the Preface to the
New Astronomy he explains that the tides are due to the attraction of the
moon, and describes the working of gravity even that the attracting
force is proportionate to mass; but in the text of that book, and of all
subsequent works, he hasincredible as it sounds completely for-
gotten all about it. I have given elsewhere a detailed account of this
remarkable case of snowblindness. 7

Galileo revolutionized astronomy by the use of the telescope; but he
refused to believe in the reality of comets and declared them to be
optical illusions. For he too believed that heavenly bodies must move
in perfect circles; and since comets moved in very elongated elliptical
orbits, they could not be heavenly bodies.

Freud's revered master, Professor Brucke at the Vienna Medicine
Faculty, discovered, in 1849, a technique to illuminate the retina of the
eye; but the idea of observing the muminated retina through a lens did
not occur to him! It was his friend Helmholtz who hit on the idea

2l8

THE ACT OF CREATION

while preparing a lecture on Brucke's work and thus became the
inventor of the ophthalmoscope.

Freud himself had two narrow escapes, as it were, from achieving
world fame in his twenties. In the course of his physiological researches
at Brucke's Institute 'he was trembling on the very brink of the
important neurone theory, the basis of modern neurology'; but, as
Ernest Jones said, 'in the endeavour to acquire "discipline" he had not
yet perceived that in original scientific work there is an equally
important place for imagination. 8 It is strange indeed to hear the
founder of psychoanalysis being accused by his pupil and biographer of
having in his early years suffered from lack of imagination; but there it
is and worse to come.

The fantastic character of the 'Cocaine Episode' in Freud's life can be
appreciated only by comparing the silences in Freud's autobiography
with the revelations in Jones's biography. In the spring of 1884 Freud
then twenty-eight read in a German medical paper that an Army
doctor had been experimenting 'with cocaine, the essential constituent
of coca leaves which some Indian tribes chew to enable them to resist
privations and hardships*. He ordered a small quantity of the stuff from
a pharmaceutical firm, tried it on himself, his sisters, fiancee, and
patients, decided that cocaine was a 'magical drug', which procured
*the most gorgeous excitement', left no harmful after-effect, and was not
habit-forming! In several publications he unreservedly recommended
the use of cocaine against depression, indigestion, 'in those functional
states comprised under the name of neuras thenia', and during the with-
drawal-therapy of morphine addicts; he even tried to cure diabetes
with it. 'I am busy', he wrote to his future wife, 'collecting the literature
for a song of praise to this magical substance.' One is irresistibly
reminded of Aldous Huxley's songs of praise to mescaline; but Huxley
was neither a member of the medical profession nor the founder of a
new school in psycho therapy.

Two years after the publication of his first paper on the wonder-drug
Knapp, the great American ophthalmologist, greeted Freud 'as the man
who had introduced cocaine to the world, and congratulated him on
the achievement. In the same year, 1886, however, cases of cocaine
addiction and intoxication were being reported from all over the world,
and in Germany there was a general alarm 9 The man who had tried
to benefit humanity or at all events to create a reputation by curing
"neuras thenia" was now accused of unleashing evil on the world.'
Among Ireud's personal patients one died as a result of a large dose of

THE SPARK AND THE FLAME

219

the drug; another his close friend Fleischl whom he tried to cure from
morphine addiction, became cocaine-addicted instead, and developed
*a delirium tremens with white snakes creeping over his skin'. 10 A
leading neurologist, Erlenmeyer, described cocaine as 'the third scourge
of humanity ' the other two being alcohol and morphine. 11

I have said enough about the disasters of this episode. And yet Freud's
dabbling with cocaine became a blessing to humanity but not in the
way in which he had thought of it. Two of his colleagues at the
Medical Faculty, Koller and Koenigstein, both ophthalmologists, both
of incomparably smaller stature than Freud, read his 1884 paper,
experimented with cocaine, and saw almost at once what Freud's
snowblindness prevented him from seeing. Freud was not interested in
surgery; it did not enter into his habits of thought. He was fascinated
by the possible internal uses of cocaine, and, above all, its effects on
nervous disorders. Only in the final paragraph of his paper did he
casually mention some possible additional uses* of cocaine as a pain-
deadener in local infections; its uses as an anaesthetic in minor surgery
never occurred to him. He and Koller both noticed that after swallow-
ing cocaine their mouths and lips went numb the familiar sensation
after the dentist's injection. Koller took the hintFreud did not. Freud
suggested to Koenigstein that cocaine could be used to alleviate the pain
in certain eye-diseases; but it was Koenigstein who thought of using it
as an anaesthetic in eye-operations. Among the first of these, incident-
ally, was an operation on Freud's father for glaucoma carried out
by Koenigstein, with Koller administering the cocaine, and Freud
assisting. . . .

But even at that stage Freud still considered the tremendous benefits
of local anaesthetics as merely 'one more of the outlying applications of
which his beloved drug was capable. It took a long time before he
could assimilate the bitter truth that Roller's use of it was to prove
practically the only one of value and all the rest dust and ashes/ 12

Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Freud I have quoted only a few out-
standing examples of mental eye-cataract. How often did Archimedes
get into his bath and watch the rising water-level which gave a perfect
measure of the volume of his gnarled body? We must resign ourselves
to the fact that snowblindness is inherent in the human condition; if it
were not so, then everything we know today about the theory of
numbers, or analytical geometry, would have been discovered within
a few generations after Euclid.

Gradual Integrations

In some of the discoveries which I discussed earlier on a sudden
intuition sparked off the instant fusion of previously unrelated matrices.
In the cases described in the previous section the spark failed to ignite,
m yet other cases it initiates the fusion without completing it. Loewi
could not decipher the note relating^ to his dream, and had to dream, a
second time before he accepted its message. Kepler rejected the 'truth
of Nature', and only admitted it when it returned 'by the backdoor'.
Some of K6hler*s less gifted chimpanzees discovered, unaided, various
new techniques for making and using tools then seemed to forget
them again; but on the next test they rediscovered them after a much
shorter period of trying than the first time (See Book Two, XIII).
The human equivalent of this situation is a cry of distress: 'Blast it, I had
the solution, but now I have forgotten it again/

Cases of this kind make one think of a lighter whose wick has started
to glow, without properly burning. The struggle will have to go on, and
more sparks will have to be produced, before it bursts into flame. In
other words, intuition has established some tentative link between the
two distant frames of reference, but that link is insufficient to overcome
resistances and effect their fusion. It will have to be streng thened by
repetition (as in the case of Loewi) or else additional links will have to
be discovered to precipitate the integration.

The Dawn of Language

The most common example for this type of gradual process is the
way in which the child discovers that 'all things have names'. During
the first year of its life, the average baby progresses from spontaneous
babbling to the imitative repetition of syllables and words spoken by
adults with some vague intimations that these words are somehow
connected with the situation in which they are regularly used. It seems
that eager parents frequently teach their offspring its first words by a
process of repetitive 'stamping in', at an age when the baby is not yet
ripe to grasp the principles involved. Thus Watson conditioned an infant
to say 'da* whenever it was given the bottle, starting at five months,
twenty days that is, six months earlier than the first words normally
appear. The process took more than three weeks, at the end of
which the word 'da' became the first, mechanically established 1k

220

THE SPARS AND THE FLAME

221

between the two otherwise still unrelated matrices of 'sounds* and
'things'.

"With each month that passes, the acquisition of new word-links
becomes quicker and easier; the child is 'learning to learn'; until, usually
in the second half of the second year, it 'makes the most important
discovery of its whole life that everything has a name 9 . 23 As far as one
can generalize from the scant statistics, the vocabulary of the average
child at the close of the first year is three words; at eighteen months
twenty-two words. This seems to be the approximate age when the
'naming discovery* is made, for three months later the average vocabu-
lary has jumped to a hundred and eighteen:

Smith's Test 1 *

Average size of vocabularies

Age

Number of cases reported Number

of words

8

13

0

10

17

i

I 0

52

3

i 3

19

19

16

14

22

i9

14

118

2 0

25

272

26

14

446

3o

20

896

3-6

26

1222

4o

26

1540

4-6

32

187O

50

20

2072

5-6

27

2289

60

9

2562

The integration of the matrices is indicated not only by the steep rise
of the learning curve after the eighteenth month, but by the fact that
from now on the child, of its own initiative, will point at a thing and
ask to be told its name. Delighted with its discovery, it sometimes
develops a veritable 'naming mania': it indicates an object, calls out its
name, or, if it has forgotten it, invents a name of its own; for henceforth
a person or thing is felt to be incomplete if it has no name attached to it.

Thus the dawn of symbol-consciousness is a gradual, cumulative

222

THE ACT OF CREATION

event; a kind of diluted Eureka process, spread out in time, because the
final integration can take place only when the child's mental organiza-
tion has attained sufficient maturity. But the same process may occur in
a telescoped, highly dramatized form in rare cases such as Helen Keller's.
The blind, deaf, and mute litde girl was nearly seven when Miss
Sullivan took charge of her and taught her the first few words, c-a-k-e,
d-o-1-1, etc., by means of the manual alphabet, a kind of morse spelt by
finger-play. Since Helen was 'overripe' for learning a language, she
covered, within less than a month, the same ground which takes a
normal child about two years, from the imitative acquisition of the
first word ( e I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that
words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like
imitation.') to the final discovery:

We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the
fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one
was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout.
As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other
the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole
attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a
misty consciousness as of something forgotten a thrill of returning
thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to
me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool some-
thing that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened
my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free! . . .

I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and
each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house
each object that I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was
because I saw everything with the strange new sight that had come
to me. 15

Here we have the undiluted bisociative act, the sudden synthesis of
the universe of signs and the universe of things. In its sequel each
matrix imparts a new significance, a new dimension to the other: the
words begin to *Iive\ to 'give birth to new thoughts*; and the objects
begin to 'quiver* under the touch of the magic wand of language.

Helen Keller's dramatic moment of truth is quite unlike the gradual
dawn of the name-relation in normal children, and much closer to the
sudden insight in discoveries of the type of Pasteur's. The normal child's
n a m in g discovery could be likened to the process known in logic as

THE SPARK AND THE FLAME

223

empirical induction: 'some things have names ergo I assume that all things
have names'. (Needless to say, I do not mean to impute any conscious
reasoning of this kind to the babe in its cradle.) The chick episode, on the
other hand, which made Pasteur jump to his conclusion and establish
the general principle of immunization, could be called 'induction from
a single case' a procedure usually illustrated in primers on logic by the
example 'all French waiters have red hair'. For a detailed discussion of
the relations of gradual learning to sudden discovery I must refer the
reader to Book Two.

Summary

New integrations arise by various processes which can be arranged in
a series. It ranges from faulty or premature integrations, through partial
blindness towards the meaning and significance of one's own dis-
coveries, to the gradual blending of matrices by dint of repetitive
experiences, which increase the number of links between them.
Finally, there is the sudden iUumination of 'spontaneous' discoveries,
sparked off by an unconscious intuition, or a chance observation, or a
combination of both.

X

THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS

There is a theory, put forward by George Sarton, and held to be
self-evident by many scientists, which says, broadly speaking,
that the history of science is the only history which displays a
cumulative progress of knowledge; that, accordingly, the progress of
science is the only yardstick by which we can measure the progress of
mankind; and moreover, that the word 'progress* itself has no clearly
defined meaning in any field of activity except the field of science.

This is the kind of pronouncement where it is advisable to hold one's
breath and count to ten before expressing indignant protest or smug
agreement, according to one's allegiance to eggheads or engineers.
Personally I believe that there is a grain of truth in Sarton's proposition
but no more than that.

Separations and Reintegrations

There are certain analogies between the characteristic stages in the
history of an individual discovery, and the historical development of a
branch of science as a whole. Thus a 'blocked matrix* in the individual
mind reflects some kind of impasse into which a science has manoeuvred
itself. The 'period of incubation , with its frustrations, tensions, random
tries, and false inspirations, corresponds to the critical periods of 'fertile
anarchy* which recur, from time to time, in the history of every science.
These crises have, as we saw, a destructive and a constructive aspect.
In the case of the individual scientist, they involve a temporary retreat
to some more primitive form of ideation innocence regained through
the sacrifice of hard-won intellectual positions and established beliefs;
in the case of a branch of science taken as a whole, the crisis manifests
itself in a relaxation of the rigid rules of the game, a thawing of the

224

THE EVOLUTION OP IDEAS

225

collective matrix, the breakdown of mental Habits and absolute
frontiers a process of reader pour mieux sauter on an historic scale. The
Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative
individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the emergence, out
of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a
quick succession of individual discoveries where, characteristically,
the same discovery is often made by several individuals at the same
time (cf. p. 110 f).

The last stage verification, elaboration, consolidation is by far the
least spectacular, the most exacting, and occupies the longest periods of
time both in the life of the individual and in the historical evolution of
science. Copernicus picked up the ancient Pythagorean teaching of the
sun as the centre of all planetary motions when he was a student in
Renaissance Italy (where the idea was much discussed at the time), and
spent the rest of his life elaborating it into a system. Darwin hit on the
idea of evolution by natural selection at the age of twenty-nine; the
remaining forty-four years of his life were devoted to its corroboration
and exposition. Pasteur's life reads like a story divided into several
chapters. Each chapter represents a period which he devoted to one field
of research; at the beginning of each period stands the publication of a
short preliminary note which contained the basic discovery in a nut-
shell; then followed ten or fifteen years of elaboration, consolidation,
clarification.

The collective advances of science as a whole, and of each of its
specialized branches, show the same alternation between relatively
brief eruptions which lead to the conquest of new frontiers, and long
periods of consolidation. In the case of the individual, this protracted
chore has its natural limits at three score years and ten, or thereabouts;
but on the historical stage, the assimilation, consolidation, interpreta-
tion, and elaboration of a once revolutionary discovery may go on for
generations, and even centuries. The new territory opened up by the
impetuous advance of a few geniuses, acting as a spearhead, is subse-
quently occupied by the solid phalanxes of mediocrity; and soon the
revolution turns into a new orthodoxy, with its unavoidable symp-
toms of one-sidedness, over-specialization, loss of contact with other
provinces of knowledge, and ultimately, estrangement "from reality.
We see this happening unavoidably, it seems at various times in the
history of various sciences. The emergent orthodoxy hardens into a
'closed system' of thought, unwilling or unable to assimilate new
empirical data or to adjust itself to significant changes in other fields of

226

THE ACT OF CREATION

knowledge; sooner or later the matrix is blocked, a new crisis arises,
leading to a new synthesis, and the cycle starts again.

This does not mean, of course, that science does not advance; only
that it advances in a jerky, unpredictable, ^ unscientific , way. Although
'in the year 1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes who died in the
year 212 B.C.', 1 it would nevertheless be foolish to deny that today we
know considerably more than Archimedes. And I mean by that not
only the fantastic and threatening achievements of applied science
which have transformed this planet to a point where it is becoming
increasingly uninhabitable; but that we also know more than Archi-
medes in other, more worthwhile ways, by having gained deeper
insights into the structure of the universe, from the spiral nebulae to the
acid molecules which govern heredity.

But these insights were not gained by the steady advance of science
along a straight line. Mental evolution is a continuation of biological
evolution, and in various respects resembles its crooked ways. 'Evolu-
tion is known to be a wasteful, fumbling process characterized by
sudden mutations of unknown cause, by the slow grinding of selection,
and by the dead-ends of over-specialization and loss of adaptability.
"Progress'* can by definition never go wrong; evolution constantly does;
and so does the evolution of ideas, including those of "exact science".
New ideas are thrown up spontaneously like mutations; the vast
majority of them are useless, the equivalent of biological freaks without
survival-value. There is a constant struggle for survival between
competing theories in every branch of the history of thought. When we
call ideas "fertile" or "sterile", we are unconsciously guided by
biological analogy. . .

'Moreover, 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 dorninant
trend of development. After these stages of "adaptative radiations",
when the species is plastic and malleable, there usually follow periods
of stabilization and specialization along the new lineswhich again
often lead into dead ends of rigid over-specialization/ 2

But there the analogy ends. The br^ching of the evolutionist's tree
of life is a one-way process; giraffes and whales do not bisociate to give
rise to a new synthesis. The evolution of ideas, on the other hand, is a
tale of ever-repeated differentiation, specialization and reintegrations on
a higher level; a progression from primordial unity through variety to
more complex patterns of unity-in-variety.

Twenty-six Centuries of Science

If we could takes kind of grandstand view of the history of scientific
thought we would at once be struck by its discontinuity, its abrupt
changes of tempo and rhythm. The record starts in the sixth century
B.C. when we find suddenly, as if sprung from nowhere, a galaxy of
Philosophers of Nature in Miletus and Elea and Samos, discussing the
origins and evolution of the universe, its form and substance, its
structure and laws, in terms which have become forever incorporated
into our vocabulary and our matrices of thought. They were searching
for some simple, ultimate principles and primeval substances under-
lying all diversity: four elements, four humours, atoms of a single kind,
moving according to fixed laws. The Pythagoreans attempted the first
grand synthesis: they tried to weave the separate threads of religion,
medicine, astronomy, and music into a single carpet with an austere
geometrical design. That carpet is still in the making, but its basic
pattern was laid down in the three centuries of the heroic age of Greek
science between Thales and Aristotle.

After the Macedonian conquest of Greece there followed a period
of consolidation, orthodoxy, and decline. Aristode's categories
became the grammar of existence, his animal spirits ruled the
world of physics, everything worth knowing was already known, and
everything inventable already invented. The Heroic Age was guided
by the example of Prometheus stealing the fire of the gods; the
philosophers of the Hellenistic period dwelt in Plato's cave, drawing
epicycles on the wall, their backs turned to the daylight of reality.

After that there came a period of hibernation lasting for fifteen
centuries. During that time the march of science was not only halted,
but its direction reversed. M* Pyke, a contemporary philosopher of
science, wrote about 'the inability of science to go backwards once the
neutron has been discovered it remains discovered'. 3 Does it? In the
fifth century B.C. the educated classes knew that the earth was a
spherical body floating in space and spinning round its axis; a thousand
years later they thought that it was a flat disc, or a rectangle perhaps.
Similar, though less drastic examples of forgetfulness can also be shown
to have occurred in modern science.

In the twelfth century A..D. we observe the first signs of a thaw, and
during the next hundred years there are hopeful stirrings: it is the
century of Roger Bacon and Peter Peregrine, of the budding univer-
sities at Oxford and Cambridge, Salerno, Bologna, and Paris. But it is

327

228

THE ACT OF CREATION

also the century of the fatal mesalliance between Aristotelian physics and
the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Within a few generations this
'faulty synthesis' was to create a new orthodoxy, which led to another
three centuries of sterility and stagnation.

Then comes a.d. 1600 a landmark second in importance only to
600 B.C. which inaugurates the second heroic age of science: the
century of Dr. Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz,
Huyghens, Harvey, and Newton. In the next century, the eighteenth,
the speed of the advance is considerably reduced: it is a period of
assimilation, consolidation, and stock-taking, the age of the popular-
izes, classifiers, and systematizers; of Fontanelle, Linnaeus, and Buffon,
of the Philosophes and Encyclopidistes. As Pledge has remarked: 'An
observer born early in the century, and making the Grand Tour,
would have been an old man before he came across, in the Paris of
Lavoisier, anyone worthy of Newton/ 4

Finally, in the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth,
we have an explosive development of ever-increasing momentum. The
nineteenth century was the age of the most spectacular syntheses in the
history of thought of royal marriages between previously unrelated
and often hostile dynasties. The science of electricity merged with that
of magnetism.* Then electro-magnetic radiations were discovered to
account for light, colour, radiant heat, Hertzian waves. Chemistry was
swallowed up by atomic physics. The control of the body by nerves and
glands was seen to rely on electro-chemical processes. The previously
independent effluvia' or powers of nature' which had been known as
'heat', 'light', 'electric fire', mechanical motion', 'magnetic flux' were
recognized to be all convertible one into another, and to be merely
different forms of 'energy', whose total amount contained in the
universe always remained the same. Soon afterwards, the various
forms of matter, the 'elements' of chemistry, suffered the same fate,
as they were all found to be constructed out of the same building blocks
in different combinations. And lastly, these building blocks themselves
seemed to be nothing but parcels of compressed energy, packed and
patterned according to certain mathematical formulae.

The Pythagorean aspiration, to reduce 'all things to numbers',
seemed to be at last on the point of fulfilment. The advance of science
in the last century offers the panorama of a majestic river-delta, where
the various branches first separate and diverge, then follow more or less
parallel courses, in a complex pattern of cross-connections and re-
unifications, as they approach their ultimate confluence in the sea.

Creative Anarchy

Even this short and breathless gallop through the twenty-six centuries
since the dawn of scientific thought, ought to be sufficient to show that
the progress of science is neither gradual nor continuous. Each basic
advance was effected by a more or less abrupt and dramatic change:
the breaking down of frontiers between related territories, the amal-
gamation of previously separate frames of reference or experimental
techniques; the sudden falling into pattern of previously disjointed
data. Let me illustrate this process by a few further examples no
longer of individual discoveries, but of episodes in the evolution of
the collective matrices of science.

In the recurrent cycle described in the previous section I mentioned
periods of crisis and creative anarchy (corresponding to the individual's
'period of incubation'), which precede the new synthesis. The first such
crisis occurred at the very beginning of our story when the ritualized
worship of the Olympian gods and demi-gods could no longer provide
answers to the ultimate questions after the meaning of existence.
Mythology had become a 'blocked matrix , ; from the whims of Vulcan
and Poseidon man's interest turned to the nature of fire and water;
from the chariot of Helios to the motions of the sun along the ecliptic;
from the antics of Zeus and Athena to the natural causes of physical
events. The result was mtoxicating. To quote Burnet: *No sooner did
an Ionian philosopher learn half a dozen geometrical propositions and
hear that the phenomena of the heavens recur in cycles man he set to
work to look for law everywhere in nature and with an audacity
amounting to hubris to construct a system of the universe.' 5

The same audacity and hubris characterized the early seventeenth cen-
tury, when the stranglehold of the Aristotelian Schoolmen was broken,
and the solid, walled-in universe of the Middle Ages lay in shambles,
exposed to the speculative depradations of hosts of Paracelsians, Gilbert-
ians, Copernicans, and Galileans. * 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone*,
lamented John Donne; it must have been an intoxicating age to live in.

Lastly, since the discoveries of the 1920s, theoretical physics, and with
it our picture of sub-atomic and extra-galactic reality, of substance and
causality, have again reverted to a state of creative anarchy. And so the
cycle keeps repeating itself:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said let Newton be, and all was light . . .
229

230

THE ACT OF CREATION

But alas:

It did not last: the Devil howling 'Ho!
Let Einstein be!' restored the status quo?*

1 Connect, Always Connect

Out of the creative anarchy emerges the new synthesis.

I have given in previous chapters a series of examples to show how
new syntheses arise in the brains of original thinkers through the bi-
sociation of previously unconnected matrices. The parallel process on
the collective plane on the map of history is the confluence of two
branches of science which had developed independently, and did not
seem to have anything in common. 'Theprogress of science', Bronowski
wrote, 'is the discovery at each step of a new order which gives unity
to what had long seemed unlike/*

The new synthesis in the mind of the thinker may emerge suddenly,
triggered by a single 'link'; or gradually, by an accumulation of
linkages. On the map of history the 'links' are the discoveries of
individuals; and here again the process of integration may be sudden,
or the result of a series of discoveries by several people. The unification
of arithmetic and geometry analytical geometry was a one-man
show, accomplished by the formidable Descartes. The unification of
electricity and magnetism, on the other hand, took a hundred years
from 1820, when Hans Christian Oersted discovered by chance that an
electric current flowing through a wire deflected a compass needle
which happened to lie on the table, to io2r, when O. W. Richardson
explained ferro-magnetism in terms of electron-spin; and it needed a
whole series of original discoveries by Ampere, Faraday, Maxwell, and
others to act as links and bring the crowning synthesis about (see
Appendix I).

All decisive advances in the history of scientific thought can be
described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different
disciplines. Some of these historic bisociations appear, even in retro-
spect, as surprising and far-fetched as the combination of cabbages and
kings. What lesson, for instance, could one expect neurophysiology to
derive from astronomy? And yet, here it is. In 1796 a minor scandal
occurred at the Greenwich Observatory: Maskelyne, the Astronomer
Royal, dismissed one of his assistants because the latter's observations
differed from his own by half a second to a whole second. Ten years

THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS

231

later the German astronomer Bessel read about this incident in a
history of the Greenwich Observatory. Bessel, who combined a
highly original mind with meticulous precision in his observations,
was puzzled by the frequent occurrence of similar timing mistakes
by astronomers. It was a typical case of a 'shift of attention* from
the nuisance aspect of a trivial phenomenon to the investigation of its
causes.

After ten years of comparing his own records with those of several
other astronomers, Bessel was able to prove that there existed systematic
and consistent differences between the speed with which each of them
reacted to observed events; and he also succeeded in establishing the
characteristic reaction-time called 'the personal equation of several
of his colleagues.

These studies were continued by other astronomers over the next
thirty years, in the course of which the development of more precise,
automatic recording instruments made it possible to arrive at 'absolute
personal equations'. Finally, fifty years after Bessel's discovery, von
Helmholtz published a paper showing that the rate of conduction of
impulses in nerves was of a definite, measurable order and not, as had
previously been assumed, practically instantaneous. Helmholtz was well
acquainted with the work that astronomers had done on personal
equations, and his experiments on the propagation of impulses in motor
and sensory nerves followed their procedure and techniques. Helm-
holtz's discovery inaugurated the era of 'mental chronometry', and was
a decisive step in the progress of neurophysiology and experimental
psychology.

In a similar manner the basic advances in our knowledge of infectious
diseases were mostly due to the importation of experimental techniques
which had been developed for quite different purposes such as the use
of filtering procedures, microscopic techniques, tissue-cultures and the
statistical methods employed in genetics.

Bartlett, in Thinking An Experimental and Social Study (1958), gave
a series of similar illustrations. The conclusions at which he arrived
seem to paraphrase the thesis of the present theory that bisociation is
the essence of creative activity:

As experimental science has gained wider and wider fields, and
won increasing recognition, it has often happened that critical stages
for advance are reached when what has been called one body of
knowledge can be brought into close and en^ctive relationship with

232

THE ACT OF CREATION

what has been treated as a different, and a largely or wholly inde-
pendent, scientific discipline.

, . . The alert experimenter is always on the lookout for points and
areas of overlap, between things and processes which natural and
unaided observations has tended to treat merely, or chiefly, as
different. . . .

One of the most important features of these turning points in
experimental development is that they very often introduce methods
and instrumentation new to the field of research involved, but
already developed in some other region of investigation. . . .

The winding progress of any branch of experimental science is
made up essentially by a relatively small number of original inquiries,
which may be widely separated, followed, as a rule, by a very large
number of routine inquiries. The most important feature of original
experimental thinking is the discovery of overlap and agreement
where formerly only isolation and difference were recognized. This
usually means that when any experimental science is ripe for marked
advance, a mass of routine thinking belonging to an immediately
preceding phase has come near to wearing itself out by exploiting
a limited range of techniques to establish more and more minute and
specialized derail. A stage has been reached in which finding out
further details adds litde or nothing to what is known already. . . .

However, at the same time, perhaps in some other branch of
science, and perhaps in some hitherto disconnected part of what is
treated as the same branch, there are other techniques generating
their own problems, opening up their own gaps. An original mind,
never wholly contained in any one conventionally enclosed field of
interest, now seizes upon the possibility that there may be some
unsuspected overlap, takes the risk whether there is or not, and gives
the old subject-matter a new look. Routine starts again. . . .

The conditions for original thinking are when two or more
streams of research begin to offer evidence that they may converge
and so in some manner be combined. It is the combination which
can generate new directions of research, and through these it may
be found that basic units and activities may have properties not
before suspected which open up a lot of new questions for experi-
mental study. 6

But I must add to this a word of warning. Except when it is merely a
matter of borrowing, so to speak, an existing technique or laboratory

THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS 233

equipment from a neighbouring science (as in most of Bartlett's
examples), the integration of matrices is not a simple operation of
adding together. It is a process of mutual interference and cross-
fertilization, in the course of which both matrices are transformed in
various ways and degrees. Hidden axioms, implied in the old codes,
suddenly stand revealed and are subsequently dropped; the rules of the
game are revised before they enter as sub-rules into the composite
game. When Einstein bisociated energy and matter, both acquired a
new look in the process.

The Thinking Cap

I have repeatedly mentioned 'shifts of attention' to previously
neglected aspects of experience which make familiar phenomena appear
in a new, revealing light, seen through spectacles of a different colour.
At the decisive turning points in the history of science, all the data in
the field, unchanged in themselves, may fall into a new pattern, and be
given a new interpretation, a new theoretical frame.

By stressing the importance of the interpretation (or reinterpretation)
of facts, I may have given the impression of underestimating the
importance of collecting facts, of having emphasized the value of theory-
making at the expense of the empirical aspect of science an unfor-
givable heresy in the eyes of Positivists, Behaviourists, and other
theorists of the anti-theory school. Needless to say, only a fool could
belittle the importance of observation and experiment or wish to
revert to Aristotelian physics which was all speculation and no experi-
ment. But the collecting of data is a discriminating activity, like the
picking of flowers, and unlike the action of a lawn-mower; and the
selection of flowers considered worth picking, as well as their arrange-
ment into a bouquet, are ultimately matters of personal taste. As T. H.
Huxley has said in an oft-quoted passage:

Those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and
anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost
every step therein has been made by . . . the invention of a hypothesis
which, though verifiable, often had little foundation to start with

Sir Lawrence Bragg is the only physicist who shared a Nobel Prize
with his own father for their joint work on analysing crystal

234

THE ACT OF CREATION

structures by means of X-rays, doubtless an eminently factual pre-
occupation, which took two lifetimes. Yet in his book on The History of
Science he too concluded that the essence of science 'lies not in dis-
covering facts, but in discovering new ways of diinking about them'. 7
New facts do emerge constantly; but they are found as the result of a
search in a definite direction, based on theoretical considerations as
Galle discovered the planet Neptune, which nobody had seen before, by
directing his telescope at the celestial region which Leverrier's calcula-
tions had indicated.* This is admittedly an extreme case of observation
guided by theory; but it remains nevertheless true that it is not enough
for the scientist to keep his eyes open unless he has an idea of what he is
looking for.

The telescope is, of course, the supreme eye-opener and fact-finder
in astronomy; but it is rarely appreciated that the Copernican revolu-
tion came before the invention of the telescope and so did Kepler's
New Astronomy. The instruments which Copernicus used for observing
the stars were less precise than those of the Alexandrian astronomers
Hipparchus and Ptolemy, on whose data Copernicus built his theory;
and he knew no more about the actual motions of stars and planets
than they had known:

Insofar as actual knowledge is concerned, Copernicus was no
better off, and in some respects worse off, than the Greek astronomers
of Alexandria who lived in the time of Jesus Christ. They had the
same data, the same instruments, the same know-how in geometry,
as he did. They were giants of *exact science'; yet they failed to see
what Copernicus saw after, and Aristarchus had. seen before them:
that the planets' motions were obviously governed by the sun. 8

Similarly, Harvey's revolutionary discoveries were made before the
microscope was developed into a serviceable tool; and Einstein
formulated his 'Special Theory of Relativity' in 1905 based on data
which, as I have already said, were by no means new. Poincare*, for
instance, Einstein's senior by twenty-five years, had held all the loose
threads in his hands, and the reasons for his failure to tie them together
are still a matter of speculation among scientists. To quote Taton:

Poincare, who had so much wider a mathematical background
than Einstein, then a young assistant in the Federal Patents Office of
Berne, knew all the elements required for such a synthesis, of which

THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS

he had felt the urgent need and for which he had laid the first
foundations. Nevertheless, he did not dare to explain his thoughts,
and to derive all the consequences, thus missing the decisive step
separating him from the real discovery of the principle of relativity. 9

Without the hard Htde bits of marble which are called 'facts' or
'data' one cannot compose a mosaic; what matters, however, are not
so much the individual bits, but the successive patterns into which you
arrange them, then break them up and rearrange them. 'We shall
find', wrote Butterfield on the opening page of his history of the
Scientific Revolution, 'that in both celestial and terrestrial physics
which hold the strategic place in the whole movement change is
brought about, not by new observations or additional evidence in the
first instance, but by transpositions that were taking place inside the
minds of the scientists themselves. ... Of all forms of mental activity,
the most difficult to induce even in the minds of the young, who may
be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the art of handling the
same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of
relations with one another by giving them a different framework, all
of which virtually means putting on a different kind of thinking-cap
for the moment. It is easy to teach anybody a new fact about Richelieu,
but it needs light from heaven to enable a teacher to break the old
framework in which the student has been accustomed to seeing his
Richelieu/ 10

Once more we are facing the stubborn powers of habit, and the anti-
thesis of habit and originality. New facts alone do not make a new
theory; and new facts alone do not destroy an outlived theory. In both
cases it requires creative originality to achieve the task. The facts which
proved that the planetary motions depended on the sun have been
staring into the face of astronomers throughout the ages but they
preferred to look away.

The Pathology of Thought

I have discussed 'snowblindness' and faulty integrations on the
individual level. In the evolution of the collective matrices of science,
similar aberrations occur on an historic scale, and are transmitted from
one generation to the next sometimes over a number of centuries.
Indeed, some of the most important discoveries consisted in the

236 THE ACT OF CREATION

elimination of psychological road-blocks in uncovering what had
always been there.

The classic example of a mental road-block, extending over two
millennia, is one to which I have repeatedly alluded before. If one had
to sum up the history of scientific ideas about the universe in a single
sentence, one could only say that up to the seventeenth century our
vision was Aristotelian, after that Newtonian. It would, of course, be
naive to blame the giant figure of the Stagyrite for crystallizing trends
in Greek thought which were originated by others, and reflected the
intellectual mood of Greece at the disastrous period before and im-
mediately after the Macedonian conquest. The reasons why his absurd
theory of physics acquired such a firm hold over medieval Europe I
have discussed elsewhere; 10 " they do not enter into our present
context.

The central postulate of the theory was that a moving body will
immediately revert to immobility when it ceases to be pushed or pulled
along by a second body, its 'mover'. Now an ox-cart on a muddy road
will indeed come to a halt when its movers, the oxen, are unyoked. But
an arrow will fly through the air once the initial impulse has been
imparted to it whereas, according to Aristotelian physics, it should
have dropped to earth the very instant it parted from the bow, its
mover. The answer to this objection was that the initial motion of the
arrow, while still on the bow, created a disturbance in the air, a kind of
vortex, which now became the arrow's 'mover', and pulled it along its
course. Not before the fourteenth century was the further objection
raised that if the arrow (or spear, or catapulted stone) was pulled by an
air-current, it could never fly against the wind.

This inability to perceive that a moving body tends to persist in its
course was the psychological road-block which prevented the emer-
gence of a true science of physics from the fourth century B.C. to the
seventeenth century A,D. Yet every soldier who threw a spear felt that
the thing had a momentum of its own and so, of course, did the
victim whom it hit; and every traveller in a post-coach which came to
an abrupt halt, had experienced to his sorrow that his motion con-
tinued after the mover's had stopped. The experience, the bodily 'feel'
of inertial momentum is as old as mankind but it was prevented from
becoming conscious and explicit knowledge by the mental block built
into the collective matrix. Even Galileo saw only part of the truth: he
thought that a moving body, left to itself in empty space, would persist
not in straight, but in circular motion. Such are the difficulties of

THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS

237

clearing away the man-made heaps of rubble under which some simple
truth lies buried.

The necessity for every moving body to be constantly accompanied
and pushed along by a 'mover' also applied to the stars; it created a
'universe in which unseen hands had to be in constant operation. 11 The
planets had to be rolled along their orbits, like beer-barrels, by a host of
angels; even Kepler needed a heavenly broomstick, wielded by the sun,
to sweep them round their path. Yet here again, the knowledge of
centrifugal force has always existed, ever since children swung stones
round at the end of a string; and this knowledge had even been
explicitly formulated in antiquity. In his treatise On the Face in the Disc
of the Moon Plutarch, who took a great interest in science and particu-
larly in astronomy, wrote that the moon was of solid stuff, like the
earth; and that the reason why it did not fall down on the earth, in
spite of its weight, was as follows:

. . . The moon has a security against falling in her very motion and
the swing of her revolutions, just as objects put in slings are prevented
from falling by the circular whirl; for everything is carried along by the
motion natural to it if it is not deflected by anything else. Thus the moon
is not carried down by her weight because her natural tendency is
frustrated by her revolution. 12 (my italics)

The translation is by Heath, who remarks: 'This is practically
Newton's first Law of Motion.' It is curious that this passage has
aroused so little comment.

Perhaps the most disastrous feature of the Aristotelian system was its
denial that the whole universe was made out of the same basic stuff (as
Parmenides and the Atomists had asserted before him) and to split the
world into two parts, divided by a kind of metaphysical iron curtain.
The 'sublunary' region (the earth and its vicinity) was made of four
unstable elements, the sides of a fifth, permanent ether; the sublunary
region was infected with the vice of change an abominable slum where
generation, corruption, and decay never stopped, whereas on the other
side of the curtain fifty-five celestial intelligences were spinning round
as many pure, crystalline spheres, carrying the planets and stars in their
unchanging circular orbits.

It was the most dramatic splitting operation the world had seen since
Lucifer was expelled from heaven; and it was unavoidably followed by
a series of divorces and remarriages between incompatible partners.

2j8 THE ACT OF CREATION

Celestial mechanics became dissociated from sublunary physics and
married to theology when Aristotle's 'first mover' became identified
with God, and his star-spinning spirits with the hierarchy of angels.
Terrestrial physics, in its turn, was divorced from mathematics, and
married to animism. The most striking fact about pre-Renaissance
science is indeed its complete indifference to quantitative measurements
and numerical relations not to mention experiment and observation;
and its obsession with ascribing animate powers to inanimate objects.
Stones fell to earth because it was their natural home, as flames rose
upward because their home was in the sky; and the stone accelerated its
fall because it was hurrying home as horses hurry to their stable. All
motion, all change, was due to a purposeful striving of objects to realize
what was potentially inherent in their nature, to move 'from potency to
act' a principle derived by specious analogy from embryonic develop-
ment. It took about three centuries (from Occam to Newton) to undo
the tangled mess which these divorces and mesalliances had brought
about.

In the healthy evolution of a science, we observe a branching out of
specialized, relatively autonomous lines of research; and a parallel
process of confluences and integrations mediated by the discovery of
universal principles underlying variety. But we also find pathological
developments of a rather drastic and persistent kind in the history of
scientific thought collective mental blockages which keep apart what
belongs together, and lead to the segregation of 'closed systems'. The
healthy periods in the growth of a science remind one of the differentia-
tion of structure and integration of function in organic development.
In the unhealthy periods, on the other hand, we find dissociation instead
of differentiation, and faulty integrations.

Some of the latter were the result of shotgun-marriages, as it were
imposed from outside, by religious or political pressures. Medieval
astronomy had to embrace theology, Soviet biology was wedded to a
crude form of Lamarckism. The development of science cannot be
isolated from its historic context, from the climate of a given age or
civilization; it influences and is influenced by its philosophy, religion,
art, social organization, economic needs. But scientific thinking
nevertheless enjoys a considerable amount of autonomy; its tortuous
progress is unpredictable, its victories and defeats are of its own making.
The reason why Copernicus postponed the publication of his theory
till the end of his life was not fear of the Catholic Church (which
encouraged and protected him) but the fear of ridicule from his fellow

THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS

239

astronomers. Galileos conflict with the Church could have probably
been avoided if he had been endowed with less passion and more
diplomacy; but long before that conflict started, he had incurred the
implacable hostility of the orthodox Aristotelians who held key-
positions at the Italian universities. Religious and political oppression
play only an incidental part in the history of science; its erratic course
and recurrent crises are caused by internal factors. 13

One of the conspicuous handicaps is the conservatism of the scientific
mind in its corporate aspect. The collective matrix of a science at a
given time is determined by a kind of establishment, which includes
universities, learned societies, and, more recendy, the editorial offices
of technical journals. Like other establishments, they are consciously or
unconsciously bent on preserving the status quo partly because un-
orthodox innovations are a threat to their authority, but also because
of the deeper fear that their laboriously erected intellectual edifice
might collapse under the impact. Corporate orthodoxy has been the
curse of genius from Aristarchus to Galileo, to Harvey, Darwin, and
Freud; throughout the centuries its phalanxes have sturdily defended
habit against originality. The uses of hypnotism in dental surgery,
child-birth, etc., are regarded as a modern discovery. In fact, Esdaile,
who lived from 1808 to 1859, carried out three hundred major opera-
tions under 'Mesmeric trance'; but since Mesmer had been declared an
impostor, medical journals refused to print Esdaile's papers. In 1842
Ward amputated a leg painlessly under hypnotic trance and made a
Report to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society. The Society
refused to believe him. One of its most eminent members argued that
the patient had merely pretended not to feel the pain, and the note of
the paper having been read was struck from the minutes of the
Society.

The martyrology of science mentions only a few conspicuous cases
which ended in public tragedies. Robert Mayer, co-discoverer of the
Principle of the Conservation of Energy, went insane because of lack
of recognition for his work. So did Ignaz Semmelweiss, who dis-
covered, in 1847, that the cause of childbed fever was infection of the
patient with the 'cadaveric materiar which surgeons and students
carried on their hands. As an assistant at the General Hospital in Vienna,
Semmelweiss introduced the strict rule of washing hands in chlorinated
lime water before entering the ward. Before this innovation, one out of
every eight women in the ward had died of puerperal fever; immedi-
ately afterwards mortality fell to one in thirty, and the next year to one

240

THE ACT OF CREATION

in a hundred. Semmelweiss's reward was to be hounded out of Vienna
by the medical professionwhich was moved, apart from stupidity, by
resentment of the suggestion that they might be carrying death on their
hands. He went to Budapest, but made little headway with his doctrine,
denounced his opponents as murderers, became raving mad, was put
into a restraining jacket, and died in a mental hospital.

Apart from a few lurid cases of this kind we have no record of the
coundess lesser tragedies, no statistics on the numbers of lives wasted in
frustration and despair, of discoveries which passed unnoticed. The
history of science has its Pantheon of celebrated revolutionaries and
its catacombs, where the unsuccessful rebels lie, anonymous and
forgotten.

Limits of Confirmation

From the days of Greece to the present that history echoes with the
sound and fury of passionate controversies. This fact in itself is sufficient
proof that the same 'bundle of data*, and even the same 'crucial experi-
ment', can be interpreted in more than one way.

To mention only a few of the more recent among these historic
controversies: the cosmology of Tycho de Brahe explained the facts, as
they were known at the time, just as well as the system of Copernicus.
In the dispute between Galileo and the Jesuit Father Sarsi on the nature
of comets we now know that both were wrong, and that Galileo was
more wrong than his forgotten opponent. Newton upheld a corpus-
culary, Huyghens a wave-theory of light. La certain types of experiment
the evidence favoured Newton, in other types Huyghens; at present
we tend to believe that both are true. Leibniz derided gravity and
accused Newton of introducting 'occult qualities and rniracles' into
science. The theories of Kekule and Van t HofF on the structure of
organic molecules were denounced by leading authorities of the period
as a 'tissue of fancies/ 14 Liebig and Wohler who had synthesized
urea from anorganic materialswere among the greatest chemists of
the nineteenth century; but they poured scorn on those of their
colleagues who maintained that the yeast which caused alcoholic
fermentation consisted of living cellular organisms. They even went so
far as to publish, in 1839, an elaborate skit in the Annalen der Chemie, in
which yeast was described 'with a considerable degree of anatomical
realism, as consisting of eggs which developed into minute atiimaU

THE EVOLUTION OB IDEAS

shaped like distilling apparatus. These creatures took in sugar as food
and digested it into carbonic acid and alcohol, which were separately
excreted.' 15 The great controversy on fermentation lasted nearly forty
years, and overlapped with the even more passionate dispute on
'spontaneous generation the question whether living organisms
could be created out of dead matter. In both Pasteur figured promin-
endy; and in both controversies the philosophical preconceptions of
'vitalists' opposed to 'mechanists* played a decisive part in designing
and interpreting the experiments most of which wre inconclusive
and could be interpreted either way.

I have compared the nineteenth century to a majestic river-delta, the
great confluence o previously separate branches of knowledge. This
was the reason for its optimism and its hubris; the general convergence
of the various sciences created the conviction that within the foreseeable
future the whole world, including the mind of man, would be 'redu-
cible" to a few basic mechanical laws. Yet as we enter our present
century, we find that in spite of this great process of unification,
virtually every main province of science is torn by even deeper
controversies than before.

Thus, for instance, the most exact of the exact sciences has been split,
for the last twenty years, into two camps: those who assert (with Bohr,
Heisenberg, von Neumann) that strict physical causality must be
replaced by statistical probability because subatomic events are in-
determinate and unpredictable; and those who assert (with Einstein,
Planck, Bohm, and Vigier) that there is order hidden beneath the
apparent disorder, governed by as yet undiscovered laws, because they
'cannot believe that God plays with dice'. Another controversy
opposes the upholders of the *big-bang theory', according to which the
universe originated in the explosion of a single, densely packed mass
some thirty thousand million years ago and has been expanding ever
since and the upholders of the 'steady-state theory*, according to
which matter is continually being created in a stable cosmos. In genetics,
the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy maintains that evolution is the result of
chance mutations, against the neo-Lamarckian heretics, who maintain
that evolution is not a dice-game either that some of the improve-
ments due to adaptive effort can be transmitted by heredity to succes-
sive generations. In neuro-physiology, one school maintains that there
is rigid localization of functions in the brain, another, that the brain
works in a more flexible manner. In mathematics, 'mtrationists* are
aligned against 'formalists'; in the medical profession, opinions are

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THE ACT OF CREATION

divided regarding the psychological or somatological origin of a great
number of diseases; therapeutic methods vary accordingly, and each
school is subdivided into factions.

Some of these controversies were decided by cumulative evidence in
favour of one of the competing theories. In other cases the contradiction
between thesis and antithesis was resolved in a synthesis of a higher
order. But what we call 'scientific evidence' can never confirm that a
theory is true; it can only confirm that it is more true than another.

I have repeatedly emphasized this point not in order to run down
science, but to run down the imaginary barrier which separates 'science'
from 'art' in the contemporary mind. The main obstacle which
prevents us from seeing that the two domains form a single continuum
is the belief that the scientist, unlike the artist, is in a position to attain
to 'objective truth* by submitting theories to experimental tests. In
fact, as I have said before, experimental evidence can confirm certain
expectations based on a theory, but it cannot confirm the theory itself.
The astronomers of Babylon were able to make astonishingly precise
predictions: they calculated the length of the year with a deviation of
only o-ooi per cent from the correct value; their figures relating to
the motions of sun and moon, which form a continuous record starting
with the reign of Nabonasser 747 B.C., were the foundation on which
the Ptolemaic, and later the Copernican, systems were built. Theirs
was certainly an exact science, and it 'worked'; but that does not prove
the truth of their theories, which asserted that the planets were gods
whose motions had a direct influence on the health of men and the
fortunes of states. Columbus put his theories to a rather remarkable
experimental test; what did the evidence prove? He and his con-
temporaries navigated with the aid of planetary tables, computed by
astronomers who thought the planets ran on circles, knew nothing of
gravity and elliptic orbits, yet the theory worked though they had
the wrong idea why it worked. Time and again new drugs against
various diseases were tried in hospital wards, and improvement in the
patients' condition was considered experimental evidence for the
efikacity of the drug; until the use of dummy pills indicated that other
explanations were equally valid. Eysenck has questioned the value of
psycho therapy in general, by suggesting that the statistical evidence for
successful cures should be reinterpreted in the light of the corresponding
numbers of spontaneous recoveries of untreated patients. His conclu-
sions may be quite wrong; but his method of argument has many
honourable precedents in the history of science. To quote Polanyi:

THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS

243

For many prehistoric centuries the theories embodied in magic and
witchcraft appeared to be strikingly confirmed by events in the eyes
of those who believed in magic and witchcraft. . . . The destruction
of belief in witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
was achieved in the face of an overwhelming, and still rapidly
growing body of evidence for its reality. Those who denied that
witches existed did not attempt to explain this evidence at all, but
successfully urged that it be disregarded. Glanvill, who was one of
the founders of the Royal Society, not unreasonably denounced
this proposal as unscientific, on the ground of the professed empiri-
cism of contemporary science. Some of the unexplained evidence for
witchcraft was indeed buried for good, and only struggled painfully
to light two centuries later when it was eventually recognized as the
manifestation of hypnotic powers. 16

It is generally thought that physical theories are less ambiguous than
medical and psychological theories, and can be confirmed or refuted by
harder and cleaner experimental tests. Speaking in relative terms, this
is, of course, true; physics is much closer to the 'ultra-violet' than to the
'infra-red' end of the continuous spectrum of the sciences and arts. But
a last example will show on what shaky empirical evidence* a generally
accepted theory can rest; and in this case I am talking of the cornerstone
of modern physics, Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

According to the story told in the textbooks, the initial impulse
which set Einstein's mind working was a famous experiment carried
out by Michelson and Morley in 1887. They measured the speed oflight
and found, so we are told, that it was the same whether the light
travelled in the direction of the earth or in the opposite direction;
although in the first case it ought to have appeared slower, in the
second faster, because in the first case the earth was 'catching up* with
the light-ray, in the second was racing away from it. This unexpected
result, so the story goes, convinced Einstein that it was nonsense to talk
of the earth moving through space which was at rest, as a body moves
through a stationary liquid (the ether); the 1 constancy of the speed of
light proved that Newton's concept of an absolute frame of space, which
allowed us to distinguish between 'motion and 'rest*, had to he dropped.

Now this official account of the genesis of Relativity is not fact but
fiction. In the first place, on Einstein's own testimony the Michelson-
Morley experiment 'had no role in the foundation of the theory*. That
foundation was laid on theoretical, indeed speculative, considerations.

244

THE ACT OF CREATION

And in the second place, the famous experiment did not in fact confirm,
but contradicted Einstein's theory. The speed of light was not at all the
same in all directions. Light-signals sent 'ahead* along the earth's orbit
travelled slower than signals 'left behind'. It is true that the difference
amounted to only about one-fourth of the magnitude to be expected
on the assumption that the earth was drifting through a stationary
ether. But the 'ether-drift' still amounted to the respectable velocity of
about five miles per second. The same results were obtained by D. C.
Miller and his collaborators, who repeated the Michelson-Morley
experiments, with more precise instruments, in a series of experiments
extending over twenty-five years (1902 to 1926). The rest of the story
is best told by quoting Polanyi again:

The layman, taught to revere scientists for their absolute respect
for the observed facts, and for the judiciously detached and purely
provisional manner in which they hold scientific theories (always
ready to abandon a theory at the sight of any contradictory evidence)
might well have thought that, at Miller's announcement of this
overwhelming evidence of a positive effect' in his presidential
address to the American Physical Society on December 29th, 1925,
his audience would have instandy abandoned the theory of relativity.
Or, at the very least, that scientists wont to look down from the
pinnacle of their intellectual humility upon the rest of dogmatic
mankind might suspend judgement in this matter until Miller's
results could be accounted for without impairing the theory of
relativity. But no: by that time they had so well closed their minds
to any suggestion which threatened the new rationality achieved by
Einstein's world-picture, that it was almost impossible for them to
think again in different terms. Little attention was paid to the
experiments, the evidence being set aside in the hope that it would
one day turn out to be wrong. 17

So it may. Or it may not. Miller devoted his life to disproving
Relativity -and on face value, so far as experimental data are concerned,
he succeeded.* A whole generation later, W. Kantor of the U.S. Navy
Electronics Laboratory repeated once more the 'crucial experiment'.
Again his instruments were far more accurate than Miller's, and again
they seemed to confirm that the speed of light was not independent from
the motion of the observeras Einstein's theory demands. And yet the
vast majority of physicists are convinced and I think rightly so that

THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS

24s

Einstein's universe is superior to Newton's. Partly this trust is based on
evidence less controversial than the 'crucial' experiments that I have
mentioned; but mainly on the intuitive feeling that the whole picture
'looks right', regardless of some ugly spots that will, with God's help,
vanish some day. One of the most prominent among them, Max Born,
who inclines to a positivistic philosophy, betrayed his true feelings,
when he hailed the advent of Relativity because it made the universe of
science 'more beautiful and grander'.

Paul Dirac, undoubtedly the greatest living British physicist, was
even more outspoken on the subject. He and my late friend Erwin
Schrodinger shared the Nobel Prize in 1933 as founding fathers of
quantum mechanics. In an article 17 * on the development of modern
physics, Dirac related how Schrodinger discovered his famous wave
equation of the electron. 'Schrodinger got his equation by pure thought,
looking for some beautiful generalization . . . and not by keeping close
to the experimental developments of the subject', Dirac remarks
approvingly. He then continues to describe how Schrodinger, when he
tried to apply his equation, 'got results that did not agree with experi-
ment. The disagreement arose because at that time it was not known
that the electron has a spin.' This was a great disappointment to
Schrodinger, and induced him to publish, instead of his original
formula, an imperfect (non-relativistic) approximation. Only later on,
by taking the electron's spin into account, did he revert to his original
equation. Dirac concludes:

I think there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more
important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit
experiment. If Schrodinger had been more confident of his work, he
could have published it some months earlier, and he could have
published a more accurate equation ... It seems that if one is working
from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if
one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If
there is not complete agreement between the results of one's work
and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged,
because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are
not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with
further developments of the theory . . .

In other words, a physicist should not allow his subjective conviction
that he is on the right track to be shaken by contrary experimental

246 THE ACT OF CREATION

data. And vice versa, its apparent confirmation by experimental data
does not necessarily prove a theory to be right. There is a rather
hideous trick used in modern quantum mechanics called the 'renorma-
lization method*. Diracs comment on it is:

I am inclined to suspect that the renormalization theory is some-
thing that will not survive in the future, and that the remarkable
agreement between its results and experiment should be looked on
as a fluke . . .

I think I have said enough to show that 'scientific evidence' is a rather
elastic term, and that Verification' is always a relative affair. The criteria
of truth differ from the criteria of beauty in that the former refer to
cognitive, the latter to emotive processes; but neither of them are
absolute. 'The evidence proves' is a statement which is supposed to
confer on Science a privileged intimacy with truth which art can never
hope to attain. But 'the evidence proves' that the statement in quotes is
always based on an act of faith. To quote K. R. Popper:

The old scientific ideal of episteme -of absolutely certain, demon-
strable knowledge has proved to be an idol. The demand for
scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific state-
ment must remain tentative for ever. It may indeed be corroborated,
but every corroboration is relative to other statements which, again,
are tentative. Only in our subjective experiences of conviction, in
our subjective faith, can we be 'absolutely certain'. 18

Fashions in Science

Controversy is the yeast which keeps science in lively fermentation.
But its progress is also beset with pseudo-controversies which appear
to reflect differences of opinion, whereas in reality they only reflect
differences of emphasis on single aspects of a complex process at the
expense of others. Nature and nurture are evidently complementary
factors in shaping an individual's appearance and character; yet a whole
library could be filled with the disputes between proponents of 'here-
dity is all' and 'environment is all'. Quantitative measurements were
virtually ignored in pre-Newtonian physics; today even psychology is
obsessed with quantity, and presumes to measure human minds by

THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS

247

LQ. ratings and character-parameters. Often a branch of science
assumes a new look* because its pundits have put on, not a new type
of thinking cap but a fashionable hat. We find in the history of science
as many fashions, crazes, and 'schools' as in the history of literature or
interior decoration. The Ionians loved discussing whether the basic
stuff of the universe was water, air, or fire; the alchemists were hypno-
tized by the properties of sulphur, salt, and mercury; the invention of
the Ley den jar threw scientists all over the world into such excitement
that to die by electric stroke appeared an enviable fate. In medicine,
fads, fashions, and fancies chase one another tirelessly, from the barber's
horror-shop to the serene citadels in Harley Street. They have always
been an easy target 'for satire; the difficulty in this disturbed border-
province is to distinguish between the quack who consciously deludes
the patient, and the sincere fanatic who deludes himself into believing
that one particular aspect, organ, or function represents the whole, and
that a partial remedy is an all-cure.

A more positive aspect of the changes of fashion is that its pendular
motions from one extreme to another occasionally result in establishing
a more balanced view. One of the remarkable achievements of Pasteur
was that, having established against considerable opposition the germ-
theory of disease and made the medical profession 'microbe-conscious',
he changed the emphasis in his writings from 'figure* to 'background 9 ,
from the microbe itself to the environment in which the microbe
operates. As Dubos puts it:

Far from being hypnotized with the idea that micro-organisms are
the only factors of importance in medicine, Pasteur knew that men
as well as animals, in health or in disease, must always be considered
as a whole and in relation to their environment hi all his public-
cations ... he repeatedly stated the thesis almost as an obsession
that the activities of micro-organisms can be controlled, not only by
acting on them direcdy, but also by modifying the environment in
which they operate. 19

'Environment' to Pasteur meant the whole range of conditions from
proper sanitation, through aseptic surgery, to the patient's bodily and
mental state. Much of this has become a fashionable truism today, but
it was not in the days of Victorian medicine; and even today the lesson
has not sunk in sufficiently, otherwise the mass-production of
'super-hygienic* food in sterilized wrappings would be recognized as

24$

THE ACT OF CREATION

detrimental to man's internal environmentby depriving it of the
imm unizing effect of ingesting a healthy amount of muck and bugs.

I have talked more about physics than the other sciences, because it is
regardedboth by its practitioners and the awe-stricken lay public, as
the paragon of objectivity. In the sciences of life the subjective, and
indeed emotive factor, is of course much more in evidence. When it
comes to psychology, fashion seems to be almost the dominant factor
which determines into which channels the research efforts of thousands
of hopeful graduates in the universities of the world will be directed. It
seems doubtful whether the doctrines of the hostile schools of analytical
psycho therapy differ as fundamentally as their practitioners believe, or
mainly by accent and emphasis; and it is becoming increasingly obvious
that the therapist's personality is a more decisive factor than the school
to which he belongs. But even on the apparently firmer ground of
Experimental Psychology and learning Theory, the history of the last
fifty years shows a bewildering succession of changing fashions in
experimental design, technical jargon, and field of interest. English
associanism; the Wurzburg school with its emphasis on introspection;
Watsonian Behaviourism which declared introspection a heresy;
Gestalt-theory stressing holism and insight; Neo-Behaviourism in its
more sophisticated guise none of them can claim to represent a com-
prehensive theory of the phenomenon Man or the phenomenon Rat,
Cat, Ape, for that matter. Rather it looks as if each school had focussed
its gaze, or collective squint, on a single aspect or slice of human
nature, designed its experiments and formulated its questions in such a
way that other aspects never had a chance to enter the picture. If one
goes on sowing cabbage seeds, one cannot expect them to grow into
mimosas but that hardly gives one a right to denounce belief in the
existence of mimosas as a superstition; and if one puts a creature into a
Skinner Box, it will behave as one expects a creature in a Skinner Box
to behave with certain quantitative variations which are gratdfyingly
measurable, but still refer to behaviour in a Skinner Box.

Boundaries of Science

I have emphasized, at the risk of repetitiveness, the irrational factors
in scientific thought, first in their positive aspect: the intuitive leap, the
reader pour mtettx sauter, then in their negative aspects: snowblindness,
closed systems, faulty integrations.

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249

These features are reflected, on a magnified scale, in the evolution of
every science as a corporate body. Their histories refute the naive belief
that progress in science is an orderly, rational affair, represented by a
continuous curve which approaches the ultimate truth by ever closer
approximations; or as we are often told that our wisdom increases
in a cumulative manner, like the steady rise of the water-level in a
reservoir.

In reality progress is neither continuous nor cumulative in the strict
sense. If it were continuous, there would be no 'revolutionary' dis-
coveries, no discarding of discredited theories and sudden changes of
direction a continuous curve has no abrupt brakes, it is not a zig-zag
line.

Nor is progress cumulative in a simple and direct way. The walls of
the reservoir the frame of reference into which new data are poured
are periodically changing their shape: narrowing, expanding, curving
this way or that; pipes are built to connect with other reservoirs of
knowledge, while rusty connections are sealed off. Moreover, the
reservoir is leaky and wasteful: gallons of knowledge are forgotten,
discoveries 'stillborn or smothered at birth'.*

It is also asserted that science moves in progressively closer approxi-
mations to truth, like a curve approaching its asymptote, even though
it will reach it only in infinity. But this statement is rather ambiguous
and leads to the frequent confusion between progress in exactitude of
observations and measurements, with progress in the explanatory power
of theories which is an altogether different affair. Tycho de Brahe's
observations of the motions of the planets represent a definite advance
in so far as precision is concerned. Yet his theory of the solar system
was not an advance, but a retreat from Copernicus. Einstein's formula
of gravity looks like a small adjustment to Newton's approximation,
but it implies a radically different conception of the universe.

The bubble chamber is a kind of aquarium window into the sub-
atomic world. It provides us with photographs of the condensation
trails, like jet trails in the sky, of what we take to be the elementary
particles of matter: electrons, neutrons, mesons, muons, etc., of some
forty different varieties. But the particles themselves can of course
never be seen, their inferred lifespan often amounts to no more than
a millionth of a millionth second, they ceaselessly transform them-
selves into different kinds of particles, and the physicists ask us to re-
nounce thinking of them in terms of identity, causality, tangibility,
or shape in a word, to renounce thinking hi intelligible terms, and

250

THE ACT OF CHEATION

to confine it to mathematical symbols. The rapid, continuous increase
in the precision and power of our methods for exploring and ex-
ploiting nature is so impressive that we are apt to forget the discon-
tinuity and periodic upheavals in the formation of explanatory
theories.

No doubt the modern scientist knows more than Archimedes; and
no doubt the modern novelist has a wider range of experience than
Homer, and more precise tools to analyse human thoughts and emo-
tions. But neither of them arrived at their present station by the
shortest way; and though both of them have solved many riddles and
attained to important part-truths, neither of them is sure whether the
present direction of lis zig-zag course leads him towards a 'closer
approximation. Nor is the scientist in a much better position to as-
certain the correctness of his course. He, too, must ultimately rely on
his intuitions, and the interpretation which he puts on his bundle of
data will remain open to controversy.

In the symbolic year 1899 the foremost German biologist Ernst
Haeckel published a best-selling book The Riddles of the Universe,
which became the bible of my youth. Haeckel was die first propa-
gandist of Darwin in Germany, and the first to draw up a geneological
tree of the various orders of animals. Like Spencer and Huxley in
England, he was a typical representative of the buoyant and arrogant
optimism of the nineteenth century. His book enumerated seven
Great Riddles of the Universe, of which six were 'definitely solved*
including the Structure of Matter and the Origin of Life; the seventh
was man's experience of freedom of choice. However, this was not
really a riddle but 'a pure dogma, based on an illusion and having no
real existence , so there were no more riddles left. Science was 'dizzy
with success* as Stalin has said in a famous speech celebrating the
triumphs of rural collectivization on the eve of the great famine of
1932.

Other ages have been similarly dizzy with success, convinced that
they stood on the doorstep of the Temple of Truth. The Pythagoreans
believed it, before they stumbled into the 'Unspeakable Numbers' and
the Temple vanished in the mist. Again, in the seventeenth century,
intoxicated by the vista which the Scientific Revolution had opened
up, most of its pioneers thought that it would take only one or
possibly two generations until they wrested its last secret from nature.
'Give me matter and motion, and I will construct the world', wrote
Descartes. 'The particular phenomena of the arts and sciences are

THE EVOLUTION OF IDEAS

251

really but a handful,' wrote Francis Bacon, 'the invention of all causes
and all sciences would be a labour of but a few years.*

Within a generation after Haeckel had proclaimed that the Riddles
of the Universe had been solved, nearly all the solutions turned out
to be spurious. In 1925 Whitehead wrote that the physical theory of
matter 'got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles
of astronomy before Copernicus'; in the lifetime of the next genera-
tion it became a welter of paradoxa, compared to which the universe
of rotating crystal spheres had been a model of sanity.

I have written elsewhere about the great vanishing act which accom-
panied the process of unification in science. It started when Galileo
discarded colour, sound, smell, and taste as illusions of the senses which
could all be reduced to the 'primary qualities' of physics, to matter
and motion. But one after another these 'ultimate and irreducible*
entities vanished to the tune of the 'Ten Little Nigger Boys*. First the
indivisible atom went up in fireworks, then the atomic nucleus, then
the 'elementary particles' in the nucleus; matter evaporated in the
physicists' hands, and its ultimate constituents joined electricity, mag-
netism, and gravity as manifestations of excited states of 'fields' which
could be described only in mathematical terms. Theoretical physics is
no longer concerned with things, but with the mathematical relations
between abstractions which are the residue of the vanished things. To
quote Russell: 'Physics is mathematical not because we know so much
about the physical world, but because we know so little; it is only its
mathematical properties that we can discover/

For three centuries the reduction of qualities to quantities has been
spectacularly successful, and it was reasonable to hope that within a
generation or two the supreme synthesis which would enable us to
reduce all phenomena in the physical world to a few basic mathe-
matical formulae something of the nature of the Unified Held
Theory on which Einstein worked, unsuccessfully, throughout the
second half of his life. It is still not unlikely that this hope was well
founded, that in the foreseeable future subatomic physics will strike
rock bottom as it were, and obtain the answers to the questions it has
asked. But it is becoming increasingly evident that both the questions
and the answers of contemporary physics are couched in an elusive
symbol-language which has only a very indirect bearing on reality,
and has lkde to offer to satisfy man's craving for glimpses of the ulti-
mate truth. Eddington realized long ago that these symbols 'have as
much resemblance to the real qualities of the material world ... as

2$2

THE ACT OF CREATION

a telephone number has to a subscriber'. And two centuries before him,
in the jubilant days which followed the unveiling of Newton's uni-
verse, Swift, the passionate sceptic, had this prophetic intuition:

He said, that new Systems of Nature were but new Fashions, which
would vary in every Age; and even those who pretend to demon-
strate them from Mathematical Principles, would flourish but a short
Period of Time, and be out of Vogue when that was determined. 20

Perhaps that saturation point is not far away, and perhaps science
will then start asking a new type of question. One branch after another
of chemistry, physics, and cosmology has merged in the majestic river
as it approaches the estuary to be swallowed up by the ocean, lose
its identity, and evaporate into the clouds; the final act of the great
vanishing process, and the beginning, one hopes, of a new cycle. It
has been said that we know more and more about less and less. It
seems that the more universal the laws' which we discover, the more
elusive they become, and that the ultimate consummation of all rivers
of knowledge is in the cloud of unknowing.

Thus, contrary to appearances and beliefs, science, like poetry or
architecture or painting, has its genres, 'movements', schools, theories
which it pursues with increasing perfection until the level of saturation
is reached where all is done and said and then embarks on a new
approach, based on a different type of curiosity, a different scale of
values. Not only Newton, but Leonardo, Mozart, and Flaubert saw
further because they too stood on the shoulders of giants; and Ein-
stein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of
science is not in a truth *more absolute' than the truth of Bach or
Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries
impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes
his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is
biassed by the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period
to period, as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.

Summary

The history of science shows recurrent cycles of differentiation and
specialization foEowed by reintegrations on a higher level; from unity
to variety to more generalized patterns of unity-in-variety. The
process also has certain analogies with biological evolution such as

THE EVOLUTION OP IDEAS

253

wastefulness, sudden mutations, the struggle for survival between
competing theories.

The various phases in the historic cycle correspond to the character-
istic stages of individual discovery: the periods of creative anarchy to
the period of incubation; the emergence of the new synthesis to the
bisociative act. It may emerge suddenly, sparked off by a single
individual discovery; or gradually, as in die history of electro-
magnetism, where a series of individual discoveries acted as 'links'.
Each revolutionary historic advance has a constructive and a destructive
aspect: the thaw of orthodox doctrines and the resulting fertile chaos
correspond to the regressive phase of the individual reader-pour-
mienx-sauter phenomenon. Lastly, the process of verification and
elaboration of individual discoveries is reflected on the map of history
as the consolidation of the new frontier followed by the develop-
ment of a new orthodoxy, a hardening of the collective matrix until
it gets blocked and the cycle starts again.

The decisive phase in the historic cycle, the dawn of the new
synthesis, appears as the confluence of previously separate branches of
science, or a cross-fertihzation between different mental disciplines or
experimental techniques. The collection of new empirical data is of
essential importance, but both the collection and interpretation of the
data are selective processes guided by theoretical considerations. The
history of every science proves that observations and experiments
which prima facie seem to contradict a theory do not necessarily lead
to its abandonment; and vice versa, successful theories (such as the
heliocentric system or Special Relativity) have been built on data which
had been available for a long time by rearranging the mosaic of hard
facts into a different pattern. I

'Snowblindness', faulty integrations, and other forms of the indi-
vidual pathology of thought, are reflected on a vasdy magnified scale
in the history of science; and the power of habit over the individual
mind is reflected in the conservatism of scientific bodies and schools
which has impeded progress for periods ranging from years to centuries.

Thus the progress of science is neither continuous, nor cumulative
in the strict sense. Its discoveries are often forgotten or ignored, and re-
discovered later on. Its history echoes with controversies which prove
that the same bundle of objective data* and even the same 'crucial
experiment* can be interpreted in more than one way. No experi-
mental test can provide the scientist with absolute certainty; and the
difference in the verifiability' between various types of scientific and

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THE ACT OF CREATION

artistic statements is a matter of degree (see also below, Chap. XVII).
Some scientific controversies are decided by cumulative weight of
evidence; others are resolved by a synthesis embracing both competing
theories; but still others are pseudo-controversies reflecting differences
in emphasis and fashions of thought and the latter are often as sub-
jective and emotional as fashions in art.

Lasdy, a distinction should be made between progress in the pre-
cision of scientific statements and their explanatory power. The latter
depends on the type of question the statement is meant to answer; and
history shows that the questions change with the changing values in
different periods and cultures.

NOTES

To p. 228. See Appendix I.

To p. 230. Bronowski (1961), p.27. Cf. also: *The most fortunate moments
in the history of knowledge occur when facts which have been as yet no more
than special data are suddenly referred to other apparently distant facts, and thus
appear in a. new light* (Wolfgang Kohler, 1940, p.89).

To p. 234. The French theoretical astronomer, Leverrier, had predicted
the existence of an eighth planet from disturbances in the motion of the seventh
planet, Uranus. The planet was discovered by the German astronomer Galle on
24 September 1846.

To p. 244. In his Presidential Address to Section 1 of the British Association,
Cambridge, 1938, C. G. Darwin said of D. C. Miller's experiments: 'We cannot
see any reason to think that this work would be inferior to Michelson*s work,
as he had at his disposal not only all the experience of Michelson's work, but also
the very great technical development of the intervening period, but in fact he
failed to verify the exact vanishing of the aether drift. What happened? Nobody
doubted relativity. There must therefore be some unknown source of error
which had upset Miller's work.'

To p. 240), It took two thousand yean until Archimedes and Euclid were
rediscovered. It took four hundred years until the Occamites' work on impetus
was appreciated. In the hectic nineteenth century, it took thirty-five years until
the significance of Mendel's work was recognized. In 1845 J. J. Waterston wrote
a paper on the molecular theory of gases which partly anticipated Maxwell: "The
referee of the Royal Society to whom the paper was submitted said: "The paper
is nothing but nonsense," and the work lay in utter oblivion until exhumed
forty-five years later. Waterston lived on disappointed and obscure for many
years and then mysteriously disappeared leaving no sign. As Trotter remarks, this
story must strike a chill upon anyone impatient for the advancement of know-
ledge. Many discoveries must have thus been stillborn or smothered at birth.
We know only those that survived* (Beveridge, op. cit., p. 108).

There may be thousands of relevant bits of information lying dormant in
hundreds of technical journals on dusty library shelves which, if remembered,
would act as Open Sesames.

XI

SCIENCE AND EMOTION
Three Character-Types

Iet me revert for a moment to our starring point, the triptych of
creative activities.
In folklore and popular literature the Artist is traditionally rep-
resented as an inspired dreamer a solitary figure, eccentric, im-
practical, unselfish, and quixotic.

His opposite number is the earthy and cynical Jester Falstaff or
Sancho Panza; he spurns the dreamer, refuses to be taken in by any
romantic nonsense, is wide-awake, quick to see his advantage and to
get the better of his fellows. His weapons range from the bludgeon of
peasant cunning to the rapier of irony; he always exercises his wits at
the expense of others; he is aggressive and self-asserting.

In between these antagonistic types once stood the Sage who com-
bined the qualities of both: a sagacious dreamer, with his head in the
clouds and his feet on the solid earth. But his modern incarnation, the
Scientist, is no longer represented by a single figure in the waxworks
of popular imagination; instead of one prototype, we had better
compose three.

The first is the Benevolent Magician, whose ancestry derives from
the rain-making Shamans and the calendar-making Priest-Astronomers
of Babylon. At the dawn of Greek science we find him assuming the
semi-mythical figure of Pythagoras, the only mortal who could hear
with ears of flesh the music made by the orbiting stars; and from there
onward, every century created its own savant-shamans whom it could
venerate even throughout the Dark Ages of science. The first millen-
nium was seen in by Sylvester II, the 'Magician Pope*, who reinstated
the belief that the earth was round. The Jews had their Maimonides,
the Arabs their Alkhazen, Christendom the Venerable Bede, before
St, Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great revived the study of nature.

255

2$6

THE ACT OF CREATION

From the Renaissance on there is an uninterrupted procession of
magicians whose names were legends, admired and worshipped by
a public which had only the vaguest notion of their achievements:
Paracelsus, Tycho on his Sorcerer's Island, Galileo with his telescope,
Newton who brought the Light, Franklin who tamed the thunder-
bolt, Mesmer who cured by magnetism; Edison, Pasteur, Einstein,
Freud. The popular image of the Magician has certain features in
common with that of the Artist: both are unselfishly devoted to
lofty tasks which frequently overlapped in the uomo universale of the
Renaissance.

The second archetype is the 'Mad Professor' who, in contrast to the
former, practises black instead of white magic for the sake of his own
aggrandizement and power. Empedokles jumped into the crater of Etna
to gain immortaHty; Paracelsus's rival, Agrippa, was allied to the devil
in the shape of an enormous black poodle; the Anatomists were allied
to body-snatchers for their sinister purposes. The alchemists distilled
witches' brews; electric rays became a favourite delusion in persecu-
tion manias; vivisection, and even compulsory vaccination, became
symbols of the scientist's blasphemous presumption and cruelty. The
Mad Professor either a sadist or obsessed with power looms large
in popular fiction from Jules Verne's Captain Nemo and H. G. Wells'
Dr. Moreau to Caligari, Frankenstein, and the monsters of the horror-
comics. He is -a Mephistophelian character, endowed with caustic wit;
he spouts sarcasm, a sinister jester plotting to commit some monstrous
practical joke on humanity. His place in the waxworks is next to the
malicious satirist's, as the Benevolent Magician's is next to the imagina-
tive Artist's.

The last of the three figures into which the popular image of the
scientist has split occupies the centre space and is of relatively recent
origin: the dry, dull, diligent, pedantic, uninspired, scholarly book-
worm or laboratory worker. He is aloof and detached, not because he
has outgrown passion but because he is devoid of temperament, desic-
cated, and hard of hearing yet peevish and petulant and jealous of
anybody who dares to interfere with his crabbed little world. This
imaginary type probably originates with the Schoolmen of the period
of decline, whom Erasmus lampooned: 'They smother me beneath
six hundred dogmas; they are surrounded with a bodyguard of
definitions, conclusions, corrolaries, propositions explicit and proposi-
tions implicit; they are looking in utter darkness for that which has no
existence whatsoever.'

SCIENCE AND EMOTION

257

Swift satirized the type in Gulliver in Laputa; then Goe the in his
Famulus Wagner: Mit Eifer hab 1 ich mich der Studien bejlissen Zwar
weiss ich viel, dock mocht* ich alles wissen. 'Thanks to my diligeace, my
wisdom is growing If I hut persevere I shall he all-knowing/ His
modern incarnations are the Herr Professor of German comedy,
and the mummified dons of Anglo-Saxon fiction. At his worst, he
incarnates the pathological aspects in the development of science:
rigidity, orthodoxy, snowhlindness, divorce from reality. But the
patience and dogged endurance of the infantrymen of science are as
indispensable as the geniuses who form its spearhead. 'The progress of
science', Schiller wrote, 'takes place through a few master-architects, or
in any case through a number of guiding brains which constantly set all
the industrious labourers at work for decades.' 1 That the industrious
labourers tend to form trade unions with a closed-shop policy and
restrictive practices, is an apparently unavoidable development. It is no
less conspicuous in the history of the arts: the uninspired versifiers, the
craftsmen of the novel and the stage, the mediocrities of academic
painting and sculpture, they all hang on for dear life to the prevailing
school and style which some genius initiated, and defend it with
stubbornness and venom against heretic innovators.

Thus we now have five figures facing us at our allegorical Madame
Tussaud's. They are from left to right: the malicious Jester; the Mad
Professor with his delusions of grandeur; the uninspired Pedant; the
Benevolent Magician; and the Artist.

At the moment only the three figures in the centre concern us. If
we strip them of the gaudy adornments which folklore and fiction
bestowed upon them, the figure of the Black Magician will turn out to
be an archetypal symbol of the self-assertive element in the scientist's
aspirations. In mythology, this element is represented by the Pro-
methean quest for omnipotence and immortality; in science-fiction it
is caricatured as a monstrous lusting for power; in actual life, it appears
as the unavoidable component of competitiveness, jealousy, and self-
righteousness in the scientist's complex motivational drive. 'Without
ambition and without vanity', wrote the biologist Charles Nicolle,
'no one would enter a profession so contrary to our natural appetites.' 2
Freud was even more outspoken: 'I am not really a man of science, not
an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am by tempera-
ment nothing but a conquistador . . . with the curiosity, the boldness,
and the tenacity that belong to that type of person.' 3
The unassuming figure of the Pedant in the centre of the waxworks

258

THE ACT OP CREATION

is an indispensable stabilizing element; he acts as a restraining influence
on the selfcasserting, vainglorious conquistadorial urges, but also as a
sceptical critic of the inspired dreamer on his other side.

This last figure, the White Magician, symbolizes the self-transcend-
ing element in the scientist's motivational drive and emotional make-
up; his humble immersion into the mysteries of nature, his quest for the
harmony of the spheres, the origins of life, the equations of a unified
field theory. The conquistadorial urge is derived from a sense of power,
the participatory urge from a sense of oceanic wonder. 'Men were first
led to the study of natural philosophy', wrote Aristode, 'as indeed they
are today, by wonder.' 4 Maxwell's earliest memory was 'lying on the
grass, looking at the sun, and wondering . Einstein struck the same chord
when he wrote that whoever is devoid of the capacity to wonder,
'whoever remains unmoved, whoever cannot contemplate or know
the deep shudder of the soul in enchantment, might just as well be dead
for he has already closed his eyes upon life'. 5

This oceanic feeling of wonder is the common source of religious
mysticism, of pure science and art for art's sake; it is their common
denominator and emotional bond.

Magic and Sublimation

The creative scientist in actual life hardly resembles any of these
single wax-figures the Conquistador, the Pedant, or the inspired
Dreamer; he contains ingredients of all of them in varying proportions,
melted down as it were, and recast according to a personal formula. I
have said already (p. 87 f.) that by calling science the 'neutral art' I did
not mean that the scientist operates 'dispassionately' as the cliche goes;
but on the contrary, that he is motivated by a particular blend of
passions into which both the self-asserting and participatory drives
enter, but in a highly sublimated state, complementing each other. A
modicum of ambition or vanity or financial need, or even aggression,
is indispensable to the most 'disinterested' scientist or explorer but the
conquistadorial appetite must have undergone a great amount of
refinement if it is to find its satisfaction in the publication of a paper,
representing years of labour, in the columns of a technical journal.
Except for the chosen few who attain popular fame, the vast majority
of scientists spend their lifetime working in obscurity, and for paltry
rewards. In his private life, the scientist can indulge his ego; but in his

SCIENCE AND EMOTION

259

work, ambition and vanity are denied all but die most indirect and
tortuous outlets, in conformity with the complex rules of the game.
The compensation for this sacrifice is in the game itself in that
'enchantment of the soul' which makes interest disinterested, as it were.

The sublimation of the self-assertive, aggressive-defensive impulses
is easily understood, since we all have to go through this painful
process, abdicating the tyrannic powers of infancyincluding the
primitive fantasies of omnipotence, from which the figure of the Black
Magician is derived and accepting the rules of the game of civilized
society. But the self-transcending, participatory emotions are also
subject to the process of sublimation, both in the history of the indivi-
dual and in the evolution of cultures. One aspect of lie latter is the
sublimation of magic into art; another, of magic into science.

I have explained earlier on (p. 54 ) that the term 'self-transcending'
or participatory* tendencies is meant to refer to those emotional states
where the need is felt to behave as a part of some real or imaginary
entity which transcends the boundaries of the individual self (whereas
when governed by the self-assertive class of emotion, the ego is
experienced as a self-contained whole and the ultimate value). Now
ob\dously a person s character and pattern of behaviour is to a large
extent dependent on the nature of that higher entity of which he feels
himself to be a part. There is of course often a multitude of such
entities, some forming a hierarchy (family, tribe, nation), others
causing rival identifications; some are of the nature of social, others of
spiritual or mystical bonds. It is with the latter that we are concerned;
more precisely with the transition from one type of mystic partici-
pation in a universe governed by sympathetic magic, to another type
of mystic communion with a universe governed by a divine or
natural order. That transformation was never completed; but even
the partial transition which the Greeks achieved had a decisive in-
fluence on the pattern of Western culture. At the risk of repetitiveness
I must once more mention here the Pythagoreans, the chief engineers
of that epoch-making change. I have spoken in more detail elsewhere
of the inspired methods by which, in their religious order, they trans-
formed the Orphic mystery cult into a religion which considered
mathematical and astronomical studies as the main forms of divine
worship and prayer. The physical intoxication which had accompanied
the Bacchic rites was superseded by the mental intoxication derived
from pkib-sopkia, the love of knowledge. It was one of the many key
concepts they coined and which are still basic units in our verbal

2<5o

THE ACT OF CREATION

currency. The cliche about the 'mysteries of nature' originates in the
revolutionary innovation of applying the word referring to the secret
rites of the worshippers of Orpheus, to the devotions of stargazing.
'Pure science* is another of their coinages; it signified not merely a
contrast to the 'applied* sciences, hut also that the contemplation of the
new mysteria was regarded as a means of purifying the soul by its
immersion in the eternal. Finally, 'meorizing' comes from Theoria,
again a word of Orphic origin, meaning a state of fervent contempla-
tion and participation in the sacred rites (thea spectacle, theoris spectator,
audience). Contemplation of the 'divine dance of numbers' which held
both the secrets of music and of the celestial motions became the link
in the mystic union between human thought and the anima mundu
Its perfect symbol was the Harmony of the Spheres the Pythagorean
Scale, whose musical intervals corresponded to the intervals between-
the planetary orbits; it went on reverberating through 'soft stillness
and the night' right into the poetry of the Elizabethans, and into the
astronomy of Kepler.

It was indeed this sublimated form of Orphic mysticism which,
through the Pythagorean revival in Renaissance Italy, inspired the
Scientific Revolution. Galileo, Descartes, and Newton all regarded
God as a kind of 'chief mathematician' of the Universe. 'Geometry
existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is
God himself', 6 wrote Kepler; and the other giants echoed his convic-
tion. The 'oceanic feeling' of religious mysticism had been distilled
into differential equations; the mind of the anima mundi was reflected
in the rainbow colours of the spectroscope, the ghostly spirals of
distant galaxies, the harmonious patterns of iron-filings around a mag-
net In all the 'great and generous minds', from Nicolas of Cusa down
to Einstein, we find this feeling of awe and wonder, an intellectual
ecstasy of distinctly religious flavour. Even those who professed to be
devoid of it based their labours on an act of faith: the belief that there
is a harmony of the spheres that the universe is not a tale told by an
idiot, but governed by hidden laws waiting to be discovered and
uttered. 'The mystic believes in an unknown God, the thinker and
scientist in an unknown order; it is hard to say which surpasses the
other in nonrational devotion (L. L. Whyte) 7 In a similar vein,
Butterfield wrote on the pioneers of the scientific revolution: '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

SCIENCE AND EMOTION

26l

worthy of God unless the whole system of the universe could be
shown to be interlocking, so that it carried the patttern of reasonable-
ness 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.' 8

It is the axiomatic belief that the pointers on his ^ afc do not move
at random, which makes the readings of his instruments meaningful
to the scientist. Though Eddington may have been justified in saying
that the dials, in the present state of physics, have no more bearing on
reality than telephone numbers, this takes nothing away from the
excitement of watching their motions. After all, to the worshipful
lover even her telephone number acquires some of the magic attraction
of the beloved.

The sublimation of the self-transcending emotions has transformed
'magic' into 'science'; but there is no hard-and-fast boundary between
the two. Unconscious, pre-rational, 'magical' thinking enters both into
the creative act and into the beliefs or superstitions of the scientist.
As Dubos said, 'the alchemist never entirely ceased to live and function
within the academician*. Not only Kepler's astronomy was derived
from belief in the Holy Trinity and the Harmony of the Spheres*, most
of the giants of science were similarly inspired by religious, mystical or
transcendental beliefs.

In Appendix II the reader will find this generalization exemplified
by a series of short character-sketches, from Copernicus and Galileo
to Franklin, Faraday, Maxwell, Darwin, and Pasteur. I shall close this
section with three quotations by men who played decisive parts in
shaping the scientific outlook of the twentieth century. The first is
Louis Pasteur, who was born a Roman Catholic and remained one
throughout his life. At the age of sixty he was elected a member of the
Academie Francaise; the wdcorning speech on that ceremonial
occasion was made, ironically, by that great and wise agnostic, Ernest
Renan. In his reply Pasteur explained that although an inescapable
conclusion of thinking, the notion of infinity is incomprehensible to
human reason indeed more incomprehensible than all the miracles of
religion: 'I see everywhere in the world the inevitable expression of the
concept of infinity. It establishes in the depths of our hearts a belief in
the supernatural The idea of God is nothing more than one form of die
idea of infinity. So long as the mystery of the infinite weighs on the
human mind, so long will temples be raised to the cult of the infinite,

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THE ACT OF CREATION

whether God be called Brahmah, Allah, Jehovah or Jesus The

Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things.
They bequea thed to us one of the most beautiful words in our lan-
guage the word enthusiasm'e theosa god within. The grandeur
of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they
spring. Happy is he who bears a god within an ideal of beauty and
who obeys it, an ideal of art, of science. All are lighted by reflection
from the infinite/

The second quotation is from Einstein who, when questioned about
his own religious views, described them as 'what in ordinary terms
one would call pantheistic'. On another occasion he talked of 'cosmic
religiousness':

... I maintain that cosmic religiousness is the strongest and most
noble driving force of scientific research. Only the man who can con-
ceive the gigantic effort and above all the devotion, without which
original scientific thought cannot succeed, can measure the strength
of the feeling from which alone such work . . . can grow. What a deep
belief in the intelligence of Creation and what longing for under-
standing, even if only of a meagre reflection in the revealed intelligence
of this world, must have flourished in Kepler and Newton, enabling
them as lonely men to unravel over years of work the mechanism of

celestial mechanics Only the man who devotes his life to such

goals has a living conception of what inspired these men and gave them
strength to remain steadfast in their aims in spite of countless failures.
It is cosmic religiousness that bestows such strength. A contemporary
has said, not unrightly, that the serious research scholar in our generally
materialistic age is the only deeply religious human being. 9

And ksdy here is Bertr and Russell, writing at the age of eighty-
nine;

I must, before I die, find some means of saying the essential thing
which is in me, which I have not yet said, a thing which is neither
love nor hate nor pity nor scorn but the very breath of life, shining
and coming from afar, which will link into human life the immensity,
the frightening, wondrous and implacable forces of the non-
human. 10

From the Pythagoreans onward, through the Renaissance to our

SCIENCE AND EMOTION

263

times, the oceanic feeling, the sense of participation in the mystery of
the infinite, was the principal inspiration of that winged and flat-
footed creature, the scientist.

The Boredom of Science

We have seen earlier on (pp. 87-89) that the emotional reaction
which follows the act of discovery is a complex one, reflecting the
complexity of the motivational drive. There is the sudden explosion
of tension, which has become redundant and must somehow be worked
off in gestures or shouts of jubilation an overflow-reaction continuous
with laughter, but of a more individual character because derived from
a more sublimated kind of emotion. Concurrent with it, there is pure
intellectual delight, the peaceful catharsis of the self-transcending
emotions. The first is derived from the fact that T made a discovery
the second from the fact that a discovery has been made, another
glimpse of the truth revealed.

Let me now turn from the creative person's emotional reactions to
those of the audience, to the 'consumer's* point of view. Whether he
listens to a joke, or reads a scientific work, or visits an art gallery, he
is supposed to participate in the intellectual and emotional experiences
of the producer to relive or re-create them. The bond between
them is the need for social communication. The consumer hopes that
by being allowed to share the creator's vision he will gain a deeper
and broader view of reality. The producer has an urge to share his own
experience with others to win accomplices to his malice, partners in
understanding, resonance for his emotions. In order to succeed, how-
ever, he must use appropriate techniques. In Chapter III (pp. 82-86) I
have discussed certain criteria by which to judge the impact of comic
inventions originality, emphasis, and economy. Are these criteria of
any value when applied to scientific discovery?

The importance of originality is self-evident. Selective emphasis on
one particular aspect of reality, with its concommitant exaggerations
and simplifications is, as we saw, the essence of model-making, and
plays almost as great a part in the changing fashions and 'schools' in
science as in art. Economy enters in various ways from Occam's
razor and the satisfaction derived from an 'elegant* solution to various
techniques of enticing the audience in the lecture-room into an
imaginative, re-creative effort.

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THE ACT OF CREATION

It is generally supposed that in this respect the creative scientist and
his audience are at a disadvantage. In contrast to the artist, the scientist
is not supposed to appeal to emotions, and the student of science not
to be guided by them. But we have seen that the equation of science
with logic and reason, of art with intuition and emotion, is a blatant
popular fallacy. No discovery has even been made by logical deduction;
no work of art produced without calculating craftsmanship; the emotive
games of the unconscious enter into both.

The aesthetic satisfaction derived from an elegant mathematical
demonstration, a cosmological theory, a map of the human brain,
or an ingenious chess problem, may equal that of any artistic ex-
perience given a certain connoisseurship. But connoisseurship is
equally required for the true appreciation of any but the most vulgar
forms of art; and particularly for ancient, alien, and 'modern' art.
However, the absurd division of our society into 'two cultures' pro-
duced the paradoxical phenomenon that the average educated person
will be reluctant to admit that a work of art is beyond the level of his
comprehension; but he will in the same breath and with a certain pride
confess his complete ignorance of the principles which make his radio
work, the forces which make the stars go round, the factors which
determine the heredity of his children, and the location of his own
viscera and glands.

One of the consequences of this attitude is that he utilizes the products
of science and technology in a purely possessive, exploitive manner
without comprehension or feeling. His relationship to the objects of
his daily use, the tap which supplies his bath, the pipes which keep
him warm, the switch which turns on the light in a word, to the
environment in which he lives, is impersonal and possessive like the
capitalist's attitude to his bank account, not the art collector's to his
treasures which he cherishes because he 'understands' them, because he
has a participatory relationship to them. Modern man lives isolated in
his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but
because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it
workof the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature,
to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his exis-
tence 'unnatural*, but his refusal to take an interest in the principles
behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind
to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian.

The historical causes which led to the split between the two cultures

SCIENCE AND EMOTION

26s

are outside the scope of this book; but I must mention one specific
factor which is largely responsible for turning science into a bore, and
providing the humanist with an excuse for turning his back on it. It
is the academic cant, of relatively recent origin, that a self-respecting
scientist must be a bore, that the more dehydrated the style of his
writing, and the more technical the jargon he uses, the more respect he
will command. I repeat, this is a recent fashion, less than a century old,
but its effect is devastating. The pre-Socratics frequently wrote their
treatises in verse; the ancient Peruvian language had a single word
hamavec for both poet and inventor. Galileo's Dialogues and polemical
writings were literary masterpieces which had a lasting influence on
the development of Italian didactic prose; Kepler's New Astronomy is
a baroque tale of suspense; Vesalius' Anatomy was illustrated by
a pupil of Titian. Even the abstract symbol language of the mathe-
maticians lent itself to works of art. As the great Boltzmann wrote:
'A mathematician will recognize Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi, or Helm-
holtz, after reading a few pages, just as musicians recognize, from the
first few bars, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert/ And Jeans compared
Maxwell's physics with an enchanted fairyl and where no one knew
what was coming next.

I have given samples of Pasteur*s and Poincare's style; Franklin was
an accomplished stylist; Maxwell wrote commendably funny,* and
Erasmus Darwin unintentionally funny verse; as for William James, I
must confess that I find his style far more enjoyable than his brother
Henry's. In our present century Eddington, Jeans, Freud, Kretschmer,
Whitehead, Russell, Schrodinger, to mention only a few, gave con-
vincing proof that works on science can at the same time be works of
literary art. (One could also quote works by literary and art critics as
pedantic and desiccated as papers in a technical journal for applied
chemistry.) Needless to say, technical communications addressed to
specialists must employ technical language; but even here the over-
loading with jargon, the tortuous and cramped style, are largely a
matter of conforming to fashion.

The same inhuman in fact anti-humanistic trend pervades the
climate in which science is taught, the classrooms and the textbooks.
To derive pleasure from the art of discovery, as from the other arts,
the consumer in this case the student must be made to re-live, to
some extent, the creative process. In other words, he must be induced,
with proper aid and guidance, to make some of the fundamental dis-
coveries of science by himself) to experience in his own mind some of

266

THE ACT OF CREATION

those flashes of insight which have lightened its path. This means that
the history of science ought to be made an essential part of the curricu-
lum, that science should be represented in its evolutionary context
and not as a Minvera born fully armed. It further means that the
paradoxes, the 'blocked matrices' which confronted Archimedes,
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Harvey, Darwin, Einstein should be
reconstructed in their historical setting and presented in the form of
riddles with appropriate hints to eager young minds. The most
productive form of learning is problem-solving (Book Two, XIII-
XIX). The traditional method of confronting the student not with the
problem but with the finished solution, means depriving him of all
excitement, to shut off the creative impulse, to reduce the adventure of
mankind to a dusty heap of theorems.

Art is a form of communication which aims at eliciting a re-creative
echo. Education should be regarded as an art, and use the appropriate
techniques of art to call forth that echo. The novice, who has gone
through some of the main stages in the evolution of the race during his
pre-natal development, and of the evolution from savage to civilized
society by the time he reaches adolescence, should then be made to
continue his curriculum by re-capitulating some of the decisive episodes,
impasses, and turning points on the road to the conquest of knowledge.
Our textbooks and methods of teaching reflect a static, pre-evolu-
tionary concept of the world. For man cannot inherit the past; he has
to re-create it.

Summary

The scientist's motivational drive is a blend of passions in which both
the self-asserting and self-transcending tendencies participate sym-
bolized by the Mad Professor and the Benevolent Magician of folklore.
It is, however, a blend in which both tendencies are sublimated and
balance each other. This development is already foreshadowed in the
exploratory behaviour of clever animals. "When Kohler's chimpanzee
Sultan discovered, after many unsuccessful efforts, that he could rake
the banana into the cage by fitting two short hollow sticks into each
other, his motivation was obviously to get at the banana. But his new
discovery 'pleased him so immensely* that he kept repeating the trick
and forgot to eat the banana (for similar observations, see Book Two,
VHE), If Archimedes was originally motivated by the desire to obtain

SCIENCE AND EMOTION

2<57

money or favours from the tyrant of Syracuse, his jubilant shout was
certainly not due to anticipation of the reward.

Ambition, greed, vanity can enter the service of creativity only
through indirect channels; and the self-transcending emotions must
undergo a similar process of sublimation from mystic immersion in
the harmony of the spheres to the scrupulous attention paid to eight
minutes arc. The process is reflected in the gradual transformation of
magic into science.

The creative achievements of the scientist lack the 'audience appeal*
of the artist's for several reasons briefly mentioned technical jargon,
antiquated teaching methods, cultural prejudice. The boredom created
by these factors has accentuated the artificial frontiers between con-
tinuous domains of creativity.

NOTE

To page 2651 See Appendix II, p, 691.

PART THREE

A. THE PARTICIPATORY EMOTIONS

XII

THE LOGIC OF THE MOIST EYE

Laughter and Weeping

The classic responses to comedy and tragedy are laughter and
weeping. Both are overflow channels for the disposal of
emotions; luxury reflexes without apparent utility. This much
they have in common; in other respects they are direct opposites.

There is a vast literature on the psychology of laughter, but hardly
any on the psychology of weeping.* The theory of the comic which I
have proposed, however controversial, can at least be judged in the
light of earlier theories on similar or opposite lines; where weeping is
concerned we are on virgin territory. This indifference towards the
manifestation of emotions in weeping (which is after all neither an
uncommon nor a trivial phenomenon) is in itself symptomatic of the
contemporary trend in psychology about which later.

Weeping and crying confront us with an even more confusing variety
of expressions than laughter. There are variations in intensity; in mood;
in spontaneity. The bawling of a spoilt child, the contrived sobs of
public or private stagecraft are secondary derivatives which distort
the original pattern; cultural restraints and social infection are further
superimpositions on it. We must disregard these adventitious elements
and concentrate on spontaneous weeping in its pure form, as an auto-
matic 'reflex* (see pp. 28-29).

The first step is to distinguish between weeping and crying it is a
peculiarity of the English language to treat them as synonyms. Weeping
has two basic reflex-characteristics which are found in all its varieties:
the overflow of the tear-glands and a specific form of breathing. These
vary in intensity from a mere moistening of the eye and 'catching one's
breath* (or feeling *a lump in the throat') to a profusion of tears
accompanied by convulsive sobbing; just as laughter varies in intensity
from smiling to convulsions. Crying, on the other hand, is the emitting

271

272

THE ACT OF CREATION

of sounds signalling distress, protest, or some other emotion. It may be
combined with, or alternate with, weeping. Frequently when a child,
or a depressed patient, is said to be crying his head off* his eyes are in
fact dry: he is not weeping. On the other hand, when your char-lady
has a 'good cry' at the movies, she isn't crying at all but weeping.
Crying is a form of communication (even if the audience is only
imagined); weeping is not.

Let me now compare the external manifestations bodily changes
in weeping and in laughter. In weeping, the eyes are 'blinded* by
tears: they lose their focus and lustre. The laugher's eyes sparkle, the
corners are wrinkled, but brow and cheeks are taut and smooth, which
lends the face an expression of radiance; the lips are parted, the corners
lifted. In weeping, the features crinkle and crumple; even when
weeping for joy or in aesthetic rapture, the transfigured face reflects
a serene languidness.

The breathing pattern in weeping is a series of short, deep, gasping
inspirations, i.e. sobs, followed by long, sighing expirations, with the
glottis partially closed the lump in the throat. This is the exact
opposite of the breathing pattern of laughter with its bursts of ex-
piratory puffs sobs in reverse, followed by long, deep intakes re-
versed sighs. A prolonged, violent fit of laughter, however, may pro-
duce the sobbing type of respiration as an after-effect a phenomenon
which streng thens the hypothesis (see below) that laughter and crying
are mediated by rival branches of the autonomous nervous system
the first being sympathicotonic, the second vagotonic.

The third contrast is between bodily postures and motions. The
person who laughs tends to throw his head back by a vigorous con-
traction of the elevators in the neck; the person who weeps 'lets the
head droop' (into the hands, on the table, or on somebody's shoulder).
Laughter contracts the muscles and throws the body into violent
motion banging the table or slapping one's knees; in weeping, the
muscles go flabby, the shoulders slump forward, the whole posture
reflects a 'breaking down', a 'letting go'.

In the fourth place, vocalization in laughter roaring, giggling,
chuckling, etc. is expressive of joie de vivre with aggressive overtones;
but if weeping is accompanied by crying, the sounds express lament,
appeals for sympathy.

finally, in laughter tension is suddenly exploded, emotion debunked;
In weeping it is drained away in a gradual process which does not break
the continuity of mood; there is no disowning of emotion, thought and

THE LOGIC OF THE MOIST EYE

273

sentiment remain united to the end. Moreover, the gradual relief in
weeping does not prevent the simultaneous generation of more emo-
tion of the same type, so that the influx may balance the overflow,
and relief is incomplete, or not even experienced as such.

Why do we Weep?

Let me discuss a few typical situations which may cause the shedding
of tears.

A. Raptness. Listening to the organ in a cathedral, looking at a
majestic landscape from the top of a mountain, observing an infant
hesitantly returning a smile, being in love any of these experiences
may cause a welling-up of emotions, a moistening or overflowing of
the eyes, while the body is becalmed and drained of its tensions. A few
steps higher on the intensity-scale, and the T seems no longer to exist,
to dissolve in the experience like a grain of salt in water; awareness
becomes de-personalized and expands into 'the oceanic feeling of
limitless extension and oneness with the universe'.*

Here, then, we see the self-transcending emotions displayed in their
purest form. Once you start fondling the smiling baby and making a
fuss of it, an active, possessive element enters into the situation and the
spell is broken. The purely self-transcending emotions do not tend towards
action, but towards quiescence, tranquillity, and catharsis. Respiration and
pulse-rate are slowed down, muscle-tone is lowered; 'entrancement'
is a step towards the trance-like states induced by the contemplative
techniques of Eastern mysticism and by certain drugs. The experience
of 'the blending of the finite with the infinite' can become so intense
that it evokes Faust's prayer: O Augenblick verweile let this moment
last for eternity, let me die. But there is nothing morbid in this; it
is a yearning for an even more complete communion, the ultimate
catharsis or samadhu

The reason for their passive, quietistic nature is that the self-trans-
cending emotions cannot be consummated by any specific voluntary action.
You cannot take the mountain panorama home with you; the surest
method to break the charm is clicking your camera. You cannot merge
with the infinite or dissolve in the universe by any exertion of the
body; and even in the most sd&ess forms of love and communion each
individual remains an island. To be 'overwhelmed' by love, wonder,
devotion, 'enraptured' by a smile, 'entranced* by beautyeach verb

274

THE ACT OF CREATION

expresses a passive state, a surrender; the surplus of emotion cannot be
worked off in action it can be consummated only in internal, visceral
and glandular, processes.

These observations are again in keeping with the character of the
two divisions of the autonomous nervous system. We have seen that
the self-assertive emotions operate through the powerful adrenal-
sympathico system which galvanizes the body into action under the
stress of hunger, pain, rage, and fear. The parasympa thetic division,
on the other hand, never goes into action as a compact unit; it does not
dispose of a powerful pep-hormone like adrenalin, acting direcdy on
the body as a whole. The sympathetic division has been compared to
the pedals of a piano, which affect all the notes sounded; the parasym-
pathetic to the separate keys which act locally on various organs.
In the main, its function is to counteract and to complement sympathico-
adrenal excitation: to lower blood-pressure and pulse-rate, neutralize
excesses of blood-sugar and acidity, to facilitate digestion and the dis-
posal of body-wastes, to activate the flow of tears, etc. In other words,
the general action of the para-sympathetic system is inward-directed,
calming, and cathartic. All this, and other arguments of a more technical
nature, point to the correlation of the participatory emotions with the
parasympa thetic system.*

B. Mourning. A woman is notified of the sudden death ofher husband.
At first she is stunned, unable to believe the news; then she finds some
relief in tears.

Again, it is a situation in which nothing purposeful can be done,
which does not beget action, but passive surrender 'giving in to
grief*. And, again, the emotion originates in the experience of 'belong-
ing to', 'belonging together, of a communion which transcends the
boundaries of the self. Resentment, guilt, unconscious gratification,
may, of course, enter into the widow's mixed feelings, but we are
concerned at the moment only with her experience of identification
and belonging. That experience, and the emotions generated by it,
have not come to an end with the husband's death; on the contrary,
they have at the same time become more intense and frustrated. The
overflow of tears is insufficient to relieve her from this surplus of
emotions; she weeps 'in grief, whereas the euphoric experiences of
the previous section caused 'weeping in joy'.

But the difference is in fact a matter of degrees. The moist eyes in
the transfigured face of the young mother also reflect an emotion which

THE LOGIC OF THE MOIST EYE

275

cannot be completely consummated, lived out; the urge to transcend
the self's boundaries, to break out of its insulation always carries a
certain amount of frustration. Saints and mystics spend their lives trying
to escape the prison of the flesh; Hemingway, who was not a saint,
wrote of the 'heart-breaking profile' of his young Venetian contessa;
and to be overwhelmed by beauty may indeed be as 'heart-breaking'
as a widow's tears sweetened by self-pity. A long, enforced separation
may be as painful as a final one; and there are cases of mourning where
worship of the dead partner, with or without hope for a reunion in
after-life, creates a more harmonious, if imaginary, communion than
the actual partnership ever did.

These continuous transitions between * weeping in joy* and weeping
in sorrow' reflect the relative nature of 'pleasure' and 'unpleasure*
(Unlust, disphoria, as distinct from physical pain). Emotions have
been called overheated drives'. A drive becomes overheated* when it
has no immediate outlet; or when its intensity is so increased that the
normal outlets are insufficient; or for both reasons. A moderate amount
of overheating may be experienced as a pleasurable arousal, thrill,
excitement, or appetitewhile anticipating (or imagining) the con-
summatory act. Even physical discomfort and pain are readily tolera-
ted (for instance, in mounts-climbing or trout-fishing on an icy
morning) in the pleasurable anticipation of the reward. But when the
'overheating' exceeds a critical level it is experienced as tension, stress,
frustration, suffering. However, the pleasure-unpleasure tone is deter-
mined not only by the intensity of emotive pressure; it also depends on
whether the pressure is increasing or decreasing. Intense frustration
changes into incipient relief the moment the consummatory action
has started or has merely come into sight. Decrease of tension is
pleasurable up to a point If the water-level, so to speak, falls below a
critical point, there is a sensation of drying-up, of boredom and rest-
lessness. At this stage increases of emotion are induced by various
methods of seeking out thrills from wild-game hunting to horror
comics and other forms of what one might call 'emotional window-
shopping': the vicarious satisfactions derived from reading the social
gossip columns or watching a strip-tease. In these cases the pleasurable
experience is derived not from anticipating, but from imagining the
reward; and the satisfaction obtained such as it is consists in the
'internal consummation' of those components in the complex drive
which can be lived out in fantasy.

Thus pleasure-unpleasure form a continuous scale of 'feeling-tones'

THE ACT OF CREATION

which accompany emotion: the former indicating the progress (real,
anticipated, or imagined) of a drive towards its consummation, the
latter indicating its frustration.

This leads us to a quasi three-dimensional theory of emotions
(which sounds involved, but is probably still a woeful over-simpli-
fication). In the first place, we must obviously differentiate between the
various emotions according to the nature of the drive, originating in
various physiological, social, or 'psychogenic' 1 needs and urges
hunger, sex, protection of ofBpring, curiosity (the 'exploratory drive'),
conviviality, etc. To use a coarse but comfortable analogy, let each of
these be represented by a different tap in a saloon-bar, which is turned
on as the demand arises, each serving a beverage with a different flavour.
In the second place, we have the pleasure-unpleasure scale, correspond-
ing to the pressure in the tap whether the liquid flows smoothly, or
gurgles and splutters because of air-locks or excess pressure. In the
third place, we have the polarity between the self-assertive and par-
ticipatory tendencies which enter into each emotion (for instance,
possessiveness versus identification in maternal love); this could be rep-
resented by the relative proportion of alcohol and water in the liquid.
We can thus distinguish between three variables or 'parameters' in
every emotional experience: 'flavour ' (hunger, love, curiosity);
pressure', pleasant or unpleasant; and 'alcohol-content': toxic, i.e.
aggressive-defensive, or soothing and cathartic.

C. Relief A woman whose son has been reported by the War Office
as missing suddenly sees him walking into her room, safe and sound.
Again the first reaction is shock and rigidity; then she flings herself
into his arms, alternately laughing and weeping.

Obviously there are two processes involved here. The first is the
sudden, dramatic relief from anxiety; the other an overwhelming joy,
love, tenderness. Some writers on the subject are apt to confuse these
two reactions to regard all joyous emotion as due to relief from
anxious tension. But clearly a tender reaction would be expected in
any case from the mother on her son's return even if he were merely
returning from a day at school, and there had been no previous
anxiety. Vice versa, relief from anxiety in itself, though always
pleasant, does not create tender feelings overflowing in tears. What
happened in the present case is that the agony the woman endured had
increased the intensity of her yearning and love; and that relief from
anxiety had increased out of all proportion the gratification she

THE LOGIC OP THE MOIST EYE

277

would have felt on his return after an absence under normal circum-
stances.

Let me be a little more explicit for the situation has, as we shall
see, a direct bearing on the emotional reactions induced by works of
dramatic art. The mother's sudden relief from anxiety could be ver-
balized as 'thank God you are not dead'. Up to that moment she had
tried to control her fears, to banish from consciousness the terrible
images of what may have been happening to her boy. Now she can
let herself go, allow her emotions a free outlet. Hence the manic dis-
play of hugging, bustling, laughing, calling in the neighbours, and
upsetting the tea kettle: she is working off the adrenalin of all that
pent-up and suddenly released anxiety. But in the middle of these
hectic activities there are moments when she glances at the embarrassed
prodigal with a kind of incredulous, rapt expression and her eyes again
overflow with soothing, peaceful tears. The alternation and over-
lapping of the two patterns one eruptive and agitated, the other
gradual and cathartic indicate the now familiar two processes and
the nature of the emotions acted out.

These become even more evident in exclamations such as 'How silly
of me to cry', followed by more bustling and merriment. The unex-
pected return of the boy was like a the 'bolt out of the blue* which cut
short the tense narrative of her anxious fantasies; the tension has sud-
denly become redundant, and is disowned by reason. At other moments
she is still unable 'to believe her eyes' and emotion wells up again. This
may even include some unconscious resentment against the cause of so
much needless worry, who stands in her room, sunburnt and grinning,
unaware of the suffering he has caused: "What a fool I have been to
worry so much* may be translated as 'What a fool you have made of me*.

'Laughing through one's tears' is caused by quickly oscillating mental
states, where reason and emotion are alternately united and dissociated.
A sudden shock which demands a major emotional readjustment is
often followed by such oscilatory phases in which the subject alter-
nately believes and disbelieves her eyes, until a full grasp of reality is
reached on all levels. If instead of the happy ending, there had been a
tragic one a telegram informing the woman of her boy's death then,
instead of disbelieving her eyes, she would have been tempted to dis-
believe the news; and while the happy mother behaves at moments as
if the boy were still in danger, the bereaved mother may behave at
times as if he were still alive. In the former case, the successive flashes of
reality which disrupt the web of illusion bring happy relief; in the

278

THE ACT OF CREATION

latter, each flash brings renewed despair. A person with psychotic
dispositions may, however, cling to the illusion, and it will be the
matrix of reality which disintegrates instead. The 'hollow' laughter in
certain forms of insanity seems to echo the effort of reversing the pro-
cess of adjustment the effort of going mad in the teeth of a world that
is sane.

In the milder forms of paranoia induced by the stage and screen,
the oscillations between illusion and reality are deliberately created and
prolonged. The cathartic effect of the antique mysteries and of the
modern drama alike are derived from man's unique faculty of believ-
ing and disbelieving his eyes in the same blink.

D. When a woman weeps in sympathy with another persons sorrow
(or joy), she partially identifies herself with that person by an act of
projection, introjecrion, or empathy whatever you like to call it. The
same is true when the 'other person 9 is a heroine on the screen or in the
pages of a novel. But it is essential to distinguish here between two
emotional processes although they are experienced simultaneously
and mixed together.

The first is the act of identification itself the fact that the subject
has for the moment more or less forgotten her own existence and par-
ticipates in the existence of another, at another place and time. This in
itself is a self-transcending, gratifying and 'ennobling' experience for
the simple reason that while it lasts, the subject, Mrs. Smith, is pre-
vented from thinking of her own anxieties, ambitions, and grudges
against Mr. Smith. In other words, the act of identification tem-
porarily inhibits the self-asserting tendencies.

The second process is mediated by the first: the act of identification
leads to the experiencing of vicarious emotions. When Mrs. Smith is
'sharing Mrs. Brown's sorrow* there is in the first place the sharing,
and in the second, the sorrow. The first is an unselfish participatory
experience which makes her feel 'good' in the literal, not in the
cheap sense (when self-congratulatory or gloating sentiments are
present, there is no true identification). The second is the sorrow a
vicarious experience, but genuinely felt. It may of course be joy or
anxiety instead. The tears of Mrs. Smith at the happy ending when the
lovers on the screen are reunited or the baby's life is saved in the nick
of time, are released by the same process as the tears of the woman
whose son has suddenly returned: relief from anxiety, and a hot surge
of joy.

THE tOGIC OF THE MOIST EYE

279

The anxiety which grips the spectator of a thr&er-film, though
vicarious, is nevertheless real; it is reflected in the familiar physical
symptoms palpitations, tensed muscles, sudden jumps' of alarm.
The same applies to the anger felt at the machinations of the perfidious
villain on the screen, whom Mexican audiences have been known to
riddle with bullets. This leads us to an apparent paradox which is
basic to the understanding of all dramatic art forms. We have seen
that on the one hand the self-transcending emotionsparticipation,
projection, identification inhibit the self-asserting tendencies: they
soothe, calm, eliminate worry and desire, purge body and mind of its
tensions. On the other hand, the act of self-transcending identification
may stimulate the surge of anger, fear, cruelty, which, although ex-
perienced on behalf of somebody else, nevertheless belong to the sel-
assertive, aggressive-defensive class and display all their bodily symp-
toms. The mother's bustling, laughter, agitation on her son s return,
shows the classic 'adreno-toxk' pattern, characteristic of the self-
assertive emotions although her anxiety was centred not on herself,
but experienced on behalf of her son. Anger, fear, and the related
'emergency-reactions' use the same physiological mechanism whether
the threat is directed at one's own person, or the person with whom
one has identified oneself. They are always 'self-assertive' although
the 'self' has momentarily changed its address by being, for instance,
projected into the handsome and guileless heroine on the screen.
Righteous indignation about injustices inflicted on others can generate
behaviour just as fanatical as the sting of a personal insult. Self-sacri-
ficing devotion to a creed bred ruthless inquisitors 'the worst of
madmen is a saint run mad'.

The glory and the tragedy of the human condition are closely
related to the fact that under certain circumstances the participatory
tendencies may serve as mediators or vehicles for emotions belonging
to the opposite class; whereas under different circumstances the two
tendencies counteract and harmoniously balance each other. We shall
return to this subject, from a different angle, in the next section; but
let me note in passing that the preceding remarks on the various ways
in which the two tendencies interact on the psychological level are
again in keeping with the facts (as far as known) about the different
modes of interaction between the two divisions of the autonomous
nervous system, which may be antagonistic, compensatory, cathartic,
or catalytic, according to conditions. 2

280

THE ACT OF CREATION

E. Self-Pity. A litdy boy is beaten up by a gang of bullies. For a while
he tries to fight back, to hit, scratch, and kick, but his tormentors
immobilize him, and at last he begins to cry in 'impotent rage\

But the expression is misleading. Anybody who has watched child-
ren fight knows that weeping will start only after the victim has given
up struggling and wriggling and accepted defeat. After a while new
outbursts of rage may renew the struggle, but, each time this happens,
weeping is interrupted. It is not an expression of rage (although the
two may overlap) but an expression of helplessness after rage has been
exhausted and a feeling of being abandoned has set in a yearning for
love, sympathy, consolation. In other words, the tears once more
signify a frustration of the participatory emotions; and if no sym-
pathy is formcoming, self-pity will provide a substitute a mild dis-
sociation of the personality, in which the self is experienced almost
as an alien object of loving commiseration.

Similar considerations apply to so-called 'crying in pain*. In states of
violent physical pain, as in acute states of rage, the organism is fully
occupied coping with the emergency and has no time for tears.

'Great pain', wrote Darwin, 'urges all animals, and has urged them
during endless generations, to make the most violent and diversi-
fied efforts to escape from the cause of sufferings. Even when a limb
or other separate part of the body is hurt, we often see a tendency to
shake it as if to shake off the cause, though this obviously be im-
possible. Thus a habit of exerting with the utmost force all the
muscles will have been established whenever great suffering is
experienced.' 8

Camion has shown that the Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and
Rage (the title of his classic work) all follow the same basic pattern,
that they are emergency responses of the sympathico-adrenal system.
Violent pain seems to be experienced by the unconscious mind as an
aggression, whether it is inflicted by an outside agent or not. When
the aggressor is a tooth or a cramp in the stomach we are apt to say 'it
hurts', as if the offending organ were not part of oneself and we try
to shake the aggressor off, as animals do, by writhing, or pressing
against it. Only when the pain has abated to a tolerably steady, 'dull'
level do we accept it as part of ourselves we 'have' a headache or 'are'
under the weather at the same time admitting that nothing can be
done about it; writhing and struggling cease in the admission of defeat,

THE LOGIC OF THE MOIST EYE

28l

as in the case of the child in the grip of its tormentors. * Weeping in
pain* starts only when the specific pain-behaviour stops, as 'weeping
with rage* starts when rage-behaviour stops, and for precisely the
same reasons: it is an abandoning of defences, an expression of help-
lessness, a craving for sympathy, and if accompanied by vocal cries
an appeal for help.

Another misconception is that children 'cry with fear', if crying' is
used as a synonym for weeping. A child may cry out, in the literal
sense, when suddenly frightened; it may run away, and if it cannot,
strain away from the threatening apparition, lift his hands in protec-
tion, and distort his face into a mask of terror. Once more, the tears
will come only after the acute fright and the specific strained fright-
reactions have ceased; they do not mean 'I am frightened* but 1 was
so frightened, and maybe still am a little, and now I want to be
comforted.'

Consider what happens when a little boy, running along a gravel
path, suddenly stumbles and falls. The fright-reaction consists in the
protective outstretching of hands, and related muscle-reflexes. Once the
contact with the earth is made and the first shock overcome, the acute
scare ebbs away, the muscles relax in surrender, the facial expression
changes from fear to the sympathy-begging grimace of incipient
weeping. If there is no witness to the drama, self-pity will again pro-
vide the overflow. If it is witnessed by the mother, who makes a fuss
and betrays her anxiety, this will increase the child's craving for tender-
ness and its tears will ask for more. If, on the other hand, she gently
but firmly debunks the drama, then, after a moment of puzzlement,
the child may break into rather hesitant laughter the residue of the
scare, and even the slight pain, are denied by reason and worked off,
while at the same time the sympathy-craving emotions are nipped in
the bud by the mother's matter-of-fact attitude.

Lasdy, 'crying in hunger'. A baby never weeps from hunger it
cries to signal hunger. The proof is that crying instantaneously stops
when the botde or breast is offered, before hunger can have ceased;
furthermore, once the child is weaned from breast and bottle, hunger
ceases to be expressed by crying or weeping. 4

Needless to say, when a baby cries to attract attention, to signal that
it is hungry or in distress, if often breaks into tears at the same time.
Yet in such situations we say 'the baby is crying', not *the baby is
weeping*, because the essence of the performance is the vocal protest
or appeal for help; the shedding of tears is merely an accompaniment.

282

THE ACT OF CREATION

The baby's bawling, kicking, and tossing is a typical and impressive
emergency-reaction in 'pain, hunger, fear, and rage' of a dramatically
self-asserting kind. The simultaneous overflow of the tear-glands may
be 'genuine' weeping longing for affection and tenderness as an
accompaniment to the bawling; it may also be due to physiological
causes. Watering of the eyes can be induced as a purely physiological
defence reflex against the intrusion of a foreign body a piece of grit
or the molecules which carry the smell of onions. (Lachrymation caused
by such local irritation is, by the way, unilateral it occurs initially in
the affected eye only). 5 It can also be caused by coughing, sneezing,
vomiting, and after prolonged fits of laughter. The physiological
mechanism is still somewhat obscure, except that all these violent
exertions affect the mucous membranes of the nose and throat, and
tend to dry them; the lachrymal glands may have the function of
restoring lubrication through tears entering the nose. 6 When one
sees a baby cry its head off with dry eyes until it gets hoarse, one in-
tuitively feels that tears would be a relief both psychologically and
physiologically. The same applies to adults in situations of extreme
distress.

Home they brought the warrior dead;
She nor swooned nor uttered cry.
All her maidens, watching said,
'She must weep or she will die'.

(Tennyson, The Princess)

Lastly, weeping may start in the child as a genuine, spontaneous
overflow-reflex, but once the power of tears has been consciously or
unconsciously recognized, the flow may be initiated automatically,
or even voluntarily, as a weapon more subde and more effective than
mere cries of complaint or protest.* 'We seem to acquire specific
visceral habits just as we pick up characteristic verbal and manual
habits,' Kling has remarked, 7 and we ought to include in 'visceral
habits* the exercise of the lachrymal glands. Weeping may be re-
cruited into the service of hysteria, emotional blackmail, and even
courtly behaviour (as a proof of sensibility less strenuous than swoon-
ing) ; it may be associated with convulsions, shrieks, and agitated display;
but its true character is manifested by the person who weeps alone
helpless in her surrender to an emotion which, by its nature, can find
no other outlet, whether it is caused by the thunder of a church organ,
or the fall of a sparrow.

NOTES

To p. 271. So scant arc the references of any significance to the subject in
the technical literature, that I thought it would be useful to future students to
list what I could find under a separate heading at the end of the bibliography.
My indebtedness to those who helped in this is acknowledged in the Preface.

To p. 273. Romain Rolland describing the character of religious experience
in a letter to Freud who regretfully professed never to have felt anything of the
sort.

To p. 274. "The characteristic anatomical organization of the parasym-
pathetic is correlated with absence of unitary action in this system. It is not sur-
prising therefore that the adrenal medulla ... has no counterpart in the para-
sympathetic system, and that no parasympathomimetic hormone capable of
acting extensively upon organs innervated by this system is liberated in the body.'
(Madeod, ed. Bard, 1941 ed.) *. . . In contrast to the sympathomimetic hormones,
the vagus substance is rapidly destroyed, and therefore produces very localized
response. These effects are in line with the general behaviour of the sympathetic
and parasympa thetic systems of nerves.' (White and Smithwick, 1941, 2nd. ed.)

'AH the viscera can be influenced simultaneously in one direction or the other
by varying, up or down, the . . . tonic activity of the sympathetic division. And
any special viscus can be separately influenced ... by varying ... the tonic
activity of the special nerve of the opposed cranial or sacral [parasympa thetic]
division. . . . The sympathetic is like the loud and soft pedals, modulating all the
notes together; the cranial and sacral [parasympa thetic] innervations are like the
separate keys.* (Cannon, 1929, 2nd. ed.)

In the years since this has been written the significance for psychology of the
anatomical and physiological contrast between the two branches of the auto-
nomic nervous system has become more evident, to the extent that 'rage is
called the most adrenergic, and love the most cholinergic reaction' (Cobb, 1950).
A further correspondence between patterns of emotive behaviour and modes of
interaction between the two branches of the autonomic nervous system emerged
when it was shown that the vagoinsulin system may act, in different circum-
stances, as an inhibitory or a catalytic agent in the glucose-utilization process
and may also produce overcompensatory after effects (Gellhom, 1943, and 1957).
Hebb (1949) suggested that a distinction should be made between two categories
of emotions, 'those in which the tendency is to maintain or increase the original
stimulating conditions (pleasurable or integrative emotions)* and 'those in which
the tendency is to abolish or decrease the stimulus (rage, fear, disgust)*. Whereas
the latter have a disruptive effect on cortical behaviour, the former have not. A
few years later, Olds (1959 and i960) and others demonstrated the existence of
'positive' and '.negative' emotive systems by electric stimulation, and further
showed that they were activated respectively by the parasympa thetic and sym-
pathetic centres in the hypothalamus.

These hints all seem to point in the same direction, but in fairness to the
general reader I ought to point out that, while there is ample experimental
proof that the hunger-rage-fear emotions are mediated by the sympathico-
adrenal division, there is no direct evidence for the symmetrical correlation pro-
posed here. Such proof can be forthcoming only when emotions outside the
hunger-rage-fcar class will be recognized as a worthwhile object of study by ex-
periment! d psychology which at present is not the case.

283

284

THE ACT OP CREATION

To p. 282. A psychoanalyst friend of mine, after reading the manuscript of
the preceding section* objected that his patients frequently weep during the
analytical hour 'in anger and frustration*. But he agreed that anger alone would
not have produced the tears, and that the frustration was due, metaphorically
speaking, to the analyst's refusal *to give the patient the breast and sing a lullaby*.

XIII

PARTNESS AND WHOLENESS

Stepchildren of Psychology

The self-txanscending emotions* are the stepchildren of con-
temporary psychology. One of the reasons is perhaps that they
do not tend towards observable muscular activity but towards
quietude; grief) longing, worship, raptness, aesthetic pleasure are
emotions consummated not in overt but in internalized, visceral be-
haviour, with weeping as its extreme manifestation. But even the
shedding of tears is not so much an activity but rather a 'passivity*.

The word 'emotion* is derived from 'motion*; and an emotion
which tends to calm down motion seems to be a contradiction in
terms. Yet the aesthetic or religious experiences which we call 'moving'
are precisely those which induce passive contemplation, silent en-
joyment. When the experimental psychologist talks of 'emotive be-
haviour', however, he nearly always refers to rage, fear, sex, and
hunger, whereas emotions which do not beget overt activity are
slurred over as 'moods* or sentiments with the implication that they
are a suspect category of pseudo-emotions unworthy of the scientist's
attention. This is probably a hangover of the great ideological currents
of the nineteenth century stressing the biological struggle for existence,
the survival of the fittest, the acquisitive and competitive aspects of
social behaviour. The ambiance of this 'Darwinistic psychology* is
reflected in passages like the following, from Crile's The Origin and
Nature of the Emotions, published in 1915:

When the business man is conducting a struggle for existence
against his rivals, and when the contest is at its height, he may
clench his fists, pound the table, perhaps show his teeth, and exhibit
every expression of physical combat. Fixing the jaw and showing
the teeth in anger merely emphasize the remarkable tenacity of
philogeny . . .

285

286

THE ACT OF CREATION

It must be admitted, though, that the social climate of the nineteenth
century did not favour the contemplative life, nor the arousal of
genuine self-transcending emotions. The Victorian versions of religion,
patriotism, and love were so thoroughly impregnated with prudery
and hypocrisy that the experimental psychologist, devoted to measur-
ing sensory threshholds and muscle twitches could hardly be expected
to take such attitudes seriously, and to put them on a par with die sex
and hunger drives. Around the turn of the century, the so-called James-
Lange theory of emotions emphasized the importance of visceral pro-
cesses, but it was nevertheless taken for granted that the 'true* or 'major'
emotions were characterized by impulses to muscular action mainly
to hit, run, or rape. "When Cannon showed that hunger, pain, rage, and
fear were, so to speak, variations on a single theme, it was tacidy taken
for granted that all emotions worthy of that name were of the active,
adreno-toxic, hit-run-mate-devour kind. Laughter and tears, awe and
wonder, religious and aesthetic feeling, the whole 'violet' side of the
rainbow of emotions was left to the poets to worry about; the so-
called behavioural sciences had no room for them. Hence the paucity
of the literature on weeping for instance although it is certainly an
observable behavioural phenomenon.

The emotions of the neglected half of the spectrum are as real as
rage and fear; that much we know for certain from everyday ex-
perience. The theory which I have proposed assumes that they form
a class, characterized by certain shared basic features. These are pardy
negative: the absence of adreno-sympathetic excitation alone puts
them in a category apart from the emergency responses. On the
positive side, emotional states as different as mourning and aesthetic
enchantment share the logic of the moist eye: they are passive, cathar-
tic, dominated by parasympa thetic reactions. From the psycholo-
gical point of view, the selasserting emotions, derived from
emergency reactions, involve a narrowing of consciousness; the partici-
patory emotions an expanison of consciousness by identiflcatory
processes of various kinds.

There exist, however, considerations of a more precise and at the
same time, more general nature on which this theory of the emotions
is based. These arc discussed in Book Two, but I must briefly allude to
them. In that wider context, the polarity between the self-asserting and
participatory tendencies turns out to be merely a particular instance of
a general phenomenon: namely, that every member of a living organ-
ism or social body has the dual attri butes of'wholeness' and partness'. It

FASTNESS AND WHOLENESS

287

acts as an autonomous, self-governing whole on its own subordinate
parts on lower levels of the organic or social hierarchy; but it is sub-
servient to the co-ordinating centre on the next higher leveL In other
words it displays both self-assertive and participatory tendencies.

The Concept of Hierarchy

The word 'hierarchy* is used here in a special sense. It does not mean
simply * order of rank' (as in the pecking hierarchy' of the farmyard);
it means a special type of organization (such as a military hierarchy) in
which the overall control is centralized at the apex of a kind of genea-
logical tree, which branches out downward. At the first branching-out,
the commanders of the land-, sea-, and air-forces would correspond to
the co-ordinating centres of, say, the digestive, respiratory, and re-
productive organ-systems; each of these is subdivided into units or
organs on lower levels of the hierarchy with their own co-ordinating
centres, C.O.S and N.C.O.s; the organs in turn are subdivided into
organ-parts; and so the branching-process goes on down to the
cellular level and beyond.

But each sub-organization, regardless on what level, retains a
certain amount of autonomy or self-government. "Without this dele-
gation of powers the organization could not function effectively: the
supreme commander cannot deal with individual privates; he must
transmit strategical orders through 'regulation channels*, which at
each level are translated into tactical and sub-tactical moves. In the
same way, information on what is happening in the various fields of
operation (the sensory input) is selectively filtered on each level before
being transmitted to the higher echelons. A living organism or social
body is not an aggregation of elementary parts or elementary processes;
it is an integrated hierarchy of semi-autonomous sub-wholes, consist-
ing of sub-sub-wholes, and so on. Thus the functional units on every
level of the hierarchy are double-faced as it were: they act as wholes
when facing downwards, as parts when facing upwards.

On the upper limit of the organic hierarchy, we find the same
double-aspect: the individual animal or man is a whole relative to the
parts of his body, but a part relative to the social organization to which
he belongs. All advanced forms of social organization are again
hierarchic: the individual is part of the family, which is part of the
clan, which is part of the tribe, etc.; but instead of 'part* we ought

288

THE ACT OF CREATION

in each case to say 'sub-whole* to convey the semi-autonomous
character and self-assertive tendency of each functional unit.

In the living organism, too, each part must assert its individuality,
for otherwise the organism would lose its articulation and efficiency
but at the same time the part must remain subordinate to the demands
of the whole. Let me give a few examples. The heart as an organ
enjoys, of course, an advanced form of self-government: it has its own
pacemakers' which regulate its rhythm; if one is knocked out a second
automatically takes over. But the kidneys, intestines, and stomach
also have their autonomous, self-regulating devices. Muscles, even
single muscle cells, isolated from the body, will contract in response to
appropriate stimulation. Any strip of tissue from an animal's heart will
go on beating in vitro in its own, intrinsic rhythm. Each of these organs
and organ-parts has a degree of self-sufficiency, a specific rhythm or
pattern of activity, governed by a built-in, organic 'code'. Even a
single cell has its organelles' which independendy look after its
growth, motion, reproduction, communication, energy-supply, etc.;
each according to its own sub-code of more or less fixed 'rules of the
game*. On the other hand, of course, these autonomous action-
patterns of the part are activated, inhibited or modified by controls on
higher levels of the hierarchy. The pacemaker-system of the heart, for
instance, is controlled by the autonomous nervous system and by
hormones; these in turn depend on orders from centres in the brain.
Generally speaking, each organ-matrix (e.g. a cell-organelle) has its
mtrinsic code which determines the fixed, invariant pattern of its
functioning; but it is at the same time a member of a matrix on a
higher level (e.g. the cell), which in turn is a member of an organ or
tissue, and so forth. Thus the two complementary pairs: matrix and
code, self-asserting and participatory tendencies, are both derived from
the hierarchic structure of organic life.

Complex skilk, too, have a hierarchic structure. However much
you try to disguise your handwriting, the expert will find you out by
some characteristic way of forming or connecting certain groups of
letters the pattern has become an automatized and autonomous
functional sub-whole which asserts itself against attempts of conscious
interference. People whose right hand has been injured and who learn
to write with the left soon develop a signature which is indistinguish-
able from the previous right-handed one 'the signature is in the brain',
as a neurologist has said. 1 Again, touch-typing is a hierarchically
ordered skill, where the 'letter habits' (finding the right key without

PABTNESS AND WHOLENESS

looking) enter as members into 'word-habits* (automatized move-
ment-sequences, each with a 'feel* of its own, which are triggered off
as wholes, c Book Two, XEE). Ask a skilled typist to misspell the
word 'the' as *hte* each time it occurs and watch how the code of the
correct sequence asserts its autonomy. Functional habits must have
some kind of structural representation in the neuron-matrices of the
brain; and these patterned circuits must be hierarchically organized
as organ-systems are to account for such complex and flexible skills
as, for instance, transposing a tune from one key into another.

Under normal conditions, the various parts of an organism nerves,
viscera, limbs perform their semi-autonomous functions as sub-
wholes, while at the same time submitting to the regulative control
of the higher centres. But under conditions of stress the part called on
to cope with the disturbance may become over-excited and get 'out of
control*. The same may happen if the organism's powers of control
are impairedby senescence, for instance, or by a physiological block-
age. In both cases the self-assertive tendencies of the part, isolated and
released from the restraining influence of the whole, will express them-
selves in deleterious ways; these range from the remorseless prolifera-
tion of cancer cells to the obsessions and delusions, beyond rational
control, in mental disorder (cf. Book Two, m, IV).

The single individual represents the top-level of the organismic
hierarchy and at the same time the lowest unit of the social hierarchy.
It is on this boundary line between physiological and social organiza-
tion that the two antagonistic tendencies, which are at work on every
level, even in a single cell, manifest themselves in the form of 'emotive
behaviour'. Under normal conditions the self-asserting tendencies of
the individual are dynamically balanced by his dependence on and
participation in the life of the community to which he belongs. In the
body social physiological controls are of course superseded by institu-
tional controls, which restrain, stimulate, or modify the autonomous
patterns of activity of its social sub-wholes on all levels, down to the
individual. When tensions arise, or control is impaired, a social 'organ*
(the barons, or the military, or the miners) may get over-excited and
out of control; the individual, for the same reasons, may give un-
restrained expression to rage, panic, or lust, and cease to obey the rules
of the game imposed by the social whole of which he is part.

The participatory tendencies are as firmly anchored in the organic
hierarchy as are their opponents. From the genetic point of view, the
duality is reflected in the complementary processes of difFerentiation

200

THE ACT OF CREATION

of structure and integration of function. We may extend the scope of
the inquiry even further downward, from animal to vegetable and
mineral, and discover analogous pairs of self-asserting and partici-
patory forces in inanimate nature. From the particles in an atom to
the planets circling the sun, we find relatively stable dynamic systems,
in which the disruptive, centrifugal forces are balanced by binding
forces which hold the system together as a whole. The metaphors we
commonly use reflect an intuitive awareness that the pairs of opposites
on various levels form a continuous series: when in rage, 'we fly off at
a tangent' as if carried away by a centrifugal force; and contrariwise, we
speak of social 'cohesion', personal 'affinities', and the 'attraction
exerted by an idea. These are no more than analogies; the 'attraction'
between two people of opposite sex does not obey the inverse square
law and is by no means proportionate to their mass; yet it remains
nevertheless true that on every level of the evolutionary hierarchy
stability is maintained by the equilibration of forces pulling in opposite
directions: centrifugal and centripetal, the former asserting the part's
independence, autonomy, individuaHty, the second keeping it in its
place as a dependent part in the whole. Kepler kept affirming that his
comparison between the moving force that emanates from the sun
and the Holy Ghost was more than an analogy; the cohesion between
the free-floating bodies in the solar system must have a divine cause.
Newton himself toyed with similar ideas.*

I must apologize for the seemingly sweeping generalizations in the
preceding section; the reader will find them substantiated in some detail
in the biological chapters of Book Two. For the time being, I only
meant to give some indication of the broader theoretical considerations
on which the proposed classification of emotions is based namely,
that 'part-behaviour 9 and 'whole-behaviour' are opposite tendencies in
dynamic equilibrium on every level of a living organism, and can be
extrapolated by way of analogy, both upwards into the hierarchies of
the body social, and downward into stable anorganic systems.

Such an approach does not imply any philosophical dualism; it is in
fact no more dualistic than Newton's law of action and reaction, or the
conventional method of 'thinking in opposites'. The choice of 'ultimate*
and 'irreducible' principles (such as Freud's Eros and Tanatos) is always
largely a matter of taste; partness* and 'wholeness' recommend them-
selves as a serviceable pair of complementary concepts because they are
derived from the ubiquitously hierarchic organization of all living
matter. They also enable us to discuss the basic features of biological,

PARTNESS AND WHOLENESS

291

social, and mental evolution in uniform terms as the emergence of more
differentiated and specialized structures, balanced by more complex
and delicate integrations of function.

Lastly, increased complexity means increased risks of breakdowns,
which can only be repaired by processes of the regenerative, reenter-
pour-mieux-sauter type that I have mentioned before and which will
occupy us again. I shall try to show that seen in the light of the relation
of part to whole, these processes assume a new significance as aids to
the understanding of the creative mind.

NOTES

To p. 285. I am using 'self-transcending emotions' as a short-hand expres-
sion for * emotional states in which the self-transcending tendencies dominate'.

To p. 2$o. In the only excursion into science fiction of which I am guilty, I
made a visiting maiden from an alien planet explain the basic doctrine of its
quasi-Kcplerian religion:

\ . . "We worship gravitation. It is the only force which does not travel
through space in a rush; it is everywhere in repose. It keeps the stars in their
orbits and our feet on our earth. It is Nature's fear of loneliness, the earth's
longing for the moon; it is love in its pure, inorganic form.* {Twilight Bar, 1945.)

XIV

ON ISLANDS AND WATERWAYS

In the chapter on the 'Logic of the Moist Eye* I have discussed
weeping as a manifestation of frustrated participatory emotions.
Let me now briefly consider the normal manifestations of this
class of emotions in childhood and adult life.

As Freud, Piaget, and others have shown, the very young child does
not differentiate between ego and environment. The mother's breast
seems to it a more intimate possession than the toes on its own body.
It is aware of events, but not for a long time of itself as a separate
entity. It lives in a state of mental symbiosis with the outer world, a
continuation of the biological symbiosis in the womb, a state which
Piaget calls 'protoplasmic consciousness'. 1 The universe is focussed
on the self, and the self is the universe; the outer environment is only
a kind of second womb.

From this original state of protoplasmic or symbiotic consciousness,
the development towards autonomous individuation is slow, gradual,
and will never be entirely completed. The initial state of consciousness
may be likened to a liquid, fluid universe traversed by dynamic currents,
by the rhythmic rise and fall of physiological needs, causing minor
storms which come and go without leaving any solid traces. Gradually
the floods recede and the first islands of objective reality emerge; their
contours grow firmer and sharper and are set off against the undifferen-
tiated flux. The islands are followed by continents, the dry territories
of reality are mapped out; but side by side with them the liquid world
co-exists, surrounding it, interpenetrating it by canals and inland
lakes, the relics of the erstwhile oceanic communion. In the words of
Freud:

Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from
itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is
292

ON ISLANDS AND WATERWAYS

293

thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feelinga
feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable
connection of the ego with the external world. If we may suppose
that this primary ego-feeling has been preserved in the minds of
many people, to a greater or lesser extent, it would co-exist like a
sort of counterpart with the narrower and more sharply outlined
ego-feeling of maturity, and the ideational content belonging to it
would be precisely the notion of limitless extension and oneness with
the universe. 2

It is this 'oceanic feeling' which mystics and artists strive to recapture
on a higher level of development at a higher turn of the spiral.

Until the end of the second or third year, while the separation of ego
and non-ego is as yet incomplete, the child tends to confuse the sub-
jective and the objective, dream and reality, the perceived and the
imagined, its thoughts and the things thought about. Children and
primitives not only believe in the magical transformations which occur
in myths and fairy tales, but also believe themselves capable of per-
forming them. The child at play becomes at will transformed into a
horse, tie doctor, a burglar, or a locomotive. Some primitives believe
that they change at night into certain animals; if the animal is killed,
they have to die. Magic causation precedes physical causation; to wish
for an event is almost the same as producing it; children are great
believers in the omnipotence of thought. As thought becomes in-
creasingly centred in verbal and visual symbols, these become in-
struments of wishful evocation of word-magic and symbol-magic.

This erstwhile method of establishing magic connections between
events regardless of distance in space, succession in time, or physical
intermediaries, is a basic feature of primitive, but also of some highly
developed societies, particularly in the East. Levy-Bruhl an anthro-
pologist now somewhat out of fashion who greatly influenced Freud,
Piaget, and Jung had called this phenomenon participation mystique
or the 'Law of Participation'. 3 It is reflected in innumerable rites and
observances; in the individual's experience of a quasi-symbiotic com-
munion between himself, his tribe, and his totem; between a man and
his name, a man and his portrait, a man and his shadow; between the
deity and its symbol; between a desired event rain, or a successful
hunt and its symbolic enactment in dance, ritual play, or pictorial
representation. Here is the ancient, unitary source out of which the
dance and the song, the mystery plays of the Achaens, the calendars of

294

THE ACT OF CREATION

the Babylonian priest-astronomers, and the cave-paintings of Altaniira
were to branch out later on a magic source which, however great the
distance travelled, still provides artist and explorer with his basic
nourishment.

At an even earlier stage of social evolution, magic participation
could be achieved by still more direct methods: the physical prowess
of animals, the courage and wisdom of other men, the body and blood
of the sacrificed god, could be acquired and shared by the simple
means of eating them.* The sacrament of Holy Communion reflects,
in a symbolic and sublimated form, the ecstasies of the Dionysian and
Orphic mystery-rites: the devouring of the torn god. The partici-
patory magic of trans-substantiation operates here not only between
the communicant and his god, but also between all those who have
partaken in the rite, and incorporated the same substance into them-
selves. A ghastly degeneration of this ritual was revealed when the cir-
cumstances of taking the Mau-Mau oath became known. A more
harmless form of it is the 'blood-brother ceremony among Arab
tribes, performed by drinking a few drops of the elected brother's
blood; a socially valuable survival of it are the rites of conviviality
from the symbolic sharing of bread and salt, to the ceremonial ban-
queting of the Chevaliers du Taste-Vin. The emotions derived from
the feeding-drive seem to be of the purely self-assertive type; in fact,
commensality, with its archetypal echoes, invests them with a more
or less pronounced participatory character.

The progress from the historically earlier, or infantile forms of
symbiotic consciousness towards voluntary self-transcendence through
artistic, religious or social communion, reflects the sublimation of the
participatory tendencies emerging at the other end of the tunnel,
as it were. Needless to say, the culture in which we live is not very
favourable to this progress; the majority of our contemporaries never
emerge from the tunnel, and get only occasional mtimations of a
distant pinpoint of light The forces which effect the gradual replace-
ment of the child's subjective by objective reality arise through con-
tinuous friction between self and environment. Hard facts emerge
because objects are hard, and hurt if one bangs against them; wishes do
not displace mountains, not even rocking horses. A second type of
friction, between the self and other selves, drives home the fact that
these latter too exist in their own right. Biological communion with
the mother is dissolved by a succession of separative acts: expulsion
from the womb, weaning from the breast, the cessation of fondling

ON ISLANDS AND WATERWAYS

29$

and petting, Western man's 'taboo on tenderness*. Things and people
wage a continuous war of attrition on the magic forms of participation
until the floods recede, and the waterways dry up. Symbiotic con-
sciousness wanes with maturation, as it must; but modern education
provides hardly any stimuli for awakening cosmic consciousness to
replace it. The child is taught petitionary prayer instead of meditation,
religious dogma instead of contemplation of the infinite; the mysteries
of nature are drummed into his head as if they were paragraphs in the
penal code. In tribal societies puberty is a signal for solemn and severe
initiation rites, to impress upon the individual his collective ties, before
he is accepted as a part in the social whole. Vestiges of these rites still
survive in institutions such as the Church and the Army; yet the
majority of individuals take their place in the body social not by a
process of integration, but as a result of random circumstances and
pressures. The romantic bursts of enthusiasm in adolescence are like a
last, euphoric flicker of the self-transcending emotions before they
submit to atrophy and begin to shrivel away.

But they are never completely defeated. For one thing, the attritive
forces of the social environment affect different strata of the personality
in different ways. The most affected are the conscious, rational surface-
layers directly exposed to contact; whereas the non-socialized, non-
verbalized strata become the natural refuge of the thwarted partici-
patory tendencies. The more remote from the surface, the less sharp
the boundaries between the self and non-self; in those depths the sym-
biotic channels still remain navigable in the dream and other games of
the underground, from which mysticism, discovery, and art draw their
intuitions.

There exists, however, a whole range of more ordinary phenomena
through which the self-transcending emotions manifest themselves in
everyday life, and which I must briefly mention. The most banal of
these is perceptual projection, which does not properly belong in this
context except in so far as it demonstrates that the boundaries of the
self in our subjective experiences are not as clear-cut as we are wont to
believe. 'Projection* in this technical sense means that the processes
which take place in the retina and the brain are experienced as taking
place not where they actually do take place, but yards or miles away.
(This becomes at once obvious when one remembers that very low-
pitched sounds are experienced correctly as reverberations inside the
ear, and darling flashes, again correctly, as occurring in the retina^
Similarly, when you drive a nail into the wall you are aware, not that

296 THE ACT OF CREATION

the handle has struck your palm, but that its head has struck the nail,
as if the hammer had become part of your body. 4 These are not in-
ventions of psychologists to make the simple appear as complicated,
but examples of our tendency to confuse what happens in the self
with what happens outside it a kind of perceptual symbiosis* between
ego and environment.

Projective empathy again in a technical sense is based on a similar
confusion: an arrow drawn on paper is felt to manifest a dynamic
tendency to move (probably a consequence of our own unconscious
eye-movements); a church spire seems to 'soar* upwards, a picture has
'movement' and 'balance*, and so on. Not only motions, but emotions
too are projected from the self into lifeless objects; my car, climbing a
hill, 'groans' and 'pants* under its 'effort*; the weeping willow weeps,
the thunder growls. The tendency to animism, to project unconsciously
life and feeling into inanimate bodies, is well-nigh kresistible witness
the two millennia of Aristotelian physics; we can only conclude that
it is a basic feature of our psychic make-up.

Equally inveterate is the tendency to project our own emotions into
other living beings animals and people. The first leads to anthro-
pomorphism ascribing to our pet dogs, horses, and canaries reasoning
processes modelled on our own; the second to what one might call
'egomorphism* the illusion that others must feel on any subject
exactly as I do. A more complicated projective transaction is trans-
ference where A projects his feelings, originally aimed at B, on to a
substitute, C: a father figure, sister figure, or what have you, each
further transferable to D, E, etc. The Who's Who of the subconscious
seems to be printed with coloured inks on blotting paper.

Introjection is meant to signify the reverse of projection, though the
two phenomena are often ^distinguishable from each other.* When
somebody bangs his head on the doorpost, I wince; when a forward
in a soccer game has a favourable opportunity to shoot, I kick my
neighbour's shin. Adolescents unconsciously ape their hero's man-
nerisms; our super-egos were supposedly moulded by our parents at a
time when the self was still in a fluid state. Throughout his life, the
individual keeps introjecting chunks and patterns of other people's
existence into his own; he suffers and enjoys vicariously the emotions
of those with whom be becomes entangled in identiflcatory rapports.
Some of these personality-transactions have lasting effects; others are
more transitory, but at the same time more dramatic. Laughter and
yawning have an instantly infectious effect; so have cruelty, hysteria,

ON ISLANDS AND WATERWAYS 297

hallucinations, religious trances. In the hypnotic state 'the functions of
the ego seem to be suspended, except those which communicate with
the hypnotizer as though through a narrow slit in a screen* (Kret-
schmer); the personality of the hypnotizer has been substituted for the
dormant parts of the ego; the 'slit* acts as a gap in the frontier between
the self and non-self, letting in the contraband.

Freud, though disappointed at an early stage with hypno-therapy,
kept stressing the affinities between hypnosis and love on die one hand,
hypnosis and mass-behaviour on the other. In states of extreme en-
amouredness (the German technical term is Horigkeit bondage,
servitude, subjection) its object replaces the super-ego or the hypno-
tist. The poetry or pathology of the condition lies in the total
fascination of the bondsman by the bond, an attenuated but protracted
variant of the hypnotic rapport. Awareness is focussed on the object of
worship, the rest of the world is blurred or screened. The perfect symbol
of the hypnotic effect is in Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma: young Fab-
rice, in his prison cell, stares for hours on end through a narrow slit in the
screen covering his window, at the figure of Clelia across the street.

The 'hypnotic effect* of political demagogues has become a cliche,
but one aspect of mass-psychology must be briefly mentioned. The
type of crowd or mob to which Le Bon's classic descriptions still apply,
is fanatical and 'single-minded' because the subtler individual differences
between its members are temporarily suspended; the whole mass is
thus intellectually adjusted to its lowest common denominator,* but
in terms of dynamic action it has a high emcacity, because the impulses
of its members are aligned through narrow slits or blinkers all
pointing in the same direction; hence their experience of being parts
of an irresistible power. This experience of partness within a dynamic
whole leads to a temporary suspension of individual responsibility
which is replaced by unconditional subordination to the 'controlling
centre*, the leader of the crowd. It further entails the temporary
effacement of all self-assertive tendencies: the total surrender of the
individual to the collectivity is manifested in altruistic, heroic, self-
sacrificing acts and at the same time in bestial cruelty towards the
enemy or victim of the collective whole. This is a further example of
the self-transcending emotions serving as catalysts or triggers for their
opponents. But let us note that the brutality or heroism displayed by a
fanaticized crowd is quasi-impersonal, and unselfish; it is exercised in
the interest, or supposed interest, of the whole. The same S.S* detach-
ments which mowed down the whole male population of Lidice were

298

THE ACT OF CREATION

capable of dying at Oradur like the defenders of Thermopylae. The
self-assertive behaviour of a mass is based on the participatory be-
haviour of the individual, which often entails sacrifice of his personal
interest and even his life. Theories of ethics based on enlightened self-
interest fail to provide an answer why a man should sacrifice his life
in the defence of his family- not to mention country, liberty, beliefs.
The fact that men have always been prepared to die for (good, bad, or
futile) causes, proves that the self-transcending tendencies are as basic
to his mental organization as the others. And since the individual
cannot survive without some form of social integration, self-preserva-
tion itself always implies a component of self-transcendence.

Excepting saints and maniacs, our emotions nearly always consist of
mixed feelings, where both tendencies (and both branches of the
autonomous nervous system) participate in the mixture. Love, of
course, is a many-splendoured thing, both with regard to its variety
(sexual, platonic, parental, oedipal, narcissistic, patriotic, canine-
directed, or feline-oriented as the technicians would say), and also with
regard to the extraordinary cocktail of emotions which each variety
represents. Much less obvious is the fact, that even such a simple and
scientifically respectable drive as hunger should give rise to mixed
emotions. If I may return to the subject (p. 294) for a moment: on the
one hand, food is 'attacked'; it is 'wolfed'; one 'puts one's teeth into it';
biting and snapping are the very prototypes of aggression. On the
other hand, the 'feeding drive* is stimulated or inhibited by the com-
pany participating in the meal; and the sacred element in the rituals of
mensality (still surviving, for instance, in the funeral and wedding
feasts) I have already mentioned. The teeth are tools of aggression,
but tie mouth is a preferential zone of affectionate bodily contact in
billing and kissing. The German idiom 'Ich habe dick zum Fressen gerne
I love you so much I could eat you and the English 'devouring
love* are symbolized by the behaviour of young mothers mock-
devouring the baby's fingers and toes; it may be a distant echo of the
gentle cannibal. Incidentally, we are told that among certain tribes
practising ritual cannibalism, to be eaten is regarded as a great compli-
ment; perhaps the male of the praying mantis feels the same way.

Lasdy, the seemingly most altruistic social behaviour may have an
admixture of conscious or unconscious self-assertion. Professional do-
gooders, charity tigresses, hospital matrons, prison visitors, mission-
aries, and social workers are indispensable to society, and do an

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299

admirable amount of good; to pry into their motives, often hidden
to themselves, would be ungrateful and churlish.

Sumtnary

Weeping is an overflow reflex for an excess of the participatory
emotions, as laughter is for the self-asserting emotions. Its nervous
mechanism and bodily manifestations are the opposites of those of
laughter with regard to facial expression, respiratory pattern, bodily
posture. In laughter tension is exploded, emotion denied; in weeping
it is gradually drained away without break in the continuity of mood;
thought and emotion remain united. The self-asserting emotions worked
off in laughter depend on the sympathico-adrenal system, which
galvanizes the body into activity; lachrymation is controlled by the
parasympa thetic division whose action is inward-directed and cathartic.
The self-transcending emotions which overflow in tears cannot be
satisfied by any specific muscular activity; they tend towards passivity
and self-abandonment, and are consummated in glandular and visceral
reactions.

The various causes of weeping which have been discussed raptness,
weeping in sorrow, in joy, in sympathy, or in self-pity all have a
basic element in common: a craving to transcend the island boundaries
of the individual, to enter into a symbiotic communion with a human
being or some higher entity, real or imaginary, of which the self is
felt to be a part. Owing to the peculiarities of our cultural climate, the
participatory emotions have been virtually ignored by contemporary
psychology, although they are as real and observable in their mani-
festations as hunger, rage, and fear. They are grounded in the hierarchic
order of life where every entity has the dual attri butes of partness and
wholeness, and the dual potentialities of behaving as an autonomous
whole or a dependent part. The classification of emotions which I
have proposed is based on this general principle of polarity, to be found
on every level of the organic and social heirarchies (cf. Book Two).
The dual concept of adaptable matrices with fixed invariant codes is
derived from the same principle.

In the development of the individual, as in the evolution of cultures,
the manifestations of the participatory tendencies show a progression,
comparable to that of the aggressive-defensive emotions from primi-
tive and infantile to adult forms. The 'symbiotic consciousness' of

THE ACT OF CREATION

infancy, with its fluid ego boundaries, is partly relegated to the sub-
conscious strata from which the artist and the mystic draw their
inspirations; partly superseded by the phenomena of projection and
introjection, empathy and identification, transference and hypnosis.
Similarly, the participatory bonds of primitive magic are gradually
transformed into symbolic rituals, mythological epics, and mystery
plays: into the magic of illusion. The shadows in Plato's cave are
symbols of mans loneliness; the paintings in the Lascaux caves are
symbols of his magic powers.

The participatory emotions, like their opposites, can be accom-
panied by feelings of pleasure or un-pleasure which form a con-
tinuous scale, and add a third dimension to emotional experience.
Lasdy, identification, in itself a seltranscending experience, can serve
as a vehicle (or trigger) for vicarious emotions of anger and fear.

NOTES

To p. 294. The point has been succinctly made by Walter de la Mare:

It's a very odd thing
As odd as can be
That whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T.

Top. 296. *In relation to the dissolution of the ego complex, identification
can receive a somewhat different interpretation according as ego-components are
projected into the outside world or as elements from the outside world are in-
corporated into the personality. In very fluid dream processes such a distinction
cannot usually be very accurately drawn; but in schizophrenia, for example, both
possibilities can be most clearly experienced/ (Kretschmer, 1954, p. 93.)

To p. 297. The expression 'lowest common denominator* is mathematically
nonsensical; it should, of course, be 'highest*. But the "highest common deno-
minator* in a crowd of large numbers is still pretty low; thus the faulty idiom
conveys the right idea, and the correct expression would only create confusion.

I

B. VERBAL CREATION
XV

ILLUSION
The Power of Illusion

Iiterature begins with the telling of a tale. The tale represents
certain events by means of auditory and visual signs. The
events thus represented are mental events in the narrator's
mind. His motive is the urge to communicate these events to others,
to make them relive his thoughts and emotions; the urge to share. The
audience may be physically present, or an imagined one; the narrator
may address himself to a single person or to his god alone, but his
basic need remains the same: he must share his experiences, make
others participate in them, and thus overcome the isolation of the self.

To achieve this aim, the narrator must provide patterns of stimuli as
substitutes for the original stimuli which caused the experience to
occur. This, obviously, is not an easy task, for he is asking his audience
to react to things which are not there, such as the smell of grass on a
summer morning. Since the dawn of civilization, bards and story-
tellers have produced bags of tricks to provide such Ersatz-stiimdL
The sum of these tricks is called the art of literature.

The oldest and most fundamental of all tricks is to disguise people
in costumes and to put them on a stage with masks or paint on their
faces; the audience is thereby given the impression that the events
represented are happening here and now, regardless of how distant they
really are in space and time. The effect of this procedure is to induce a
very lively bisociated condition in the minds of the audience. The
spectator knows, in one compartment of his mind, that the people on
the stage are actors, whose names are familiar to him; and he knows
that they are 'acting' for the express purpose of creating an illusion in
him, the spectator. Yet in another compartment of his mind he ex-
periences fear, hope, pity, accompanied by palpitations, arrested
breathing, or tears all induced by events which he knows to be pure
make-believe. It is indeed a remarkable phenomenon that a grown-up

301

302

THE ACT OP CREATION

person, knowing all the time that he faces a screen onto which shadows
are projected by a machine, and knowing furthermore quite well what
is going to happen at the end for instance, that the police will arrive
just in die nick of time to save the hero should nevertheless go through
agonies of suspense, and display the corresponding hodily symptoms.
It is even more remarkable that this capacity for living in two universes
at once, one real, one imaginary, should be accepted without wonder
as a commonplace phenomenon. The following extract from a London
newspaper report may help to restore our sense of wonder: 1

Twice a week, with a haunting, trumpeted signature tune and
a view of terraced roofs stretching away into infinity, Coronation
Street, Granada Televisions serial of North Country life, goes on
the air. It has now had 200 issues and is coming up to its second
birthday next week. It is one of Britain's most popular television
programmes. Enthusiasts call it a major sociological phenomenon.
In fact all marathon TV serials with fixed settings and regular
characters are cunningly designed to turn the viewer into an addict.
Coronation Street eschews glamour and sensational curtains and
concentrates on trapping the rugged smug ambience on North
Country working and lower middle-class life. It will follow a local
event like a council election or an amateur theatrical through instal-
ment after instalment with the tenacity of a parish magazine. Its
characters provide parts that actors can sink their teeth into and
digest and assimilate. They have become deeply planted, like the
permanent set of seven terraced houses, the shop on the corner, the
Mission Hall, and the pub.

The characters have devotees who insist on believing in their
reality. When the buxom Elsie Tanner was involved with a sailor
who, unknown to her, was married, she got scores of letters warning
her of the danger. Jack Watson, the actor who played the sailor, was
stopped outside the studio by one gallant mechanic who threatened
to give him a hiding if he didn't leave Elsie alone.

Hie strongest personality of them all, the sturdy old bulldog
bitch, Ena Sharpies, has a huge following. When she was sacked
feom the Mission Hall of which she was caretaker, viewers from all
over the country wrote offering her jobs. When she was in hospital
temporarily bereft of speech, a fight broke out in Salford between a
gang of her fens and an Irish detractor who said he hoped the old
bag would stay dumb till Kingdom come.

ILLUSION

303

Moreover, when one of the seven houses on the set became Vacant*
because its owner was said to have moved in fact because the actor
in question had been dropped from the programme there were several
applications for renting the house; and when at a dramatic moment of
the serial the barmaid in the 'Rover's Return* smashed an ornamental
plate, several viewers sent in replacements to comfort her.

Of course, these people know that they are watching actors. Do they
nevertheless believe that the characters are real? The answer is neither
yes nor no, but yes and no. The so-called law of contradiction in
logic that a thing is either A or not-A but cannot be both is a late
acquisition in the growth of individuals and cultures (Book Two,
XV). The unconscious mind, the mind of the child and the primi-
tive, are indifferent to it. So are the Eastern philosophies which teach
the unity of opposites, as well as Western theologians and quantum
physicists. The addicts of Coronation Street who insist on believing in
the reality of Ena Sharpies have merely carried one step further the
momentary split-mindedness experienced by a sophisticated movie-
audience at the climax of a Hitchcock thriller; they live in a more or
less permanently bisociated world.

The Value of Illusion

But where does beauty, aesthetic value, or 'art' enter into the process?
The answer requires several steps. The first is to recognize the in-
trinsic value of illusion in itself- It derives from the transfer of attention
from the 'Now and Here' to the 'Then and There* that is, to a
plane remote from self-interest. Self-assertive behaviour is focussed on
the Here and Now; the transfer of interest and emotion to a different
time and location is in itself an act of self-transcendence in the literal
sense. It is achieved through the lure of heroes and victims on the
stage who attract the spectator's sympathy, with whom he partially
identifies himself, and for whose sake he temporarily renounces his
preoccupations with his own worries and desires. Thus the act of
participating in an illusion has an inhibiting effect on the self-asserting
tendencies, and facilitates the unfolding of the self-transcending ten-
dencies. In other words illusion has a cathartic effect as all ancient and
modern civilizations recognized by incorporating various forms of
magic into their purification-rites and abreaction therapies.
It is true that illusion, from Greek tragedy to horror comics, is also

THE ACT OP CREATION

capable of generating fear and anger, palpitations and cold sweat,
which seems to contradict its cathartic function. But the emotions
thus generated are vicarious emotions derived from the spectator's
participation in another person*s existence, which is a self-transcending
act (< pp. 278-9). Consequently, however exciting the action on the
stage, the anger or fear which it generates will always carry a com-
ponent of sympathy, an irradiation of unselfish generosity, which
facilitates catharsis just as a varying amount of high-voltage current
is always transformed into heat. At a later stage, when the climax of
the drama is passed, and the tension ebbs away, the whole amount of
the current is consumed in a gentle inner glow.

The Dynamics of Illusion

In the comedy, the accumulation of suspense, and its subsequent annihi-
lation in laughter take place at distincdy separate stages (although the
two may overlap in the smiling, anticipated pleasure of the joke to
come). la the tragedy, on the other hand, excitation and catharsis are
continuous. Laughter explodes emotion; weeping is its gentle over-
flow; there is no break in the continuity of mood, and no separation of
emotion from reason. The hero, with whom the spectator has identi-
fied himself, cannot be debunked by slipping on a banana-skin or by any
sudden incongruity in his behaviour. The gods of the Greek and Hindu
pantheon might change into any shape a swan, a bull, a monkey, a
shower of coins and yet their paramours would lovingly surrender
to them. On the bas-reliefs of Indian temples Shiva is often seen making
love to Parvati while standing on his head, without appearing ridi-
culous. When the events in epic or drama take an unexpected turn
Odysseus's companions transformed into swine or chaste Ophelia
singing obscene songs emotion, if aggressively tainted, refuses to
perform the jump and explodes in laughter; if sympathetic, it will
follow the hero through all viscissitudes. The abrupt change of situa-
tion which required an equally quick reorientation of the mind to a
different associative context, led in the first case to a rupture between
emotion and reason, in the second to a transfer of emotion to the new
context whereby its harmonious co-ordination with reason is preserved
Thus incongruity the confrontation of incompatible matrices-
will be experienced as ridiculous, pathetic, or intellectually challen-
ging, according to whether aggression, identification, or the well-

ILLUSION

305

balanced blend of scientific curiosity prevails in the spectator s mind.
Don Quixote is a comic or a tragic figure, or a case-history of incipient
paranoia, depending on the panel of the tryptich in which lie is
placed. In all three cases the matrices of reality and delusion of wind-
mills and phantom-knights confront each other in the reader's mini
In the first case they collide, and malice is spilled in laughter. In the
second, the two universes remain juxtaposed, reason osculates to and
fro between them, compassion remains attached to it and is easily trans-
ferred from one matrix to the other. In the third case, the two merge
in a synthesis: the (emotionally neutral') diagnosis of the clinician.

Thus compassion, and the other varieties of the participatory emo-
tions, attach themselves to the narrative told on the stage or in print,
like faithful dogs, and follow it whatever the surprises, twists, and in-
congruities the narrator has in store for them. By contrast, hostility,
malice, and contempt tend to persist in a straight course, impervious to
the subtleties of intellect; to them a spade is a spade, a windmill a
windmill, and a Picasso nude with three breasts an object to leer at.
The self-transcending emotions seem to be guided by the rnavim tout
comprendre cest tout pardonner; the self-asserting emotions are designed
for assertion, not comprehension. Hence, when attention is suddenly
displaced from one frame of reference to another, the self-asserting im-
pulses, deprived of their raison d'etre, are spilled in the process, whereas
the participatory emotions are transferred to the new matrix.

The physiological considerations which lend support to this view I
have already discussed (pp. 56 f; 274, 283). Anger and fear owe their
persistence and momentum to the sympathico-adrenal machinery,
which causes them to become occasionally dissociated from reasoning*
The self-transcending emotions, on the other hand, are accompanied
by parasympa thetic reactions which are in every respect the opposite of
the former; since they are devoid of massiveness and momentum, there
is no cause for their falling out of step with the higher mental activities,
and the normal co-ordination of thought and emotion will prevail. If
your mind has the nimbleness of migrating, at a moment's notice,
into Romeo's in sixteenth-century Verona, then you will also be capable
of shedding tears at Juliet's death.

We must remember, however, that emotions are complex mixtures;
our amusement at Charlie Chaplin's adventures is full of compassion.
All that is required for a mildly comic effect is that an aggressive factor
should DC present of sufficient strength to provide a certain inertia of
feeling or anaesthesia of the heart.

Escapism and Catharsis

Illusion, then, is the simultaneous presence and interaction in the mind
of two universes, one real, one imaginary. It transports the spectator
from the trivial present to a plane remote from self-interest and makes
him forget his own preoccupations and anxieties; in other words, it
facilitates the unfolding of his participatory emotions, and inhibits
or neutralizes his self-asserting tendencies.

This sounds like an escapist theory of art; and in spite of its deroga-
tory connotations, the expression contains a grain of truth though no
more than a grain. The analysis of any aesthetic experience requires,
as said before, a series of steps; and the escape offered by transporting
the spectator from his bed-sitter in Bays water to the Castle of Elsinore
is merely the bottom step of the ladder. But, nevertheless, it should not
be under-estimated. In the first place, if illusion offers escape it is
escape of a particular kind, sharply distinguished from other dis-
tractions such as playing tennis or bingo. It teaches us to live on two
planes at once. Children and primitive audiences who, forgetting the
present, completely accept the reality of the events on the stage, are
experiencing not an aesthetic thrill, but a kind of hypnotic trance; and
addiction to it may lead to various degrees of estrangement from
reality. The aesthetic experience depends on that delicate balance
arising from the presence of both matrices in the mind; on perceiving
the hero as Laurence Olivier and Prince Hamlet of Denmark at one
and the same time; on the lightning oscillations of attention from one
to the other, like sparks between charged electrodes. It is this precarious
suspension of awareness between the two planes which facilitates the
continuous flux of emotion from the Now and Here to the remoter
worlds of Then and There, and the cathartic effects resulting from it.
For when interest is deflected from the self it will attach itself to some-
thing else; when the level of self-assertive tension falls, the self-trans-
cending impulses become almost automatically dominant. Thus the
creation of illusion is in itself of cathartic value even if the product,
judged by more sophisticated standards, is of cheap quality; for it
helps the subject to actualize his potential of self-transcending emotions
thwarted by the dreary routines of existence. Liberated from his
frustrations and anxieties, man can turn into a rather nice and dreamy
creature; when he changes intd a dark suit and sits in a theatre, he at
once shows himself capable of taking a strong and entirely unselfish
interest in the destinies of the personae on the stage. He participates

306

ILLUSION

307

in their hopes and sufferings; his frustrated cravings for communion
find their primeval outlet in the magic of identification.

To revert to Aristotle, the cathartic function of the tragedy is
'through incidents arousing horror and pity to accomplish the purga-
tion of such emotions'. la cruder terms, a good cry, like a good laugh,
has a more lasting after-effect than the occasion seems to warrant.
Taking the Aristotelian definition at face value, it would seem that
the aesthetic experience could purge the mind only of those emotions
which the stage-play has created; that it would merely take out of the
nervous system what it has just put in, leaving the mind in the same
state as before. But this is not so. The emotion is not created, but
merely stimulated by the actors; it must be worked up* by the spec-
tator. The work of art does not provide the current, like an electricity
company, but merely the installations; the current has to be generated
by the consumer. Although this is obvious once we remember it, we
tend to fall into the mistake of taking a metaphor at face value and
believing that the stage 'provides* us with a thrill against cash payment
for a seat in the stalls. What we buy, however, is not emotion, but a
sequence of stimuli cunningly designed to trigger off our latent par-
ticipatory emotions which otherwise would remain frustrated or look
for coarser outlets, and to assure their ultimate consummation. Life
constantly generates tensions which run through the mind like stray
eddies and erratic currents. The aesthetic experience inhibits some,
canalizes others, but above all, it draws on unconscious sources of
emotion which otherwise are only active in the games of the under-
ground.

Thus the concept of catharsis assumes a twofold meaning. Firstly, it
signifies that concentration on the illusory events on the stage rids the
mind of the dross of its self-centred trivial preoccupations; in the
second place it arouses its dormant self-transcendent potentials and
provides them with an outlet, until they peacefully ebb away. Peaceful,
of course, does not necessarily mean a happy ending. It may mean the
'earthing' of an individual tragedy in the universal tragedy of the
human condition as the scientist resolves a problem by showing that
a particular phenomenon is an instance of a general law. It may dis-
solve the bitterness of personal sorrow in the vastness of the oceanic
feeling; and redeem horror by pity. Tragedy, in the Greek sense, is
the school of self-transcendence.

Identification and Magic

The projections of a single cine-camera with its rotating Maltese cross
arouse anger, terror, and righteous indignation in up to five successive
audiences on a single day, as if it were a machine designed for the
wholesale manufacture of adrenalin. Yet the emotions aroused even
by a cheap rariller-fum are vicarious emotions derived from one of
the primordial games of the underground: the transformation of one
person or object into another (Chapter VIII, p. 187 ). The fear and
anger experienced by the audience is experienced on behalf of another
person; the adrenalin secreted into their bloodstream is secreted to
provide another person with excess energy for fight or flight; the
magic of identification is at work.

It enters into illusion in two stages. The first is the partial identi-
fication, in the spectator's mind, of the actor with the character he is
meant to represent; the second is the partial identification of the spec-
tator with one or several of the characters. In both cases the identifica-
tion is only partial, but nevertheless the magic is powerful enough to
provide the palpitations and activate the supra-renal glands. And when
I speak of magic, I am not speaking metaphorically; the 'magic of the
stage* is a cliche which originates in the sympathetic magic practised
by all primitive and not-so-primitive cultures, rooted in the belief in
the substantial identity of the masked dancer with the demon he mimes;
of the impersonator with the power he impersonates. The uncon-
scious self, manifested in the beliefs of the child and the dreams of the
adult, is, as we saw, immune to contradiction, unsure of its identity,
and prone to merging it with others'. 'In the collective representations
of primitive mentality, objects, beings, events can be, though in a way
incomprehensible to us, both themselves and something other than
themselves/ 2 This description of tribal mentality by a Victorian
anthropologist could be applied almost without qualifications to the
audiences of Coronation Street.

I have taken a short-cut from primitive to contemporary magic, but
the development is in fact historically continuous: the latter is a direct
descendant of the former. Dramatic art has its origin in ceremonial
rites dances, songs, and mimewhich enacted important past or
desired future events: rain, a successful hunt, an abundant harvest.
The gods, demons, ancestors and animals participating in the event
were impersonated with the aid of masks, costumes, tattooings and
make-up. The shaman who danced the part of the rain-god was the

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ILLUSION

309

rain-god, and yet remained the shaman at the same time. From the
stag dances of the Huichol Indians or the serpent dances of the Zuni,
there is only one step to the goat dance of the Achacans, the precursor
of Greek drama. 'Tragedy' means 'goat-song' (traoos he goat, tide
song); it probably originated in the ceremonial rites in honour of
Dyonysius, where the performers were disguised in goat-skins as
satyrs, and in the related ceremonies in honour of Apollo and Demeter.
Indian and Chinese stage craft have similarly religious origins. Etruscan
drama derived from funeral rites; modern European drama evolved
from the medieval mystery plays performed on the occasion of the
main church festivals. But though the modem theatre hardly betrays
its religious ancestry, the magic of illusion still serves essentially the
same emotional needs: it enables the spectator to transcend the narrow
confines of his personal identity, and to participate in other forms of
existence. For to quote for a last time the unfashionable Levy-Bruhl,
to whom Freud, Jung, and others owe so much:

The need of participation remains something more imperious and
intense, even among people like ourselves, than the thirst for know-
ledge and the desire for conformity with the claims of reason. It lies
deeper in us and its source is more remote. During the long pre-
historic ages, when the claims of reason were scarcely realized or
even perceived, it was no doubt all-powerful in all human aggregates.
Even today the mental activity which, by virtue of an intimate
participation, possesses its object, gives it life and lives through it
finds entire satisfaction in this possession. 8

The Dawn of Literature

The dawn of literature, too, was bathed in the twilight of mysticism
and mythology. 'The recitation of the Homeric poems on the Pana-
thanaea corresponds to the recitation elsewhere of the sacred texts in
the temple; the statement of Phemios that a god inspired his soul with
all the varied ways of song expresses the ordinary belief of early
historical times.* 4 But the earliest literati priests, prophets, rhapsodes,
bards had less direct means to impress their audiences than their
older colleagues, the masked and painted illusion-mongers. They had
to 'dramatize' their tales, by techniques which we can only infer from
hints. The dramatization of an epic recital aims, like stage-craft from

3io

THE ACT OF CREATION

which it is derived, at creating, to some extent at least, the illusion that
the events told arc happening now and here. Perhaps the oldest of these
techniques is the use of direct speech, to make the audience believe
that it is listening not to the narrator but to the characters themselves;
its use is still as frequent in the modern novel as it was in the Homeric
epos. In the ancient forms of oral recital it was supplemented by
imitation of Voice and gesture another tradition still alive in the
nursery room. The minstrels and troubadours, the joculators or
jugglers, the scops and the chansonniers de geste, were direct descendants
of the Roman mimes actors who, having lost their livelihood when
the Roman theatre decayed, became vagabonds and diverted their
patrons with dancing, tumbling, juggling and recitals as much acted
as told. The early minstrels were called histriones, stage-players; the
bard Taillefer, who sang the Chanson de Roland during the battle of
Hastings, is described as a histrion or mimus.

There is hardly a novelist who had not wished at times that he were
a histrion, and could convey by direct voice, grimace, and gesture what
his characters look like and feel. But writers have evolved other
techniques to create the illusion that their characters are alive, and to
make their audience fell in love with a heroine who exists only as
printer's ink on paper. The real tears shed over Anna Karenina or
Emma Bovary are the ultimate triumph of sympathetic magic.

I

XVI

RHYTHM AND RHYME

Pulsation

The effect of the rhythm of a poem, wrote I. A. Richards, 'is
not due to our perceiving pattern in something outside us,
but to our becoming patterned ourselves 1 . 1 Rhythmic perio-
dicity is a fundamental characteristic of life. All automatic functions of
the body are patterned by rhythmic pulsations: heart-beat, respiration,
peristalsis, brain-waves are merely the most obvious ones. For there is
also an inherent tendency in some parts of the nervous system, par-
ticularly on its phylogenetically older levels, to burst into spontaneous
activity when released from the inhibitory control of the higher centres
by brain-damage, toxic states, or by patterns of stimuli acting as
triggers.

Perhaps the most striking example of such a trigger-effect is the
experimental induction of fits in epileptic patients by shining a bright
flickering light into their eyes, where the frequency of the flicker
is made to correspond to a characteristic frequency in the patient's
electro-encephalogram. This, of course, is an extreme example of a
trigger-effect by direct physiological stimulation; moreover, the in-
coming rhythm is synchronized with an inner rhythm to produce an
unholy resonance effect. The convulsions of voodoo-dancers, on the
other hand, which have been compared to epileptic fits, are certainly
not caused by the rhythmic beat of the tom-tom alone; other factors,
of a psychological nature, must be present to produce the effect. But
it is nevertheless true that our remarkable responsiveness to rhyth-
mically patterned stimuli and our readiness 'to become patterned our-
selves' arises from the depths of the nervous system, from those archaic
strata of the unconscious which reverberate to the shaman's drum.

Needless to say, even the contemporary Rock- n -Roll or Twist are
restrained and sublimated displays compared to the St. Vitus's dance

311

312

THE ACT OF CREATION

which spread as an infectious form of hysteria through medieval
Europe, Likewise, if rhythm in poetry is meant, as Yeats said, 'to lull
the mind into a waking trance', that entrancement carries only a faint,
remote echo of the incantative power of the muezzin's call, or of the
recitation of the Homeric poems on the Panathanaea. On the other
hand, we do experience a common kind of 'waking trance' when we
keep repeating a silly phrase to the rhythm of the wheels of a railway
carnage; hypnotists used to rely on metronomes, flickering candles,
monotonously repeated orders or passes; and the rocking motions
accompanying the prayers of Oriental religions and mystic sects serve
the same purpose. Thus experience, both of the exalted and trivial
kind, indicates that the mind is particularly receptive to and suggestible
by messages which arrive in a rhythmic pattern, or accompanied by a
rhythmic pattern.

This is true even on the elementary levels of perception. We are
more susceptible to musical tones than to noises, because the former
consist of periodical, the latter of a-periodical air-waves. Similar con-
siderations apply to pure colours; or to the symmetry and balance
which lend a design its 'unity in diversity'. Plato decreed that all
heavenly motions must take place in perfect circles at uniform speed,
because only such regular periodicity could assure the steady, eternal
pulsations of the universe. Perhaps the compulsive pattern-walking
ritual of certain neurotics, who must always step into the centre of
pavement-stones, is motivated by the same unconscious craving for
order and regularity as a protection against the anxiety-arousing threat
of change.

Measure and Meaning

'The superimposition of two systems: thought and metre,' wrote
Proust, 'is a primary element of ordered complexity, that is to say, of
beauty/ 2 But this superimposition in our jargon, the bisociation of
rhythm and meaning is again trivalent: it can be put to poetic,
scientific, or comic use. When rhythm assumes a rigidly repetitive
form, it no longer recalls the pulsation of life, but the motions of an
automaton; its superimposition on human behaviour is degrading, and
yields Bergson s formula of the comic: the mechanical encrusted on
the living. But here again, all depends on one's emotional attitude:
pre-war films of German soldiers marching the goose-step or if it

RHYTHM AND RHYME

313

comes to that, the changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace
will strike one spectator as comic, and appeal to the tribal, or romantic,
emotions of another. Once one is in a marching column, it is extremely
difficult to keep out of step; one has become patterned by the rhythmic
motion in which one participates. But the comedian as an army recruit
falling chronically out of step is comic, for obvious reasons.

In the natural sciences, the analysis of rhythmic periodicities the
numerical patterns underlying the phenomena of naive experience
play a dominant part. The Pythagoreans regarded the universe as a
large musical box, the organism as a well-tempered instrument, and
all material phenomena as a dance of numbers. The metre of the poet,
the metronome of the musician, the centimetre of the mathematician,
are all derived from the same root, metron: measure, measurement. Yet
the quantitative patterns in themselves would be meaningless to us if
they were not accompanied by the sensory qualities of colour, sound,
heat, taste, texture, and so on; and the rhythms of our brain-waves on
the electro-encephalogram would be meaningless if we were not con-
scious of thinking. The scientist takes a 'bi-focaT view of life; and so
does the reader whose attention is focussed simultaneously both on the
measure and the message of the poem.

Without the message, the rhythm is of course meaningless, in poetry
as in science. A monotonous rhythm, for instance, can be either sleepy-
making or exciting, according to the message which it carries. Rhyth-
mic stroking of the skin may be soothing or sexually exciting it
depends on the message. The rhythmic rattle of the wheels on a train
journey will lull one to sleep, as a superior form of counting sheep, if
one is in a relaxed mood; but I can remember at least one ghastly
journey, when I found myself in a predicament of my own making,
and the wheels kept repeating, 'I told you so, I told 'you so, I told you so*
with such hallucinatory clarity and insistence that I found it difBcult to
convince myself that the other passengers in the compartment did not
hear it. Rhythm penetrates so deeply into the unconscious strata that
it makes us suggestible even to self-addressed messages from the
Yogic recitation of mantras to Coue's 'every day in every way . . .\

However, unlike the beat of the tom-tom, or the rattle of the car-
riage wheels, a strophe of verse does not consist in a simple repetitive
rhythm, but in complex patterns of short and long, stressed and light
syllables, farther complicated by super-imposed patterns of assonance
or rhyme. As music has evolved a long way from the simple, repetitive

314

THE ACT OF CREATION

figures of rnonochords and drums, so the various metric forms in poetry
contain their substructure of rhythmic pulsation in an implied, and no
longer in an explicit form. In free verse, the rhythmic substructure has
become so implicit, as to go sometimes unnoticed.

This development from the explicit to the implicit, from the direct
statement to the veiled hint, is a phenomenon which we have already
met (pp 84 fF.), and shall meet again in other provinces of art, as a
characteristic factor in the evolution of creative techniques in general.

Repetition and Affinity

The rhyme is a relatively late offspring of rhythm. Both words are
derived from the same Greek root, rhutmos; up to the sixteenth century
they were treated as practically synonymous. Metric patterns based
exclusively on the regular succession of ups and downs of intonation
the only form of verse in Greek and Latin poetry were later com-
bined with patterns based on the repetition of single consonants and
vowels; and thus, via alliteration and assonance, the rhyme came into
being as melody was born out of originally unmodulated, rhythmic
beats.

But although conscious rhyming was only admitted into formal
literature in the Middle Ages (at first as the internal rhyme in Leonine
verse), it has, like rhythm, its primordial roots in the unconscious. The
repetition of syllables is a conspicuous phenomenon at the very origins
of language. In the early stages of learning to speak, children seem to
have an irresistible impulse to jabber repetitive variations of sound
patternsfrom ma-ma and pa-pa to obble-gobble, rninky-pinky and
so on ad infinitum; gibble-gabble was the Victorian word for it. Simi-
larly, in many primitive languages as far apart as Polynesian and Bantu,
words like Kala-Kak or Moku-Moku abound; and why does the
name Humpty-Durnpty hold such a charm for child and adult
alike?

Next to repetition, association by sound affinity punning is one of
die notorious games of the underground, manifested in dreams, in
the punning mania of children, and in mental disorders. The rhyme is
nothing but a glorified pun two strings of ideas tied in an accoustic
knot. In normal, rationally controlled speech, association by pure sound
is prohibited, for, if given free rein, it would destroy coherence and
meaning. Thus, on re-reading the previous sentence, it occurs to me

RHYTHM AND RHYME

315

that 'des-troy' lends itself to a pun (Helen was fated to destroy Troy);
once one 'tunes in* to the matrix of sound-associations, a number of
quite idiotic puns and rhymes will invade the mind. No effort is
required to produce them; on the contrary, when concentration flags,
and the rational controls are relaxed, thinking has a tendency to revert,
by its own gravity as it were, to matrices governed by more primitive
rules of the game. Among these, association by sound-affinities plays
a prominent part; the free associations of the patient on the analyst's
couch belong as often as not to this category. Let us also remember
(pp. 186 f.) that other games based on sound-affinity have exercised a
perennial attraction on the most varied cultures; anagrams, acrostics,
and word-puzzles; incantations and verbal spells; hermeneutics and
Cabala, which interpreted the Scriptures as a collection of the
Almighty's hidden puns, combining letter-lore with number-lore.

Thus rhythm and assonance, pun and rhyme are not artificially
created ornaments of speech; the whole evidence indicates that their
origins go back to primitive and infantile forms of thought and
utterance, in which sound and meaning are magically interwoven, and
association by sound-affinities is as legitimate as association based on
other similarities. Rationality demands that these matrices should be
relegated underground, but they make their presence felt in sleep and
sleeplike states, in mental illness and in the temporary regression the
reculer-pour-mieux-sauter of poetic inspiration. But before we come to
that, let me once more quote additional evidence from neurology,
more precisely, from brain surgery a field rarely bisociated with the
poetic faculty.

Compulsive Punning

The phenomenon to be described is known as 'Forster's syndrome'. It
was first observed by Forster, a German surgeon, in 1929, when he was
operating on a patient sufFering from a tumour in the third ventricle
a small cavity deep down in the phylogenetically ancient regions of
the mid-brain, adjacent to structures intimately concerned with the
arousal of emotions. When the surgeon began to manipulate the
tumour, affecting those sensitive structures, the (conscious) patient
burst into a manic flight of speech, 'quoting passages in Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew. He exhibited typical sound associations, and with every
word of the operator broke into a flight of ideas. Thus, on hearing the

THE ACT OF CREATION

operator ask for a Tupfer [tampon] he burst into "Tupfer . . . Tupfer,
Hupfer, Hiipfer, hup/en Sie tnal . . On hearing the word Messer, he
burst into "Messer, messer, Metzer, Sie sind ein Metzel, das ist ja ein
Gemetzel, metzeln Sie dock nicht so messen Sie dock Sie messen ja nicht
Hen Professor, projiteor, professus sum, profiteri" These manic responses
were dependent on manipulation of the tumour and could be elicited
only from the floor of the third ventricle.' 3

FSrster's patient opened up a curious insight into the processes in
the poet's brain in an unexpectedly literal sense of the word. The
first flight of ideas, Tupfer, Hupfer, etctampon, jumper, go and
jump into the air' has a gruesome kind of humour coming from a
man tied face down to the operating table with his skull open. The
second flight, translated, runs as follows: Messer, Metzer, etc. 'Knife,
butcher, you are a butcher in a butchery; truly this is a massacre
[Gemetzel]; don't go on butchering [metzeln], take measurements
[raewew] ; why don't you measure, Herr Professor, projiteor, professus sum'
and so on.

Thus the patient's apparently delirious punning and babbling con-
vey a meaningful message to the surgeon his fear of being butchered,
and his entreaty that the surgeon should proceed by careful measure-
ments, that is, in a more cautious, circumspect way. His train of
thought seems to move under dual control. It is controlled by allitera-
tion and assonance for he has regressed to the level of sound-associa-
tion and must abide by its rules. But it is also controlled by his inter-
mittent, rational awareness of his situation on the operating table.
Without this, his flight of words would become meaningless (and does
so at times). Without the tyranny of the other code, he would address
the surgeon in simple, sensible prose. As it is, he must serve both masters
at the same time.*

Let us take a blasphemous short-cut from patient to poet. We have
seen that the creative act always involves a regression to earlier, more
primitive levels in the mental hierarchy, while other processes continue
simultaneously on the rational surface a condition that reminds one
of a skin-diver with a breathing-tube. (Needless to say, the exercise
has its dangers: skin-divers are prone to fall victims to the *rapture of
die deep' and tear their breathing-tubes off the reader sans sauter of
William Blake and so many others. A less fatal professional disease
is the Bends, a punishment for attempting to live on two different
levels at once.)

Coaxing the Unconscious

The capacity to regress, more or less at will, to the games of the
underground, without losing contact with the surface, seems to be the
essence of the poetic, and of any other form of creativity. 'God guard
me from those thoughts men think/In the mind alone,/He that sings a
lasting song/Thinks in a marrow bone* (Yeats);

or, to quote A. E. Housman:

... I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat,
but we both recognize the object by the symptoms which it pro-
vokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connection
with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: 'A spirit passed before
my face: the hair of my flesh stood up/ Experience has taught me,
when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts,
because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles
so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accom-
panied by a shiver down the spine. ... I think that the production
of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a passive and involun-
tary process; and if I were obliged, not to define poetry, but to name
the class of things to which it belongs, I should call it a secretion;
whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or a morbid
secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I have seldom written poetry
unless I was rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasur-
able, was generally agitating and exhausting. 4

The next quotation, in a more academic vein, is from Paul Valry's
A Course in Poetics (the italics are in the original):

"When the mind is in question, everything is in question; all is dis-
order, and every reaction against that disorder is of the same kind as
itself. For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind's
fertility

. . . The constitution of poetry ... is rather mysterious. It is strange
that one should exert himself to formulate a discourse which must
simultaneously obey perfectly incongruous conditions: musical,
rational, significant, and suggestive; conditions which require a con-
tinuous and repeated connection between rhythm and syntax,
between sound and sense. . . .

317

318

THE ACT OF CREATION

. . . There is a poetic language in which words are no longer the
words of free practical usage. They are no longer held together by
the same attractions; they are charged with two different values
operating simultaneously and of equivalent importance: their sound
and their instantaneous psychic effect. They remind us then of those
complex numbers in geometry; the coupling of the phonetic variable
with the semantic variable creates problems of extension and con-
vergence which poets solve blindfold but they solve them (and
that is the essential thing), from time to time. 5

The sceptical reader may object that all these metaphors about the
blindfold poet thinking in his marrow-bones while secreting pearls
like an oyster, reflect a too romantic view of the profession; and that
I have put altogether too much emphasis on the role of the uncon-
scious. The answer is partly to be found in the chapter on 'Thinking
Aside', which shows that the unconscious is neither a romantic nor a
mystic fancy, but a working concept in the absence of which nearly
every event of mental life would have to be regarded as a miracle.
There is nothing very romantic about the wheels of the railway carriage
screaming 'I told you so'; it is simply an observed fact.

In the second place, though unconscious processes cannot be
governed by conscious volition, they can at least be coaxed into
activity by certain tricks acquired at the price of a little patience.
Friedrich Schiller learned to get himself into a creative frame of mind
by smelling rotten apples, Turgenev by keeping his feet in a bucket
of hot water, Balzac by drinking poisonous quantities of black coffee;
for lesser mortals even a pipe or pacing up and down in the study
might do.

And lastly, there is the long process of conscious elaboration of
cutting, grinding, polishing the rough stone which inspiration has un-
earthed. Here the range of variations from one writer to another
and from one work to another by the same writer is as enormous
as with the elaboration and formulation of a nuclear discovery' in
science. An excellent account of this process is to be found in an essay,
far too little known, by A. E. Housman from which I have already
quoted:

Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon beer is a sedative to the
brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life
I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along,

RHYTHM AND RHYME

319

thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me
and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my
mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or
two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once, accompanied, not
preceded, by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined
to form part o Then there would usually be a lull of an hour or so,
then perhaps the spring would bubble up again. I say bubble up,
because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions
thus proffered to the brain was an abyss which I have already had
occasion to mention, the pit of the stomach. When I got home I
wrote them down, leaving gaps, and hoping that further inspiration
might be forthcoming another day. Sometimes it was, if I took my
w alks in a receptive and expectant frame of mind; but sometimes the
poem had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain, which
was apt to be a matter of trouble and anxiety, involving trial and
disappointment, and sometimes ending in failure. I happen to
remember distinctly the genesis of the piece which stands last in my
first volume. Two of the stanzas, I do not say which, came into my
head, just as they are printed, while I was crossing the corner of
Hampstead Heath between the Spaniard's Inn and the footpath to
Temple Fortune. A third stanza came with a little coaxing after
tea. One more was needed, but it did not come: I had to turn to and
compose it myself, and that was a laborious business, I wrote it
thirteen times, and it was more than a twelvemonth before I got it
right.

NOTE

To. p. 316. Less dramatic than Forster's syndrome but equally convincing
were experiments by Luria and Vinagradova, which demonstrated that subjects
who normally associated words by their meaning regressed to association by
sound when they were made drowsy by chloral hydrate (Br. J. of Psychol,
May, X9S9).

XVII
IMAGE
The Hidden Analogy

In Chapters VH-VHI I have spoken at length of the dose related-
ness between the scientist seeing an analogy where nobody saw one
before, and the poet's discovery of an original metaphor or simile.
Both rely on the mediation of unconscious processes to provide the
analogy. In the scientist's Eureka process two previously unconnected
frames of reference are made to intersect, but the same description may
be applied to the poet's trouvaille the discovery of a felicitous poetic
comparison. The difference between them is in the character of the
'frames of reference', which in the first case are of a more abstract, in
the second of a more sensuous nature; and the criteria of their validity
differ accordingly. But the difference, as we have seen, is a matter of
degrees; and often the two overlap. The discovery of perspective and
fore-shortening, for instance, belongs to both geometrical science and
representative art; it establishes formal analogies between two-dimen-
sional and three-dimensional space, but at the same time a direct
sensory impact.

Here is another example which I have already mentioned the
account, by one of Freud's earlier biographers, of how the master
suddenly hit upon the idea of the sublimation of instinct:

It happened while he was looking at a cartoon in a humorous
periodical which showed the career of a young girl in two subse-
quent stages. In the first she was herding a flock of young geese with
a stick, in the second she was shown as a governess directing a group
of young girls with her parasol. The girls in the second picture were
arranged exactly in the same groups as the goslings in the first. 1

The two cartoons provided the hidden (though not all to deeply
hidden) analogy for the Eureka process. But vice versa, the two

320

IMAGE 321

cartoons may be regarded as a metaphorical illustration of it. The same
reversibility applies to Kekule's snake and Faraday's cosmic lines of
force. Lastly, on the third panel of the triptych, the governess or the
snake can be turned into a joke as was actually done by malicious
contemporaries.

Emotive Potentials

Among the simplest metaphors are cross-references from one of the
senses to another: a 'warm' colour, a 'sweet' voice, a 'sharp' light; the
'blind lips* of Swinburne, the 'blind hands' of Blake. Such combina-
tions of different sensory matrices lend a new richness or multi-dimen-
sionality to experience so that, again with Swinburne, 'light is heard
as music, music seen as light'.

The aesthetic satisfaction derived from metaphor, imagery, and re-
lated techniques (which I shall treat as a single category) depends on
the emotive potential of the matrices which enter into the game. By
emotive potential I mean the capacity of a matrix to generate and
satisfy participatory emotions. This depends of course partly on indi-
vidual factors, partly on the collective attitudes of different cultures,
but also on objective factors: on the intrinsic 'calory value', as it were,
of some associative contexts mental diets the ingredients of which
have, for instance, a religious or mythological flavour.

On the simplest and most general level, the emotive potentials of
the seiise-modalities sight, sound, odour, touch differ widely with
different people. Robert Graves 2 has confessed that his favourite
poems have 'without exception* a tactile quality. He quoted as an
example for it the Early English:

Cold blows the wind on my true love
And a few small drops of rain

'where*, he comments, 'I feel the rain on my hands and hair rather
than see it,' He goes on to say that he always liked Keats and dis-
liked Shelley because 'the characteristic of Keats is, I find, his constant
appeal to the sense of touch, while Shelley's appeal is as constantly to
the sense of movement*. Graves's stimulating essay (published in 1925)
ended with the suggestion that psychologists should engage in 'intense
research' on this question; it is a pity that it has not been followed up.
(My guess would be that more people than one suspects can smell

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THE ACT OF CREATION

poetry but that, needless to say, is a generalization based on personal
experience, for I can always smell the dust-cloud raised by the gallop-
ing horses in a Western film; and the lines 'Cold blows the wind*
convey to me mainly the fresh smell of the rainy wind and of True
Love's wet hair.)

However, granted such personal idiosyncrasies, man lives primarily
by his eyes and ears. The emotive potentials of patterned sound I
have already discussed; it adds to the virtues of language the dynamism
of the dance, the melody of the song, and the magic of incantation. It
may even happen that the magic makes us forget the message as
when (quoting Graves) people read Swinburne for the mere glorious
rush of his verse, without any more regard for the words than will
help to a vague scenic background'; and with Blake one often feels
that the emotive calories generated by the matrix have burnt up the
meaning.

The Picture-strip

Much the same could be said of the emotive power of some visual
imagery including Blake's own. We have seen (Chapter VII) that
'thinking in pictures' dominates the manifestations of the unconscious
in the dream, in hallucinatory states, but also in the creative work of
scientists. In fact, the majority of mathematicians and physicists turned
out to be Visionaries' in the literal sense that is, visual, not verbal
thinkers.

But we have also seen that pictorial thinking is an earlier and more
primitive form of mentation than conceptual thinking in the evolu-
tion of the individual as in that of the species. The language of children
is 'picturesque* again in the literal sense of the word; and the lan-
gauge of primitives is 'like the unfolding of a picture strip, where each
word expresses a pictorial image, regardless as to whether the picture
signifies an object, an action, or a quality. Thus "to strike" and "a
blow" are expressed by the same word. These languages are not merely
deficient in the more abstract type of imagery, but in practically all
higher grammatical construction (Kretschmer). 3

Let me give a concrete example from Kretschmer's textbook,
followed by the comments of that excellent German psychiatrist
whose work, comparable in importance to Jung's, is far too little
known to the English-speaking public. The example is a simple story
told in the Bushman language. It is about a Bushman who worked as

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323

a shepherd for a white man until the latter ill-treated him; whereupon
the Bushman ran away, and the white man engaged another Bushman,
to whom the same thing happened. Translated into Bushman language,
this story is picturized as follows:

Bushman-there-go, here-run-to-Whites, White-give-tobacco,
Bushman-go-smoke, go-fiH-tobacco sack, White-give-meat-Bush-
man, Bushman-go--eat-meat, get-up-go-home, go-merry, go-sit,
graze-sheep Whites, White-go-strike-Bushman, Bushman-cry-
much-pain, Bushman-go-run-away-Whites, White-run-after-Bush-
man, Bushman-mere-omer-this-graze-sheep, Bushman-all-away.

Kretschmer comments:

The thought of primitive peoples allows of but little arrangement
and condensation of separate images into abstract categories; but the
sensory perceptions themselves, retained directly as such in memory,
unwind themselves before us unchanged, like a long picture roll.
The discrete visual image dominates the scene throughout, whilst
the relation between the separate pictures is barely indicated. Logical
connections are as yet quite tenuous and loose. If we wish to con-
ceive of speech at a slightly lower level still, we shall have to dispense
with even those slight hints of a syntax which are present; we shall
then find that the thought-processes of a people using such a language
would consist entirely of an asyntactical series of pictures.

Some passages in die Old Testament seem to reflect the transition
from predominantly pictorial to abstract thought:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
nor the batde to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet
riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but
time and chance happeneth to them all. (Ecclesiastes.)

The tendency to stick to concrete visual images is still evident; but
the characters in the picture-strip no longer represent individuals the
swift, the strong, the wise are collective nouns, abstracted universals.
Incidentally, George Orwell once wrote a parody of this passage in
modern academic jargon to highlight the contrast between vivid
.imagery and desiccated abstraction:

324

THE ACT OF CREATION

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the
conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no
tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a con-
siderable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into
account.

While dreaming, even a paragon of normality regresses in time not
merely to Ecclesiastes, but to the earlier mythological creations of the
Babylonians and the visual concreteness of the Bushman's statements.
But on awakening 'all the charm is broken, all that phantom world so
fair, vanishes , as at the call of the gentleman from Porlock. It may be
just as well the quick effacement from memory of the majority of
our dreams may be a normal protective device of the mind (as distinct
from pathological repression). In the hallucinatory psychoses, however,
the regressions are more intense, realistic, enduring, and unforgettable
in a painful sense; hence the remarkable affinities between the paint-
ings of schizophrenics and primitive art. To quote Kretschmer again:
'Schizophrenic symbols, like primitive and dream symbols, are the
pictorial antecedents of concepts and are not developed beyond that
stage/ He then relates the case of one of his patients, a gifted young
man who, between periods of normality and abnormality, lived
through a prolonged transitional phase, enlivened by what he csiJled
his picture show':

In these phases he passively experiences the outcropping of a mass
of images which arise from abstract concepts, or which appear to
exist in concrete objects. The images often 'resemble old Norse
ornaments or Roman sculptures'; sometimes they are grotesque
figures, sometimes sensible film-like scenes of knights and soldiers
who occupy a real old castle which lies in the valley. Most interesting
are the images which arise directly out of abstract thought. For
example, he is reading a philosophical work of Kant, and as he reads,
the abstract thoughts are continuously converted into imagery.
"Whilst reading Kant on the question of the infinity of space he had
the following experience: "The pictures crowded on me towers,
circles behind circles, a cylinder which thrust itself obliquely into the
whole picture. Everything is showing movement and growth; the
circle acquires depth and thus becomes cylindrical; the towers
become higher and higher; everything is arbitrary as in an experi-
mental picture or a dream.'

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325

In case-histories like this we see the extreme development of ten-
dencies which on a moderate scale are present in the normal imagina-
tive person; just as we saw in the punning and rhyming patient on the
operating table the pathological extreme of the poet's urge to convey
his meaning in rhythmic patterns. And just as rhythm is not an arti-
ficial embellishment of language but a form of expression which pre-
dates language, so visual images and symbols are not fanciful em-
broideries of concepts, but precursors of conceptual thought. The
artist does not climb a ladder to stick ornaments on a facade of ideas
he is more like a pot-holer in search of underground rivers. To quote
Kretschmer for the last time: 'Such creative products of the artistic
imagination tend to emerge from a psychic twilight, a state of lessened
consciousness and diminished attentivity to external stimuli. Further,
the condition is one of "absent-mindedness" with hypnoidal over-
concentration on a single focus, providing an entirely passive experi-
ence, frequently of a visual character, divorced from the categories of
space and time, and reason and will. These dreamlike phases of artistic
creation evoke primitive phylogenetic tendencies towards rhythm and
stylization with elemental violence; and the emergent images thus
acquire in the very act of birth regular form and symmetry/

On Law and Order

Some images seem to appeal more to the intellect than to emotion
because of their logical and didactic character but nevertheless evoke
an emotive response:

And how dieth the wise man? as the fool (Ecclesiastes)

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

(Cymbeline)

When Adam dolve and Eve span,
Who was then a gentleman?

(John Ball ?)

Bach of these quotes may be described as a particular illustration of
a general truth: the first and second affirm that all men must die, the

326

THE ACT OP CREATION

third proclaims that all men are equal. If we wish to be pedantic, we
can enumerate the various bisociative techniques which enter into
them: sense and sound in the last two; or in the first two, me joining
of habitually incompatible opposites in the focal concepts 'dying' and
'dust'. We may further note die archaic, or archetypal, resonances of
Adam, Eve, the sage, the fool, and the golden lads. Finally, the tech-
nique of condensation and implication in the third quote poses a kind
of naive riddle which enhances its effect. But when all these points are
made, the main feature which the three quotes share remains their
didactic intent of driving home a message, of demonstrating a universal
law by means of concrete imagery.

Now such reductions of particular instances to universal causes or
abstract laws are supposed to represent a purely intellectual pastime
which has nothing to do with art and emotion; in fact, however, they
give rise to the most powerful emotional release. When John Ball
exhorted the peasants at Blackheath to rise against their Lords, he ad-
vertently chose 'When Adam dolve' as his text, because it enabled
him to prove that their particular grievances were based on a Law
ordained by the Creator: that there should be no privilege of birth.
It is significant that this same text, with its indirect affirmation implied
in a riddle, should have such an explosive effect not only in England,
but also during the peasant risings in Germany, where it became the
marching song of the rebels ('Als Adam grub und Eva spann Wo war
da der Edelmann?'). Blake's

There came a voice without reply
"lis man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die,

might serve as a motto for all appeals to the emotions which are ex-
plained and justified by reference to divine law the Voice Without
Reply.

The Will of God, or the Laws of Nature, as the organizing and har-
monizing principle of the universe is one of the most powerful arche-
types of human experience. No doubt it originates to a large part in
feelings of insecurity, of cosmic anxiety, the need for protection
hence the reassurance and relief which are felt whenever a threatening
or merely puzzling phenomenon can be Explained* as a manifestation
of some universal law or divine order. For the opposite of order is
chaos which means unpredictability of events, absence of protection,

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327

exposure to the whims of incomprehensible forces. The emergence or
order from chaos is a leitmotif of all mythologies; even the blood-
thirsty goddesses of the Hindus and the choleric deities of the Pantheon
provided a measure of reassurance, because they were moved by
human passions which could be comprehended by the mind; so that
everything that befell one was satisfactorily explained.

Thus virtually any explanation valid or notwhich commands
belief has a calming and cathartic effect. It can be observed on every
level: from the sudden, smiling relief of the small child when some
startling appearance is shown to be related to something familiar, and
recognized as part of the general order of things to the euphoria of
the scientist, who has solved his problem. Even painful experiences
are tempered with relief once they are recognized as particular in-
stances of a general law. To lose a relative by a 'stupid accident' is more
painful than to lose one 'kwfully', through old age or incurable illness.
The only effective consolation in the face of death is that it is part of
the cosmic order; if chimneysweepers were exempted from it, we
should resent it very much indeed. The idea of 'blind chance* deciding
our fate is intolerable; the mind abhors gaps in the lawful order as
nature abhors the vacuum.

On Truth and Beauty

However, the reduction of the uncanny and vexing to the orderly and
familiar, of the rustling of leaves in the dark forest to the whisper of
fairies or the vibrations of compressed air both equally reassuring
is merely the negative aspect of the power of explanation: relief from
anxiety. Its positive aspect is epitomized in the Pythagorean belief
that musical harmonies govern the motion of the stars. The myth of
creation appeals not only to man's abhorrence of chaos, but also to his
sense of wonder at the cosmic order: light is more than the absence of
darkness, and law more than the absence of disorder. I have spoken
repeatedly of that sense of 'oceanic wonder' the most sublimated ex-
pression of the self-transcending emotions which is at the root of the
scientist's quest for ultimate causes, and the artist's quest for the ulti-
mate realities of experience. The sensation of 'marvellous clarity' which
enraptured Kepler when he discovered his second law is snared by
every artist when a strophe suddenly fells into what seems to be its
predestined pattern, or when the felicitous image unfolds in the mind

328

THE ACT OF CREATION

the only one which can explain* by symbols the rationally unex-
plainable and express the inexpressible.

Experiences of this kind, when something previously turbid be-
comes suddenly transparent and permeated by light, are always
accompanied by the sudden expansion and subsequent catharsis of the
self-transcending emotions. I have called this the earthing' of emotion,
on the analogy of earthing (or 'grounding') an electrically charged
body, so that its tensions are drained by the immense current-absorb-
ing capacity of mother earth'. The scientist attains catharsis through
the reduction of phenomena to their primary causes; a disturbing par-
ticular problem is mentally 'earthed* into the universal order. The
same description applies to the artist, except that his 'primary causes'
and 'laws of order' are differently constituted. They derive from
mythology and magic, from the compulsive powers of rhythm and
form, from archetypal symbols which arouse unconscious resonances.
But their 'explanatory power', though not of a rational order, is
emotionally as satisfying as that of the scientist's explanations; both
mediate the 'earthing' of particular experiences into a universal frame;
and the catharsis which follows scientific discovery or artistic trou-
vaille has the same 'oceanic* quality. The melancholy charm of the
golden lads who come to dust because that is the condition of man, is
due to the 'earthing' of our personal predicaments in a universal
predicament. Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it
expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches
us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle.

"When Rembrandt had the audacity to paint the carcass of a flayed
ox, he taught his public to see and accept behind the repulsive par-
ticular object the timeless patterns of light, shadow, and colour. We
have seen that the discoveries of art derive from the sudden transfer
of attention from one matrix to another with a higher emotive poten-
tial. The intellectual aspect of this Eureka process is closely akin to the
scientist's or the mystic's 'spontaneous iHumraation*: the percep-
tion of a familiar object or event in a new, significant, light; its emotive
aspect is the rapt stillness of oceanic wonder. The two together intellec-
tual iQumination and emotional catharsis are the essence of the
aesthetic experience. The first constitutes the moment of truth; the
second provides the experience of beauty. The two are complemen-
tary aspects of an indivisible process that 'earthing' process where
'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite, to stand visible, as it
were, attainable there* (Carlyle).

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329

Every scientific discovery gives rise, in the connoisseur, to the ex-
perience of beauty, because the solution of the problem creates har-
mony out of dissonance; and vice versa, the experience of beauty can
occur only if the intellect endorses the validity of the operation
whatever its nature designed to elicit the experience. A virgin by
Botticelli, and a mathematical theorem by Poincare, do not betray
any similarity between the motivations or aspirations of their res-
pective creators; the first seemed to aim at 'truth', the second at
'beauty*. But it was Poincare who wrote that what guided him in his
unconscious gropings towards the 'happy combinations' which yield
new discoveries was 'the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the har-
mony of number, of forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true
aesthetic feeling thai all mathematicians know.' The greatest among
mathematicians and scientists, from Kepler to Einstein, made similar
confessions. 'Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the
world for ugly mathematics*, wrote G. H. Hardy in his classic, A
Mathematician s Apology. Jacques Hadamard, whose pioneer work on
the psychology of invention I have quoted, drew the final conclusion:
'The sense of beauty as a "drive'* for discovery in our mathematical
field, seems to be almost the only one/ And the laconic pronouncement
of Dirac, addressed to his fellow-physicists, bears repeating: 'It is more
important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit
experiment/

If we now turn to the opposite camp, we find that painters and
sculptors, not to mention architects, have always been guided, and
often obsessed, by scientific and pseudo-scientific theories the golden
section, the secrets of perspective, Diirer's and Leonardo's 'ultimate
laws* of proportion,* Cezanne's doctrine 'everything in nature is
modelled on the sphere, the cone and the cylinder'; Braque's substitu-
tion of cubes for spheres; the elaborate theorizings of the neo-impres-
sionists; Le Corbusier's modulator theory based on the so-called
Fibonacci sequence of numbers the list could be continued endlessly.
The counterpart to A Mathematician's Apology, which puts beauty
before rational method, is Seurat's pronouncement (in a letter to a
friend): 'They see poetry in what I have done. No, I apply my method,
and that is all there is to it/

Both sides seem to be leaning over backwards: the artist to rationalize
his creative processes, the scientist to irrationalize them, so to speak. But
this fact in itself is significant. The scientist feels the urge to confess his
indebtedness to unconscious intuitions which guide his theorizing; the

330

THE ACT OF CREATION

artist values, or over-values, the theoretical discipline which controls
his intuition. The two factors are complementary; the proportions in
which they combine depend other things being equalforemost on
the medium in which the creative drive finds its expression; and they
shade into each other like the colours of the rainbow.

The act of creation itself, as we have seen, is based on essentially the
same underlying pattern in all ranges of the continuous rainbow spec-
trum. But the criteria for judging the finished product differ of course
from one medium to another. Though the psychological processes
which led to the creation of Poincare's theorem and of Botticelli's
virgin lie not as far apart as commonly assumed, the first can be
rigorously verified by logical operations, the second not. There seems
to be a crack in Keats's Grecian urn, and its message to sound rather
hollow; but if we recall two essential points made earlier on, the crack
will heal.

The first is that verification comes only post factum, when the crea-
tive act is completed; the act itself is always a leap into the dark, a dive
into the deeps, and the diver is more likely to come up with a handful
of mud than with a coral. False inspirations and freak theories are as
abundant in the history of science as bad works of art; yet they com-
mand in the victim's mind the same forceful conviction, the same
euphoria, catharsis, and experience of beauty as those happy finds which
are post factum proven right. Truth, as Kepler said, is an elusive hussy
who frequendy managed to fool even Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz,
Pasteur, and Einstein, to mention only a few. In this respect, then,
Poincare is in no better position than Botticelli: while in the throes of
the creative process, guidance by truth is as uncertain and subjective as
guidance by beauty.

The second point refers to the verifiability of the product after the
act; we have seen that even in this respect the contrast is not absolute,
but a matter of degrees (Chapter X). A physical theory is far more
open to verification than a work of art; but experiments, even so-
called crucial experiments, are subject to interpretation; and the his-
tory of science is to a large part a history of controversies, because the
interpretation of facts to 'confirm' or refute* a theory always contains
a subjective factor, dependent on the scientific fashions and prejudices
of the period. There were indeed times in the history of most sciences
when the interpretations of empirical data assumed a degree of sub-
jectivity and arbitrariness compared to which literary criticism appeared
almost to be an 'exact science'.

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331

I do not wish to exaggerate; there is certainly a considerable dif-
ference, in precision and objectivity, between the methods of judging
a theorem in physics and a work of art. But I wish to stress once more
that there are continuous transitions between the two. The diagram
on p. 332 shows one among many such continuous series. Even pure
mathematics at the top of the series had its logical foundations shaken
by paradoxes like Godel's theorem; or earlier on by Cantors theory
of infinite aggregates (as a result of which Cantor was barred from
promotion in all German universities, and the mathematical journals
refused to publish his papers). Thus even in mathematics 'objective
truth' and logical veriflability' are far from absolute. As we descend
to atomic physics, the contradictions and controversial interpretation
of data increase rapidly; and as we move further down the slope,
through such hybrid domains as psychiatry, historiography, and biog-
raphy, from the w T orld of Poincare towards that of Botticelli, the
criteria of truth gradually change in character, become more avowedly
subjective, more overtly dependent on the fashions of the time, and,
above all, less amenable to abstract, verbal formulation. But neverthe-
less the experience of truth, however subjective, must be present for
the experience of beauty to arise; and vice versa, the solution of any
of 'nature's riddles', however abstract, makes one exclaim 'how
beautiful'.

Thus, to heal the crack in the Grecian urn and to make it acceptable
in this computer age we would have to improve on its wording (as
Orwell did on Ecclesiastes): Beauty is a function of truth, truth a
function of beauty. They can be separated by analysis, but in the lived
experience of the creative act and of its re-creative echo in the
beholder they are inseparable as thought is inseparable from emotion.
They signal, one in the language of the brain, the other of the bowels,
the moment of the Eureka cry, when 'the infinite is made to blend
itself with the finite* when eternity is looking through the window
of time. Whether it is a medieval stained-glass window or Newton's
equation of universal gravity is a matter of upbringing and chance;
both are transparent to the unprejudiced eye.

NOTES

To p. $29. 'proportions op the human figure.

'From the chin to the starting of the hair is a tenth part of the figure.

'From the chin to the top of the head is an eighth part.

333

THE ACT OP CREATION

'And from the chin to the nostrils is a third part of the face.

*And the same from the nostrils to the eyebrows, and from the eyebrows to
the starting of the hair.

'If you set your legs so far apart as to take a fourteenth part from your height,
and you open and raise your arms until you touch the line of the crown of the
head with your middle fingers, you must know that the centre of the circle
formed by the extremities of the outstretched limbs will be the navel, and the
space between the legs will form an equilateral triangle.

'The span of a man's outstretched arms is equal to his height/ (From Leonardo's
Notebooks, quoted by R. Goldwater and M. Treves, cds., 1947, p. 51.)

Figure 10

'-Medicine

'''..IfoveL

subjective

See text on pages 28, 331

XVIII
INFOLDING

Iet me return once more to the three main criteria of the technical
excellence of a comic work: its originality, emphasis, and
-J economy; and let us see how far they are applicable to other
forms of art.

Originality and Emphasis

From antiquity until well into the Renaissance artists thought, or pro-
fessed to think, that they were copying nature; even Leonardo wrote
into his notebook 'that painting is most praiseworthy which is most
like the thing represented'. Of course, they were doing nothing of the
sort. They were creating, as Plato had reproached them, 'man-made
dreams for those who are awake'. The thing represented had to pass
through two distorting lenses: the artist's mind, and his medium of
expression, before it emerged as a man-made dream the two, of
course, being intimately connected and interacting with each other.

To start with the medium: the space of the painter's canvas is smaller
than the landscape to be copied, and his pigment is different from the
colours he sees; the writer's ink cannot render a voice nor exhale the
smell of a rose. The nature of the medium always excludes direct
imitation. Some aspects of experience cannot be reproduced at all;
some only by gross oversimplification or distortion; and some only at
the price of sacrificing others. The limitations and peculiarities of his
medium force the artist at each step to make choices, consciously or un-
consciously; to select for representation those features or aspects which
he considers to be relevant, and to discard those which he considers
irrelevant. Thus we meet again the trinity of selection, exaggeration,
and simplification which I have discussed before (pp. 82-6; 263 ). Even

333

334

THE ACT OF CREATION

the most naturalistic picture, chronicle, or novel, whose maker naively
hopes to copy reality, contains an unavoidable element of bias, of
selective emphasis. Its direction depends on the distorting lenses in the
artist's mind the perceptual and conceptual matrices which pattern
his experience, and determine which aspects of it should be regarded
as relevant, which not. This part-automatic, part-conscious processing
of the experience, over which the medium exercises a kind of 'feed-
back-control', determines to a large extent what we call an artist's
individual style.

Theoretically, the range of choice before him is enormous. In
practice, it is narrowed down considerably by the conventions of his
period or school. They are imposed on him not only by external
pressures the public's taste and the critics' censure but mainly from
inside. The controls of skilled activities function, as we saw, below the
level of awareness on which that activity takes place whether it con-
sists in riding a bicycle or 'taking in' a landscape. The codes which
govern the matrices of perception are hidden persuaders; their in-
fluence permeates the whole personality, shapes his pattern of vision,
determines which aspects of reality should be considered significant,
while others are ignored, like the ticking of one's watch. For centuries
painters did not seem to have noticed that shadows have colours, nor
the fluidity of contours in hazy air; and if we were to add up those
aspects of existence which literature has ignored at one time or another,
they would cover practically the whole range of human experience.
Conversely, every period over-emphasizes some particular aspects of
experience and produces its special brand of 'stylization and compul-
sive mannerisms obvious to all but itself. For instance, the emphasis
on contour in classical painting is still so firmly embedded in our frames
of perception that we are unaware of the impossibility of seeing fore-
ground figure and background landscape simultaneously in sharp
focus. But we are aware of the absence of shadows in Chinese painting
or the absence of sex in Victorian fiction.

The measure of an artist's originality, put into the simplest terms, is
the extent to which his selective emphasis deviates from the conven-
tional norm and establishes new standards of relevance. All great in-
novations, which inaugurate a new era, movement, or school, consist
in such sudden shifts of attention and displacements of emphasis onto
some previously neglected aspect of experience, some blacked-out
range of the existential spectrum. The decisive turning points in the
history of every art-form are discoveries which show the characteristic

INFOLDING

335

features already discussed: they uncover what has always been there;
they are 'revolutionary', that is, destructive and constructive; they
compel us to revalue our values and impose a new set of rules on
the eternal game.

Most of the general considerations in the chapter on 'The Evolution
of Ideas' equally apply to Revolution of art. In both fields the truly
original geniuses are rare compared with the enormous number of
talented practitioners; the former acting as spearheads, opening up new
territories, which the latter will then diligently cultivate. In both
fields there are periods of crisis, of 'creative anarchy', leading to a
break-through to new frontiers followed by decades, or centuries of
consolidation, orthodoxy, stagnation, and decadence until a new
crisis arises, a holy discontent, which starts the cycle again. Other
parallels could be drawn: multiple discoveries* the simultaneous
emergence of a new style, for which the time is ripe, independently in
several places; 'collective discoveries' originating in a closely knit
group, clique, school, or team; 'rediscoveries* the periodic revivals of
past and forgotten forms of art; lastly 'cross-fertilizations' between
seemingly distant provinces of science and art. To quote a single
example: the rediscovery of the treatise on conic sections by Apol-
lonius of Perga, dating from the fourth century B.C., gave the ellipse
to Kepler who built on it a new astronomy and to Guarini, who
introduced new vistas into architecture.

Economy

Yesterday's discoveries are today's commonplaces; a daringly fresh
image soon becomes stale by repetition, degenerates into a cliche, and
loses its emotive appeal. The newborn day or the piercing cry are no
longer even perceived as metaphorical: the once separate contexts of
birth and dawn have merged, there is no juxtaposition reverting to
jargon, bisociative dynamism has been converted into associative
routine.

The recurrent cycles of stagnation, crisis, and new departure in the
arts are to a large extent caused by the gradual saturation which any
particular invention or technique produces in artist and audience. A
child or a savage, who is taken to the cinema for the first time, derives
wonder and delight not so much from the context of the film as from
the magic of illusion as such. In the sophisticated theatre-goer's mind,

33"

THE ACT OF CREATION

illusion in itself plays a relatively subordinate part except when,
watching a thriller, he regresses to infancy; the two matrices have
become virtually integrated into one, so that he is capable of thinking
critically of the quality of the acting and of appreciating at the same
time the merits of the play. But to recapture the erstwhile magic, in all
its freshness, he must turn to something new: experimental theatre,
avant-garde films, or Japanese KabuH, perhaps; novel experiences
which compel him to strain his imagination, in order to make sense of
the seemingly absurd to participate, and re-create.

When the styles and techniques of an art have become conventiona-
lized and stagnant, the audience is exempted from the necessity to
exert its intelligence and imagination and deprived of its reward.
The 'consumer' reads the conventional novel, looks at the conventional
landscape, and watches the conventional play with perfect ease and
self-assurance and a complete absence of awe and wonder. He pre-
fers the familiar to the unfamiliar, because it presents no challenge and
demands no creative effort. Art becomes a mildly pleasant pastime and
loses its emotive impact, its transcendental appeal and cathartic effect.
The artist, in growing frustration, senses that the conventional tech-
niques have become 'stale*, that they have lost their power over the
audience, and become inadequate as means of communication and
self-expression. Of course the technique itself cannot become 'stale':
blank verse has the same rhythmic qualities today as it had three cen-
turies ago; Fragonard's nymphs and shepherds are as delightful as
ever, but they dance no more. We have become immunized against
their emotional appeal at least for the time being. We may again
become susceptible to them at the next romantic revival, at some
future turn of the spiral.

The history of art could be written in terms of the artist's struggle
against the deadening cumulative effect of saturation. The way out of
the cul-de-sac is either a revolutionary departure towards new horizons,
or the rediscovery of past techniques, or a combination of both.
(Egyptian art went through a revival of archaic styles under the
twenty-sixth dynasty, in the seventh century B.C.; Rome had a Renais-
sance of sorts in the second century a.d. when Hadrian built his
Athenaeum; and so on to the pre-Raphaelites and the relatively recent
rediscovery of primitive art.)

But in between these dramatic turning points one can observe a
more gradual evolution of styles which seems to proceed in two
opposite directions both intended to counteract saturation. One is a

INFOLDING

337

tread towards more pointed emphasis; the other towards more economy
or implicitness. The first strives to recapture the artist's waning mastery
over the audience by providing a spicier fare for jaded appetites:
exaggerated mannerisms, frills, flamboyance, an overly explicit appeal
to me emotions, 'rubbing it in* symptoms of decadence and im-
potence, which need not concern us further. The opposite trend is
towards economy and implicitness in the sense previously defined
(p. 82 et seq.); it has been eloquently described by Mallarme in a passage
which outlined the programme of the French symbolist movement:

Je pense qu'il faut quil n y ait qu allusion. La contemplation des
objets, 1' image s'envolant des reveries sucitees par eux, sont le chant:
les Parnassiens, eux, prennent la chose entierement et la montrent;
par la il manquent de mystere; ils retirent aux esprits cette pie
dilicieuse de croire quits creent. Nommer un objet, e'est supprimer les
trois quarts de la jouissance du poeme, qui est fait du bonheur de
deviner peu a peu: le suggerer, voila le reve. C'est le parfait usage
de ce mystere qui constitue le symbol: evoquer petit a petit un
objet pour montrer un etat d'ame, ou, inversement, choisir un
objet et en degager un etat d'me, par une serie de dechiffrements. . . .

(Enquete sur Involution Litteraire.)
(It seems to me that there should be only allusions. The contempla-
tion of objects, the volatile image of the dreams they evoke, these make
the song: the Parnassians [the classicist movement of Leconte de Lisle,
Heredia, etc.] who make a complete demonstration of the object
thereby lack mystery; they deprive the [reader's] mind of that delicious joy
of imagining that it creates. To name the thing means forsaking three
quarters of a poem's enjoyment which is derived from unravelling it
gradually, by happy guesswork: to suggest the thing creates the dream*
Symbols are formed when this secret is used to perfection: to evoke
little by little, the image of an object in order to demonstrate a mood;
or, conversely, to choose an object and to extract from it a mood, by
a series of decipherings.)

However, it was not the French symbolists who invented the trend
from the explicit statement to the implicit hint, from the obvious to
the allusive and oblique; it is as old as art itself. All mythology is
studded with symbols, veiled in allegory; the parables of Christ pose
riddles which the audience must solve. The intention is not to obscure
the message, but to make it more luminous by compelling the recipient
to work it out by himself to re-create it. Hence the message must be

338

THE ACT OP CREATION

banded to him in implied form and implied means 'folded in. To
make it unfold, he must fill in the gaps, complete the hint, see through
the symbolic disguise. But the audience has a tendency to become more
sophisticated witb time; once it has mastered all the tricks, the excite-
ment goes out of the game; so the message must be made more im-
plicit, more tightly folded. I believe that this development towards
greater economy (meaning not brevity, but implicitness) can be traced
in virtually all periods and forms of art. To indulge in a little law-
making, let me call it the 'law of infolding*. It is the antidote to the
law of diminishing returns in the domain of the emotions.

Greek tragedy, as far as we can tell, starts with the 'goat song',
derived from the worshipful ceremonies in honour of Bacchus-
Dionysius. These in turn originate even further back in the past, in
rituals accompanied by human sacrifice, which the Bacchantae enacted
in symbolic ways, that is, by implication; their traces can still be found
in Euripides. At some stage, the epic recital of events branched off
from their direct representation by actors in disguise. The early bards
were probably still impersonating their heroes by voice and gesture, as
the mimes and histriones did in medieval days; but economy demanded
that histrionics be banned from recitation it is practised now mainly
by artistically minded nannies, and on the B.B.C. children s hour.
And even legitimate histrionics, the art of acting, shows a trend towards
less emphasis, more economy. Not only do Victorian melodramatics
strike one as grotesque; but even films no more than twenty years old,
and highly valued at the time, appear surprisingly dated overdone,
obvious, over-explicit.

Somewhere around 600 B.C. the Homeric epics were consolidated
in their final version, disguised in written symbols, and folded into
parchment. The actor in his mask impersonated the hero; the bard
imitated his voice; the printed book evokes the illusion that some-
body is talking by a pair of inverted commas yet we can almost hear
Karenina's whisper or Uriah Heap's ingratiating whine.

We have gone a long way in learning to create magic by the most
frugal means. Only a hundred years ago the average Victorian novelist
did not shrink from crude methods of dramatization: printed illus-
trations, the use of the historic present, invitations addressed to the
gentle reader to follow the narrator to a certain house in a certain
town on a winter evening of the year 183 . . and peep through the
window. Here, as in pre-Raphaelite painting, we find emphasis sans
economy at work a safe criterion of bad art.

INPOIDXNG

339

One method of economy is 'leaving out* firstly, everything that
by the writer's standards is irrelevant, in the second place everything
that is obvious, i.e. which the reader can and should supply out of his
own imagination. 'The more bloody good stuff you cut out the more
bloody good your novel will be,* Hemingway advised a young writer.
Modern prose had to accelerate its pace, not because trains run faster
than mailcoaches, but because the trains of thought run faster th?n a
century ago, on tracks beaten smooth by popular psychology, the
mass-media, and torrents of print. The novelist no longer needs to
crank up the reader's imagination as if it were a model-T car; he
pushes the button of the self-starter and leaves the rest to the battery.
A glance at the opening lines of Mountains like White Elephants, or
Cat in the Rain, will show that the comparison is hardly exaggerated.

But there exist other, different, methods of infolding obliquity,
compression, and the Seven Types of Ambiguity a modest estimate
of Empson's. The later Joyce, for instance, makes one realize why the
German word for writing poetry is 'dichten to condense {certainly
more poetical than 'composing*, i.e. 'putting together'; but perhaps
less poetical than the Hungarian kolteni to hatch). Freud actually
believed that to condense or compress several meanings or allusions
into a word or phrase was the essence of poetry. It is certainly an essen-
tial ingredient with Joyce; almost every word in the great monologues
in Finnegans Wake is overcharged with allusions and implications. To
revert to an earlier metaphor, economy demands that the stepping-
stones of the narrative should be spaced wide enough apart to require
a significant effort from the reader; Joyce makes him feel like a runner
in a marathon race with hurdles every other step and aggravated by a
mile-long row of hieroglyphs which he must decipher. Joyce would
perhaps be the perfect writer if the perfect reader existed.

Evidently, if the infolding technique is pushed too far, obscurity
results, as witnessed by much contemporary poetry. It may be only a
passing effect, due to a time-lag between the artist's and his public's
maturity and range of perception; it may also be a conscious or half-
conscious deception, practised by the artist on his public including
himself. To decide which of these alternatives applies to a difficult work
of art is one of the trickiest problems for the critic; here, as a warning
example, is Tolstoy's assessment of the French symbolists: 1

The productions of another celebrity, Verlaine, are not less
affected and unintelligible, ... I must pause to note the amazing

340

THE ACT OF CREATION

celebrity of these two versifiers, Baudelaire and Verlaine. . . . How
the French . . . could attri bute such importance to these versifiers who
were far from skilful in form and most contemptible in subject-
matter, is to me incomprehensible.

The Last Veil

We have seen the Law of Infolding at work in the evolution of humour
from the coarse comedian's rubbing in of the joke to the mere hint,
the New Yorker type of riddle. The comic simile starts with comparing
a rnan to a pig or an ass (neither of them comic any longer, but simply
a colloquial adjective) and progresses to Heine's esoteric comparison
of a girl's face to a palimpsest. A similar progression could be shown
towards more oblique or condensed forms of metaphor and poetic
imagery, replacing explicit analogies which, through wear and tear,
have shrivelled to empty cliches. Long before the Symbolists, Blake
realized the drawbacks of trying to make 'a complete demonstration
of the object* and thereby depriving it of its mystery:

The vision of Christ that thou doest see

Is my visions greatest enemy. Thine has a great

hook nose like thine
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.

Rhythm has undergone a similar evolution. Unlike the beat of the
tom-tom or the rattling of the carriage wheels, metre does not consist
of simple repetitions, but of intricate patterns of short and long
stressed and light syllables, on which patterns of assonance and allitera-
tion have further been superimposed. As music has travelled a long
way from the simple repetitive figures performed on monochords and
other primitive single-tone instruments, so has metre. Its original,
simple pulse is only preserved in its sub-structure implied, but no
longer pounded out,

In his analysis of metric form, L A. Richards 2 calls its effect 'patterned
expectancy*:

Rhythm and its specialized form, metre, depend upon repetition,
and expectancy. Equally where what is expected recurs and where it
fails, all rhythmical and metrical effects spring from anticipation.
As a rule this anticipation is unconscious. . . . The mind, after

INFOLDING

341

reading a line or two of verse . . . prepares itself for any one of a
number of possible sequences, at the same time negatively incapaci-
tating itself for others. The effect produced by what actually follows
depends very closely upon this unconscious preparation and consists
largely of the further twist which it gives to expectancy. It is in
terms of the variation in these twists that rhythm is to be
described This texture of expectations, satisfactions, disappoint-
ments, surprisals, which the sequence of syllables brings about, is
rhythm. . . . Evidently there can be no surprise and no disappoint-
ment unless there is expectation Hence the rapidity with which

too simple rhythms, those which are too easily 'seen through',
grow cloying or hispid.

if the mind is to experience the * waking trance* which Yeats promised
as poetry's reward it must actively co-operate by filling in the missing
beats and extending the sequence into the future. The witch-doctor
hypnotizes his audience with the monotonous rhythm of his drum;
the poet merely provides the audience with the means to hypnotize
itself.

"While elaborate metric forms impose a strain on our patterned ex-
pectation, the Thyme is its sudden and full reward; it has the same
cathartic effect as the harmonious resolution of a musical phrase. It is
gloriously explicit in its amrmation of unity in variety; of the magic
connection between sense and sound; of the oggly-gobbly delights of
sheer repetition. That is obviously the reason for its unpopularity with
contemporary poets; it offends against the ascetic diet imposed by the
law of infolding. I am old-fashioned enough to regret its passing, as I
regret the passing of the barrel-organ.

Emphasis derives from the selection, exaggeration, and simplification
of those elements which the artist chooses to regard as significant; it is
a means to impose his vision on his audience. Economy is a technique
designed to entice the audience into active co-operation, to make them
re-create the artist's vision. To do so the audience must decipher the
implied message; put into technical terms, he must (cf. pp. 84-6)
intrapolate (fill in the gaps between the stepping stones'); extrapolate
(complete the hint); and transform or reinterpret the symbols, images,
and analogies; unwrap the veiled allegory. Now these operations which
the audience must perform (interpolation, extrapolation, transforma-
tion) to get the artist's implied message, correspond like mirror

342 THE ACT OF CREATION

images, as it were to the devices for lending a message emphasis: ex-
aggeration, simplification, selection. The artist, intent on driving home
his message, exaggerates and simplifies the audience co-operates
by filling in the gaps and extending the range of the communica-
tion. He chooses what he considers to be the significant aspect among
other aspects of a given experience the audience discovers the sig-
nificance by reinterpreting the message. All this may sound a little
abstract, but it leads to a simple conclusion: explicit works of art with
an emphatic, pointed message contain all the elements in ready-made
form which otherwise the audience would have to contri bute. The
surest symptom of decadent art is that it leaves nothing to the imagina-
tion; the muse has bared her flabby bosom like a too obliging harlot
there is no veiled promise, no mystery, nothing to divine.

The law of infolding affects science too, though in a different way.
Aristode had thought that nearly everything worth discovering about
the ways of the universe had already been discovered; Francis Bacon
and Descartes believed that to complete the edifice of science would
take but a generation or two; Haeckel proclaimed that all the seven
riddles of the universe had been solved. The idea of progress (in
science and any other cld) is only about three centuries old; and only
since the collapse of mechanistic science around the turn of the last
century did it begin to dawn on the more far-sighted among scientists,
that the unfolding of the secrets of nature was accompanied by a
parallel process of infolding that we were learning more and more
about less and less. The more precise knowledge the physicist acquired,
the more ambiguous and oblique symbols he had to use to express it;
he could no longer make an intelligible model of sub-atomic reality,
he could only allude to it by formal equations which have as much
resemblance to reality 'as a telephone number has to the subscriber.
One might almost think that physical science is determined to imple-
ment the programme of the French symbolists.

It may seem that I have laid too much stress on the law of infolding.
But quite obviously it plays an essential role in the progress of art
and understanding; and it is in fact a characteristic of the human
condition. For man is a symbol-making animal. He constructs a
symbolic model of outer reality in his brain, and expresses it by a second
set of symbols in terms of words, equations, pigment, or stone. All he
knows directly are bodily sensations, and all he can directly do is to
perform bodily motions; the rest of his knowledge and means of ex-
pression is symbolical. To use a phrase coined by J. Cohen, 3 rrar> has a

INFOLDING

343

metaphorical consciousness. Any attempt to get a direct grasp at
naked reality is self-defeating; Urania, too, like the other muses, al-
ways has a last veil left to fold in.

Summary

Art originates in sympathetic magic; in the illusions of stagecraft its
origin is directly reflected. In the mind of naive audiences, the im-
personator becomes identified with the character impersonated, as in
ancient days the masked dancer became identified with the rain-god.
On the other hand, sophisticated audiences are conscious and critical
of the actors* performance, but are nevertheless caught by the illusion
to the extent of producing the physical symptoms of intense emotion;
their awareness suspended between two planes of experience, they
exemplify the bisociative process in its purest form

The escapist character of illusion facilitates the unfolding of the
participatory emotions and inhibits the self-asserting emotions, except
those of a vicarious character; it draws on untapped resources of
emotion and leads them to catharsis.

Rhythm and rhyme, assonance and pun are not artificial creations,
but vestigial echoes of primitive phases in the development of lan-
guage, and of the even more primitive pulsations of living matter;
hence our particular receptiveness for messages which arrive in a
rhythmic pattern, and their hypnotic effect. Association by sound
affinity is still employed in subconscious mentation; it is manifested
in the punning mania of children, in sleep, fatigue and mental disorder.
The poet creates by bisociating sound and sense, metre and meaning;
his voice is bi-vocal so to speak.

Metaphor and imagery come into existence by a process, familiar
from scientific discovery, of seeing an analogy where nobody saw one
before. The aesthetic satisfaction derived from the analogy depends on
the emotiove potential of the matrices which participate in it. Synes-
thetic cross-references from sight to touch, for instance, may enrich
the experience, depending on personal preferences. Visual imagery,
derived from the most important sense organ, carries a special emotive
appeal; the 'picture-strip' language of concrete imagery pre-dates
conceptualized thought. The highest emotive potential is found in
images which evoke archetypal symbols and arouse unconscious
resonances. They lead to the 'earthing* of emotion by relating

344

THE ACT OF CREATION

particular experiences to a universal frame, the temporal to the eternal
as die scientist relates particular phenomena to general laws and
ultimate causes. In both cases the flash of spontaneous illumination is
followed by emotional catharsis; 'truth' and beauty* appear as
complementary aspects of the indivisible experience. The difference
between the two in objective verifiability is a matter of degrees, and
arises only after the act; the act itself is in both cases a leap into the
dark, where scientist and artist are equally dependent on their fallible
intuitions.

Originality, selective emphasis, and economy are certainly not the
only criteria of literary excellence, but they proved to be a kind of
handy mariner's compass for the critic at sea; and the 'law of infolding'
appears to be equally valid and tantalizing in science as in art.

XIX

CHARACTER AND PLOT

Identification

In his monologue in Act 33, after the Hrst Player's dramatic recital,
Hamlet asks a pertinent question:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from, her working all the visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in *s aspect,
A broken voice . . .

. . . and all for nothing,

For Hecuba!

What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?

The answer to Hamlet's question was given by Flaubert: Emma
Bovary, cest moL

The magic tie is identification. "Without it, why indeed should our
tear-glands become active on Hecuba's behalf? Goethe's early novel,
The Sorrows of Young Werther, unleashed an epidemic of suicide in
Germany; every romantic young man felt that he was Wcrther.

The extent to which a character in a novel 'lives' depends on the
intensity of the reader's participatory ties with him. To know what
Hamlet feels while listening to the ghost, is the same thing as to know
how it feels to be Hamlet. I must project part of myself into Hamlet,
or Hamlet into myself 'projection* and *introjection' are metaphors
referring to the partial breakdown of the crust of personal identity.
This remains true, regardless whether the reader admires, despises,

345

34<*

THE ACT OP CREATION

hates, or loves the fictional character. In order to love or hate some-
thing which exists only as a series of signs made with printer's ink, the
reader must endow it with a phantom life, an emanation from his
conscious or unconscious self. The major contri bution will probably
come from the unconscious, which takes phantoms for granted and is
apt to confuse personal identities.

Thus the figments of Bovary, Little Lord Faunderoy, and Alyosha
Karamazov which float around us in the air, are projections which
body forth from our intimate selves, like the medium's ectoplasm. The
author has created the prototype-phantoms, and the reader creates out
of himself a copy, which he assumes to be like the original, though this
is not necessarily the case. Whether the Elizabethans saw Shylock in a
tragic or grotesque light, my own Shylock is a tragic figure he has a
great hook nose like mine, not a snub nose like to thine.

Some novelists give meticulous descriptions of the visual appearances
of their characters; others give little or none. Here again the general
trend is away from the over-explicit statement towards the suggestive
hint which entices the reader to build up his own image of the character.
I am always annoyed when the author informs me that Sally Anne has
auburn hair and green eyes. I don't particularly like the combination,
and would have gone along more willingly with the author's intention
that I should fall in love with Sally Anne if he had left the colour-scheme
to me. There is a misplaced concreteness which gets in the way of the
imagination. It is chiefly due to the misconception that 'imagination'
means literally seeing images in the mind's eye; and consequendy that,
for a character to come alive, I must carry a complete picture of it in
my mind. Now this is an old fallacy which affects the subject we are
discussing only indirecdy, but has a direct bearing on certain basic
assumptions about the nature of perception and memory, on which
the present theory rests. These are discussed in Book Two, which also
contains the detailed evidence for the rather summary remarks which
follow*

Phantoms and Images

Jn the first place, the evidence shows that there are people endowed
with the faculty of so-called eidetic imagery that is, of really seeing
mental images with dream-like, hallucinatory vividness; but this
faculty, though relatively frequent in children, is rare in adults. The
average adult does not really see anything approaching a complete and

CHARACTER AND PLOT

347

sharp image when lie recalls a memory for instance, the face of a
friend though he may deceive himself into believing that he does.
How do we know that he is deceiving himself? Here is one way of
proving it among many others. The experimenter lets the subject
look at a square o say, four rows of four letters (which do not form
any meaningful sequences) until the subject thinks he can see them in
his mind's eye. He can, in fact, fluently read' them out after the square
has been taken away or so he believes. For when he is asked to read
the square backwards, or diagonally, his fluency is gone. He has, in
fact, learned the sequence by rote without realizing it which is quite
a different matter from forming a visual image. If he could really see
the square, he could read it in all directions with the same ease and
speed

The ordinary citizen, who does not happen to be a painter, or a
policeman, or of a particularly observant type, would be at a loss to
give an exact visual description even of people whom he knows quite
well- What we do remember of a person is a combination of (a)
certain vivid details, and (b) what we call 'general impressions'. The
'vivid detail' may be a gesture, an intonation, an outstanding visual
feature the mole on Granny's chinwhich, for one reason or an-
other, has stuck in one's memory, like a fragment from a picture-
strip, and which functions pars pro toto as a part, or sign deputizing
for the whole.

The 'general impression' on the other hand, is based on the opposite
method of memory-formation: it is a schematized, sketchy, quasi
'skeletonized* outline of a whole configuration, regardless of detail.
A woman may say to a man, *I haven't seen you wearing that tie
before* though she has not the faintest recollection of any of the
ties he has worn in the past. She recognizes a deviation from memories
which she is unable to recall. The explanation of the paradox is that
although she cannot remember the colour or pattern of any single tie
which that man wore in the past, she does remember that they were
generally subdued and discreet, which the new tie is not. It deviates not
from any particular past experience, but from the general code, from
an abstracted visual quality that these past experiences had in common.
Such perceptual codes function as selective filters, as it were; the filter
rejects as 'wrong' anything which does not fit its 'mesh'; and accepts
or 'recognizes' anything that fits it, i.e. which gives the same 'general
impression . The gentleman with the new tie, for instance, can get his
own back with the remark, 'You have done something to your hair,

348

THE ACT OF CREATION

haven't you?' He has never noticed her previous hair-dos at all, but he
does notice that the present one just doesn't go with her mousy appear-
ance. Here the code is 'mousiness' which, like all visual schematizations,
is difficult to describe in words, but instantly recognized by the eye.
We talk of an 'innocent' or 'lascivious' expression, of 'sensitive' or
'brutal' features characteristics which defy verbal description, but
which can be sketched with a few lines as emotions can be indi-
cated by a few basic strokes indicating the slant of mouth and eyes.
Other codes of recognition may combine form and motion, or
vision and hearing: a characteristic gait, the timbre of a voice.

Thus recognizing a person docs not mean matching a retinal image
against a memory image of photographic likeness. My memory of
John Brown is not a photographic record; it consists of several, simpli-
fied and schematized 'general impressions' whose combination, plus a
few 'vivid details', enable me to recognize him when we meet, or to
remember him in his absence. But that remembrance is only partly of
a pictorial nature, and much less so than I believe it to be see the
experiment with the letter-square. The reason for this self-deception is
that the process of combining those simplified visual and other schemata
and adorning them with a few genuine 'photographic fragments, is
unconscious and instantaneous. The perceptual codes function below
the level of awareness; we arc playing a game without being aware
of the rules. We overestimate the precision of our imagery, as we
overestimate the precision of our verbal thinking (quite often we thml-
that we have understood the meaning of a difficult text and discover
later that we haven't really) because we are unaware of the gaps
between the words and between the sketchy contours of the schemata.
All introspective 'visual' thinkers, from Einstein downward, em-
phasized the vagueness, haziness, and abstract character of their con-
scious visual imagery. True picture-strip thinking is confined to the
dream, and other manifestations of the subconscious.

The point of this apparent digression was to show that if the above
is true regarding our mental images of real people whom we know, it
must be all the more true regarding our images of fictional characters
which lack any sensory basis. A character may indeed be 'alive' with
the utmost vividness in the reader's mind, but this vividness need not
be of a visual nature. The reader may fall in love with Kargnina,
despair when she throws herself under the train, mourn her death
and yet be unable to visualize her in his mind's eye or give a detailed
description of her appearance. Her 'living image' in the reader is not

CHARACTER AND PLOT

349

a photographic image, but a multi-dimensional construct of a variety
of aspects of her general appearance, her gestures and voice, her pat-
terns of thinking and behaving. It is a combination of various 'general
impressions' and 'vivid details' that is, constructed on much the same
principles as images of real people.

In fact, there is no sharp dividing line between our images of people
whom we have met in the flesh, and those whom we know only from
descriptions whether factual or fictional (or a combination of both).
The dream knows no distinction between factual and fictitious charac-
ters, and children as well as primitives are apt to confuse the two.

Thus the phantoms of Bovary and Karenina which float around
us are not so very different from our apparently solid memories of Joe
Smith and Peter Brown; both varieties are made of the same stuff.
In one of Muriel Spark's novels, a wise old bird asks his woman friend:
'Do you think, Jean, that other people exist? ... I mean, do you
consider that people the people around us are real or illusory?
Surely you see that here is a respectable question. Given that yon
believe in your own existence as self-evident, do you believe in that of
others? Do you believe that I for instance, at this moment exist?' 1

The only certainty that other people exist, not merely as physical
shapes, but as sentient beings, is derived from partly conscious, but
mostly unconscious, inference, i.e. empathy. We automatically infer
from minute pointers in a person's face or gestures which we mostly
do not even register consciously his character, mood, how he will
behave in an emergency, and a lot of other things. Without this
faculty of projecting part of one's own sentient personality into the
other person s shell, which enables us to say *I know how you feel*,
the pointers would be meaningless. Lorenz has shown that the various
postures and flexions of the wolf's tail are indicative of at least ten
different moods. As we have lost our tails we cannot empathize with
these moods but since our labial muscles are not very different, we
feel at once the significance of bared teeth.

The semi-abstract schematizations which we call 'general impres-
sions' of appearance, character, and personality, are intuitive pointer-
readings based on empathy. It is by this means that we assign reality
and sentience to other people. Once more, the process diners from
bringing a fictional character alive in our minds mainly by the nature
of the pointers. A bland face at a cocktail party uttering the conven-
tional type of remark may provide less pointers for empathy and imagi-
nation than the cunningly planted hints of die novelist, specially

350

THE ACT OF CREATION

designed to produce positive or negative identifications. Some phan-
toms can be more real to the mind than many a bore made of solid
flesh. The distinction between fact and fiction is a late acquisition of
rational thought unknown to the unconscious, and largely ignored
by the emotions.

Conflict

Drama strives on conflict, and so does the novel. The nature of the
conflict may be explicitly stated or merely implied; but an element of
it must be present, otherwise the characters would be gliding through
a frictionless universe.

The conflict may be fought in the divided heart of a single charac-
ter; or between two or more persons; or between man and his destiny.
The conflict between personalities may be due to a clash of ideas or
temperaments, to incompatible codes of behaviour or scales of value.
But whatever its motif, a quarrel will assume the dignity of drama only
if the audience is lead to accept the attitude of both sides as valid, each
within its own frame of reference. If the author succeeds in this, the
conflict will be projected into the spectator's or reader's mind, and
experienced as a clash between two simultaneous and incompatible
identifications. 'We make out of our quarrels with others rhetoric,
but of our quarrels with ourselves poetry,* said Yeats.

Dramatic conflict thus always reveals some paradox which is latent
in the mind. It reflects both sides of the medal whereas in our practical
pursuits we see only one at a time. The paradox may be seemingly
superficial, as when our sympathies are divided between Hamlet and
Laertes, two equally worthy contestants, with the resulting desire to
help both, that is to harm both. But at least the double complicity in
the double slaughter is prompted not by hate but love, and we are
made to realize that it was destiny, not their own volition, which made
them destroy each other; the paradox is 'earthed* in the human
condition.

Thus the artist compels his audience to live on several planes at
once. He identifies himself with several characters in turn Caesar,
Brutus, Antony, projecting some aspect of himself into each of them,
and speaking through their mouths; or introjecting them, if you like,
and lending them his voice. He presents Brutus and Caesar alternately
in situations where they comm and sympathy and impose their patterns
of reasoning, their scales of value, until each has established his own

CHARACTER AND BLOT

351

independent matrix in the spectator's mind. Having acquired these
multiple identities, the spectator is led to a powerful climax, where he
is both murderer and victim; and thence to catharsis. In the Bhagavid
Gila the Lord Krishna appears on the battlefield in the role of charioteer
to his disciple Arjuna, whom he cures of his pacifist scruples by ex-
plaining that the slayer and the slain are One, because both are em-
bodiments of the indestructible Atma; therefore 'the truly wise mourn
neither for the living nor for the dead.' I doubt whether this doctrine,
taken literally, had a beneficial effect on the ethics of Hinduism,* but
to be both Caesar and Brutus in one's imagination has a profound
cathartic effect, and is one way of approaching Nirvana.

Brutus is an honourable man; so is Caesar; but what about Iago?
Through pitying Desdemona, and sharing Othello's despair, we are
compelled to hate Iago; but we can hate Iago only if he has come to
life for us and in us; and he has come to life in us because he too com-
mands our understanding and, at moments, our sympathy the
resonance of our own frustrated ambitions and jealousies. Without
this unavowed feeling of complicity, he would be a mere stage-prop,
and we could hate him no more than a piece of cardboard. Iago,
Richard III, Stavrogin, the great villains of literature, have an irresist-
ible appeal to some common, repressed villainousness in ourselves,
and give us a wonderfully purifying opportunity to discover what it
feels like to be frankly a villain.

But true-black villains are limit cases; the more evenly our sym-
pathies are distributed among the antagonists, the more successfully
the work will actualize latent aspects of our personalities. Caliban and
Prospero, Faust and Mephisto, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Christ
and the Great Inquisitor each pair is locked in an everlasting duel in
which we act as seconds for both. In each of these conflicts two self-,
contained frames of reference, two sets of values, two universes of
discourse collide. All great works of literature contain variations and
combinations, overt or implied, of such archetypal conflicts inherent
in the condition of man, which first occur in the symbols of mythology,
and are restated in the particular idiom of each culture and period. All
literature, wrote Gerhart Hauptmann, is 'the distant echo of the primi-
tive word behind the veil of words'; and the action of a drama or
novel is always the distant echo of some ancestral action behind the
veil of the period's costumes and conventions. There are no new
themes in literature, as there are no new human instincts; but every age
provides new variations and sublimations, new settings and a different

35^ THE ACT OF CREATION

set of rules for fighting the old battles all over again. To quote G. W.
Brandt: 'There is basically only a limited number of plots; they can be
seen, in different guises, recurring down the ages. The reason is in life
itself. Human relationships, whilst infinitely varied in detail, reveal
stripped down to fundamentals a number of repetitive patterns.
Writers straining to invent a plot entirely fresh have known this for a
long time. Goe the quoted Gozzi's opinion that there were only thirty-
six tragic situations- and he added that Schiller, who believed that
there were more, had not even succeeded in finding as many as that/ 2

Integrations and Confrontations

If the individual act of discovery displays essentially the same psycho-
logical pattern in science and in art, their collective progress differs in
one important respect. We have seen (Chapter X) that the evolution
of science is neither continuous nor cumulative in a strict sense; but it
is nevertheless more so than the evolution of art.

In the discoveries of science, the bisociated matrices merge in a new
synthesis, which in turn merges with others on a higher level of the
hierarchy; it is a process of successive confluences towards unitary,
universal laws (at least, this applies to a given province of science in a
given period or cycle). The progress of art does not display this overall
'river-delta* pattern. The matrices with which the artist operates are
chosen for their sensory qualities and emotive potential; his bisociative
act is a juxtaposition of these planes or aspects of experience, not their
fusion in an intellectual synthesis to which, by their very nature, they
do not lend themselves. This difference is reflected in the quasi-linear
progression of science, compared with the quasi-timeless character of
art, its continual re-statements of basic patterns of experience in chang-
ing idioms. If the explanations of science are like streams joining rivers,
rivers moving towards the unifying ocean, the explanations of art
may be compared to the tracing back of a ripple in the stream to its
source in a distant moimtain-spring.

But I must once more repeat, at the risk of being tedious, that in all
domains of creative activity intellectual and aesthetic experience arc
both present in various mixtures; that 'science' and 'art' form a con-
tinuum; that changes of fashion are common in the zig-zag course of
science, while on the other hand, development of a given art-form over
a period often shows a distinct 'river-delta' pattern.* The modern

CHARACTER AND PLOT

353

atom-physicist knows more than Democritus, but then Joyce's
Ulysses also knows more than Homer's Odysseus; and in some respects
this progress in knowledge, too, is of a cumulative order.

Archetypes

Always bearing these qualifications in mind, we might spin out the
metaphor: if the great confluence towards which science strives is the
universal logos, the ultimate spring of aesthetic experience is the
archetypos. The literal meaning of the word is 'implanted' [typos=z
stamp) 'from the beginning'. Jung described archetypes as 'the psychic
residua of numberless experiences of the same type' encountered by
our ancestors, and stamped into the memory of the race that is, into
the deep layers of the 'collective unconscious , below the level of per-
sonal memories. Hence, whenever some archetypal motif is sounded,
the response is much stronger than warranted by its face value the
mind responds like a tuning fork to a pure tone.

One need not be a follower of Jung to recognize the same arche-
typal experiences crystallized into symbols in the mythologies of
cultures widely separate in space and time. Examples of such recurrent
patterns are the death-and-resurrection motif; the extension of the
sexual duality into the metaphysical polarities of masculine logic and
feminine intuition, mother earth and heavenly father, etc.; the strife
between generations and its counterpoint, the taboo on incest; the
Promethean struggle to wrest power from the gods and the impera-
tive need to placate them by sacrifice; the urge to penetrate to the
ultimate mystery and the resigned admission that reality is beyond
the mind's grasp, hidden by the veil of Maya, reduced to shadows in
Plato's cave. These perennial patterns of victory and defeat recur in
ever-changing variations throughout the ages, because they derive
from the very essence of the human condition its paradoxes and
predicaments. They play an all-important part in literature, from
Greek tragedy down to the present, permeating both the whole and
the part: the plot, and the images employed in it. The poetic image
attains its highest vibrational intensity as it were, when it strikes
archetypal chords when eternity looks through the window of time.

William Empson 8 has given a convincing analysis of the archetypal
imagery in Nash's famous lines which, however often quoted, never
lose their power: 'Brightness falls from the air./Queens have died young

354

THE ACT OF CREATION

and fair./Dust hath closed Helen's eye./I am sick, I must die/Lord have
mercy upon us.'

'If death did not exist', wrote Schopenhauer, 'there would be no
philosophy nor would there he poetry.' That does not mean that
either philosophy, or art, must be obsessively preoccupied with death;
merely, that great works of art are always transparent to some dim
outline of the ultimate experience, the archetypal image. It need not
have a tragic shape, and it may be no more than the indirect reflection
of a reflection, the echo of an echo. But metaphor and imagery yield
aesthetic value only if the two contexts which are involved in the com-
parison form an ascending gradient if one of them is felt to be
nearer to the source of the stream. Mutatis mutandum, a scientific
theory need not be direcdy concerned with the ultimate secret of the
universe, but it must point towards it by bringing order and harmony
into some obscure corner. To clinch the argument, I must quote once
more Housman's essay on The Name and Nature of Poetry:

In these six simple words of Milton

Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more

what is it that can draw tears, as I know it can, to the eyes . . . ?
"What in the world is there to cry about? Why have the mere words
the physical effect of pathos when the sense of the passage is bli the
and gay? I can only say, because they are poetry, and find their way
to something in man which is obscure and latent, something older
than the present organization of his nature, like the patches of fen
which still linger here and there in the drained lands of Cambridge-
shire.

Cataloguing Plots

Let me mention a few examples of archetypal patterns in literature
without any attempt at cataloguing Goethe's thirty-six bask plots.

The Promethean striving for omnipotence and omniscience is
symbolized in Jacob's struggle with the angel, the Tower of Babel,
the flight of Icarus, the Faustus legend, and so on through Voltaire's
Candide, down to the broken Promethean heroes of H. G. Wells
(Dr. Moreau) or Dostoyevski (Stavrogin in The Possessed). In the

CHARACTER AND PLOT

355

modern development of the theme, it is of course treated in a more
allusive, implicit manner; but in the mass media and pulp magazines,
Supermen, Space Cadets, and Black Magicians are all happily running
true to archetype.

The next catalogue-heading would be 'Individual against Society',
with several subheadings, such as 'from Oedipus to Schmoedipus, or
shall we love mamma?' Next would come polygonal patterns of
libidinous relations' (triangles, quadrangles, etc.); a title I have actually
borrowed from a learned publication by a field-anthropologist; it
shows that if you collect archetypes methodically, they crumble to
dust. Yet under this heading belongs at least half the total bulk of world
literature, from the Vulcan-Venus-Mars triangle onward. Next might
come the War of the Sexes from the Amazon myths through
Lysistrata to Ann Veronica and Simone de Beauvoir; next, love
triumphant, or defeated the Song of Songs alternating with Isolde's
Liehestod. Lastly, the Conquest of the Flesh, from the Buddha to
Aldous Huxley.

Still under the heading 'Man and Society* would come the sub-
headings: the hubris of Power; the hubris of Cleverness; the hubris of the
Ivory Tower and, less obvious, the hubris of Sanctity. The last is either an
offence to God Qob; the ten righteous men who find less favour than
the one repentant sinner) or to society, because the hero's personal
scales of value deviate from the conventional. He must therefore either
be an inspired fool, or play the fool to escape sanction, or suffer martyr-
dom 'The time is out ofjoint; O cursed spite, / That ever I was born
to set it right!' Examples range from the Perceval legend and The Lay
of the Great Fool, through Don Quixote, Ulenspiegel and The Good
Soldier Schweik to Prince Mishkin in Dostoyevski's The Idiot, and
Camus' U&ranger.

Under the heading 'The Divided Heart' would fall, as sub-categories,
conflicts between Love and Duty; between Self-Preservation and Self-
Sacrifice; between Ends and Means; and between Faith and Reason.

Puppets and Strings

To end this pedantic and yet very incomplete catalogue, I must
mention one of the most powerful archetypes, which appears in count-
less variations in the history of literature: the Puppet on Strings, or
Volition against Fate. In Oedipus Rex fate appears in the shape of

THE ACT OF CREATION

malevolent powers who trap the King into performing his disastrous
deeds apparently out of his own free will. In all plots of the Appoint-
ment in Samara type, apparent coincidences are the means by which
destiny defeats the will of man (cf. coincidence in comedy, p. 78). In
Christian theology, the ways of God become less arbitrary, but more
inscrutable; man proposes, God disposes; original sin chokes his
designs. In the Eastern religions he is tied to the wheel of rebirth; in
Islam he carries his fate fastened round his neck. The great theological
disputes between Calvinists and Lutherans, Jansenites and Jesuits
turned mainly on the question of predestination, or more precisely, on
the length of the rope left to man to hang himself.

With the rise of Natural Philosophy, a change in the character of
destiny began to take shape. Romeo and Juliet still die as a result of
fatal misunderstandings ('One writ with me in sour misfortune's
book*). But in Shakespeare's later works, destiny acts no longer only
from outside but also from inside the personae; they are victims not
so much of blind fate, but of their blind passions: 'the fault, dear Brutus,
is not in our stars, but in ourselves'. These are great, brave words; but
they did not solve the dilemma, they merely polished its horns. Divine
predestination was transformed into scientific deterniinism, which left
man even less scope than before for exercising his will and making free
choices. The hairshirt of the penitent had allowed him some freedom
of movement, but the laws of heredity and environment wove a
strait-jacket so tight that it became indistinguishable from his living
skin. Even the word Volition was banned from psychology as empty
of meaning. Chromosomes and glandular secretions took over from
the gods in deciding a man's fate. He remained a marionette on strings,
with the only difference that he was now suspended on the nucleic
acid chains determining his heredity, and the conditioned-reflex
chains forged by the environment.

The most explicit adoption of this schema for literary uses is found
in the naturalist movement of the nineteenth century. Its programme
was formulated in Zola's Le Roman Experimental inspired by the
Introduction a Yitude de la medicine experimentale by the great Claude
Bernard (who discovered the vaso-motor system of nerves, and the
glucose-producing function of the liver). Zola urged his fellow writers
to take a physiological view' of man as a product of nature devoid of
free will and subject to the laws of heredity and environment. For-
tunately, in spite of the naturalist vogue in Germany, Russia, and
Scandinavia, writers accepted his views in theory only as they are

CHARACTER AND PLOT

357

wont to do. The creative mind knows how to draw on archetypal
symbols without degrading them by misplaced concreteness.

You can make an X-ray photograph of a face, but you cannot make
a face from an X-ray photograph. You can show that underlying the
subde and complex action of a novel there is a primitive skeleton,
without committing Use majesti, or foolishly assuming that the plot
makes the novel. There is only a limited number of plots, reairring
down the ages, derived from an even more limited number of basic
patterns the conflicts, paradoxes, and predicaments inherent in man's
condition. And if we continue the stripping game, we md that all
these paradoxes and predicaments arise from conflicts between in-
compatible frames of experience or scales of value, iHuminated in con-
sciousness by the bisociative art. In this final illumination Aristotle
saw 'the highest form of learning' because it shows us that we are 'men,
not gods'; and he called tragedy 'the noblest form of literature' because
it purges suffering from its pettiness by showing that its causes lie in
the inescapable predicaments of existence.*

NOTES

To p. 351. Hindu apologists would have us take Krishna's exhortations to
belligerence as allegorical references to wars fought inside the human soul. The
argument is as far-fetched as the Christian apologists* attempts to represent the
Song of Songs as an allegory of Christ's love for His Church.

Top. 352. Eric Newton (An Introduction to European Painting) actually uses
the same metaphor.

Top. 357. At least this seems the most plausible explanation of the cryptic
remark in the Poetics that we take pleasure in tragedy because learning is pleasur-
able, and tragedy involves learning.

XX

THE BELLY OF THE WHALE
The Night Journey

One archetype remains to be discussed, which is of special
significance for the act of creation. It is variously known as
the Night Journey, or the Death-and-Rebirth motif; but
one might as well call it the meeting of the Tragic and the Trivial
Planes. It appears in countless guises; its basic pattern can be roughly
described as follows. Under the effect of some overwhelming ex-
perience, the hero is made to realize the shallowness of his life, the
futility and frivolity of the daily pursuits of man in the trivial routines
of existence. This realization may come to him as a sudden shock
caused by some catastrophic event, or as the cumulative effect of a
slow inner development, or through the trigger action of some
apparently banal experience which assumes an unexpected significance.
The hero then suffers a crisis which involves the very foundations of
his being; he embarks on the Night Journey, is suddenly transferred
to the Tragic Plane from which he emerges purified, enriched by
new insight, regenerated on a higher level of integration.

The symbolic expressions of this pattern are as old as humanity. 1
The crisis or Night Journey may take the form of a visit to the under-
world (Orpheus, Odysseus); or the hero is cast to the bottom of a well
(Joseph), buried in a grave (Jesus), swallowed by a fish (Jonah); or he
retires alone into the desert, as Buddha, Mahomet, Christ, and other
prophets and founders of religions did at the crucial turn in their lives.

I went down to the bottoms of the mountains: the earth with her
bars was about me for ever.

The journey always represents a plunge downward and backward
to the sources and tragic undercurrents of existence, into the fluid
magma, of which the Trivial Plane of everyday life is merely the thin

35*

THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

359

crust. In most tribal societies, the plunge is symbolically enacted in the
initiation-rites which precede the turning points in the life of the
individual, such as puberty or marriage. He is made to undertake a
minor Night Journey: segregated from the community, he must fast,
endure physical hardships and various ordeals, so that he may ex-
perience the essential solitude of man, and establish contact with the
Tragic Plane. A similar purpose is served by the symbolic drowning
and rebirth of baptism; the institution of periods of retreat found in
most religions; in fasts and other purification rituals; in the initiation
ceremonies of religious or masonic orders, even of university societies.
iUumination must be preceded by the ordeals of incubation.

Freudians and Jungians alike emphasize the intimate relation between
the symbolism of the Night Journey, and the unconscious craving for
a return to the womb. The connection is no more far-fetched than our
references to 'mother earth', 'mother ocean', or 'mother church'.

Not only do we speak of 'Mother Church', but even of the 'womb
of the Church', and in the ceremony of the 'benedictio fontis' of the
Catholic Church the baptismal font is even called the 'immaculatus
divini fontis uterus' (the immaculate uterine font of divinity). . . . 2

The maternal aspect of the church is impersonated in the Virgin
Mary. In Donne's 'Annunciation', the Angel greets her with:

That All, which alwayes is All every where,
Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare,
"Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die,
Loe, faithfull Virgin, yeelds himselfe to lye
In prison, in thy wombe; . . .

. . . yea thou art now
Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers mother;
Thou 'hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome,
Immensity cloystered in thy deare wombe.

The craving for the womb, for the dissolution of the self in a lost,
vegetative oneness Freud's Nirvana principle is further symbolized
in the image of mother ocean in whose calm depths all life originates.
Mythology is full of these symbols the metaphors of the collective
unconscious. However bewildering they may appear to the waking
mind, they are familiar to the dreamer, and recur constantly in the

360 THE ACT OF CREATION

sleep of people who have nothing else in common. The Night Journey
is the antipode of Promethean striving. One endeavours to steal the
bright fire from the gods; the other is a sliding back towards the pulsa-
ting darkness, one and undivided, of which we were part before our
separate egos were formed.

Thus the Night Journey is a regression of the participatory tendencies,
a crisis in which consciousness becomes unborn to become reborn in
a higher form of synthesis. It is once more the process of reenter pour
mieux sauter; the creative impulse, having lost its bearing in trivial
entanglements, must effect a retreat to recover its vigour.

Without our regular, minor night journeys in sleep we would soon
become victims of mental desiccation. Dreaming is for the aesthetically
underprivileged the equivalent of artistic experience, his only means of
self-transcendence, of breaking away from the trivial plane and creating
his own mythology.

The Guilt of Jonah

Among the many variations of the Night Journey in myth and folk-
lore, one of the most forceful is the story of Jonah and the whale
perhaps because in no ancient civilization was the tension between the
Tragic and Trivial planes more intensely felt than by the Hebrews.
The first was represented by the endless succession of invasions and
catastrophes, the exacting presence of Jehovah and of his apocalyptic
prophets; the second by the rare periods of relatively normal life,
which the over-strung spiritual leaders of the tribe condemned as
abject. Jonah had committed no crime which would warrant his
dreadful punishment; he is described as a quite ordinary and decent
fellow with just a streak of normal vanity for he is, justifiably, Very
angry* when, in the end, God does not raze Nineveh as Jonah had
prophesied at His bidding, and thus makes Jonah appear an impostor
or fool.

Now this very ordinary person receives at the beginning of the
story God's sudden order to 'go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry
against it' which is a rather tall order, for Jonah is no professional
priest or prophet. It is quite understandable that he prefers to go on
leading his happy and trivial life. So, instead of responding to the call
from the Tragic Plane, he buys a passage on a ship to Tarshish; and
he has such a clean conscience about it, that while the storm rages and
the sailors cry 'every-man unto his god' and throw the cargo into the

THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

sea, Jonah himself is fast asleep. And therein in his normality, com-
placency, in his thick-skinned triviality and refusal to face the storm,
and God, and the corruption of Nineveh; in his turning his back on the
tragic essence of life precisely therein lies his sin, which leads to the
crisis, to the Night Journey in the belly of the whale, in 'the belly of
hell\

The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth
closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head . . .
yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God. When
my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer
came in unto thee. . . . They that observe lying vanities forsake their own
mercy.

The story sounds in fact like an allegory of a nervous breakdown and
subsequent spiritual conversion. Jonah might serve as a symbol for
Dimitri Karamazov, or any of the countless heroes of fiction who
progress through crisis to awakening. For I must repeat that Jonah's
only crime was to cling to the Trivial Jflane and to cultivate his litde
garden, trying to ignore the uncomfortable, unjust, terrible voice
from the other plane. Melville understood this when, in the great
sermon in Moby Dick, he made his preacher sum up the lesson of
Jonah and the whale in this unorthodox moral:

Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has
brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather
than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than
goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour!

And the author of the Jonah story himself must have been aware of
its vast implications, of the impossibility of treating all men who
lead an ordinary life as harshly as Jonah for the story ends with an
unusual act of clemency by the otherwise so vengeful desert-god,
which comes as a curious anticlimax full of ironical tolerance for the
inadequacy of man:

Then said the Lord And should I not spare Nineveh, that great

city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot
discern between their right hand and their left hand: and also much
cattle?

The Root and the Flower

Just as there is no mythology without some mention of the death and
rebirth motif, so there is hardly any epoch in world literature without
some variation of it. Maud Bodkin 8 has made an exhaustive study of
its occurrence in works as wide apart as The Ancient Mariner, Morgan's
The Fountain, Eliot's The Waste Land, and D. H. Lawrence's The
Plumed Serpent and The Man Who Died. Even such an urbane novelist
as E. M. Forster has in each of his five novels one central episode in
which the hero or heroine, who previously walked with self-assurance
on the smooth surface, seems to fall into a manhole with its lid off,
and re-emerge as a changed character like Mrs. Moore, after her visit
to the primeval Marabar caves. With the great Russian novelists,
crisis and conversion is a central theme; in German literature one can
trace it from Faust II to The Magic Mountain. It pops up in such un-
expected places as The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, or the last
page of To Have or Have Not; and it was elevated to a philosophy in
Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and in Sartre's existentialist credo:
man is what he makes out of his anguish, he becomes 'free' through the
realization of his nothingness.

Needless to say, not all great novels are or should be problem
novels' aiming at us a constant heavy barrage of the tragic and the
archetypal; if they were, literature would be very monotonous indeed.
But indirectly and implicidy every great work of art has some bearing
on man's ultimate problems. Yeats had a loathing for 'those learned
men who are a terror to children and an ignominious sight in lovers'
eyes'; because 'Art bids us to touch and taste and hear and see the world,
and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematical form, from every
abstract thing.' And yet he knew better when, for instance, he evoked
the purely sensual delight of Cleopatra dancing alone under her 'topless
towers':

'She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,

That nobody looks: her feet

Practise a tinker's shuffle

Picked up on a street.

Like a longAegged fly upon the stream

Her mind moves upon silence. 9

The refrain, recurring after each of the three stanzas of the poem,
, connects (as the context clearly indicates) Cleopatra's meditations

362

THE BELLY OF THE "WHALE

during her childish dance with the monumental archetype of the spirit
of God moving upon the face of the waters.

A flower, even if it is only a daisy, must have a root; and a work of
art, however gay, precious, or serene, is in the last instance fed, how-
ever indirectly, invisibly, through delicate capillary tubes, from the
ancient substrata of experience. If it has a humorous message, it pro-
duces a smile a subdued laugh or sous-rire; if it is tragic, it produces a
sous-pleurei, that rapt stillness and overflowing of emotion where, to
quote Donne again, with a strong, sober thirst, my soule attends.

The Tightrope

The ordinary mortal in our urban civilization moves virtually all his
life on the Trivial Plane; only on a few dramatic occasions during
the storms of puberty, when he is in love or in the presence of death
does he fall suddenly through the manhole, and is transferred to the
Tragic Plane. Then all at once the pursuits of his daily routines appear
as shallow, trifling vanities; but once safely back on the Trivial Plane,
he dismisses the realities of the other as the products of overstrung
nerves or adolescent effusions. Sudden catastrophes famines, wars, and
plagues may shift a whole population from the Trivial to the Tragic
Plane; but they soon succeed in banalizing even tragedy itsel and
carry on business as usual among the shambles. During the Spanish
Civil War, one of my fellow prisoners, a youth condemned to death
by shooting, and suffering from appendicitis, was put on a milk diet
two days before his execution.

The force of habit, the grip of convention, hold us down on the
Trivial Plane; we are unaware of our bondage because the bonds are
invisible, their restraints acting below the level of awareness. They are
the collective standards of value, codes of behaviour, matrices with
built-in axioms, which determine the rules of the game, and make most
of us run, most of the time, in the grooves of habit reducing us to
the status of skilled automata which Behaviourism proclaim s to be the
only condition of man. What Bergson called 'the mechanical encrusted
on the living' is the result of protracted confinement to the Trivial
Plane.

But, glory be, man is not a flat-earth dweller all the time only
most of the time. Like the universe in which he lives, he is in a state
of continuous creation. The exploratory drive is as fundamental to his

364. THE ACT OF CREATION

nature as the principle of parsimony which tends towards the auto-
matization of skilled routines; his need for self-transcendence as basic
as the necessity of self-assertion; lastly, we shall see that the reenter
pourmieux sauter of the creative act itself has its evolutionary precedents
in the phenomena of organic regeneration and in the 'original adapta-
tions' of which animals are capable in a crisis.

Life on the Trivial Plane is a state of unnoticed confinement but
also a condition of social and intellectual stability. The belly of the
whale cannot be made into a permanent residence. Neither emotionally,
nor intellectually, can we afford to live for more than brief transition
periods on the Tragic Plane, surrounded by archetypes and Ultimates.
Emotionally, it would mean the journey of no return of Blake or of
the Yogi entering into final samadhi. Intellectually, it would mean the
abdication of reason. For the entities encountered on that plane, the
members of its matrixeternity, infinity, mtimate causes, archetypal
paradoxes are irreducible absolutes which do not lend themselves to
logical manipulation. They disrupt all rational operations, as the
mathematical symbols for nought and the infinite do if introduced
into a finite equation. Malraux's 'une vie ne vaut rien mats rien ne
vaut une vxe is a perfect expression of this. The physicist can deal with
infinite space in an abstract symbol-language, but in ordinary ex-
perience it is just the infinite, a thing that passeth understanding, and
there the matter ends.

Absolutes are too inhuman and elusive to cope with, unless they are
connected with some experience in the tangible world of the finite. In
fact, eternity is a pretty meaningless notion unless it is made to look
through the window of time. 'Immensity' is a bore unless it is
cloystered in thy deare wombe'. The absolute becomes emotionally
effective only if it is bisociated with something concrete dovetailed,
as it were, into the familiar. The rain of manna on the children of
Israel which lasted forty years was an act of incomprehensible divine
largesse which, as we learn from Exodus, did not particularly impress
them; the miracle of the loaves and fishes was a true miracle.

Where the Tragic and Trivial Planes meet, the Absolute becomes
humanized, drawn into the orbit of man, while the banal objects of
daily experience are transfigured, surrounded by a halo as it were.
The meeting may have the majesty of an incarnation where the logos
becomes flesh; or the charm of Krishna's descent to dally with the
shepherdesses. On a less awe-inspiring scale, the tragic and the trivial
may meet in golden lads and chimney-sweeps; in the petrified boot

THE BELLY OP THE WHALE

365

which the Pompeian boot-mender holds in his petrified hand; in the
slice of pig's kidney which Bloom fingers in his pocket during the
funeral service. Laplace regarded it as the ultimate aim of science to
demonstrate from a single grain of sand the mechanics of the whole
universe'.

The locus in quo of human creativity is always on the line of inter-
section between two planes; and in the highest forms of creativity
between the Tragic or Absolute, and the Trivial Plane. The scientist
discovers the working of eternal laws in the ephemeral grain of sand, or
in the contractions of a dead frog's leg hanging on a washing-line. The
artist carves out the image of the god which he saw hidden in a piece
of wood. The comedian discovers that he has known the god from a
plum-tree.

This interlacing of the two planes is found in all great works of art,
and at the origin of all great discoveries of science. The artist and
scientist are condemned or privileged to walk on the line of inter-
section as on a tightrope. At his best moments, man is 'that great and
true amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other
creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds'.

C. VISUAL CREATION

XXI

MOTIF AND MEDIUM
Looking at Nature

Kepler, contemplating a snow-crystal melting on his always
sweaty palm, saw in it the harmony of the spheres reflected
in miniature. Let a less romantically disposed person look for
the first time at a snowflake under a microscope: he will catch his
breath and wax equally lyrical: 'How strangehow beautiful how
clever is nature', et cetera. Yet the symmetrical pattern of hexagons
thus marvellously revealed, loses all its magic when drawn on a
drawing-board. It becomes aesthetically neutral for lack of a second
context the familiar sight of the feathery snowflake. It is the super-
imposition of the two matrices the trivial object revealing the mathe-
matical regularity of its micro-cosmic architecture which creates the
impact, and gives rise to the aesthetic experience.

"Whether Odysseus saw in the sky at dawn 'rosy-fingered Athene
lift her golden ray*, or whether you share the sorrow of the weeping
willow, there is inevitably a second frame of reference superimposed
on the picture. Man always looks at nature through coloured glasses
through mythological, anthropomorphic, or conceptual matrices
even when he is not conscious of it and believes that he is engaged in
'pure vision', unsullied by any meaning. The 'innocent eye' is a fiction,
based on the absurd notion that what we perceive in the present can be
isolated in the mind from the influence of past experience. There is no
perception of 'pure form' but meaning seeps in, and settles on the
image (though the meaning need not be expressed in verbal language,
about which more later).

The idea that looking at nature is self-rewarding, and that land-
scapes devoid of action can give rise to aesthetic experiences, is of
relatively recent origin; so is landscape painting.* Dr. Johnson regarded
mountains as 'rather uncouth objects'; in the literature of the eighteenth

$66

MOTIF AND MEDIUM

3<*7

century precipices were branded as 'frowning* and 'horrid*. 1 The
further we go back in time the less appreciation we find of the purely
visual aspects of form and colour in inanimate nature:

Considering the bulk and value of Greek literature, and the
artistic brilliance of Athens, the feeling for nature . . . was but poorly
developed among a people whose achievement in the dramatic and
sculptural arts has been unsurpassed; it is seriously lacking in Homer,
even when he refers to the sea or to the famous garden of Alcinous,
and it can hardly be said to enter Greek drama save in the Oedipus
at Colonnus and in some of the lyrical choruses of Euripides. Indeed,
the continent of nature had to wait for a thorough and minute
exploration until the romantic movement of the nineteenth century:
Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Goethe, first brought the ocean, the
rivers, and the mountain ranges into their own. . . . For primitive
man earth and sea are simply the perennial source of those material
goods on which life depends, and mountain peaks are uninteresting
and unattractive because they are barren and bleak (Listowel) , 2

The same could be said about the underprivileged classes and
nations in our own time. The peasants in the alpine village where I
live in summer never cease to marvel at the silliness of tourists who
talk about the 'beauty* of the mountains which to them means so
much timber, pasture, and hay. Travelling in India one is amazed by
the indifference, even among the educated classes, towards landscape
and scenery, birds and plants.

All this does not mean that earlier dvilizations derived no emotional
experiences from nature. But they were derived from different sources:
the supernatural powers and magic forces which animated the visible
world. The Babylonians populated the starry heavens with Hons, vir-
gins, and scorpions. The Sicilian straits were to the Greeks not a land-
scape but the seats of Scylla and Charybdis. To Homer, a storm at sea
signified the anger of Poseidon; to Mr. Babitt it signifies the majesty of
nature, a vaguely personalized Power manifested in the spectacle before
his eyes. There is always a second matrix active behind, or superimposed
upon, the visual appearance. The beholder may be convinced that he is
simply perceiving images on his retina, but he is in fact perceiving
with the whole of his brain; and what he sees is modified by the
perceptual codes which operate in it, resonances of his racial and
personal past, floating images of touch and smell, even kinesthetic

368

THE ACT OF CREATION

sensations or incipient muscular stresses. When an appearance gives
rise to an aesthetic experience, it always represents or symbolizes or
expresses something behind and beyond its retinal image exactly as
the pigment on a canvas always refers to something beyond its frame.

A human face is also an object of nature, a landscape of live tissue.
To evoke aesthetic feeling, it must point at something beyond itself
in the beholder's mind. The analogue of the snow-crystal is here that
scaffolding of perfect symmetry and proportions, whose geometrical
laws the painters of Greece and the Renaissance tirelessly pursued. The
golden section and other basic proportions were thought to be the
ultimate constituents of organic form as the Pythagorean scale of
music was thought to regulate the heavenly motions, and as simple
geometrical units, the architect's elementary 'modules', combined to
make Gothic cathedrals. The philosophers of classicism, from Pliny to
Leonardo and Durer, saw beauty wherever mortal flesh testified to
the immortal axioms of Euclidean geometry.

However, the ideal to which the bloated Venus of Willendorf testi-
fies with her pendulous breasts and enormous hips, is not Euclid, but
the goddess of Fertility. Our whole manner of perceiving the human
frame depends on our ideas about its purpose or function on the
selective code which determines our criteria of significance and patterns
our vision. I am using here the word 'fixnction' in the dictionary sense,
as referring to a 'mode of action by which [a thing] fulfils its purpose*.
The definition, of course, takes it for granted that we know what the
purpose of the thing in question is. Now if the thing is a railway en-
gine, the answer is clear; but the purpose of the thing called a human
body is open to various interpretations. And according to the inter-
pretation of human purpose which we accept, our ideas will change,
and our manner of seeing the human body in its functional aspect will
change accordingly. In the drawings of some lunatics, adolescents,
lavatory artists, and tribesmen, the dominant functional aspect is
shown by a huge genital part, while the remainder of the body is
only indicated by a sketchy outline. On Egyptian wan-paintings and
reliefs, conventionalized and schematized figures are shown function-
ing as fishermen, hunters, builders, servants, or parts of a state pro-
cession. The size of the figures is usually proportionate to their rank
not to bodily but to social stature; male skin is painted dark brown,
female skin pale yellow; the code which provides the criteria of rele-
vance is not visual but conceptual. For three thousand years the
sculptors and painters of Egypt produced no original discoveries in

MOTIF AND MEDIUM 369

the technique of visual representation. They had no visual curiosity.
In its indifference to colour, movement, human anatomy, Egyptian
painting was more single-mindedly functional than any before or
after; but 'function was defined as social function, a person's rank and
occupation in the social hierarchy. Apart from that, individuals are
interchangeable, without personal identity, and their appearance de-
void of interest.

In the golden age of Greek art, the human body was seen in a
totally different aspect, that of its physical function: in throwing a
disc, tying a sandal, or simply lifting an arm; vision is attuned to geo-
metrical proportion, to the play and co-ordination of muscles and
joints; and by the criterion of a perfect physique, with facial expressions
limited to types, the curve of the buttocks becomes as important and
expressive as the curve of the brow. Again, in Byzantine painting the
human body functions as an indifferent, and often awkward, shell of
the spirit; and if the spirit commands the saint to bend his head back
and gaze rapturously into the sky, the artist has no qualms in breaking
his neck and letting the body float upward with all limbs out of joint.
The Renaissance once more gave the body its due; and in the centuries
that followed it became the carrier of an individual head, and hence
of an expression and mood. For the courtiers of Louis XV, the prin-
cipal function of human bodies was to play, suitably covered and un-
covered, hide-and-seek between trees and bosquets, and to fall into
each other's arms. For the impressionist painter, the function of the
body is to demonstrate the impermanence of appearances in the
luminous blurr of colours; for the cubist, to prove God's preference
for cubes; and so on.

"Which aspects of reality dominate the visual matrix of a culture or
group depends dtimately on its conception of the purpose and mean-
ing of existence. Accordingly, its norms of beauty will always reflect
the archetype of some kind of functional perfection: the rigid dignity
of Pharaoh, through whose eyes eternity looks in stony silence at
time; the play of muscles in the Greek adolescent's perfect anatomy;
the spirituality in the transfigured face of the Byzantine madonna; the
harmonious resolution of the body into Euclidean forms, or a patch-
work of coloured blobs. Whichever aspect is dominant, its matrix
acts as a kind of optical polariscope, through which the particular
appearance is seen as a thing of general significance, an embodiment
of some universal law or meaning.

Pigment and Meaning

Abstract painting is a misnomer, a contradiction in terms as 'pictorial
philosophy* would be. The concept of justice is an abstraction. The
concept of a square is an abstraction. A picture of Solomon meting
out justice is concrete. But the picture of a blue square on a yellow
ground is equally concrete.

'Non-representational art* and 'expressionist art' are serviceable
labels for certain styles of painting; but if they are supposed to describe
a philosophy or a programme, they are equally misleading and can
create only confusion. A pattern of pigment on canvas always means,
or expresses, or represents something which is not the canvas plus
pigment. However, it does not represent objects or events, but the
artist's mental experiences or imaginings of the nature, causes, shape,
and colour of objects and events. It does not represent a model, but
the artist's vision of the model; not a young lady called Lisa, but the
way Leonardo saw his Lisa. It invites the spectator to share an ex-
perience which the artist had; it provides him with an illusion not the
illusion of seeing a thing, but the illusion of seeing through the artist's
eyes. Without that illusion there will be no response, and the spectator
will behold the canvas through the eyes of a dead fish.

Art was always expressionist' in the legitimate sense of the word:
it expressed a subjective, biassed vision even if the artist deluded him-
self into believing that he was 'copying nature*. And pigment on
canvas always 'represents* something outside its frame for instance
the impact of a green arrow on the blue square when placed next to
it on the yellow ground. That impact does not take place on the can-
vas, but in thcartist's mind, and in the beholder's mind. The pigment
of the blue square remained static and unchanged. But in the be-
holder's eye its colour, shape, and weight have undergone a dynamic
change. To produce this illusionary change was the artist's intention;
it is as if he were saying: Look what my green arrow can do to my
blue square. The canvas expresses or represents an idea in the artist's
head, and if all goes well it will cause a similar experience to occur in
the beholder's head: he will read something in the picture which
stricdy speaking is not there. Apologies for the pedantic demonstration,
but one has to revert to elementary issues to escape the muddle created
by the writings of some expressionists and anti-representationalists.

Much of this confusion (as in other impassioned controversies in
the past) is due to the fact that visual experiences cannot be traduced

370

MOTIF AND MEDIUM

371

into verbal statements without suffering major impoverishment and
distortion. All verbal analysis tends to make implicit, part-conscious
experiences explicit and fully conscious and to destroy them in the
process. There seems to exist a kind of biological rivalry between the
eye and the vocal cords, epitomized by the painter puffing at his pipe
in contemptuous silence while the garrulous art-critic is holding form.
We always see a work of nature or art 'in terms of a selective matrix
governed by this or that criterion of significance; but these 'terms' are
not verbal terms, and if we attempt to verbalize them the result is
unavoidably a gross 'dumsification a medley of cliches and psycho-
logical jargon. The matrix may carry emotive echoes of some arche-
typal experience, but our vocabulary is extremely poor where emo-
tions are concerned. If we say that it responds to the sight of the ocean
with associations of eternity', 'infinity', and so forth, this sounds as
if we were referring to verbal associations. Such words may present
themselves to the mind, but words are the least important part of the
experience, and detract from rather than add to its value. We cannot
help using words in referring to processes which in the listener's mind
are not crystallized into words. The alternative is to say a rose is a
rose is a rose, and leave it at that.

Another difficulty is that at moments of intense aesthetic experience
we see not only with our eyes but with the whole body. The eyes
scan, the cortex thinks, there are muscular stresses, innervations of the
organs of touch, sensations of weight and temperature, visceral re-
actions, feelings of rhythm and motion all sucked into one integrated
vortex. A literary narrative or a piece of music unfolds in stages, but
in a still-life time is fore-shortened as it were, and by taking it in with
a single sweep of the eye (or so it seems) this multitude of experiences
blends into one near-simultaneous process, so that it is extremely dim-
cult to sort out the various elements which went into its making. The
trouble with explaining visual beauty, and also its fascination, is that
so much is happening at the same time.

The Two Environments

What is happening is, put into our jargon, a series of bisociative pro-
cesses involving the participatory emotions.

At the base of the series we again find illusion the magic transforma-
tion of the carved tree into a god. The painted mask, the carved

372 THE ACT OF CREATION

idol, are perceived at the same time as what they are and what they
represent The witch-doctor works his evil spell by sticking a needle
into the rag-doll representing the victim; the cave-artist of Altamira
made sure of a plentiful supply of meat by populating the rock with
painted bison and wild horses.

To those with naive tastes, illusion in itself is sufficient to evoke
aesthetic experience, and 'life-likeness' is regarded as the supreme
criterion of art. As mentioned before, even Leonardo wrote 'that
painting is most praiseworthy which is most like the thing represented'.
However, the 'most like' has an infinite number of interpretations
and that for two solid reasons: the limitations of the medium and the
prejudices of vision. The range of luminosity in the painter's pigment
is only a fraction of that of natural colours; the area on the canvas only
a fraction of the visual field; its coarse grain can accommodate only
a fraction of fine detail; it lacks the dimension of depth in space, and
motion in time. (Even a photograph is far from being a true likeness;
apart from its obvious limitations of colour and light = sensitivity,
it increases the ratio of focal to peripheral vision about a hundredfold
which may be one of the reasons why nature is so much prettified
on picture postcards.) Hence the painter is forced to cheat, to invent
tricks, to exaggerate, simplify, and distort in order to correct the dis-
torting effects of the medium. The way he cheats, the tricks he uses,
are partly determined by the requirements of the medium itself he
must think 'in terms of stone, wood, pigment, or gouache but
mainly by the idiosyncrasies of his vision: the codes which govern the
matrices of his perception. Whether Manet's impression of 'The Races
of Longchamp' looks more 'life-like* than Frith's academically meticu-
lous 'Derby Day' depends entirely on the beholder's spectacles. An
artist can copy in plaster, up to a point, a Roman copy of a Greek
bronze head; he cannot 'copy' on canvas a running horse. He can only
create an appearance which, seen in a certain light, at a certain distance,
in a certain mood, will suddenly acquire a life of its own. It is not a
copy, but a metaphor. The horse was not a model, but a motif for his
creation in the sense in which the landscape painter looks for a
romantic or pastoral motif.

In the terminology of behaviourist psychology we would have to
say that looking at the model constitutes the 'stimulus', and putting
a dab of paint on the canvas the 'response' and that is all there is to
it. But the two activities take place on two different planes. The
stimulus comes from one environment the outer world: the response

MOTIF AND MEDIUM

373

acts on a different environment: a square surface. The two environ-
ments obey two different sets of laws. An isolated brush-stroke does
not represent an isolated detail. There are no point-to-point corres-
pondences between the two planes of the motif and the medium;
they are bisociated as wholes in the artist's mind.

Visual Inferences

Once the artist has acquired sufficient technical skill to do with his
material more or less what he likes, the question what he Ekes, i.e.
what aspects of reality he considers relevant, becomes all-important.
In other words, of the two variables I mentioned the limitations of
the medium, and the prejudiced eye beholding the motif, the first can
be regarded, within a given school, as relatively stable, and we can
concentrate our attention on the second. There can be no unprejudiced
eye for the simple reason that vision is full of ambiguities, and all per-
ception, as we saw, is an inferential construction which proceeds on
various levels, and most of it unconsciously (cf. pp. 38-44). The visual
constancies (p. 43) which enable us to perceive objects as stable in shape,
size, colour, etc., in spite of their unstable, ever-changing appearances
are a first step in the interpretation of our confusing, ambiguous retinal
images. They are automatic skills, partly innate, mostly learned in
early childhood. The process is reversed in some of the so-called optical
illusions where the unconscious code governing preception draws the
wrong inferences in an unusual situation. But even these primitive
mechanisms, which normally function below the level of awareness,
can suddenly become a problem in interpretation for the painter. I
have mentioned (p. 43) that owing to the mechanism of brightness-
constancy a black glove looks as black in sunlight as in the shade
until you look at it through a reduction screen in the experimental
laboratory or through the impressionist painters crooked index-finger.
The various constancies are unconscious inferences we draw to make
sense of our sensations, to lend stability to the unstable flux of appear-
ances. They transform what the eye sees so as to suit the requirements
of reason, of what we know about the external world. Between the
retina and the higher centres of the cortex the innocence of vision is
irretrievably lost it has succumbed to the suggestion of a whole series
of hidden persuaders.
Perceptual projection, which I have already mentioned (p. 295), is

374

THE ACT OF CREATION

one of them: the unconscious mechanism which makes us project
events, located in the brain, into a distance of yards or miles (as opposed
to the dazzling flashes which are 'correctly' located on the retina).
Foreshortening and perspective are consciously added twists to uncon-
scious projection like sensations in a phantom-limb: the flat canvas is
the amputation stump. (The analogy is actually quite precise: pain, too,
is located in the brain, but projected to the locus of the injury; the
phenomenon of the phantom-limb is a secondary projection.)

Projective empathy is another hidden persuader which I have briefly
mentioned before (p. 296). Vernon Lee 3 regarded aesthetic experience
as primarily derived from 'the attri bution of our own moods of dy-
namic experience, motor ideas, to shapes. We attri bute to lines not
only balance, direction, velocity, but also thrust, strain, feeling, inten-
tion, and character.' Jaensch has been able to demonstrate in a fascina-
ting series of experiments that the eidetic image (p. 346) of a straight
horizontal line will expand considerably in length if a pull is exerted on
the horizontally outstretched arms of the subject. 4 And vice versa, the
sensation of the scanning motions performed by the eye, and of other
subliminal muscle-impulses and stresses not to mention Berenson s
'tactile values*, the 'feel* of texture all interfere with perception.

Again, the painter can consciously exploit these unconscious pro-
cesses, and give them an added twist. In Seurat's 'divisionist* theory,
horizontal and gendy* ascending lines, as well as 'cool' colours convey
a mood of calm and content, 'swift' and 'animated' lines and 'warm'
colours make for gaiety, and so on. (The adjectives in quotes have
become so current that we tend to overlook their synesthetic origin).
Juan Gris, though certainly far removed from Seurat's neo-impres-
sionism, talked in the same vein of expansive' and 'contractile' forms,
of the physiological effects of various types of symmetry. 5 The theoriz-
ings of the 'abstracts' are not at all new. Linear rhythm, chromatic
harmonies, and their combined effects have always played, consciously
or unconsciously, an important part. In non-figurative painting the
motifs are, instead of a landscape and a human body, say blue squares
and green arrows. But ultimately these too are derived from nature
the blue and the green, the square and the arrow. Let me invoke the
authority of the greatest and most eclectic painter of our time:

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something.
Afterwards you can remove all traces of reality. There's no danger
then anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible

MOTIF AND MEDIUM

375

mark. It is what started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred up
his emotions. . . . When I paint a picture I am not concerned with
the fact that two people may be represented in it. Those two people
once existed for me but they exist no longer. My vision of them gave
me an initial emotion, then little by little their presence became
blurred; they became for me a fiction, and then they disappeared
altogether, or rather they were transformed into all kinds of
problems, so that they became for me no longer two people but
forms and colours forms and colours which nevertheless resume an
experience of two people, and preserve the vibration of their life. 6

I must add a word on a more primitive kind of attitude to colour.
Some reactions to the 'temperature-values' of colours seems to be
common to most people within the same culture circle; Rimbaud even
tried to co-ordinate each vowel with a different colour. But the
emotive associations of specific colours vary from person to person,
and can be very strong. Wollberg 7 had a schizoid patient who reacted
to red with intense anxiety, to blue with a feeling of elation; yet under
deep hypnosis, Wollberg reversed these reactions. Valentine 8 quotes
the case of a patient born blind who, after a successful operation, felt
intense pleasure at his first sight of red, and was physically sick at the
first sight of yellow. Man not only 'thinks with his hands', he quite
often sees with his bowels.

The visual constancies and illusions, perceptual projection, empathy
and synesthesia form an ascending series of inferential processes. One
step higher in the series we come to the phenomenon of the 'face
hidden in the tree', the 'image in the cloud', the Rohrschach-blot: the
projection of meaning into the ambiguous motif. Once more we have
here an unconscious process which has been consciously exploited from
antiquity to the expressionists. Pliny recounted the anecdote of an
artist who tried in vain to paint the foam at a dog's mouth until, in
exasperation, he threw a spongeful of paint at his canvas and there
was the foam. The story reappears in Leonardo's Treatise on Paintings
where he makes 'our Botticelli* say that if you just throw a sponge
at a wall it will 'leave a blot where one sees a fine landscape*. There is
an oft-quoted passage in that classic treatise which bears being quoted
once more:

You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of
uneven colour. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be

THE ACT OF CREATION

able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with
mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in
great variety; and then again you will see there battles and strange
figures in violent action, expressions of faces and clothes and an
infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete
and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the
sound of bells, in whose, stroke you may find every named word
which you can imagine. 9

This passage inspired the eighteenth-century English landscape
painter Alexander Cozens to publish a book 10 recommending the use
of random ink-blots 'from which ideas are presented to the mind', to
serve as landscape motifs. It seems that Rohrschach's method of psy-
chological testing by inviting subjects to interpret ambiguous blot-
shapes was derived from Cozens and thus from Leonardo, and thus
from Pliny. Similar methods were used by Chinese artists from the
eleventh century onwards. The bisociations of form and meaning are
inexhaustible.

In these cases the motif (the cloud, the patterned wallpaper, or the
ink-blot) and also the meaning read into it, are both of a visual nature.
But the matrix which provides the meaning can also be governed by
non-visual conceptual codes for instance, a verbal suggestion such as
Hamlet uses on Polonius to make the cloud change from weasel to
whale; or by the various notions entertained by Egyptian, Greek, and
Byzantine artists on the function and purpose of the human body. In
some forms of insanity, and in the experimental psychoses induced by
drugs, the patient sees serpents, genitals, archaic creatures budding out
of every curve of an ornamental design. The cubist's vocabulary
consists of cylinders and cubes; the pointillist's of daub's; classical
composition obeyed the grammar of harmony and balance; the
Egyptian painter saw in stereotyped cliches; so does the Japanese Zen
artist.

Codes of Perception

This leads us to the most powerful single factor among the many
factors which enter into the processing of the visual input: the power
of convention as a hidden persuader (p. 42 ). Perception is a part-
innate, part-acquired skill of transforming the raw-material of vision

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377

into the 'finished product'; and every period has its conventional
formulae and methods of interpretation for doing this. The ordinary
mortal thitiWs most of the time in cliches and sees most of the time in
cliches. His visual schemata are prefabricated for him; he looks at the
word through contact-lenses without being aware of it.

The extreme example is ancient Egypt but merely because it
lasted so long; contemporary Zen painting and calligraphy, as already
said, obeys almost as rigid rules of the game. The Egyptian painter
unvaryingly represented the human figure with head in profile, eye
frontally, legs in profile, chest frontally, and so on, showing each part
in its most characteristic aspect. Whether the ordinary Egyptian per-
ceived his fellow creatures this way we cannot tell, and remembering
that we perceive a tilted coin still as a circle, and not foreshortened
into an ellipse he probably could not tell either. But we do know that
the moment he translated motif into medium, his vision became
stereotyped. It is highly improbable that conformity was enforced on
artists against their will for a full three thousand years. There exist
exceptions to the rule, relief figures dating as far back as 2400 B.c., u
which show foreshortening and dynamic motion; if there had been a
taboo on such innovations, they would hardly have been preserved.
But the exceptions became less, not more frequent as time went by;
for reasons beyond our understanding, Egyptian art, as Egyptian
society, remained static, and habit prevailed over originality.

Greek art, between the sixth and fourth century B.C. was, compared
with Egypt, in a state of permanent revolution, which carried it within
no more than six or seven generations from the archaic style to the
trompe Vail. Yet, although originality and innovation were valued as
never before, it could not avoid developing its own cliches. 'After all,*
wrote Gombrich, 'Greek art of the classical period concentrated on the
image of man almost to the exclusion of other motifs, and even in the
portrayal of man it remained wedded to types. This does not apply
only to the idealized type of physique which we all associate with
Greek art. Even in the rendering of movement and drapery the reper-
toire of Greek sculpture and painting has turned out to be strangely
limited. There are a restricted number of formulas for the rendering of
figures standing, running, fighting, or falling, which Greek artists
repeated with relatively slight variations over a long period of time.
Perhaps if a census of such motifs were taken, the Greek vocabulary
would be found to be not much larger than the Egyptian.* 18

That vocabulary and its Euclidean grammar of proportion

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THE ACT OF CREATION

remained as indelibly printed on European art as the categories of
Aristotle on European philosophy. The Byzantine painter and mosaic
maker had given up the aspiration to copy nature, but he used the
approved Greek stock-formulae to represent faces, hands, gestures,
and draperies. Warburg 13 has shown that the artists of the Renaissance
were prone to fall back on Greek models whenever they wanted to
indicate emotion by a gesture or attitude: he called these emotive
cliches Pathosformeln*

'Even Dutch genre paintings that appear to mirror life in all its
bustle and variety will turn out to be created from a limited number
of types and gestures' if for instance, one compares them with news-
paper-photographs of crowd scenes. The quotation is again from
Professor Gombrich, 14 whose Art and Illusion proved an invaluable
source of illustrative examples.

Skilled routine in perceiving as in thinking, has its positive and
negative side. Without certain conventional rules of the game, which
were acquired by learning but function unawares, we could not make
much sense either of nature or of art. 'The art of seeing nature',
Constable wrote, 'is a thing almost as much to be acquired as the art of
reading Egyptian hieroglyphs.* 15 On the other hand, conventions tend
to harden into rigid formulae the matrix freezes up, and makes us
ignore those aspects of reality which do not fit into the schema. The
Greek sculptor is indifferent to individual expression, the Byzantine
painter to anatomy, the Chinese to shadows, and so on. But there exist
far more striking examples of the single-minded neglect by the eye of
anything which the mind does not consider relevant. They are engrav-
ings dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, which show
that even artists reputed for their meticulousness can be indifferent or
blind to features which are considered irrelevant or offensive to the
conventional rules of the game. One of them was Merian, an extremely
skilful illustrator who obviously tried hard to make a faithful 'copy'
it looks actually like an architect's drawing of the Cathedral of
Notre-Dame. And what happened? *. . . As a child of the seventeenth
century, his notion of a church is that of a lofty symmetrical building
with large, rounded windows, and that is how he designs Notre-Dame.
He places the transept in the centre with four large, rounded windows
on either side, while the actual view shows seven narrow, pointed
Gothic windows to the west and six in the choir/ 16 He could not go
against the code which governed his visual perception.

Nor could those medieval artists, who drew lions, elephants, and

MOTIF AND MEDIUM

379

other exotic animals 'from life', but, incapable of visually digesting the
startling appearance, produced monstrosities reminding one of Greek
chimeras creatures compounded of a lion's head, a goat's body and
a serpent's tail. The reason is simple. The codification of experience
into 'rules of the game* is as indispensable in perceptual skills as in
manual or reasoning skills. The learning process starts in the cot and
ends only when the artist has learned to forget what he has learned
but that is only for the chosen few. The medieval artist- like the con-
temporary amateur taking a correspondence course in draftsmanship
did not start by drawing from nature, but by learning, from drawing-
books, the tricks and formulae of how to draw heads, hands, and feet,
birds, stags, trees, and clouds. There were hundreds of such works
published, from Villard de Honecourt's Album of Patterns in the first
half of the thirteenth century to date including such classics as
Diirer's Dresden Sketchbook or Fialetti's The True Method and Order to
Draw All Parts and Limbs of the Human Body which seems to contain
every conceivable shape and mis-shape of ears, eyes, and noses under
the sun. To succeed in drawing an ear with an untutored eye requires"
genius; even Diirer, so we are told, got the anatomy of the human eye
wrong.

To quote Constable again: an artist who is self-taught is taught by
a very ignorant person indeed. He must acquire a vocabulary not
only to express himself, but to read meaning into appearances. The
same Villard de Honecourt whose album of patterns contains the
most admirably schematized swans, horses, ostriches, and bearded
heads drew a lion 'from life', as he assures us and produced a chimera.
We do not know for how long he had the chance of looking at the
lion or how coherent his sketch was. But it is evident that where he
had to fill in features from memory, he could only do so by supplanting
the forgotten details of the strange creature by parts of more familiar
animals. He had certainly not intended to falsify deliberately any
more than Merian did in his drawings of Notre-Dame. But neither of
them could digest the unfamiliar motif because it could not be re-
solved into familiar schemata, pigeonholed, labelled, and confined to
memory or jotted down in shorthand, as it were, by means of a
ready-made formula. They were in the same position as the subjects
in the psychological laboratory who are made to witness an unex-
pected sequence of events and, when asked to relate what happened,
give notoriously divergent, unreliable accounts. Their verbal re-
production is jumbled, not because they lack the skill to express

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THE ACT OF CREATION

themselves, but because they were unable to take in a sequence of
events which did not fit their scheme of things.

Not only the medieval artist used formulae like recipes from a
cookery-book. Camper, an eighteenth-century anatomist, wrote a
book on The Connection Between the Science of Anatomy and the Arts
of Drawing, Painting, Statuary, etc., in which he described the standard
procedures of portraiture in his time: 'The portrait painters of the
present day generally describe an oval upon their panel before the
person to be painted sits to be drawn, make a cross in the oval, which
they divide into the length of four noses and the breadth of five eyes;
and they paint the face according to these divisions to which it must
be accommodated, let the proportions themselves be ever so much at
variance.' 17 The oval with its subdivisions represented the matrix with
its fixed code; the ftlling-in of details was a matter of elastic strategy.

Convention and Creation

Regardless of the period at which we look, every work of art betrays
the prejudiced eye, governed by selective codes which lend coherence
to the artist's vision, and at the same time restrict his freedom. The
ensemble of these codes provides the 'rules of the game', the routine
aspect of his work; while his 'strategy' must be adapted to the double
environment of motif and medium. The greatness of an artist rests in
creating a new, personal idiom an individual code which deviates
from the conventional rules. Once the new idiom a new way of
bisociating motif and medium is established, a whole host of pupils
and imitators can operate it with varying degrees of strategic skill.

It does not mean belittling the creative mind to point out that every
artist has his cookery recipes for the basic ingredients of the dishes he
serves. But we must distinguish between true creativity the invention
of a new recipe, on the one hand, and the skilled routine of providing
variations of it. The whole, vexed question of the artistic value oforilliant
forgeries and copies hinges on this distinction (see Chapter XXIV).

But whether the rules of the game were imposed by convention or
originally designed by the artist, they have an equal sway over him.
Rubens' puttis sometimes look mass-produced, and even some of the
portraits of his children seem to obey the same formula; similar blas-
phemies could be uttered about Renoir's pneumatic nudes, Henry
Moore's convexities and concavittes-wira-a-hole, or Bernard Buffet's

MOTIF AND MEDIUM

381

obsessive angularities. One cannot help feeling that artists who spend
the rest of their lives exploring the possibilities of a single formula
which they discovered in their truly creative period, resemble the
'one-idea-men' in the history of science. The difference is that the
concrete language of the painter's brush permits endless variations on
a single theme without losing its enchantment- which the abstract
symbol-language of science does not.

The reader may have felt, in following the last few pages, an uneasy
suspicion that I was deliberately confusing the tricks and formulae
for drawing a pussycat with the artist's vision of the pussycat, and the
history of painting with a history of seeing. But in fact the two interact
so intimately in the artist's mind (and in the responsive beholder's
mind) that they cannot be separated. Take seeing first; already Pliny
knew (what Behaviourist psychology managed to forget) that 'the
mind is the real instrument of sight and observation' and the eyes merely
act 'as a kind of vehicle, receiving and transmitting the visual portion
of consciousness'. 18 But the mind is also the real instrument of manual
dexterity, in a much deeper sense than we generally realize, including
those quirks of manner and style which can be 'left to the muscles' to
be taken care of. Renoir, when his ringers became crippled with
arthritis, painted with a brush attached to his forearm, yet his style
remained unchanged. It would be psychologically just as absurd to
assume the reverse that a pattern of expression so deeply ingrained
should have had no effect on his pattern of perception, as it would be
to assume that his perception had no influence on what his hand was
doing. The two activities are bisociated; in the terminology of the
communication engineer, the medium 'in terms of which the artist
must think, influences by feed-back his pattern of vision.

An obvious example is provided by the way in which the study
of anatomy even if merely demonstrated by a lay-figure trans-
forms the artist's perception of the human body. A less obvious
example is the following which I again owe to Gombrich. Cozens,
the eighteenth-century painter who advocated the ink-blot technique
to inspire his pupils to paint 'Rohrschach' landscapes, also drew for
their benefit a series of schemata of various types of cloud-formation
as Guercino had given recipes for drawing various types of ears.
Constable studied and faithfully copied these crude schematizations of
'streaky clouds at the top of the sky' or 'bottom of the sky' or clouds
'darker at the top than the bottom'. By learning to distinguish different
types of cloud-formation acquiring an articulate cloud-vocabulary as

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THE ACT OF CREATION

it were he was able to perceive clouds, and to paint clouds, as nobody
had done before, His brush, like the poet's pen, 'turned them into
shapes, and gave to airy nothing a local habitation and a name'. The
result is that Constable addicts see real clouds in Constable's terms, as
Van Gogh addicts see the fields of Provence in Van Gogh's terms
and in either case much to their benefit. Some French authors Lalo,
I believe was the first, and among contemporaries, Malraux have
proposed that our aesthetic appreciation of nature is derived from
having seen landscapes in paint. That may be the case with many of us,
but it only means as suggested already at the beginning of this chapter
that man has always looked at nature through a frame. Through the
painter's frame, or the frame of mythology, or the frame of science;
through half-closed eyes or eye glued to the lens of the telescope.
Constable called landscape painting an inquiry into the laws of nature;
and Richardson, discovering that the difficulties of his pupils were
caused as much by their unskilled eye as by their unskilled fingers,
drew the conclusion:

For it is a certain maxim, no man sees what things are, that knows
not what they ought to be. That this maxim is true, will appear by
an academy figure drawn by one ignorant in the .structure, and
butting of the bones, and anatomy, compared with another who
understands these thoroughly . . . both see the same life, but with
different eyes. 10

NOTES

To p. 366. I am speaking of Europe: landscape painting in China has a
much older tradition.

To p. 378. Incidentally, there is a bridge waiting to be' built between art
criticism and the physiology of gesture. To give an example: the neurologist
Kurt Goldstein (1947) has made a study of the way in which people point with
their arms at an object. If the object is to the front and to the right, the person
will point with the extended arm, which will form with the frontal plane of the
body an angle of approximately forty-five degrees. If the object is moved further
to the right, the person will start turning his trunk to the right, so that the angle
between body and arm remains 45 degrees. But if the object is placed straight
in front ofhim, he will turn his body to the left and the angle will still be the same.
There are obvious anatomical reasons for this. But if you make your figure point
an musing finger straight ahead, fully racing his adversary, you get a 'pathos-
formula*.

XXII

IMAGE AND EMOTION

The trouble with putting into words the aesthetic experience
aroused by a picture is, as we saw, that so much is happening
at the same time; that only a fraction of it becomes conscious,
and an even smaller fraction verbalized. 'The forceps of our minds', to
quote H. G. Wells again, 'are clumsy things, and crush the truth a
little in the course of taking hold of it.' Wells was talking of the
difficulties of putting ideas into words; when it comes to putting aesthe-
tic experiences into words, nothing short of a caesarian will help. The
surgical tool that I proposed was 'bisociation; and the operation con-
sisted in disentangling the various bisociative, or bifocal, processes
which combine in the experience. I have mentioned a number of
these; I shall have to mention one or two more, and discuss briefly the
emotional reactions which they call forth.

Virtues of the Picture Postcard

The essence of the aesthetic experience consists, as I have tried to show,
in intellectual illumination seeing something familiar in a new, signifi-
cant light; followed by emotional catharsis the rise, expansion, and ebb-
ing away of the self-transcending emotions. But this can happen only
if the matrix which provides the 'new light* has a higher emotive
potential or 'calory value' (pp. 321-31); in other words, the two
matrices must lie on an ascending gradient.

Let us see in what manner the various bisociative patterns mentioned
earlier on fulfil this requirement. Take illusion once more, which
enters art in a variety of guises and disguises, on its most naive level:
the discovery that something can be itself and something else at the

383

384

THE ACT OF CREATION

same time. A small child, fascinated by dad's amateur efforts as a
draftsman, will beg 'make me a donkey', 'make me an elephant', thus
unconsciously evoking Pygmalion's power. I shall not hark back to
Altamira and the witch-doctor merely dot my i's by pointing out
that the gradient leads in that direction.

Or take the simplest illusion of space: the delighted shock of looking
for the first time through fieldglasses, and seeing the distant church-
spire leap to within grasp. Here again unconscious analogies, echoes of
sorcery enter into play: the power to be in two places at once; the
conquest of space by magic carpet; action-at-a-distance. The reverse
experience is the illusion derived from a perspective landscape or a
Chinese silk painting which, with a few brushstrokes, makes the
horizon recede into infinity. To call perspective and trompe Vceil
'magic* is a cliche, because their genuine magic has succumbed to the
law of diminishing returns; but to the unsophisticated eye the hole in
the wall through which it looks into a different world has the dream-
like quality of Alice stepping through the looking-glass; dream-like,
because the creation and annihilation of space is a favoured game of
the underground.

I have made a slighting mention of the 'petrification' of nature on
picture postcards, which bring the whole scenery within the range of
focal vision. But there is a genuine appeal to the emotions in the fact
that a landscape painting can be taken in almost at a glance, without
the half-conscious, constant scanning which the real scenery requires.
To have it all there simultaneously laid out before his view, gives the
beholder a kind of naive Olympian feeling, a sense of power entirely
harmless, since his only aim is passive contemplation; enhanced by
the cfrcumstance and here the next bisociation enters into the process
that he is looking at the scenery not through his own, but through
Claude's or Courbet's eyes.

Another facet or pair of facetsof the many-sided experience of
looking at a picture is synesthesia (p. 321). Berenson's dictum 'the
painter can accomplish his task only by giving tactile values to retinal
impressions' does not only mean that the bisociation of vision with
touch lends an added dimension to experience and more solidity to
illusion. Berenson's emphasis on tactile values also indicates that the
sense of touch had a special appeal to him as it had to Keats (p. 321).
But neither of them was exceptional in this respect; after all, the
adjective 'touching* that is, emotionally moving is derived from
touch; and 'touching' in the verbal sense is a primary impulse not

IMAGE AND EMOTION

385

only among lovers; the texture of silk or polished stone also provides
minor pleasures. The brocade fineries of Van Eyck's figures have a
strong tactile appeal; the impact of the gangrened flesh of Christ in
Griinewald's Isenheim altar is one of horror redeemed by pity. It is-
perhaps only matched in power by Flaubert's rendering of the legend
of St. Julian sharing his bed with the leper.

Taste and Distaste

This brings us to a subject which I have not mentioned so far, although
it used to play an important part in aesthetic theories of the hedonistic
type, and was a wonderful source of confusion: I mean the polarity
of agreeable and disagreeable, attractive and repellent sense-impressions.

The first necessity, if we wish to avoid similar confusion, is to make
a clear distinction between tastes and distastes directly affecting the
senses (the tongue, the nose, the ear); and the pleasure-unpleasure tone
of complex emotional states mediated by the autonomous nervous sys-
tem. The distinction may seem pedantic, and a sharp line cannot always
be drawn, because the different levels in the nervous system interact
with each other; the palate can be Educated* to delight in rotten
Chinese eggs, and the smell of honeysuckle can become nauseating to
the rejected lover. Whether the selective codes which govern our
spontaneous reactions of taste and distaste are inborn or acquired in early
childhood is irrelevant in this context; and the fact that these reactions
can be altered in later life does not affect the argument. What matters
is to distinguish between the aesthetic experience or the experience
of beauty if you like on the one hand, and sensory gratification on the
other; and to get away from such definitions as the Concise Oxford's
of beauty: 'Combination of qualities . . . that delights the sight; com-
bined qualities delighting the other senses', etc. Evidently, by these
criteria not only Grunewald, but the vast majority of works of art
would be beyond the pale of beauty and could never give rise to
aesthetic experience defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary as
'the appreciation of the beautiful*.

I do not mean to flog the dead horse of hedonist aesthetics but to
emphasize the difference between sensory gratification and aesthetic
satisfaction a difference of levels deriving from the hierarchic organi-
zation of the nervous system (Chapter XIII and Book Two). Take
an obvious example from music. Periodic sounds musical tones

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THE ACT OP CREATION

are more pleasing to the ear than a-periodic noises; and some screeching
noises rubbing a blackboard with a dry sponge for instance are
so offensive that they give gooseflesh to some people. Again, among
musical chords, the octave, fifth, and major third are more agreeable
to the European ear than others; and some dissonances, heard in
isolation, can put one on edge. But the flattery or ofFensiveness of
individual chords has only an indirect bearing on the emotional
effect of a string quartet as a whole. There is no numerical relation
between the number of consonances and our aesthetic appreciation.
The pattern of alternation between sweet and bitter sounds is merely
one among several relevant patterns interacting with each other in
the multi-dimensional experience.

Sensory preferences the dismrnmation between sensory stimula-
tions which 'agree', and those which 'disagree* with our innate or
acquired dispositions do not provide the clue to the nature of aesthetic
experience, but they provide one of the clues: particularly those pre-
ferences which are part of the human heritage, and shared by all. The
Chinese taste for music differs from ours considerably; but all men
are subject to the pull of gravity and prefer keeping their balance to
losing it. A leaning tower, or a big head on a thin neck give rise to dis-
agreeable sensations mediated by projective empathy (p. 296). But
this again is only part of the story. Inverted, top-heavy, disturbing
forms may combine in the picture with forms in repose, creating a
total pattern with a balance of a higher order in which the parts
with positive and negative balance play the same role as con-
sonant and dissonant chords, or beats and missed beats in a metric
stanza.

One of the most haunting pictures in this particular respect is
Pollaiulo's 'Martyrdom of St. Sebastian , (in the London National
Gallery). The saint stands with his naked feet on the sawn-off stumps
of two branches of a dead tree, his hands tied behind his back, looking
as if he were bound to topple over any moment. He is held up by
another, hardly visible, branch of a tree which rises behind him, and
to which his hands are presumably tied; but even so he is bound to
fall. What prevents him, in the beholders eye, from falling is a trick
in the composition of the picture: the figure of the saint forms the
apex of a solid, well-balanced triangle. The sides of the triangle are
six figures in symmetrical poses, performing symmetrical gestures.
The imbalance of the part is redeemed by the balance of the whole,
by the triangle which lends unity to diversity. The fact that the

IMAGE AND EMOTION

387

figures are the saint's executioners, shooting their murderous arrows
into him, belongs to a different level of awareness.

Empathy projects our own dynamic experiences of gravity, balance,
stress, and striving into the pigment on the canvas representing human
figures or inert shapes. Thus vertical and horizontal lines acquire a
special eminence; a vertical line looks longer than a tilted line of the
same length, and right angles are so much singled out, that an angle
of, say, ninety-five degrees is seen as an imperfect, 'bad' angle of ninety
degrees. Patients with brain lesions sometimes give freer rein than
normal people to the hedonistic bias of their eyes, and do not notice
deviations up to ten degrees from the horizontal or vertical. They
indulge in 'wishful seeing' as others in wishful thinking. And to a
lesser extent that is true of all of us. Goe the knew that after-images
which appear on the retina tend to reduce irregularities and asym-
metries, and to transform squares into circles. The Gestalt school has
shown that the raw material of the visual input is subjected to yet
other kinds of processing than those I have mentioned: the 'closure
principle' makes us automatically fill in the gaps in a broken outline;
'Pragnanz' (conciseness), 'good continuation , symmetry, simplicity
are further built-in criteria of excellence which prejudice our per-
ceptions. But once again, it can hardly be maintained that the delights
of looking at a perfect circle with a closed circumference, and the
disgust with circles marred by a bulge, enter directly into the aesthetic
experience. If that were the case, the perfect picture would be a perfect
circle with a vertical and a horizontal line intersecting in its centre; all
hedonistic principles and Gestalt-criteria would be satisfied by it. The
innate bias in our taste-buds in favour of sweet compared with acid
stimuli is a fact which every theory of culinary aesthetics must take
into account; but it does not make syrup the ideal of culinary per-
fection. Symmetry and asymmetry, closure and gap, continuity and
contrast, must combine, like consonances and dissonances, into a
pattern on a higher level of the perceptual hierarchy as far removed
from Freud's pleasure-principle as from the Oxford Dictionary's defini-
tion of beauty.

Motion and Rest

That pattern is in fact our old friend, unity-in-diversity ; or rather unity
implied in diversity, for here the 'law of infolding' asserts itself with a
vengeance. If a work of art strikes one as hopelessly dated, it is not

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THE ACT OF CREATION

because its particular idiom dates from a remote period, but because
it is spelt out in a too obvious, explicit manner. The Laocoon group is
more dated than the archaic Apollo of Tenea in spite of the vasdy
superior representational skill of the Hellenistic periodwhich the
sculptor displays with such self-defeating ostentation. Pollainolo's delight
in the recendy discovered laws of perspective, and the resulting over-
emphasis on geometrical structure has a somewhat chilling effect;
the same could be said of Uccello's 'The Rout of San Romano*. Again
(as Eric Newton has pointed out), the triangular scaffolding in
Raphael's treatment of the Madonna and Child theme is a shade too
obvious. To discover the principle of unity hidden in variety must be
left to the beholder's imagination. Leonardo has given a 'formula' how
to draw trees: if you draw a circle round the crown of a tree, the
sections of all the twigs must add up to the thickness of the stem; the
bigger the radius of the circle, the more twigs it will cut, but because
the sections get thinner, the result is the same. Though the law is not
exact, it holds the secret which lends unity to the tree drawn in its
full foliage, and implied symmetry to its irregularly shaped branches
and twigs.

Unity-in-variety can be debased to a formula: the portrait painter
drawing his oval and dividing it into the length of four noses; it can
also be a peephole to eternity. 'Motion or change/ wrote Emerson,
*and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature: Motion
and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumb-
nail or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a
brook, admits us to the secrets of the mechanics of the sky. Every
shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup
explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition of matter
from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex form; and yet so
poor is nature with all her craft, that, from the beginning to the end
of the universe, she has but one stuff but one stuff with its two ends,
to serve up her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star,
sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same
properties/

I owe this quotation from Emerson's essay on 'Nature' to G. Kepes*
The New Landscape one of the most remarkable books on art in
recent years. It opens up a world as unattainable to the limited range
of our senses the narrow biological filter of perception as light and
colour are unattainable to the blind. 'Of the total stimuli flooding the
world with potential messages, the visible and audible ranges acces-

IMAGE AND EMOTION

389

sible to our bodies represent a tiny segment/ 1 But it has now become
possible to decipher these signals and bring their message into visible
focus by instruments which expand and compress events in time,
penetrate space near to the border where granules of matter are revealed
as patterns of concentrated energy, and enable the eye to see 'in terms
of ultra-violet and infra-red radiations. All of us have seen an occa-
sional photograph of a spiral nebula or a snow-crystal, but these are like
early daguerreotypes compared with the new landscapes seen through
the electron-microscope. They show the ultra-structure of the world
electric discharges in a high voltage arc which look like the most
elaborate Brussels lace, smoke molecules of magnesium oxide like a
composition by Mondrian, nerve-synapses inside a muscle suspended
like algae, phantom-figures of swirling heated air, ink molecules
travelling through water, crystals like Persian carpets, and ghostly
mountains inside the micro-structure of pure Hafnium, like an illus-
tration to Dante's Purgatorio. What strikes one is that these land-
scapes, drawn as it were in invisible ink, possess great intrinsic beauty
of form. The aesthetic experience derived from them seems to be
directly related to what Emerson called the first and second secrets of
nature: 'Motion or change, and identity or rest' and also to the
fact that the universe is made of only one stuff with a finite set
of basic geometrical patterns in an infinite number of dynamic
variations.

'There are two basic morphological archetypes,' wrote Kepes,
'expression of order, coherence, discipline, stability on the one hand;
expression of chaos, movement, vitality, change on the other.
Common to the morphology of outer and inner processes, these are
basic polarities recurring in physical phenomena, in the organic
world and in human experience.' They are 'the dynamic substance of
our universe, written in every corner of nature'. . . . "Wherever we
look, we find configurations that are either to be understood as
patterns of order, of closure, of a tendency towards a centre, co-
hesion and balance, or as patterns of mobility, freedom, change, or
opening. We recognize them in every visible pattern; we respond
to their expression in nature's configurations and in human utter-
ances, gestures, and acts. Cosmos and chaos ... the Apollonian
spirit of measure and the Dionysian principle of chaotic life, organiza-
tion and randomness, stasis and kinesis ... all these are different
aspects of the same polarity of configuration/ 2

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THE ACT OF CREATION

Thus the cliche about unity-in-variety represents one of the most
powerful archetypes of human experience cosmos arising out of
chaos. "We have seen it at work in the scientist's search for universal
law; and when we see it reflected in a work of art, or in any corner of
nature, however indirectly, we catch a faint echo of it.

Ascending Gradients

When I compared the landscape of the smoke micrograph to a Mon-
drian composition, I was not merely indulging the metaphoric con-
sciousness; for another strange thing about these shapes not meant for
the human eye is that they all look like something else. But not in the
same way as the ink-blot which serves as a passive receptacle for our
projections; they are so precise and well-defined that they seem to
ask for an equally definite meaning. The electric discharge does look
unmistakably like lace-work, the various unexpected shapes which a
water-drop assumes during its fall through the air look unequivocally
like a chain of semi-precious stones; and when no concrete interpreta-
tion presents itself, some painter's work comes to mind. To be told
that die Brussels lace is actually the 'portrait of an alternating current
reversing its direction a hundred and twenty times per second' pro-
vides an additional shock: the sudden substitution of a new matrix,
a different contact-lens has the effect of a sudden iUurnination. The
sparkling electric discharge still looks like lacework, and the Hafnium
crystal still looks like a mountain in Hades, but the original interpreta-
tion has now become a metaphor, which supplies an additional
dimension, and feeds more calories to the experience.

The mind is insatiable for meaning, drawn from, or projected into,
the world of appearances, for unearthing hidden analogies which
connect the unknown with the familiar, and show the familiar in an
unexpected light. It weaves the raw material of experience into pat-
terns, and connects them with other patterns; the fact that something
reminds me of something else can itself become a potent source of
emotion. Girls fall in love with men who remind them of father;
men get infatuated with a reflection of Botticelli in a vacuous profile;
every face is a palimpsest. The willow's shoulders droop, limp like a
mourning widow's; the ripples on the lake reflect the Pythagorean
harmonies; the whirlpool on the surface of die brook 'admits us to
the mechanics of the sky'. When a painting is said to represent nothing

IMAGE AND EMOTION

391

but 'significant form' to carry no meaning, no associative connec-
tions, no reference to anything beyond itself we can be confident
that the speaker does not know what he is talking about. Neither the
artist, nor the beholder of his work, can slice his mind into sections,
separate sensation from perception, perception from meaning, sign
from symbol.

The difficulty of analysing the aesthetic experience is not due to its
irreducible quality, but to the wealth, the unconscious and non-
verbal character of the matrices which interlace in it, along ascending
gradients in various dimensions. Whether the gradient is as steep and
dramatic as in a Griinewald or El Greco, or gently ascending through
green pastures, it always points towards a peak not of technical per-
fection, but of some archetypal form of experience. We thus arrive at
the same conclusion as in our discussion of literature: a work of art
is always transparent to some dim outline of ultimate experience
even if it is no more than the indirect reflection of a reflection, the
echo of an echo. Those among the great painters who had a taste for
verbal theorizing, and the articulateness of translating their vision into
words, almost invariably evoked absolutes and ultimates the tragedy,
or glory of man's condition, the wrath or mercy of divinity, the uni-
versal laws of form and colour harmony, the norms of beauty hidden
in the mysteries of the golden section or anchored in Euclid's anxioms.
Everything has two aspects,' wrote Chirico, 'the current aspect,
which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the
ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see
in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. A work of
art must narrate something that does not appear within its outline/

Regardless of the site we choose for our excavation, we shall always
hit at the same ancient underground river which feeds the springs of
all art and discovery.

Summary

The aesthetic experience aroused by a work of art is derived from a
series of bisociative processes which happen virtually at once and
cannot be rendered in verbal language without suffering impoverish-
ment and distortion. At the base of the series we once more find
illusion. But 'life-likeness* is a matter of interpretation, dependent on
the limitations of the medium and the prejudices of vision. Perception

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THE ACT OF CREATION

is loaded with unconscious inferences, from the visual constancies,
through spatial projection, empathy, and synesthesia, to the projection
of meaning into the Rohrschach blot, and the assigning of purpose and
function to the human shape. The artist exploits these unconscious
processes by the added twists of perspective, rhythm and balance, con-
trast, 'tactile values', etc. The conventions of a period or school lend
coherence to its vision, but also tend to crystallize as in all domains
of science and art into fixed 'rules of the game': into formulae,
stereotypes, visual cliches; these may be so firmly established that the
artist becomes snowblind to aspects of reality which do not fit into
them. The originality of genius, here as elsewhere, consists in shifts of
attention to aspects previously ignored; in seeing appearances in a new
light; in discovering new relations and correspondences between
motif and medium.

Tastes and distastes on the sensory level play, like consonances and
dissonances, only a subordinate role in the aesthetic experience, as one
among many patterns of unity-in-variety. The pre-condition of the
experience to occur is once more that the emotive potentials of the
matrices participating in it should form an ascending gradient, and
provide a hint, however tentative or teasing, of some hidden reality in
the play of forms and colours.

XXIII

ART AND PROGRESS

In the discussion which followed a lecture at an American univer-
sity on the subject of this book, one of the 'resident painters*
remarked angrily:

'I do not "bisociate". I sit down, look at the model, and paint it/
In a sense he was right. He had found his 'style', his visual vocabulary,
some years earlier and was quite content to use it, with suitable varia-
tions, to express everything he had to say. The two planes of motif and
medium had become firmly welded together at a fixed angle, and the
original bisociative act had become stabilized into a skilled routine
highly flexible, but governed by a fixed code. It would be very foolish
to underestimate the achievements of which skilled routine is capable.
By working tirelessly to improve his technique, the pupil or imitator
may as the history of doubtful attri butions and outright forgeries
proves equal and sometimes surpass the master in technical perfection.
But technical virtuosity is one thing, creative originality another.

Cumulative Periods

Original discoveries are as rare in art as in science. They consist in
finding new ways of bisociating motif and medium. Art historians who
lived in periods of rapid transition, considered 'progress* in terms of
discoveries of new techniques: Pliny called each innovator a heuretes
a 'finder' entitled to utter Archimedes' triumphant shout. The inno-
vations which he and Qumtilian listed as quasi-scientific discoveries
were feats such as rendering difficult, contorted motions; making the
first statue with an open mouth; showing the course of the veins;
paying attention to light and shadow. They regarded each discovery

393

394 THE ACT OF CREATION

as a landmark on the road towards the mastery of reality; and during
the second great awakening, the Renaissance, Vasari, Leonardo, and
Durer took a similar attitude. Vasari described the triumphant ad-
vance of painting from Giotto to the sixteenth-century masters in
terms almost comparable to a history of sea-farers, where each of the
great captains puts a new continent on the map. Leonardo thought in
all seriousness that it was a wretched pupil who did not surpass his
master; and if we recall that less than two centuries, or six generations,
separate Giotto and Duccio on the one hand, from Raphael and Titian
on the other, we can appreciate his point of view. Greek sculpture,
from Polymedes of Argos to Praxiteles (also a span of about six
generations), and Italian art from the early fourteenth to the early
sixteenth century, advanced indeed in a cumulative way each genius
'stood on the shoulders of giants' and could look a little further than
his predecessors.

But here a dangerous misunderstanding might arise. 'Cumulative
progress' means in this context merely that each painter could make
use of the discoveries of his predecessors without having to make them
again. Foreshortening, perspective, anatomy, a whole series of steps
in the rendering of light and colour, of textures, movements, expres-
sions; these and many other innovations in the treatment of the
medium and the perception of reality, once made, could be easily
absorbed by pupils and imitators. When Leonardo spoke of the
pupil's duty to 'surpass* his master, he meant only this that the pupil
was free to incorporate at his ease the discoveries of his elders into his
repertory and to look for new pastures. But neither he nor Vasari
meant that those who came later were better painters in an absolute
sense than those on whose shoulders they stood. Moreover, Leonardo
knew that the pupil was free not only to accept, but also to reject
the discoveries of his elders. The deliberate distortions and asymmetries
in the face of Mona Lisa, and the equally deliberate ambiguities of
contour in the corners of mouth and eyes, are deviations from the
canon; but they were based on a knowing rejection of certain aspects
of 'scientific realism* in painting not on naive ignorance. In this
sense the achievements of art are indeed cumulative and irreversible,
as those of science are. The artist can decide to go against them, but
he cannot ignore them.

'Florentine pafoting', wrote Eric Newton, 1 'starts, like a sprint,
with a pistol shot, hi 1280 it hardly exists. By 1300 it is racing ahead.'
Quite a number of modern art-historians share, with Pliny and

ART AND PROGRESS

395

Vasari, a belief in the cumulative progress of art* Ruskin and Roger Fry
thought the history of painting from ancient days was a progressive
shedding of prejudices and the recovery of our lost 'innocence of the
eye'. 'It has taken from Neolithic times till the nineteenth century to
perfect this discovery,' wrote Fry, 'European art from the time of
Giotto progressed more or less continuously in this direction, in
which the discovery of linear perspective marks an important stage,
whilst the full exploration of atmospheric colour and colour perspec-
tive had to await the work of the French impresaonists/ 2 Eric Newton
sees the development of European art 'as a great river system in which
many tri butaries are gradually drawn together'; 8 and his diagram of the
outstanding artists and trends from 1300 to 1940 is a map of branches
and confluences representing 'the cycle of realism that had begun with
Giotto and ended with Cezanne'. Lastly Gombrich, though puzzled
by the representational skill of the prehistoric cave-painters, agrees that
'all representations can be somehow arranged along a scale which
extends from the schematic to the impressionist'.

Stagnation and Cross-Fertilization

On the other hand, it is easy to match, in the history of every culture
or country, the relatively brief periods of rapid cumulative advances
with much longer periods of stagnation, onesidedness, mannerism and
estrangement from reality. The parallel between the dizzy zig-zag
curves in the development of the sciences and arts is obvious; and so
is the kinship between the defenders of scientific and of artistic ortho-
doxy the phalanxes of inertia. 'The more we become aware of the
enormous pull in man to repeat what he has learned, the greater will
be our admiration for these exceptional beings who could break this
spell and make a significant advance on which others could build.'*

Because visual discoveries are so difficult to verbalize, we have
hardly any introspective records of the painter's 'moment of truth*
which could be compared to the accounts left by scientists; we do not
know how the games of the underground enter into the picture. But
if we consider the history of art as a whole in its aspect of a collective
enterprise, as Vasari saw it we shall find that the great innovators all
stand at draughty corners of world-history, where air-currents from
different ailture-climates meet, mix, and integrate. The Greek awaken-
ing in the sixth century B.C. probably started under the impact of the

39

THB ACT OF CREATION

seemingly incompatible Egyptian, Oriental, and Cretan art forms on
the tribes of northern origin when they became sufficiently settled to
take an interest in these matters. Later Alexander reversed the process:
in the wake of his conquests, Hellenistic art invaded Egypt, the Middle
East, and India; even the Buddha was made to put on a Greek smile.
Gothic art originates in the p?rticularly draughty climate of the
migrations and incursions from the north, and led to the integration of
pagan and Roman-Christian traditions. Another great synthesis, of the
Byzantine and the Gothic, started the chain-reaction in Sienna and
Florence; the rediscovery of Greek statuary gave it a further boost.
Brunelleschi married the Gothic invention of vaults carried by pillars
and ribs with the columns and pillasters of classic Roman architecture
and created that wonderful hybrid, the Renaissance style. And so it
goes on to Chinese Chippendale, the impact of Japanese colour-
prints on Manet and Degas, and of primitive African sculpture on the
moderns. Equally important were cross-influences from not directly
related fields: the discovery of the laws of perspective, and the re-
discovery of Apollonius' work on conic sections; the revival of anatomy
(Leonardo himself dissected more than thirty corpses); the invention
of oil-paint, of the woodcut, of lithography, and photography; the
evolution of colour-theory in physics.

To sum up: it seems to be undeniably true, as Pliny was the first to
suggest, that art evolves, like science, in a cumulative manner but only
for a while, and within limits, until all that can be done has been done
along that particular line; at the great turning points, however, which
initiate a new departure along a new line, we find bisociations in the
grand style cross-fertilization between different periods, cultures, and
provinces of knowledge.

Statement and Implication

I have compared (p. 72 f.) the cartoonist's technique of reducing a face
to its bare essentials, to the scientist's technique of representing a
process by a diagram, schema, map, or model. In the third panel of our
tryptich, the artist applies similar techniques. He too is engaged in
making models of phenomena in his particular medium, using a par-
ticular set of formulae, and concentrating on those aspects of reality, to
the detriment of others, which are significant to him, or to the fashions
and conventions of his time. (Let me repeat, though, that the reality
which he represents need not be a tangible object in three-dimensional

ART AND PROGRESS

397

space any more than the elusive 'objects* represented in the physicist's
equations.) Thus unavoidably, artist, scientist, and caricaturist alike
must use the techniques of selective emphasis, exaggeration, and simpli-
fication, to underline those aspects or features which seem relevant
to them.

They must also observe the rules of economy. As the laws of physics
become more universal in character, the symbols which represent them
become more elusive and implicit. In the history of art we can trace
the effects of the 'law of infolding' in every period. On Egyptian tomb-
paintings, each part of the body is still shown explicitly, in its most
characteristic aspect; but the young girl picking flowers on a famous
wall-painting in Stabiae impertinently turns her back on us. What we
see of her face is only the merest hint of a profile, leaving it to us to
extrapolate her lovely features. The deliberate return of Byzantine
art to pre-HeUenistic rigidity and 'naivety', expressed a rejection of
worldly realism in favour of a more implicit manner of conveying its
message. Much the same could be said of the deliberate simplicity and
discreet, almost apologetic, use of perspective by Fra Angelico; and of
all the later, unceasing attempts by artists to escape saturation, evade
the obvious, and appeal to the beholder's imagination. It was Leonardo
who invented sfumato the smoke-screen of ambiguous shadows, the
blurred contours at the corners of Mona Lisa's eyes, which kept people
guessing through four centuries; and it was Titian who in his later
years invented the technique of the bold and 'rough* brushstroke, those
'crudely daubed strokes and blobs' as Vasari admiringly described
them which, looked at from close quarters, make no sense at all. A
similar progression from the neat and meticulous to the loose and
evocative brush can be seen in Rembrandt's rendering of textiles and
embroideries: the law of infolding asserts itself both in the evolution
of individual artists and in the historic development of any particular
form of art. A striking example of the latter are the two views of the
same Venetian motif (the Campo San Zanipolo) by Canaletto in 1740,
and by Guardi in 1782 the first neat and explicit like a photograph,
the second suggestive, impressionistic, and 'modern'.

One can hardly accuse Reynolds of exaggerated modernism; some
of his nice little girls hugging their nice little doggies have precisely
that sweet-and-sticky quality which, by its over-explicit attack on the
emotions, defeats its own purpose. But as he was an accomplished
master of his craft, he was capable of seeing the reverse of the medal;
and in his 'Discourse' commemorating the work of Gainsborough,

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THE ACT OF CREATION

there is a surprising passage: *I have often imagined that this un-
finished manner contri buted even to that striking resemblance for
which his portraits are so remarkable. Though this opinion may be
considered as fanciful, yet I think a plausible reason may be given, why
such a mode of painting should have such an effect. It is presupposed
that in this undetermined manner there is the general effect; enough
to remind the spectator of the original; the imagination supplies the
rest, and perhaps more satisfactorily to himself, if not more exacdy,
than the artist, with all his care, could possibly have done/

From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, the trend to-
wards me implicit, the oblique hint, the statement disguised as a riddle
kept gathering speed and momentum so much so that it sometimes
gave the impression of art not merely 'folding in but folding up. In im-
pressionist painting, Gombrich remarked, 'the direction of the brush-
stroke is no longer an aid to the reading of forms. It is without any
support from structure that the beholder must mobilize his memory of
the visible world and project it into the mosaic of strokes and dabs on
the canvas before him. The image, it might be said, has no firm anchor-
age left on the canvas it is only "conjured up* in our minds"/ 5 From
here it was only a step to cutting the anchor and doing away with
illusion as something altogether too obvious. Picasso's women shown
part en face and part in profile, sometimes with a third eye or limbs
shuffled around, rely on the beholders knowledge of the female form
and on his willingness to participate in the master's experiments with
it; like Leonardo's experiments with his chimeras, they are a challenge
and an invitation to explore the possible worlds implied in the visible
world. At the opposite extreme of the scale we find the meticulous
realism of a series of great portrait painters from Holbein to, say,
Fantiii Latour. From a purely optical point of view they seem to be
completely explicit statements; and yet they contain a mystery in
another dimension the mystery of character and personality summed
up in a single expression, breathing through the pigment of the canvas.
A photograph can convey the truth of a moment; a portrait can inti-
mate the truth of a whole life.

Thus there exist various dimensions of infolding various direc-
tions in which the beholder must exert his imagination and complete
the hint. One is reflected in the development which started with the
veiled sfumato and the loose, evocative brush with Eastlake's judicious
unfinish of the consummate workman' and ends, for the time being,
with the baffling challenges offered by contemporary art. Another is

ART AND PROGRESS

399

the avoidance of any too overt appeal to the emotions whether in a
human face or in a Neopolitan sunset. The less there is left to divine,
the quicker the process of saturation sets in, which rejects any further
oifer of the mixture as before as sentimental, melodramatic, porno-
graphic, or just slushy kitsch. Rembrandt's famous warning to the
spectator to keep his distance 'don't poke your nose into my pictures,
the smell of paint will poison you could be reversed: 'don't turn your
canvas into flypaper to catch my emotions, I can't bear the feel of it/
Even patterns of unity-in-diversity, for all their archetypal echoes,
become boring if they are too obvious as rhythm becomes monotonous
unless its pulsation is perceived beneath the surface only of a complex
musical or metric pattern.

The Japanese have a word for it: shibuyu The colour-scheme of a
kimono so discreet, subdued, and apparently dull that there seems to be
no scheme at all, is shibuyi. A statue whose grace is hidden by a rough,
unpolished, seemingly unfinished surface, is shibuyu So is the delicious
taste of raw fish, once the acrid tang which hides it is overcome. The
Chinese, however, discovered the law of infolding much earlier on. A
seventeenth-century manual of painting advocates the technique of
'leaving out', illustrated by drawings-of the familiar kind where the
simple outline of a face, minus features, serves as a surprisingly ex-
pressive formula: 'Figures, even though painted without eyes, must
seem to look; without ears, must seem to listen. There are things which
ten hundred brushstrokes cannot depict but which can be captured by
a few simple strokes if they are right. That is truly giving expression
to the invisible.'*

But economy of means and avoidance of the obvious should not be
misinterpreted as lack of spontaneity or a tendency towards modera-
tion. Sesshu, perhaps the greatest of Japanese painters (a contemporary
of Leonardo's), was a master of the leaving-out technique; yet he used
not only his brush, but fistfuls of straw dipped in ink to impart to his
landscapes their powerful and violent sense of motion. Goya's 'Disasters'
combine a maximum of economy with a maximum of horror. On
the other hand, Royal Academy portraits in the approved tradition
display all the virtues of moderation, yet in their pedestrian ^^licit*
ness 'deprive the mind*, to quote Mallarme once more, 'of that
delicious joy of imagining that it creates*.

The artist's aim, we saw at the beginning of this book, is to turn his
audience into his accomplices. Complicity does not exclude violence
but it must be based on a shared secret.

XXIV

CONFUSION AND STERILITY

The Aesthetics of Snobbery 1

In 1948, a German art restorer named Dietrich Fey, engaged in
reconstruction work on Lubeck's ancient St. Marien Church,
stated that his workmen had discovered traces of Gothic wall-
paintings dating back to the thirteenth century, under a coating of
chalk on the church walls. The restoration of the paintings was en-
trusted to Fey V assistant, Lothar Malskat, who finished the job two
years later. In 1950 Chancellor Adenauer presided over the ceremonies
marking the completion of the restoration work, in the presence of
art experts from all parts of Europe. Their unanimous opinion, voiced
by Chancellor Adenauer, was that the twenty-one thirteenth-century
Gothic saints on the church walls were 'a valuable treasure and a
fabulous discovery of lost masterpieces'.

None of the experts on that or any later occasion expressed doubt as
to the au thenticity of the frescoes. It was Herr Malskat himself who,
two years later, disclosed the fraud. He presented himself on his own
initiative at Liibeck police headquarters, where he stated that the
frescoes were entirely his own work undertaken by order of his boss,
Herr Fey; and he asked to be tried for forgery. The leading German
art experts, however, stuck to their opinion; the frescoes, they said,
were without doubt genuine, and Herr Malskat was merely seeking
cheap publicity. An official Board of Investigation was appointed,
and came to the conclusion that the restoration of the wall-paintings
was a hoax but only after Herr Malskat had confessed that he had
also manufactured hundreds of Rembrandts, Watteaus, Toulouse-
Lautrecs, Picassos, Henri Rousseaus, Corots, Chagalls, Vlamincks,
and other masters, and sold them as originals some of which were
actually found by the police in Herr Fey's house. Without this corpus
delicti, it is doubtful whether the German experts would ever have
admitted having been fooled.

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CONFUSION AND STERILITY

401

My point is not the fallibility of the experts. Herr Malskat's exploit
is merely one of a number of similarly successful hoaxes and forgeries
of which the most fabulous were probably van Megeeren's faked
Vermeers. The disturbing question which they raise is whether the
Liibeck saints are less beautiful, and have ceased to be 'a valuable
treasure of masterpieces', simply because they had been painted by
Herr Malskat and not by somebody else? And furthermore, if van
Megeeren can paint Vermeers as good as Vermeer himself, why
should they be taken off the walls of the Dutch and other National
Galleries? If even the experts were unable to detect the difference, then
surely the false Vermeers must procure as much aesthetic pleasure to
the common run of Museum visitors as the au thentic ones. All the
curators would have to do is to change the name on the catalogue
from Vermeer to van Megeeren.

There are several answers to this line of argument, but before going
into them I want to continue in the part of the devil's advocate by
considering an example of a forgery in a different field: Macpherson's
Ossian. The case is so notorious that the facts need only be briefly
mentioned. James Macpherson (173 6-1796), a Scottish poet and
adventurer, alleged that in the course of his wanderings in the High-
lands he had discovered some ancient Gaelic manuscripts. Enthusiastic
Scottish litterateurs put up a subscription to enable Macpherson to
pursue his researches, and in 1761 he published Fingal, an ancient Epic
Poem in Six Books, together with several other poems composed by Ossian,
the Son of FingaL Ossian is the legendary third-century hero and bard
of Celtic literature. Fingal was soon followed by the publication of a
still larger Ossianic epic called Temora, and this by a collected edition,
The Works of Ossian, The au thenticity of Macpherson s text was at
once questioned in England, particularly by Dr. Johnson (whom
Macpherson answered by sending him a challenge to a duel), and to
his death Macpherson refused, under various unconvincing pretexts,
to publish his alleged Gaelic originals. By the turn of the century the
controversy was setded; it was established that while Macpherson had
used fragments of ancient Celtic lore, most of the 'Ossianic texts'
were of his own making.

Yet here again the question arises whether the poetic quality of the
work itself is altered by the fact that it was written not by Ossian the
son of Fingal, but by James Macpherson? The Ossianic* texts were
translated into many languages, and had a considerable influence on
the literature and cultural climate of Europe in the late eighteenth and

402

THE ACT OF CREATION

early nineteenth centuries. This is how the Encyclopedia Britannica sums
up its evaluation of Macpherson (rny italics):

The varied sources of his work and its worthlessness as a transcript
of actual Celtic poems do not alter the fact that he produced a work
of art which . . . did more than any single work to bring about the romantic
movement in European, and especially in German, literature . . . Herder
and Goe the . . . were among its profound admirers.

These examples could be continued indefinitely. Antique furniture,
Greek tanagra figures, Gothic madonnas, old and modern masters
are being forged, copied, counterfeited all the time, and the value we
set on the object is not determined by aesthetic appreciation and
pleasure to the eye, but by the precarious and fallible judgement of
experts. And it will always be fallible for the good and simple reason
that genius consists not in the perfect exercise of a technique, but in its
invention; once the technique is established, diligent pupils and
imitators can produce works in the masters idiom which are often indis-
tinguishable, and sometimes technically more accomplished than his.

Some years ago, at a fancy-dress ball in Monte Carlo, I believe
a competition was held to decide which among the dozen or so guests
masquerading as Charlie Chaplin came nearest to the original. Chaplin
himself happened to be among them and got only the third prize.
In 1962, the Fogg museum of Harvard arranged a private exhibition
for connoisseurs, where some of the exhibits were fakes, others genuine;
the guests were to decide which was which. Included were, among
other items, an original portrait by Annibale Carracci, one of the most
influential painters of the Italian baroque, and a contemporary copy
thereof; also an original Picasso drawing of a Mother and Child, and
two forgeries thereof. The result was similar to that of the Chaplin
competition; among those who plumped for one of the forgeries were
the chairman of Princetons Art Department and the Secretary of
the Fogg; the director of the Metropolitan Museum refused to submit
to the test, while other experts 'scored themselves on sheets of paper,
compared their verdicts with the officially announced facts, and quietly
crumpled their papers'. 2

Let me repeat; the principal mark of genius is not perfection, but
originality, the opening of new frontiers; once this is done, the con-
quered territory becomes common property. The fact that even pro-
fessional experts are unable to point out the difference in artistic

CONFUSION AND STERILITY

403

merit between the true and the false Picasso, Caracci, or Vermeer, is
conclusive proof that no such difference can be registered by the lay-
man's eye. Are we, then, all snobs to whom a signature, an expert
testimony based on X-ray photography, or the postmark of a period
is more important than the intrinsic beauty of the object itself? And
what about the contested works of Shakespeare and Johann Sebastian
Bach? Are their dramatic and poetic and harmonic qualities dependent
on the technical controversies between specialists?

The answer, I believe, can be summed up in a single sentence: our
appraisal of a work of art or literature is hardly ever a unitary act,
and mosdy the result of two or more independent and simultaneous
processes which interfere with and tend to distort each other. Let me
illustrate this by a story which I have told elsewhere at greater length.*

A friend of mine, whom I shall call Catherine, was given as a present
by an unobtrusive admirer a drawing from Picasso's classical period;
she took it to be a reproduction and hung it in her staircase. On my
next visit to her house, it was hanging over the mantelpiece in the
drawing-room: the supposed reproduction had turned out to be an
original. But as it was a line-drawing in ink, black contour on white
paper, it needed an expert, or at least a good magnifying lens, to show
that it was the original and not a lithograph or reproduction. Neither
Catherine, nor any of her friends, could tell the difference. Yet her
appreciation of it had completely changed, as the promotion from
staircase to drawing-room showed. I asked her to explain the reason
for her change of attitude to the thing on the wall which in itself had
not changed at all; she answered, surprised at my stupidity, that of
course the thing had not changed, but that she saw it differently since
she knew that it was done by Picasso himself and 'not just a repro-
duction . I then asked what considerations determined her attitude to
pictures in general, and she replied with equal sincerity that they were,
of course, considerations of aesthetic quality 'composition, colour,
harmony, power, what have you. She honesdy believed to be guided
by purely aesthetic value-judgements based on those qualities; but if
that was the case, since the qualities of the picture had not changed, how
could her attitude to it have changed?

I was labouring a seemingly obvious point, yet she was unable to
see that she was contradicting herself. It proved quite useless repeating
to her that the origin and rarity-value of the object did not alter its
qualities and, accordingly, should not have altered her appreciation
of it, if it had really been based on purely aesthetic criteria as she

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THE ACT OP CREATION

believed it to be. In reality, of course, her attitude was determined not
by those criteria, but by an accidental bit of informationwhich
might be right or wrong, and was entirely extraneous to the question
of aesthetic value. Yet she was by no means stupid; in fact there is
something of her confusion in all of us. We all tend to believe that
our attitude to an object of art is determined by aesthetic considerations
alone, whereas it is decisively influenced by factors of a quite different
order. "We are unable to see a work of art isolated from the context
of its origin or history; and if Catherine were to learn that her Picasso
was after all a reproduction, her attitude would again change accord-
ing to the changed context. Moreover, most people get quite indignant
when one suggests to them that the origin of a picture has nothing to'
do with its aesthetic value as such. For, in our minds, the question of
period, authorship, and au thenticity, though in itself extraneous to
aesthetic value, is so intimately mixed up with it, that we find it well-
nigh impossible to unscramble them. The phenomenon of snobbery,
in all its crude and subtle variants, can always be traced back to some
confusion of this type.

Thus Catherine would not be a snob if she had said: 'A reproduction
of this line-drawing is to all practical purposes indistinguishable from
the original, and therefore just as beautiful as the original. Nevertheless,
one gives me a greater thrill than the other, for reasons which have
nothing to do with beauty/ But alas, she is incapable of disentangling
the two different elements which determine her reactions, and to a
greater or lesser extent we are all victims of the same confusion. The
change in our attitude, and in the art dealer's price, when it is discovered
that a cracked and blackened piece of landscape displaying three sheep
and a windmill, bears the signature of Broeckendael the Elder, has
nothing to do with beauty, aesthetics, or what have you. And yet,
God help us, the sheep and the mill and the brook do suddenly look
different and more attractive even to the hard-boiled dealer. What
Happened was that a bit of incidental information cast a ray of golden
sunlight on those miserable sheep; a ray emitted not by the pigment
but by the cerebral cortex of the art-snob.

The Personal Emanation

Let me now present the case for the defence. The appraisal of a work
of art is generally the result of two or more independent processes

CONFUSION AND STERILITY

405

which interact with each other. One complex process constitutes the
aesthetic experience as such, which has been discussed in previous chap-
ters; it implies a system of values, and certain criteria of excellence, on
which we believe our judgement to be based. But other processes
interfere with it, with their different systems of values, and distort our
judgements. I shall mention two types of such interfering systems.

The first is summed up in the statement of a little girl of twelve,
the daughter of a friend, who was taken to the Greenwich Museum,
and when asked to name the most beautiful thing she had seen there,
declared without hesitation: 'Nelson's shirt.' "When asked what was
so beautiful about it, she explained: 'That shirt with blood on it was
j oily nice. Fancy real blood on a real shirt which belonged to somebody
really historic.'

Her sense of values, unlike Catherine's, was still unspoilt. The
emotion that she had experienced was derived from the Same kind of
magic that emanates from Napoleon's inkpot, the relic of the saint
carried in the annual procession, the rope by which a famous
murderer was hanged, the galley-proof corrected by Tolstoy's hand.
Our forbears believed that an object which had been in the possession
of a person became imbued with his emanations, and in turn emanated
something of his substance. 'There is, I am sure,' a columnist wrote in
the Daily Express, 'for most of us a special pleasure in sinking your
teeth into a peach produced on the estate of an Earl who is related to
the Royal Family.' 4 You might even come to feel that you are a
member of the family if you persist long enough in this somewhat
indirect method of transubstantiation.

We can no more escape the pull of magic inside us than the pull of
gravity. Its manifestations may take a more or less dignified form; but
the value we set on the peach from the Earl's estate or the splinter from
the saint's bone, on Dickens's quill or Galileo's telescope, is derived
from the same source of sympathetic magic. It is, as the little girl said,
jolly nice to behold a fragment of a marble by Praxiteles although it
has been battered out of human shape, with a leper's nose and broken
ears. The contact with the master's hand has imbued it with a kind
of effluvium which has lingered on, and emanates the same thrill
as the real blood on Nelson's shirt or the real ink from Picasso's
pen.

The inordinate importance that we attri bute to the original and
au thenticated, even in those borderline cases where only the expert
can decide on questions of au thenticity, has its unconscious roots in

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THE ACT OF CREATION

this particular kind of fetish-worship. Hence its compelling power
who would not cherish a lock from an Egyptian mummy's head? Yet,
as every honest art dealer will admit, borderline cases are so frequent
as to be almost the rule. I am no longer referring to forgeries, but to
the classical practice of the master letting his pupils, apprenticed to his
workshop, assist in the execution of larger undertakings; and 'assis-
tance* could mean anything from the filling in of background and
minor details, to the painting of a whole picture after the master's
sketch. We are made to realize how common this practice was by
the emphasis which Michelangelo's admiring contemporaries put on
the fact that he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel 'alone and
unaided'. If we remember that even the experts were at a loss to tell the
Caracci portrait from its contemporary copyprobably by a pupil
we must conclude that for the great majority of mortals, including
connoisseurs, the difference between an au thenticated masterpiece, a
doubtful attri bution, and a work 'from the school of, is in most cases
not discernible. But the fact remains that an 'attri bution', perfect in
its genre but not au thenticated, is held in lower esteem than a work of
lesser perfection, guaranteed to have come from the ageing master's
hand. It is not the eye that guides the museum visitor, but the magic of
names. The English nation forked out a million pounds to prevent the
sale to America of a Leonardo sketch to which it had never paid any
attention; and the hundreds of thousands of good citizens who queued
to see it could not have told it from a page in an art-student's sketch-
book; they went to see Nelson s shirt.

The Antiquarian Fallacy

The second 'interfering system' is period consciousness. A Byzantine
icon, or a Pompeian fresco is not enjoyed at its face value, but by a part-
conscious attunement of the mind to the values and techniques of the
time. Even in paintings from periods whose idiom is much closer to
ours a Holbein portrait, for instancesuch externals as costume and
headdress drive it mercilessly home to us that the man with the un-
forgettable, timeless face belonged to the court of Henry VHL The
archetypal quality is there, but period-consciousness intrudes; and the
danger is that it may dominate the field.

Thus we look at an old picture through a double frame: the solid
gilt frame which isolates it from its surroundings and creates for it a

CONFUSION AND STERILITY

407

hole in space; and the period-frame in our minds which creates for it
a hole in time, and assigns its place on the stage of history. Each time
we think we are making a purely aesthetic judgement according to our
lights, the stage-lights interfere. "When we contemplate the Gothic
wall-paintings on the church in Liibeck for the first time, believing
them to be au thentic, and then -a second time, knowing that they were
made by Herr Malskat, our experience will indeed be completely
changed, although the frescoes are the same as at the time when they
were hailed as masterpieces. The period-frame has been changed, and
with it the stage-lights.

Apart from being unavoidable, this relativism of aesthetic judgement
has its positive sides: by entering into the spirit and climate of the
period, we automatically make allowances for its crudities of tech-
nique, for its conventions and "blind spots; we bend over the past with
a tender antiquarian stoop. But this gesture degenerates into anti-
quarian snobbery at the point where the period-frame becomes more
important than the picture, and perverts our scale of values. The
symptoms are all too familiar: ^discriminate reverence for any-
thing classified as Italian Primitive or Austrian Baroque (including its
mass-produced puffy, chubby, winged little horrors); collective shifts
of period-consciousness (from anti-Victorian to pro-Victorian in
recent years); the inanities of fashion (Fra Angelico is 'in', Botticelli is
out').

The Comforts of Sterility

The mechanism responsible for these perversions is the same as dis-
cussed previously, and provides us with a handy definition: snobbery
is the result of a mix-up between two frames of reference, A and B t with
different standards of value; and the consequent misapplication of standard A
to value-judgements referring to B. The art-snob's pleasures are derived
not from the picture, but from the catalogue; and the social snob's
choice of company is not guided by human value, but by rank or
celebrity value catalogued in the pages of Who's Who. The confusion
may even affect his biological drives his taste and smell preferences,
his sexual inclinations. A hundred years ago, when oysters were the
diet of the poor, the snob's taste-buds functioned in a different manner.
In the days before Hitler there was a young woman in Berlin who
worked for a publisher and was well known in the literary world for
a certain peculiarity: she had carried on a number of affairs with

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THE ACT OF CREATION

authors, regardless of age or sex but only with those whose
books had sold more than 20,000 copies. Her own explanation was
that with less successful authors she was unable to obtain physical
satisfaction.

It is a depressing anecdote because it has a ring of clinical au then-
ticity; at the same time it displays the familiar pattern of the comic:
the clash of two incompatible contexts. But to the poor heroine of the
story it was no joke, because she could not see their incompatibility;
the Kama Sutra and the best-seller list were hopelessly mixed up in
her mind. The reader may have wondered why I have devoted a
whole chapter of this book on human creativity to the seemingly
trivial subject of snobbery. The answer is in the question: snobbery
is, I believe, by no means a trivial phenomenon, but a confusion of
values which, in various forms, permeates all strata of civilized
societies, present and past (see, for instance, Petronius's Banquet of
Trimalchio); and it is in many respects a negation of the principle
of creativity.

We have seen how laughter is sparked off by the collision of
matrices; discovery, by their integration; aesthetic experience by their
fuxtaposition. Snobbery follows neither of these patterns; it is a
hotchpotch of matrices, the application of the rules of one game to
another game. It uses a clock to measure weight, and a thermometer
to measure distance. The creative mind perceives things in a new
light, the snob in a borrowed light; his pursuits are sterile, and his
satisfactions of a vicarious nature. He does not aim at power; he merely
wants to rub shoulders with those who wield power, and bask in their
reflected glory. He would rather be a tolerated hanger-on of an envied
set than a popular member of one to which by nature he belongs.
What he admires in public would bore him when alone, but he is
unaware of it. When he reads Kirkegaard, he is not moved by what
he reads, he is moved by himself reading Kirkegaard but he is
blissfully unaware of it. His emotions do not derive from the object,
but from extraneous sources associated with it; his satisfactions are
pseudo-satisfactions, his triumphs self-delusions. He has never travelled
in the belly of the whale; he has opted for the comforts of sterility
against the pangs of creativity.

One cannot discuss the act of creation without devoting at least a
few pages to the act of desecration. Snobbery is a poor word with too
specifically modern connotations for that benightedness, due to the
confusion of values, which is one of the leitmotifs of the history of

CONFUSION AND STERILITY

409

man; he always seems to be groping his way through a labyrinthine
world, armed with a compass which always points in the wrong
direction. The symbol of creativity is the magic wand which Moses
used to make water come out of the rock; its reverse is the faulty
yardstick which turns everything it touches into dust.

BOOK TWO
HABIT AND ORIGINALITY

INTRODUCTION

So far I have discussed creativity in science and art, that is to say,
the highest forms of mental activity, with only occasional
references to the humbler routines of existence. I started at the
roof, as it were what remains to be done is to build up the walls which
support it.

The main purpose of this somewhat perverse procedure was to deal
first with those subjects which are of primary interest to the general
reader and to establish a wider theoretical framework afterwards. But
there exist additional considerations to justify this reversal of order.
At the Hixon Symposium in 1948 K. S. Lashley quoted with approval
a French author writing in 1887. 'The study of comparative grammar/
Lashley said, 'is not the most direct approach to the physiology of the
cerebral cortex, yet Fournie has written, "Speech is the only window
through which the physiologist can view the cerebral life." The word
'only* is, of course, an unwarranted exaggeration, but perhaps no more
unwarranted than the opposite claim, that the 'only' legitimate window
is that through which we watch the workings of the salivary reflex in
dogs or the behaviour of rats in mazes. To repeat an argument from
the Preface to Book One: in the history of most sciences we find
alternations between the downward approach from roof to basement,
from the complex to the elementary, and the upward approach from
the elementary to the complex; until the two finally merge. It was the
study of complex electro-magnetic phenomena which provided the
clue to sub-atomic structures. Torn out of the larger context in which
the 'elementary part' functions, it ceases to be a true elementary part
whether we speak of electrons, tissue-cells, or 'elements of behaviour'.
Genetics started with morphological classifications and comparisons of
whole organisms long before anything was known about chromo-
somes, genes, and nucleic acids. The use of undefined, *dirty* concepts
as black boxes in theory-making has led into many cul-de-sacs in the
history of science, but was nevertheless indispensable for its progress.

413

414

THE ACT OF CREATION

In experimental psychology the pendulum oscillated in the course
of the last century between the upward* and the 'downward' approach:
from the atomism of the English associationists to the introspec-
tionism of the Wurzburg school; from the chain-reflex theory of
Watsonian behaviourism to the Holism of Gestalt, and back again to
the more sophisticated behaviourism of the forties and fifties. But
there are signs which indicate that the controversies between 'cog-
nitive* versus 'stimulus-response' theories of behaviour have become
sterile, and that a new synthesis is in the making.

So much by way of justification for the order of the two parts of
this book. The methodological approach of the second is meant to be
the reverse of the first. It starts 'from the bottom' with some ele-
mentary considerations which are non-controversial. Yet gradually,
I hope, a structure will emerge which makes contact with and lends
support to the controversial theories of creative activity outlined in
Book One.

I

PRENATAL SKILLS

Organic life, in all its manifestations, from embryonic develop-
ment to symbolic thought, is governed by 'rules of the
game* which lend it coherence, stability, and an appearance
of purpose (or 'goal-directedness' if you prefer that term). These
rules or codes, whether phylogenetically or ontogenetically acquired,
function on all levels of the hierarchy, from the chromosomes to the
neuron-circuits responsible for verbal thinking. Each code represents
the fixed, invariant aspect of an adaptable skill or matrix of behaviour.
I shall take the stylistic licence of using the word 'skill' in a broad
sense, as a synonym for 'matrix', and shall speak of the morphogenetic
skills which enable the egg to grow into a hen, of the vegetative
skills of maintaining homeostasis, of perceptual, locomotive, and
verbal skills.

We shall find as a fundamental characteristic of codes on all levels
that they function on the trigger-release principle, so that a relatively
simple signal releases pre-set, complex action patterns. The signal may
be mechanical, as in artificial par thenogenesis induced by a pin-prick;
chemical (e.g. inducers and evocator substances); or neural (Tin-
bergen and Lorenz's Internal Releasive Mechanisms). But the pre-set
action pattern activated by the code is generally an elastic pattern, not
a rigid automatism (such as suggested, for instance, in Tinbergens
schema). Skills have varying degrees of flexibility. The restraints im-
posed by the code do not exhaust the degrees of freedom possessed by
the matrix; there are usually various alternative choices left to provide
for a flexible strategy according to the 'lie of the land' i.e. guided by
feedback from the environment. Matrices thus function under the
dual control of an invariant code and a variable environment. These
two factors jointly determine which members of the matrix should
enter into action and in what order.

415

4X6

THE ACT OP CREATION

The members of the matrix are sub-matrices governed by their
sub-codes. Facing 'upward* and 'inward' in the organismic hierarchy,
they act as dependent parts; facing 'downward* and 'outward', they
act as relatively autonomous sub-wholes. On every level of structure
and function in the living organism we find the same phenomenon of
Janus-faced entities which behave partly as wholes, yet wholly as
parts, as it were. The 'irreducible, elementary particle' has turned out
to be a will-o'-the-wisp, even in inorganic chemistry; in the organism,
the firing of a single nerve-cell turns out to be not an event, but a
complex, autonomous pattern of events.

Structure and Function

I shall take as my starting point two complementary aspects of the
evolutionary process: differentiation of structure and integration of
function. Regardless of what causal theory one adopts to account for
the evolution of higher forms of life, the means by which progress is
achieved is the development of more complex and specialized bodily
structures and of more elaborate ways of co-ordinating their function.
These are two aspects of a unitary process, not two processes. In fact
both terms, 'structure* and 'function', are abstractions derived from
imaginary cross-sections along the spatial or temporal axis of indivisible
spatio-temporal events.

Structure is a static concept of a process frozen in the specious
present. 'Anatomy abstracts from time. It studies the organism con-
ceived "at an instant".' 1 A kidney, or a single kidney cell, which has
stopped functioning no longer has the same spatial structure as before;
and while it is still functioning its structure is changing at every
moment. All living matter continuously alters its shape and composi-
tion; it can be said to preserve its identity only if both structure and
function are taken into consideration. Vice versa, function detached
from structure is the grin detached from the cat. Physiological pro-
cesses, unlike mechanical automata, are 'open systems'; Ostwald
compared them to the flame of a gas-burner. The flame is a relatively
stable phenomenon; but how is one to distinguish between its structure
and function, between combustible and combustion?

Most of the time it is both convenient and necessary for the biolo-
gist and physician to forget that when he is speaking of 'structure' and
'function' he is using 'dirty concepts'- otherwise his work would

PRENATAL SKILLS

417

come to a standstill. However, we shall soon come across problems
where the tacit implications of both terms will become relevant.

A second catch is the semantic ambiguity of the wofd 'function. It
can either mean the role or part which my liver ought to play to keep
me in good health, or it can refer with heartless matter-of-factness to
what is in fact happening in my liver, i.e. not to its function in the first
sense but to its actual 'functioning*. In the first case, the organ is con-
sidered as part of the organism; in the second case it is treated, prima
facie, as an independent whole. Whenever a distinction is indicated, I
shall use the word 'function in the first sense, and 'functioning' iri the
second.

The complementary aspects of structural differentiation and func-
tional integration are reflected at every step in the process of mor-
phogenesis.

The giant molecules of DNA (dioxyribonucleic acid) in the chromo-
somes of the fertilized egg are said to represent the blue-print of the
future organism. Let us consider for a moment this first code which
we meet at the base of the hierarchy. It is a 'code' in the twofold
meaning in which I have used that term: a canon of rules for making
an organism, represented in a 'coded', compressed language. The way
in which the coding is done deserves some attention. Each DNA
molecule is supposed to be capable of storing something of the order
of 10 10 bits of information. 2 According to the Watson-Crick model,
the molecule has the shape of a ladder twisted into a double helix.
The two sides of the ladder consist of uniform, linear chains of sugar
groups alternating with phosphate links. The rungs of the ladder are
pairs of nitrogenous bases attached on each side to the sugar groups
in the double helix. There are four of these bases: adenine, guanine,
cytosine, and thymine, or A, G, C, T for short. A is always paired with
T, and G always with C, so that the two sides of the ladder are com-
plementary. The sequence of bases as read down along one side of the
ladder is the genetic code, written in the four-letter alphabet, 'A*,
*G\ 'C\ 'T\ Here, then, floating in the nuclear sap, is the code which
governs the skill of creating a six-foot drum major with a slight squint
and dimpled cheeks, out of an egg with a diameter of a few microns.

The code's remarkably complex activities are set off by a relatively
simple signal: the impact of the fertilizing agent. Theprinciple involved
must indeed be relatively simple, because in virtually all main groups
of animals, including rabbits and sheep, normal development of the

4i8

THE ACT OF CREATION

egg can be induced by stimulation with non-specific, physical, or
chemical agents: heat or cold, salinity, ultra-violet rays, galvanic
currents, or puncture with a fine needle. Though it may be hurtful
to the male's pride, his seed seems to be a dispensable commodity.
Its primary function is to trigger off the egg; butwith frogs at least
a platinum needle will do just as well.*

The main task of the growing cell is the manufacture of proteins
which constitute the basic stuffs of the body, and of protein-enzymes,
which control all its biochemical activities. The growing cell is pri-
marily a protein-producing factory, or rather a group of specialized
plants, each engaged in synthesizing one variety at a time among the
thousands of different types of protein-molecules. The order and
quantity in which each substance is produced, is regulated by the
genetic code. The key-substances are the enzymes, which can be
regarded as structural embodiments of the genetic instructions coded
in the DNA chains. Each discrete set of instructions a code-word
composed of several hundred code-letters contains the recipe, as it
were, for a specific enzyme. It is usual to call these sets of instructions
'genes* (although the meaning of this traditional term has become
somewhat blurred and some geneticists prefer more non-committal
words). Each code-word is composed of sub-wholes: three-letter
syllables like CTA, AAG, etc. Each of these sub-units in the code-
sequence is capable of 'recognizing* and transporting one particular
kind of sub-unit which goes into the making of proteins. These sub-
units or 'building-blocks' are the amino acids; there are twenty common
varieties of them. A protein usually contains all or most of the twenty
varieties of amino-acid units, strung together into a chain of two
hundred or more in a specific sequence. The number of permuta-
tions of twenty units in a sequence of several hundred links is of course
enormous, and accounts for the impressive variety of proteins and
protein-enzymes which go into the making of our all-too-solid flesh.
Thus the main process in morphogenesis seems to consist in trans-
cribing the implicit, 'functionaT four-letter alphabet of the code into
the explicit 'structural* twenty-letter alphabet of proteins.

The details of the process are only beginning to be known at the time
of writing; and progress has become so accelerated in this particular
field that by the time these pages appear in print much in them will
be outdated. Broadly speaking, we know at present of two kinds of
instruction-carriers between the genes and the protein-plants of the
cell. The first is messenger RNA\ The chemical structure of RNA

PRENATAL SKILLS

419

ribonucleic acid is closely related to that of DNA. The DNA chain
apparendy manufactures 'messenger RNA' chains by the same
process of base-paring by which it replicates itself. Each messenger is
supposed to contain the 'recipe' of one specific enzyme, and to carry
it to the protein-plant, the ribosome. A second type of messenger is
'transfer RNA\ Each variety of it is a much shorter chain, supposed
to represent a triplet of code-letters corresponding to a particular
variety of amino acids. When a transfer RNA unit meets an amino
unit of the proper type in the proper condition, it will attach itself to
the unit like a sort of locomotive, drag it to the ribosome plant, and
shunt it into its proper place in the nascent protein chain, according to
the instructions of its bigger colleague, the 'messenger RNA*.

This, in broad outlines, is the picture to date in the year after the
Crick-Watson-Wilkins team received the Nobel prize for 'breaking
the genetic code'. It is to a large extent derived from work on the
genetics of micro-organisms such as the colon bacillus, and there are
reasons to believe that something essential is still missing from the
picture,* But we need not be concerned with these niceties. What
matters is that we find, literally ab ovo, fixed, invariant codes in
control of the variable cell matrix. JThe order in which the various
sub-codes the genes become active and engage in producing their
specific varieties of messenger RNA is supposed to depend on the pre-
set activities of 'operators' and 'repressors* in the chromosomes, and
perhaps on some additional biological clocks. But it must also depend
to some extent on feedback signals from the cytoplasm, including
signals from neighbouring tissues which reach the cell through its
sensitive membranes. Finally, recent experiments by Hyden 2a have
shown that in the nerve-cells of the mature organism experiences
retained in learning lead to more or less lasting alterations in the
chemical composition of the cell's RNA content: a fact of great sig-
nificance for the problem of memory.

The Cell-Matrix

The growing cell illustrates the relativity, or complementary nature,
of such terms as part and whole, or structure and function. 'What are
called structures are slow processes of long duration, functions are
quick processes of short duration. If we say that a function such as the
contraction of a muscle is performed by a structure, it means that a

420

THE ACT OP CREATION

quick and short process-wave is superimposed on a long-lasting and
slowly running wave (Bertalanfry). 3

The same considerations apply to the relations between the genetic
code and the cell-matrix. The latter is of course a very complex struc-
ture, equipped with an animal and a vegetal pole, with chemical and
morphogenetic gradients, and with a variety of organelles these, in
their ensemble, are the members of the matrix. Each member is a
sub-whole governed by its sub-code which can be turned on and off
by orders 'from above, but once triggered into action follows its
autonomous functional pattern. The centrosomes and kinetosomes, for
instance, are organelles of apparently similar structure but vastly
different functions. Both possess the privilege of self-replication when
the cell divides; both have a cylindrical shape and are made up, it
seems, of eleven fibres two in the centre, nine outside. But these
deceptively simple structures revealed by the electron-microscope
are complete biochemical machines in miniature. The kinetosomes
are attached to the cilia or flagella of motile cells and trigger off their
activities. The centrosomes provide the poles of the spindle apparatus,
which effects cell division; they establish connections with the chromo-
somes in the distant nucleus, tear the pairs of duplicated chromosomes
apart as it were, and direct them towards their new locations in the
centres of the two nascent daughter cells.

To take another example, let us cast a quick glance at the most
glorious of organelles, the mitochondria. There are fifty to five
thousand of them according to the type of cell and (together with the
chloroplasts of green-leafed plant-cells) they are 'the power plants of
all life on earth'. As a physicist has said, waxing lyrical on a biological
peccadillo, they 'feed on negative entropy and drink orderliness from
the environment'. 4 The chloroplasts do it by photosyn thesis, the
mitochondria by extracting a very special form of energy from the
chemical bonds in glucose, fat, and proteins. The end product is ATP
adenosine-triphosphate the universal carrier used by the organism
to supply the energy needed for the contraction of muscles, the trans-
mission of nerve impulses, the manufacture of proteins, and so on.
The synthesizing of ATP is carried out in three main stages (glycolysis,
Krebs cycle oxidation, and 'respiration'*) involving about fifty dif-
ferent successive reactions, each of them catalyzed by a specific enzyme
system. A single mitochondrion may possess up to forty thousand of
such enzyme systems; their assemblies are arranged in the membrane
of the organelle in patterns which have been described as 'wiring

PRENATAL SKILLS

421

diagrams*. They represent the sub-codes which govern the operations
of the energy plant. It also has a complex feedback system: in the
presence of an excess of ATP, for instance, the organelle will contract.

Even this very sketchy outline indicates the hierarchic organization
of the living cell once considered the ultimate 'atom' of life. The
genetic code is blue-printed in the chromosomes; but the chromosomes
do not deal directly with the sub-matrices on lower levels of the
hierarchy. They do not interfere with the stepwise operations of
breaking down glucose into phosphoglycerate, into lactate, into
pyruvate, into citrate, and so forth; these operations, just as those of
the spindle apparatus of the centrosomes, are governed by their own
sub-codes. Each organelle is a highly integrated structure and enjoys a
considerable amount of functional autonomy. Its operations are
switched on or off by signals from the higher echelons; but these sig-
nals are addressed, as it were, to the code which governs the action-
pattern of the whole organelle, and not to its subordinate parts.
Generally speaking, we shall see that a matrix on any level of the hierarchy
is represented on the next-higher level by its code. Or, to put it the other
way round: the members of a matrix are sub-matrices which respond
as functional units to signals activating their codes.

Nucletds and Cytoplasm

The fertilized egg contains the total pattern of the unborn individual.
This privileged position of a single cell representing the whole is of
short duration: after the first few cleavages, the daughter cells begin to
differentiate; they lose their potential capacity of reconstructing the
whole individual, and are reduced to being parts of the growing
embryo.

The process involves both the nucleus and the cytoplasm, but in
different ways. The characteristics of different types of cells, tissues,
organs, are essentially the characteristics of their cytoplastic structure,
which vary from type to type. The nuclei which (jointly with the
cell's environment) determine that structure also differ according to
cell-type, but in a subtler, more 'functional' than 'structural' way, It
is generally assumed that each cell in the mature organism inherits a
complete set of the genetic blue-print in the DNA chains of its chromo-
somes; but only a fraction of the set remains active i.e. those
genes which govern the cell's specialized functions; the remainder is

422

THE ACT OF CREATION

permanently 'switched off. As mentioned before, the activity of the
enzyme-producing genes is supposed to be controlled by 'operators*
and repressors' built into the chromosomes; and these regulators in
turn are controlled by feedback from the cytoplastic environment. 6
Thus the changes in the nucleus could be described as functional
specialization: only certain sub-codes fractions of the complete code
remain operative; whereas the changes in the cytoplasm of successive
generations amount to structural individuation.

The nuclear changes can actually be observed under the micro-
scope. The salivary gland cells of midge larvae for instance possess
large bundles of chromosomes, which are seen as sausage-like structures,
with occasional swellings or puffs the so-called Balbiani rings. The
purls are the sites of intense RNA production; it is therefore assumed
that they indicate active genes. The pattern of these swellings changes
according to the age of the larva and the type of cell.*

The action of the cytoplasm on the nucleus has also been directly
demonstrated. When the nucleus from the salivary gland cell of a
drosophila larva is transplanted into the cytoplasmic environment of a
cell at an earlier stage of development, the chromosomes again under-
go very marked changes: certain swellings disappear and others appear
in their place. This clearly indicates the existence of a feedback mecha-
nism whereby the development of the cytoplasm as a result of gene
activity in its turn calls forth the activity of particular genes. 6

The reverse type of experiment demonstrates the action of nuclei of
different ages on the same cytoplasmic environment. The nucleus of an
unfertilized frog-egg is removed, and replaced by a nucleus from a
developing frog-embryo. If the transplant nucleus was taken from an
embryo in the early blastular stage, the result will be a clone of normal
tadpoles; if it was obtained from embryos in later stages of develop-
ment, it will produce abnormal forms.

These experiments indicate not only that the nuclei undergo changes
in the course of differentiation, but also that in the course of these
changes they progressively lose their erstwhile 'totipotentiality'. The
more the cell specializes in the role of a part, the less it is capable of
creating a new whole.

This does not mean that the DNA chains which contain the genetic
code of the whole organism are lost in the differentiated cell it only
means that as differentiation progresses, more and more genes are
debarred from activity. Those which remain active are genetic sub-
codes, governing the particular sub-skills which the specialized cell is

PRENATAL SKILLS

433

called on to perform. Only the future germ-cells, segregated and pro-
tected from the beginning, retain their total creative potential to con-
tinue the genetic line they specialize in immortality as it were.
Specialization, in morphogenesis as in other fields, exacts its price in
creativity*

The transplant experiments which I have briefly mentioned, and
other evidence clearly show that while on the one hand the nuclear
code governs the activities of the cell-matrix, the cytoplasm, on the
other hand, is in communication with the cells' outer environment,
and by feeding information on the total state of affairs back to the
nucleus, cc^etermines which sub-code should be switched on next.
The code as a whole is unalterable; but the choice of the sub-codes to
be activated depends on the 'lie of the land', as in other skills. The
destiny of a cell depends on the composition of the cytoplasm which it
inherited from its mother cell (e.g. more animal or vegetal stuff) and
on its spatial position in the growing embryo.* We have here the
equivalent of a flexible strategy in morphogenesis: the development of
the individual cell is determined by its invariant code and by the
hazards of environment. The code represents the fixed rules of the
game: if you get into the ectoderm, you must do this; if into the
endoderm, you must do that. Both the fixity of the code and the flexi-
bility of strategy become more evident as we turn to later stages of
development the matrices of morphogenetic fields, which differen-
tiate, in hierarchic order, into organ-systems, organs, and organ-parts.

Regulative and Mosaic Development

In the five-day-old salamander embryo, whose development is fairly
typical for vertebrates in general, transplantation experiments make it
possible to distinguish well-defined areas which will give rise to the
eye, gill, limbs, kidney, etc., although not the faintest indication of
these organs is as yet visible. At this stage, the tissue of a limb-area
transplanted into a different position on the embryo, or on another
embryo, will form a complete limb; even a heart can be formed on
an embryo's flank. Such autonomous, 'self^etermining' tissue-areas
are called morphogenetic fields. If half of the heart, limb, or eye area is
cut away, the remainder of the field will form not half an organ, but
a complete heart, limb or eyejust as, at the earlier, cleavage state,
each half of a frog-egg, mechanically broken up, will form a complete

424

THE ACT OF CREATION

frog. Moreover, if the tissue of, say, the kidney area is (by centri-
fuging) completely disintegrated into freely floating separate cells dis-
tri buted at random, these cells, suspended in a proper medium, will in
due time produce rudimentary kidneys -just as the dissociated cells
of a living sponge, which has been broken up by straining through a
filter, will start to form new cell aggregates and end up by forming a
complete, normal sponge. 7

Thus a morphogentic field behaves 'as a unit or a whole and not
merely the sum of the cellular materials of which it is composed. The
field with its organizing capacities remains undisturbed if the cellular
material which it controls under normal circumstances is diminished
or enlarged. The unit character of the field finds its clearest manifesta-
tion in these regulative properties.' (Hamburger. 8 )

The various fields of the future organs and limbs form a mosaic in
the embryo as a whole; at the same time they display remarkable
regulative properties towards their own parts; they are again Janus-
faced entities. Each organ primordium is, when 'looking upward', a
member of the total matrix; when 'looking downward', a self-
governing, autonomous sub-whole. Although the future of the field
in its entirety is clearly predetermined on the mosaic principle, the
future of its parts is still dependent on regulative factors. The cell-
populations which constitute an organ-primordium have lost their
genetic totipotentiality, but they stiU possess a sufficient amount of
multi-potentiality to keep the matrix of the field flexible. The shape of
the future organ is fixed, but the part which a given cell-group or
single cell will play in it is again dependent on biochemical gradients
and inducers in the environment, which will trigger off the appro-
priate genes in the cells' genetic code.

The differentiation of organ systems, organ parts, etc., is a stepwise
affair which has been compared to the way a sculptor carves a statue out
of a block of wood. With each step in development the functions
assigned to each group of cells become more precise, and more of its
genetic potential is suppressed until in the end most cells lose even
their basic freedom to divide. By the time the fertilized ovum has
developed into an adult organism, the individual cell has been re-
duced from totipotentiality to almost nullipotentiality. It still carries
the coded blue-print of the whole organism in its chromosomes, but all,
except that tiny fraction of the code which regulates its specialized
activities, has been permanently switched off.

Organizers and Inducers

The embryo grows; the adult behaves. Growth is controlled by the
genetic code; adult behaviour by the nervous (and hormonal) systems.*
But in between the initial and the final stage there are some transient
controlling agencies at work, which catalyze development by a
mechanism as yet incompletely understood: the organizers or evocators.

During the earliest stages of development the growth of the embryo
takes place in a fairly stable environment, so that feedback-controls
play a relatively minor part. But with the beginning of gastrulation
the situation changes: from now on each differentiating tissue acts as
'environment* on adjacent tissues; the various types of cell-population
interact within the embryo.

A particularly important cell-population originates in the grey
crescent of the zygote; reappears as an analogous crescent on
the blastula; gives rise to the dorsal lip, migrates into the in-
ternal cavity of the gastrula, where it takes its place in the chorda-
mesoderm, and becomes the so-called 'primary organizer* of the
embryo, specifically concerned with initiating its nervous system to
which it will eventually hand over control. The tissue in the ectoderm
which lies directly above it is destined to become the neural plate
but only if it remains in physical contact with the organizer. If that
contact is prevented, the ectoderm will not form a neural plate and
there will be no nervous system. If, on the other hand, organizer tissue
from the dorsal Hp is grafted on to the flank of another salamander
embryo which is in the process of gastrulation, it will invade the host
and produce a complete Siamese twin, composed pardy of the in-
vader's tissue and partly of host tissue. It was this remarkable experi-
ment, first performed by Spemann and Hilde Mangold in 1925, which
earned the privileged region of the dorsal lip in the gastrula die name
of 'primary organizer.

At a later stage, the organizer tissue seems to differentiate into head-,
trunk-, and tail-organizers; and with the appearance of organ pri-
mordia, its inductive functions are further divided up and handed over
to centres located in the organs themselves. A classic example of in-
duction is the formation of the vertebrate eye. The rudimentary brain
has two sacs, or vesicles, attached to it: the future eyes. The brain and
its eye primordia originate as thickenings of the surface area which,
after the in-folding of the neural tube, come to lie under the surface. So
the eye vesicles must now move outward again to make contact with

425

42<5 THE ACT OF CREATION

the surface, but at the same time remain attached to the brain by the
optic stalks (which will develop into the optic nerves). In the process,
the vesicles assume the shape of concave saucers, the optic cups.
When these make contact with the surface, the skin areas overlaying
the contact areas fold neatly into the hollow cups, thicken, detach
themselves from the surface, and eventually become the transparent
lenses. It can be shown that it is the optic cup which induces the skin
to make a lens, for if the cup of a frog embryo is removed, no lens will
form; and vice versa, if the eye vesicle is grafted under the embryo's
belly, the belly skin will form a lens.

However, the docility of embryonic tissue has its limits. The tissue
must be 'competent' 9 to react to the inductor; and 'competence' is
determined by the degree of differentiation the tissue has reached or,
put in another way, by the amount of genetic multipotential which it
still retains. An inductor 'cannot make any cell produce any specific
response unless the cell is intrinsically prepared to do so'. 10 A given
region of the ectoderm at a given stage of differentiation may retain
enough genetic flexibility to become either a lens or skin-tissue; it
will not be prepared to form a kidney. In the experimental laboratory,
a transplanted eye-vesicle can be used to induce a lens on the sala-
mander's belly. But under normal conditions the inductor's function
is to catalyze or 'evocate' the actualization of the genetic potentials
present in the appropriate tissue. Hence the term 'evocator-sub-
stance' for the chemical agent responsible for induction.

A curious fact about inductors is that they seem to be organ-specific
but not species-specific. The optic cup of a frog transplanted under a
salamander embryo's skin will cause it to produce a lens; the primary
organizer of the salamander will induce brain structures not only in
frogs but even in fish; 11 and the organizer of a frog, even of a fish, can
induce secondary embryos in the obliging salamander. But the in-
duced embryo will be a salamander, not a frog or a fish; and the frog-
skin transplanted on to the salamander's head will form a frog-mouth,
not a salamander-mouth. In this respect, too the evocator seems to
act merely as a trigger-releaser on the genetic potential of the cell.

This assumption was confirmed when Holtfreter, J. Needham, and
others discovered that rudimentary nervous systems could be in-
ducted in salamander embryos by a great variety of liying or dead
organizers. These include most tissues of the adult salamander itself;
mouse-liver and insect organs, molluscs, acidified salt solutions,
sterols, and dye stuffs. Moreover, it was found that some tissues (such

PRENATAL SKILLS

427

as embryonic skin and intestine) which cannot act as inductors when
alive can do so when killed (in alcohol or by heating). All this points
to the conclusion that the evocator of the nervous system is a non-
specific chemical agent whose function is merely 'to release the true
active substance from neighbouring cytolyzing cells'; 12 and that the
substance thus released is RNA, the carrier of the cell's genetic instruc-
tions. It has indeed been shown that there exist distinct RNA gradients
in the inducted tissues, and that the highest RNA concentrations are
found in nervous-systems induction. Since the evocator substances, un-
like hormones, act only by direct contact, i.e. by diffusion from cell to
cell, it seems that their function is merely to activate those RNA sub-
codes which will specify the tissues' destiny. This is in keeping with
Hamburger's definition of embryonic induction as a process in which
one developing structure, the "inductor", stimulates an adjacent
structure to undergo a specific differentiation'. 13 Artificial induction
through transplant experiments would then amount to drastic changes
in the environment of a cell-population, which interfere with its
biological time-clocks (the pre-set sequence of gene-activities); just
as the transplantation of a nucleus into a different cytoplasmic environ-
ment causes a change in the pattern of its chromosome-puffs.

Induction is a transient method of regulating development, where the
genetic potentials of certain cell-populations, or morphogenetic fields,
are activated by chemical agencies diffused in their immediate environ-
ment. Although the chemistry of induction is still a ^problematic
affair, it seems safe to assume, as Mittasch has pointed out, that 'organic
catalyzers also show a rank order: beginning with the enzymes, which
are adjusted most specifically to carry through a single reaction, to
biocatalyzers such as the . . . organizer substances in animals which
regulate more or less wide complexes of processes, and up to directing
biocatalyzers, such as many hormones, that influence to a large extent
the whole organism psychophysically. ,:u

Past the early and transitory phase of induction, more advanced
methods of co-ordination and control make their appearance. In the
human embryo the heart begins to beat at the end of the third week,
controlled by its own pace-maker, when the whole creature is less
than a fifth of an inch long. Muscle contractions in response to ex-
ternal stimuli can be elicited after the eighth week, and spontaneous
movements may begin in the tenth week. They are myogenic re-
actions of the muscle tissue to direct local stimulation, while the
nervous system is still in the making. But the conspicuous readiness

THE ACT OF CREATION

of the neural plate to start growing in response to non-specific evoca-
tors' designates it, as it were, as the heir apparent to the earlier forms
of integration.

To sum up: at various stages of embryonic development, and at
various structural levels, we find different biochemical mechanisms,
but analogue principles at work. At every stage and level the game is
played according to fixed rules but with flexible strategies (although
their flexibility is normally hidden from the eye and revealed only by
the transplantation and grafting techniques of experimental embry-
ology). The overall rules of the game are laid down in the complete
set of instructions of the genetic code; but the particular set of in-
structions operative at any level at any time is triggered off by mes-
sages from the inter- and extra-cellular environment, which vary in
character according to structural level and developmental stage:
fertilizing agents, cytoplasmic feedbacks, direct-contact evocators,
hormones, and other catalysts.

On the level of the zygote, the cell-matrix consists of biochemical
gradients and organelles; it is a structural mosaic equipped with axial
polarity which under normal conditions predetermines the head and
tail region; the blastopores, etc., of the embryo; but it also has striking
regulative properties revealed by experimental manipulation. With
progressive differentiation the regulative properties of the cell diminish,
and its degrees of genetic freedom* freeze up. On the level of the
morphogenetic field we again find self-regulating properties half the
field will still form a complete limb and a mosaic-matrix of cell-
populations. The autonomous, self-assertive character of morphogene-
tic fields is manifested in grafting and centrifuging experiments; their
dependent, or part character by the trivial fart that they are kept in their
proper size and place in the normally growing organism. This will
sound less of a truism when we turn to the phenomena of regeneration
(Chapter HI). We shall find regulative character and mosaic character,
autonomy and subservience, the self-assertion of the part and its
dependence on the whole to be complementary aspects on every level
of the hierarchy in normal development and behaviour; but also, that
under abnormal conditions this ceases to be the case, and that the part
may then assert itself at the expense of the whole, with sometimes
beneficial, mostly destructive, effects.*

NOTES

To p. 418. This is, of course, not meant to belittle the enormous advantages
of sexual over asexual reproduction.

To p. 419. The three-letter 'dictionary*, for instance, is partly a dictionary
of synonyms: there are 4 3 =^64 triplets, but only 20 amino acids, and many of the
latter are represented by more than one code syllable.

To p. 420. 'Respiration' is an approximate term. The process is in fact oxida-
tive phosphorylation.

To p. 422. In some, probably extreme cases, the nuclear changes are even
more drastic. The nucleus of the fertilized egg of the gall-midge contains forty
chromosomes, and in the course of the first few divisions these are faithfully
duplicated. But in the fifth division, only eight sets of chromosomes in the soma
cells duplicate in the orthodox manner; the other thirty-two fail to do so and
gradually dissolve in the cytoplasm. The future germ cells, however, which have
previously been segregated from the rest of the eggs, do not participate in the
fateful fifth division and preserve their chromosome complement intact. Thus
the nuclei of all specialized body cells have only eight chromosomes, whereas
the germ cells have forty. Cf. Fischberg, M. and Bladder, A. W. (1961).

To p. 423. In a paper read at the British Association Meeting in August
1962, L. Wolpert suggested that differentiation resulted from the single cell's
tendency to stick on to that part of the gastrula wall best suited for it (the
idea seems to have been originated by T. Gusthafson). At the same meeting 32. N.
Willmer showed that changes in the salt balance of the surrounding medium
made amoebae change from amoeboid to flagellate form, reversibly the implica-
tion being that chemical gradients played an important part in the early stages of
differentiation (New Scientist, No 303, 6.9.1962, p. 492).

To p. 425, During maturation in the higher species, the two types of control
overlap; and pre-set biological time-clocks seem to exercise some influence
throughout adult life.

To p. 428. In this necessarily simplified discussion of morphogenetic pro-
cesses I have made no mention of cytoplasmic inheritance and other complicating
factors, which do not affect the basic argument of this book.

429

II

THE UBIQUITOUS HIERARCHY
Development of the Nervous System

The pioneer work on the development of the nervous system in
vertebrate embryos is G. E. CoghilTs monumental study of
ambystoma, a larval form of salamander. 1 Coghill published his
results in a series of papers spread over a period of twenty-five years,
1914-39. Since they are surprisingly seldom quoted outside the
technical literature presumably because they ran against the be-
haviourist Zeitgeist I must briefly summarize his conclusions.

The traditional assumption about the development of the nervous
system was that elementary, local reflexes arise first, and are chained
together at a later stage. Thus the segmental reflex arcs of the earth-
worm would develop first, as independent units aligned in a series
perpendicular to its axis, and only later on would they become con-
nected, like rings hanging from a festoon string, by the spinal cord.
CoghilTs work showed that the opposite is true. In the salamander,
development starts with the growth of the motor-tracts of the cord
axially from head to tail; then this central bundle sends out collateral
branches into the segmental muscles, co-ordinating their actions in
primitive, unitary patterns; the sensory neurons become functional
only at a later stage, and the local reflex-arcs come last, as segrega-
tions of 'partial patterns' out of the 'total pattern' which preceded them.
The whole development is centrifugal: the stem precedes the branches,
spontaneous undifferentiated movements involving the whole neuro-
muscular apparatus precede differentiated movement, total responses
precede specialized local responses. To give an example: when the
limbs develop, their first movements are entirely dependent on and
synchronized with the movements of the trunk. Only later on do the
limbs begin to move independently; the same applies to the motions
of head, mouth, etc. The growth of the nervous system from beginning

430

THE UBIQUITOUS HIERARCHY

431

to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progres-
sive integration of primarily individuated units*. The organism is not
a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the meclianism of the total
pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e.
the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even em-
bryonic behaviour, because movements appear long before the motor
neurons of the reflex arc are connected with the sensory neurons. This
centrifugal mode of development means that the individual acts on
its environment before it reacts to its environment.

'In so far as the correlation of nervous structure and function in the
development of the individual has been carried, structural provision
has been found for the perpetuation of spontaneity, autonomy, or
initiative as a factor in its behaviour. Any theory of motivation, there-
fore, that attri butes this function wholly to the environment, is
grossly inadequate.' The idea that instincts are chained reflexes must
be abandoned; instincts represent 'total action patterns in response to
relatively general situations'. Comparing the embryonic development
ofambystoma with that of the human foetus, Coghill sums up:

In conclusion I am convinced by a study of all available records of
movement in human foetuses during the first six months, that be-
haviour develops in man as it does in ambystoma by the expansion
of a total pattern that is integrated as a whole from the beginning,
and by individuation of partial patterns (reflexes) within the unitary
whole.*

We thus find in the development of the nervous system the same
principles at work which we have discussed before. The neural plate
starts as a primordium with multipotential cell-populations which
differentiate in a series of steps into the brain, the spinal cord, and its
sub-structures. The 'wiring diagram' of the organism has a standar-
dized pattern an invariant code; but transplant experiments again
show the great flexibility of the 'neurogenetic skill' which realizes that
pattern. If a limb-bud from a salamander embryo is transplanted to
another embryo's flank, outgrowing nerve-fibres locate the bud and
establish a normal nerve pattern. The bulb-shaped tips of the outgrow-
ing nerves are apparendy guided by sub-microscopic structures in the
cell-matrix of the growing bud at least according to the current
'contact guidance' theory.

I have called differentiation of structure and integration of function

43^ THE ACT OF CREATION

complementary aspects of a unitary process. But the 'functions' of the
growing embryo are different from the 'functions' of the adult. It
has been shown that the limb-buds and wing buds of chick embryos
develop into almost normal legs and wings if nerves are prevented
from entering them. This does not mean, of course, that differentiation
of structure comes first, and integration of function later on, as a
separate act. For the function of the leg-bud is to grow -not to walk.
Growth is a function controlled by the genetic code; when growth is
completed and the time has come to walk, the nervous system takes
over control; and if it fails to do so, the muscle tissues will degenerate,
as denervated adult muscles do.*

Locomotor Hierarchies

'Whatever the nature of organizing relations may be,' J. Needham
wrote in 1932, 'they form the central problem of biology, and biology
will be fruitful in the future only if this is recognized. The hierarchy of
relations, from the molecular structure of carbon compounds to the
equilibirum of species and ecological wholes, will perhaps be the
leading idea of the future.' 2

This prophecy has not come true. The Gestalt school's over-em-
phasis on 'wholeness', and the behaviourists' over-emphasis on 'simple
elementary processes the so-called S.-R. (stimulus-response) scheme
created a controversy based on a fallacious alternative, and prevented
a true appreciation of the multi-layered hierarchic order to be found in
all manifestations of life.

Yet the idea is of course by no means new; hierarchies in nervous
function were proposed by Herbert Spencer in the 1870s, and elabor-
ated by Hughlings Jackson, Sherrington, and others. 3 The hierarchical
character of skills was demonstrated in great detail by Bryan and
Harter in their study of telegraphy and in Book's study of touch-
typing (see below, pp. 544 ff ) at the turn of the century, but neither
S-R psychologists nor Gestaltists paid attention to them. Woodger
(1929) attempted a formalization, by means of symbolic logic, of
certain types of hierarchies ('divisional hierarchies', 'spatial hierarchies',
'genetic hierarchies', etc.) which are of somewhat abstract interest.
Heidenhain (1923) 4 proposed a hierarchy of 'histo-systems' which are
'encapsulated* into one another (e.g. neuro-fibriles, neurons, nerve
fibres), Bertadanfiy (1952) tried to make a distinction between 'hier-

THE UBIQUITOUS HIERARCHY

433

archies of parts', 'hierarchies of processes', 'hierarchies of centraliza-
tion, etc. Tinbergen defined instinct as a hierarchically organized
nervous mechanism but his mechanism is fixed and rigid (see below
p. 478). A stimulating discussion of the subject can be found in
Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's remarkable essay on 'Plans and the
Structure of Behaviour' (i960).

The word 'hierarchy can be used to mean simply rank-order.
Hull's famous 'habit family hierarchy', for instance, means just that
(the ordering of a group of interchangeable responses according to
their strength), and is not a hierarchy at all in the sense in which the
term is used in this book. I have summarized what I meant by it in the
chapter 'Partness and Wholeness' (Book One, Chapter XIH). A hier-
archy, in this sense, is not like arowof organ pipes; it is like a tree, arboriz-
ing downward. The structural or functional entities on each level are
autonomous sub-wholes of complex pattern, but are represented on
the next higher level as units. In every organic hierarchy, to para-
phrase Gertrude Stein's statement about the rose, a part is a whole is a
part is a whole*.

Figure 11

Perhaps the most satisfactory theoretical treatment of the concept of
hierarchic order was given by Paul Weiss whose experimental work
was a major contri bution towards providing the concept with a firm
empirical hasis. The quotation which follows is from the celebrated
Hixon Symposium; its vividness is enhanced by the fact that it is

434

THE ACT OF CREATION

taken from an ex tempore contri bution by Weiss to the discussion of
Lashley's paper on 'The Problem of Serial Order in Behaviour* (my
italics):

'While the physiologist and psychologist deal with the ready-made
machine of the nervous system and can add to it as many properties as
he thinks necessary, the embryologist must explain just how such an
immensely intricate, yet orderly, thing can develop. These studies
are still in their infancy, but a few things have already come out . . .
for instance, the relative autonomy of structured patterns of activity, and the
hierarchical principle of their organization, . . . The nervous system is not
one big monotonic pool whose elements can be freely recombined in
any number of groupings, thereby giving an infinite variety of nervous
responses. This used to be the old idea of the associationists, and it is
utterly incompatible with what we have learned about the develop-
ment of the nervous system and its function in animals.

'The working of the central nervous system is a hierarchic affair in
which functions at the higher levels do not deal directly with the ultimate
structural units, such as neurons or motor units, but operate by activa-
ting lower patterns that have their own relatively autonomous struc-
tural unity. The same is true for the sensory input which . . . operates
by affecting, distorting, and somehow modifying the pre-existing,
preformed patterns of central co-ordination. . . . The final output is
then the outcome of this hierarchical passing down of distortions and
modifications of intrinsically preformed patterns of excitation, which
are in no way replicas of the input. The structure of the input does not
produce the structure of the output, hut merely modifies intrinsic nervous
activities that have a structural organization of their own. This has been
proved by observation and experiment. Coghill has shown that the
motor patterns of the animal develop prior to the development of
sensory innervation. I have shown, as others have, that the removal of
the sensory innervation does not abolish the co-ordination of motor activities.
Moreover, co-ordinated motor functions of limbs and other parts
develop even if these parts have been experimentally prevented from
ever becoming innervated by sensory fibres. Therefore, the sensory
pathway can have nothing to do with the structure of the motor
response. There are still some authors who try to save the old associa-
tionist idea that actually the input shapes the structure of the output. I
think that they are fighting a losing fight, and I think that today's
discussion ought to have given them the coup de grdce.

THE UBIQUITOUS HIERARCHY

435

'Intrinsic automatic rhythms have been shown, for instance, by
Adrian in the brain stem of the goldfish and in insect ganglia, by
Prosser in other arthropods, by Bremer and by von Hoist in the spinal
cord, and by Be the in jellyfish. I have shown experimentally that any
group of bulbar or spinal nerve cells taken from vertebrates, if deprived
of their structural bonds of restraining influences and allowed to under-
go a certain degree of degradation, will display permanent automatic,
rhythmic, synchronized activity of remarkable regularity. Rhythmic
activity, therefore, seems a basic property of pools of nervous elements.
. . . The rhythm is not something generated through an input rhythm,
but is itself a primary rhythm which may be released and even speeded
up or retarded by the input, but is not derived from the input. So we
have experimental evidence that rhythmic automatism, autonomy of
pattern, and hierarchical organization are primary attri butes of even the
simplest nervous systems, and I think that this unifies our view of the
nervous system/ 5

Let me enlarge on some of these points and add a few facts which
have emerged since.

In the first place it has been found that intrinsic, rhythmic activity
of an autonomous character is not confined to motor nerves, but that
'receptors also are spontaneously active even in the absence of stimula-
tion from environment.' 8 This spontaneous receptor activity, while
modified by environmental events, is under efferent control from the
central nervous system. The central control (both of the spontaneous
receptor activity and of the input) is, as we shall see, primarily of a
restraining, inhibitory nature. But for the time being let us confine
ourselves to motor organization.

In an earlier paper (1941 a, p. 23) Weiss distinguished the following
levels of the hierarchy:

'1. The level of the individual motor unit.
'2. All the motor units belonging to one muscle.
'3. Co-ordinated functions of muscular complexes relating to a
single joint.

'4. Co-ordinated movements of a limb as a whole.

'5. Co-ordinated movements of a number of locomotor organs

resulting in locomotion.
'6. "The highest level common to all animals", the movements of

"the animal as a whole**.*

436"

THE ACT OF CREATION

This is as far as the schema proposed by Weiss goes. Now let me
extend it one step further downward in the hierarchy. Even the lowest
among the six levels is a very complex affair. The individual muscle
cell of a striped muscle usually called a muscle fibre is a long,
cylindrical structure surrounded by a membrane. Its principal functions
are: (a) to serve as a receptor for nerve impulses which reach it at the
synapse through a chemical transmitter; (b) to re-code this message
into an electro-chemical excitation spreading along its surface; (c) to
relay it to the actual contractile structure, and to provide the energy
for the contraction in the cell's internal energy currency ATP;
(d) to contract.* This involves at least three distinct processes (acetyl-
choline transmission; sodium-potassium action potentials; activation
by ATP) entering successively into action between the synaptic and
the filament levels, with mechanical contraction as the end product.
Thus the ultimate 'motor unit' at the base of the hierarchy is not the
cell itself, but the apparatus within it which provides the contraction.

That apparatus is, broadly speaking, a kind of cylindrical cable, the
fibre, composed of a bundle of fibrils, each in turn composed of
bundles of filaments. The filaments are of two varieties, a thick
and a thin one, the former supposed to be consisting of molecular
threads of actin, the second of myosin. The combination of these two
proteins acto-myosin is a substance which contracts when activa-
ted by the energy carrier of the cell, ATP. The mechanism of the con-
traction is presumed to be a telescoping into each other of the thick
and fine bundles of filaments. 7 *

It is assumed, then, that muscle movement is due to the chemical
action of ATP on contractile proteins; and moreover that essentially
the same process is responsible for the streaming motion of amoeba,
the rowing motion of cilia, and the tail-stroke motion of flagella.
Amoeba, as I have mentioned before (note to p. 423, previous chapter)
are capable of changing from amoeboid to flagellate form and back.
Thus at the very bottom of the hierarchy we find the same basic,
universal mechanism the archetype of organic motility as it were
throughout the whole animal kingdom from amoeba to man; and
within man, we again see it at work, serving such varied functions as
the swimming of his spermatozoa, die brisding of his hair, and the
flexing of his muscles in a tennis-stroke. It is a mechanism or apparatus
with a high degree of autonomy and it reminds one of the equally
autonomous functioning and universal occurrence of the power-
plant-organeile, the mitochondria.

THE UBIQUITOUS HIERARCHY

437

However close we seem to get to rock-bottom in the organic
hierarchy, we find complex, integrated sub-wholes leading a relatively
autonomous existence. Viruses have been compared to nomadic*
genes (though 'freelancing* genes might be a more appropriate des-
cription).

Even a dead muscle cell (dissected and soaked in a cold glycerine
solution for months, which makes it very dead indeed) will contract
when exposed to the chemical trigger-action of ATP. The glycerine
destroys cell-components serving its higher functions, but the essential
structure of the fibrils the structural matrix of the basic motor unit
remains intact; and it is still capable of functioning according to its
built-in code. This function is of course a fixed reaction, as one would
expect on the lowest level of the hierarchy; it is activated by the trigger-
action of ATP on the acto-myosin. The environment of this matrix is
represented by the temperature, oxygen supply, degree of fatigue in
the cell, but the degrees of freedom of the fibre to adjust to these
conditions boil down to an 'aU-or-nothing' strategy: the alternative
is to twitch or not to twitch.

On the higher levels of the hierarchy, the autonomous function-
patterns of muscles and muscle-complexes are even more in evidence;
at the same time the degrees of freedom in the matrix allowing for
adaptable performance increase with each level. Muscles dissected
from the body and put into Ringer solution will contract normally for
hours. Practically any part of an animal's heart, a muscular strip, and
even a single muscle cell grown on a blood clot, will continue to go
on beating in its own intrinsic rhydim. The heart of the chick embryo
starts beating before any nerve cells have grown into it, and the hearts
of frogs and tortoises will go on beating normally if the nerve supply
is cut. Some smooth muscles equally show a rhythm of their own.

But complementary to this Eigenfunktion, or functional autonomy,
is control by a centre or system on the next higher level. The heart has
its own pacemaker-system which is in itself a threefold hierarchy;
under normal conditions, the sino-auricular node, the fastest part,
acts as a pacemaker; but if it is prevented from doing so, the auro-
ventricular node will take over, and as a last resort (in experiments
carried out on frog and tortoise) yet a third centre may enter into
action. The pacemaker-system is, in its turn, subject to regulatory
control by sympathetic and parasympa thetic nerves and by hormones,
which will speed up or slow down the rate of beat by order of centres
in the hypothalamus. Other organs kidney, intestine, stomach also

438 THE ACT OF CREATION

have their self-regulating, intrinsic codes which assure their status as
autonomous sub-wholes, while at the same time they function as parts
in a multi-levelled hierarchy. Even the mid-brain centres which
control temperature, metabolism, food and liquid intake, respiration,
etc. even these homeostatic controls responsible for maintaining the
equilibrium of the milieu interieur, turn out to be subject to the control
of still higher levels. They are 'biassed homeostats* which can be 'set',
as a thermostat is 'set* by the tenant to keep a higher or lower room
temperature. 8 And so the top of the hierarchy which controls the
controls recedes into a cloud just as its base is embedded in the
murky problem of what constitutes living matter and ultimately
dissolves into genetic mutations with thresholds on the quantum
level.

The Goldfish and the Crab

Getting back to earth, that is, to the medium levels of the hierarchy
the levels 3, 4, and 5 in Weiss*s schema we find, fortunately, more
precise indications about its manner of working.

Von Hoist's study of the swiniming motions of fish revealed a
distinct three-step hierarchy: (a) the motions of the rays within a
single fin, due to the alternative contractions of two antagonistic
pairs of muscles; (b) the motions of the fin as a whole; and (c) the co-
ordination of the motions of all the fins. In the anaesthetized goldfish,
the swinging motions of each individual ray remain perfecdy regular,
but their co-ordination within the fin is disturbed: they flutter in dis-
order. The anaesthesia evidently does not affect the integrative centres
on the lowest (a) level, but puts the higher nervous centres on the (b)
level out of action. On the next higher, (c) level, the pectoral fin acts
as a kind of pacemaker by imposing, or superimposing, its own rhythm
on die caudal fins the so-called 'magnet effect'. This whole loco-
motor hierarchy is relatively independent of sensory stimuli, for
fishes and tadpoles go on swimming in perfect co-ordination if they
have been disafferentated, i.e. if all the main sensory connections have
been severed. Von Hoist concludes that the stimulus-response schema
does not apply to the autonomous locomotive hierarchy, and that 'the
reflex is not the primary element of behaviour but a device for adapt-
ing the primary automatism to changing peripheral conditions'. 9

Higher up on the evolutionary ladder we find increasing flexibility

THE UBIQUITOUS HIERARCHY

439

of motor skills. In a series of famous experiments, von Buddenbrook
and Be the have shown that the removal cf one or several legs from
centipedes, spiders, and other insects does not lead to disorganization,
but to a spontaneous rearrangement of the whole pattern of loco-
motion which is instantaneous and not preceded by trial-and-error
learning. The normal progress of an insect or crab is the so-called
cross-amble'. If 'U and 'R' stand for left and right, and the index
numbers stand for the order of legs from front to rear, the crab's
locomotive code is as follows: R x , L 2 , R 3 , L 4 , R 5 , etc., are stepping
simultaneously; then Lj, R 2 , L 3 , R 4 , L 5 are stepping simultaneously;
and so on. If, now, the left front leg is removed, the pattern changes
instantaneously to: R 1 , L 3 , R3, L 5 , etc. ; followed by L 2 , R 2 , L 4 , R 4 , L 6 , etc.
The crab's progress before and after loss of the left front leg:

Before:

7

X

Z 1

-Pi

After: 7

Figure 12

This transformation indicates that the front legs act as 'pacemakers';
this makes it impossible for the animal to adopt the simpler solution of
preserving the original pattern minus 1^: for in tins case R 2 would
become the second pacemaker and both pacemakers would be on the
right side of the animal. The crab's behaviour provides us with a
rather elegant example how a motor skill can be adapted to changed
conditions while preserving the basic pattern laid down in its code. I
have mentioned other examples earlier on from the spider's net to
the pianist who transposes a tune from one key to another. The
experiments to be described presently illustrate the challenging nature
of the problem.

Shuffling the Salamanders Limbs

Weiss's transplantation experiments date back to the 1920s and
proved to be, as one author said, 'of immeasurable positive signifi-
cance for the appraisal of centro-peripheral co-ordination in nervous
function. 10

Weiss grafted fully developed limbs of salamander as super-numera-
ries on to normal animals which thus had five limbs instead of four. The
additional limb was always grafted next to a normal one, and in the
process some of the nerve-fibres supplying the normal limb were
severed. At first the transplant limb hung inertly from the body as a
mere appendage the fifth wheel of the cart. However, after a few
weeks, it began to give signs of movement, and within a short time it
functioned in complete synchronicity with the adjacent normal limb,
as its equal in vigour and co-ordination.

The implications of this phenomenon wece described by Weiss as
follows (italics in the original):

'As could be incontrovertibly gathered from the microscopical
(post-mortem) investigation and reconstruction of the course of the
nerves in the original limb and in the transplanted limb, this is what
took place. The severed nerve fibres had vigorously split up in the
scar at the place of grafting. The branches had pressed forward, and
some of them, had eventually met the degenerated nerve paths of the
transplanted limb. As fortuitously as they were located and distributed,
they had penetrated into these and so had reached the muscles ... in
the most extraordinary and ^discriminate tangle. . . . Moreover,
those few paths belonging to the normal extremity which had also
been previously cut (in order to obtain severed nerve stumps capable
of regeneration for the supply of the grafted limb) these too were
filled with fresh nerves. In the end, therefore, the relatively small
number of ganglion cells, which originally led to a small, limited
section of the musculature of the normal extremity were now not
only connected with this very section of muscle again, but in addition

with the entire musculature of the grafted limb Thus not only have

the ganglion cells involved to serve a terminal area several times as
large as before; and not only have they to serve muscles altogether
different from the previous ones ... but above all the previous rule,
that one ganglion cell had connections with only one muscle, now
becomes the exception. Instead the rule is now a boundless confusion
of conduction paths.* 11

440

PC

0

3 1

1 '

6

) <

1

A B C D A fi C D
0 0 0 0 0 t t t t -v

origwuiL extremity tran^lcmted,extrem^

Figure 13

Assuming D 0 and E 0 to be a pair of antagonistic muscles how can
they properly function if both now depend on the same nerve supply?
And what about \, B t , C t ? Yet this 'boundless confusion of con-
duction paths' nevertheless produces perfectly co-ordinated movement-
Weiss concludes that it is not the topographical layout of the pathways
which matters, but the specific properties of the excitation transmitted
by them; in other words, that although each muscle of the added
limb will receive a chaotic medley of excitations, it will respond
selectively to such excitations only which are appropriate to it:

'The means by which the central nervous system maintains concord
with each muscle individually, does not consist in separate conduction
paths. ... If one and the same nerve cell has to supply excitation to
several organs simultaneously, but if under these circumstances only
one single route common to all these end-organs is at its disposal . . .
then it is logical to assume that the periphery is so constituted that a
control of its functioning in a co-ordinated manner inheres in itself. . . .
We require ... a mechanism of positive selectivity in the end organ,
which must explain us why, when two muscles in the same state arc
given, one of them enters into function and the other does not,

441

442 THE ACT OF CREATION

although both, being connected with the same nerve cell, receive
excitation equally. . . . The nature of every muscle is such that it does
not react to every excitation from the centre, but only to excitation of a
quite definite form which is characteristic for it.' 12

To account for the specific selectivity of muscle response, Weiss
uses the analogy of selective resonance in a broad sense. The acoustic
analysers of the ear each respond to one particular pitch and to one
only, thus analysing a complex clang into its harmonic elements.
Mutatis mutandis, Weiss assumes that:

\ . . the total impulse flowing towards a particular peripheral
region from the central nervous system can, metaphorically speaking,
forthwith be designated as an "excitation clang". The "excitation
clang" is composed of "excitation tones" for the varying muscles
which are to be activated at a given moment, and hence is constantly
fluctuating in its composition. . . . The process now is as follows: at
the very same time, the same "excitation clang" flows through all
the motor root fibres (at least all those supplying a given functional
area of considerable extent) towards the periphery. It flows equally
through all the fibres as if it had been indiscriminately poured into a
canal system and were flooding all the channels. Thus it arrives at all
the muscles which are in any way whatever connected with the centre.
But when it gets to this point it is analysed. Every muscle, in accordance
with its constitution, selects the components appropriate to it from
those eventually arriving, and acts as if these components alone had
arrived. And thus, although the very same impulse streams to all the
muscles and across every available route, only that combination of
muscles comes into action as is now intelligible which the central
nervous system has provided for/ 15

He then proceeds to show that the theory of selective response is
not contradicted by the mdiscriminate responses of muscles to electro-
galvanic stimulation. The latter is an artificial, gross stimulation which
compares to natural stimulation like a violent a-periodic blast to a
specific clang. *Just as, both with the clang and with the blast, the sub-
stratum carrying the movement is always the same, i.e. the air, so
obviously the medium in which both the organized and the un-
organized nerve impulse run their course is always the same, i.e. the
conductive substance of the nerve fibre. But just as the clang sets a
definite selection of resonators vibrating, whereas a noise or blast
causes them to resound all at once and without an exception; so also
only the organized impulse, built up of specific impulse-tones, is

THE UBIQUITOUS HIERARCHY

443

capable of bringing the co-ordinated selection of muscles into activity,
while the artificially induced, unorganized impulse, by contrast,
forces every muscle whatsoever which it reaches into function.' 1 *

Let me translate the picture that emerges from the experimental
evidence into the terms of the present theory. The locomotor matrix
on level 4 of the hierarchy (p. 435) is represented by the muscular
structure of the limb, plus the 'canal-system' of nervous pathways
leading into it, and includes the apparatus whatever its nature
which accounts for the selectivity of the response by enabling muscles
to analyse incoming impulses. The code is the sequence of excitation-
clangs which calls forth one complete motion say, one step of the
limb. Members of the matrix are the several joints on the next-lower
level No. 3, which are triggered off in a pre-set order by their sub-
codes, i.e. by the appropriate components of the excitation-clang.
We may remember by way of analogy, how part-sequences of the
genetic code are triggered into action in a pre-set order.

The 'motor unit' at the bottom of the hierarchy responds according
to the aH-or-nodiing rule, but the musculature of a joint is capable of
graded responses, and the motions of the whole limb follow a flexible
strategy shorter or longer step, swift or groping dependent on the
input from the environment. Weiss accounted for these variations by
proposing that the excitation-clang 'is constantly fluctuating in its
composition*, and thus determines which single muscle should be
activated at any given moment. But this conception does not seem to
agree well with the basic principle that centres on high levels do not
deal directly with units on low levels of the hierarchy. A way out of
this difficulty is to be found in suggestions by Ruch (195 1) and Miller
et al. (i960), according to which pre-set patterns of skilled, movements
are triggered offas units by the brain; but the signal i.e. the 'excitation
clang* would merely 'rough in* the sequence of movements 'and thus
reduce the troublesome transients involved in the correction of move-
ment by output-informed feedbacks'. 15 Since feedback circuits must
be assumed to operate on every level, down to the single cell, the
adjustment of the details of the 'roughed-in' movement could be
handed over to lower levels. Miller et al. have made the further sugges-
tion that this handing-down procedure may be the equivalent of
converting an order coded in a 'digital' language, into a graded,
'analogue' output. The excitation-clang could thus consist in a series
of 'on*, 'off signals like the dots and dashes of the Morse code; but
each sub-unit could respond to its specific 'on' signal by a 'more* or

444

THE ACT OF CREATION

'less' intense activity, dependent on local conditions (see also below,
pp. 519 f). These are speculations, and offered by their authors as
such; but there are various alternative possibilities to account for the
' fillin g in of details which were left open in the generalized excitation
pattern, by feedback devices on successively lower levels.

Limits of Control

In the experiments previously discussed, a super-numerary limb was
grafted next to a normal one, facing in the same direction. In another
series of experiments Weiss exchanged and reversed the position of
the limbs of newts. The result is again best described in his own words:

'The essential independence of the structure of motor activity is
dramatically demonstrated when one exchanges and reverses the
limbs of animals and then finds them crawling backwards whenever
they aim to crawl forwards and vice versa. . . . This has been done in
the developed animal, but the same operations have been done in
embryos, and these animals have then functioned in reverse from the
very beginning. What more spectacular expression can there be of the
intrinsic primacy of the motor patterns of behaviour for which the
external input acts only as a selective trigger?* 16

In other transplant experiments, only the position of the two fore-
limbs was interchanged and reversed:

*The grafted limbs moved just as they would have done had they
been left in their original position, causing backward motion when
the rest of the animal was trying to move forward, and forward motion
when the rest of the animal was trying, for example, to avoid a noxious
stimulus presented in front of it, A year's experience did not change
this reversed movement of the grafted legs.' 17

The experiment beautifully illustrates the autonomy of the limb-
matrix. As in the fifth-limb experiment, the nerves growing out of
the stump reached the muscles of the grafted limb in a random manner.
Once more, the graft-limb achieved perfectly co-ordinated motion,
thanks (we assume) to the analyser devices in the muscles which
respond to one component in the clang signal only. But since the
limb was grafted in reverse, it has to step in reverse. No doubt the poor
creature senses that something is wrong if its fore-limbs move back-
ward and the back limbs move forward. But owing to the principles

THE UBIQUITOUS HIERARCHY

445

of hierarchic order, the centre which co-ordinates the movements of
the animal as a whole level 5 in "Weiss's schema cannot interfere
with the functioning of the analyser devices on level 2, to reverse their
responses. It apparently cannot even prevent excitation-clangs being
triggered off automatically by level 4 to the useless limbs. And when
the excitation reaches the latter, they respond as they must. We have
here a first, artificially produced example of 'faulty integrations' which
will occupy our attention later on.

The example further illustrates a point mentioned before: a matrix
on the n-level is represented on the n -j- 1 level by its code. There is, under
normal conditions, no direct commerce between its members on the
n 1 level, and the co-ordinating agency on the n + 1 level. If the
latter interferes directly with the former, routines become disor-
ganized, and we get the paradox of the centipede'. Loss of direct
control over automatized processes on lower levels of the body hier-
archy is part of the price paid for differentiation and specialization.
The price is of course worth paying so long as the species lives in an
environment that is fairly stable. It is after all not part of the normal
destiny of the salamander to encounter Dr. Paul Weiss.

NOTES

To p. 431. The validity of Coghill's findings for a whole range of other
species cat, bird, man was demonstrated in a general way by authors like
Coronios (1933), Herrick (1929), Kuo (1932). However, some geneticists (e.g.
Windle and his associates) have maintained that functional co-ordination in
higher species is the result of additive chaining of specialized local reflexes. As
against this, Hooker (1950) has pointed out the undisputed fact that motor nerves
are functional before the sensory nerves, and that the sensory and intercallated
neurons in the reflex arc are the last to become functional, which amounts to an
indirect refutation of the reflex summation view. For a summary of this con-
troversy see Thorpe (1956) pp. 20 IE and p. 45; also Barron (1950) and Hooker
(1950).

On the other hand, Tinbergen has shown that in some patterns of complex
instinct behaviour (e.g. nest building, Kortlandt, 1940), the part-performances
which go into the total pattern emerge at different times, following 'a fixed time
pattern just as with growing morphological structures' (Tinbergen, 1951, p. 136).
Thus, for instance, fastening of twigs in the nest precedes searching for twigs.
The existence of 'internal clocks* which regulate the serial activation of the
various sub-codes of the integrated performance is entirely in keeping with the
total pattern view. Thorpe concludes: 'Embryological studies now suggest that
ontogenetically, complex muscle co-ordinations resembling fixed action patterns
[see below] precede responses of the simple reflex type in mammals.* Cf. next
note

To p. 432. This confusion may have been a contri buting factor in the con-
troversy mentioned in the previous note. Since myogenic muscle contractions

446 THE ACT OF CREATION

can be produced in embryos by electrical or mechanical stimulation before
neuro-muscular integration is established, the 'isolated reflex-school' assumed
such pseudo-reflexes to be true reflexes and the primary elements of adult be-
haviour. See, e.g. Thorpe, loc. cit.

To p. 434. The Hixon Symposium was one of the most fertile exchanges ever
held between leading experts in various disciplines. Among its participants were
H. Kluver, Wolfgang K6hler,K. S. Lashley, W. S. McCulloch John V. Neumann,
R. W. Gerard, Lorente de No, Paul Weiss, Linus Pauling, etc., to mention only
a few. No wonder that Weiss, carried away by enthusiasm after hearing
Lashley 's brilliant paper on 'The Problem of Serial Order in Behaviour*, concluded
with expressing his hope that today's 'discussion will mark a turning point in the
building of neurological theories'.

To p. 436. To make matters a little more complicated, we may remind our-
selves in passing that muscle-contractions serve not only motility but also main-
tenance of tone and temperature in the organism; sometimes they serve only the
last function alone (in shivering) since muscle is a main source of animal heat.

To p. 436. At the time of writing this theory still has certain difficulties to
overcome; among them the fact that the energy supply of the fibre depends not
only on ATP itself but also on creatin phosphate.

Ill

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM AND
REGENERATIVE POTENTIAL

Acting and Reacting

The organism', to quote Coghill once more, 'acts on the en-
vironment before it reacts to the environment.' This statement
seems to apply to every level and every aspect of organic life.
The lowliest creature and the highest, the moment it is hatched or
born, lashes out at the environment, be it liquid or solid, with cilia,
flagellae, or contractile muscle fibre; it crawls, swims, glides, pulsates;
it kicks, yells, breathes, feeds, and sucks negative entropy from its
surroundings for all its worth.

The patterns of these built-in motor activities we saw to be to a
large extent autonomous; 'the structure of the input does not produce
the structure of the output, but merely modifies it.' Moreover, the
input itselt is actively controlled and modified by the central nervous
system from the moment it impinges on the peripheral receptor
organs; and recent developments have caused, at least among an
unorthodox minority of psychologists, a distinct 'shift from the notion
that an organism is a relatively passive, protoplasmic mass whose res-
ponses are controlled by the arrangement of environmental stimuli
to a conception of an organism that has considerable control over what
will constitute stimulation.' 1

Even below the level of the single cell, organelles such as the mita-
chondria and kinetosomes carry on their autonomous activities; their
shadowy patterns under the electron-microscope are a reminder that
the emergence of life means the emergence of spontaneous, organized
exertion to maintain and reproduce originally unstable forms of
equilibrium in a statistically improbable system in the teeth of an
environment governed by the laws of probability. The live organism
succeeds in this by creating an inner environment with which to

447

448

THE ACT OF CREATION

confront the outer environment and in which the law of entropy
seems to be reversed, biological clocks replace astronomical clocks, and
hierarchic order reigns supreme.

An organism is said to be well balanced' or 'well adapted' or 'in
dynamic equilibrium' if it has established a modus vivendi between its
internal and external environment. This, of course, is a more complex
form of balance than mechanical or chemical equilibrium; it implies
metabolic processes required for the maintenance of form and function
in an open system in perpetual flux Bertalanffy's (1941) Fliessgleich-
gewicht; it implies self-regulating devices which keep irritability and
motility within a safe standard range; and it also implies the slow,
cyclic changes of morphogenesis, maturation, and reproduction, regu-
lated by biological clocks. If all these processes are to be lumped to-
gether under the portmanteau word 'adaptation', then we must call
it adaptation of a special kind, on the organism's own terms; after all,
the perfect adaptation of an organism to the temperature and chemistry
of the environment is to die. In fact, the animal does not merely adapt
to the environment, but constantly adapts the environment to itself.
It eats environment, drinks environment, fights and mates environ-
ment, burrows and builds in the environment; and even in observing
environment, it modifies, dismantles, analyses, and reassembles it
after its own fashion, converting 'noise' into 'information . 'Percep-
tion', Woodworth wrote, 'is always driven by a direct, inherent motive
which might be called "the will to perceive".'

Thus the terms 'adaptation', 'environment', 'equilibrium' will be
used in the following pages not in their usual passive connotations, but
with active overtones, as it were. Instead of treating an animal as a
'relatively passive, protoplasmic mass whose responses are controlled
by the arrangement of environmental stimuli' a Pavlov-dog in its
restraining harness we shall regard it as a relatively self-contained
organism, deploying spontaneous activities simultaneously on various
levels of its constituent functional hierarchies activities which are
triggered and modified, but not created by the environment.

What is Equilibrium?

An organism can be said to function normally so long as the stresses
between internal and external milieu do not exceed a certain standard
range. To simplify the argument, let the term 'internal milieu* em-

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM AND REGENERATIVE POTENTIAL 449

brace all processes within the organism, and let us lump together the
nature, intensity, and duration of environmental excitations in a single
variable. We shall then be able to distinguish between (a) 'normal',
(b) 'paranormal' or 'traumatic', and (c) destructive environmental
conditions though, needless to say, the boundaries between them
cannot be sharply defined.

The term 'dynamic equihbrium' shall apply only to a normal
organism functioning under 'normal' conditions. Under these con-
ditions the organ-systems, organs, and organ-parts of the animal per-
form their specific, autonomous functions as sub-wholes, at the same
time submitting to the regulative control imposed by the higher
centres. The control is exercised by excitatory and inhibitory pro-
cesses, but the latter play a vastly greater part. From the moment of
conception, the genetic potentials of the individual cell are further
restrained with every step in differentiation; and on every level of the
growing and mature organism inhibitory blocks, negative feedbacks,
growm-inhibiting hormones are at work. In the nervous system,
in particular, there is censorship at every step to prevent overloading
of the information channels and overshooting of responses. Without
this hierarchy of restraints, the organism would instandy blow its
fuses in a kind of delirium agitans and then collapse.

Under normal conditions the part will not tend to escape the res-
training influence of the whole. Under paranormal conditions the
balance is upset. Thus the term 'balance' or 'equmbrium* takes on a
special meaning in the context of an organic hierarchy: it is not meant
to refer to relations between parts on the same level of the hierarchy,
but to the relation of a part to its controlling centre on the next higher level.
The stresses arise not between inputs 'competing for the final common
path,' as the expression goes, not between 'antagonistic drives' or
'conflicting impulses' (which do not direcdy communicate with each
other and cannot 'fight it out among themselves') but between the
excited part and the whole, whose attention it is trying to monopolize:
in other words, between the self-assertive tendencies of the part and the
restraints imposed by the controlling centre. Equilibrium is maintained in
the organism by rules comparable to the procedure in a law court
where the opposing parties address themselves not to each other, but
to the judge.

This interpretation of equilibrium in a hierarchy was suggested in
my Insight and Outlook (p. 139 seq.), and independendy proposed by
Tinbergen. In discussing the competition between various 'fixed

450

THE ACT OF CREATION

response patterns' in innate behaviour, Tinbergen wrote: 'It should be
emphasized that it is quite possible that these interconnections [between
the competing centres] do not in reality run directly from one centre
to the other, but go by way of the superordinated centre/ 2 Thorpe
has expressed similar ideas. 3

Super-Elasticity and Regenerative Span

An organism lives by constant transactions with the environment. As
a result, stresses are set up in the parts or organs which have been
aroused to carry out the transaction. The excited part may tend to
'get out of control', i.e. to assert its autonomy against the restraints
imposed on it; it may tend to act to the detriment of the whole. In a
normal' environment, these tensions between part and whole are of a
transitory nature, and equilibrium is restored with the completion of
the transaction. Under paranormal conditions traumatic challenges
this is not the case, and only what one might call 'adaptations of the
second order' can restore the balance. The animal's capacity to re-
cover from such traumatic challenges is its regenerative potential.

A stable, monotonous environment tends to produce stereotyped
and automatized reaction-patterns. A variable environment calls for
flexible strategies, for behavioural matrices with sufficient degrees of
freedom to cope with the changing conditions. Paranormal challenges
call for a kind of super-flexibility, for adaptations of a second order
which enable the animal to carry out major reorganizations on several
levels of its structural or functional hierarchies. The range of this
ability constitutes the animal's 'regenerative span'.

The regenerative span of a species thus provides it with an additional
safety device in the service of survival, which enters into action when
the limits of dynamic equilibrium are exceeded as the shock-absorbers
of a motor-car take over when the range of elasticity of the suspension
springs is exceeded. But it is more than a safety device. Regeneration
has been described as 'one of the more spectacular pieces of magic in
the repertoire of living organisms'. 4 That may be the reason why it is
so difficult to find a satisfactory definition which would embrace the
whole range of phenomena to which the term is applied.

These include (a) the replication of entire individuals by asexual re-
production (fission and budding); (b) the reconstitution of a whole
organism from its brokqn-up fragments, or from a single fragment.

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM AND REGENERATIVE POTENTIAL 451

Sponges and hydra can be disintegrated into small clumps or even
single cells by forcing them through a fine filter mesh, yet will re-
organize themselves into normal, complete individuals. A single
tentacle of a sweet-water polyp is capable of regenerating a complete
individual; and transverse slices of a flatworm, taken from any part of
its body, will regenerate the whole animal including, brains, eyes,
genitalia, and other complex organs which the segment did not contain,
(c) Among the higher animals, crustaceans are capable of regenerating
single organs exposed to accidental damage (antennae, stalk-eyes, etc.);
among vertebrates, salamanders and newts are capable of regenerating
limbs, eyes, tails, and some inner organs (lungs and gonads); the pro-
cess in these cases follows closely the processes of embryonic develop-
ment, (d) Equipped with high regenerative powers, some animals
practise autotomy the self-amputation of an exposed structure in
the grasp of an enemy, which is subsequently replaced. Lizards let go
of their tails; crabs, insects, and spiders of their legs or antennae, star-
fish cast off an arm. Self-amputation is facilitated by a 'breaking plane*
of weakened structure somewhere near the base of the expendable
appendage rather like the perforations between stamps, (e) Among
mammalia, regeneration is generally limited to the repair of damaged
bone, muscle, skin, and peripheral nerves, (f) Lastly, the term 'physi-
ological regeneration is used for the routine replacement of tissues
used up by ordinary wear and tear.

Thus regeneration appears to serve two different functions: on the
one hand normal, asexual reproduction, on the other, the restoration
of organs and structures lost by accidental mutilation or by wear and
tear. But the two functions are in fact continuous; they shade into
each other, and are often undistinguishable. If a flatworm spon-
taneously sheds its tail, then grows a new tail and the shed tail grows a
new head, this is called asexual reproduction; if it is sliced into two in
the laboratory it is called regeneration; and the same goes for budding,
which is the natural way of reproduction of some marine coelen-
terates, but can be artificially induced by laceration of the body wall.
The 'regenerative field* in the salamander's amputated leg-stump
obeys the same type of code as the morphogenetic field of embryonic
primordia. And vice versa: the development of twins or triplets
following accidental fragmentation might as well be called a regenera-
tive process. Hence, ontogenesis may be described as the regeneration
of a complete individual from a fragment specially set aside for that
purpose. But this 'setting apart' of undifferentiated embryonic cells

452

THE ACT OF CREATION

which 'specialize in non-specialization occurs in regenerative pro-
cesses too for instance, in annelids, hydra, and natworms, which store
'reserve cells' or 'regeneration cells' in various parts of their bodies
and mobilize them when the need arises. Sexual reproduction thus
appears merely as an added twist to asexual regeneration though a
twist with momentous consequences. Instead of replicating a single
genetic code ad infinitum, the bisociation of two genetic codes is the
basic model of the creative act.

Although closely related species on the same level of the evolu-
tionary hierarchy may differ widely in their regenerative power, it is
nevertheless true that, in a general way, this power decreases as we
proceed from lower to higher organisms. The essence of organic
regeneration is a release of genetic cell potentials which are normally
inhibited in adult tissue.

Physiological Isolation

These genetic potentials are the residues of the cell's erstwhile toti-
potentiality before differentiation set in its original power to create
a whole new organism. Some of that power is reactivated when the
regeneration tissue the part designed to replace the lost organ or
limb is released from the controls which under normal conditions
keep it under restraint. For this partial or total secession of the part
from the whole, C. M. Child coined the useful concept of physio-
logical isolation. 5

Physiological isolation may be regarded as a drastic form of dis-
equilibrium between the part and the whole. Its consequences may be
beneficial or deleterious. Child distinguishes four causes for it. (a)
Growth of the whole beyond a critical limit may make it ungovern-
able so that parts of it find themselves outside the range of central
dominance and control. This may lead in lower organisms to re-
production by fission or budding: the isolated part is either shed (as,
for instance, the planarians tail) to form a new organism, or it may
de-differentiate and reintegrate into a complete organism by budding,
(b) Decline of the organism's powers of control (through senescence,
metabolic or hormonal disorders) may, in combination with other
causes, lead to a pathological regression of cells and tissues with un-
tramelled proliferation and without reintegration, resulting in malig-
nant growths, (c) Partial obstruction or total blockage of (nervous and

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM AND REGENERATIVE POTENTIAL 453

chemical) communications, and (d) persistent local excitation beyond
a critical limit, may release the part from its normal controls and
activate, for better or worse, its latent potentialities.

"We shall see that Child's 'isolation* concept has a wide range of
applicability. In all cases, isolation of the part from the whole leads to
de-differentiation or other forms of regression; in some cases this is
followed by re-differentiation and reintegration. Isolation leading to
regression of an irreversible kind plays a considerable part in pathology,
psycho-pathology, and social pathology.* On the other hand, re-
gression followed by a progressive rebound releases creative potentials
which are normally under restraint. Its magic can be observed on every
level: from asexual reproduction to the repair of structural damage
and functional disorder, and further up to psycho therapy, scientific
discovery, and artistic creation. In the chapter which follows I shall
briefly discuss the manifestations of 'super-flexibility' of recukr pour
mieux sauter on these various levels.

NOTE

To p. 455. Thus, for instance, Smithers in A Clinical Prospect of the Cancer
Problem (i960) stresses the decisive influence which Child's Physiological Founda-
tions of Behaviour had on the development of his ideas.

IV

RECULER POUR MIEUX SAUTER
Structural Regenerations

In primitive organisms such as the flatworm, and in the early em-
bryonic stages of higher organisms, a physiologically isolated part
tends in general 'to lose its characteristics as a part and to become or
approach the condition of a new whole individual'. 1 Liberation of the
part's previously restrained genetic potential 'involves a change in
behaviour and structure from that of a part towards that of a whole
organism'. 2 Such organisms could be said to live not only in dynamic
equilibrium with their environment, but in a kind of 'regenerative
equilibrium' which enables them to rise to virtually any challenge by
means of these secondary adaptations.

Some higher animals are still capable of regenerating lost organs or
limbs. Let us have a closer look how it is done. When a salamander's
leg has been amputated, the tissues near the wound surface de-differen-
tiate and the cells acquire an embryonic appearance. This is the regres-
sive or 'catabolic' phase. Around the fourth day begins the formation
of the blastema the regeneration bud; and from here on throughout
the 'anabolic' or synthetic phase the process follows closely the forma-
tion of limbs in normal embryonic development.* The blastema
elongates into a cone and develops axially, the toes at its tip appearing
first, and the rest of the limb gradually taking shape as it grows in
length. When the organ is completed, central control is taken over
by the nervous system, just as in the case of the embryo. The nervous
system, however, also plays an indispensable part in initiating the first,
catabolic phase. If no peripheral nerves are present in the amputation
stump, regeneration does not occur.**

The 'isolated part* in this case is the amputation stump. The blastema
has in the beginning the multi-potential characteristics of the organ
primordia, and its re-diflferentiation again proceeds stepwise: if the

454

RECULER POUR MIEUX SAUTER

455

field is split in half, each half gives rise to a whole organ; if one half is
removed, the remaining half will still develop into a complete limb.

Although the isolated part, transformed into a new organ primor-
dium (or its close equivalent), enjoys a high degree of independence
and controls the formation of the new limb, its ties with the higher
levels of the hierarchy are not completely severed. Its function in the
whole has changed; its normal controls (through the nervous system
and local chemical gradients) are out of action or even reversed; but
the organism as a whole nevertheless assists the regenerating part by
certain emergency measures a 'general alarm reaction* followed by a
'general adaptation syndrome', each stage indicated by metabolic
changes and by the appearance of specific proteins and hormones in the
circulatory system.

Thus the isolation of the part is only temporary and relative; and
when the process is completed, the regenerated limb assumes its
normal function in the whole. The entire regressive-progressive
sequence is the means by which the animal's 'regenerative equiHbrium'
enables it to adjust to traumatic experiences from the environment.

Looked at from a different angle, one might say that the whole
process is designed to prevent or correct malformations, i.e. faulty
integrations. Without the initial nerve supply, the regressing am-
putation stump would be resorbed, the scar tissue would close over
it, and the animal would achieve a modus uivendi as a cripple a faulty
integration. On the other hand, a frog which will not normally re-
generate a lost limb will do so if the nerve supply to the stump is
artificially augmented, providing the initial stimulus to start the pro*
cess. Traumatic challenges can only be met by the liberation of the
organism's latent powers a temporary return to a more youthful or
primitive condition.

Reversed Gradients

An important part in regeneration, as in morphogenesis, is played by
axial gradients. The apical or 'head* end of the fertilized egg, the
growing embryo, or the regenerating limb, are exposed to the highest
degree of stimulation and show the highest rate of metabolism, pro-
tein synthesis, and RNA activity. Thus the anterior end becomes the
dominant region, the 'head* in the literal and metaphorical sense, and
exercises a restraining influence on the genetic potentials along the
axial gradient so that activity is highest at the front and lowest at the

45<*

THE ACT OF CREATION

tail end (higher organisms have of course a complex pattern of inter-
acting gradients, some axial, some radial). But physical isolation by
blockage or hyper-excitation (Child's third and fourth cause) of parts
in previously subordinate positions can be shown to alter or reverse the
gradient. In plants, where the dominant region is the growing tip of
die shoot, pruning makes previously subordinate parts burst into
activity. If in the marine polyp, tubularia, a piece of the stem is cut out,
the frontal end of the fragment will normally regenerate the hydrant
which is its 'head'; but if a ligature is applied to isolate the front end
of the fragment, the gradient is reversed and the tail end, now the region,
of maximum excitation, becomes dominant and grows a head.
Similarly, short pieces of planaria sometimes regenerate one head at
the front and another at tie tail end, if the metabolism of both cut
surfaces is equally high.

The Dangers of Regression

Two more phenomena must be mentioned in this context: the first
illustrates the flexibility, the second the vulnerability of regenerative
processes.

If the crystalline lens of a salamander-eye is removed, part of the
iris de-differentiates, forms a vesicle, enters the cavity through the
pupil, re-differentiates, and forms a normal lens whereas in embryonic
development the lens is formed by the epidermis overlaying the eye-
cup, without participation of the iris. Thus the morphogenetic skill of
making a lens can make use of either of two different materials; the
code is again invariant, the strategy adaptable.*

On the other hand, the factors which, in a higher organism, deter-
mine whether a given trauma will lead to regenerative or pathological
changes are of an extremely delicate nature. Thus Smithers 8 writes:

'The type of structure regenerated, or the kind of neoplasm formed,
will depend on the level of the controlling field-gradient against which
it is exerting itself, and the steepness of the gradient it can itself es-
tablish and promote as shown by its tendency towards undifferentiated
cell-reproduction. The part which is physiologically isolated then
produces an imperfect portion of a new whole, giving rise to whatever
tissues it is capable of forming under the circumstances pertaining.
This may result in malformations of all degrees, from simple over-
growth of adult tissues, through irregular mixtures of recognizable,

RECULER POUR MIEUX SAUTER

457

well-differentiated cells, to the most rapidly growing, undifferentiated
tumours/

Pathogenic regulatory responses are reactions to stimulations which
are 'outside the standardized range of normal experience of the species
during its developmental peak period. They do not differ from the
normal regulatory responses, however, in any fundamental particular.
. . . Tissue overgrowth as a response to a long-continued external
irritant, is of the same order as heat regulation, wound-healing or
lactation. . . . Useless or harmful regulating mechanisms and tissue
responses to isolation, injury, or stimulation are not fundamentally
different in kind from those favourable ones which have become in-
corporated into the inheritance of the species because they promoted

survival through the period of reproductive activity The tissues

most often called on for regeneration and repair, or most liable to re-
current stimulation into specialized activity, are those most prone to
tumour formation.' 4

'Routine Regenerations'

The last sentence that I have quoted leads into the borderl and between
regenerative and 'normal' processes: namely routine replacements.
They range from the periodic moulting of feathers and shedding of the
antlers, to the replacement of the whole human epidermis about once
a month owing to wear and tear, and the replacement of red blood
cells at the rate of 3 X io 11 per day; not to mention the metabolic turn-
over on die molecular level which consumes about thirty per cent of
our total protein intake. This type of routine (or so-called 'physio-
logical') regeneration which goes on all the time is sometimes described
as a constant 'renewal' or 'rejuvenation' of the body. It is often im-
possible to make a clear distinction between 'wear' and 'tear' for
instance in minor abrasions of the skin. The differential factor is
obviously the degree of stress, which, past a critical threshold, will
bring general alarm reactions and 'adaptations of the second order'
into play.

Reorganizations of Function

The transplanted salamander limb which functions normally in spite
of its randomized nervous connections can be regarded as an example
of both regeneration of structure and reorganization of function. The

458 THE ACT OF CREATION

pathways leading into the limb all seem to be equipotential in their
capacity as conductors of the excitation-clang. Without entering the
old controversy about equipotentiality versus localization of func-
tions in nervous tissues, it seems to be safe to say that in repetitive
routines and local reflexes, equipotentiality has 'frozen up' into fixed
local arrangements; whereas in case of injury to the pathways in
question, the equipotentiality (or rather, multi-potentiality) of alter-
native canal-systems' is revived, and they take over the function of
the injured system. To quote Lashley: 'The results indicate that when
habitually used motor organs are rendered non-functional by removal
or paralysis, there is an immediate, spontaneous use of other motor
systems which had not previously been associated with, or used in, the
performance of the activity/ 5 Nearly a century earlier Pfliiger had
shown that even the spinal reflexes of a frog are capable of 'crisis
adaptations'. If a drop of acid is placed on the back of the left front
limb of a decapitated frog, it will attempt to wipe it away with the left
hind limb; but if prevented from doing so it will use the right hind
limb which it normally never does in the exercise of the wiping
reflex.

Turning from the spinal level to the brain, Lashley's celebrated maze
experiments have shown what astonishing regenerative adaptations the
cerebral cortex is capable of. If a rat is trained to choose between
two doors the one where a brighter light is shown, this habit (or at
least part of it) must be localized in its optical cortex, for if this is
extirpated, the habit is lost. But a rat with its optical cortex cut out
can still be taught or re-taught the same skill. This means that some
other cortical area has taken over the learning function after extirpation
of the proper areajust as in the morphogenetic field intact tissue will
deputize for lost tissue. Moreover, if a rat has learned to run a certain
maze, no matter what parts of its motor cortex are injured, it will
follow its path even if it has to roll the whole way with paralysed
legs; and if the injury makes it incapable of executing a right turn, it
will achieve its aim by a three-quarter turn to the left. The rat may be
blinded, deprived of its smell, partially paralysed in various ways
each of which would throw the chain-reflex automation, which the
rat was supposed to be, completely out of gear. Yet: 'One drags him-
self through [the maze] with his forepaws; another falls at every step
but gets through by a series of lunges; a third rolls over completely
in making each turn, yet avoids rolling into a cul-de-sac and makes an
errorless run. The behaviour presents exactly the same problem of

RECULER POUR MIEUX SAUTER

459

direct adaptation of any motor organs to the attainment of a given end
which was outstanding in my earlier observations on monkeys after
destruction of the pre-central gyri. If the customary sequence of move-
ments employed in reaching the food is rendered impossible, another
set, not previously used in the* habit, and constituting an entirely
different motor pattern, may be directly and efficiently substituted
without any random activity/ 6

In human beings, structural regeneration of skin, bone, muscle, and
peripheral nerves is confined to tissue-outgrowth: that is to say, the
new structures are derived from cells of their own kind, not from de-
differentiating tissues. But though we have lost the amphibian's
enviable powers of replacing a lost limb, we have gained a unique
super-flexibility of functions in our nervous system.

On its lowest level it is manifested in certain secondary or crisis-
adaptations of neuro-muscular mechanisms. The artificial limbs in-
vented by the Austrian surgeon Sauerbruch are flexed by muscles in
the stump which formerly acted as extensors, and extended by flexors. 7
Other reversals of function are obtained by grafting operations. When
the musculo-spiral nerve which activates the extensors of wrist and
fingers is severed with resulting paralysis, the damage can be re-
paired by grafting one of the flexor-tendons from the inner side of
the wrist on to the extensor-muscle. After a while the flexor will depu-
tize for his former antagonist, although it remains attached to the
'wrong' (median) nerve which thus carries opposite orders to the
remaining flexors and to the transplanted one, along the same common
path* 8

In these and similar grafting operations the first step is the undoing
of a fixed neuro-muscular connection; thereby the nerve to be grafted
becomes 'de-specialized' as it were the functional analogue to the de-
difTerentiation of structures and regains its multi-potentiality to
function in more than one way. The second step, when the grafting
operation is completed, is 're-specialization of the nerve in its new
role, and the reintegration of the new neuro-muscular unit into the
whole. Similar considerations apply to Lashley's rats or Bethe's insects
except, of course, that in their case, the reorganization of functions
is spontaneous.

Thus there is a close parallel between the regeneration of structures
and the reorganization of functions after traumatic challenges; and
both are continuous with the regulative principle in morphogenesis.
The antithesis between localization of functions, fixed pathways' on

460

THE ACT OF CREATION

the one hand, and 'mulitpotential pathways, selective responses' on
the other, reflects the earlier antithesis between the mosaic character
and the regulative character in embryonic development. But the
seemingly opposite principles turn out to be in fact complementary
aspects of development. "With each successive step in the differentiation
of the embryo, of the nervous system, and of adult behaviour-patterns,
the regulative powers decrease, and the mosaic-character of structures
and functions increases: tissues become specialized, responses localized,
habits automatized up to a point. For all matrices of structure and
behaviour display varying amounts of flexibility even while the
organism lives in dynamic equilibrium with its environment; but the
often unsuspected amount of its regenerative potential becomes only
manifest when a severe challenge induces it to retrace its steps on the
genetic gradient, as it were, and make a fresh start.

Recuter sans Sauter

Hyper-excited organs or organ-systems tend to get out of control.
During the repair of physical injuries, the injured part tends to monopo-
lize the attention of the whole organism; in periods of starvation, the
digestive system asserts itself to the detriment of other parts; in rage
and panic, the sympathico-adrenal apparatus tyrannizes the whole; and
when sex is aroused, reason (as the Austrian proverb has it) descends
into the testes'. The over-excited part behaves as if it were in a tem-
porary state of 'physiological isolation' (pp. 452 ), released from its
restraints; it asserts its autonomy and sometimes tends to usurp the
functions of the whole.

Analogous situations occur on the cognitive level, where the 'hyper-
excited part' appears in the guise of the idiejixe, or a closed system' of
beliefs. Both the achievements and aberrations of human thought are to a
large extent due to obsessionalpreoccupations withreligious and scientific
theories, or political ideologies, more or less closely knitted around some
central idea, around a part-truth usurping the role of the whole truth.

We have seen in the previous volume how an obsessional pre-
occupation can force the whole mental organization into its service
during the period of incubation, and give birth to a new system of
thought. But these are the glorious exceptions; in the vast majority of
cases, the 'over-valued idea' (to use Kretschmer's 9 term) will become
segregated from the rest of the mental field, and assert itself in harm-

RECULER POUR MIEUX SAUTER

461

ful ways. The results are all too familiar: personalities whose whole
outlook is dominated by prejudice and biassed values; the compulsive
rituals of neurotics; the devouring obsession of the crank; and so on
to the major psychoses in which large chunks of the personality have
been 'split off' and become permanendy isolated from the rest. The
intrusion of magic causation; inability to distinguish between fact and
fantasy; delusions of grandeur, or persecution by invisible powers, are
symptoms of regression to earlier levels, of the de-differentiation of
thought-matrices of reenter sans sauter.

Regeneration and Psycho therapy

Less extreme cases are neurotics who react to their traumatic experiences
by elaborating defence systems which enable them to find some kind of
modus vivendi with the world. One may call such behaviour-patterns
'faulty integrations' like the newt's whose forelegs move back-
wards. Psycho therapy aims at undoing faulty integrations by inducing
a temporary regression of the patient to an earlier level, in the hope
that he will eventually reintegrate into a more stable pattern. Neuro-
surgery, shock-therapy, and related methods aim at releasing philo-
genetically older centres of the brain from cortical restraints. In a less
drastic form, Freudians, Jungians, etc., try to make the patient revert
to unconscious and infantile planes of experience, and to regenerate,
as it were, into a more or less new-born person.

Thus psycho therapy may be called an experiment in artificially in-
duced regeneration. It relies on the same basic process of reader pour
mieux sauter \ which we see operating on every level: from the flatworm
which replaces a lost head, through the crab which adjusts its gait to
the loss of a leg, to the rat which, unable to turn to the right, makes a
three-quarter turn to the left. We found the same pattern repeated on
the level of human creativity: the scientist, faced by a perplexing situa-
tion Kepler's discrepant eight minutes' arc, Einstein's light-traveller
, paradox must plunge into a 'dark night of the soul' before he can re-
emerge into the light. The history of the sciences and arts is a tale of
recurrent crises, of traumatic challenges, which entail a temporary
disintegration of the traditional forms of reasoning and perception: a
de-differentiation of thought-matrices, a dismantling of its axioms, a
new innocence of the eye; followed by the liberation from restraint
of creative potentials, and their reintegration in a new synthesis.

The Routine of Dreaming

There is also a mental equivalent for the less spectacular routine re-
generation of tissues, designed to compensate for wear and tear. The
analogue process is the maintenance of mental tissues' exposed to the
wear and tear of diurnal stresses, by the regenerative effect of nocturnal
regressions to me primitive levels of the dream. Experimental evidence
seems to indicate that the restorative powers of sleep are primarily
derived from the process of dreaming. Experimental subjects who were
woken up each time their EEG waves indicated the onset of dreaming,
displayed symptoms of fatigue and nervous disorder; long periods of
dreamless sleep could not compensate for dream-deprivation. 'Man
cannot persist long in a conscious state/ wrote Goethe, 'he must throw
himself back into the unconscious, for his root lives there/

We have seen (Book One, VII, VIII) that these periodic plunges
into the unconscious are accompanied by the temporary disintegra-
tion of matrices of logical thought. But they also entail a partial loss
of identity, a de-differentiation of the personality as indicated by the
remarkable degree of uniformity in the contents of dreams shared by
people of very different character, and by the relatedness of these
contents to mythological themes and symbols. These shared patterns
led Jung to postulate a 'collective' that is, individually undifferen-
tiated level of the unconscious. On that level, members of the same
culture seem to share some degree of psychic equipotentiality ex-
pressed in 'archetypal symbols'. These are supposed to be condensa-
tions of basic experiences of the race in the distant past; hence their
great emotion-rousing potential.

To recapitulate: the fact that art and discovery draw on uncon-
scious sources indicates that one aspect of all creative activity is a
regression to ontogenetically or philogenetically earlier levels, an
escape from the restraints of the conscious mind, with the subsequent
release of creative potentials a process paralleled on lower levels by
the liberation from restraint of genetic potentials or neural equi-
potentialiry in the regeneration of structures and functions. The
scientist, traumatized by discordant facts, the artist by the pressures of
sensibility, and the rat by surgical intervention, share, on different
levels, the same super-flexibility enabling them to perform 'adapta-
tions of a second order', rarely found in the ordinary routines of life.

462

Regeneration and Creativity

I must enlarge a little on this seemingly sweeping analogy, and try to
show that it is in fact based on homologous principles, traceable on all
levels of the hierarchy, and preserving their basic pattern throughout
them.

Differentiation and specialization of the parts are necessary for the
normal functioning of lie whole; abnormal conditions call for radical
measures which may include a retreat of the over-exerted part to a
structurally less differentiated, functionally less specialized stage, if
the whole is to survive. The part* may be the newt's amputation
stump, or the unsolved problem in the scientist's mind which tortures
and obsesses him. We have seen that such regressions are mostly patho-
genic, but under favourable conditions they may redress the situation
by re-activating potentials which had been operative in the past but
are inhibited in the adult such as the regulative powers of the embryo
in the womb or the undifferentiated total-pattern-responses of its
nervous system. The period of incubation is a similar retreat, if not
into the womb, at least into long-outgrown forms of ideation, into the
pre-verbal, pre-rational games of the unconscious, the wonderland-
logic of the dream. The challenge which sets the process going is in
all cases a traumatic experience: physical mutilation or mental lacera-
tion by data which do not fit, observations which contradict each
other, emotions which disrupt approved styles in art: experiences
which create mental conflict, dissonance, perplexity. The creative
stress' of the artist or scientist corresponds to the 'general alarm re-
action' of the traumatized animal; the anabolic-catabolic sequence of
de-differentiation and reintegration corresponds to the destructive-
constructive sequence in the creative act. The 'physiological isolation
of the over-excited part which tends to dominate, corresponds to the
smgle-minded and obsessive preoccupation with the idee fixe
Kretschmer's 'over-valued idea', Kepler's pursuit of a chimera which
monopolizes the whole mind; it will either lead to its reorganization
by giving birth to a new system, or to the cancerous proliferation of a
degenerate tissue of ideas.

Over-excitation of an organ or part is one of the four causes of
'physiological isolation'. The other three were: growth of the whole
beyond a critical limit; senescence; and (partial) blockage of com-
munication (pp. 452 f.). Each situation has its parallels on the mental
plane of the individual, or the history of thought. The unmanageable

463

THE ACT OF CREATION

size of the total body of human knowledge or even a single province
thereof created that dissociated phenomenon, the specialist mind;
senescent cultures produce degenerate art-forms; blocked communica-
tions between Ptolemaic astronomy and the main body of the physical
sciences led to the untramelled proliferation of epicycles in a closed
system, divorced from reality.

'It is wonderful to see how analogies can blossom when they are
given a little affection', wrote the authors of a book I have repeatedly
quoted. 10 Particularly, one might add, if they have solid roots in the
earth. So let me carry analogy one step further. In Book One (Chapters
V-VHI) I have described various aspects of the Eureka process; each of
these re-structurings of thought has its obvious correlate in regenera-
tive processes on lower levels. The 'displacement of emphasis' to a
previously irrelevant part or aspect of experience corresponds to the
sudden dominance of a hitherto subordinate part of an organism
such as the crab's second leg which becomes a pacemaker. The reversal
of logic' (or of the figure-background relation) has its parallel in the
reversal of physiological gradients during regeneration. When psycho-
logical textbooks describe Duncker's experiments as 'detaching' part
of a visual percept from the context in which it is 'embedded', and
'attaching' it to the new context of the problem to be solved (pp 1 89 f.)
this description itself is based on analogies from physiological pro-
cesses. During incubation, the intuitive groping of ideas towards the
'good combination, and their guidance by 'gradients in the un-
conscious', reminds one of the biochemical gradients in morpho-
genesis, or the 'contact-guidance' of out-growing nerve-processes
towards their end-organ. Lasdy a 'nascent', unverbaHzed analogy may
be compared to an unarticulated organ-primordium.

But these genetic skills operate only in the embryonic stage of
development; in the adult they are superseded by the integrative
action of the nervous system unless the embryonic potentials are re-
activated by regenerative needs. Similarly, the adult's mental co-
ordination relies on conscious, verbalized, 'logical' codes; not on the
quasi 'embryonic' (infantile, pre-causal) potentials of the unconscious;
again unless these are revived under the creative stress. Physical re-
generations strike us as 'spectacular pieces of magic' because they
derive from pre-natal skills; and creative inspirations are equally
mysterious because they derive from levels which predate the
conscious mind. As Polanyi wrote (in a different context): 'The
highest forms of originality are far more closely akin to the

RECULER POUR MIEUX SAUTER 46$

lowest biotic performances than the external circumstances would
indicate.' 11

Regeneration and Evolution

A |

1

I

B

( diffcrtrUuitioru ^

R-

/ specialised rvtttme

Figure 14

These rather fancy diagrams are solely meant to indicate in a crude way
the complementary factors in the reculerpour mieux sauter phenomenon.
In A, increase in tissue-differentiation entails a reciprocal decrease of
genetic multipotentiality. In B, an analogous reciprocity prevails
between unconscious intuitions and automatized routines or, if you
like, between fluid imagery and 'misplaced concreteness'. R indicates
the 'regenerative span'. (The curve in A should of course have breaks
and a series of discrete steps.)

It could be objected that structural regenerations merely restore the
status quo ante whereas mental reorganization leads to an advance. But
in the first place this is not always the case. Psycho therapy aims at
correcting 'faulty integrations' caused by traumatic experiences at
restoring normality. In the second place the biological evolution of
the species with which we are concerned has to all intents and purposes
come to a standstill, whereas mental evolution continues, and its
vehicle is precisely the creative individual. The Eureka process is a
mental mutation, perpetuated by social inheritance. Its biological
equivalent are the genetic mutations which carried the existing species
up the evolutionary ladder. Now a mutation whatever its unknown

466

THE ACT OF CREATION

cause i s n0 doubt a re-moulding of previous structures, based on a
de-diiFerentiation and reintegration of the otherwise rigid genetic
code. The transformations of fins into legs, legs into arms, arms into
wings, gills into lungs, scales into feathers, etc., while preserving certain
basic structural patterns (see, for instance, d'Arcy Thompson's On
Growth and Form) were eminently 'witty* answers to the challenges of
environment. It seems obvious that the dramatic release, at periods of
adaptative radiations, of unexplored morphogenetic potentials by a
re-shufHing of molecules in the genetic code, resulting in the de-dif-
ferentiation and reintegration of structures like limbs into wings, is
of the very essence of the evolutionary process. After all, 'ontogenesis
and regenesis are components of a common mechanism', 12 which
must have a phylogenetic origin.

In Book One, Chapter XX, I have mentioned the perennial myth of
the prophet's and hero's temporary isolation and retreat from human
society followed by his triumphant return endowed with new powers.
Buddha and Mohamed go out into the desert; Joseph is thrown into
the well; Jesus is resurrected from the tomb. Jung's 'death and re-
birth' motif, Toynbee's 'withdrawal and return' reflect the same
archetypal motif. It seems that reader pour mieux sauter is a principle of
universal validity in the evolution of species, cultures, and individuals,
guiding their progression by feedback from the past.

NOTES

To p. 454. It is still an open question, however, whether or how much
undifferentiated 'reserve cells' (as in lower animals) contri bute material to the
blastema.

To p. 454. It seems that the initial role of the nervous system is to determine
the main axis of the regenerate that it acts, not as an inductor, but as a trophic
agent. At the later, anabolic stages of the process no nerve supply is needed as
denervation experiments show.

To p. 4$6, This, actually, is the only clearly demonstrated case of metaplasia
among higher animals.

To p. 45g. About the ways how this is achieved, cf. McCu Iloch in the
Hixon Symposium, p. 56.

V

PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION

Before we turn to adult behaviour, a pause for stocktaking may
, be in order.
In a four-dimensional continuum, embryonic development
would be represented by an ascending hierarchy of spatial levels per-
pendicular to the time axis. In spite of the perplexing diversity of
phenomena on different levels cleavage, gastrulation, induction,
neuro-genesis certain basic principles were seen to operate on every
level throughout the hierarchy. Principles (or 'laws of nature') can
only be described in symbolic language of one kind or another. The
language used in the present theory is based on four key-concepts:
motivation, code, matrix, and environment. Since these are assumed to
operate in a hierarchic framework, the dichotomy of self-asserting and
participatory tendencies of behaviour on all levels need not be separately
postulated, but derives logically, as it were, from the dual character
of every sub-whole as a subordinate and supra-ordinate entity.
Let me now recapitulate some of the main points which have
emerged from the previous chapters, taken in conjunction with
Book One:

1. Motivation in embryonic development is a subject for the meta-
physician. J. Needham's tongue-in-the-cheek phrase about 'the
striving of the blastula to grow into a chicken indicates the directive-
ness of the morphogenetic process and its equifinal, regulative proper-
ties, which become particularly evident under adverse conditions.
These properties represent the genetic precursors of the motivational
drives, needs, and goal-directedness of the adult animal; during matura-
tion, the former shade into the latter, and there is no sharp dividing line
between them.

2. 'A part is a whole is a part*. Each sub-whole is both a 'sub' and a

467

468

THE ACT OF CREATION

'whole*. Facing downward or outward in the hierarchy, it behaves as
an autonomous whole; facing upward or inward, it behaves as a
dependent part which is inhibited or triggered into action by higher
controls. One might call this the 'Janus principle' in organic (and
social) hierarchies.

3. The 'whole-aspect of the sub-whole is manifested in its auto-
nomous and spontaneous activities. The principle of autonomy is asserted
on every level; from cell-organelles functioning as power plants or
motor units, through the self-differentiating activities of the morpho-
genetic field, to the autonomous regulations of organs and organ
system. In the motor hierarchy, it is reflected at every stage, from the
muscle's selective response to specific excitation-patterns, through the
stubborn behaviour of the reversed newt limb, to the unalterable
features in a persons gait or handwriting. I have briefly mentioned
(Book One, Chapters XIII, XXI), and shall discuss in more detail later,
autonomous mechanism in perceptual organization visual constancies,
the automatic filtering, analysing, generalizing of the input. Lastly,
thinking and communicating are based on hierarchically ordered,
autonomous patterns of enunciation, grammar, logic, mathematical
operations, universes of discourse.

The dynamic aspect of the part's autonomy is manifested in its
apparently spontaneous, unprovoked rhythmic activities which are
'modified but not created by the environmental input' a statement
which equally applies to morphogenesis, to intrinsic motor patterns,
to the spontaneous discharges of unstimulated sensory receptors, the
electric pulses of the unstimulated brain, to drives in the absence of
external stimuli or to communications addressed to imaginary
audiences.

Autonomy and spontaneity taken together constitute what I have
called the 'self-assertive' aspect of part-behaviour.

4. The opposite aspect is the part's dependence on supra-ordinate
controls which may be said to represent the interests of the whole
vis-h-vis the part in question. The controls are largely of an inhibitory
or restraining character, to prevent overloading of information
channels, over-shooting of responses, confusion and redundancy in
general; while the activation of the part ii effected by signals of the
trigger-release type. During morphogenesis, control is exercised by
the suppression of unrequired, and the release of required genetic
potentials; in the mature organism by interlacing multiple hierarchies
of nervous and circulatory processes, and biochemical gradients.

PRINCIPLES OP ORGANIZATION

469

5. Sub-wholes on any level of the hierarchy function (a) auto-
nomously in supra-ordination to their own parts, (b) in sub-ordination
to their controlling agency, and (c) in co-ordination with their en-
vironment.

'Environment' is a relative term. On the level of the single cell, the
environment of the nucleus is cytoplasm; on the level of the morpho-
genetic field, the environment of one cell-population is another cell-
population; each organ in the adult animal is bathed in body-fluids
which constitute its environment. The structure and function of any
sub-whole is determined by (a) and (b) its intrinsic pattern and its
controls in the Vertical' hierarchy to which it belongs; but it is also
affected by inputs and feedbacks from its 'horizontal' environment,
as it were the lie of the land. The difference between (a) and (b)
on the one hand, and (c) on the other is that the former determine the
invariant pattern of the operation, (c) only its variable details. To
mention a few examples: feedback from the cytoplasm to the genetic
blue-print co-determines into which variety of specialized cell that par-
ticular unit will develop; but it does not alter the blue-print itself.
Inductor substances in the immediate environment of a tissue will pro-
mote its differentiation into an organ but only within the limits of
the tissue's 'competence'. Environmental hazards decide the neuro-
muscular connections in the grafted salamander-limb, but its func-
tional co-ordination remains unaffected by it: it is controlled by its
'vertical* hierarchy, and the lie of the land in the scar-tissue determines
only the local 'tactics' of the outgrowing nerve-filaments.

Thus the function of every component in the organism is determined
by two types of 'input'. The first consists of specific trigger signals
from its superior controls in the hierarchy; the second are inputs and
feedbacks from more or less random events in its environment. But
I must stress again that the meaning of the word 'environment* depends
on the hierarchic level to which it is applied. The environment of John
driving his car is the traffic stream around him. The environment of
John's right foot is the brake-pedal on which it rests. Let us call the
former an environment on the t-level, where t stands for the top of the
hierarchy controlling the various sensory, motor, and cognitive pro-
cesses which constitute the skill of driving; then the brake-pedal will
be an environment on the, say, t minus 4 level. Now John approaches
a sign which reads 'Halt Road Works Ahead*. This input is analysed
and relayed by various stations of the perceptual and cognitive hier-
archy, and is eventually re-coded into a 'sign releaser' which triggers

470

THE ACT OF CREATION

off the pre-set patterns of slow-down-to-a-halt behaviour on lower
echelons of the motor hierarchy. Thus an environmental input on the
t-level has been transformed into a specific trigger signal in a 'vertical'
hierarchy; in other words a 'category c input on a higher level has
been translated into a 'category b' input on a lower level, activating
the autonomous pattern of the slowing-down skill. This consists in
several sub-skills: braking, steadying the wheel, going into neutral
gear at the proper moment. The foot on the brake-pedal is not res-
ponding to the 'Halt* signal from the environment; it is responding to
a specific 'excitation-clang' travelling down John's spinal cord. But
the foot's pre-set response is modified by feedback from the environ-
ment on its own level: the 'feel* of the pedal's elastic resistance governs
the 'strategy' of braking neither too abruptly nor too softly. Similar
feedbacks influence the automatized motions of the hands on the
wheel, etc.

We may perhaps speculate that the digitally coded signals: 'brake',
'steady wheel' have been converted into analogue-computing servo-
mechanisms. But speculations apart, we can confidently say that an
action-pattern of a general nature has been initiated on the top level,
and that the details were successively filled in by feedbacks from more
and more restricted local environments on the lower echelons. Simi-
larly, the future adult is 'roughed in' in a summary way in the morpho-
genetic gradients of the zygote, then 'sketched in' in the organ-
Anlage of the uncouth embryo, and so on, until the last detail is elabora-
ted by the joint action of a cell-group's self-difTerentiation potential and
its local environment. The performance of a skill means executing a
general order by a series of progressively differentiated action-patterns,
each controlled from above, and adjusted by local feedbacks.*

We thus arrive at a synthesis between the principles of hierarchic
organization and feedback adjustment. To the hierarchy of autono-
mous sub-wholes must be added the complementary 'hierarchy of
environments' and 'hierarchy of feedbacks' of loops-within-loops,
from those embracing the personality as a whole in the 'total field',
down to the molecular level. An elementary but engaging model for
a hierarchy of servo-mechanisms is the 'TOTE unit' proposed by
Pribram. 1

Let me dot my i's on this rather important point by a martial
analogy. The commander of the N'th Army has decided, taking into
account all available intelligence reports on the enemy's dispositions,
to capture tomorrow at dawn the vital hill No. 607. He sends his orders

PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION

471

to his six divisional comanders, broadly outlining their tasks. The
commander of the 3rd division is assigned the task of occupying ham-
let X. There are several approaches to the hamlet; to decide which is
best, he sends out some reconnaissance aircraft which feed informa-
tion to him. He then communicates his orders to his battalion com-
manders. Each of these will send out patrols to get the lie of the land
allotted to them before giving orders to his company commanders;
and in the end each individual soldier will have to make the best of
his own small environment of protective hedges and ditches as he
moves forward in obedience to the sergeant's orders.

6. It ought to be evident by now that the terms 'matrix* and 'code'
are not meant to refer to separate entities, but (like 'structure' and
'function) to complementary aspects of a unitary process. The, code is
the invariant pattern of the process; it is not affected by environmental
input. The matrix is the ensemble of part-processes, or 'members'
potentially capable of being activated by the code; it thus represents the
total repertory of alternative (equipotential or equifinal) variations in
carrying out the process, according to feedbacks from the environ-
ment. The code is the fixed, the matrix the adaptable side of the pro-
cess; the former determines the rules of the game, the latter the actual
course of the game. The matrix, therefore, represents the more 'alert'
or 'articulate' or 'explicit' side of the unitary process the side turned
towards the environment. The twenty-letter alphabet of protein-
synthesis in the cell-matrix is more explicit than the three-letter
alphabet of the genetic code; it 'spells out' what the latter implied.
The articulated motions of the limb spell out the compressed message
of the excitation-clang, as the pianist's ringers spell out the tune. In
the perceptual and cognitive hierarchies, the codes which govern per-
formance (e.g. grammar and syntax) function on lower levels of
awareness than the performance itself.

7. The control of the whole over the parts is exercised, as in our
military hierarchy, through 'regulation channels'. The genetic code
does not interfere with the details of ATP synthesis: it activates the
sub-code of the mitochondria. The centre coordinating the motion
of the limbs in newt or man does not deal direcdy with individual
muscles; it activates the proper sub-centres. The battalion commander
does not issue orders to individual soldiers, or even squads; he signals
to Company headquarters: 'D Company will advance at 1800 hours.*
The Company, the limb, the mitochondria are complex sub-wholes;
but they are activated from the next-higher level as units, through their

472

THE ACT OP CREATION

codes; and they in turn activate their members as units through their
sub-codes.

To put it in a different way: each part-process is a pattern of relations;
but it is manipulated from the next-higher level as a unit a relatum.
We shall see that as a general rule, when we ascend in any hierarchy,
relations turn into relata, which enter into new relations, and so on.
The code can be said to represent the invariant pattern of a relation;
the matrix the ensemble of the relata. But one step up, and the code
itself becomes a relatum; one step down, and the members of the
matrix are seen as complex relations. "We may thus add one more pair of
complementary terms to characterize the Janus-faced entities in the de-
velopmental hierarchy: part < > whole; structure < > func-
tion, regulative < > mosaic, autonomous < > dependent,

relation < > relatum, matrix < > code.

8. The stresses set up between the organism's inner and outer en-
vironment are matched by active adaptations on various scales. The
term 'dynamic equilibrium' indicates adaptative processes which do
not entail major changes in the pattern of the whole; 'regenerative
span* refers to the organism's capacity for 'adaptations of the second
order to challenges which can be met only by a reshaping of structures
or a reorganization of functions; while 'routine regenerations' occupy
an intermediary position, and overlap with both.

'Equilibrium* in this context refers not to relations between parts,
but between the excited part and the controls which represent the
whole. Under conditions of dynamic equilibrium, the stresses between
the self-assertive tendencies of the excited part and its integrative
controls are of a transitory character. Paranormal challenges may lead
to the phenomenon of 'physiological isolation , owing to over-stimula-
tion of the part or blockage of communication with its normal con-
trols. In lower organisms, the isolated part tends to develop into a
new whole. If it was segregated ab ovo, as sex cells and regeneration
cells are, this development follows a straight course; if isolation occurs
at later stages, as in fissure, budding, and organ-regeneration, it in-
volves a temporary regression of the part to an embryonic or more
juvenile phase of development, and the liberation of genetic potentials
which are normally under restraint. It is a safety device which enables
the organism to cope with traumatic challenges, and correct faulty
integrations; it furthermore confers on it a super-flexibility which
plays an important part in biological and mental evolution.

On higher levels of the evolutionary scale, regenerative processes

PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION

473

are predominantly reorganizations of functions. These range from the
repair of neuro-muscular co-ordination to the compensation of cor-
tical damages, and to the re-stracturing of perceptual and conceptual
patterns in the reculerpour mieux sauter of the creative process.

During the regressive, catabolic phase, the part tends to dominate
the whole through the reversal of axial gradients and hierarchic con-
trols. This may lead to irreversible changes of a pathological nature
(malignant growths, idee fixe). To avoid snapping of the loosened ties,
the isolation of the part must be temporary and not complete: after
the routine-controls have gone out of action, the organism as a whole
must assist the regenerative process.

'Routine repairs' were seen to range from the regeneration of tissues
lost through wear and tear, to the restorative effects of sleep. Dreaming
could be described as a de-diflerentiation of reasoning-matrices and
even, up to a point, of personal identity.

9. These periodic fluctuations from the highest level of integration
down to earlier or more primitive levels and up again to a new,
modified pattern, seem to play a major part in biological and mental
evolution. Their universality is reflected in the myths of death and re-
birth, the 'dark night of the soul', etc. The 'magic of organ-regenera-
tions, and of unconscious guidance in creativity, both owe their
striking character to the sudden re-activation of (morphogenetic or
psychogenetic) potentials which are normally under restraint in the
adult individual. The period of incubation may be compared to the
catabolic phase in organ-regeneration: the former releases pre-con-
ceptual, intuitive modes of ideation from the censorship imposed by
the conscious mind; the latter triggers off embryonic growth-processes
equally inhibited by the mature organism. The contact-guidance of
nerves towards their end-organs and the revival of other pre-natal
skills, provide enticing parallels to the unconscious gradients and ancient
'waterways' which mediate the underground rendezvous of ideas.

Summary

To the hierarchy of sub-wholes in the development and behaviour of
organisms, we have now added a complementary 'hierarchy of en-
vironments', and a third hierarchy of (exteroceptive and proprioceptive)
feedbacks of loops-within-loops which connect the first and the
second on every level. Certain homologue principles of organization

474

THE ACT OF CREATION

were seen to operate on all levels, such as: (a) the dichotomy of self-
assertive and participatory tendencies derived from the dual character
of each part as a 'sub' and a 'whole'; and the related complementarity
of regulative and mosaic development, of equipotentiality and fixed
pathway, of relations and relata. (b) Control within the organic hier-
archy is exercised by 'regulation channels', i.e. high centres do not
normally have direct dealings with lowly ones, and vice versa, (c)
Trigger-releaser devices seem to be the general rule in the activation of
pre-set, autonomous patterns, (d) The releaser signals (excitation-
clangs, frequency-modulation sequences?) from higher echelons were
found to be of a more implicit, generalized order than the actual per-
formance 'spelled out' by the addressee, (e) The pattern of the per-
formance is determined by its invariant code, but sub-wholes have
varying degrees of freedom for adaptable strategies (equipotential
variations) dependent on feedback from their local environment.

(f) Under normal conditions these flexible strategies are sufficient to
restore dynamic equilibrium between the whole and its excited parts.

(g) Traumatic experiences may cause irreversible, degenerative changes
in the exposed part, but under favourable conditions may initiate
superflexible adaptations of a second order regenerations of structure
or reorganizations of function, which are capable of redressing faulty
integration, and also play an important part in biological and mental
development.

The reader may consider some of these conclusions trivial, others
perhaps as rash generalizations. In the following chapters their validity
will be tested in the light of instinct-behaviour, learning, and problem-
solving.

NOTE

To p. 470. 'Feedback' is used here in a broad sense, to include all extero-
ceptive and proprioceptive inputs relevant to the ongoing activity.

VI

CODES OF INSTINCT BEHAVIOUR

The Genetics of Behaviour

The phylogenetic origins of instinct-behaviour are among the
blackest black boxes found in the sciences of life. The causative
mechanism responsible for the evolution of species in their
morphological aspect is perplexing enough; regarding the origin of
specific behaviour-patterns, the darkness is almost complete. As one
eminent ethologist laments: 'The backward position of ethology is
striking. Owing to the difficulty of tracing genetically determined be-
haviour components, geneticists have nearly always used morpho-
logical characters as indicators of gene-function. ... A genetics of
behaviour still has to be developed.* 1

Evolutionary genetics lies outside the scope of this book, but a
brief remark in passing may be excused. If, apart from a few tentative
studies, 2 the genetics of behaviour is still an uncharted territory, the
reason may perhaps be an unconscious reluctance to put the already
strained theoretical framework of neo-Darwinian genetics to an
additional test. To quote a very trivial example: an individual song-
bird or jackdaw or sparrow, on spotting a predator, will give an
alarm call, warning the whole flock. 'These alarm calls', Tinbergen
points out, 'are a clear example of an activity which serves the group
but endangers the individual.' 3 Are we really to assume that the occulo-
vocal 'wiring diagram' in the sparrow's nervous system which releases
the alarm call in response to a sign-Gestalt stimulus of predatory shape,
arose by random mutations and was perpetuated by natural selection
in spite of its negative survival value for the mutant? The same question
could be asked concerning the phylogenetic origin of the ritualized
tournament rights in such various animals as stags, iguana, wolves,
and fish. Wolves sprawl on their backs as a token of defeat and surren-
der, exposing their vulnerable bellies to the victor's fangs. One is

475

476

THE ACT OP CREATION

inclined to call this a rather risky attitude; and what is the individual
survival value of not hitting (or biting, goring) below the belt? Or if
it comes to that, of the digger-wasps' nerve-racking maternal activities?

*A female of this species, when about to lay an egg, digs a hole,
kills or paralyses a caterpillar, and carries it to the hole, where she
stows it away after having deposited an egg on it (phase a). This done,
she digs another hole, in which an egg is laid on a new caterpillar. In
the meantime, the first egg has hatched and the larva has begun to
consume its store of food. The mother wasp now turns her attention
again to the first hole (phase b), to which she brings some more moth
larvae; then she does the same in the second hole. She returns to the
first hole for the third time to bring a final batch of six or seven cater-
pillars (phase c), after which she closes the hole and leaves it for ever.
In this way she works in turn at two or even three holes, each in a
different phase of development. Baerends investigated the means by
which the wasp brought the right amount of food to each hole. He
found that the -wasp visited all tie holes each morning before leaving
for the hunting grounds. By changing the contents of the hole and
watching the subsequent behaviour of the wasp, he found that (i)
by robbing a hole he could force the wasp to bring far more food than
usual; and (2) by adding larvae to the hole's contents he could force
her to bring less food than usual.' 4

Let me repeat: the reason why a genetics of behaviour still has to be
developed' seems to be that it cannot be developed with the existing
theoretical tools without reducing the whole attempt to absurdity.
It may still be possible, and even respectable today for a geneticist to
state that: "The hoary objection of the improbability of an eye or a
hand or a brain being evolved "by blind chance" has lost its force.' 5
But are we also to assume that the behaviour-patterns of the digger-
wasp, or of the courtship and fighting rituals of various species have
all evolved 'by pure chance'? This assumption is implied in the doctrine
of contemporary genetics though rarely stated in explicit form.
Similar assumptions fcave been made by extreme behaviourists in the
field of learning theory; there is, in fact, a direct continuity between
the doctrine of natural selection operating on random mutations, and
reinforcement operating on random trials. Both grew out of the same
philosophical climate. But while learning theory is in full retreat from
that extreme position, and has a variety of alternative suggestions to
offer, nothing the like is in sight in the genetics of instinct-behaviour.

Instinct and Learning

Learnt behaviour is built on the foundations of innate behaviour,
though it is often difficult, if not impossible, to tell where the 'founda-
tion' ends and the building' starts. But the absence of fool-proof
delineations between 'inheritance', 'maturation', and learning' need
not prevent us from recognizing the existence of distinct patterns of
animal behaviour which are (a) stereotyped, (b) species-specific, (c)
unlearnt in the sense that they can be shown to appear, more or less
completely, in animals raised in isolation. It has been objected against
this view that 'innate* behaviour, e.g. the pecking of chicks, may
partly be due to pre-natal influences, 6 that 'isolation' is never absolute, 7
and that learning may be practically instantaneous (as in imprinting).
Such arguments are valuable in showing that pure heredity sans
environment is an abstraction; but they do not alter the fact that each
animal is born with a hereditary potential to feed, hoard, court, nest,
fight, and care for its young in certain specific and highly characteristic
ways which are as much part of its native equipment as its morpho-
logical features, and which can be modified by, but are not derived
from, imitation and learning. Only the unbalanced claims of some
extreme behaviourists could temporarily obscure the obvious fact
that 'if the physical machinery for behaviour develops under genetic
control, then the behaviour it mediates can scarcely be regarded as
independent of inheritance'. 8

learning appears then as the adaptation of the innate potential to
lived experience. To quote the convergent definitions of one etholo-
gist and one psychologist: 'Learning is a central nervous process causing
more or less lasting changes in the innate behavioural mechanisms

under the influence of the outer world ' 9 'learning is a process by

which an activity originates or is changed through reacting to an en-
countered situation, provided that the characteristics of the change in
activity cannot be explained on the basis of native response tendencies,
maturation, or temporary states of the organism (fatigue, drugs, etc.)/ 10

It must be repeated, however, that outside the experimental labora-
tory it is virtually impossible to draw a precise distinction between the
'innate' and 'acquired' aspects or components in the adult animal's
behaviour. Even the discrimination of biologically relevant sign-
Gestalten in the environment seems to require a minimum of ex-
perience; and one must conclude, with Thorpe, that 'since comparison
involves learning, an element of learning enters into all orientation

477

478

THE ACT OP CREATION

and all perception. Accordingly it is suggested that the difference
between inborn and acquired behaviour is of degree rather than kind;
it becomes, in fact, a difference chiefly of degree of rigidity and plas-
ticity/ 11 In the terms of our schema, what is inherited is the specific
and invariant factor in the native skill its code. Its more or less
flexible matrix develops through learning from experience. To quote
Thorpe again:

'In each example of true instinctive behaviour there is a hard core of
absolutely fixed and relatively complex automatism an inborn move-
ment form. This restricted concept is the essence of the instinct itself.
Lorenz originally called it "Erbkoordination" or fixed action pattern.
Such action patterns are items of behaviour in every way as constant
as anatomical structures, and are potentially just as valuable for systema-
tic, philogenetic studies. Every systematist working with such groups
as birds or higher insects will be able to recall examples of the value of
such fixed behaviour patterns in classification/ 12

Tinbergens Hierarchy

Thus on the level of instinct-behaviour 'codes* appear in the guise of
fixed action-patterns, which incorporate the rules of the game of
courting, nest-building, duelling, etc. Each of these activities is again
a hierarchy of autonomous sub-skills. These tend to be more flexible
on the higher levels which co-ordinate the drive, and more rigid on
the lower levels. The autonomous sub-codes are restrained from
spontaneous activity by 'inhibitory blocks', and triggered into activity
by patterned impulses from higher echelons. This trigger-sensitive
apparatus is called, after Lorenz, the innate releasing mechanism or
I.R.M. for short:

'In all the channels which flow downward from the centre [of a
given drive], there is supposed to exist a physiological mechanism
which effectively prevents all discharge of activity unless the animal
encounters the right environmental situation and stimuli to remove or
release this block. Thus there is an innate releasing mechanism (LR,M.)
* . . which is in some way attuned to the biologically right stimulus in
the environment . . . and which is, as it were, unlocked by the app-
ropriate releaser, thus allowing behaviour to proceed to the next lower
level. These in their turn incorporate blocks and, so long as these
remain, action of these lower centres cannot proceed/ 13

CODES OP INSTINCT BEHAVIOUR

479

Tinbergen's famous example of the hierarchic control of instinct-
activity is the reproductive behaviour of the male stickleback, which
I shall describe in the terminology of the present theory.

Lcvctof the
Wtsummatory act

Figure 15

In spring the leng thening of days triggers off the small fish's 'migra-
ting code', while hormonal activities provide the drive or motivation.
The fish then migrates into shallow water and swims around until a
certain environmental configuration (rise of temperature, combined
with green vegetation, etc.) strikes the 'right note*, i.e. releases an
efferent impulse, which in turn triggers off the sub-code of the nest-
building activity. This activity is again subdivided into digging, glue-
ing, etc., each of these skills governed by its autonomous sub-code.
The latter are activated by trigger releasers; the order of operations is
determined by inputs from the environment and proprioceptive
feedbacks. The hierarchy of mating behaviour remains blocked until
nest-building is complete; but the 'fighting* hierarchy (with its five
different sub-codes) may be called at any moment into action by a
trigger mechanism sensitive to a specific sign-Gestalt input: 'red male
enteri ng te rritory'. In this case the fighting code dominates the animal's

48o

THE ACT OF CREATION

entire behaviour, and nest-building as well as other activities are in-
hibited while the emergency lasts: the (functional) part monopolizes
the attention of the whole.

The sub-units of the behaviour-pattern tend to become more
specific regarding input and more stereotyped in output on the lower
levels of the hierarchy. * Which one of the five motor responses belong-
ing to the fighting pattern will be shown depends on sign stimuli that
are still more restricted in effect.' 14 The nuptial colours of the fish are
shining blue eyes and a red underbelly. Accordingly, any crude model
which is red underneath will release an attack, regardless of shape and
size whereas a perfecdy shaped model without nuptial colouring will
not do so. Apart from colour, behaviour also acts as a releaser. *When
the stranger bites, the owner of the territory will bite in return.
When the stranger threatens, the owner will threaten back; when the

stranger flees, the owner will chase it; and so on 15 But fighting is

rarer than threat. The threat-behaviour of male sticklebacks is peculiar.
Not only do they dart towards the opponent with raised dorsal spines
and open mouth, ready to bite, but, when the opponent does not flee
at once but resists, the owner of the territory does not actually bite
but points its head down and, standing vertically in the water, makes
some jerky movements as if it were going to bore its snout into the
sand.' 16

This of course is an exceptional example ^nest-building is a rarity
among fish. But the rigidity of fixed action patterns in certain classes
such as birds and insects remains nevertheless a striking phenome-
non. The ritualized rules of the game of courtship and display, of threat
and danger signals, of tournament fighting and social behaviour, some-
times reminds one of the ceremonious observances at Byzantine
courts, at other times of the obsessive rituals of compulsion-neurotics.
And the process of 'ritualization' does indeed suggest the emancipation*
or isolation of a behaviour-pattern from its original context,
accompanied by intensification, stabilization, and rhythmic repetitive-
ness of the pattern; the reasons are as yet hardly understood. 17

Appetitive Behaviour and Consummately Act

In spite of the relatively stereotyped nature of fixed action-patterns
of which ritualization is an extreme example it would be entirely
wrong to regard the hierarchy of instinct behaviour as a one-way affair,

CODES OP INSTINCT BEHAVIOUR

481

in which a plastic, general drive (the 'appetitive behaviour) dis-
charges downward along pre-formed and discrete alternative channels
into the completely rigid and mechanical, fixed-action-patterns of the
'consummatory act\ This conception of the organism as an automaton
whose 'adaptability' is reduced to that of a kind of automatic record-
changer or jukebox, with a choice between a few dozen fixed records
appropriate to the occasion, seems to have originated in a misunder-
standing of the distinction made by Wallace Craig between appetitive
behaviour' and 'consummatory act'. This point must be briefly dis-
cussed as it is of some importance for the sections which follow.

Appetite (or 'appetance') was denned by Craig (191 8) as a 'state of
agitation', a striving for an absent 'appeted' stimulus (conversely, a
striving to escape from a noxious or disturbing stimulus); whereas the
'consummatory act' was meant to bring the activity to a close by
attaining (or escaping from) the appetitive stimulus, 'after which the
appetitive behaviour ceases and is succeeded by a state of relative rest'. 1 *
More generally, 'the term appetitive behaviour is used by present-day
writers on ethology to mean the flexible or variable introductory
phase of an instinctive behaviour pattern or sequence'. 1 *

Thus 'appetitive behaviour' became a more refined and noncom-
mittal name for the old, shop-soiled concepts of 'need', 'drive',
'instinct', and 'purpose'.* So far all was well; it was the 'consummatory
act', which led instinct-theory into a cul-de-sac. The trouble started*
rather inconspicuously, when first Woodworth 20 then, independently
from each other, K.* S. Lashley and Konrad Lorenz became impressed
with the stereotyped character of certain 'consummatory acts' (animal
rituals and automatized habits in humans), as compared with the more
general 'appetitive behaviour' or drive.** Eventually the focussing of
attention on such fixed patterns of behaviour led to a distortion of the
whole picture: Lorenz and Tinbergen made a rigid distinction between
appetitive behaviour which was supposed to be flexible, and con-
summatory acts which were supposed to be completely fixed and
automatic. Thus Tinbergen:

*It will be clear, therefore, that this distinction between appetitive
behaviour and consummatory act separates the behaviour as a whole
into two components of entirely different character. The consum-
matory act is relatively simple; at its most complex it is a chain of
reactions. . . . But appetitive behaviour is a true purposive activity,
offering all the problems of plasticity, adaptiveness, and of complex
integration that baffle the scientist in his study of behaviour as a whole.

482

THE ACT OF CREATION

. . . Lorenz has pointed out . . . that purposiveness, the striving towards
an end, is typical only of appetitive behaviour and not of consumma-
tely actions Whereas the consummatory act seems to be dependent

on the centres of the lowest level of instinctive behaviour, appetitive
behaviour may be activated by centres of all the levels above that of

the consummatory act 21 The centres of the higher levels do control

purposive behaviour which is adaptive with regard to the mechanisms
it employs to attain the end. The lower levels, however, give rise to
increasingly simple and more stereotyped movements, until at the
level of the consummatory act we have to do with an entirely rigid
component, the taxis, the variability of which, however, is entirely
dependent on changes in the outer world. This seems to settle the
controversy; the consummatory act is rigid, the higher patterns are
purposive and adaptive/ 22

But what exactly, one might ask, constitutes a 'consummatory act'?
A glance at Tinbergen's diagram on page 479, for instance, will show
that all actual manifestations of the reproductive instinct are classified
as 'consummatory acts', whereas 'building', 'fighting', etc., are merely
abstract, classificatory terms in which longer sequences of consum-
matory acts are bracketed together. Where, then, is the 'appetitive
behaviour'? In the stickleback's spring migration in search of a nesting
site? But that action-pattern was, judged by its dependence on specific
releasers (temperature, verdant vegetation, etc.) on the same 'con-
summatory' level as, for instance, 'testing of materials'. The nearest
Tinbergen gets to a definition of the consummatory act is in the
following passage:

'The activation of a centre of the lowest level usually, perhaps always,
results in a relatively simple motor response: biting, chasing, threaten-
ing, etc., in the case of fighting. . . . actual eating, actual escape, actual
coition, etc., in other instincts. . . . These relatively simple responses
are, usually, the end of a bout of prolonged activity, and their per-
formance seems to "satisfy" the animal, that is to say, to bring about a
sudden drop of motivation. This means that such an end-response
consumes the specific impulses responsible for its activation. Fighting,
eating, mating, "playing the broken wing" etc., are, as a rule, "self-
exhausting".' 23

However, neither 'digging' nor 'leading female to nest* is an end-
response, or self-exhausting, or leads to a 'drop in motivation'. 'Testing
of materials' is not a consummation, but a part-activity in the flexible,
i.e. 'appetitive*, pattern of%uilding. And the building activity is not a

CODES OP INSTINCT BEHAVIOUR

483

one-way affair in the sense of higher levels in the hierarchy discharging
along fixed conduits into the lower level of consumxnatory acts, along
irreversible gradients. On the contrary, the control of operations
oscillates all the time between different levels; the operational units
responsible for one kind of 'end-response* carry on until a centre on a
higher level, informed by feedback, switches to some other *con-
summatory act'. It is at this point that the concepts of 'hierarchies of
environment' and 'hierarchies of feedback* become important. In a
complex activity like nest-building, even the relatively stereotyped
operations on subordinate levels are under the dual control of their
fixed codes and variable environment; and furthermore, information
about their activities is constancy fed back (by proprioceptive and
exteroceptive channels) to higher centres, so that the whole always
remains in hierarchic control 'through regulation channels' of all of its
parts. Tinbergen's schema does not really represent an organismic
hierarchy, but a mechanical one rather like an automatized telephone
net-work where the subscriber making a trunk call first dials the code-
number of the whole town ('appetitive behaviour'), then the code of
his fiancee's local exchange (semi-appetitive, semi-consummatory?),
and lastly her personal number (consummatory act).

Thorpe, arguing on similar lines, has given an inventory, which
fills two printed pages, of the eighteen releasers and fourteen distinct
action-patterns in the Longtailed Tits' 'consummatory acts' of build-
ing a nest ending with the exclamation: 'So much for simplicity!' He
concludes:

It seems, then, that in much of appetitive behaviour the animal's
own activities . . . must be sel-rewarding and self-stimulating. ... In
other words, much appetitive behaviour is also in a sense the con-
summatory act 24 Hinde concludes that appetitive behaviour and

consummatory act differ only in degree, and that no absolute distinc-
tion can be made between them. Both are to some extent "spon-
taneous" in that they show evidence of external activation, and both
are stereotyped to some degree and show some rigidity. Thus the
classic examples of appetitive-behaviour and consummatory act can
be regarded as the two ends of a series ranging from extreme varia-
bility and plasticity on the one hand to almost complete fixity on the
other.'**

Many patterns of instinct-behaviour are of course cyclic: hunt-
ing > capturing > ingesting > digesting > hunting,

etc.; and all one can say about the sub-activities in the cycle is that they

484 THE ACT OF CREATION

are both 'appetitive* and 'consummately, but that some are more
appetitive and some more consummatory than others.

"What really matters in our context is the continuous scale of grada-
tions between rigid and flexible action-patterns. Somewhere near the
middle of the scale we find the common spider, whose web-making I
have already used as a paradigm for an invariant yet adaptable built-in
code (Book One, p. 38). It will suspend its familiar net from three,
four, or more points of attachment, according to the Be of the land;
yet the centre of the polygonal web will always coincide with its
centre of gravity and the radial threads will always intersect the lateral
threads at equal angles. We thus have a simple fixed code, yet a highly
flexible strategy. Moreover, if some of the garden spiders legs and
claws are amputated, it will still construct a more or less normal net
the code remains unaffected by the elimination of some members of
the matrix.

Leerlauf and Displacement

Towards the rigid' end of the scale we find reflex-like matrices, exem-
plified in the so-called Leerlauf activities. This term, too, was coined
by Lorenz; the current English translation is Vacuum activity' but
'freewheeling* would perhaps be more appropriate. Seagulls, reared
in isolation, will perform on the stone floor of the laboratory their
characteristic 'tap-dance* which, under normal circumstances, would
serve to bring small animals to the surface of the tidal mud. Cats will
go through the motion of burying their faeces on the kitchen tiles; and
hand-reared young flying-squirrels 'when given nuts, would go through
all the motions of burying them in the bottom of the wire-cage, and
then go away contented, even though the nuts were exposed to full
view*. 26 The same author describes the behaviour of hand-reared
tawny owls 'which, after being fed, would act as if pouncing upon
living prey though it had never had the experience of dealing with a
living mouse*. 27

Such examples of 'stupid', automaton-like behaviour are the stron-
gest evidence for innate codes of action. At the same time they are
also additional evidence against the chain-reflex theory of instinct-
behaviour: the owl, which has never seen a mouse, pounces after being
fed, and without any visual stimulus; in the gulTs case, the hard floor
of the laboratory is a stimulus quite different from the soft mud hence
the 'chain-reaction ought never to start, or to break off after the .first

CODES OF INSTINCT BEHAVIOUR

485

unsuccessful attempt at 'digging' the tiles. Instincts are purposive and
flexible, but their flexibility is limited to conditions more or less within
the experience of the race. In a crassly unnatural environment the
performance degenerates into 'freewheeling' and loses its purposive
aspect.

According to Lorenz's rather controversial theory, the motivation
of Leerlauf activity is derived from a 'damming up' of the animal's
'specific action potential' (SAP) which lowers the threshhold of the
innate releasing mechanism so that the action will go off even in
the absence of appropriate stimuli. Hence also the term 'overflow
activity'.

Another distortion of instinct-behaviour are the so-called displace-
ment activities which overlap with Leerlauf (and also with play). 'Dis-
placement is the performance of a behaviour pattern out of the
particular functional context of behaviour to which it is normally
related. It seems to appear when the charge (SAP) attached to one
instinct is denied opportunity for adequate discharge through its own
consummatory act or acts and instead "sparks over" to set going the
consummatory act of another instinct.' 28 A dog in its restraining harness
in a Pavlov-type laboratory, while expecting the fall of food from the
container, will stamp, yawn, and pant activities which do not belong
to his normal feeding behaviour; but what else, one may irreverently
ask, can the poor excited creature do? Pail-fed calves will suck the
ears or navels of their companions, as infants suck their thumbs. Some
birds play elaborate games, throwing up and catching sticks; so do
puppies; kittens will 'pretend* that a ball of wool is a mouse. Leerlauf
and 'displacement* thus comprise a broad range of activities which
occur in the absence of the proper stimulus or in the presence of
normally inadequate ersatz stimuli; or when the proper response is for
some reason blocked. Its human equivalents range from playful
activities to repetition compulsions and the formation of neurotic
ersatz symptoms.

Instinct and Originality

At the opposite end of the rigidity-flexibility scale we find adapta-
tions of instinct-based behaviour-patterns which give the impression
of original improvisation. Even the ritual-bound stickleback, that
stickler for etiquette, is capable of them: 'If the normal behaviour-
pattern is continually interfered with, quite large modifications in the

48(5

THE ACT OF CREATION

normal instinctive orientation of the nest-building movements may
be made/ 29

Thus the denial of normal outlets can lead either to the mechanical
reeling-off of the built-in pattern in freewheeling or displacement
activity; or to original re-adaptations of the pattern. "Which of these
alternative possibilities will occur depends on the nature of the chal-
lenge, and the animal's ripeness' to cope with it. What solution, after
all, could even a genius cat find to comply with its code of hygiene
on the kitchen tiles? What creative outlet is left to the squirrel to solve
his nut-hiding problem?

On the other hand, ethologists have produced many striking
examples of ingenious instinct-based behaviour in the face of ad-
versity. The female of a certain wasp, Eumenes conica, builds clusters of
clay-cells or pots, deposits an egg in each, provisions it with cater-
pillars for food, then closes the cells with clay lids. If now an artificial
hole is made in a cell, the wasp will first stuff the caterpillars which
have fallen out back through the hole, then mend the hole with a
pellet of clay operations which are quite different from her normal
building routines. Hingston 30 has described in detail the actions of
another wasp Rkynchium nitiderium in repairing a man-made hole
in a clay-pot. On one occasion the female tried for two hours to mend
the hole with bits of material taken from the wall of the pot. Then
night came and she had to give up. Next morning she flew straight to
the damaged spot and set about repairing it by a different strategy.
In the normal course of events the wasp works from outside. But now,
in order to repair the hole, 'she examines it from both sides and then,
having made a choice, elects to do the repair from within'. 31

Equally surprising is the ingenuity of the caddis-fly larva. If a group
of larvae are ejected from the tubular 'houses' which they built, and
are then allowed to return, they often get mixed up and enter the
wrong 'house' which is either too big or too small. The larva then
sets about to cut off parts of the tube or to add to it, until it fits it
exactly. Again the 'consummatory acts' in these activities are quite
different from those in normal building.

Many birds, too, are capable of such 'super-flexible' behaviour in
emergencies. If their brood is taken away, they will re-start their
sexual cycle, court and mate out of season, and get a new family
going. In some species, in the absence of the female, the male bird
takes over her dudes in feeding the young which never happens
under normal conditions.

CODES OF INSTINCT BEHAVIOUX

487

Lastly, a brief mention must be made of 'supra-individual codes'
such as those which regulate activities in the honey-bee hive. Lindauer,
among others, has shown that 'the programme of work carried out by
the individual is not determined by the physiological state of the insect
but is dictated by the needs of the colony as a whole'. 32 An individual
worker-bee hardly ever builds a complete cell. She may start the cell,
with wax from her own glands, then complete another cell, started by
a colleague, using her own wax or that of another bee whichever
happens to be convenient. Generally, there is rigid division of labour
according to age groups: each worker has to perform a different kind
of * National Service' in different periods of its life. During her first
three days, she works as a cell-cleaner. For the next three days she feeds
the older larvae with honey and pollen from the stores. Then she
feeds the younger larvae, who get an additional diet a liquid secreted
from glands on the worker's head. At the age of ten days she is en-
gaged in complex household chores and building activities. At twenty
days she takes over guard duties at the entrance of the hive; and finally,
she becomes a forager and remains one until the end of her life. But
even among the foragers there is further specialization of labour: some
of them become 'scouts', whose task it is to discover new sources of
food, and to communicate, on their return, the nature and location of
it, in their dance-language, to the hive. 33

But this is not all. If one of the specialized age-groups is artificially
eliminated from the colony, a kind of collective super-flexibility mani-
fests itself in the hive: other age-groups deputize for the vanished
group 'and thus save the superorganism. When, for instance, all
pollen-and-honey foragers are taken away usually bees of twenty
days or over young bees of scarcely six days old, who normally feed
the larvae, fly out and become foragers. If all building workers are
taken away those between eighteen and twenty days oldtheir task
is taken on by older bees who had already been builders before, but
who had gone on to the stage of forager. To this end they not only
change their behaviour, but also regenerate the wax-glands. The
mechanisms of these regulations are not known.' 34

Thus at one end of the scale we find rituals, fixed action-patterns,
vacuum and displacement activities rigid, automatized, and compul-
sive, petrified habits of unknown phylogenetic origin. At the other
extreme we find supra-individual codes which govern behaviour of
remarkable flexibility, and original adaptations which lie outside the

488

THE ACT OF CREATION

animal's normal skills and habit repertory. In all forms of social
organization from courtship, mating, and fighting rituals, through
territorial demarcations, up to the complex insect state, we find an
interlocking of individual behaviour-patterns into a collective super-
code which casts the individual bird or bee into the role of a part in
the social whole. Thus we see the hierarchic part-whole relationship
repeated on the level of social organization, where the integrative
functions of catalyzers, inductors, and nerve impulses are superseded
by interlacing systems of social releasers, including communication
by signs and symbol from display, through bird-song, to the dance-
language of the honey-bee.

NOTES

To p. 481. The equivalent of the term 'appetitive behaviour' in American
behaviourist theory are Hull's drive-stimulus (S D ); and his 'fractional ante-
dating goal-stimuli and responses' (S Q Re).

Tc p. 481. Out of this grew the theory that the fixed pattern of the con-
summatory act and not the 'appeted stimulus' is the goal of the animal's
striving and the sourc* of the 'action-specific energy' of the drive; but the subject
is outside the scope of this book.

VII

IMPRINTING AND IMITATION

So far we have discussed the codes of morphogenesis and innate
behaviour, which emerge ready-made from the black boxes of
evolution like Ali Baba's thieves, popping out of the urns in
which they were hiding.

In the chapters which follow we shall discuss the ontogenesis of
behavioural codes the acquisition of habits, knowledge, skills, by the
processes of learning from experience.

The 'Following-response

The transition from innate to learnt behaviour is sharply highlighted
in the phenomena of imprinting. The follow-the-leader response of the
gosling is governed by an innate code; it must stick to the mother-
goose or perish. But like many phylogenetically acquired codes it seems
to have been formed according to the principle of parsimony. It can
be triggered off by any releaser which satisfies very broad Gestalt
criteria of 'goose-likeness* including German ethologists and even
inanimate moving objects of a certain size. In a normal environment
this would indeed be sufficient to ensure the gosling's survival, since
the first sizeable moving creature seen would be the mother-goose.
Accordingly, a young goose, reared from the egg in isolation (or in
the incubator) will accept during the brief critical period of matura-
tion when imprinting occurs its human keeper as its 'mother*, and
follow him around. Once this has happened the process becomes more
or less irreversible: the 'imprinted* bird will reject the company of
other geese and attach itself only to members of the human species
treating them as parents, companions, and later on as objects of sexual

489

490

THE ACT OF CREATION

advances. Many other birds, and possibly also some fish and insects,
show the phenomena of imprinting in varying degrees.

Here, then, we have a pregnant example of the genesis of a matrix
through the integration of innate and acquired behaviour-patterns.
The built-in 'following response* has the characteristic autonomy of
motor-patterns which we have met before: it is triggered off and modi-
fied, but not created by the environmental input. The first step in the
development of the matrix is the act of imprinting itself; it must occur,
as already mentioned, during the critical phase when the young bird
is susceptible for it (in ducks, for instance, between eleven and eighteen
hours after birth, with a pointed peak in the susceptibility curve at
sixteen hours). 1 The input which triggers off the following-response
is at this stage an undifferentiated and primitive sign-releaser: 'Large
moving object' much simpler in character than the more specific
Gestalt stimuli which release the fighting or mating instinct in the
stickleback (red belly', 'swollen belly*) or the begging response of the
herring-gull chick (red spot on beak').

The next stage is one of perceptual learning. After a few hours, even a
few minutes, of following a human being, the gosling will follow only
human beings it has somehow learned to 'abstract', or 'encode' in its
memory some specific Gestalt-characteristics of homo sapiens which
distinguish it from other 'shapes that move*. On the other hand, at
this stage all human beings are still 'equipotentiaT members of the
emergent perceptual matrix. At a still later stage, the goose may
become attached to one or more single individuals, that is to say, it
learns to discriminate individuals within the species as, vice versa,
animal breeders learn to sharpen their perception and to distinguish
one sheep or goose from another.

We thus meet, already on this level, the twin phenomena involved
in all learning processes: generalization ('transfer', 'abstraction ) and
discrimination (segregation of pattern, selective inhibition of responses
to non-specific stimuli). These basic processes will be discussed later
(Chapter X); in the meantime, let us note that the innate, primitive
'rule of the game' which made the new-born animal respond to 'things-
that-move', has been sharpened and elaborated into a more complex
set of rules by a series of steps. Each of these steps involved a re-
structuring of the perceptual matrix by successive generalizations and
discriniinations which we may regard as quasi-extensions of func-
tional integration and structural differentiation into the learning pro-
cess. Morphogenesis and learning form continuous series which over-

IMPRINTING AND IMITATION

491

lap during maturation; and the matrices of innate and acquired be-
haviour form an equally continuous hierarchy.

Bird-song and Parrot-talk

There are no sharply defined boundaries between imprinting and learn-
ing by imitation, or by trial and error. The word sprinting' itself is
a translation of Heinroth's Pragung, 2 by which he meant to indicate
the dramatic form of learning in birds which we have just discussed.
Its chief characteristics are: it is species-specific and directly dependent
on innate organization; quasi-instantaneous; and limited to a relatively
brief period in the animal's life. By applying these criteria, Thorpe has
extended the concept of imprinting to include a bird's instantaneous
attachment to territory, its occasional attachment not only to humans
but also to other animals and even inanimate objects; and lastly, the
song-bird's way of learning its species-characteristic song'. 3

Apparently in some birds such as thrushes, warblers, pippits, the
whole song is genetically 'built in' and can be but slightly modified by
learning; while in others, for instance the skylark, it is mainly learned.
In chaffinches Thorpe has shown that while the basic pattern of the
song is innate, all the finer detail and much of the pitch and rhythm
have to be acquired by learning.'* We have here another example
of a 'roughed-in' pattern (p. 470) whose details are filled in later
by that particular type of 'feedback' process which constitutes
learning.

When we turn to imitative bird-song and parrot-talk, the part played
by innate organization is obviously less specific and the part played by
learning much greater; yet the difference is again one of degree. In
fact, Pragung means stamping (a coin), which makes the continuity
between imprinting and 'stamped-in learning' even more obvious.**
Less obvious, however, is the biological purpose or adaptive value of
the striking capacity of parrots, mocking-birds, starlings, etc., to imi-
tate the songs of entirely alien species ^including 'God Save the
King', 4 Now parrots living in freedom in their natural environment
utter only a few fixed, simple types of cries; yet folklore apart, we have
no lesser authority than Lashley describing a captive parrot with a
'vocabulary' of between fifty and a hundred words; and there is
reliable evidence 5 that both parrots and robins can learn to utter certain
words meaningfully. Granted that vocal imitation, as McDougall

492

THE ACT OF CREATION

has pointed out, 6 is a special case owing to the close integration
of auditory-vocal patterns, one must nevertheless admit that such
imitative ability is 'a further example of pre-adaptation for apparently
remote and unlikely contingencies, specialization going in advance of
immediate adaptive requirement, and as such on a par with the
astonishing number-sense which can be developed in many species
by careful training. Such a counting ability seems to offer even less
practical advantage for a wild bird than the features we have been
considering; all are as yet somewhat mysterious. , 7 (The counting ability
of birds was revealed in Otto Koehler's famous experiments, to be
discussed later.) Ethologists such as Koehler (not to be confused with
Wolfgang Kohler), Lorenz, Craig, and Thorpe all agree that the tonal
purity, the t inventiveness , and improvisation in the advanced forms of
bird-song should be regarded as 'the first steps in both music and
speech'. 8

To mention one example among many: Waite, at the Museum
in Sydney, owned an Australian magpie whom he taught by playing
on the flute a fifteen-note melody in two distinct phrases'. Some years
later he got a second magpie which learned the tune from, the first.
The two birds then developed the habit of singing it antiphonally,
the first singing the first phrase, and the second only the second. 'Later
the second, younger, bird died whereupon the first resumed its per-
formance of the whole.' 9

Examples like this show not only the great flexibility of these
auditory-vocal matrices. They also show that the total pattern the
rudimentary code of the hand-reared chaffinch develops first, and
that learning the song does not consist in the chaining of individual
notes according to the S.-R. scheme, but in the elaboration and varia-
tion of the pattern. We further note that originality or 'inventiveness'
make their appearance at only a few removes from innate and im-
printed behaviour. Lasdy, the striking learning abilities of some birds,
which are only revealed under the abnormal conditions of captivity
these examples of *pre-adaptations for remote and unlikely contin-
gencies' remind us of regenerative potentials manifested in response to
traumatic challenges.

Untapped Resources

We have seen evidence of this latent super-flexibility of 'doing won-
ders' in adversity on every level: from the restoration of locomotive

IMPRINTING AND IMITATION

493

patterns in mutiliated insects and rats, through the emergency redistri-
bution of labour in the beehive, up to the solution of blocked problems
by * thinking aside'. In recent years, unsuspected learning abilities were
revealed in such widely different classes as flatworms, dolphins, and
seals the latter, apparently, can even be taught to obey visual sign-
commands printed on cards. Yet the evidence for a surplus, or reserve,
of learning potentials far surpassing immediate adaptive needs has
always been there in our own species: ten thousand years ago our
ancestors fought with clubs and arrows, but the structure of their
brains was the same as ours, and therefore potentially just as capable
of learning Boolean Logics or the principles of making a nuclear bomb.
Even the dumb fish have been shown to have optical capacities for
form and colour discrimination far in advance of their needs under
natural conditions. Thorpe comments: 'It does indeed seem to be a
general feature of animal life that the precision and sensitivity of sense
organs is higher than the environment would appear to justify. This
fact poses a serious problem for students of evolution, since it is not
easy to account for such perfection on the basis of natural selection
alone/*

It seems that this overshooting of the mark, this giving more than was
asked for, is an inherent characteristic of the mechanism of evolution.
In homo sapiens the 'overshooting* is demonstrated by the fact that
mental evolution learning to exploit the surplus potentials in his
brain has been going on for an astronomical period, and with no end
in sight. The problem is not so much why mental evolution occurs in
man, but why no similar phenomenon learning to use their native
equipment to maximum capacity seems to have occurred in any
other species, although many animals demonstrate the existence of
their untapped resources in captivity. (Animals, it is true, keep no
written records of their discoveries, but these could have been trans-
mitted by imitative learning.) All this is a nice subject for speculations
on a rainy day; the important point in our context is the hard core of
evidence to show that various animals reveal in captivity various
degrees of originality and resourcefulness which are not displayed
under natural conditions. Most animals seem to have more sensitive
organs than they need, and more latent capabilities than they ever learn
to actualize, except when challenged under propitious circumstances.
That bar-pressing experiments with rats are not the type of challenge
designed to elicit original responses, need not be emphasized, and it is
not surprising, therefore, that leading Behaviourists have either denied

494

THE ACT OF CREATION

the occurrence of original responses or put them down to chance.
We shall return to the subject in later chapters.

NOTES

To p. 491. The chaffinch song consists of three distinct and well-articulated
phrases. Hand-reared chaffinches produce a much simplified, rudimentary variant
of the song, where the first and second phrase are often inseparable, and the third
partly or wholly missing. But and this is the elegant point of the experiment
if the young bird is left to be reared by its parents, then taken away and isolated
in September, that is to say, long before it starts singing, it will nevertheless burst
into normal song next spring. Apparently 'these birds have by their first Septem-
ber learned that the song "should" be in three phrases and that the terminal phrase
should contain a more or less elaborate flourish*. Thus 'on the perceptory side
the process of recognizing and accepting the specific song as henceforth the
"normal" for the individual (as distinct from the acquisition of the new motor
habits involved in performing the song) seems to resemble the original examples
of imprinting [the following response] sufficiently close to warrant considering
them together' (Thorpe, 1956, p. 375).

Top. 491. In the human child, processes analogous to Pragung may perhaps
be responsible for producing infantile fixations and fetishistic rituals. The cases
of boot-fetishism, for instance, frequently reported in works on sexual pathology
remind one of imprinting by inanimate objects such as a gander's seven-year
fixation on an oildrum, reported by Thorpe (p. 365). A further analogy may be
found between Gestalt-sign releasers, based on the vital statistics of film-stars, and
Tinbergen's simplified laboratory models of the pregnant stickleback.

Top. 493. Thorpe continues: 'However, the answer may be that the nature
of sensory nervous mechanisms is such that to achieve full efficiency at the normal
levet of stimulation, the threshold must be much lower.' (Thorpe, 1956, p. 283).
But other passages which I have quoted show that he does not regard this ex-
planation as satisfactory.

VIII

MOTIVATION

Retrospect

Future historians will probably regard it as significant that
throughout the first half of the twentieth century the dominant
schools of psychology even schools as far apart as behaviourism
and psychoanalysis recognized only one basic type of motivation,
and that a negative one: the reduction of biological needs and drives,
the diminution of tension, escape from anxiety. 'At the level of ego-
psychology', wrote Mowrer in his survey on 'Motivation* in the
Annual Review for 1952, 1 'there may be said to be only one master
motive: anxiety.*

The trend seems to have originated in the climate of the Darwinian
revolution independently in Germany and America, with Fechner's
(1873) 'Tendenz zur Stabilitat' and Thorndike's (1898) 'Law of Effect'.
Freud (1920), acknowledging his indebtedness to Fechner, postulated
his own Principle of Parsimony, according to which 'the course of
mental events is invariably set in motion by an unpleasurable tension,
and it takes a direction such that its final outcome coincides with a
lowering of that tension'. Thus pleasure is derived from 'the diminu-
tion, lowering, or extinction of psychic excitation' and 'un-pleasure
[Uitlust, dysphoria, as distinct from physical pain] from an increase of
it'. The organism tends towards stability a kind of homeostasis,
applied not only to autonomic regulations but also to voluntary
behaviour; it is guided by 'the striving of the mental apparatus to keep
the quantity of excitations present in it as low as possible or at least
constant. Accordingly, everything that tends to increase the quantity
of excitation, must be regarded as adverse to this tendency, that is to
say, as unpleasurable.* 2

Now this is of course true, in a broad sense, in so far as the frustration
or satisfaction of primary biological needs is concerned. But it passes

495

496

THE ACT OP CREATION

in silence a whole class of experiences to which we commonly refer as
pleasurable excitement 9 . The preHminaries of love-making cause an
increase in sexual tension and should, according to the theory, be un-
pleasant which they are decidedly not. It is curious that in the works
of Freud there is no answer to be found to this embarrassingly banal
objection. The sex-drive in the Freudian system is essentially some-
thing to be disposed q/^-through the proper channels or by sublimation;
pleasure is derived not from its pursuit, but from getting rid of it.
One might argue that in Freud's universe there is no place for amorous
love-play because Freud, like D. H. Lawrence, was basically a puritan
with a horror of frivolity, who treated sex 'mit tierischem Ernst' * But
arguments ad hominem do not explain the general trend in the first half
of the century to interpret motivation as something negative. As
Hilgard raefully remarked, 3 the 'Zeitgeist favoured our seeing incen-
tives not as providing something sought after for what was inherent
in the incentive, but something providing relief. The incentive was
seen as an avenue of escape from pain, anxiety, tension/ Just as Freud's
libido-theory had no room for dalliance, so learning-theory had no
room for curiosity or learning-by-play.

Thorndike's 'Law of Effect' was essentially a stick-and-carrot theory;
the reward (and to a lesser degree, punishment) is the factor which
stamps in the correct responses in learning, and stamps out the in-
correct ones. In the extreme behaviourist systems of Watson and
Guthrie, the mechanization of the living organism is complete: con-
tiguity is the basic factor in producing associative S.-R. bonds, and
motivation has virtually disappeared from the picture. Nor is any
theory of motivation allowed to enter into Skinner's concept of
'operant behaviour'. His system is by programme confined to the
description of experimental operations, preferably in quantitative
terms. The effects of different rates and sequences of positive and
negative reinforcers are counted and plotted; die entity on which they
act is the 'operant strength', which in turn is measured by the rate
and number of responses during extinction; but the motivation of the
animal is represented by a single, crude variable: the number of hours
in which the rat had been deprived of food. Optimum learning results
from the combination of the appropriate number of hours of de-
privation with the appropriate rate of applying positive reinforcers,
i.e. stimuli of the type, one might say, which are apt to deprive the
organism of its deprivation. Differences between the learning abilities
of various species, or of age groups within a species, are not considered

MOTIVATION

497

to be relevant to this type of 'functional analysis' of behaviour. By the
same method of selective reinforcement, by 'baiting' each step in a
series of steps, pigeons can be trained to describe a figure-eight with
their heads held high, and students can be trained to select the right
answer among several alternatives and to punch it into the tape of the
learning machine the reinforcement in this case being that the tape
moves on to the next question. Since each reinforcer is a drive-reducer,
learning becomes a process of progressive de-motivation.

Hull did not share Skinner's rigidly positivistic, hypotheses-non-jingo
attitude. He kept elaborating and modifying his theory until his death
in 195 1 ; the system has been described as the last and most impressive
attempt to build an edifice on S.-R. foundations. His emphasis gradually
shifted from primary to secondary drives and secondary rewards; and
from need-reduction to drive-stimulus reduction (eating eliminates
the stimulus of the hunger-drive but not the biological need which will
be satisfied only later by digestion). This made the system more
elastic, yet in spite of these refinements, the primitive drives of hunger,
sex, avoidance of pain, were considered to be the only motivational
factors in learning. To quote Hebb's (1949) summing up of Hull's
theory: 'Its weakest point, and clearest departure from the facts, is in
the treatment of motivation as biological need. According to the
theory, the rat in the maze should learn nothing about it until one of
his responses is accompanied by a decrease of hunger or thirst, or
escape from electric shock, or some similar reward. In actual fact, when
he is allowed to run in the maze without reward or punishment, the
rat learns a good deal about it. It is clear of course that the primitive
drives of pain, hunger, and sex are often of overwhelming impor-
tance. We need an approach to motivation that neither minimizes
these things nor fails to provide for the unrewarded learning
that also occurs when the animal's belly is full and his sex drive
satisfied/ 4

If we turn to the opposite camp Tolman and the Gestalt psycholo-
gists the emphasis shifts from the need-reducing to the goal-seeking
aspects of behaviour. In classical Gestalt theory, motivation by rewards,
usually in the form of bananas, is taken for granted; it does not question
the effect of reward on learning, the dispute is about whether this effect
is achieved by stamping in or by insight. Similar considerations apply
to Tolmans sign4earning theory, although he has progressed a con-
siderable step further by his explicit rejection of reinforcement theories,
by his emphasis on 'expectancy' and 'purposiveness', on latent learning

498

THE ACT OF CREATION

and 'creative instability'. Lastly, Kurt Lewin's 'psychological field
theory', with its complex and changing motivation, its concepts of
'ego-involvement' and levels of aspiration'; above all with its notion
of striving after 'success' (which is subjective and relative in contrast
to reinforcement by tangible rewards), played an important part in
promoting that change of climate which has been increasingly notice-
able since about 1950.

Decline of the Reflex

This new orientation seems to be the cumulative efiect of independent
developments in several fields, such as: (a) disillusionment regarding
the utility of the reflex-formula both in neurology and psychology;

(b) rediscovery of the fact that organisms are not passive masses of
software reacting to environment, but 'open systems', feeding on
'negative entropy', engaged in spontaneous activities on all levels, and

(c) that animals are capable of 'latent' learning in the absence of tan-
gible rewards, motivated solely by their exploratory drive.

(a) The physiological concept of the reflex arc, which even Sherring-
ton considered as no more than a 'useful fiction , has become an
anachronism * The Pavlovian conditioned reflex was another useful
fiction which exercised at first a stimulating, then a paralysing effect
a phenomenon frequently met in the history of science. In Hebb's
words: 'Pavlov has deservedly had a great influence on psychology,
and his theory has not been rejected because it is too physiological but
because it does not agree with experiment.' There is no need to re-
capitulate the evidence which has led to this rejection. 5 'Conditioning*
is still a useful term when applied to induced changes in glandular
and visceral reactions, but leads to confusion when used in a loose,
analogical way for other types of learning.

The last blow to the reflex-arc concept came with the discovery that
it was impossible to make a precise distinction between 'stimuli' and
'responses'. As already mentioned (p. 435) not only motor units, but
also sensory receptors display constant spontaneous activity in the
absence of external stimulation. 6 External events alter the pattern of
this spontaneous activity, but this in itself does not yet constitute a
stimulus. The receptors are under efferent control from higher levels
of the central nervous system; the acceptance, suppression, or modi-
fication of the input starts on the periphery, and the centre decides
what shall constitute a stimulus and what shall not. Even the stretch-

MOTIVATION

499

sensitive receptors in muscle spindles are controlled by efferent fibres
from the centre. In other words, 'stimuli* and responses' are not one-
way processes, and cannot be isolated: 'because stimulus and res-
ponse are correlative and contemporaneous, the stimulus processes
must be thought of not as preceding the response but rather as guiding
it to a successful elimination of the incongruity. That is to say, stimu-
lus and response must be considered as aspects of a feedback loop. . . . 7
These properties are a far cry from the ubiquitous S.-R. reflex arc
diagrams that grace (more appropriately one wants to say "disgrace")
today's texts' (Pribram). 8

It is historically interesting that an independent but parallel softening-
up process of the hard and fast S.-R. concept took place at the same
time in psychology, e.g. in Skinner's and Hull's systems. Skinner was
careful to state that he used the word 'reflex' not in an anatomical or
neurological sense but as a purely psychological, descriptive term for
the 'unit of behaviour'. But his definition of the unit was constantly
shifting and changing. 'A reflex is not, of course, a theory. It is a fact.
It is an analytical unit, which makes the investigation of behaviour
possible. 9 The appearance of smooth curves in dynamic processes
marks a unique point in the progressive restriction of a preparation,
and it is to this uniquely determined entity that the term "reflex" may
be assigned.' 10

As Miller et al were to comment, to define the reflex in terms of tie
smoothness of curves is a 'somewhat odd approach'. 11 Yet even so it
did not work: 'Skinner's "unit appropriate for experimental study"
turns out, in fact, to have a measure of arbitrariness about it. . . . Some-
times the functional unit is a simple response, sometimes a complex act,
sometimes a rate of responding. The unit no longer has the clean dimen-
sions of a correlation between a class of stimuli and a class of responses
as implied in the original concept of a reflex. The atom of behaviour
proves to be evasive/ 12 In the later versions of Skinner's system the
stimulus no longer even precedes the response: in operant behaviour
the organism emits responses in search of a stimulus as it were. The
reflex as a unit of behaviour has evaporated like the physicist's hard
little lumps of matter.

Skinner's experimental work had some lasting merits. He was among
the first to demonstrate that 'intermittent reinforcement' where only
some correct responses are rewarded can be as efFective as the consistent
rewarding of all correct responses. Humphreys 13 then showed that
random rewards are actually a superior (more extinction-resistant)

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THE ACT OF CREATION

form of training the rat thus trained is less discouraged when the
reward is withheld, than the rat trained by the consistent-reward
method. From this there was only one logical step to Tolman's
theory of motivation by expectancy a step which Skinner never
took.

In Hull's case the 'softening-up' process took a different course. In
his later years, Hull's attention shifted more and more from primary
biological drives to secondary drives (from the need' to the 'taste'
or 'appetite'). These secondary drives he saw manifested in antici-
patory events 'fractional antedating goal-responses Rq\ and 'frac-
tional antedating goal-stimuli S Q \ 'The fractional antedating re-
action (R G ) with its proprioceptive stimulus correlate (S G ), provides
for the "automatic (stimulus) guidance of organismic behaviour to
goals"/ The great importance Hull attached to this postulate is illus-
trated by his comment: 'Further study of this major automatic device
presumably will lead to the detailed behavioural understanding of
thought and reasoning, which constitutes the highest attainment of

organic evolution. Indeed the R S G mechanism leads in a stricdy

logical manner into what was formerly regarded as the very heart of
the psychic: interest, planning, foresight, foreknowledge, expectancy,
purpose, and so on.' 14

From a strictly logical point of view, the postulate makes no sense
as Hilgard has pointed out in a careful analysis because S Q acts at
the same time as a producer of the secondary drive S D and as a secon-
dary reinforcer which reduces S D . 15 Hilgard put down this confusion
as a sign of logical weakness in Hull;* yet he did not seem to realize
that Hull was intuitively on the right track, that the contradiction is
merely an apparent one, and vanishes if one stops thinking in terms of
need-reducing motivation. 'That stimulus associated with reinforce-
ment could become at once both a drive and a reinforcing agent* sounds
like a contradiction, but makes eminent sense if, getting rid of the
dreadful terminology, we translate it as follows: 'A rewarding ex-
perience can at the same time be both an incentive and a reward'; or
even simpler: *Some pursuits are self-rewarding*. That is the implied
conclusion of Hull's eighth and last postulate which he regarded as the
crowning achievement of his system. That he himself did not realize
this implication only shows that the once useful S.-R. formula had
by that time become a strait-jacket to thought.

Hunger, Fear, and Curiosity

It took natural philosophy nearly a thousand years to rediscover that
the earth is round; it took experimental psychology nearly fifty years
to rediscover, after its Dark Ages of need-reducing S.-R. theories, that
rats and men are pleasure-seeking creatures, that some activities are
pleasurably self-rewarding, and that exploring the environment,
solving a chess problem, or learning to play the guitar are among these
activities.

An interesting reflection on the spirit of the times was the long,
impassioned controversy which followed the earth-shaking discovery
that rats who were allowed to familiarize themselves with the maze
by running around in it without reward, got quicker to the food-box
when this was eventually put in than the control rats who ran the
maze for the first time. How could the rat profit from its previous
experience in the maze without being rewarded by food or punished
by electric shock? As Berlyne put it: 'There are plenty of experiments
to show that latent maze-learning can occur in the rat, which is em-
barrassing for those whose theories are not built to assimilate it. . . .
Where does the reinforcement for these responses come from? Several
writers have considered the possibility that it comes from the reduction
of curiosity/ 16 Other writers suggested that it came from the drive-
reducing diminution of boredom. One might as well say that com-
posing a song is a silence-reducing activity.

There have been throughout these Dark Ages voices crying in
the wilderness', but they were dismissed as old-fashioned. Thus
McDougall (1923) kept reaffirming that the earth was round and that
striving towards a goal was often more satisfactory than reaching it.
Allport held that activities originally derived from biological needs
may become autonomous and self-rewarding: 'The characteristic
feature of such striving is its resistance to equilibrium: tension is main-
tained rather than reduced/ 17 Goldstein emphasized the tendency of
organisms towards 'self-actualization. 18 But the revival of a dynamic
psychology which reinstated the academic respectability of such terms
as curiosity, exploratory drive, purpose, only came about when experi-
mental evidence showed that even in the rat the urge to explore may
prevail over hunger and fear.

The experiments of Harlow, Montgomery, Butler, Hudson, etc.,
on rats and monkeys showed what naturalists had always known
that animals are inquisitive, that they have an urge to manipulate,

501

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THE ACT OF CREATION

explore, to look what's inside', which is independent from such bio-
logical drives as hunger, sex, and fear or, rather, that the exploratory
drive itself stems from a primary biological need. They showed that
exploratory behaviour may combine with, or enter the service of,
hunger or fear, but that it may also compete with and sometimes
assert itself against them; and that novelty, surprisingness, or puzzle-
ment are as real incentives to learning as pellets of food dropped into
the Skinner box. 19

As far back as 1930 Nissen had found that rats would cross an elec-
trified grill to reach a maze which contained nothing but some unusual
objects; he concluded that an exploratory urge did exist 'a biogenic
drive to explore, perceive, to know'. 20 Experiments by Hudson,
Berlyne, and Walley, in which rats were punished for approaching
some novel visual pattern, led them to conclude that 'objects that have
become associated with danger are often explored before they are
shunned*. 21 Carr and Williams 22 showed that the exploratory drive
varies with heredity and environment: hooded rats explore more than
black rats, and black rats more than Albino rats. Montgomery and
Barnett 23 showed that wild rats are more frightened, tame rats more
attracted by novelty; Thompson and Heron 24 that young animals
are more curious than old ones, and as one would expect that
female rats are more inquisitive than males. 25 Confronted with novel
situations, hungry rats interrupt their feeding to explore their surround-
ings; 26 but rats whose cerebral cortex has been removed in part, while
still capable of learning to run a maze to get at food, show a diminished
tendency to exploration. They 'do not evince the preference for a
variable path over a standardized path that is characteristic of a normal
rat, except when the variable path is the shorter. Brain-damaged rats
likewise show less variability of route in a Dashiell maze.' 27 Yet, as
Lashley's rats have shown, even depriving the creature of substantial
portions of its brain does not make it conform to the S.-R. ideal.

On higher levels of the animal kingdom the evidence becomes less
monotonous and depressing. What a relief to get out of the Skinner
box and to read Lorenz's description of curiosity battling with fear
in one of his birds: 28

'A young raven, confronted with a new object, which may be a
camera, an old bottle, a stuffed polecat, or anything else first reacts
with escape responses. He will fly up to an elevated perch and, from
this point of vantage, stare at the object literally for hours. After this,

MOTIVATION

503

he will begin to approach the object very gradually, maintaining all
the while a maximum of caution and the expressive attitude of
intense fear. He will cover the last distance from the object hopping
sideways with half-raised wings, in the utmost readiness to flee. At
last, he will deliver a single fearful blow with his powerful beak at

the object and forthwith fly back to his safe perch ' In the end 'he

will grab [the object] with one foot, peck at it, try to tear off pieces,
insert his bill into any existing cleft and then pry apart his mandibles
with considerable force. Finally, if the object is not too big the raven
will carry it away, push it into a convenient hole and cover it with
some inconspicuous material.'

As for primates, we can comfortably fall back on Darwin's Descent
of Man:

'All animals feel Wonder, and many exhibit Curiosity. They sometimes
suffer from this latter quality, as when the hunter plays antics and thus
attracts them; I have witnessed this with deer, and so it is with the
wary chamois, and with, some kinds of wild-ducks. Brehm gives a
curious account of the instinctive dread, which his monkeys exhibited,
for snakes; but their curiosity was so great that they could not desist
from occasionally satiating their horror in a most human fashion, by
lifting up the lid of the box in which the snakes were kept.' Darwin
was 'so much surprised at this account* that he proceeded to the
monkey-house at the Zoological Gardens armed with a stuffed snake,
a dead fish, a mouse, and a live turtle:

'The excitement thus caused was one of the most curious spectacles
which I ever beheld.' The greatest success was the turtle. The monkeys

'showed unbounded astonishment, as well as some fear This was

displayed by their remaining motionless, staring intently with widely
opened eyes, their eyebrows being often moved up and down. Their
faces seemed somewhat leng thened. They occasionally raised them-
selves on their hindlegs to get a better view. They often retreated a few
feet, and then turning their heads over one shoulder, again stared in-
tently In the course of a few minutes some of the monkeys ven-
tured to approach and touch the turtle. ... I then placed a live snake
in a paper bag, with the mouth loosely closed, in one of the larger
compartments. One of the monkeys immediately approached, cau-
tiously opened the bag a little, peeped in, and instantly dashed away.
Then I witnessed what Brehm has described, for monkey after monkey,
with head raised high and turned on one side, could not resist taking a

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THE ACT OF CREATION

momentary peep into the upright bag, at the dreadful object lying
quiedy at the bottom/ 29

This was written half a century before Kohler's Mentality of Apes
was translated into English with a delay of eight years after the
appearance of the German original. 30 It had the effect of something
like a bombshell on American psychology, in which Pavlov and
Watson were all the rage. Yet even Kohler, though he attacked
Thorndike, remained essentially conservative as far as motivation is
concerned; it took another quarter-century for a new crop of experi-
mentalists to discover, in the 1950s, that the exploration of novelty,
the manipulation of objects, the dismantling and reassembling of
complex manual puzzles, and even scribbling and drawing were self-
rewarding and self-arousing activities.

'Those who have had opportunities to observe monkeys and apes at
close hand for prolonged periods invariably dwell on their addiction
to looking, mauling, prodding, licking, and generally squeezing every
drop of possible entertainment from whatever crosses their path.' 31
Particularly revealing is the fact that Rhesus monkeys who have learned
to dismantle a complex manual puzzle of interlocking pieces performed
better when there was no food reward put inside the puzzle than when
they knew that there was one. In the second case they got impatient
and tried short-cuts; in the first case they practised disinterestedly,
'V art pour Vart\ 32

The Exploratory Drive

The cumulative evidence of these and similar experiments led Harlow
to die conclusion:

'There are logical reasons why a drive-reduction theory of learn-
ing, a theory which emphasizes the role of internal, physiological-
state motivation is entirely untenable as a motivational theory of
learning.

'The condition of strong drive is mimical to all but very limited

aspects of learning the learning the ways to reduce tension The

hungry child is a most uncurious child, but after he has eaten and
become thoroughly sated, his curiosity and all the learned responses
associated with his curiosity take place.' 33

Montgomery came to similar conclusions, which he put into the
laconic formula: 'Exploratory behaviour is motivated by the ex-
ploratory drive.'

MOTIVATION

505

These clarion calls of a new generation of experimentalists in fact
echoed the earlier Voices in the w Ilderness , such as Woodworm's:
'To see, to hear to see clearly, to hear distinctly moment by mo-
ment, such concrete, immediate motives dominate the life of relation
with the environment.' 34 In the meantime, however, these 'old-
fashioned' views had received added, powerful support from neuro-
physiology. Lindsley (195 1), Hebb (1955) and others have shifted
their attention from tension-reducing, stabilizing processes in the
nervous system to the supposedly arousing, attention-sharpening
functions of certain structures in the midbrain the so-called 'reticular
activating system', RAS. Although these theories are still controversial,
parallel studies on sensory deprivation have dramatically revealed the
deleterious effects of protracted stimulus-starvation, and the organism's
need for more or less constant stimulation, or at least a steady inflow
of information a hunger for experience and thirst for excitation
probably as basic as hunger and thirst themselves. Instead of respond-
ing passively to the environment, 'human beings and higher animals
spend most of their time in a state of relatively high arousal and . . .
expose themselves to arousing stimulus situations with great eager-
ness'. 35 Two thousand years ago Juvenal had said much the same:
'Duos tantum res anxius optat, j Partem et circenses. 9

Berlyne 36 has made a systematic survey of the manifestations of the
exploratory drive on various levels from orientation reflexes to
artistic and scientific curiosity. At the bottom of the ladder we have
Pavlov's 'investigatory' or 'what is it?' reflex. 'It is this reflex', Pavlov
wrote in a famous passage, 'which brings about the immediate res-
ponse in men and animals to the slightest changes in the world around
them, so that they immediately orientate their appropriate receptor-
organ in accordance with the perceptible quality in the agent bringing
about the change, making full investigation of it.' 37 From true reflexes
such as dilatation of the pupil and automatic scanning, we ascend to
oculo-motor responses, movements of the head or the whole body
towards the stimulating phenomenon: animals prick their ears, tense
their muscles, sniff the air 'musingly'. Next comes 'locomotor ex-
ploration' which 'appears to be universal among higher vertebrates
and present to some degree in other branches of the animal kingdom';
yet, as Berlyne ruefully remarks: 'It has been studied systematically in
rather few species. By far the greater part of the relevant literature is
concerned with the rat.' According to Darchen, 38 even the cockroach
is capable of disinterested latent learning, prompted by sheer curiosity;

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THE ACT OF CREATION

while kittens, puppies, and young chimps seem to spend a major portion
of their time in locomotive exploration. Lastly, we come to 'investi-
gatory' or 'mquisitive' behaviour, ranging from Darwin's monkey who
cannot refrain from peeping into the snake-infested Pandora's box, to
the 'insatiable curiosity' of the artist and explorer.

Thus neuro-physiological considerations, laboratory work with
animals, and the observations of ethologists of the Lorenz-Tinbergen
school, all seem to converge in the same direction. Even the embryo-
logical studies of Coghill (pp. 430 F.) and Weiss (p. 434 seq.), with their
emphasis on spontaneous, intrinsic activities on all levels of the organic
hierarchy, lend indirect support to the primacy of the exploratory
drive. The lesson of fifty years of rats-in-mazes has been summed up,
e.g. by Thacker in the statement that 'motivation for learning is
central and neural . . . organized and proliferated cognitive structure
itself is the goal towards which learning moves'. 39 In other words,
the motivation for teaming is to team.

Thorpe, for all his habitual caution, has gone even further. He
starts with a rhetorical question: *And so it becomes important to
consider how far there is evidence of learning motivated by a general
drive quite independent of the motivation of particular instincts'; 40
and he concludes that 'there is now substantial and precise evidence for
a general drive in a number of animals, and this can be looked upon
as an indication of a primary motivation which to some extent, how-
ever slight, is superior to the governing centres of any of the instincts
or of their combinations, and finds its most characteristic expression
in exploratory behaviour in all its various forms'. 41

In his monograph on The Nature of Explanation (1943), which has
inspired a great many neurologists and computer-theorists, the
Cambridge psychologist K. J. Craik put forward the idea that the
function of the organism's nervous system is to set up a symbolic
model of the external world: 'The brain . . . imitates or models
external processes. The function of such symbolization is plain. If the
organism carries a "small-scale model" of external reality and of its
own possible actions within its head, it is able to try out various alter-
natives, conclude which is the best of them, react to future situations
before they arise, utilize the knowledge of past events in dealing with
the present and future, and every way to react in a much fuller, safer,
and more competent manner to the emergencies which face it.' 42

To extract information from the chaotic environment is as vital
to the organism as it is essential for it to extract specific forms of

MOTIVATION

507

energy from sunlight and food. If we assume this to be an inherent
tendency of all living organisms, then we must also assume the exis-
tence of an inherent primary drive to explore the environment for
relevant information.

Thus the organism functions not merely by responding to the en-
vironment, but by asking it questions. The main incentive to its ex-
ploratory activities are novelty, surprise, conflict, uncertainty.* The
exploratory drive may combine with, or be instrumental to, other
drives sex, nutrition, anxiety. But in its purest form in play, latent
learning, unrewarded problem-solving 'stimuli' and responses' are
undistinguishable parts of the same feedback loop along which
excitation is running in a circle like a kitten chasing its tail. 'The
scientist', wrote AJlport, f by the very nature of his commitment,
creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of
our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to
feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.' 43

We have thus established a broader base for the scientist's motiva-
tion as discussed earlier on (Book One, XI). The exploratory drive may
combine with the self-transcending mysticism of a Kepler or with the
self-asserting vanity of a Galileo. Each original artist has an element of
the explorer in him: the poet does not 'manipulate words' as Watson
thought, he explores the emotive and descriptive potentialities of
language; the painter is engaged, throughout his life, in learning to see.

NOTES

To p. 496. Ernest Jones says in his biography: 'Freud partook in much of the
prudishness of his time, when allusions to lower limbs were improper*. He then
gives several examples such as Freud 'sternly forbidding* his fianoie to stay
'with an old friend, recently married, who, as she delicately put it, "had married
before her wedding" ' (Jones, 1953, Vol. I, p. 142).

To p. 498. "The simple reflex is probably a purely abstract conception,
because all parts of the nervous system are connected together and no part of it is
probably ever capable of reaction without affecting and being affected by
various other parts ... the simple reflex is a convenient, if not a probable, fiction*
(Sherrington, 1906, p. 8).

To p. 500. 'His thinking was particular, not general. When he thought of
secondary drive, he thought of . . . fear or anxiety. When he thought of secon-
dary reinforcement, he thought of such tilings as . . . tokens substituting for food*
(Hilgard, 1958, P- 177).

Top. 507. Uncertainty is more arousing than certainty as witnessed by the
universal passion for gambling which coincided with the consolidation of the

508

THE ACT OF CREATION

British Welfare State. Its rudiments can be found even in the rat and pigeon as
Skinner himself pointed out when rewards are given rarely and irregularly;
this treatment induces the creature to go on trying for an astonishingly long time
without a single reward just as Britons will fill in week after week their foot-
ball coupons.

IX

PLAYING AND PRETENDING

Logically every book on learning theory ought to have between
the sections on 'innate behaviour* and 'acquired behaviour* a
chapter on 'learning through play' or, at least, on 'ludic
behaviour' (from ludere, to play) a term coined by Berlyne, pre-
sumably to make the subject sound more respectable. The role of play
in the learning and practice of skills is too obvious to naturalists and
pedagogues to need stressing; yet play was another stepchild of the
Psychology of the Dark Ages. Its connotations of curiosity, explora-
tion, frivolousness and joie de vivre did not appeal to the spirit of the
times; its unpredictability did not fit the S.-R. schema; above all, its
self-reinforcing motivation, dissociated from the primary physio-
logical needs, stood in flagrant contradiction to any drive-reducing
theory. Thus the concept of 'ludic behaviour* was objectionable on
the same grounds as the concept of the exploratory drive; the former
appears in fact to be the purest manifestation of the latter.

Difficulties of Definition

A further reason for this neglect may have been the difficulty of de-
fining 'play'* without making the definition circular. By way of
eHmination, let us try to distinguish between true play and vacuum
activities during maturation. A young bird toys with straws and
feathers 'aimlessly* before the other action-patterns of the nest-
building instinct have matured; displays of fragmentary mating be-
haviour before sexual maturity fall into the same category. Some of
these activities look playful in the sense of serving no apparent pur-
pose (although in fact they may be useful as 'practice runs' in develop-
ing a skill); yet they can hardly be regarded as true play because they

509

510 THE ACT OF CREATION

display all the rigidity of fixed action-patterns. They are performances
of isolated bits of the animal's built-in repertory, and thus contrary
to appearances, in the direct service of 'primary biological needs' in
the classic sense. This implies that 'true play' is dissociated from those
needs; that 'it does not have a biological function that we easily
recognize'. 1 But precisely at this point the danger of circular definitions
comes in: to say that play does not serve a primary need reopens the
whole question of what needs, drives, motivations, should be called
'primary'. Thus, for instance, in Drever's Dictionary of Psychology play
is defined as an 'activity, which may be physical or mental, existing
apparently for its own sake, or having for the individual as its main aim
the pleasure which the activity itself yields; usually involving also a
detachment from serious aims and ends . . .'. If we then ask 'What are
serious aims and ends?' the answer is obviously: those which are not
playful. The way out of the vicious etch is to 'take play seriously',
as an activity with a definite 'primary biological function viz. to
give free rein to the exploratory drive. But such a view can only be
held once it is recognized that the exploratory drive itself originates in
a 'primary need' equal in importance to the others.

It seems to be wrong, however, to go to the opposite extreme and
stretch the meaning of the word 'play' so as to cover all manifestations
of the exploratory driveas Berlyne seems to do when he says that
'in human beings, ludic behaviour includes everything that is classi-
fied as recreation, entertainment, or "idle curiosity", as well as art,
philosophy, and pure (as distinct from applied) science. . . .' 2 This, of
course, is a matter of definitions, but I think it more expedient to use
the word play in a more precise and restricted sense, which is closer
to its colloquial usage. A small child, kicking a ball about, plays; a
professional football *player' works hard for a living. When the
monkey takes the puzzle apart and puts it together again, he 'plays';
when there is food inside the puzzle he Strives'. Two chess masters
may play a friendly cafe game; in a tournament they compete. The
examples show how fluid the borderlines are, yet the principle is clear:
the degree of * playfulness' in an action decreases in proportion as the ex-*
ploratory drive is adulterated by other drives; or, to put it differently: as
the self-arousing and self-rewarding nature of the activity, charac-
teristic of the exploratory drive, yields to striving for specific rewards.
This foreshadows a similarly continuous, graded relationship between
the dynamics of latent and reinforced learning, to be discussed later.

The Ludic and the Ludicrous

It follows from the above that play can only arise at an evolutionary
level or in such special situations, where the organism has been partially
liberated from the tyranny of 'primary needs' in the traditional sense,
and can afford to 'take time off* to play. This happens among animals
where the young mature slowly and enjoy prolonged parental pro-
tection and care; under the sheltered conditions of domestication and
captivity; and in human history, of course, with the increase of security
against the hazards of the natural and social environment. To quote
Thorpe again: 'The prolonged childhood of the human species [has]
been of prime importance in the process of freeing appetitive behaviour
from the primary needs. This and man's growing mastery of his
environment have been the essential first steps not only for play but
for all those activities which transcend mere maintenance and which
underlie the mental and spiritual development of man; activities
which, though originating in "play", have produced real advantages
in knowledge and comprehension, of the scheme of things. . . ,' 3

A related process of emancipation, namely the detachment of reason-
ing from emotion, gave rise, as we saw, to humour. Man's emergent
ability to perceive a thing or event simultaneously in two incompatible
mental contexts enabled him to take the step from the 'ludic' to the
'ludicrous'. The historic link between the two is probably reflected in
the word 'ludicrum' stage play. The actor's or bard's pretence of
being himself and somebody else at the same time was at the origin of
tragedy and epic; a similar act of magic carving or painting a thing
which is meant to be something else was the origin of representational
art. These, of course, are activities on an incomparably higher level
than the play of kittens and birds; yet as Lorenz has pointed out, both
imitation and pretence occur already on the animal level. When
puppies fight in play, they do not hurt each other or their masters;
they conform to certain 'rules of the game'. Whether these have their
phylogenetical origin in the ritualized fights of their wild ancestors or
whether they are acquired by social learning, the fact remains that such
fights are 'not in earnest' and necessitate 'bringing in the "higher" or
more psychological concept of "pretence" '. 4

Equally suggestive is the so-called 'sub-song' of birds. As distinct
from the true or full song which is fixed and species-specific, the sub-
song is 'a somewhat amorphous, rambling utterance'. 6 Birds indulge
in it when their 'primary needs' are not pressing before the mating

511

512

THE ACT OF CREATION

season or in captivity as a kind of vocal play which might either
represent practice for the true song, or else a form of 'pretending':
some birds which never imitate alien species in their true song do
so in their sub-song. Thorpe compares this vocal imitation to the
process by which human infants learn to speak from 'amorphous'
babblings to the imitation of sounds produced by their elders (echo-
lalia). Thus imitation, pretence, as well as art, seem to have their pre-
cursors in the playful activities of the higher mammalia and birds.

To sum up: 'exploratory behaviour is motivated by the exploratory
drive'. In play, its purest form, it is generalized, non-specific, and in-
discriminate a puppy let into an unfamiliar room rushes to and fro,
sniffs at every corner, picks up any object, beside itself with excite-
ment under the incentive of novelty. On the other hand, when the
exploratory drive is canalized towards more specific targets, it results
in latent learning and, still higher up, in problem-solving. While play
is self-rewarding, in problem-solving the search itself may also be self-
rewarding to varying degrees, but the principal reward is finding the
solution. In this broader sense, of course, the law of effect remains
valid; but the reward, the pleasure derived from success, is specific to
the exploratory drive its 'consummatory act' as it were and not a
premium extraneous to its nature. If the problem was an easy one, the
solution may be both a reward and an incentive to have a go at another
problem at once; if the drive was obstructed, involving stress, the
solution is tension-reducing. And, of course, the solution may carry
supplementary rewards the carrot of satisfied ambition, for instance.

In laboratory experiments the animal's exploratory possibilities are
restricted, and artificial motivations replace the drive as it operates in
freedom. At the same time, animals in the laboratory are induced to
pay attention to, and discriminate between, stimuli which under
normal circumstances would be biologically irrelevant to them; or
else to perform motor actions (e.g. Skinner's ping-pong playing
pigeons) which are outside their natural repertory. Tricks of this kind
can be taught only by stamping in; and attempts to build a universal
theory of learning on such methods carry the danger of confusing a
travelling circus with Plato's Academy.

NOTE

To p. 500. The Concise Oxford Dictionary gives no less than thirty-four
meanings of the word.

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

I must now switch from animal to man, and later back again. The
manner in which animals learn holds important lessons for man;
but in order to interpret the data the experimenter must make
certain minimum assumptions regarding the animals' experiences; and,
whether he is aware of it or not, these assumptions are based on his
own human experience. We talk about the animal's pain-reaction or
fear-reaction because we have experienced pain and fear; we interpret
certain signs as meaning that the animal is alert or apprehensive by in-
ferences which are often unconscious and contain an unavoidably
anthropomorphic element. Even Lloyd Morgan's canon acknowledged
this; it merely said that one should not be more anthropomorphic than
one could help.*

Now, learning involves perception and memory; and since we know
incomparably more about both in man than in cats or rats, we must
discuss some aspects of man's perceptual and sensory-motor skills
before we turn to learning in animals. Instead of the over-worked
province of visual perception, I shall start, for a change, on hearing.

Screening the Input

It has been said that visitors to Stalin had to go through seventeen suc-
cessive screenings: at the outer gate of the Kremlin compound, at
several inner gates, and so forth, until the last corridor and the last
door leading to the inner sanctum. *Inputs* which aspire to become
'stimuli' apparently suffer a similar fate. Where hearing is concerned,
the brain's stimulus-screening activity starts in the ear. Efferent, in-
hibitory fibres from higher centres to the cochlea of the cat were dis-
covered by Galambos in 1956. In a series of remarkable experiments 1

513

514

THE ACT OF CREATION

the cat's auditory nerve was tapped and wired to an amplifier, so that
impulses passing from ear to brain were direcdy recorded. The im-
pulses were caused by the clicking of a metronome. But the moment
a mouse in a glass jar was shown to the cat the firings in the auditory
nerve were diminished or ceased altogether: the cat was turning a
'deaf ear* on the metronome. The point of the experiment was to
show that the process of stimulus-selection is centrally controlled, but
sets in at the periphery the outer gate of the Kremlin compound.

Attitude and expectation the pattern of the behavioural matrix to
which the organism is attuned at the time determine what shall con-
stitute a stimulus and what shall not. On a happy family evening, when
people are talking while the radio is playing, junior is crying, and the
dog is begging to be let out, each of these simultaneous inputs may be
perceived as 'signal' and the rest as 'noise'. In audition, at least, the
'figure-background relation' seems to be more complicated than the
Gestalt school suggests; it is not something innate in perceptual organi-
zation, but dependent on past experience and present state of mind.
Women were known to sleep soundly through an air-raid but to
awake at the slightest cry of their babies; people deeply asleep show
sharp EEG reactions when their own name, or the name of a girl-
friend, is read out in a list of other 'background' names. 2

The point has also an indirect bearing on the controversy whether
discrimination is based on the 'absolute' or relational properties of
stimuli. 3 The answer seems to be, briefly, that absolute stimuli do not
exist short of sticking a knife into somebody. Yet even on the
primitive level of pain, the matrix influences perception as wit-
nessed by the General in the American Civil War who, in the heat of
battle, did not notice that his middle finger was shot away; not to
mention anaesthesia by hypnosis in dentistry and child-birth or the
even more remarkable phenomena of hysterical conversion blindness.

Thus the higher centres exercise a selective influence on sensation and
perception; those aspects of the input which are irrelevant will be treated
as noise, and forgotten 'without leaving a trace'. But the criteria of rele-
vance depend on the 'rules of the game' which the organism is playing
at the time.

Stripping the Input

Selective control of the input is the first stage in the process of ex-
tracting information from the chaotic noises and other sensations which

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

515

bombard the organism's receptors; without it, the mind would be in
a kind of Brownian motion. This first stage is followed by the proces-
sing of the input in a series of relaying operations, each of them designed
to strip the input of what appears to be irrelevantaccording to the
criteria of relevance which operate along that input-channel. One
might call this a process of de-particularization. It is a clumsy word, but
it conveys what is really implied in the terms 'generalization or 'ab-
straction', with their multiple connotations.

The most familiar examples of 'de-particularization' are, of course,
the visual constancies. The triangle, or the letter "W", is stripped of the
irrelevancies of retinal position, size, etc. Thanks to colour constancy
the accidents of light and shadow are discarded; thanks to size con-
stancy, my moving hand does not seem to shrink or grow changes in
perspective size are 'dis-regarded' by the regard. Yet the criteria of
relevance and irrelevance depend, even in these cases of apparendy
spontaneous perception, to a considerable degree on interpretative
frames on perceptual matrices acquired by past experience. When
an object of the appearance of a tennis ball is inflated against a homo-
geneous background, it will be seen as if it were retailing its size and
approaching the observer. 4 This is different from size constancy be-
cause in this case the observer has to accommodate his eyes and make
them converge at a closer range so that the ball gets out of focus and
should be seen as a blurred double image. Yet the knowledge that
tennis balls behave reasonably and do not grow into footballs some-
how manages to compensate for this, and to discard the anomalies in
the situation as irrelevant noise. To quote Bartlett once more: 'Even
the most elementary perceptions have the character of inferential
constructions/ The Baconian ideal of observation without theorizing
is undermined by the mechanism of observation itself. Perception is-
polluted by implied hypotheses. To look, to listen, to taste, means to
ask questions; and mostly they are leading questions.

To obtain a more detached view of the living organism's methods
of coding and storing its experiences, let me make a naive comparison
with a typical engineering procedure. Exairiining a modern gramo-
phone record with a niagnifying glass, you see a spiral curve with
lateral oscillations of varying amplitude and spacing a curve where
the abscissa represents time, and the ordinate the amplitude of the
needle's oscillations. And yet this two-dimensional curve, with a
single independent variable, can reproduce any sequence of sounds,
from the Sermon on the Mount to the Ninth Symphony performed by

THE ACT OF CREATION

orchestra and choir, including the buzzing of a fly and a cough in the
audience. In fact the entire range of human knowledge and experience
could be expressed by the function of this one independent variable, so
that one is tempted to ask why the nervous system does not produce
engrams in this simple type of code, instead of the incomparably more
complicated methods it uses. The answer is, that a 'linear* memory
trace of this type would be completely useless for the purposes of
analysing, recognizing, and matching new inputs, and for working
out the appropriate responses. It would merely represent the 'blooming,
buzzing confusion of pure sensation sans organization which, in the
words of William James, is the new-born infant's world. Before it
can be more or less permanently stored, the input must be processed,
dismantled, and reassembled in various ways, which the following
examples may serve to illustrate.

Dismantling and Reassembling

Let the input be fifty instruments and fifty voices performing a choral
part of Beethoven's Ninth. On the gramophone record, and in the air-
waves which make the ear-drum vibrate, the pitch, timbre, and loudness
of the individual voices and instruments have all been superimposed
on each other scrambled together into a single variable pulse. The
individuality of soprano, flute, viola, is lost in the process; it requires
a human nervous system to reconstitute it.

The pulse is transmitted and amplified by the bones of the middle
ear and enters through the oval window into the cochlea. Here the
basilar membrane, based in viscous fluid, starts the process of un-
scrambling the acoustic omelette. This is done, partly at least, by a
kind of Fourrier-analysis of the oscillatory curve, which breaks it down
into its spectrum of basic frequencies.* The parallel fibres of the basilar
membrane form a kind of spiral harp; each fibre responds to a specific
frequency. This analysing mechanism operates over a range of twenty
to twenty thousand cycles per second, and auditory discrimination
varies from about 0.05 at low frequencies to 0.02$ at 2,000 c/s (Piccolo
flute). Each frequency has its separate 'place' on the spiral membrane.
Each place' is presumed to be connected by a separate group of fibres,
rwuiing through several relay stations, to a presumably fixed location
in the primary reception area in the auditory cortex area 22.

But this mechanism of transmission by fixed pathways and non-

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

517

specific impulses is only half of the story; the other half is transmission
of the lower frequencies by Volleys* in a bundle of fibres firing in turn
at the specific frequency of the input. 5 The details of both theories are
still controversial, but the available evidence indicates that they com-
plement each other. We have, then, here one more instance of the
complementary character of two types of nervous function: conduction
by specific pathways, and conduction by specific signals over equi-
potential pathways.

We now have our fifty singers and fifty instruments decomposed
into a constantly changing mosaic pattern of excitations in area 22
where each point (or region or circuit) 6 represents the frequency of
one pure tone, and in some form also its intensity regardless of the
instrument or voice in which it originated. This state of affairs bears no
resemblance to any conceivable neural model based on S.-R. theory
or on the Gestalt physiology of Kohler and Koff ka.* In fact the
whole physiological theory of Gestalt, and many of its psychological
postulates, break down when we come to audition. This is not sur-
prising since Kohler concentrated entirely on visual perception; and
in the seven hundred-odd pages of KofFka's Principles of Gestalt Psy-
chology exactly one page (p. 200) is devoted to 'other (than visual)
senses'. Even on this one page, the only reference to audition is the
statement that 'sound' and 'stillness' have a reversible figure-back-
ground relation.

At the auditory projection area we must assume the dismantling
process to end and the reassembling to start. When we listen to the
symphony we do not hear an ensemble of the pure tones into which
it has been broken up in the cochlea, but an ensemble of individual
instruments and voices: that is, of organized sub-wholes. The individual
timbre of an instrument is determined by its overtones the series of
partials which accompany the fundamental, and the energy-distribu-
tion of them. By superimposition of the sine curves of the partials, we
obtain the periodic curve characteristic for each instrument. When we
identify the sound of a violin or flute by picking out and bracketing
together its partials which were 'drowned' among thousands of other
partials in the air-pressure wave we have achieved 'timbre constancy',
comparable to visual figure constancy. This, of course, is based on past
experience and involves an act of recognition by the 'trained ear* of
instruments previously heard in isolation,

'Coloured Filters 9

Since all but the most elementary perceptions interact with past ex-
perience, it seems a rather unsound procedure to discuss perception
divorced from the problem of memory. The question, then, is how
the 'trace' was originally acquired which enables me to recognize an
instrument or voice on subsequent occasions. Let us assume that I am
hearing an exotic instrument for the first time, and that I am interested
at the moment only in its timbre, not in the melody played on it
(which, in the case of a Japanese koto or samisen, would be above my
head anyway). As I am listening, the mathematical relations between
the partials remain constant and enduring, whereas their pitch and
loudness are changing all the time. This stable and enduring relation-
pattern (the fixed ratios between the part-frequencies) will be treated
by my nervous system, which is processing the input, as relevant,
whereas the changes in the relata (the absolute frequencies) are dis-
carded as irrelevant. When this filtering-out process is completed, the
input will have been finally stripped of all irrelevant detail, according
to the demands of parsimony, and reduced to its invariant pattern
to formation' purified of noise*. If an input has undergone these
transformations and was permitted to progress this far without being
blocked somewhere on its way (as, for instance, the voices of irrelevant
strangers at a cocktail party are) then it will tend to leave a lasting
'trace* which will enable the nervous system to recognize in future the
same voice or instrument.

We have witnessed, as it were, the formation of the code of a new
perceptual skill. The organism feeds on negative entropy; in com-
munication theory, entropy* becomes noise*. The sensorium ab-
stracts information from the chaotic environment as the mitochondria
extract, by a series of dismantling and reassembling processes, a specific
form of energy from food. The abstracting and recording of informa-
tion involves, as we have just seen, the sacrifice of details which are
filtered out as irrelevant in a given context. But what is considered as
irrelevant in one context, may be relevant in another; and vice versa.
We can recognize an instrument regardless of the tune played on it;
but we can also recognize a tune regardless of the instrument on which
it is played. The tune is abstracted and recorded in a memory-trace
de-particularized of timbre; timbre is recorded de-particularized of
tune. Thus the filtering-out of redundancies as the input is relayed
from periphery to centre does not proceed along a single channel, but

518

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

519

along several channels, each with its series of filters of different colour,
as it were. The different colours represent the criteria of relevance in
different perceptual hierarchies. Each hierarchy analyses the input
according to its own criteria of relevance; but the loss of detail in-
curred in the process of memory-formation along a single channel is
partly counteracted by the fact that information rejected as irrelevant
by its coloured filters may be admitted as relevant by another channel
belonging to a difierent hierarchy. We shall see that this principle of
multi-dimensional analysis is of basic importance in the phenomena of
recognition and recall.

A Digression on Engrams

The neurophysiological problems of memory are beyond the scope of
this book, but the following remarks may help to forestall possible
misunderstandings. Perceptual codes of the type which enables us to
recognize an instrument are devices which analyse complex acoustic
inputs by some unknown process of 'matching' or 'resonance'. The
quotes indicate that these words are used as metaphors only; the
process must of course be incomparably more complicated than
acoustic or electric resonance. What matters is that a memory-trace
cannot be visualized as a mechanical record like a gramophone groove,
'stamped* into the brain and activated by specific pathways. Such an
arrangement would be as useless for purposes of auditory analysis as
it would be useless for the visual recognition of shapes to have an
archive of photographic engrams. Instead of this, we must hypothesize
some kind of 'attunement' of a cluster or clusters of neurons, with a
hierarchic ogranization and containing sub-wholes which are equi-
potential in their response to one specific pattern of excitation and to
that pattern only. Pringle 7 assumed that memory-traces function like
'coupled resonators*; Hyden's 8 theory of RNA changes which deter-
mine selective responsiveness to frequency-modulation sequences of
excitation seems more plausible. Whatever the mechanism is, it must
combine the principle of fixed but partly equipotential spatial con-
nections, with selective responses to specific excitation patterns, to
account for the hierarchic organization of perceptual, conceptual, and
motor skills. Weiss' excitation clang was an approach in that direction.
Hebb's phase sequences in neuron assemblies was another. The Pitt-
McCullough model of a scanning analyser to account for figure con-
stancies should show that basically similar principles can be applied in

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THE ACT OF CREATION

vision as in audition to the problem of analysing and matching the
input.

The matrix of a complex skill such as the maze-running skill of
Lashley's rats may be no more 'localized* than the programme of a
political party is localized by the addresses of all members who adhere
to it. If some members or groups of members are ehniinated, other
groups may take over. Simpler and more primitive matrices, however,
are perhaps rather like the professional guilds of craftsmen concentrated
in one area of a medieval town; if that area is destroyed, the skill is
lost.

Tracing a Melody

We have seen that recognition of a voice or instrument is based on an
invariant relation (the fixed ratios between partials or formants) which
has been extracted from the variable relata. Once the instrument is
perceived as a recognizable whole, the relation becomes a relatum
e.g. 'a violin* regardless whether a verbal symbol is attached to it
or not. This relatum then enters into relations with the sound of other
instruments, which are analysed on higher levels according to the
criteria of more complex rules of the game harmony, melodic, and
contrapuntal form in which several perceptual hierarchies participate.

A tune is defined by rhythm and pitch. Rhythm derives from the
hierarchic organization of beat-cum-accentinto measure, measure into
phrase. To qualify as a tune, the pitch-variation sequence must con-
form to certain codes of modality, key, harmony. These codes must
also be represented in the listener's perceptual organization, otherwise
there would be no musical experience, only the sensation of a medley
of sounds as when a European listens for the first time to Chinese
opera. The melody itself has the structural coherence of a closed figure
as distinct from an open, linear chain. It is either 'taken in' as a whole
in the specious present, or learned by the integration of sub-wholes,
that is of entire phrases but never by chaining note to note in the
m a nn er of learning nonsense-syllables (though even these tend to form
patterns). A chain of notes could not be transposed from one key or
instrument to another; nor recognized after transposition.

A tune is a temporal pattern of notes in a given scale. The notes are
the relata; by humming it in a different key, or playing it on a different
instrument, the relata are changed but the relation remains invariant
in all transformations. On a higher level, the tune as a whole again

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

521

becomes a relatum which enters into relations with other tonal pat-
terns; or with itself in symmetrical reversal; or contrapuntally with
other themes.

Most people are capable of learning and recognizing simple melodies,
and equally capable of recognizing the sound of various instruments
but few mortals share the privilege of 'absolute pitch', of being
able to identify single notes. In other words, retention of a pattern of
stimuli is the rule, retention of an isolated stimulus the exception. If
the pattern is relatively simple, it is 'take in at a glance', as a whole:
as a rule, listening to the first two transients is sufficient to identify an
instrument. 9 But the more complex the pattern, the more difficult it
becomes to 'take the whole in at a glance', and it can be retained only
by dint of a certain amount of rote learning.

Conditioning and Insight in Perception

Once more, however, the items memorized are not discrete bits, but
organized sub-wholes; and they are not summated in an open chain
but interrelated in a closed figure. Thus the first movement of a sonata
will fall into three sub-wholes: statement of themes, development,
recapitulation; and the first of these is usually subdivided into the ex-
position of two themes in the order A-B-A; while in the rondo we
usually have ABACA.

Similar considerations apply, for instance, to the learning of a
poem. Rhythm, rhyme, grammar, and meaning provide patterns or
'grids' superimposed on each other matrices governed by already
established codes; and the memorizing that remains to be done is not
so much a 'stamping in' but a 'filling of gaps'. This is shown by the
typical way of 'getting stuck' in reciting a poem; e.g.:

'. . . Cannon to left of them / Cannon in front of them / ( )

and thundered'. A word has fallen out like a piece from a jigsaw
puzzle but it merely leaves a gap; it does not break the 'chain*. The
old-fashioned method of teaching history by reigns and battles is an
obvious example of stamping in. Even so, the data often show some
rudimentary organization into rhythmic or visual patterns, acquired
spontaneously or by some memorizing trick such as rhyming jingles.
Calculating prodigies memorize long series of numbers, not by chain-
ing but by ordering them into familiar sub-groups. Nonsense syllables
are easier retained by twisting them into a semblance of words, and

522

THE ACT OF CREATION

weaving these into a story. 10 The position of thirty men on a chess-
board is easier retained than of five chessmen lying in a heap on the
floor.

How do we recognize complex patterns? Take a professional musi-
cian who has turned on his radio in the middle of a programme: 'It's
a string quartet. . . . Something by Beethoven. . . . It's a quartet of

the middle period It's the second Rasoumovsky It is probably

played by the Amadeus Quartet. . . The input has been matched in
rapid succession against the very complex coded constancies in several
interlocking hierarchies timbre, melody, rhythm, accent, phrasing,
volume, density, etc. until the last drop of 'information' has been
extracted from it. Each independent hierarchy of 'coloured filters*
activated by the input adds an additional dimension to understanding.

Perception cannot be divorced from past experience. What I have
said so far already foreshadows a continuous scale of gradations between
opposite methods of perceptual learning. At one end, in classical con-
ditioning, we shall find stamping-in, under artificial conditions, of
excitation-patterns which outside the laboratory would be treated as
biologically irrelevant and would accordingly leave no trace. Outside
the laboratory, edible things do not emit signals by metronome-clicks,
or by displaying the figure of an ellipse on a cardboard. The dog's
perceptual organization is not 'attuned* to this kind of input-signal;
it lies outside all recognized rules of the game; and there will be no
inherent tendency in the naive dog to abstract information from the
rate of metronome-clicks. However (see below, Chapter XII), even
the artificial stamping-in of a trace in this type of experiment is not
purely mechanical, and not comparable to the action of the recording
needle on the gramophone disc.

In the intermediary ranges of the scale we find blends of varying
proportions between *bit learning' and 'whole' or pattern-learning;
and lastly, at the opposite end, the input is analysed in all its relevant
aspects by the various competent* perceptual hierarchies, until it is
saturated, as it were, with meaning. This, I shall suggest, is what we
mean by 'insight-learning'. Insight thus becomes a matter of degrees
and not, as the Gestalt school seemed to hold, an all-or-nothing
process.

The key-word in the previous paragraph was 'competent'. The
amount of 'stamping in* needed, and the type of learning which will
occur, depends on the animal's (native and acquired) perceptual organi-
zationin other words, on its 'ripeness' for that particular kind of

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

523

task. If this sounds like a truism, one still wonders how conditioning
'classical' or 'operant' could ever have been regarded as the para-
digm of all learning.

Abstract and Picture-strip

Memory of a sort is found on every organic level, from protozoa
upwards. The human nervous system we assume to be equipped with
a hierarchy of memory-systems operating on various levels: from
short-lived, unstable modifications in the receptor organs, to stable
and enduring central 'engrams' and the codes of complex skills. Since
perception and memory-formation proceed in a continuous series, and
since perception filters the input, we are led to the apparently para-
doxical conclusion that the most enduring memory-traces must be
those which have been most thoroughly de-particularized that is to
say, impoverished. This seems indeed to be the case at least in so far as
one important category of hierarchies is concerned: the abstractive
category.

When one is watching a play at the theatre the successive sounds
emitted by the actors must be retained by short-term memory until
they can be bracketed together into words or larger syntactic sub-
wholes. The psychological present embraces various-sized chunks of
the immediate past (by means of a 'mnemic afterglow', of reverber-
ating circuits, or what-have-you). By the time the actor utters his
next line, the perceptual relata the speech-units of the previous line
have already been forgotten, and only the wording is still retained.
A few lines further the exact wording of the first phrase is also wiped
off the memory slate, and only its content is still stored on some
higher level of the hierarchy. The next day one still has a fairly detailed
recollection of the actual sequence of scenes in the play; a few months
later only an outline of the plot as a whole remains in the 'store'.
Parsimony in memory-formation demands that only a mere skeleton
of the complex original experience should be retained on the highest
level of a given hierarchy; and vice versa, that the trace which an
input leaves shall be the more enduring, the higher the level to
which it has attained by successive stages of de-particularization and
re-coding.

The example I described was of an abstractive hierarchy governed
exclusively by logical analysis. A computer built on these lines, after
being fed a number of West End plays, would probably filter down

524. THE ACT OF CREATION

all that it found worth retaining, to a formula such as: isoscele marriage
triangle with pet-dog at centre of gravity, or: whodunit with five in-
dependent variables (suspects).

Let us assume that at each stage of this serial abstractive process, the
input activates some particular scanning- or filtering-device which is
'attuned' to that particular input. The receiving end of that device
corresponds to its 'matrix' aspect: it is potentially responsive to a great
many inputs which have one specific feature or pattern in common,
and are thus equipotential in that respect. When an input is 'recognized*
by the matrix as conforming to that pattern, it will emit a code-
signal to the higher echelons. But while the matrix is 'attuned' to a
great number of variations in the input pattern, the code merely signals
the invariant aspect of it, e.g. 'a triangle', 'an octave', 'a fly', a denial'.
The size and position of the triangle, the particulars of the fly, the
wording of the denial are lost in the coding, and cannot be retrieved by
reversing the process within that particular hierarchy (though it may
have been preserved by another).

Thus the analysing-devices behave like analogue-to-digital com-
puters, and in other respects, too, the order of events is the exact re-
verse as one would expect of the processes we have observed in
motor-hierarchies. When an animal engages in some skilled action,
the co-ordinating centre activates a matrix of equi-final motor patterns;
which particular sub-skill will be called into activity depends on cir-
cumstances. Thus the 'roughed-in' action-programme becomes more
and more particularized in the course of its descent to the periphery
while contrariwise, the peripheral input is more and more de-particu-
larized or 'skeletonized* in its ascent towards the centre. The first is a
process of progressively spelling out implicit orders; the second an
equally stepwise process of abstracting the meaning implied in the
mosaic of sensations. Both processes are irreversible: the exact words
of the actors in the play cannot be retrieved.

It can also happen, however, that one has quite forgotten what that
play, seen years ago, was about except for one particular detail, an
inflection of voice, an imploring gesture of the heroine which, torn
from its context, remains engraved on one's memory. There exists,
indeed, a method of retention which seems to be the direct opposite
of memory-formation in abstractive hierarchies. It is characterized by
the preservation of vivid details, which, from a purely logical point ,
of view, are often quite irrelevant; and yet these quasi-cinemato-
graphic details or 'close-ups', which seem to contradict the demands

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

525

of parsimony, are both enduring, strikingly sharp, and add texture and
flavour to memory.

Bartlett, in a classic experiment, made his subjects read an Indian
legend and then reproduce it on repeated occasions at intervals of in-
creasing length ranging from fifteen minutes after the first reading
to several months or years. The story was about thirty lines long; it
concerned a young Indian who got involved in the 4 War of the Ghosts',
and was wounded in the process. The last paragraph read:

He told it all, and then became quiet. When the sun rose he fell
down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became
contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead. 10 *

Twenty subjects were tested. Their written recollection of the story
shrank with the passage of time to a few lines which, in most cases,
distorted its content almost * beyond recognition\ But, with one ex-
ception, all the spaced-out versions of all subjects, even after several
years, contained the lines: 'Something black came out (or "issued" or
"rushed" or "jumped out") of his mouth.' The one exception wrote
(after four months): 'My remembrance was in visual terms ... of
breath somehow materializing into a ghost.'

Fiction and autobiography abound with examples of such Vivid-
fragment-memories' : the mole on Granny's chin, the fly crawling over
the lump of sugar at the moment of the dramatic climax. Let us call
this the picture strip' type of memory although, of course, the
'vivid fragment' may be auditory or olfactory, or even a whole
'cinematographic sequence' like the detailed, auditory-visual se-
quences which Penfield evoked in his patients through electric stimu-
lation of their exposed temporal lobes (see below).

Obviously the formation of such 'picture-strip traces* must also be
preceded by some filtering process; but in this case the criteria of rele-
vance and parsimony are different, and often directly opposed to those
of the abstractive hierarchies. The vivid detail is usually described as
'striking', 'attractive', 'evocative', 'nostalgic*, 'frightening'; it always
has some emotional significance. It is mostly on a pre-verbal level; but
even verbal fragments of a poem, of a chill warning or whispered
endearment are retained because of their affective quality. The filter-
matrices that operate in these hierarchies must be emotionally 'attuned*
let us say to some hypothalamic controls. We may further assume
that such picture-strip memories are formed on lower (prc-conceptual)

526

THE ACT OF CREATION

levels than memories of the abstractive kind; they may be symbolic,
but their symbolism too is often pre-verbal, and perhaps related to
the symbolism of the dream; they may even obey their own special
brand of parsimony. We have seen that occasional regression to lower
levels of tie hierarchy is a conditio sine qua non of creativeness; the com-
bination of the abstractive and picture-strip type of memory may serve
the same purpose vide Coleridge and Kekule.

We are thus led to assume the existence of various hierarchies in
perception and cognition, whose criteria of relevance are determined
by the attitudes, drives, emotions, which they serve; they interlace
with each other on every level, and thereby provide the multi-dimen-
sionality or multi-colouration of experience; at the same time they
also compensate for the impoverishment of experience in the process
of memory formation. The outstanding memory which some geniuses
are said to have possessed may possibly be due to their niany-dimen-
sional ways of analysing and storing experiences.

Learning to See

Let us turn to vision.

Innate perceptual organization provides no more than the primitive
foundation on which learning can build. The long controversy be-
tween Behaviourists and the nativistically inclined Gestalt school
whether perceptual organization is innate or learned has finally been
superseded by the more realistic question how much is innate and how
much acquired by early learning. The consensus seems to be that
colour and brightness constancy, and the recognition of line, angle, and
texture are innate in rats as well as men. u So is primitive unity' (Hebb)
the segregation of simple figures as coherent entities from the back-
ground (for instance, a black splash on a white card). But when it
comes to more complex figures where the contrast is less marked, even
the figure-ground relation is strongly influenced by learning and ex-
pectancy. I have quoted examples from the neglected field of auditory
perception where the relativity of figural unity is obvious. The radio-
logist whom experience has taught to see a peptic ulcer or a lesion of
the lung, treats die much sharper contours of the ribs as 'background'.
When you hunt for a collar-stud in a drawerful of miscellaneous ob-
jects, that small, insipid form, poor in Gestalt Pragnanz, will 'stick out
a mile'; the reniaining contents of the drawer are 'background*.

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

527

Thus even figural coherence is influenced by past experience and
present attitude. When it comes to the identification and recognition of
visual Gestalten, it has been shown that even the simplest of them
triangles, squares require an element of learning. The behaviour of
chimpanzees reared without pattern vision, of human beings with
congenital cataract who had to learn to see* after they were operated
on, and the cumulative evidence from other experiments indicate, in
Hebb's words, 'that the normal human infant goes through the same
process, and that we are able to see a square as such in a single glance
only as the result of complex learning'. 12 The learning process seems
to depend mainly on visual exploration: a two-year-old child will
recognize a triangle that has been rotated by 120 degrees only after
rotating its own head; 13 but even in the adult, perception is bound up
with exploratory motions of the eyes, from conscious movements to
the involuntary, minute motions ('drift', 'flick', 'tremor') which move
the image across the fovea when the eye seems 'fixed' on a stationary
object. Identification of a triangle or square seems to depend on serial
scanning of its contours. 14 With practice, the scanning motions may
become summary or subliminal; but when scanning is artificially
eliminated by a mechanical device, the image disintegrates into frag-
ments. ' Wir tasten mit unserem Blick das Sehfeld ab\ Exner wrote in
1891 15 (We finger over the visual field with our gaze).

Thus with the exception of brightness and colour constancy, and a
few other primitive 'innate skills', visual perception is inextricably
bound up with learning, i.e. with memory. What we perceive in
audition is not the linear pulse of pressure-variations arriving at the
eardrum, but an 'inferential construct' of individual voices, instru-
ments, musical or verbal phrases; and what we perceive in vision is
not the camera-image on the retina but the 'inferential construct' of
people and objects which preserve their constant shape and size, regard-
less of angle and distance. The eye may be a camera, but immediately
behind its lens there is a series of compensating, correcting, and re-
touching devices the perceptual matrices of skilled vision.

Knowing and Seeing

The best-known among these are the matrices responsible for the
visual constancies and illusions which are found in every elemen-
tary textbook. Less attention has been paid to the modification of

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THE ACT OF CREATION

automatically functioning perceptual matrices by verbal learning and
verbal suggestions, by attitude and expectation. 16 Mitscherlich, an
outstanding observer, had denied that there existed any structural
difference between the two types of tartaric acid of opposite optical
activity. Pasteur, using the same apparatus, saw at once the asymmetric
facets on the tartar crystals because his hypothesis on molecular struc-
ture demanded that they should be there. 17

Perceptual matrices function not only autonomously, but display
considerable 'self-assertion*. This is shown in a simple but drastic
manner by the difficulty of breaking the arrow illusion:

a b

< < *=b

Another example of 'self-assertion is the tiresome insistence with
which a tune will go round and round in your head; or the infuriating
messages 'I told you so' 'I told you so* rapped out at the rate of
once per second by the wheels of your railway-carriage. A more ad-
vanced but equally typical illustration for 'knowing is seeing' is this
quote from Babbage: 'I will prepare the apparatus, and put you in
such a position that [Fraunhofer's dark lines] shall be visible, and yet
you shall look for them and not find them: after which, while you
remain in the same position, I will instruct you how to see them, and
you shall see them, and not merely wonder you did not see them
before, but you shall find it impossible to look at the spectrum with-
out seeing them.' 18

A pretty illustration of perception impregnated by previous know-
ledge is in the drawing opposite.

The bear climbing on the other side of the tree is purely inferential.
Yet you see the semi-circles plus four strokes as his paws.

Levels of Memory

Perception and memory cannot be un-scrambled. Let us consider
briefly a few types of 'mnemic processes which intervene on various
levels of the hierarchy.

On the lowest, peripheral level we find automatisms designed to
reduce redundancy and to 'compress' the input It would be unecono-
mical if each receptor in the retina would signal to report stimulation

from a uniformly illuminated area; hence lateral inhibition between
neighbouring receptor units, combined with light-adaptation, will
filter down the input to signals which report only the relevant spatial
differences in illumination---i.e. the contours of the iHuminated area. 19.
Likewise, the eye adapts to uniform motion as seen in the illusion
of reverse movement when the real movement stops (the 'waterfall-
illusion'). These automatisms could be called memory processes con-
fined to the psychological present (in the broad sense of 'memory =
modification of responsiveness by experience').

More lasting are after-images once regarded as the prototypes of
'photographic' memory. In fact, however, the after-image 'improves'
on the original by achieving greater regularity and simplicity. Goe the
was the first to observe that the after-image of a square will gradually
become transformed into a circlea figure of greater symmetry.
Rothschild's 20 experiments showed that only regular figures with
good* contour produce stable after-images; that figures with gaps in
their contours appear 'closed' in the after-image; that small irregulari-
ties disappear, and elements which 'do not belong' to a figure, such as.

529

530

THE ACT OF CREATION

a squiggle or tail attached to a square, become detached from it and
come and go as independent units. Thus the reproduction is far from
mechanical, and is controlled both by intrinsic codes and from higher
centres. 21

There are some significant parallels between after-images and
images which have been artificially stabilized on the retina. The latter
are obtained by a tiny projector, mounted on a contact-lens worn by
the subject. The iUuminated target-figure is fixed at the other end of
the projector; it moves with the involuntary scanning motions of the
eyeball, and its projection remains thus fixed on the same spot of the
retinasubtending a visual angle of two degrees in a patch of light of
five degrees, with darkness all round. Under these conditions the per-
ceived image will vanish and reappear much as after-images do either
as a whole, or it will disintegrate into parts. If the latter is the case, the
fragments will be meaningful in one way or the other: a human face
will break up into its specific features or groups of features profile or
top of the head; and a composite monogram will break up into the
individual letters and numbers which were hidden in it. Conversely,
the elements in a meaningless pattern of curlicews will at first fade and
reappear in various combinations; but after a while they will organize
themselves into stable sub-wholes. Central processes fraught with past
experience exert an obvious influence on these phenomena; and so
does the subject's attitude.

The next step leads to eidetic images. These occupy an intermediate
place in the memory hierarchy between after-images and the picture-
strip' type of recall. In their direct sensory impact they are comparable
to hypnagogic images and close to hallucinations. The experimenter
directs the subject to inspect a picture for about thirty seconds without
staring (to eliminate after-images), then to look at a grey screen. The
average person sees nothing; the eidetic projects' the image onto the
screen and behaves as if the picture were actually there. He can focus
on a detail, point out its exact position on the screen, count the buttons
on a coat, the number of spokes on a wheel, and read' the letters in a
foreign-language text forward or backward. 22 It seems, therefore, that
eidetic images 'are seen in the literal sense of the word'. 23 Eidetic
recall may be limited to a short interval after inspecting an object or
picture, or extend to 'minutes, days, years'. 2 * Analogous phenomena
seem to exist in other sense-modalities: Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner,
and Elgar were supposed to be able to 'hear at will the full texture of
an orchestra'. 25

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

531

Eidetic memory, though rare in adults, seems to be quite common
in children before puberty; 'in certain regions/ according to Kluever,
'eighty to a hundred per cent of the children are reported eidetic. 26
This is a striking confirmation of the commonplace that the child lives
in a world of images of great vividness, whereas the average adult's
images are grey shadows. The eidetic type of memory seems to be
irretrievably lost, in all but exceptional cases, with the transition from
the perceptual and affective to the conceptual and symbolic mentality.
Pictorial memory, as we saw, belongs to a phylogenetically and onto-
genetically earlier level of the mnemic hierarchy.

Yet if we expect the eidetic image to be a true photographic record,
we shall again be disappointed. All reports agree that the development
of the image on the screen depends on the child's interest in the picture
as a whole, and in its details. Exciting details come out sharply, while
adjacent parts may remain blank, blurred, or even appear in com-
plementary colours. Pictures which have no meaning for the child do
not appear on the screen. 27 The objects in the image can be moved
about, and their colour and size can be changed at will, or in response
to verbal suggestions. Synaes thetic phenomena also enter: if the
subject's arms are pulled while he is inspecting a horizontal line, the
eidetic image of the line will be leng thened; images of the Mueller-
Lyer illusion may be leng thened 'by as much as two yards'. 28

Image r and Meaning

A further step upward in the hierarchy leads to what I have called the
'picture-strip' kind of memory with emotive significance; and lastly
we arrive at the phenomena referred to as 'memory images' in ordinary

An image is defined in Drevers Dictionary as 'a revived sense ex-
perience, in the absence of the sensory stimulation'. But since most of
the sensory stimulation has been irretrievably lost in the filtering-
processes of memory formation, only some exceptionally sharp,
vivid details are perhaps capable of being 'revived' or 'reproduced';
the remainder of the experience must be 'reconstructed'. It has been
known for a long time that introspective reports on 'visual memory
images' are largely based on self-deception. Visual recall as Semon
once wrote 'renders only the strongest lights and shadows'; 29 but
strictly speaking, even shadows are absent from visual images as they

532

THE ACT OF CREATION

are from Chinese paintings; and so are, as a rule, all but the crudest
shades of colour. The normal adult's memory-images are much vaguer,
sketchier in outline than he is wont to believe; in most cases when he
believes that he possesses a visual image of a thing, he is really referring
to aggregates of simplified perceptual schemata, held together by
conceptual links.

This has been amply demonstrated (cf. Book One, pp. 346 seq) . In the
Binet-Mueller test 30 the subject is directed to memorize a letter square
(comprising sixteen or twenty-five letters in random distribution) until
he thinks that he has formed a visual image of it, and can 'see' it in his
mind's eye. But when he is asked to read the letters in his image in
backward order or diagonally, he will take up to ten times longer than
when reciting them in their proper serial order from left to right.

Another classic test is the drawing of elephants by patients suffering
from a form of aphasia which impairs symbolic thought but leaves
perceptual faculties intact a test first used by Pierre Marie, and later
by Henry Head: 31

Case No. 8 ('semantic asphasia): Asked to draw an elephant, he
moved his pencil about aimlessly, saying 'I can't get the idea'. Then
he suddenly drew the outline of the head, back and belly, adding the
four legs and an eye; the tusks were indicated but he omitted the
trunk. I asked 'What is the characteristic of an elephant?' To this he
replied, 'Its trunk; I see I have omitted to put in his trunk'.

Case No. 11 . . . made an incomplete drawing of an elephant to
order. Asked if he had left out anything, he replied 'His ear', and
made a mark on the side of the head. When I inquired 'Has an
elephant got anything else?', he answered 'Trunk, eye, tail, toes',
marking in each object in turn as he named it; but he forgot the
tusks.

Case No. 21 (a woman of high intelligence with some semantic
disorder): When I requested her to draw an elephant she produced
a picture distincdy resembling this animal, except that she gave it a
bushy tail and forgot the tusks. After she had finished she exclaimed
'I haven't put the tusks in. I can't remember where they come.
They come from just below the eye, I think; but I don't know. I
believe they are teeth and should come out of the top of the jaw
really.'

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

533

The quotations show that the visual image of the elephant was not
in fact a 'perceptual whole* but a melange of perceptual and conceptual
entities; die glue which held the visual parts, together was meaning.
Thus in a number of drawings the tusks at first appeared on top of the
elephant's head as if they had been horns; and only when their function
was remembered were they put in their correct place.

"We have now reached the boundary between the perceptual and
symbolic hierarchies the highest level of perceptual integration, where
symbolic coding must take over if further progress in learning is to
be achieved. The schematized visual forms of trunk, legs, tusks, seem
to be the upper limit of the patient's capability of forming true per-
ceptual Gestalt-traces. When it comes to reproducing the 'image' of
the complete elephant, the visual pattern of the tusk is manipulated as a
symbolic unit, labelled a 'tusk'. It is, once more, a double-faced entity:
one side is a complex and flexible perceptual whole, the other is a
semantic unit which signals the word 'tusk' and is activated by the
same signal.

Klangbild and Wortschatz

A similar frontier is found in audition, where perception of sound
patterns turns into interpretation of language. Here one face of the
entities which pass the frontier is a Klangbild, the other belongs to
the Wortschatz a distinction between 'sound-picture' and 'word-
treasure' (i.e. vocabulary) which Wernicke made in 1874. 32

There is considerable doubt whether the discrete elements or
'segments' of speech are phonemes, syllables, or even larger units. Let
us assume for argument's sake that the segments are characteristic
vowel-consonant combinations digrams or trigrarns* and call these
the perceptual units (the 'sound-pictures' of speech). In whatever way
you define your unit, when it comes to the transition from perceiving
the sound-picture to interpreting its speech-value, a considerable degree
of ambiguity creeps in. Thus the, speech-value of a vowel (the o-ness
of an o) is independent of the frequency of its fundamental, and
depends on the characteristic frequency-ranges of its two formants
(its dominant partials). But these formant-ranges overlap; and accor-
dingly 'a sound with a particular spectrum will be recognized as / 1 /
on one occasion and / e / on another'. 33 Most consonants, on the
other hand, vary their pitch according to the vowel with which they

534

THB ACT OF CRBATION

are associated, and are characterized not only by pitch but also by the
change, and rate of change of pitch. 34 Thus the identification of
language units depends to a considerable extent on their meaning-
context; experimental subjects confuse m and n in nonsense syllables
more frequently than when listening to meaningful speech; and the
ambiguity of the input can only be resolved with reference to the pre-
ceding and following inputs in the psychological present. In discussing
the practical feasibility of robots for translating speech into typescript,
Fry and Denes concluded: 'It is unlikely that the mechanical speech-
recognizer will be successful without the use of some form of lin-
guistic ^formation/ 35 It is the same as with ambiguous visual stimuli,
whether they are riddles of the face-hidden-in-the-tree kind, or
Frauenhofer-lines in the spectroscope. 'Es hort dock jeder nur was er
versteht\ Goe the noted in his Maximcn.

If scanning is an aid to vision, articulation is an aid to hearing.
When we try to remember a tune, we hum it. The decisive factor in
the emergence of human speech was not the development of the ear,
but of the vocal organs and of the speech area in the motor cortex.
The multiple feedbacks of auditory-vocal coordination exceed even
those of oculo-motor co-operation. The child learns words by articu-
lating them; adults learning a foreign language follow a similar pro-
cedure. Reading is more often accompanied by sub-vocal articulation
than by images in the ear (except if you know intimately the author of
what you are reading). The analysis of speech-sounds by matching
them against innervation-patterns of the vocal tracts is a much simpler
procedure than the acoustic analysis of the ambiguous sound spectra.
However complex and variable the wave form of a vowel which
reaches the ear, its identity as a language unit depends on its two for-
mants, which in turn depend only on the resonance effects produced
by the alterations of shape of two vocal cavities, mouth and pharynx.
Paget 36 proposed that 'in recognizing speech sounds the human ear
is . . . listening ... to indications, due to resonance, of the position
and gestures of the organs of articulation'. More recently a team of
American experimentalists in the Haskins Laboratories have come to
the same conclusion that 'speech is perceived by reference to articula-
tion that is, that the articulatory movements and their sensory
[proprioceptive] effects mediate between the acoustic stimulus and the
event we call perception'. 87 Lastly, Lawrence (1959) has described a
method of speech-analysis which specifies such details as the fre-
quencies of resonance of the vocal tract and the vibration frequencies

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

535

of the vocal chords a method of analysis 'which preserves all per-
ceptually valuable features, but is vastly simpler than the acoustic
wave form. From an information theory point of view it is a tre-
mendous reduction in the bit rate it is a reduction of the order of
thirty to one. It may well be that speech is held in the short-term
memory in a form like this/ 38

Once again we find confirmed that perception is Something the
organism does, not something which happens to the organism'; 39
that responses enter at every level of the hierarchy into the processing
of stimuli; and that motor activities intervene to analyse the input
long before it has achieved its full status as a 'stimulus' before it has,
for instance, become a meaningful word capable of stimulating the
central process which is to mediate the 'response'. As Drever, Jr., has
so nicely put it: 'Assodationist learning theory, where it has tried

to hold to a stria S >R pattern, appears to be lapsing into an

esoteric scholasticism. Where it has abandoned S >R in favour of

S >X >R, there are complaints that it is struggling to say

things which must be said, but doing so in a language which is no
longer appropriate/ 40

Perceptual and Conceptual Abstraction

One last example of a frontier where perceptual organization can do
no more for you, and symbolic thought has to take over.

When a number of objects is projected by lantern slide on a screen
just long enough to be fully seen but not long enough to be counted,
few people can correctly tell how many objects they have seen if the
number exceeds seven; and many reach their limit of 'number per-
ception at five. 41 Surprisingly enough, the remarkable experiments of
Otto Koehler revealed that pigeons, jackdaws, paroquets, and
budgerigars can do as well, and that specially gifted jackdaws have a
'number sense' with the upper limit eight just as the most gifted
humans.

The experimental procedure consists, briefly, in training birds to
open that box among several other boxes whose lid shows the same
number of spots as the number of objects shown to the bird on a cue
card. The sizes and spatial arrangements of the spots on the lid and of
the objects on the card are not related in any way;- and the rigorous
experimental conditions and controls seem to have established beyond

536

THE ACT OF CREATION

doubt that birds have a 'prelinguistic number sense'; that they 'are
able to abstract the "concept" of numerical identity from groups of up
to seven objects of totally different and unfamiliar appearance'. 42
Among mammals, squirrels have been shown to have the same
ability. 43 The evidence suggests 'that men and animals may have a pre-
linguistic "counting" ability of about the same degree, but that man's
superiority in dealing with numbers lies in his ability to use, as symbols
for numbers, words and figures which have not the same, or indeed
any, numerical attri butes.' 44 The symbolic coding of number Ges-
tagen seems indeed a decisive step towards the formation of cardinal
numbers; I shall return to the subject later (Chapter XV).

Sound-pictures, printed letters of the alphabet, number-configura-
tions, are all complex perceptual wholes, and at the same time ele-
mentary parts of symbolic thought: one might call them (to change
the metaphor) 'amphibian' entities. They signal the transition, in
mental evolution, from the aquatic' world of perception which keeps
the organism submerged in a fluid environment of sounds, shapes, and
smells, to the dry land of conceptualized thinking. The highest forms
of purely perceptual abstraction on the pre-verbal level are like bubbles
of air which aquatic creatures extract from the water; conceptualized
thought is dry and inexhaustible, like the atmosphere.

This is not meant of course to belittle the formidable powers of
perceptual abstraction found in some animals. The innate (or im-
printed) releasive mechanisms, for instance, may be regarded as
phylogenetically acquired skills which enable the animal to combine
the colour, shape, and movement of the stimulus-pattern into a single
'constancy'. The rat learns to make a 'mental map' of the maze in its
head (Chapter XII); and it has always been a mystery to me how my
dog recognizes another dog on the opposite sidewalk at sight without
using his sense of smell- for the typical reactions of staring, straining
at the leash, whining, occurs at the very instant of catching sight. The
other dog may be a miniature Peke, a dolled-up Poodle, or a Great
Dane; how does my dog identify that apparition as a kinsman how
did he abstract the universal 'Dog'? Perhaps at a distance he merely
reacts to four legs and one or two other Gestalt characteristics common
to all amines, which account for their Mogginess' though we would
be at a loss to define them.

Generalization, Discrimination, and Association

We have discussed various forms of 'filtering' codes, both innate and
acquired, which de-particularize or strip the input for purposes of
recognition and storage according to the criteria of relevance in a given
hierarchy. The mcoming pattern is thus subjected to 'generalization' and
discrimination at the same time; the two are complementary aspects of
the same process. (The word 'generalization is often used in two different
senses: (a) extracting invariant features from a variety of experiences,
(b) the 'spreading* of responses. I am using it in the first sense.)

Native equipment and early learning provide the basic foundations
on which the different hierarchies are built, designed to filter out more
and more sharply defined features. The coarse-meshed 'perceptual
sieves' of the tyro acquire fine-meshed sub-analysers: perceptual
learning progresses 'from the seeing of gross differences to the seeing
of fine differences' (pp. 490 f.). All connoisseurship -from the
chicken-sexer's to the handwriting expert's, from the wine-taster's to
the art historian's, depends on the hierarchic build-up of analysing,
matching, scanning codes which extract subtle similarities and make
precise discriminations.

This leads to the hoary problem of the nature of 'similarity'. The
simplest answer would be to elirninate it altogether from the vocabu-
lary of psychology and to substitute 'equipotentiality' for it. Two per-
cepts are equipotential if both can pass a given filter in a given hierarchy
if they satisfy its criteria according to the rules of the game that is
played at the time; in other words, if 'for one intent and purpose' (but
not Tor all intents and purposes') they are the same thing. Sultan dis-
covered the 'similarity' between a branch on the castor-oil bush and a
stick because they were equipotential for his purpose. A paperclip is
'similar* to a hair-pin when I have to mend a blown fuse. The answer
to the old classroom question whether a red circle is more similar to a
green circle than to a red triangle, depends on whether I am teaching
geometry or colour-theory. In the first case, the two circles are for
my purpose, 'the same thing'; in the second, the two colours are 'the
same thing.'*

The width of the span within which two stimuli are perceived as
'the same thing' depends on the precision of the analyser the gauge
of the sieve through which they must pass. To talk of the 'spreading*
of response ('generalization' in sense (b) ) is confusing; the equi-
potentiality of circle and ellipse to the naive Pavlov dog is not due to

537

538

THE ACT OF CREATION

any spreading of reactions from circle to ellipse, but to the absence of
discrimination between two figures which for the 'intents and purposes'
of the untrained animal are the same as for my intents and purposes
one sheep is the same as another. Similar considerations apply to
'transfer* (Chapter XV).

'Association by similarity' of perceptions would accordingly mean
that an input-pattern A at some stage of its ascent in the nervous
system initiates the recall of some past experience B which is equi-
potential to A with respect to the scanning process at that particular
stage, but not in other respects. We might say that A and B have one
partial' in common which causes B to resonate*.

Association by sound and visual form plays, as we have seen, an
important part in the dream and in subconscious processes which
enter into creativity. But in the ordinary routines of life, association
of sensory percepts uncontaminated by conceptual thinking seems to
be rare, and whether it occurs at all is anybody's introspective guess.
In the Rohrschach test visual association depends on projective dy-
namics imbued with meaning. Verbal suggestions influence the visual
matrix and distort even the eidetic image; the ambiguities of the sound-
picture can only be dispelled by reference to vocabulary; children and
aphasic patients often confuse p and q, or write s and e as mirror
images, because the cognitive glue which holds the true perceptual
units together (verticals, loops, etc.) has not yet hardened or has
already decayed like the aggregate of visual and cognitive elements
which constitutes the image of the elephant. Thus hearing is inex-
tricably bound up with interpreting, seeing with knowing, perceiving
with naming. By these methods the organism is enabled to build a
model of the external world into its own nervous system, without
having to store lantern-slides and gramophone records of complex
perceptual forms animal, vegetable and mineral- which would not
work anyway. All that the model needs in the way of perceptual
'traces' is a modest inventory of elementary root-forms much like
the cubist painter's austere repertory which Cezanne recommended:
'Everything in nature is modelled on the sphere, the cone and the
cylinder. One must teach oneself to base one's painting on these simple
figures then one can accomplish anything one likes.* 45

"What we call our visual or auditory memory probably consists of a
limited number of such 'root traces' or 'perceptual elements' (in Hebb's
sense). These alone may have 'real form' as perceptual wholes, and at
the same time enter as parts into the complex, aggregate 'pseudo-

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

539

images', held together by meaningful association. If it seems to us that
such complex aggregates can be 'taken in* and 'recognized at a glance*
without scanni n g and exploration, this is perhaps because we com-
monly underestimate the span of the psychological present. In his
review of the literature on the psychological present, Woodrow found
that its maximum span is estimated to lie between 2*3 and 12 seconds. 46
No wonder there is considerable disagreement about the size of the
'discrete units of speech' in perception whether the unit is the
phoneme, syllable, word, or a whole sentence! A few seconds are
ample time for those partly or wholly unconscious operations which
make our perceptions into inferential constructions. If the psycho-
logical present /P/ be regarded as an elementary quantum of conscious
experience, then the processes which go on within /P/ can ex hypothesi
not be on a conscious level; they must remain an unanalysable and un-
compressible blur.

Recognition and Recall

While new matrices are formed by learning, others may decay through
disuse like old waterways overgrown by weeds. Apart from genera-
tion and decay, the traces left by past events in the nervous system also
undergo dynamic changes simplification, condensation, distortion
on the one hand; elaboration and enrichment through the addition of
extraneous material on the other. The 'schemata* of memory, as
Bardett called them, are 'Hving, constandy developing, affected by
every bit of mcoming sensational experience of a given kind'. 47 In
other words, the past is constantly being re-made by the present.*
To quote Bardett again:

'Remembering is not re-excitation of innumerable, fixed, lifeless
and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or con-
struction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole
active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little
outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language
form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary
cases of rote-recapitulation, and it is not at all important that it should
be so.' 48

True recall by imagery would be possible only if the de-particu-
larized memory could be re-particularized, the irreversible process
reversed. One may be- able to 'hear' while shaving, for instance
the faint, pale ghost of a voice from the past singing a simple song. To

540 THE ACT OF CREATION

make this possible, at least three different systems of 'coloured filters',
concerned with melody, timbre, and wording, must each have pre-
served one aspect of the original experience. One may also recall,
more or less distinctly, characteristic combinations of form and
motion: the stride of a person, the roll of a boat, the waddle of a
tortoise. But the average persons abilities of perceptual imaging are
limited to this kind of production. Hence the paradox of what one
might call negative recognition , : I visit a friend whom I have not seen
for some time, look round and say: * Something is changed in this
room' without being able to say what has been changed. I can only
assume that my memory of the room was determined by several
complementary matrices sketchy, part verbal, part visual schemata,
such as 'Regency furniture', 'L-shaped plan*, 'subdued colour scheme',
etc. plus one or two 'vivid details': a picture, a flower-vase. A good
many changes could be made in the room which I would not notice
so long as they satisfy these criteria as 'equipotential variations'; only
changes which offend against one of the codes will make me register
that 'something is wrong'. My inability to name that 'something*
indicates that the code was functioning below the level of conscious
awareness (Cf. Book One, XIX).*

The adjectives used to describe a face 'soft', 'bony', 'pinched',
'humorous', etc. refer to part visual, part verbal schemata, some of
which may be as, simplified as the surprisingly few linear elements
which suffice to indicate emotional expression by the posture and slant
of mouth and eyes. The caricaturist can evoke a face by a few strokes
which schematize a total impression (Hitler's moustache and lock), or
he can pick out a detail which acts as a 'sign-releaser' (Churchill's
~~cigar). It is often easier to remember a face known only from illus-
trations Napoleon or Mona Lisa than faces of living persons; per-
haps because half of the compressing and coding of the visual infor-
mation has already been done by the artist. Equally revealing is the
police method of reconstructing the likeness of a criminal by the
Identi-Kit method. This is based on 'a slide-file of five hundred and
fifty facial characteristics containing, among other things, a hundred
irid two sets of eyes ranging from pop to squinting, thirty-three sets
of lips from thin to sensuous, fifty-two chins, from weak to jutting,
and even twenty-five sets of wrinkles. Witnesses pick the individual
features that most closely resemble their idea of the crirninal's look.
From their selections a composite picture of all the features is then
assembled.* 49

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

541

If in the process of memory-formation the input is stripped down to
bare essentials, recall requires dressing it up again. This seems to be
done by some summary drapings, patched out with surviving frag-
ments of picture-strip, plus some fitting garments borrowed from
elsewhere we all know how often 'vivid details' are incorporated
into the recall of experiences to which they do not belong. Imaging
involves imagining, which is a flexible skill. It is triggered-ofF by an
impulse of central origin a kind of 'extitation-clang' which unlocks
'memory releasers' and sets off the feedback-circuits of 'inferential
reconstruction; as with other plastic skills, two performances are never
quite the same.

Summary

I have treated perception, recognition, and memory-formation as a
continuous series. The sensory input is screened, dismanded, re-
assembled, analysed, interpreted, and stored along a variety of channels
belonging to different hierarchies with different criteria of relevance.
A tune can be stored stripped of timbre, and vice versa. The de-
particularization of experience in the process of memory-formation is
compensated to some extent by the multiplicity of abstractive hier-
archies which participate in the process, and by the retention of
picture-strips' vivid fragments of emotive or symbolic significance.

Central controls and motor activities participate at various stages
in the processing of the input; from stimulus-selection in the end-
organ and visual scanning, through resonances from the vocal tract,
to the interpretation of Klangbild by Wortsckatz, and of the seen by
the known. Nowhere are 'stimuli' and 'responses' neady separable;
they form hierarchies of loops within loops. The mechanisms res-
ponsible for the processing are partly inborn, mosdy acquired; their
codes have a high degree of autonomy and show their 'self-asserting'
tendencies in the tenacity of optical illusions and of 'seeing in terms of.

The generalization and retention of perceptual forms has an upper
limit where symbolic coding must take over to make further progress
in learning possible. The ability of man to form 'number percepts' is
not significandy superior to that of some birds; memory images are
aggregates of relatively simple schematized forms, i.e. of true per-
ceptual elements, held together by cognitive linkages, as the 'sound-
pictures' of speech are given coherence by their meaning. They are
double-faced entities: complex perceptual Gestalt-wholes which enter

542

THE ACT OF CREATION

as units into the symbolic hierarchy. We must assume that there are
analysing devices of this kind active in the nervous system, 'resonators'
which are attuned 1 to a certain configuration in the perceptual input,
and respond to it by signals in symbolic coding addressed to the higher
echelons. All inputs which are equipotential with respect to that con-
figuration e.g. 'triangularity' are regarded by the analyser as 'the
same thing', and reported by the same signal. The process is thus the
reverse of the 'spelling out' activites of the motor hierarchy which is
in some respects comparable to the unlocking of memory-releasers in
recall.

'Generalization and 'discrirnination , are complementary aspects of
the same process, and will be discussed, together with the ambiguities
of 'spreading' and 'transfer', in later chapters.

NOTES

To p. 513. Cf. Polanyi, 1958, p. 364: 'Behaviourists teach that in observing
an animal we must refrain above all from trying to imagine what we would do
if placed in the animal's position. I suggest, on the contrary, that nothing at all
could be known about an animal that would be of the slightest interest to physi-
ology, and still less to psychology, except by following the opposite maxim '

To p. 516. This response is mediated either by resonance (Helmholz's
theory) or, more likely, by the locus of maximum hydraulic pressure in the
'travelling wave'.

To p. $17. The latter assumes that in visual perception a spatial 'picture* is
projected on to the primary optical cortex, which reproduces the retinal image.
But the excitation-pattern in the auditory cortex has no 'contours' separating
' figure and background, and it would be difficult to imagine 'field currents*
created by them.

To p. 333, There are strong arguments against the segmentation of language
according to the letters of the written alphabet (cf. e.g. Paget 1930; Ladefoged
in Mechanization of Thought Processes, 1959).

To p. 537. There exist of course both innate and acquired preferences for
choosing one system of 'coloured filters* rather than another as a criterion of
equipotentiality. Two notes an octave apart sound more 'similar* to man and
rat than two notes close together. Evidently the nervous system finds it for its
own 'intents and purposes' more convenient to regard two frequencies of the
ratio 2p : p as mote similar than two frequencies of the ratio p : (p*r).

To p, 539. The protracted controversy about the existence of progressive,
systematic changes in perceptual traces ('levelling* and 'sharpening') was un-
fortunately restricted to one type of change only the reduction of 'dynamic

PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

543

stress* in the physical trace, predicted by Gestalt physiology see Wulf, quoted
by Koffka (1935); Hebb and Foord (1954). No psychologist would dare to deny
that 'memory plays us false'; but its confidence-tricks are evidently not of the
grossly mechanical type, divorced from the subject's living experience, which
Kohler's theory of cortical field-processes demanded.

To p. 540. 'Negative recognition' could be called the unconscious variety of
Woodworth's (1938) 'schema with correction'.

XI

MOTOR SKILLS

In the process of becoming an expert typist, the student must go
through the whole range of learning processes variously classified
as instrumental conditioning, sign-learning, trial and error, rote and
place learning, insight. He is, of course, quite unaware of these cate-
gories which, in fact, overlap at almost every stage. The essence of
the process is the step-wise integration of relatively simple codes of
behaviour into complex and flexible codes with a hierarchic structure.
This conclusion was actually reached (although expressed in different
words) in the 1890s by Bryan and Harter 1 then buried and forgotten
for nearly half a century. Woodworth was one of the few experimental
psychologists who kept harking back to the subject. The following is
taken from his summary of Bryan and Harter 's Studies on the Tele-
graphic Language, The Acquisition of a Hierarchy of Habits?

'The beginner first learns the alphabet of dots and dashes. Each letter
is a little pattern of finger movements in sending, a little pattern of
clicks in receiving. It is something of an achievement to master these
motor and auditory letter habits. At this stage the learner spells the words
in sending or receiving. "With further practice he becomes familiar
with word-patterns and does not spell out the common words. The
transition from the letter habit to the word-habit stage extends over a
long period of practice, and before this stage is fully reached a still
more synthetic form of reaction begins to appear. "The fair operator
is not held so closely to words. He can take in several words at a
mouthful, a phrase or even a short sentence." In sending he antici-
pates, as in other motor performances; but in receiving, he learns to
"copy behind'*, letting two or three words come from the sounder
before he starts to copy. Keeping a few words behind the sounder
allows time for getting the sense of the message.'

544

MOTOR SKILLS

545

Let us call these three stages of habit-formation the 'letter', 'word',
and 'context* levels. The letter habit is acquired by 'serial learning'.
But no chain-response theory can account even for this first step in
acquiring the skill for the simple reason that the homogeneous dots
and the homogeneous dashes of the Morse sequence offer no distin-
guishable characteristics for the forming of specific S.-R. connections.
The letter V is transmitted by dot-dot-dash; the letter *w' by dot-
dash-dash. In terms of S.-R. theory, the finger-movement made in
sending the first dot is the initial part-response which triggers the chain,
its kinaes thetic sensation acting as a stimulus which calls out the next
response. But the correct response to the same stimulus will be either
dot or dash; nothing in the nature of the stimulus itself indicates what
the next response should be; the response is determined at this and each
following step not by the preceding stimulus but by the total pattern. The

habit cannot be represented by a linear series : > >

it can only be represented as a two-tired hierarchic structure:

Figure 17

The related skill of touch-typing was studied by Book, 3 who wired
his machines to time every move made by the experimental subjects.
In this case the letter habit is acquired by pUce-learning'- the key-
board is hidden from the student by a screen, and he is required to form
a 'map' of its layout in his head. This map, one supposes, is structured
by a simple co-ordinate-system: the fixed resting position of the ten
fingers on the third row of the keyboard; the result is a kind of simple

54<5

THE ACT OF CREATION

'maze' with variable target positions. But when, after a certain amount
of hit and miss, the letter habit had been mastered:

further practice gave results unexpected by the learner. He found
himself anticipating the sequence of finger movements in a short,
familiar word. Habits were developing for groups of letters such as
prefixes, suffixes, and short words. ... 'A word simply means a
group of movements which I attend to as a whole. I seem to get

beforeh and a sort of feel of the whole group' The single letters

were no longer thought of and each word became an automatic
sequence. . . . Familiar phrases were similarly organized, the thought
of the phrase calling out the whole series of connected movements. 4

Yet even phrases ending with a full stop did not prove to be the
highest units. The records showed no pauses between phrases' but
an even flow; and here, too, 'the eyes [on the text to be copied] were
well ahead of the hands' to enable the typist to take in the meaning.

As a third example let us consider learning to play the piano (though
I could find no textbook references to this not altogether unusual human
occupation). The 'letter habit' here becomes a note habit' hitting
the intended black or white key; for 'word' read 'bar' or 'musical
phrase'; and so on to more complex integrated patterns. In this case,
however, even the lowest unit of the skillhitting the right key-
displays considerable flexibility. There is no longer, as on the type-
writer, a rigid attri bution of each key to one finger; on the piano
keyboard almost any finger can be used, according to circumstances,
to hit any key; several keys may be hit and held at the same time; and
a hard or soft touch makes all the difference to musical quality. (Need-
less to say, even the typist's motion-patterns must be adaptable to small
portables and large office niachines, and the starting position of the
finger varies according to the preceding stroke. Flexibility is a matter
of degrees; a completely fixed response is, like the reflex arc, an
abstraction.)

The skill of hitting the correct piano-key is not acquired by es-
tablishing point-to-point correspondences, but primarily by practising
the various scales; these superimpose, as it were, structured motions
on to the keyboard, sub-structured into triads, septdms, etc. At an
advanced stage, when improvization has become possible, the left
hand will learn to accompany the right, which acts as a 'pace-maker'
a glorified form of the magnet effect in the gold-fish (p. 438); but the

MOTOR SKILLS

547

left can also act in relative independence, according to the commands
of the score. At this level we have approximately the following state of
affairs: the visual input consists in two groups of parallel rows (staves)
of coded signals, of which the upper series must be referred to the
right, the lower to the left hand. In the course of this procedure both
rows of signals must be de-coded and re-coded. The symbols on the
two rows are usually in different parallel codes (Violin clef* for the
right, 'bass clef for the left). Moreover, there are 'key signatures'
sharp and flat signs at the beginning of a section, which modify the
'face value' of the notes; there are symbols which indicate the timing
and duration of notes; and overall instructions regarding loudness,
tempo and mood. All these part-dependent, part-independent de- and
re-coding operations for both hands must proceed simultaneously, in
the psychological present, and more or less automatically.

On an ever higher level, the concert pianist develops a repertory of
ceuvres that he can 'trigger off' as units and play by heart though
some of these units may be an hour long. Once again we must assume
that this is done by a combination of several interlocking hierarchies,
each articulated into sub-wholes and the sub-wholes thereof.

Then there is improvisation. It need not be creative; the bar-
pianist who, half asleep, syncopates Chopin and trails off into some
variation of his own, is not a composer; but he has gained additional
flexibility more degrees of freedom in the practice of his skill. And
finally there is the creative act: the composer who weaves his threads
into new patterns, and the interpreter who sheds new light on existing
patterns.

The learning process is, somewhat paradoxically, cssiest to visualize
as a reversal of the hierarchic sequence of operations which will
characterize performance when learning is completed. When the
typist copies a document, the sequence of operations is initiated on the
semantic level, then branches down into successive lower levels with
increasingly specific 'fixed action-patterns' 'word-habits' and 'letter-
habits'; terminating in the 'consummatory act' of the finger muscles.
The impulses arborize downwards and outwards, whereas learning
proceeds in the reverse direction: the tips of the twigs of the future
tree are the first to come into existence; the twigs then grow together
centripetally into branches, the branches merge into the trunk. It
strikes one as a very artificial procedure; but the type of mechanical
learning we have discussed, where the discrete base-units must be
stamped in bit by bit, is indeed an artificial procedure. The difference

548

THE ACT OF CREATION

between this method of learning through trial and error and learning
'by insight' becomes glaringly obvious if you compare what happens
during an elementary violin lesson and an equally elementary singing
lesson. The choir boy can rely on his innate, multiple auditory-vocal
feedbacks operating through the air, through his bones, and through
proprioceptive sensations from his vocal tract to control his voice.
But there exist no innate feedbacks between the violin student's cochlea
and finger-muscles, to control their motions. No amount of theoretical
insight into the working of the instrument can replace this handicap;
it can only be overcome by supplementing insight with trial and
error. In other words, human beings are biologically less 'ripe' for
learning the violin than for learning to sing. If evolution were to
produce a super-cricket or cicada sapiens, the opposite may be true.

To put it in a different way: the built-in feedbacks of the auditory-
vocal apparatus provide a direct insight into the Tightness or wrong-
ness (singing out of tune) of the response; they permit an immediate
'perception of relations' which is Thorpe's definition of insight. But
once more, this insight is far from absolute: when it comes to pro-
fessional singing, a heart-breaking amount of drill is required. The
pupil is often taught the proper techniques of breathing with his hand
on the teacher's stomach because his insight into, and control of,
his own physiological functions is limited. Verbal instructions are of
little help, and are sometimes a hindrance, in the acquisition of muscle
skills; to become clever with one's hands, or one's feet in dancing,
requires a kind of muscle training which defies classification as either
insightful or trial-and-error learning.

I have repeatedly mentioned the mysteries of riding a bicycle:
nobody quite knows how it is done, and any competent physicist
would be inclinded to deny a priori that it can be done. However, as a
two-legged primate, man has an innate 'ripeness* for the acquisition
of all kinds of postural and balancing skills such as skating, rock-
climbing, or walking the tight-rope; accordingly, the hierarchy of
learning processes in the case of the cyclist starts on a higher level of
already integrated sub-skills, than in the examples previously dis-
cussed. Broadly speaking, the pupil must turn the handle-bar in the
direction he is falling, which will make him tend to fall in the opposite
direction, and so forth, until he gradually 'gets the feel' of the amount
of correction required. This is certainly trial-and-error learning in the
sense that errors are punished by a fall; but the trials are by no means
random, and the errors arc all in the right direction they merely over-

MOTOR SKILLS

549

or under-shoot the mark. The code which is formed by successive
adjustments of the neural 'servo-mechanism* is presumably of the
analogue-computer type and the same applies probably to dancing,
skating, or tennis-playing.

But once the skill has been mastered and formed into a habit, its
integrated pattern is represented as a unit on the next-higher level in
the hierarchy, and can be triggered off by a single (verbal or non-
verbal) command. To take a more complicated example: the soccer-
player must acquire a variety of basic routines of taking comm and of
the ball 'stopping' it with foot, thigh, chest, or head; volleying it in
flight without stopping; kicking it with the instep, the inner or outer
side-wall of the boot; dribbling, passing, and shooting at the goal, etc.
When these elementary, yet very complex, techniques have been
mastered, each of them will become a self-contained sub-skill in his
repertory, and he will be able to decide, in a split second, which of
them to employ according to the layout of the field. The decision
whedier to shoot or pass is based on discrete yes-no alternatives of the
digital type; but the execution of the actual move shooting, passing,
etc. seems to require an analogue-computer type of code. A further
step down the 'analogue' process of flexing the leg-muscles for a pass
of appropriate length is again converted into the digital on-off pro-
cesses in individual motor units; while on the top level a fluid strategy
is converted into discrete tactical decisions.

It would seem that behavioural matrices on every level of a given
hierarchy are triggered off by digital-type all-or-nothing impulses;
if the matrix is flexible it will function as a digital-to-analogue con-
verter; and will in its turn trigger off sub-codes at certain critical
limits as analogue-to-digital converters. But theorizing about the
nervous system in terms of computer models is a risky affair, and may
yet lure psychology into a cul-de-sac as the telephone-exchange
model did half a century ago.*

Summary: Rigidity and Freedom

Let me recapitulate some points which emerge when the observations
in the present chapter are taken in conjunction with the broader
issues discussed in Book One.

On the elementary levels of learning a skill a varying amount of
stamping-in is required, depending on the organism's ripeness* for

550

THE ACT OF CREATION

the task; or, to put it the other way round, depending on the natural-
ness* of the task relative to the organism's existing skills. Learning to
type requires more stamping-in than learning to ride a bicycle; the
former is comparable to the blindfold memorizing of a maze, the
latter to the gradual adjustment of various interlocking servo-
mechanisms. In both cases the learning process consists in the integra-
tion of elementary skills the members of the nascent matrix into
a single pattern which can be activated as a unit. But even in acquiring
a mechanical skill like typing, bit-by-bit learning plays in fact a lesser
part than seems to be the case. The typist's mental map of the key-
board is not simply a rote-learned aggregation of twenty-six letters
(plus numbers and signs) distributed at random; it is a 'coded' map,
structured by a system of co-ordinates the resting position of the
fingers and by the frequency-rating of letters, syllables, etc. These
patterns, superimposed on the keyboard map, could be compared to
the mnemonic aids used in the learning of nonsense syllables. Whole-
learning invades bit-learning at every opportunity; if the meaningless
is to be retained, the mind must smuggle meaning into it.

Once a skill has been mastered so that it can be activated as a unit it
functions more or less autonomously and automatically. This applies
to both perceptual and motor skills, from the perceptual constancies
and motor reflexes upwards. Learning to find the right key on the
keyboard -requires concentration, focal awareness; but when the
letter-habit has been acquired it becomes 'instinctive', unconscious;
attention is freed to concentrate on meaning, and can 'let the fingers
take care of themselves'; their control is relegated to lower levels of
awareness and, in all likelihood, to lower levels in the nervous system.
Thus the work of Gastaut and Beck clearly suggests that 'once we
have learned something we no longer rely so much on our cortex
and reticular formation. Those things we do "without thinking" . . .
may depend more on the older primitive parts of the nervous system
such as the limbic structures, thus releasing higher centres such as the
cortex for other tasks. . . Common sense indicates such a possibility;
electro-physiology suggests it. . . .' s *

The same skilled action driving a motor-car or playing a nocturne
by heart can be performed automatically, or in semi-conscious
absent-mindedness, or with full concentration. But the motorist who
concentrates on driving fast along a crowded road has his attention
focussed on matters of general strategy e.g. whether it is safe to over-
take or not, whereas the actual manipulation of the wheel and pedals

MOTOR SKILLS

551

are still carried out automatically; and the pianist trying to give his
best, still finds the keys automatically. We again find confirmed that
the code which controls skilled behaviour always operates through
sub-codes which function on lower levels of awareness. Shifting the
focus of attention to these sub-codes produces the familiar paradox
of the centipede'. Its equivalent in perception is the loss of meaning
which results when a word is repeated monotonously and attention
becomes focussed on the Klangbild (cf. 'ce-du, ce-du, ce-du\ Book
One, p. 75 f.; even more painful is the semantic paralysis which some-
times befalls a writer while correcting the proofs of a forthcoming
book.

The lower we descend in the hierarchy the more stereotyped, re-
flex-like activities we find; and vice versa, flexibility increases with each
step upward. The more complex the skill, the more alternative varia-
tions it offers for adaptable strategies: a matrix on the n+ 1 level has
more degrees of freedom than a matrix on the n level. But whether
they will be utilized and produce varied performance, depends on the
environment. Monotonous environments induce repetitive, stereo-
typed habits; the degrees of freedom in the matrix freeze up. 'Over-
learning , is the fixation, through repetition in unvarying conditions,
of one among many possible variations in the exercise of a skill at the
expense of all others. Thus habits become automatized (a) because
they operate on the lower strata of the hierarchy with few degrees of
freedom, like hitting a typewriter key or depressing the accelerator
pedal; (b) when a complex skill is reduced through environmental
monotony to a single-track habit. 'Monotony' is of course a subjective
term referring to lack of change in those features of the environment
which are relevant to the subject's interests. For all we know the
streets of Koenigsberg through which Emmanuel Kant took his fixed
walk at a fixed hour for forty years might have been wildly exciting
to another person.

The integration of motor-patterns into larger and more complex
skills in the process of learning is paralleled by a similar progression
on the perceptual side. The telegraphist who has advanced from 'letter-
habits' through 'word-habits' to 'phrase-habits' in his sending tech-
nique, has at the same time learned to take in several words and even
phrases 'at a mouthful'. The pianist takes in a whole musical phrase
from the score at a glance; both input and output are no longer
measured in bits but in chunks.* The more complex the skill, the
bigger the chunks in space or time which must be taken into account.

552

THE ACT OF CREATION

The skilled soccer player keeps his eye on the ball, but is at the same
time aware of the positions and peculiarities of the other players on the
field. The motorist, driving to his office, chooses the least congested
road among several alternatives by consulting the mental map in his
head. The typist, who deliberately lags a phrase or two behind dic-
tation, expands the duration of the psychological present to take in a
bigger chunk of meaning. While listening tp speech or music we do
the same; while talking we trigger off long sequences of muscular
patterns as a whole. As we become more proficient in any skilled
activity, we learn 'to put feedback loops around larger and larger
segments of our behaviour'. 6

Though motor learning proceeds, generally speaking, from lower
to higher levels, and performance in the reverse direction, this does
not mean that in performing we run through the whole gamut of the
learning process in reverse gear. As one learns to play a sonata by
heart, one needs less and less often to consult the score, and in the end
the visual feedback which was indispensable during learning can
be dispensed with entirely; the habit now functions autonomously.
The skilled pianist can play blindfold, a man can knot his tie without
looking into the mirror, the physician can tell the patient's pulse
without looking at his watch, the adult reads without spelling out the
letters. When the skill has been mastered, the props which served the
learning process are kicked away as Maxwell kicked away the
scaffolding of his mechanical model when he arrived at his equations
(see Appendix I). In this respect, too, the learning process is irreversible.

The autonomy of the codes which pattern behaviour is a phenomenon
which we have met on all levels from the self-regulatory activities
of the morphogenetic field, through the fixed action-patterns of
instinct behaviour, to the perceptual frames responsible for constan-
cies, illusions, and our ways of seeing the world through coloured
filters, as it were. But on the level of complex skills, the 'self-assertive'
tendencies of acquired motor-patterns are particularly striking. To
repeat an obvious example, one cannot disguise one's handwriting
sufficiently to fool the expert; even the skilled burglar has his indi-
vidual style in safe-breaking which gives him away. Autonomy and
self-government are basic principles in the hierarchy of skills. Thus 'the
performance of very quick movements', Lashley observed, 'indicates
their independence of current control. "Whip-snapping" movements
of the hand can be regulated in extent, yet the entire movement, from
initiation to completion requires less than the reaction time for a

MOTOR SKILLS

553

tactile or kinaes thetic stimulation of the arm, which is about one-
eighth of a second, even when no discrimination is involved. . . . The
finger-strokes of a musician may reach sixteen per second in passages
which call for a definite and changing order of successive finger-
movements. The succession of movements is too quick even for visual
reaction time. . . . Sensory control of movement seems to be ruled
out in such acts.' 7

Similar conclusions were reached, as already mentioned, by Ruch,
concerning voluntary movement in general. In view of the rapidity
of skilled movements which are too fast to leave room for visual or
proprioceptive feedback control, Ruch, like Lashley, assumed the
operation of pre-set time-tension patterns of muscle contraction in the
nervous system: 'The cerebral-cerebellar circuit may represent not so
much an error-correcting device as a part of a mechanism by which an
instantaneous order can be extended in time . . . and thus reduce the
troublesome transients involved in the correction of movement by
output-informed feedbacks/ 8

The tendency to reduce those 'troublesome' feedbacks to a minimuni
is the essence of habit-formation and automatization. It follows the
principle of parsimony; if we had to concentrate on each movement
we made, there would be no room for thought. On the other hand,
this inherent tendency to form neural organizations which, one might
say, jealously defend their autonomy against interference from a
changing outside world, makes us all, in varying degrees, the slaves of
habit. We may reduce the degree of enslavement, but the basic pre-
dicament is inherent in the hierarchic structure or nervous organiza-
tion, where 'the structure of the input does not produce the structure
of the output, but merely modifies intrinsic nervous activities that
have a structural organization of their own'. The quotation (repeated
from p k 434) referred to instinct behaviour and the lower motor
functions, but it is equally applicable, as we have seen, to complex,
acquired skills. These may have a high degree of flexibility, but they
nevertheless operate through automatized sub-skills on the lower
ranges of the hierarchy, which manifest themselves in the individual
'touch' of the pianist, the 'style' of the tennis-player, the fixed man-
nerisms, quirks, idiosyncrasies, and unconscious rituals which are our
personal hallmarks.

How much of his potential freedom a person puts to active use
depends partly on environmental factors the novelty, intensity,
vexatiousness, etc., of the stimuli to which he is exposed. But the

554

THE ACT OF CREATION

nature and amount of stimulation derived from a given input depends,
of course, on personality structure. One type of individual will
respond to monotonous situations with stereotyped reactions; another
type will find monotony vexatious, that is to say, stimulating. 'Active
boredom', as this kind of reaction may be called, can provide alter-
natives to habituation; the subject may experience the very absence of
change as a novelty as prison is a novelty to the first offender; and
since the environment refuses to offer variety, he will vary his own
performance to provide it. Hence the apparently spontaneous changes
in fashions and crazes, not only in human society but also in colonies
of captive chimpanzees.

If, on the other hand, the challenge from the environment exceeds
a critical limit, behaviour will either become distintegrated, or the
challenge will be met by an original, 'super-flexible' response a re-
structuring of the pattern of the skill. We have met examples of this
on all levels, from the 'prenatal skills' of morphogenesis, through
Bethe's mutilated insects to Lashley's rats and Kohler's chimpanzees.
The complex, acquired motor-skills, which we discussed in this
chapter, are capable of equally impressive emergency-reorganizations.
The first aircraftsman who, when his brakes refused to function on
landing, saved his plane by opening his parachute through the rear-
window, achieved a true bisociation of two unconnected skills. The
violinist who finishes his piece in spite of a broken E string; the typist
managing on a half-broken machine; the secret tunnel-builders in
prisoner-of-war camps; the legless war pilot winning a Victoria Cross;
Renoir, crippled with arthritis, continuing to paint with a brush
fixed to his forearm they all gave proof of an unexpected, creative
surplus-potential in the nervous system. Such accomplishments are
more impressive than the quasi-miraculous feats performed in panic
or rage the latter are of a quantitative order and do not involve the
reorganization of pattern.

The homologous nature of the basic principles which operate on
different levels of the hierarchy becomes evident when we remember
the conclusions which emerged from the discussion of instinct be-
haviour: 'At one end of the scale we find rituals, fixed action-patterns,
vacuum and displacement activities rigid, automatized, and com-
pulsive, petrified habits. At the other extreme we find . . . codes which
govern behaviour of remarkable flexibility, and original adaptations
which lie outside the animal's normal skills and habit repertory.' 10

NOTES

To p. 549. See, for instance, the rather desperate footnote on p. 197 of
Miller et al (i960) : 'One reason for much of the trouble on reaching an agreement
about the way the brain works was that two of the authors stubbornly persisted
in trying to talk about it in terms appropriate to the dry hardware of modern
digital computers, whereas the third was equally persistent in using language
appropriate to the wet software that lives inside the skull. After a decade of
cybernetics you might think the translation from one of these languages into the
other would be fairly simple, but that was not the case. The relation between
computers and brains was a batde the authors fought with one another until the
exasperation became unbearable.'

To p. 550. Experiments by S. M. Evans (New Scientist, 2 May, 1963) have
shown that the supraoesophageal ganglia of the ring-worm (its 'brain') are essen-
tial for learning but not for memory storage since learned habits will be retained
after removal of the 'brain*. Once the habit is acquired, it is apparendy trans-
ferred 'to a storage centre which is presumably somewhere else in the nervous
system'.

To.p. 551. Cfalso: 'in rapid sight reading it is impossible to read the individual
notes of an arpeggio. The notes must be seen in groups, and it is actually easier
to read chords seen simultaneously and to translate them into temporal sequence
than to read successive notes in the arpeggio as usually written' (Lashley in the
Hixon Symposium, p. 123).

555

XII

THE PITFALLS OF LEARNING THEORY
A Glance in Retrospect

In the course of the past fifty years, learning theory has been one
of the central battlefields of psychology. 'One may say broadly*,
Bertr and Russell wrote in 1927, 'that all the animals that have been
carefully observed have behaved so as to confirm the philosophy in
which the observer believed before his observations began. Nay, more,
they have all displayed the national characteristics of the observer.
Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, with an incredible
display of hustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by
chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last
evolve the situation out of their inner consciousness. To the plain man,
such as the present writer, this situation is discouraging. I observe,
however, that the type of problem which a man naturally sets to an
animal depends upon his own philosophy, and that this probably
accounts for the differences in the results.' 1

Russell's remarks remain true, even though some eminent psycho-
logists deny that they have a philosophy at all and hold all theory-
making to be 'wasteful and misleading'. 2 Not only the choice of
problem, but also the choice of animals is characteristic of the ex-
perimenter's bias. Kohler, desirous to prove insight and intelligence,
concentrated mainly on chimpanzees. Skinner's best-known books
are called The Behaviour of Organisms (1938) and Science and Human
Behaviour (1953); but as Hilgard said 'neither title betrays that the
precise data were derived largely from experiments on rats and pigeons.
It is somewhat anomalous that a systematist who refuses to predict
what a rat or pigeon will do because such prediction does not belong
in a scientific study of behaviour is willing to make confident
assertions about the most complex forms of human behaviour, eco-
nomic, political, religious'. 8

55<5

THE PITFALLS OP LEARNING THEORY

557

Hull's attempt to create an all-embracing theory of behaviour
was almost entirely based on the bar-pressing activities of rats. This
was considered by Hull and his school as a sufficiently solid basis to
derive from them 'the basic laws of behaviour . . . including the social
behaviour of man'. 4

Lasdy, the German school of ethologists Lorenz, Tinbergen, etc.
concentrated mainly on highly ritualized forms of animal life in
birds and insects. Thus each school developed its special universe of
discourse, moving in a closed system, concentrating on their favourite
animals in their favourite experimental situations dogs dripping
saliva through fistulae, cats raging in puzzle-boxes, rats rurining
through mazes, geese being 'imprinted' by Dr. Lorenz ambling on
all-fours.

But the data from these highly specialized, experimental trends did
not add up to a coherent picture, and each school had a tendency to
ignore what the others were doing. Thus, for instance, in Skinner's
Science and Human Behaviour, which was intended as a textbook, the
index contains neither the word 'insight', nor the names of Kohler,
Koffka, Lewin, Tolman, Hull, Lashley, or Lorenz; only Thorndike
and Pavlov are mentioned by name as theorists of learning with some
merit. And vice versa, I have searched in vain for the name of Pavlov
in the indices of Kohler's and KofFka's books. 5 Thus much of the
controversies in learning theory resembled less a battle than a game of
blind man's buff.

How, just at a time when the mechanistic conceptions of the nine-
teenth century had been abandoned in all branches of science, from
physics to embryology; how just at that time, in the 1920s, the concept
of man as a rigid mechanism of chained reflexes could become fashion-
able in cultures as different as the United States and the Soviet Union
is a fascmating problem for the historian of science. The Pavlovian
school in Russia, and the Watsonian brand of Behaviourism in
America, were the twentieth-century postscript to the nineteenth
century's mechanistic materialism, its belated and most consistent
attempt to describe living organisms in terms of machine theory.

The Denial of Creauitity

Nearly half a century has passed since the publication of Watson's
Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviourist (i$tf0), and few students

558

THE ACT OF CREATION

today remember its contents or even its basic postulates. In Watson's
second book (1924) there is a chapter entided: ' Talking and Thinking
Which, When Rightly Understood, Go Far In Breaking Down the Fiction
That There Is Any Such Thing As "Mental" Life.' In this chapter, the
behaviouristic view on the creative activities of man is set down in a
simple and striking way (all italics are Watson's) :

How the new comes into being: One natural question often raised is:
How do we ever get new verbal creations such as a poem or a
brilliant essay? The answer is that we get them by manipulating words,

shifting them about until a new pattern is hit upon It will help us to

go to manual behaviour. How do you suppose Patou builds a new
gown? Has he any picture in his mind' of what the gown is to look

like when it is finished? He has not He calls his model in, picks up

a new piece of silk, throws it around her; he pulls it in here, he pulls
it out there, makes it tight or loose at the waist, high or low, he makes
the skirt short or long. He manipulates the material until it takes on
the semblance of a dress. . . . The painter plies his trade in the same
way, nor can the poet boast of any other method. 6

The key word is 'ru^pu^on, defined by Watson as an 'instinctive
tendency sometimes exalted by calling it constructiveness. That there
is an original tendency to reach out for objects, to scrape them along
the floor, to pick them up, put them into the mouth, to throw them
upon the floor, to move back and forth any parts which can be moved,
is one of the best grounded and best observed of the instincts/ 7 That
is all we learn about manipulation. It is a random activity, which,
through elimination of useless movements by the trial-and-error
method, gradually develops into ordered habits. The rat, put into an
unknown maze, goes on manipulating its motor-organs at random
until it hits upon the food in the same way as (the comparison is
Watsons own 8 ) Patou manipulates the piece of silk until he hits upon
a new model; likewise, the poet or essayist 'shifts about' words 'until
a new pattern is hit upon. It is expressly denied that Patou, the poet,
or painter has any 'picture in his mind' of the kind of thing he is
planning; he simply goes on manipulating his units until the model,
poem, or drama is 'hit upon. At that moment the stimulus 'to arouse
adjuration and condemnation ceases to be active, and manipulation
stops 'the equivalent of the rat's finding food'. 9

Obviously, viewed from this angle, psychology presents no prob-

THE PITFALLS OF LEARNING THEORY

559

lems. Yet the matter is of more than historical interest, because,
although the cruder absurdities of Watsonian behaviourism are for-
gotten, it had laid the foundations on which the later, more refined
behaviouristic systems were built; the dominant trend in American
and Russian psychology in the generation that followed had a dis-
tinctly Pavlov-Watsonian flavour. 'Each of these systems', Hilgard
wrote (referring to the immensely influential schools of Guthrie,
Hull, and Skinner*) 'represents in its own way a fulfilment of the
behaviouristic programme originally proposed by Watson.' 10 The
methods became more sophisticated, but the philosophy behind them
remained the same. Originality and creativeness have no place in it.

For Guthrie, the original solution of a problem 'must be in the
category of luck, and hence He outside of science'. 11 In Skinner's
works, as I have just said, the word 'insight' does not occur; and the
technique of problem-solving is, in Skinner's view as in Watson's,
'merely that of manipulating variables which may lead to the emission
of the response. No new factor of originality is involved/ 12 Hull
expressly postulated that the differences in the learning processes of
man and rat are of a merely quantitative, not of a qualitative order:

'The natural-science theory of behaviour being developed by the
present author and his associates assumes that all behaviour of the
individuals of a given species and that of all species of mammals,
including man, occurs according to the same set of primary laws.* 13
The verbal and mathematical symbolism of man, verbal communica-
tion and written records, were considered to differ only in degree,
not in kind, from the learning achievements of the lower animals,
epitomized in the bar-pressing activities of the rat. 'Hull did not
intend merely to systematize the account of rat lever-pressing, from
which most of the data for his later set of postulates derived. He in-
tended to arrive at the basic laws of behaviour, at least the laws of the
behaviour of mammalian organisms, including the social behaviour
of man/ 14 **

The state of affairs in that period has been succinctly summed up
by Osgood:

Lloyd Morgan's canon that the behaviour of animals should not
be explained in terms of human attri butes if it can be explained on a
lower level was designed to counteract the common tendency to
put oneself in an animal's place and explain its actions in terms of
what we would do in that situation It is interesting that through

THE ACT OF CREATION

the behaviouristic phase in which American psychology has been
moving, Lloyd Morgan's canon has been subtly inverted. Many
present-day psychologists are loath to attri bute to humans any
characteristics that cannot be demonstrated in lower animals. 15

In other words, for the anthropomorphic view of the rat, American
psychology substituted a rattomorphic view of man.

The Advent of Gestalt

A turning point seemed to have been reached with the publication
of Kohler's Mentality of Apes in 1925. The Gestalt school had been
steadily growing in Germany since Wertheimer's first papers in 1912.
As already mentioned, the German edition of Kohler's ape book
appeared in 1917, but the first American translation only eight years
later. Imagine Einstein's General Relativity theory, also published in 1917,
reaching America with an eight years' delay! Yet physicists are supposed
to have a limited, psychologists a broad and open-minded, oudook.

The historical merit of the Gestalt schbol was, beside its concrete
discoveries about perceptual organization, to crystallize the convergent
trends towards a new, dynamic conception of the organism as a living
whole and not merely as the sum of its parts. Such trends had been
developing since the beginning of the century, independently from one
another, in biology, embryology, neuro-physiology, and in psycho-
logy itself. But only when the new terms 'Gestalt', 'configuration', and
'functional whole' became fashionable slogans comparable to Rela-
tivity and the Oedipus Complex did this silent revolution penetrate
into the broader public's mind and convey some vague idea of a new
orientation towards the problems of organic life and the human
intellect.

However, the great expectations which Gestalt aroused were
only partly fulfilled; and its limitations soon became apparent.
Gestalt-explanations seemed to flourish only in the area of their
origin, visual perception; when it was attempted to transplant them
into the fields of cognition, memory, neuro-physiology, even the
other sense-modalities, they seemed to wilt away. Some of these
limitations I have already mentioned in previous chapters; the am-
biguities of the central concept of 'insight' will be discussed in the
next one. The result was a kind of abortive Renaissance, followed by a

THE PITFALLS OF LEARNING THEORY

behaviourist Counter-Reformation. The neo-Behaviourists, having
incorporated some of the Gestalt findings into their theories, had
indeed a remarkable come-back; the Gestaltists remained more or
less firmly entrenched in their positions which displayed good
closure' all round. The experimental evidence was mostly inconclusive;
some of it proved damaging to one school, but without directly con-
firming the contentions of the other. Each camp was divided in itself;
and (apart from the 'lone voices' of the elder generation) a 'third
force' began to make itself increasingly felt, comprising such out-
standing freelances as Tolman and Hebb, who stood with one foot in
each camp, as it were. Hebb has compared the situation to 'the running
battle between the Left and Right' 16 where each party, while shouting
its own slogans, tacitly keeps adopting ideas originally advanced by its
opponents. All this, of course, refers to the American scene; but in
England, at least, developments followed similar lines.

In spite of this rapprochement, and the new outlook of a younger
generation (cf. the chapter on Motivation), some basic differences
still divide learning theory into two broadly outlined camps differ-
ences not on points of fact, but on their interpretations on explicidy
stated or tacidy implied axioms, general oudook and selective em-
phasis. These can be briefly schematized as follows:

S.-R. Theories contra Cognitive Theories

Conditioning Insight

Chained responses,
stamped in bit by bit

Gradual learning by
trial and error

Acquisition of habits and
skills through reinforcement

Emphasis on peripheral,
sensory motor activity

Emphasis on discrete
stimuli, cm parts aixd
perceptual elements

Patterned, flexible
responses adapted to the
total situation
Sudden learning and
problem-solving through
insight.

Acquisition of knowledge
(Cognitive structures')
through latent learning
Emphasis on central
cognitive processes

Emphasis on relation-
patterns, wholes,
perceptual Gestalten

THE ACT OF CREATION

S.-IL Theories
Motivation = reinforcement
by need- or drive-reduction,
or anticipation thereof

Continuous linear gradient
leading from rat to man

contra Cognitive Theories

Motivation by exploratory
drive, or its combination
with other primary drives

Hierarchic levels of
organization

This schema follows (except for the last two points) by and large
Hilgard's classification of 'issues on which learning theories divide*. 17
Only a few prominent psychologists would subscribe to all the
principles listed in either of the two columns; but a majority of them
would probably subscribe to the majority of the principles in a single
column.

The core of the controversy could be summed up in shorth and as
'drill* versus 'insight*. The answer, already suggested, seems to be
that the various methods of learning form a continuum extending
from classical conditioning at one end to spontaneous, intelligent
problem-solving at the other, while in the intermediary ranges we
find various combinations between drjUed-in and insightful learning,
depending on the animal's ripeness for the task to be learned. This
approach, which aims at synthesis, not compromise, is of course by no
means original; it is shared though for somewhat different reasons
by 'functionalists' like Woodworth, behaviourists like Hebb, and
ethologists like Thorpe. Thus Hilgard wrote on the 'functionalist
outlook': 'laming is not blind on the one hand and insightful on the
other; there are degrees of understanding involved from a minimum
at one extreme to a maximum at the other, with most cases falling
between these extremes.' 18 However, the definitions of 'insight' and
'understanding* vary, which leaves us with the same problem, only in
a different formulation. Let us try to get closer to it by considering
some typical examples of animal learning.

Conditioning and Empirical Induction

A newly hatched chick will peck at grains, worms, caterpillars in its
neighbourhood. If a so-called cinnabar caterpillar is now placed before
the chick, of which species it has no previous experience, it will peck
at it as at any other small object, but reject it at once with signs of dis-

THE PITFALLS OF LEARNING THEORY 5<$3

taste. With the majority of chicks one single experience is enough to
make it in the future avoid caterpillars by sight (The cinnabar cater-
pillar has a distinct black and gold colouring, a visual pattern easy to
retain.) Thus the chick has acquired a new skill, the avoidance of
caterpillars, after a single experience (or one repetition in the case of
less gifted chicks); and moreover, that skill, or 'cognitive structure',
or knowledge, or whatever you call it, is a correct replica, in the
chick's nervous system, of the relation between the visual appearance
and disgusting nature of caterpillars. Must we ascribe insight to the
chick; or shall we adopt the opposite viewpoint, according to which
the single try was sufficient to eliminate the error of pecking at cater-
pillars and to establish the avoidance reaction; and are we faced with a
real alternative or merely a verbal quibble? Let us, for the time being,
leave the question open.

A dog is an animal of much greater intelligence than a chick, and
yet in Pavlov's laboratory dogs require long series of repeated ex-
periences for learning to relate certain perceptual signals to the immi-
nence of food. Weeks of stamping-in are often necessary to make the
dog differentiate between the food-signal values of a circle and an
oval, whereas a single experience is sufficient to make the chick
differentiate between the signal values in the appearances of a worm
and a caterpillar.

The reason for this contrast has already been discussed (Chapter X).
Caterpillars belong to the natural environment of the chick; the per-
ception of the striped creature is a biologically relevant input while the
chick is engaged in pecking; its horrid taste makes it even more rele-
vant; the visual input will accordingly be allowed to pass through the
filters of the memory hierarchy, where it will be encoded and serve
as an analyser-device for future inputs. On the other hand, gongs,
bells, metronomes, tuning forks, cardboard figures, red lights, and
electric shocks have no biological relevance to the species dog, nor
to the individual dog outside the laboratory. In its natural environ-
ment the dog would pay no attention to them, but pursue some
exciting scent; the cardboard ellipse would never have a chance to
form a stable trace in the dog's perceptual organization.

How should one explain, then, that the experimenter nevertheless
succeeds in stamping in the response? In the first place, a Pavlov dog
in its restraining harness is not a dog, but a preparation, which can
only be found in laboratorio. It is immobilized on the experimental
"platform, in a soundproof laboratory, alone, cut off from all natural

THE ACT OF CREATION

stimuli and habitual activities; it is, so to speak, isolated under a glass
bell. This state creates a particular stress in the animal, called the
dog's laboratory attitude', which is sharply distinguished from its
behaviour outside the lab. Deprived of all other stimuli and activities,
the ticking of the metronome or the figure on the cardboard are the
only events on which the dog's attention can focus; there is no com-
petition between different inputs; and thus the originally irrelevant
stimuli are gradually transformed into relevant stimuli and encoded
in stable traces. Relevant to what? To the only biologically important
events which are allowed to occur under the glass bell: the periodic
appearance of meat-powder by remote control. The dog's laboratory
attitude is dominated by this periodically repeated event; and as his
perceptual hierarchy becomes slowly readapted to pay attention, in
the absence of other stimuli, to the irrelevant sound of the bell, die
nascent trace of the bell-sound will become incorporated into the
feeding hierarchy. If the sound of the bell always overlaps with the
appearance of the meat-powder, then the sound will eventually trigger
off the feeding code, as the first two bars of the Marseillaise will trigger
off the following bars; the dog will begin to salivate. But salivation
is merely the first, anticipatory act of its feeding behaviour, and if no
meat-powder is actually presented, it will stop there; the dog will not
chew and snap at nothing. In the absence of food, the feeding habit
gets no 'environmental feedback', and the activity comes to a halt at
the expectant, salivatory stage. It is quite untrue, therefore, to say that
the 'conditioned stimulus', e.g. the bell, has been 'substituted' for the
'unconditioned stimulus', the meat-powder. What happened was that
the dog has learned, by the cumulative effect of its past experience,
to expect the appearance of the meat-powdef after lie bell, because
that is the 'rule of the game*. He* salivates, not because he confuses the
bell with food, but because he expects the food, signalled by the bell. We
can say, with Polanyi, 19 that the dog has arrived at a correct empirical
induction; or with Craik, that the dog's nervous system is now func-
tioning 'as a calculating machine capable of modelling or parallel-
ing external events' which is 'the basic feature of thought and of
explanation'; 20 or in our own terms, that the invariant factor in
a repeated sequence or experiences has been encoded in the dog's
brain.

All this is a far cry from the conception of reflex arcs in which USs,
CSs URs, and CRs are mechanically coupled together or substituted
for each other like railway carriages in a shunting yard. In fact, the

THE PITFALLS OF LEARNING THEORY 565

dog's behaviour in the strange, artificial universe where red lights
portend food and metronomes electric shocks, is erriinently 'logical';
and the reason why it takes so long to stamp in the lesson is that the
dog must readapt its entire attitude and hierarchy of values -of what
is important in life and what is not to that universe, where natural
law is replaced by Pavlov's law; a kind of Nietzschean Umwertung
alter Werte. Perhaps the highest achievement of the dog is learning to
discriminate between more or less flattened ellipses for unlike its
sharp pitch-discriniination, based on native equipment, geometrical
forms must represent the height of irrelevance in canine eyes. Yet once
relevance has been revalued, and the perceptual analyser-devices have
been established, the development of sharper sub-analysers or dis-
criminatory filters must follow the stages outlined in Chapter X.*

In a seemingly casual aside, Hebb has remarked that 'the characteris-
tic adult learning (outside of psychological laboratories) is learning
that takes place in a few trials, or in one only'. 21 The implication is
that the stamping-in of responses under artificial conditions in dogs,
cats, or rats is quite uncharacteristic of the normal learning process.
To try to base a human psychology on these procedures was a rather
perverse approach.

Do Insects have Insight?

The work of Baerends, de Kruyt, Tinbergen, and Thorpe was rarely
mentioned in the controversies to which I have referred, as if wasps,
bees, fishes, and birds belonged to the fauna of another planet. As
Thorpe remarked wistfully: 'Perhaps the arguments as to whether
certain performances of rats in mazes represent insight or trial-and-
error learning would have been somewhat less prolonged if the
abilities of some of the "lower animals", such as insects, had been

known While it surprises no one that something like latent

learning should be displayed by mammals and by birds with their
proverbial powers of orientation, it may come as something of a shock
to comparative psychologists who work primarily with mammals to
find learning of this kind displayed at a high level among inverte-
brates. It is true that, with the confirmation of the work of von Frisch
on the orientation of the hive-bee, we are now prepared to believe
almost anything of bees, but there are certainly many insects other
than bees, and many invertebrates other than insects, in which latent

566

THE ACT OF CREATION

learning and similar performances can be discerned. The neglect of the
study of invertebrate behaviour has given the impression that insight-
learning is a characteristically human faculty hardly to be expected in
a sub-primate mammal and, of course, out of the question in an
arthropod. We now see what an astonishing misconception this is.' 22
While behaviourists denied the rat the capability to acquire a mental
map of a maze, the ethologists have shown that this is precisely what
insects do. Their work merits consideration in some detail which is
done best by textual quotation. Tinbergen and de Kruyt have trained
wasps to find their way to the nest by a configuration of certain land-
marks (such as fir-cones and twigs). When these training marks were
moved, and the wasp might have been expected to show complete
disorientation, it 'will suddenly utilize new landmarks completely un-
related to the previous orientation marks on which it had apparently
been trained a result which has interesting and suggestive simi-
larity to Krechevsky's work on hypotheses in maze-learning. Many
such examples lead us imperceptibly to what we may consider as
insight-learning. Ammophila hunts caterpillars which are too heavy
to be brought back on the wing, and which may thus have to be
dragged for a hundred yards or more across and through every imagin-
able natural obstacle. Here the original learning of the territory has
probably been in the main affected by observation from the air, and
yet the return has to be made on foot. Although the insect may from
time to time leave her prey and take short survey flights, this is by no
means invariable . . . and quite often the wasp seems able to maintain
orientation while on the ground as a result of earlier aerial recon-
naissance/ 23 When large obstacles (metal screens 50 by 120 centi-
metres) were placed in its path, 'the insect diverged just enough to carry
it round the obstacle on a perfectly smooth, even course of maximum
economy of effort. On one particular occasion the experiment was
immediately repeated twice with the same results, but the third time
the insect walked straight at the screen, climbed with perfect ease to
the top and, without ever letting go of its caterpillar, flew down to
the ground on the other side and continued its journey. On subsequent
occasions this insect would adopt now one type of behaviour, now
another, but in no instance did she ever show trial and error. The
solution to the problem was always smooth, unhesitating, and eco-
nomical.

*This and other individuals which behaved in the same way were
then caught and transported in a dark box to a new site, a process

THE PITFALLS OF LEARNING THEORY 567

taking less than a minute. On release the insect might have been ex-
pected to be at least momentarily disorientated. On the contrary, it
appeared quite unperturbed and without any orientation flight set
out at once on its new course. It was again given the detour test three
times on its new course, but it reacted as efficiendy as before and with-
in a few minutes had arrived exactly on its nest. Although the insect
too, on occasion, shows some evidence of disorientation, nevertheless
the overwhelming impression given (as also recorded by Baerends
(1941) and other workers) was one of almost uncanny knowledge of
the details of the terrain.' 24 Thorpe concludes: 'In some instances it
is possible that the homing faculty depends on no more elaborate
sensory mechanism than that involved in simple taxes or light-com-
pass reactions. Nevertheless, it is certain that in a large number of
examples this is inadequate and that we have a true place memory.' 25
In the case of at least the honey-bee, the memory is communicable.
The orientation dance of the bee is certainly as striking an example as
one could wish for, of place-learning encoded and re-coded into a
symbolic motor-pattern. Yet again the question arises: if, following
Thorpe, we call the behaviour of these insects 'insightful', have we not
stretched the word into a kind of rubber concept? And once more the
only description which implies neither too much nor too litde seems
to be that the organism has contrived to build a coded model of the
invariant and significant aspects of the territorial environment into its
nervous system.

The Controversial Rat

Munn's Handbook of Psychological Research on the Rat, published in 1950,
contains a bibliographical list of over two thousand five hundred titles;
its rate of growth since then is anybody's guess. A considerable portion
of this research was devoted to maze studies. Not even Newton, as
Bertr and Russell remarked, 26 could learn a maze by any method other
than trial and error; yet what the rat learns is not a chain of responses,
but the pattern of the maze as a whole as shown by the experiments
with mutilated rats, and in others where the rat takes prompt ad-
vantage of short-cuts when a wall is removed, and avoids newly
created cul-de-sacs. The evidence is equally conclusive that the rat
is capable of latent learning and of forming 'hypotheses' by 'pro-
visional tries'. Yet the Great Rat Controversy was kept going partly
because S.-R. theorists kept coming up with ingenious alternative

568

THE ACT OF CREATION

interpretations of the evidence, and partly because of the weighted
character of much of the experimental procedure itself. A good
illustration for this was the 'continuity versus non-contmuity* dispute,
where Spence and others represented the behaviourist view against
Krech, Lashley, etc. The results could be interpreted either or neither
way; but as Osgood wrote, in surnming up the controversy: 'It is
significant with respect to methodology in psychological experi-
mentation that, almost without exception, the studies supporting the
Lashley view have used the jumping stand, while those supporting the
continuity view have used a Yerkes-type discrimination box.' 27

Not only the experimental conditions, but the experimenters'
subjective attitudes seemed to exert their influence on the data ob-
tained. In this respect Rosenthal's experiment on experimenters' must
have come as a shock to students who had taken at least the 'hard and
fast* quantitative data (if not the interpretations) of nearly half a
century of rat experiments for granted. Rosenthal gave one group of
his research workers rats which, he explained, were 'geniuses' specially
bred from a stock with exceptionally good maze-learning records.
To a second group of researchers he gave what he explained were
'stupid rats'. La fart, all rats were of the same common-or-garden
breed; yet the score-sheets of the 'genius rats' showed unmistakably
that they learned to run the maze much faster than the 'stupid rats'. 28
The only explanation Rosenthal could offer was that the bias in the
research-workers' minds had somehow been transmitted to the rats
just how this was done he confessed not to know. These and other
experiments by Rosenthal caused one science editor to comment:
'The results throw a pall over the entire range of psychological tests
as reported by the psychologists over the last fifty years.' 29

Thus I shall have little more to say about the bar-pressing and maze-
running experiments with rats. In spite of the impressive mathematical
apparatus, and the painstaking measurements of 'rates of response',
'habit-strength', 'fractional anticipatory goal-responses', and the rest,
rarely in the history of science has a more ambitious theory been built
on shakier foundations.

The Cat in the Box

The cat in the puzzle box, in Thorndike's classic experiments, is also
put into a situation so designed that it can be solved only by trial and
error. The box is equipped with contrivances such as rings, loops,

THE 2IXFAJKEJS OF LEARNING THEORY 569

turning bolts, pedal boards, etc., and with a door which opens, accord-
ing to the experiment, when the animal operates one of these con-
trivances, or several of them in a given order. Thus the cat may have
to turn bolt B which, however, becomes loose only after bolt A has
already been turned; or it may have to pull a string, or a loop, in order
to free itself. When the cat is put into the box, it 'tries to squeeze
through any opening; it claws or bites at the bars or wire; it thrusts
its paws out through any opening, and claws at everything it reaches;
it continues its efforts when it strikes anything loose and shaky; it may
claw at things within the box. It does not pay very much attention
to the food outside, but seems simply to strive instinctively to escape
from confinement. The vigour with which it struggles is extraordinary.
For eight or ten minutes it will claw and bite and squeeze incessantly/ 30
The cat's behaviour is typical of that phase in a 'blocked* situation,
where organized behaviour disintegrates and yields to more or less
random trials. The solution pushing a bolt or pulling a loop or even
licking itselfwill be first hit upon by chance, and after a number of
repetitions, it will be retained; the learning curve will be more or less
continuous or it may show a sudden, sharp drop. The objections
against this kind of experimental design are essentially the same as
against classical conditioning: they create an artificial universe. 'The
solution of Thorndike's problems demanded behaviours that were
quite beyond the animal's normal repertoire. Cats do not get out of
boxes by pressing buttons or by washing themselves; rather they try
to squeeze through narrow openings or scratch at the barriers, and
Thorndike's animals were observed attempting just such solutions as
part of their early trial and error. In other words, the correct response
in a situation like Thorndike's could only be hit upon by sheer, blind
chance.' 31

The conclusion which Thorndike and his followers drew from
these experiments 'that animals are incapable of higher mental pro-
cesses such as reasoning and insight that they are limited to the
"stamping-in" and "stamping-out" mode of trial and error' is one
of the most astonishing examples of question-begging in the history
of modern science. One might just as well adapt Thorndike's method
of reasoning to human education, teach children nonsense syllables
which can only be learned by rote, and then conclude that children
are only capable of learning by rote. And yet, to quote Hilgard: 'for
nearly half a century one learning theory dominated all others in
America, despite numerous attacks upon it and the rise of its many

570

THE ACT OF CREATION

rivals. It is the theory of Edward L. Thorndike.' 32 Tolman, writing
forty years after the publication of Thorndike's Animal Intelligence,
went even further:

The psychology of animal learning not to mention that of child-
learning has been and still is primarily a matter of agreeing or dis-
agreeing with Thorndike, or trying in minor ways to improve upon
him. Gestalt psychologists, conditioned-reflex psychologists, sign-
Gestalt psychologists all of us here in America seem to have taken
Thorndike, overtly or covertly, as our starting point. 324

Cat experiments of a type diametrically opposed to Thorndike's
were carried out by Adams. It is amusing to compare the description
of the behaviour of Thorndike's cats which I have just quoted, with
the behaviour of Adams' cats:

*A piece of liver is suspended from the top of a wire-cage, so that
the liver rests on the floor inside the cage, loosely held by the thread.
A hungry cat in the room with the cage, but outside it, sees the liver
and walks over to the cage. It hesitates for a time and its head moves
up and down as though it is studying the string. Then it jumps on top
of the cage, catches the string in its mouth, raises the liver by joint
use of mouth and paw, and leaps down with the stick at the end of the
string in its mouth.' 33

The behaviour of Adams' cat, first 'thinking out' the solution of the
problem, then acting it out in an unhesitating, smooth, purposeful
manner, is of the same kind as Kohler's chimpanzees'. The contrast
between this type of intelligent problem-solving, and Thorndike's
stamping-in process seems to be complete. Yet the cat's learning in the
box is by no means the blind, random process which Thorndike and
his followers read into it. In the first place we must realize that the cat's
handicap lies not only, as in classical conditioning, in the irrelevance
of the clues which in its natural environment the cat would ignore;
but also in the fact that the clue say, a loop hanging from the ceiling
is hidden or 'drowned' among other equally irrelevant clues latches,
bolts, etc. The unnaturalness of the tasks set in these experiments is
illustrated by the 'lick-yourself-to-escape* type of rule. Yet even in
this surrealistic universe, the cat's behaviour testifies to a remarkably
high I.Q. After the initial bewilderment, as adjustment to the labora-
tory situation progresses, the range of the cat's tries will be narrowed
down, and loops, bolts, etc., will be paid an increasing amount of

THE PITFALLS OF LEARNING THEORY

571

attention, as members of the nascent matrix. The cat develops, like
Pavlov's dogs, an attitude of expectancy, of 'Means-End Readiness*
(Tolman); it begins to form 'hypotheses'. 34 Thus, when the cat has
learned to get out of the box by clawing at a loop, and the loop is
then displaced from the front to the rear wall of the box, it will learn
to free itself much quicker than before it had abstracted the loop-
Gestalt from other clues. If, however, the loop is replaced by a small
wooden platform hung in the same place which the loop occupied
before, the animal will free itself after a short while by striking at the
platform; in this case, the location is the clue. Thus the 'loop hypothesis'
can exist side by side with the 'place hypothesis' just as Krechevsky's
rats, who had to guess whether the food was hidden by a door of a
given colour, or of a given location, formed first a colour hypothesis,
then a place hypothesis. 35

At this stage, the cat's behaviour can be described as a series of 'pro-
visional tries'. 36 These tries, far from being governed by chance, show
great plasticity: if the cat has learned to escape by pulling a string with
its foot, it may on the next occasion free itself by pulling the string with
its teeth, which requires an entirely different sequence of motions.
Even where the 'correct' response was the perverse action of licking
its own fur, the act is reduced in the final trials 'to a mere symbolic
vestige.' 37

Whichever way we look at it, the cat's behaviour is most fittingly
if somewhat metaphorically described as learning the rules of Thorn-
dike's game by a process of elimination and empirical induction. The
learning curve is a function of several variables: it will show gradual
or sudden progress, continuity and discontinuity, according to the
experimental conditions, individual learning capacity, fatigue, and
chance.

NOTES

To p. 559. Hilgard calls Hull's system 'the most influential of the theories
between 1930 and 1950, judging from the experimental and theoretical studies
engendered by it, whether in its defence,its amendment or its refutation' (Hilgard,
1958, p. 192).

To p. 559. The objection to this is not that Hull postulated a continuous
series linking rat to man, but that his 'primary laws' are epitomized by the bar-
pressing act of the rat, which he regarded as the atomic unit of behaviour. The
fallacy of this reasoning seems to be derived from Hull's implied notion of
mental progress from rat to man as a linear gradient. Theories of this kind fail to
take into account the hierarchic principle in mental evolution reflected in the

THE ACT OF CREATION

hierarchy of levels in the nervous system. If instead of linear gradients, we think
in terms of levels of increasing complexity, then a difference in degrees does
become a difference in kind. Since the basic mechanisms of sexual reproduction
are common to all mammalian species, Hull's postulate seems to imply that
detailed study of sexual behaviour in the rat would eventually yield the 'primary
laws' underlying the Kinsey reports on the sexual behaviour of the American
male and female. Homologue principles (such as the part-whole relation, or
control by feedback) do operate on all levels, but they are general principles,
not specific 'units' or 'atoms' of behaviour.

To p. 565. Coding is an irreversible act, and once the code is established, it
will be relatively permanent until it decays. If, however, the dog is fooled
repeatedly and in quick succession ('massed practice'), i.e. food is withheld after
the buzzer has sounded, a negative code will superimpose itself on the previous
one. The first few times the response will stop at salivation short of chewing; but
soon it will stop short of salivation. After a few hours' rest, however, salivation
is restored by 'spontaneous recovery' a paradox which has bedevilled learning
theory for a long time. Perhaps the explanation may be sought on the following
lines. The whole attitude of the dog, as it has become adapted to the laboratory
situation, is based on the expectation that all stimuli are events relevant to food; and

that the negative code (buzzer > no food), if it has been quickly superimposed

on the positive one (buzzer >food), is of a more temporary and brittlenature

than its opponent. If, however, the unrewarded signals are spaced out over a
greater length of time, i,e. if the extinction-drill approximates in thoroughness
the original drill, extinction becomes final (Cf. e.g. Hebb, 1958, pp. 134-5, 147).

XIII

THE PITFALLS OF GESTALT
More about Chimpanzees

If the S.-R. theorist's method, of designing experiments seems to
be aimed at printing a wiring circuit into the animal's nervous
system, Kohler's method was to provide it with a do-it-yourself
kit. The main task of the experimenter, as K6hler saw it, was to
arrange for his chimpanzees conditions which favour original discovery
by placing the necessary paraphernalia in their cage solid and hollow
sticks, crates, etc.; and to make the task just difficult enough to exceed,
by a fraction as it were, the limit of the animal's repertory of skills.

I have mentioned a few typical examples of the chimpanzees'
achievements in Book One (Chapter V). In the use of tools the
decisive factor was the discovery that a previously acquired playful
technique M x could be applied as a mediating performance to solve a
problem in the blocked matrix M 2 . Nueva applied her stick which
previously she had used only for pushing things about in play to rake
in a banana placed beyond her reach outside the cage. In similar ways,
the chimpanzees used sticks as jumping poles to get at fruit hung high
from the ceiling; as implements to make holes in the wire-netting of
the cage, to dig up roots in the earth or to prise open the lid of a
water-tank; they used sticks as traps to capture crowds of succulent
ants, and as weapons for stabbing at fowls and killing lizards. Each
of these new achievements was based on the combination of two or
more already existing skills, and some of them on serial sequences of
'Eureka processes': when a chimp had discovered the use of a stick as
a rake, a short stick was then used to rake in a longer stick to rake in
the bananas.

In the making of tools we saw similar bisociative processes at work.
Sultan's star achievement was the fitting of two hollow bamboo-
rods together into one long rod, by pushing the end of the thinner rod

573

574

THE ACT OF CREATION

into the opening of the other. Let me describe this experiment in some
detail:

Sultan is given the two sticks, and the banana is placed at a distance
from the bar greater than the length of each single stick. For quite a
while he tries to reach the banana with one stick or the other (M 2
obstructed, random trials). He then pulls a wooden box, which has
been used in a different type of experiment, to the bar (fumbling for
some M 2 to provide the 'mediating performance'). He pushes the use-
less box away again, pushes one stick outside the bar on the ground as
far as it will go and prods it with the second stick towards tie banana
(M 3 : Sultan learned long ago to push a longer stick about with a
shorter one). He succeeds in pushing the first stick into contact with
the banana, but obviously cannot pull the banana in. Nevertheless, he
repeats the procedure: when he has pushed one stick out of his reach
and it is given back to him, he starts once more. 'But although, in
trying to steer it cautiously, he puts the stick in his hand exactly to the
cut (i.e. the opening) of the stick on the ground, and although one
might think that doing so would suggest the possibility of pushing one
stick into the other, there is no indication whatever of such a prac-
tically valuable solution [no "insight"]. Finally, the observer [i.e.
Kdhler] gives the animal some help by putting one finger into the
opening under the animal's nose (without pointing to the other stick
at all). This lias no effect [still no insight]; Sultan, as before, pushed
one stick with the other towards the objective. . . .'

He finally abandons the attempt altogether. These tries have lasted
over an hour. The chimp was then left in the keeper's care, who
reported later on:

Sultan first of all squats indifferently on the box, winch has been
left standing a little back from the railings; then he gets up, picks up
the two sticks, sits down again on the box and plays carelessly with
them. While doing this, it happens that he finds himself holding one
rod in either hand in such a way that they He in a straight line; he
pushes the thinner one a little way into the opening of the thicker,
jumps up and is already on the run towards the railings, to which he
lias up to now half turned his back, and begins to draw a banana
towards him with the double stick. I call the master: meanwhile, one
of die animal's rods has fallen out of the other, as he has pushed one
of them only a little way into the other; whereupon he connects
them again. 1

THE PITFALLS OF GESTALT

575

Henceforth Sultan never had any difficulty in connecting two rods;
and later on even three.

At first sight, Sultan's achievement appears not as an integration of
existing skills, but as the invention of a totally new one. However,
commenting on the keeper's report, Kohler says: (my italics) *The
keeper emphasized the fact that Sultan had first of all connected the
sticks in play and without considering the objective [the banana]. The
animals are constantly poking about with straws and small sticks in
holes and cracks in their play, so that it would be more astonishing if
Sultan had never done this [i.e. poking the thinner rod into the hole
of the other], while playing about with the two sticks/ 2

Thus the discovery again followed the familiar pattern of a playful
habit being connected with a blocked matrix, with chance acting as a
trigger. Later on, a third matrix was added: Sultan had learned long
ago to sharpen sticks by biting off splinters, so that they could be used
to poke in keyholes; now this skill was used to make two sticks fit
together. Obviously, Sultan would never have invented this sophisti-
cated method of tool-making if each of the three component skills
(raking, poking, sharpening) had not been pre-existing items of his
habit-repertory. The more familiar and well exercised each of the
matrices, the more likely it is that the animal will solve the problem
and, other things being equal, the less it will depend on the helping
hand of chance. (In the case of the two bamboo rods which 'happened'
to fit each other a chance which the animal will rarely encounter in-
the woods we have an example of 'guided learning': the experi-
menter serves as a match-maker in lieu of the favourable chance event;
the rest is up to the pupil.)

Uniform Factors in Learning

Sultan's original achievements cannot be explained either by
stamping-in, or by spontaneous inspiration out of the blue; they are
integrations, of existing, flexible skills, of previously unconnected
codes of behaviour into more complex codes of a higher order. In
conditioning and rote-learning, the new code has to be formed more
or less from scratch, more or less bit by bit. This 'drilling in is a
gradual, cumulative process; whereas the bisociation of two matrices
appears as a sudden fusion. But in between these opposite extremes
we find a graded series of learning methods, with certain basic

57<5

THE ACT OF CREATION

features common to all. Let me enumerate a few of these common
features.

The chimpanzee, straining to reach a banana behind the bars,
remembers the stick lying out of sight; he runs to get it and uses it as a
rake. This has been mentioned in the early Gestalt literature as one of
the criteria of insight learning. But memory enters into all learning
processes. Thus retention in delayed reaction tests has been shown to
last in cats from three to thirteen hours, in chimpanzees up to forty-
eight hours. 3 Another feature which we find in all types of con-
ditioning and learning, from Pavlov upward, is expectancy and
anticipatory behaviour. Once the stage of initial bewilderment or
frustrated rage is passed, and the animal has embarked on learning to
learn', random trials are superseded by less random 'fumbling tries';
and these in turn by hypotheses. At the Tumbling' stage, Sultan's
behaviour in the stick-connecting experiment shows no more insight
than the cat's: his fetching of the wooden box and attempts to push
one stick with the second, were quite inappropriate. On the other
hand, however, we have met with plenty of examples of comparable
fumblings among human geniuses of wild guesses and inappropriate
tries preceding the act of discovery. If we remember that Kepler spent
seven years of trial and error, pursuing false inspirations and wrong
hypotheses before the discovery of his First and Second Laws, we are
led to realize the subdeties and wide applications of the try-method
and how completely wrong it is to equate it with blind random
behaviour. The range of learning by trial and error extends from
relatively haphazard tries through the whole graded series, to the
relative certainty of inductive inference. On the lower reaches the
trials are explicit and often temperamental, like the frantic attempts of
Thorndike's cats to get out of the box; on the higher reaches, they
assume more and more the character of implicit hypothesis Adams'
cat moving its head up and down as it 'works out' the means of
getting at the liver suspended from the string. Lastly, at the top of the
series, the inventor toys with an idea in his head before taking the
more explicit step of trying out several alternative sketches on paper;
after which he may proceed to making a rough model an even more
explicit, but nevertheless merely symbolic try. The writer, groping
for the right adjective, will sample several with his literary taste-
buds; even the Lord Almighty, according to Genesis, proceeded by
trial and error, as witnessed by the painful episode of the Flood.

Criteria of Insight Learning

So far, then, we have a continuous series of learning methods, where
the amount of required stamping-in decreases in proportion to the
animal's ripeness for the experimental task. But, according to the
contentions of the Gestalt school, there is a decisive break in the con-
tinuity of the series which puts insightful learning into a category apart
from other methods of learning; and this break is said to be reflected
in the animal's characteristic behaviour at the moment the true in-
sightful solution occurs. In this view, Sultan's trial-and-error behaviour
was merely a preliminary to the true solution, which emerges with
dramatic suddenness and all in a piece; whereas in trial-and-error
learning it emerges gradually.

The chief descriptive characteristics of 'insight' which have been
proposed by various authors are as follows: (a) dramatic suddeness;
(b) 'the appearance of a complete solution with reference to the whole
layout of the field'; 4 (c) the smooth, unhesitating manner in which
the solution is 'suddenly, directly and definitely' 5 carried out; (d) the
solution of the problem precedes the actual execution of it; 6 (e) the
solution is retained after a single performance; (f) novelty of the
solution. 7 It is furthermore generally assumed that 'insight' is closely
related to, if not synonymous with, intelligence and understanding
and, by implication, that trial-and-error learning is not so or to a
lesser degree so. This last point, however, I shall discuss later; first let
us turn to the purely descriptive aspects of 'insight learning'.

When Kohler's experiments are discussed, the authors usually
select the star performances of Sultan, and it is often overlooked that
these were rather in the nature of rare limit cases. In the experiment I
am going to describe, a young chimpanzee, Koko, was faced with the
problem how to get a banana hung high from the wall. The only
solution was to push a wooden box underneath the banana and to
climb on the box. Though Koko is described by Kohler as 'just as
gifted as Sultan', it took him no less than nineteen days to learn this
whereas he had learned to rake in a banana with a stick in a few minutes.
The use of sticks is part of the chimpanzee's repertory of habits but
there are no wooden boxes lying about in the forest. However, before
the experiment was started, Koko was given a small wooden box as a
toy; 'he pushed it about and sat on it for a moment*. He was then
removed to another cage and in his absence the banana was suspended

577

578

THE ACT OF CREATION

from the wall, three or four yards away from the wooden box (the
italics are KohlerV. by 'objective' he means banana):

Koko . . . first jumped straight upwards several times towards the
objective, then took his rope in his hand, and tried to lasso the prize
with a loop of it, could not reach so far, and then turned away from
the wall, after a variety of such attempts, but without noticing the
box. He appeared to have given up his efforts, but always returned
to them from time to time. After some time, on turning away from
the wall, his eye fell on the box: he approached it, looked straight
towards the objective, and gave the box a slight push, which did not,
however, move it; his movements had grown much slower; he left
the box, took a few paces away from it, but at once returned, and
pushed it again and again with his eyes on the ohjective, but quite gently,
and not as though he really intended to alter its position. He turned
away again, turned back at once, and gave the box a third tentative
shove, after which he again moved slowly about. The box had
now been moved 10 centimetres in the direction of the fruit. The
objective was rendered more tempting by the addition of a piece of
orange (the non plus ultra of delight!), and in a few seconds Koko was
once more at the box, seized it, dragged it in one movement up to a
point almost directly beneath the objective (that is, he moved it a
distance of at least three metres), mounted it and tore down the fruit.
A bare quarter of an hour had elapsed since the beginning of the
test. 8

All's well that ends well. But it does not. A few minutes later the
experiment was repeated after the banana had been moved about
three yards from its former position, while the box was left standing
where Koko had dragged it. When Koko was led back onto the stage:

he sprang at the new banana in the same manner as before, but with
somewhat less eagerness; at first he ignored the box. After a time he
suddenly approached it, seized and dragged it the greater part of the
distance towards the new banana, but at a distance of a quarter of a
metre he stopped, gazed at the banana, and stood as if quite puzzled
and confused. And now began a tale of woe for both Koko and the
box. When he again set himself in motion it was with every sign of
rage, as he knocked the box this way and that, but came no nearer to
the objective. After waiting a little the experiment was broken off. 9

THE PITFALLS OF GESTALT

579

This tale of woe continued for nineteen days during which the
experiment was repeated at varying intervals; and even afterwards,
when the new skill was firmly established at last, its performance still
alternated for a while with random trials.

Does Koko's behaviour satisfy the descriptive criteria of insight
learning?

(a) Suddenness. Yes, it does because at the climactic moment of the
first experiment, the solution did appear suddenly and all of a piece.
No, it does not because prior to it Koko had made several half-
hearted attempts at the correct solution and yet abandoned them,
(b) 'Complete solution with reference to the whole layout to the field'.
The answer is, No. (c) 'Smooth, unhesitating, direct and definitive'
on one occasion, Yes, on the others, No. (d) 'Solution precedes exe-
cution of solution' yes and no. (e) 'Solution retained after a single
performance' definitely No. (f) Noveltyyes.

Kohler's own comments on this experiment are revealing. Although
in The Mentality of Apes he stresses that the gulf between Trial-and-
Error and Insight is unbridgeable ('the contrast is absolute' 10 ), his
comment on Koko's initial hesitations and rumblings with the box is:
'there is only one expression that really fits his behaviour at that
juncture: it's beginning to dawn on him!' u Let us note that for about
ten days after that first success, Koko kept manipulating the box,
sometimes aimlessly, sometimes angrily, and during this whole
period 'no trace of a solution appeared, except an equivalent of the
words: "there's something about that box".' 12 In another passage
Kohler says (italics Kohler's): 'It may happen that the animal will
attempt a solution which, while it may not result in success, yet has
some meaning in regard to the situation. "Trying around" then
consists in attempts at solution in the half-understood situation.* 13

Preconditions of Insight

No more need be said to prove that if we apply the descriptive criteria
which I have ennumerated, we find a graded series from 'trying
around', through the 'dawning' of the solution, to the limit case of
the sudden solution. But limit cases at the end of a graded series do
not require a separate set of postulates to explain them. The break in
actual behaviour, the discrete and unitary character of the solution in
these cases can be explained in terms which are also applicable to other

58o

THE ACT OF CREATION

forms of learning. Thus with regard to criterion (a) we can say that
the suddenness of the solution is due to the trigger action of chance in
a situation which was ripe for solution that is to say, where the
animal's repertory comprises all the requisite single skills, and where
all that is needed is a link to combine them into a complex skill e.g.
Sultan accidentally pushing one rod into the opening of the other. In
other cases Sultan turning round to pick up the, remembered stick
where chance plays no part, memory provides the link; but memory
enters into all forms of learning. Regarding (c) and (d) (smooth,
unitary execution of the act, indicating that it has been thought out
before being acted out), we may say that the animal has formed a
hypothesis, or carried out an implicit try, followed by explicit per-
formances of the act. Rats, cats, and dogs also show this brief suspension
of activity, this 'attitude of concentrated attention' 14 before they act
out a hypothesis which may or may not be the correct one. (e)
Retention after a single performance can be interpreted as 'induction
based on a single case* as the chick, from a single experience, draws
the correct empirical inference that all cinnabar caterpillars are to be
avoided. Lasdy, (f), novelty is of course also achieved when the cat
learns the open-sesame trick in the puzzle-box. To argue that the cat's
novel response was acquired by Trial and Error, the chimp's by
Insight, is to argue in a circle, since novelty itself is supposed to serve
as a differential criterion.

Thus Sultan's Eureka processes, once we have got rid of thinking in
S.~R. schemata, are interpretable in terms of the same theory which
covers all lower forms of learning. They make a spectacular impression,
because (since the separate skills which had to be integrated into the
new skill were well-exercised items in his repertory of habits), the
problem to be solved was just one step beyond the limits of that
repertory, and all was set for a single spark to trigger off the
fusion.

At the opposite end of the learning scale, the dog in Pavlov's
laboratory is not equipped with pre-existent rules of the game which
could be combined with each other; it must construct a new code of rules,
starting more or less from scratch. Therein lies the main difference.
The dog must start with an agonized reappraisal of which environ-
mental events are relevant and which are not; then extract and codify
the recurrent invariant features from the stimuli promoted to signi-
ficance; then discriminate between finer features within those features.
The rat must piece together, bit by bit, his cognitive map of the maze;

THE PITFALLS OF GESTALT

581

the cat must gradually extract, by empirical induction, the rules of
Thorndike's game from a surrealistic universe.

The 'missing link' in between the cat and Sultan is provided by
Koko. He does not have to start from scratch; he has already played
with the box; he has sat on it and pushed it about. Was his first success-
ful solution of the problem a random try? Certainly not. It had all the
'dramatic suddenness, smoothness, directness and definiteness , that one
can wish for. It was more than a provisional try', rather like a hypo-
thesis which carried implicit conviction; yet on the other hand, it had
been preceded by hesitant action along the correct lines which was
abandoned; and it was succeeded by forgetting all but a fragment of
the successful solution the fragment 'there is something about that
box'.

The reason for this paradoxical behaviour is evident. Koko had to
combine two skills; the reachmg-jumpmg-climbing skill M 1} and dis-
placing the box to serve as a platform, M 2 . But M 2 is not part of the
chimp's habit-repertory; in all Kohler's experiments with manipu-
lating boxes and putting them on top of each other, his chimps proved
surprisingly stupid.* Thus the skill of manipulating boxes is not a well-
exercised, 'ready-made* item in Koko's repertory; and Koko is not
really ripe for the task set for him, because M 2 is still too tentative and
unstable to become firmly attached to M x ; linking did occur in a lucky
moment, but the link broke again. This description presupposes that
the box-manipulating skill was developing independently from banana-
collecting, as a purely playful occupation as it did in fact when
Koko was made to play with the box before the experiment started.
And it further presupposes that if Koko had been given sufficient time
to become proficient in that playful skill, then he would have become
ripe for a true bisociative act. Instead of this, however, he was led to
form a 'premature linkage* between boxes and bananas (cf. Book
One, IX).

This interpretation differs from K5hler's appearance of a complete
solution with reference to the whole layout of the field*; or rather, it
specifies the condition under which such a 'complete solution has a
chance to occur. But our interpretation is borne out by later experiments
by others, in which chimpanzees were given the same raking task as
set by Kohler. One cHmpanzee out of six had previously used sticks
in play; this animal was the only one which had the 'insight* to rake in
the food placed outside the cage; the other five failed, although the
stick was lying in plain view. For the next three days all six chimps

582

THE ACT OF CREATION

were given sticks to play with. They used the sticks, as usual, to push
and poke, but never as a rake. Then the experiment was repeated and
all six sticks turned into rakes instantly. 15 Experiments with dogs reared
in isolation and then set 'insight situation tasks, gave similar results. 16
It may seem pedantic to lay so much stress on the independent
primary development of skills which are later combined in the
'moment of truth*. But the point does become relevant on higher
levels. The experimental sciences of electricity and magnetism de-
veloped independendy, and the discovery of electro-magnetic in-
duction was a truly bisociative act; in comparison to it the subsequent
improvements of electromagnets were a pedestrian procedure. The
previous independence of the cognitive structures which are made to
fuse in the creative act is, as we saw before, one of the criteria of
originality; I shall return to the subject in the final chapter.

The Ambiguities of Gestalt

The Gestalt theory was developed in Germany, before Wertheimer,
Kohler, and KofTka settled in America; and the original German term
for insight was 'Einsicht'. In a footnote on page 291 of the English
translation of The Mentality of Apes we read (my italics) : 'The German
word" Einsicht" is rendered by both "intelligence" and "insight" through-
out this book. The lack of an adjective derived from the noun "in-
sight", apart from other considerations, makes this procedure neces-
sary.'

In this casual footnote we find the clue to the sad confusion which
has bedevilled the controversy from its beginning: Gestalt theorists
used the word 'insight' mdiscriminately to mean either (A) intelli-
gence, understanding, judgement, knowledge in general, or (B)
specifically the acquisition of new understanding and knowledge
under the sudden and dramatic circumstances specified in the previous
section. By equating (A) with (B), the Gestaltists were led to regard
(B) as the only type of 'intelligent' learning, eveiything else as 'blind'
learning; and their explanations of why and how learning of type (B)
occurs become unavoidably tautological Thus K5hler writes:

We can, in our own experience, distinguish sharply between the
kind of behaviour which from the very beginning arises out of a
consideration of the structure of a situation, and one that does not.

THE PITFALLS OF GESTALT

583

Only in the former case do we speak of insight, and only that
behaviour of animals definitely appears to us intelligent which takes
account from the beginning of the lay of the land, and proceeds to
deal with it in a single, continuous, and definite course. Hence
follows this criterion of insight: the appearance of a complete solution
with reference to the whole layout of the field. 17 (Kohler's italics).

But a few pages further we read: ' "trying around" consists in
attempts at solution in the half-understood situation; and the real solu-
tion may easily arise by some chance outcome of it, i.e. it will not arise
from chance impulses, but from actions, which, because they are
"au fond" sensible, are great aids to chance'. 18 Kohler further speaks
of the 'dawning' of the solution and of good errors' that is, tries in
the right direction vaguely sensed. Thus Kohler admits that insight
in the sense (B) is a matter of approximation, and may be achieved
in several steps, consisting of more or less 'sensible' hypotheses and
tries; yet in other passages he asserted the exact opposite, namely that
the criterion of insight was 'the appearance of a complete solution . . .
in a single continuous and definite course'.

To get out of this confusion, let me distinguish between two
problems; firstly, what constitutes understanding or Insight A; and in
the second place, how new understanding or Insight B is acquired.
Regarding the second problem, we have seen that the dramatic
Eureka process is not the rule, but rather an exceptional limit case;
and that understanding or Insight A enters to varying degrees into all
forms of learning.

Let us examine for a moment the Gestalt school's answer to the
first problem: the nature of understanding or Insight A. On page 219
of The Mentality of Apes we read that it is based 'on the grasp of a
material, inner relation of two things to each other . . .'; 'relation'
being further defined as an 'interconnection based on the properties
of these things themselves, not a "frequent following each other" or
"occurring together" \ The meaning of these formulations becomes
clearer in Kohler's later book (1949). There this 'material' 'inner'
relation between two things is expressed as 'our feeling of something
naturally depending on something else'. 19 'Between the attitude and
its sensory basis we experience what in German is called ihr sachlicker
Zusammenhang . . .'; and sachlicher Zusamtnenhang is translated, with
some hesitation, as 'intrinsic connection'. This again is used synony-
mously with 'experienced determination' such as that prevailing

584. THE ACT OF CREATION

'between a disease and its germ'. 20 Again: 'Here not only the result is
experienced, but also very much of its "why" and "how" is felt in
just the actual context. Wherever this is the case we apply the term
insight* But 'very much' is a relative term, and its use as an all-or-none
criterion 'wherever this is the case* again confuses the issue. Turn-
ing to KofFka, we fmd that he explains the difficulties confronting the
cat in the problem-box by the fact that the actions which it must per-
form to gain release are to the cat 'objectively meaningless', that they
have 'no sort of internal connection with release', that they have no
'material relation* or 'intrinsic relation' with the opening of doors,
and so on.

It should be clear by now that all these somewhat obscure terms
are shamefaced references to physical causality, and that the position of
the Gestalt school boils down to the tautology that the animal's be-
haviour is the more intelligent the more insight it has into causal
relations. Nobody will quarrel with this statement; but it entirely
begs the central question of learning theory: namely, by what pro-
cesses and methods that insight into causal relations is acquired. The
loop in the puzzle-box, at the beginning of its training, means nothing
to the cat; at the end of its training it means escape. How is this mean-
ing acquired? Through trial-and-error learning, hypotheses, etc. The
problem can now be re-formulated as follows: can learning by trial
and error result in 'genuine' solutions, can it provide a correct, or true,
or meaningful representation of the causal connection between loop
and door? We can even go one step further and ask the same question
with regard to classical conditioning. If the dog could express itself
in Kdhier's terminology, it would no doubt answer that the sound
of the gong 'signals' or 'means' food, that an 'objectively meaningful
connection', an 'mtrinsic connection* or sachlicher Zusammenhang,
exists between the two. And this statement would entirely correspond
to fact, because in the laboratory universe this sequence is natural law.
Of course some connecting links are missing in the dog's inner model
of that law: the intentions of God Pavlov who has decreed it are un-
known to the dog. But such gaps occur on all levels of cognitive pro-
cesses. When the average citizen turns on his radio he has about as
much insight into the 'intrinsic connections* between the knob and
the sound, the 'whys' and 'hows', the 'interconnections based on the
properties of the things themselves', the 'total layout of the field' as
Pavlov's dogs have.

Understanding is a matter of approximation. If we hold, with

THE PITFALLS OF GESTALT

585

Craik, that the basic achievement of the nervous system is derived
from its power to parallel or model external events, 21 then the cat
which has learned to open the door by tugging at the loop can be
said to have made a correct, if crude, model of a causal sequence. The
crudeness of the model is mainly due to the fact that the rope connec-
ting the loop and the door is hidden from the cat's sight whereas
under normal conditions the cat can 'see what it is doing*. But this
difference is one of degree not of kind; and it is not justifiable to argue
as Gestalt theorists have occasionally done that because the cat
cannot see the connection, it has no 'insight'. Because sight is our main
sense organ, we have come to use the words 'I see' as synonymous
with 'I understand'. The Gestalt school with its strong emphasis on
visual perception has carried this tendency to extremes, and thus came
to believe that to have all relevant facts of a situation or problem laid
out before one's eyes is both necessary and sufficient for its under-
standing. 22 In fact, of course, it is neither. Rats learn to know a maze,
and to form a mental map of it which amounts to as complete an
understanding of the situation as one could wish for without having
been offered a bird's eye view of it. Nor is seeing a sufficient condition
for knowing in chimpanzees or humans, even if the 'whole field'
containing all the necessary clues is laid out in full view. Thus Sultan
establishes a visual connection with the banana outside the cage by
pushing one stick towards it with a second stick, but that procedure
does not testify to much insight. In other experiments, where a string
is attached to the banana and one or more strings are laid out in the
vicinity, Sultan will pull at random at any of the strings, although
he can clearly see which string is connected to the banana, which is
not.* The young child behaves in similar ways; Piaget has called this
phenomenon 'optical realism'. It 'consists in considering things as
being what they appear to be in immediate perception and not what
they will become once they have been inserted in a system of rational
relations transcending the visual field. Thus the child imagines that
a stick can draw an object because it is beside it or touches it, as though
optical contact were equivalent to a causal link.' 23

Adults are also quite often unable to understand how a simple
mechanism works although it is laid bare before their eyes. The visual
concurrence of all elements which belong to the problem facilitates
understanding (in various degrees according to species, see previous
note), but does not guarantee or imply it; it does not provide a
'direct and complete' insight into the causal connections of the situation,

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THE ACT OF CREATION

nor, except in certain cases, does it occasion a 'complete answer accor-
ding to the total layout of the field'. Even in relatively simple situa-
tions there are always gaps in understanding the 'intrinsic material
relations' between things. Why can I pull but not push an object with
a string? What are the whys and hows of rigidity, flexibility, cohesion,
etc.? Why is a hemp-cord stronger than a paper-cord, and less elastic
than a rubber-cord? Our insight into the 'inner material relation of
phenomena' is full of missing links, so to speak; the model of the out-
side world which we form in the matrix of our minds represents, by
the very nature of that matrix, not a point-to-point correspondence
but a point-to-blur correspondence, a more or less rough approxima-
tion. Not only this blurred microstructure, but even the macro-
structure of the universe, and the laws which govern it, put us into
much the same perplexed condition as the cat which has to infer, by
empirical induction, the laws which Thorndike made in his wisdom.
And the cat's behaviour in the box is, in fact, a first approximation
to the methodology of exact science as formulated by Craik: 'in-
duction supported by experiments to test hypotheses'. 24

It is necessary to remind ourselves of these truisms, because the
controversies in learning theory have almost made us lose them from
sight. The extreme wing of the Behaviourists has tried to banish the
concepts of understanding, memory, purpose, consciousness, hypo-
thesis, from the groves of Academe, to interpret trial and error as a
random process, and human induction as an equally mechanical affair.
Classical Gestalt theory sinned in the opposite direction; its attitude is
epitomized, e.g. in the passages from Kohler already quoted: accord-
ing to which true understanding can be derived only from 'an inter-
connection based on the properties of the things themselves, not a
"frequent following each other" or "occurring together'V To pay
attention to the 'frequent following each other' or 'occurring together'
of two events, which is so contemptuously dismissed here,, is the very
essence of inductive inference. To quote Russell again: 'Let there be
two kinds of events, (a) and (b) (e.g. Hghtning and thunder), and let
many instances be known in which an event of the kind (a) has been
quickly followed by one of the kind (b), and no instances of the
contrary. Then either a sufficient number of instances of this sequence,
or instances of suitable kinds, will make it increasingly probable that
(a) is always followed by (b), and in times the probability can be
made to approach certainty without limit. . . ,' 25 Instances of a very
suitable, clear-cut kind that is to say, situations for which the animal

THE PITFALLS OF GESTALT

587

is 'ripe', may then lead to inductive certainty derived from a single
occurrence the chick inferring that all caterpillars of appearance (a)
are accompanied by a disgusting taste (b).

The mistake of the classical Gestalt school was to identify triat-and-
erroT learning with chain-reflex theory a historically understandable
mistake since the two were lumped together in the S.-R. schemata of
Thorndike, Pavlov, Watson, Guthrie, etc. Yet the history of science
abounds with examples of brilliant discoveries which were preceded
by long periods of more or less fumbling tries in half-understood
situations. To try is to adventure; and to quote Russell once more:
'If an induction is worth making, it may be wrong/ 26

The same kind of bias led to the Gestalt school's uncompromising
rejection of any assocktionist theory of learning. Again this radical
attitude is historically understandable as a reaction against mechanistic
interpretations of associations as rigid neural connections, fixed path-
ways, conditioned reflex arcs and the rest. But the Gestalt school did
not succeed in offering any valid alternative of its own for associative
memory. Kohler's trace theory, elaborated by KofFka, does not give
even a remote clue as to how a visual percept say a caricature of
Nelson, which is 'pictured' by an electrolytic field-current in the op-
tical cortex will activate, 'by similarity' the auditory trace of the word
'Trafalgar'. The influence of past experience on the present is mini-
mized by Kohler wherever possible, and learning is virtually reduced
to spontaneous 'Insight B\ where new knowledge emerges all in a
piece like Minerva in full armour from Jupiter's head.

According to Kohler, association has to be given up as a special
and independent theoretical concept. It is not more than a name for the
fact that organized processes leave a trace picturing their organiza-
tion and that in consequence of it reproductions are possible. . . .
Our conclusion is, that association depends upon organization because
association is just an after-effect of an organized process/ 27 'Organiza-
tion' in this context means perceptual orgariization- that is to say, the
animal's innate faculty to order its perceptions into Gestalt-configura-
tions which arise spontaneously as the 'experienced direct determina-
tion' of 'objectively meaningful mtrinsic connections' based on the
'whys and hows of the interaction of the properties of the things them-
selves' and so on. Gestalt has become the ultimate panacea. As one
critic remarked: 'The Gestalten thus become primary realities, existen-
tial intimates, in terms of which all events should be comprehended/ 28

As so frequently in the history of science, a school of outstanding

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THE ACT OF CREATION

achievements has succumbed to the magic power of a unifying formula.
That formula, in its turn, is based on a metaphysical assumption: the
existence of an a priori correspondence, or co-ordination, between the
physico-chemical processes in the nervous system and the events in
the outside world. Owing to Kohler's theory of psycho-physical
isomorphism', the sight of a square gives rise to a field current in the
cortex, and 'this cortical process must have the structural characteristics
of the square.' 29 The 'intrinsic', 'material', or causal relations in the
outer world are automatically mirrored by isomorph electro-chemical
Gestalt processes in the brain, and 'insight* turns out to mean the spon-
taneous operation of the isomorph faculty. Thus the organism does not
have to build a symbolic model of reality in the nervous system by the
processes of learning such as scanning, coding, abstraction, gradual
approximation through inductive hypotheses; the isomorph model
in the head is pre-figured, potentially given in its native perceptual
organization, and need only be activated by 'spontaneous insight'. To
quote Polanyi: 'From this principle (isomorphism) it would follow
that the whole of mathematics whether known or yet to be dis-
covered is latent in the neural traces arising in a man's brain when he
looks at the axioms of Principia Mathematical and that the physico-
chemical equilibration of these traces should be capable of producing
a cerebral counterpart (a coded script) comprising the entire body of
mathematics.' 30

Thus the metaphysical assumptions of Gestalt psychology lead us
(as Koffka somewhat reluctantly admits) 31 back to the kind of 'faculty
psychology' abandoned about a century ago; and ultimately to Plato;
whereas Behaviourism leads us ultimately back to the atomism of
Democritus combined with the scepticism of Ecclesiastes. Kohler's
chimps look at the world through the 'eyes of the soul'; Hull's rats
are wired marionettes jerked about by a non-existent puppet player.

Putting Two and Two Together

Contiguity is the Deus ex machina of Behaviourists such as "Watson and
Guthrie, and the bete, noire of Gestaltists, who reject association by
contiguity as 'blind* and 'meaningless'.

'There is not a single example', writes Kohler, 'of an effect pro-
duced by the interaction of two things or processes quite independently
of their properties. Nevertheless this is the character of the classical

THE PITFALLS OF GESTALT

589

law of association as we find it stated in most textbooks.' 32 I cannot
remember having seen anywhere the law stated in quite that form, and
Kohler s description is obviously a caricature; how can two things
interact 'independently of their properties'? Does not the term 'inter-
action imply that properties of the interacting processes are involved?
Contiguity the overlapping of two events in spacetime of a regular,
recurrent kind is the base on which inductive inference can build. This
applies, impartially, to the dog learning that the gong is a signal for
food, and to Kepler observing that the tides follow the moon. Kepler
concluded that there must be a causal connection between the moon
and the tides, although his ideas of gravity were of the most erratic
kind; and his was a correct approximation, followed by the closer
approximations of Newton and Einstein though we are perhaps as
far as ever from grasping the intrinsic, material relations' between
bodies acting at a distance. More often than not, the starting point of
the scientist's inquiry is 'post hoc, ergo let's hope -propter hoc. Even
in the rare limit case of the Eureka process, contiguity the simul-
taneous activity in the mind of the two matrices which are to
be integrated provides the link; and the provider may even be
'blind chance' a fungus sailing through the window into Fleming's
laboratory.

Learning, then, in the most general sense of the word, consists in
putting two and two or A and B together. It may be done gradually,
by plodding through hypotheses and eliminations; or all of a sudden,
following upon a single implicit try. A and B may stand for recurrent
features abstracted from a series of perceived events; or A may be a
signal-pattern requiring the correct choice of reaction B among other
possible choices; A and B may be codes of behaviour or universes of
discourse, each complete in itself and adequate for routine tasks; but
to solve a certain new task they must be put together. If the subject is
ripe for the solution, the putting together can occur in a single flash.
But let me repeat that such hghtning inductions based on a single case
are possible only if both M x and M 2 are well-established, flexible
matrices which the subject knows 'inside out'. Only those chimpanzees
discovered spontaneously the use of a stick as a rake who had previously
played with sticks; those who had not, though of equal intelligence,
failed to see the light.

There is a rather striking parallel between the present interpretation
of discovery as a bisociative process, and the conclusions which Hebb
reached regarding the sudden appearance of new insights:*

590

THE ACT OP CREATION

The sudden activation of an effective link between two concepts
or percepts, at first unrelated, is a simple case of 'insight' . . . 88

Insight, as a sudden perception of new relationships, can result
from the simultaneous activity of two conceptual cycles in adult
learning. 34

The insightful act is an excellent example of something that is not
learned, but still depends on learning. It is not learned, since it can be
adequately performed on its first occurrence; it is not perfected
through practice in the first place, but appears all at once in recog-
nizable form (further practice, however, may still improve it). On
the other hand, the situation must not be completely strange; the
animal must have had prior experience with the component parts of
the situation, or with other situations that have some similarity to
it. ... All our evidence thus points to the conclusion that a new
insight consists of a recombination of pre-existent mediating processes,
not the sudden appearance of a wholly new process. [Hebb's italics]

Such recombinations must be frequent in man's everyday living,
and in a theoretical framework we must consider them to be original
and creative. . . .**

Hilgard (1958) came to similar conclusions: 'Because all learning is
to some extent cognitively controlled, the distinction between blind
learning and learning with understanding becomes one of degree.' 36

NOTES

To p. $8t. Kohler made a distinction between one-box experiments and
the building of two- or three-storey structures. In the latter additional difificulties
arise from what he called the chimp's *lack of a feeling for statics'. This handi-
cap no doubt adds to the animal's perplexity; but Koko's and Sultan's behaviour
in experiments of this kind (c pp. 47, 118, 122 ff) indicates that not only the
problem of balance, but the whole box-building business goes against the
chimpanzee's grain.

To p. 585. The importance of visual clues varies of course with different
species. Adams' cat immediately saw that the piece of liver can be hauled up by
the string to which it was attached. Kohler tried a similar experiment with his
dog: a basket, containing food, was suspended from a rope outside the barred
window of the room so that the dog could easily have hoisted it up with herteeth
or paws. But she 'did not even attempt this simple method of self-help, and paid
no attention to the string which was lying just under her nose whilst at the same
time she showed the liveliest interest in the distant basket. Dogs, and probably,
for instance, horses as well . . . might easily starve to death in these circum-
stances which offer hardly any difficulty to human beings or to chimpanzees'

THE PITFALLS OF GESTALT 591

(Kohler, 1957, p. 31). Far be it from me to suggest that cats are more intelligent
than dogs; what the experiment shows is that cats are phylogenetically more
ripe for this type of perceptual and manipulative skill than dogs.

To p. S8g. Hebb's Organization of Behaviour was published in the same year
as Insight and Outlook; his A Textbook of Psychology in 1958.

XIV

LEARNING TO SPEAK

Intending and Saying

Preparing to say something, whether it is a single sentence or a
public lecture, is to set a hierarchy in motion.
*. . . And has the reader never asked himself*, 'WiDia.m James wrote
in 1890, 'what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before
he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other
intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore; and
yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words
or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and things
come into the mind; the anticipatory intention, the divination is there
no more . . . [The intention] has therefore a nature of its own of the
most positive sort, and yet what can we say about it without using
words that belong to the later mental facts that replace it? The intention
to say so and so is the only name it can receive. One may admit that a
good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory per-
spective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate.* 1

In other words, before the verbal hierarchy is set into motion,
there is an ideational process of a highly conscious character, an inten-
tion or active expectation, which itself is not yet verbalized. Consider
what is involved in preparing an ex-tempore lecture. The first step is
to jot down the principal arguments or themes in key-words in
'symbols of the second remove' so to speak. Each theme is then treated
as a sub-whole, a flexible matrix of ideas with an invariant code: the
logic of the argument to be conveyed. But the ways of putting it
across are many: factually, whimsically, by concrete examples. My
strategical choice is governed by the lie of the land: the character of
the audience; and by feedback from implicit tries: their anticipated
reactions. If I have decided on concrete examples, I must search for

592

LEARNING TO SPEAK

593

them in my memory, and then again make strategical choices. The
next question is where to start, to decide on the sequential order, and
the approximate time allotted to each of the various subjects so as to
make a balanced whole. In this quasi-architectural planning, the argu-
ments are still treated as sub-wholes or building blocks, whose 'con-
tents are known but are present without adequate verbal designation\ 2
All this is still a long way from the choice of actual words; in fact the
hazy intentional situation described by James repeats itself on several
levels.

But as we approach the actual formation of sentences, automatisms
begin to intrude, indicating that we are nearing the bottom of the
hierarchy the consummatory acts of language which terminate the
appetitive behaviour of thought. The sub-codes of grammar and
syntax, which now enter into action, are almost wholly automatized;
and when we finally arrive at the formation of syntactic units indi-
vidual words patterned into phrases there is a good chance that these
will be 'fixed action-patterns* verbal formulae, cliches, mannerisms,
stereotyped turns of phrase, which remind one of the fighting rituals
of the stickleback (e.g. 'the evidence tends to show*, 'as we have seen
before', 'we must bear in mind, however*, etc.). Technical papers and
bureaucratic utterances are conspicuous by their narrowness of vocabu-
lary and rigidity of phrasing. Fortunately, there exist non-abstractive
hierarchies whose criteria of relevance are aesthetic or emotional,
which cc^letermine the tactics of verbal choices and counteract the
tendency towards automatization.

Having gone through all these implicit motions, we end up by
spelling out the actual sounds or ink marks, vocal patterns or type-
written letters. Yet even on this automatized level, hierarchic organiza-
tion prevails; the phonetic sequences or manual patterns are triggered
off as wholes and perceived as wholes; nowhere, in the course of our
descent through the hierarchy, do we strike rock-bottom, made of
hard 'atoms of behaviour*.

Thus 'verbal behaviour* is initiated by unverbalized intentions at
the top of the language hierarchy, and terminates, in deverbalized
sensory-motor activities; at each level it is governed by rules which
elude verbal definition, and modified by extraneous factors acting on
the plastic matrices of language. Each time we slice behaviour 'ver-
tically* instead of horizontally on a single level we arrive at a series
which at the top recedes into an elusive blur and at its base vanishes in
the twilight of awareness.

594

THE ACT OF CREATION

The above description may have seemed unnecessarily verbose,
since the hierarchic structure of language is so obvious that it need
not be stressed. After all, nearly half a century has passed since Watson
proclaimed that speech consists in the manipulation of words, and
thinking in the sub-vocal manipulation of words. However, if the
reader thinks that the cruder forms of Paleo-Behaviourism are a
matter of the past, he should turn to the first Note* at the end of this
chapter (which will also provide some light relief ). It is an excerpt from
a textbook for College students, published in 1961, which starts with
the sentence: 'For many of you, this is your first encounter with psy-
chology as a science.' One wonders what this .rst encounter will do
to the mind of the trusting student who is here quite literally led to
believe that human discourse consists in the chaining of S.-R. units
which are best studied by bar-pressing experiments 'under the more
ideal conditions in the laboratory'.

The Dawn of Symbol Consciousness

The previous section referred to speech as a performance. Learning to
speak proceeds more or less in the opposite direction from the
bottom to the top of the hierarchy. But only 'more or less', because
bit-learning plays here a much lesser part than in the acquisition of
mechanical skills like typing. Let us take a closer look at a few charac-
teristic aspects of the process.

The first vocal ventures of the child confirm the now-familiar
principle (cf. Chapter II) that spontaneous motor activity precedes
sensory control. The child, too, 'acts on the environment before it
reacts to it* as parents must learn in sleepless nights; cooing and
babbling are spontaneous expressions of joie de vivre, in which a sur-
plus of energy is discharged, as in the waving of arms and wriggling of
toes.

At the early stages these spontaneous babbling sounds are the same
whether they are produced by an American white or a Negro baby
(i.e. the frequency spectra of the phonemes are practically identical). 3
At five to six months, however, when syllabic, speech-like sounds
become increasingly frequent, the spectrum shifts noticeably towards
the sound patterns produced by the adults in the child's environment;
and at twenty-four months the resemblance is close. Thus the originally
^distinguishable phonetic matrices of infants from different language-

LEARNING TO SPEAK

595

groups become differentiated by the imitative repetition of adult
sound-patterns. Imitation is at first probably automatic, the auditory-
vocal feedback apparatus being excited by the input as in the young
singing bird; then shades into a more or less conscious response
from 'echolalia' to 'metalalia'.

The first correlations between a sound pattern and an object or
person are probably 'stamped in* by the parents at an age when the
child's nervous system is not yet mature for them. In Book One (pp.
220-3) I have mentioned two examples at opposite extremes: Watson
conditioning an infant less than six months old Le. much too early
to say da each time it was given the bottle; and Helen Keller's sudden
and dramatic discovery, at the age of seven i.e. when she was over-
ripe for it that 'everything had a name and each name gave birth to
a new thought'. In the average, normal child the dawn of symbol
consciousness seems to be a gradual, cumulative process. From
approximately the eighteenth month onward there is a sharp increase in
the child's vocabulary (Book One, p. 221) and somewhere around that
time it makes that 'most important discovery of its life*, that verbal
labels can be attached not only to particular things and events, but
that everything under the sun has a name. The universe of words, and
the universe of things, have become integrated and will remain in-
separable. Henceforth, every word must mean something and every-
thing must have a name.

With the emergence of language, we have attained a new level of
the cognitive hierarchy, which represents a sharp break in the con-
tinuity of learning processes in animals and man. Homologue laws
still operate: 'All things have names' may be regarded as yet another
case of empirical induction which we have seen operating on all levels;
and verbal symbolism may be regarded as an extension of sign situa-
tions. Dolphins can be taught to respond to verbal or visual commands;
dogs and chimps can make their wishes be known to their masters;
cats will learn that bolts and loops mean escape; bees can communicate
their experiences by dancing. But such communication by signs ex-
tends only to a few particular situations; it is generalized to some extent
in the laboratory situation, when it seems to dawn on the cat that 'all
these contraptions are means of escape', as it dawns on the child that
'all these words are means of getting one's way'. But at this point
the cat has reached the limit of its abstractive capabilities, whereas the
child has only got to its first inkling of what words can do for you.*

Their first, obvious advantages to the child are that they can be

596

THE ACT OF CREATION

utilized both as labels, and as levers which make things happen, that
they serve both the progressive socialization and internalization of
behaviour communication and inner discourse. This is well-covered
ground which needs no further labouring. But another phenomenon
of early language behaviour is rarely emphasized: the appearance of
the naming question or 'naming mania'. The child points at anything
it sees, asks 'This?' or 'What that?', and is visibly satisfied to learn
the answer, without any utilitarian reward. Alternatively, it points at
things, calls out their name or, if it has forgotten it, invents a new one.
Here is a true paradigm of latent learning, of the exploratory drive, or
oil* art pour I* art behaviour whatever one wants to call it. To quote
Piaget: 'It is ... no exaggeration to say that sensory-motor intelligence
is limited to desiring success or practical adaptation, whereas the func-
tion of verbal or conceptual thought is to know and state truth.' 4

But there is another aspect to the 'name-expectation: henceforth
the child's concept of a tiling or event will be experienced by it as
incomplete if there is no verbal label attached to it. The concept will
behave like a molecule with a free valency, as it were. "We can perhaps
recapture an echo of this when we hunt for the forgotten name of a
person. Also, when we learn a new language, we suddenly have a
whole class of free valencies: we feel actually frustrated when we dis-
cover that the French have no word for 'snobbery' or 'understate-
ment', and are tempted to exclaim like a child: 'But surely they must
have a name for it?'

The behaviour of the rat exploring a maze or of the monkey fear-
fully peeping into the box with the snake, could be described as inter-
rogatory, and the same description could be applied to the puzzled
expressions and actions of a small child before it has learned to speak.
But its first explicit, verbal questions refer to the names of things, promp-
ted by the need to 'saturate' the free valencies in its pre-verbal object-
concepts. Is it too speculative to assume that this origin of the question-
ing habit must influence the whole later development of thought? The
fact that each naming question can be readily answered by adults, may
implant the implicit belief into the child that all questions are both
meaningful and answerable; that the nature of explanation is based on
the same kind of simple and direct connections as that between 'thing'
and 'name'. This implicit belief seems to have been one of the factors
responsible for the aberrations of human thought.

Concepts and Labels

I have talked of (pre-verbal) 'concepts' to wtrich the verbal label
becomes attached. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a concept
as an 'idea of a class of objects; general notion; Webster as 'a mental
image of a thing formed by generalization from particulars'; Hilgard:
'When a symbol stands for a class of objects or events with common
properties, we say that it refers to a concept 9 ; 5 Piaget 8 regards the de-
velopment of 'object concepts' as one of the principal achievements
of the 'sensory-motor intelligence' which precedes the rise of
verbal intelligence in the child's first two years. He distinguishes six
stages in the attainment of stable object-concepts, which he defines as
'a system of perceptual images endowed with a constant spatial form
throughout its sequential displacements and constituting an item which
can be isolated in the causal series unfolding in time.' 7 It is interesting
to compare Piaget's rather abstract formulations with the lucid 'in-
cisiveness' of Wilder Penfield a neuro-surgeon. He too starts by
securing his flanks with quotes from Webster and Oxford; then he
goes on:

'The concept may be a butterfly. It may be a person he has known.
It may be an animal, a city, a type of action, or a quality. Each concept
calls for a name. These names are wanted for what may be a noun or a
verb, an adjective or an adverb. Concepts of this type have been formed
gradually over the years from childhood on. Each time a thing is seen
or heard or experienced, the individual has a perception of it. A part of
that perception comes from his own concommittant interpretation.
Each successive perception forms and probably alters the permanent
concept. And words are acquired gradually, also, and deposited some-
how in the treasure-house of word memory the corticothalamic
speech mechanisms. Words are often acquired simultaneously with
the concepts. ... A little boy may first see a butterfly fluttering from
flower to flower in a meadow. Later he sees them on the wing or in
pictures, many times. On each occasion he adds to his conception of
butterfly.

'It becomes a generalization from many particulars. He builds up a
concept of a butterfly which he can remember and summon at will,
although when he comes to manhood, perhaps, he can recollect none
of the particular butterflies of past experience.

'The same is true of the sequence of sound that makes up a melody.
He remembers it after he has forgotten each of the many times he

597

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THE ACT OF CREATION

heard or perhaps sang or played it. The same is true of colours. He
acquires, quite quickly, the concept of lavender, although all the
objects of which he saw the colour have faded beyond the frontier of
voluntary recall. The same is true of the generalization he forms of an
acquaintance. Later on he can summon his concept of the individual
without recalling their many meetings/ 8

Thus the pre-verbal concepts of the child are formed by a series of
operations continuous with those described in previous chapters: the
de-particularization, filtering, and coding of percepts according to
those of their common features which are relevant to a given con-
ceptual hierarchy; the formation of colour- shape- and object-con-
stancies; the development of sensory-motor skills such as the grasping
of objects, bringing them close to the eye, visual and tactile explora-
tion, etc.; lasdy, according to Piaget's schema, the 'objectification of
space and time, the gradual separation of the self from the non-self, and
the beginnings of the transition from magical to more objectified
kinds of implied causality. Most of these processes can be found, to a
greater or lesser degree, in animal learning; but with the addition of a
verbal label, the concept acquires a new dimension as it were, and the
continuity of the series of learning processes in animal and man is
broken. No extrapolation is possible from the behaviour of the rat to
that of man.

This can be demonstrated even in maze-learning experiments with
humans, where the advantages of verbalization are not at once ob-
vious. In a famous experiment by Warden 9 forty subjects were seated
in front of a table with a grooved maze on it. The maze was of the
same type as in rat experiments, with various cul-de-sacs; the subject
had to thread his way through it with a stylus in his hand, by purely
tactile guidance, for the maze was hidden from his view by a screen.
The number of trials required until the maze was completely learned
varied, according to subject, between 16 and 195 (!). At the end of the
experiment each subject had to report whether he had memorized the
maze by the 'feel' of it, that is by motor-kinesthetic imagery; or by
making a 'visual map'; or by a verbal formula e.g. 'first left, third
right, first right', etc.

The results were as follows: out of 60 subjects, 17 adopted the
'motor* method. These needed an average of 124 trials (ranging from
72 to 195 according to subject) to learn the maze. Eighteen adopted the
'visual* method; average trials: 68, ranging from 41 to 104. Twenty-
five adopted the Verbal' formula; average trials: 32, range: 16 to 62.

LEARNING TO SPEAK

599

Thus, in round figures, the visualizers learned twice as fast, the ver-
balizers four times as fast as the motor learners.

This reminds one of Otto Koehler's experiments (mentioned on
p. 535 f.), which showed that clever jackdaws have a 'pre-linguistic
number sense' almost equal to man's and are 'able to abstract the
concept of numerical identity from groups of up to seven objects*;
which 'suggests that many animals may have a prelinguistic "counting"
ability of about the same degree, but that man's superiority in dealing
with numbers lies in his ability to use, as symbols for numbers, words
and figures'. 10 The dependence of counting and calculating abilities
on verbal processes is further illustrated by Penfield's studies on
aphasia, about which later.

Even voluntary movements (as opposed to automatized skills)
seem to be to some extent dependent on guidance by internal ver-
balization. Some of Head's patients with speech disorders due to brain
lesions were unable to imitate correctly Head's gestures such as
touching an eye or an ear with the left or right hand while they
were sitting face to face with Head; but had no difficulty in doing so
if standing in front of a mirror with Head standing behind them. In
the mirror test, of course, the task is reduced to pure imitation, whereas
sitting opposite the experimenter 'left' and 'right' are reversed and the
patient cannot see himself: V:

'When the patient sitting opposite to me attempts to imitate move-
ments of my right or left hand brought into contact with one or other
eye or ear, internal verbalization occurs at a phase of the normal act.
No word may be uttered, but the words "right" and "left", "eye "and
"ear", are essential to correct imitation of this kind. For the same reason
these patients may find considerable difficulty in carrying out the hand,
eye, and ear tests when the comm and is pictorial (given by a drawing
on a printed card) although they can execute them correctly when
asked to do so by word of mouth (or even by printed command).
Their difficulty is in evoking the words they require, and the verbal
comm and supplies the necessary want.' 11

Thus Head's patients, with their impaired comm and of words,
were virtually reduced from the level of the verbalizers to that of the
motor-learners in Wardens maze experiment. We must conclude that
verbal symbolism enters even into the learning of complex motor
skills just as it provides the mortar for holding together complex
visual pseudo-images (p. 53 1 rE).

Ideation and Verbalization

Owing to the immense benefits derived from verbalization, the verbal
symbol, which at the dawn of symbol-consciousness was at first no
more than a label attached to a pre-existing conceptual schema, soon
becomes its focal member, its centre of gravity, as it were. As words
are the most convenient and economical means not only of com-
munication but also of internal discourse, they soon assume a central
role in the child's mental life, whereas images and other forms
of unverbalized thought are gradually pushed towards the peri-
phery, the fringes of awareness, or sink slowly down below its
surface.

This tendency of verbal thinking to dominate and monopolize
consciousness has its blessings and its curses, though the latter are less
obvious than the former. Some of the dangers of thought becoming
enslaved to words have been discussed in Book One, VII. Woodworth's
remark, 'often we have to get away from speech in order to think
clearly' 12 was seen to apply to a wide range of creative activities
from mathematics and physics to philosophy, and there is no need to
labour the point further. What needs stressing once more is that words
are symbols for perceptual and cognitive events, but they are not the
events. J'hey are vehicles of thought, but the vehicle should not be
confused with the passengers.

Let me recapitulate, (i) The child has formed a variety of pre-verbal
concepts of persons, objects, and recurrent events to which later verbal
symbols become attached as labels; without the previously existing
person-concept, the symbol 'Mama* would have nothing to refer to;
it would remain meaningless an empty vehicle without passenger.
(2) At a later stage, the word and the concept may be acquired simul-
taneously: 'Mummy, what does seductress mean?' 'A very bad
woman who uses too much make-up.' (3) The concept 'seductress' will
undergo drastic changes during adolescence and later years; the word
seductress remains unchanged. It is a vehicle with a fixed, im-
mutable structure; whereas the passengers are constantly changing,
getting in and out of the bus. We may even distinguish between
passengers of first and second class: trim denotations, furtive connota-
tions, and stow-aways hidden under the seats. Dr. Watsons sugges-
tion that the passengers themselves are subliminal omnibuses was not
a helpful one. (4) The word seductress refers to different con-
cepts in different people. (5) The word which is attached to a concept

600

LEARNING TO SPEAK

60 1

may become detached from it, leaving the concept more or less un-
impaired. This last point needs elaboration.

One may of course forget the name of a person without forgetting
the person, i.e. without losing one's concept of him or her. But does
the same apply when the word refers to an abstract concept?

A certain class of Head's aphasic patients confused the names of
numbers, but nevertheless carried out the correct numerical operations.
The patient would call a card 'nine of hearts' when he meant 'seven of
hearts', and yet play a correct game. On doing a multiplication he
would say aloud 'seven nines are fifty-six' and yet write down '63'
correctly. This shows that his number-concepts remained intact,
although he attached the wrong verbal labels to them; he probably
catalogued them by their visual labels (the written figures), but this
did not impair the efficiency of his symbolic operations. The trouble
of the jackdaw is not that it cannot attach verbal symbols to its number-
concepts, but that it cannot symbolize them in any other way either.
One has only to think of deaf-mutes to remind one that a symbolic
language is not necessarily an auditory-vocal language.*

The clinical phenomena of aphasia are frequently open to more than
one interpretation; but on the particular point under discussion this
is not the case. After surveying the literature on the subject, Humphrey 13
concluded: 'the general argument from aphasia for the independence
of thought and language seems, on reading the evidence, overwhelm-
ingly strong'. ('Independence' manifested in pathological cases does
not, of course, prevent interaction under normal conditions.)

More recently, Penfield and Roberts, reviewing the literature and
their own case histories, came to the same conclusion: 'It is obvious
that in many cases the aphasic patient is able to perceive accurately.
He knows what an object is used for; he recognizes it. He must, there-
fore, be able to draw upon his store of recorded experience. He is still
able to record his new experience of things heard and seen, and to
compare the new experience with the whole of his past similar ex-
periences. Thus his capacity to perceive through other channels than
the sound and form of words is preserved.' 14

Particularly impressive is the evidence from temporary aphasia in-
duced by electrical stimulation of the cortical speech areas of the con-
scious and consenting patient. Penfield's usual method was to show the
patient an object printed on a card and ask him to name it, while the
low-voltage electrode was applied to various points of the cortex:
'The patient may remain silent, or he may use words to explain that

602

THE ACT OF CREATION

he cannot name the object, or he may misname it. He may show
perseveration.' 15
A typical case is the following (italics in the original):

When the electrode was applied to the supramarginal gyrus at point
27, he said: 'I know what it is', and was silent. When the electrode
was withdrawn, he said at once, 'tree*, which was correct.

When the electrode was applied to the posterior temporal region
at 28, he was completely silent. A little time after the electrode was
withdrawn, he exclaimed suddenly: 'Now I can talk butterfly
[which was correct]. I couldn't get that word "butterfly" and then I
tried to get the word "moth". . . .' The speech mechanism was
separately paralysed, and yet the man could understand what he saw
and could substitute the concept, moth, for the concept butterfly,
in a reasoned attempt to regain control of the speech mechanism, by
presenting to it a new idea, moth. He could also snap his fingers (as
he did) in exasperation at his failure.

The words of C. H. [the patient] bring us face to face with other
brain mechanisms. The concept of a moth, as distinguished from a
butterfly, must also depend on a brain mechanism a mechanism
capable of functioning when the speech mechanism is selectively
paralysed a mechanism that stores something derived from the
past 16

Dropping the terminology of physiology for the moment, I may
say that the patient presented the concept of a 'butterfly' to his speech
mechanism, expecting that the word for it would be forthcoming.
When the mechanism failed him, he cast about and selected an
analogous concept from his storehouse of concepts and presented
that to the speech mechanism. But again he was disappointed, and he
snapped his fingers in exasperation. He could still express himself
emotionally with his fingers in that way, although he would
probably not have been able to write the lost words.*

Penfield concludes that there exists a 'conceptual mechanism' in the
brain, and a 'speech mechanism' which is structurally separate, and
functionally separable from the former.

We have seen that a considerable portion of mental activities is of
a non-verbal character in the nature of experiences which 'cannot be
put into words', which remain incommunicable and inarticulate, and
nevertheless play an important, sometimes even a dominant, part in a

LEARNING TO SPEAK

603

person s life. We now see that even in articulate verbal thinking, a
distinction must be drawn between the ideational process and its con-
version into verbal currency. I have quoted some of the clinical
evidence; there is also a vast body of experimental evidence reviewed,
e.g. by Humphrey (195 1). 17 Among the most convincing results are
those which emerged from factor analysis (Burt, 1949).*

Everyday experience points in the same direction. In states of fatigue
one may read every word of a printed paraghraph without under-
standing 'a single word of it'. And vice versa: every experienced
lecturer knows that one's thoughts may race ahead, or go astray,
while one goes on talking as if talking were an automatized and
autonomous skill like the typist's who copies behind'. More precisely,
the lecturer converts into verbal currency cognitive sub-wholes on
lower levels of the hierarchy, which have already been portioned out
or 'pre-chewed' by the ideational process proceeding on the higher
level.

"We may safely conclude, then, with Humphrey: 'Clinical expert"
mental and factorial results agree that language cannot be equated with
thinking. Language is ordinarily of great assistance in thinking. It may
also be a hindrance.'

NOTES

Top. 504. Excerpt from the textbook Psychology t ed. A. D. Calvin (Boston,
1961), Section Four: 'Learning, Retention and Motivation* by F.J. McGuigan:

The experimental data that we have presented . . . have been limited, to
rather simple responses such as salivation and bar-pressing. In our everyday
life we seldom spend much time in thinking about such isolated responses,
usually thinking of more gross activities, such as learning a poem, carrying on a
conversation, solving a mechanical puzzle, learning our way around a new city,
to name only a few. While the psychologist could study these more complicated
activities, as is done to some extent, the general approach of psychology is to
bring simpler responses into the laboratory for study. Once the psychologist dis-
covers the principles of learning for simpler phenomena under the more ideal
conditions of the laboratory [sic], it is likely that he can apply these principles
to the more complex activities as they occur in everyday life. The more complex
phenomena are, after all, nothing but a series of simpler responses. Speaking to a
friend is a good example of this. Suppose we have a conversation such as the
following:

He: "What time is it?*

She: 'Twelve o'clock.'

He: 'Thank you.*

She: 'Don't mention it.*

He: 'How about lunch?*

She: 'Fine.'

Now this conversation can be analysed into separate S.-R. units. 'He' makes
the first response, which is emitted probably to the stimulus of the sight of 'She*.

THE ACT OF CREATION

When 'He* emits the operant, 'What time is it?*, the muscular activity, of course,
produces a sound, which also serves as a stimulus for 'She*. On the receipt of this
stimulus, she emits an operant herself: 'Twelve o'clock', which in turn produces
a stimulus to 'He'. And so on. . . .

In such a complex activity, then, we can see that what we really have is a
series of S.-R. connections. The phenomenon of connecting a series of such S.-R.
units is known as chaining, a process that should be apparent in any complex
activity. We might note that there are a number of sources of reinforcement
throughout the chaining process, in this example the most obvious being the
reinforcement of 'She' by receiving an invitation for lunch and of 'He' by having
the invitation accepted. In addition, as Keller and Schoenfeld point out, there
are such sources of reinforcement as the hearer 'encouraging' the speaker to
continue, the use that the conversationalists make of the information received
(he finds out what time it is), etc.

This example of the analysis of a complex activity is but one of numerous
possibilities that we could discuss. You should continue to think of others your-
self and try to diagram the chaining process for them ... (p. 375).

To p. 595. It is interesting to note that Hebb, an enlightened behaviourist
yet a behaviourist, considers as the chief advantages of language that words can be
used in varying combinations: 'In man ... we also have a kind of behaviour,
which, as far as we know, does not occur in any other species. This is language.
It includes sign language as well as spoken and written words; and the chief
problem does not concern the ability to make the sounds of human speech,
since lower animals are not capable of sign language either. What puts language
on a higher level than the purposive communication of dog or chimpanzee is the
varied combination of the same signs (words, pictures, gestures) for different pur-
poses. . . . The criteria of language are then: (1) that it is usually purposive com-
munication (though a number of non- purposive uses is common also, as in
talking to oneself), and (2) that two or more items of the behaviour are com-
bined in one way for one purpose and recombined for other purposes' (Hebb,
1958, p. 209; his italics). Is that all? Or may we at least add, with Hilgard, that
'without language it would be well-nigh impossible to think of such abstract
notions as justice or reciprocal tariffs* (Hilgard, 1957, p. 315).

Top. 601. In Head's gesture-imitation experiments, on the other hand, some
kind of implicit verbal symbolization seems to be indispensable, because reliance
on visual or kinesthetic clues leads only to the familiar mirror-confusion as
any normal person will discover by repeating the experiment.

To p. 602. One might further speculate that the patient's inability to name
the object shown on the printed card, while he is perfectly capable of using words
to explain that he cannot name it, may be due to the fact that single object-names
like tree, moth, etc., have a more arbitrary character qua phonetic labels learnt by
rote, and have more 'brittle' traces, than verbs and propositions which form
syntactic sub-wholes. A 'tree', after all, is originally a nonsense syllable. One of
Penfield's patients, shown a card picturing a foot, said, 'Oh, I know what it is.
That is what you put in your shoes'. After withdrawal of the electrode, he said
correctly 'foot'. Now why should 'foot* be more difficult to name than 'shoe'?
Perhaps because the word 'shoe' occurred in a meaningful context Burt's
Factor II of Verbal Ability whereas 'foot* occurred in a naming context (Factor
I) which was blocked (see next note). In other words, the naming-code was out
of action, while the semantic code continued to function.

LEARNING TO SPEAK

605

To p. 603. Burt divided Verbal Ability into a word factor dealing with words
in isolation and a language factor dealing with words in their context. The former
he sub-divided into a receptive factor of recognizing and understanding words
and into an executive factor for finding and selecting the right word. The
language factor is similarly sub-divided into a receptive factor for understanding
statements and an executive factor for literary expression and verbal fluency.
Burt's divisions followed in broad outline Head's classifications of aphasia and
substantiated the validity of the letter, (The British Journal of Educational Psy-
chology, Vol. XIX, June and November, 1949).

XV

LEARNING TO THINK

tet me return to the early development of verbal matrices.
From about the eighteenth month onward, the child acquires
-/ new words at a faster rate; about the same time it begins to
correlate single words into word-sequences, and later on into sentences.
The earliest word-sequences are again produced by spontaneous, un-
directed vocal activity, in which meaningful words alternate with
strings of nonsense syllables and with words imitated but not yet
understood. Some children have the uncanny gift of imitating the
phonetic patterns of adult speech so well that from the next room their
babbling sounds like a meaningful monologue. If we are to believe
Bertr and Russell, his daughter at the age of eighteen months, 'when
supposed to be sleeping, was overheard saying to herself: "Last year
I used to dive off the diving-board, I did." Of course, "last year" was
merely a phrase repeated without understanding. . . .' x This philoso-
phical comment seems to imply, oddly enough, that the remainder of
the sentence was pronounced with understanding.

Frequently the first meaningful string of words refers to a sequence
of events. Fenton's unusually precocious son, also at the age of eighteen
months, 'uttered soon after seeing his father climb into an automobile
with another man and drive away, the words, "Daddy, school, man,
auto".* 2 This sounds exactly like the 'picture-strip language' of the
primitive (as Kretschmer called it 3 ) the unrolling of a visual sequence,
where each single word symbolizes a complete event. 'The speech
units of the child belong to no single class of words because they are
(i.e. stand for) not single words but sentences/* Even the first verbal
labels have a not merely denotative, but an operative character; they
do not refer to objects in vacuo, but to 'action-objects', 5 that is to say,
to the functional relevance of the object to the child. 'Chamberlain,
Tracy, Dewey, Binet and others have shown that the child's symbols

606

LEARNING TO THINK

607

are action-words, i.e., their content is action. There is also practically
universal agreement on the fact that the first symbols of the child are
in reality word-sentences designating action and object or subject,
or all three at once.' 6

This, of course, is again a far cry from any S.-R. theory of language
learning. The comm and right turn is a simple and definite verbal
stimulus, which, one would think, should be easy to associate with a
definite motor response; but many children and some normal adults
have considerable difficulty in distmguishing between right and left.
This fact is used by Hebb as an elegant proof that the concept (of right-
left-sidedness) precedes the word for it: 'The child can very readily learn
at the age of three that "right" and "left" each refers to a side of the
body but ah me, which one? . . . What is set up first is a conceptual
organization. By the age of six the word "right" clearly and im-
mediately means sidedness to the child. A considerable conceptual
elaboration has already occurred, and the stimulus effectively arouses
that structure; but it arouses no prompt, specific response. . . . With
such facts, it becomes nonsense to explain man's conceptual
development as exclusively consisting of verbal associations.* 7

The point becomes clearer when we realize that between the ages of
two and four many children are equally confused about 'up-down',
'back-front', etc.; but they only confuse opposites with each other,
never 'left' with 'up' or 'front' with 'down'. 8 This shows that the child
forms at an early stage sensory-motor matrices of 'up-downness*,
left-rightness', etc.; and that the verbal labels acquired later on may
become attached to the matrix as a whole, before directions within the
matrix are verbally cUscriminated. This does not mean, of course, that
abstraction preceded ^crimination, since both are aspects of the same
process; it only means that there is often delay and confusion in the
verbal labelling of pre-verbal concepts.

This brings us to the central problems of the evolution of symbolic
thought: abstraction and concept-formation.

Abstraction, Discrimination, and Transfer

In common usage abstract' thought is regarded as a specifically
human faculty, and more particularly as a prerogative of the scientific
mind. The Concise Oxford defines abstraction as 'the process of strip-
ping an idea of its concrete accompaniments'. There are, however,

6o8

THE ACT OF CREATION

obvious analogies between the abstraction of ideas the formation of
concepts and perceptual generalization the extraction of invariant
features, stripped of their accidental accompaniments, from varied
situations. It is therefore frequently asserted or implied that abstract
thought is merely the extension, along a continuous scale, of selective
processes which operate already in the rat and even lower down. I shall
first briefly recapitulate those aspects of the abstractive process which
are indeed continuous with animal learning until we arrive at the
point where the line again breaks. I shall again use the term generaliza-
tion' in the sense indicated above and not in the sense of 'spreading of
responses* (seep. 537 ff.).

The continuum of abstractive processes can be extended down into
the inorganic domain. The green-grocer's balance abstracts from a
pound of peaches and a pound of potatoes the one feature which it has
been programmed to recognize as relevant, their weight. A barometer,
programmed to compensate for variations of temperature, can be
regarded as a model for perceptual size-constancy the apparatus
programmed to compensate for distance. The same barometer used
as an altimeter may serve to illustrate the reversible figure-ground
relation. Each of these programmes is represented by a code which
determines which type of stimulus should be regarded as relevant and
abstracted from experience, and which not.

Built-in perceptual analysers for the recognition of species-specific
sign-releasers may be described as the result of the phylogenetic ab-
straction of biologically relevant stimulus-patterns. We may regard
this abstractive power, with Lashley, as 'one of the primitive basic
functions of organized nervous tissue'. 9

Turning to acquired behaviour, we must distinguish between learn-
ing under natural and artificial conditions. In both cases the animal
must learn to abstract relevant patterns from its environment as a
conditio sine qua non of properly reacting to them. With animals in their
natural habitat this happens either during maturation, or, in adult
animals, after a few repetitions of a certain kind of experience. Since
the animal attends only to stimuli which are biologically relevant to it
to which its perceptual organization is 'attuned' the learning pro-
cess consists essentially in the sharpening and modification of its built-
in perceptual analysers. In the laboratory situation, however, the
animal must in the first place readjust to an artificial universe, in which
stimuli which it would normally treat as irrelevant, become all-
important. When this revaluation is well under way, the cat in the box

LEARNING TO THINK

will begin to abstract from its bewildering environment die significant
patterns of loops and bolts in general, regardless of variations in their
position and shape. But this will be a slow, repetitive process because
abstraction is a function of relevance, and relevance in this case must
be inferred by induction; the cat is caught in a vicious circle. Even so,
its powers of abstraction are considerable see the perfunctory lick
reduced to a symbolic performance (p. 570). The rat in the maze is in
a more favourable position: it likes exploring highways and byways;
and the cognitive map which it abstracts from a number of concrete
tries provides it with a matrix of remarkable plasticity see Lashley's
extirpation experiments, pp. 458 f.

The child's pre-verbal concepts are derived from abstractive pro-
cesses which form a continuous series with animal learning from the
early development of its perceptual constancies and its 'sensory-motor
intelligence' to the crystallization of 'object concepts'. The child learns
to recognize its mother before it learns the word 'ma'. Unlike the
gosling whose nervous system is ready, a few hours after its birth, to
receive the imprint of the mother-goose all in one piece, the helpless
infant must slowly, and perhaps painfully, abstract the concept of
its mother as a stable, unvarying entity from a series of her very varied
appearances, all different in shape, and disconnected in time. The breast
first, more tactile than visual, monopolizing the whole perceptual
field; a fully-clad figure with concealed breasts, standing or bending
over; a series of faces appearing at intervals, never looking quite the
same such must have been the fragmentary, concrete experiences
out of which the unitary mother concept was extracted in the first
three weeks of our existence if only we could remember.

However, owing to the nursing mother's exceptional importance
to, and sustained bodily contact with, the child the formation of the
mother-concept must also be regarded as an exceptional process in
which several successive stages are telescoped into one. Other object
and action concepts emerge more slowly and hesitantly, even if the
object is a person. The adult's awareness of other people's personal
identity is based on empathy-^which is a projective phenomenon, in
some respects comparable to the stroboscopic effect. But in the babe
the experience of its own identity is still hazy, and so is its awareness
of the personal identity of others. When a feature F, which is im-
portant to the child, is common to several individuals whose other
attri butes are less important to it, then the child will abstract, con-
ceptualize, and name that shared feature in preference to the collection

6io

THE ACT OF CREATION

of features which constitutes each individual's personal identity. This
can happen even if one of the persons concerned is the father at the
stage before the father becomes functionally important to the baby. A
baby is often taught the word 'da-da' before it has learned to recognize
its father except for some vague features such as largeness or bulki-
ness, which are equally found in other appearances. As a result, it
applies the label 'da-da' 'widely and often embarrassingly to large
individuals of all shapes, sizes, ages, and colours'. 10 Abstraction and
discrimination are guided by relevance; and the relevant experience
in this case is some feature of dada-ness shared by lots of visitors who
their colour, age, etc., being as yet irrelevant are not discriminated
as individuals. It is the same with the gosling, which in the first stage
of imprinting follows all human shapes, and only later on confines its
attention to the keeper. During the first stage individual differences in
appearance are seen, but not 'taken in' and retained, because they are
not yet relevant to the gosling; during the second stage the distinguish-
ing marks become relevant because the gosling has learned that keepers
produce food, while other humans do not. Thus the sharpenings and
modifications of discriminatory codes are the result of changes in the
scales of relevance. In the first stage of development, all 'dada-ish'
visitors to the baby and all human beings to the gosling are regarded
as 'for all intents and purposes the same thing' ; in the second stage they
no longer are, because the intents and purposes have changed.

I have laboured this point at the risk of repetitiveness because once
accepted, it allows us to dispense with terms like transfer, spreading,
'generalization' (in sense b, cf. p. 537), and 'association by similarity'
and to close the lid of the semantic Pandora box. Take, for instance,
"Watson's famous experiment intended to establish a 'conditioned fear
reflex' in an infant eleven months of age, by striking an iron bar
with a hammer each time the child touched its pet animal, a white rat.
After this was repeated several times within the span of a week, little
Albert responded with fear, crying, etc., whenever the rat was shown
to him. But he also showed fright-reactions in varying degrees to
rabbits, fur coats, cotton wool, and human hairnone of which had
frightened him before. Watson concluded, and a number of textbooks
with him, that the conditioned reflex had 'spread' or been 'transferred'
to all furry things words which have the connotation of motion in
space, conveying the image that the child had somehow lifted its fear-
reaction from the rat and put it down on the piece of cotton wool. In
fact the idea of the 'spreading' of the conditioned response was origin-

LEARNING TO THINK <5ll

ally derived from Pavlov's notion of the irradiation of excitatory-
processes spreading across the cortical tissues. This physiological theory
of Pavlov's has long been abandoned, 11 but its unconscious echoes still
haunt the laboratories. On a metaphorical level there is of course no
objection to saying that the child's dread had spread from rats to cotton
wool, but on the technical level the concept of 'spreading' has no
explanatory value, and has been the source of endless confusion. (The
same applies to 'transfer', and to 'generalization' used as a synonym
for spreading.) Instead of pretending that the child has shifted its
response, along a so-called generalization gradient, from rat to cotton
wool, we should say that it has abstracted the tactile quality of furriness,
and recognized it in the cotton wool. And its reaction to it was per-
fecdy logical, because Watson had taught it that furriness always
signalled the dreaded bang. It would of course be nonsensical to pretend
that this child of eleven months was incapable of seeing the difference
between rabbit, cotton wool, and human hair. But at that time the
tactile quality alone was relevant, and with regard to that, rabbit, rat,
and fur coat were all 'the same thing' (cf. pp. 537 ff.).

We can observe the operation of the same principles on the verbal
level at a more advanced age. Stern's daughter, Hilda, 12 at the age of
nineteen months, had been in the habit of pulling at her parents'
noses; when she discovered that the tips of their shoes (before having
learned the name 'shoe') offered the same satisfactory opportunities,
she prompdy named them 'noses'. Again, instead of speaking of
'transfer', etc., we shall say that the child recognized an abstracted
quality that could be found in various objects. Koffka mentions a
boy of twenty-six months 'to whom "la-la" first meant song or music;
later when he heard a military band, it meant soldier, and finally all
kinds of noises, including sounds like claps and thuds. . . . Another
little boy uttered the word "atta" at the end of his eleventh month
whenever anything disappeared when a person left the room or
when a light was turned out.* 13

The first object- and relation-concepts to be abstracted and named
are those which have the greatest functional relevance to the child.
At that stage no verbal distinctions are made between objects and
attri butes, between qualities and things in which these qualities are
vested, between nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Lala refers to music; it
functions as a collective name for bells, soldiers, instruments; and if we
feel that Lala is a silly name for a soldier, but regard 'redcoat' or
'poilu as reasonable, then only because wearing a red coat or being

6*12

THE ACT OF CREATION

unshaven appear to us more relevant martial qualities than making
music. "When the child learns to use words, the functionally most
important aspect of an as yet unnamed object or event will provide
its name; the less important aspects of secondary qualities are then
relegated to the role of 'going together with it' its 'attri butes' or
'parts' or 'functions'. But the criteria of relevance change with age;
when Stern's little girl learned to walk, shoes acquired a more im-
portant function than that which they shared with noses; and with it a
new name.

Of course the visual experience of Watson's baby is different when
it touches a rat and when it touches a fur coat; but it is the touch that
matters, the visual aspect is irrelevant, and accordingly, in its overt
reactions, the baby does not discriminate between the two. Similarly,
the baby mentioned by Koffka saw the difference between the shapes
of its Teddy bear and of its stuffed rabbit; but this difference is irrele-
vant at the early age when all that matters is. manipulating a soft toy;
hence the name 'dolly* was sufficient to symbolize the whole class,
and no motivational need arose for explicit verbal cUscrimination.
Adults behave much the same way. The Eskimoes have several words
for various kinds of snow where we have only one; but Malinovski's
savages had only one word, manna wala, for all insects and birds
except those that could be eaten. Building workers, who shift from
job to job, cannot be bothered to learn one another's names; all elec-
tricians are 'Sparks' and all carpenters 'Chippies'. Elderly ladies addic-
ted to romantic novels from the lending library feel that the names of
authors are irrelevant; all that matters is that it should be a 'nice book'.

Thus all along the line we abstract and discriminate only qualities
which are relevant to us; and new cUscriminations arise as a result of
changes in our criteria of relevance where 'us' refers to animal and
man. In the normal development of the individual these changes are
due to maturation and guided learning. In the experimental laboratory,
as in reformatory schools and other brainwashing establishments,
rewards and punishments effect the transformation of the subject's, or
victim's, scale of values. In classical conditioning all tuning forks are
'the same thing' to the dog until the difference in pitch is made sig-
nificant by the giving or withholding of food. In guided learning, all
pages in his algebra book look the same to the schoolboy unci he
learns to distinguish linear from quadratic equations at a glance.

Distinctions which are irrelevant to the subject will either go entirely
tmnotked; or they may be perceived but not retained; or they may be

LEARNING TO THINK

613

retained but not verbally discriminated. Thus if we fail to observe
differences, it is either because we lack the equipment for doing so
('lack of discrimination in the colloquial sense), or because the
differences are 'indifferent' to us, or not important enough to give
them verbal labels (e.g. knowing stars by sight but not by name).

I have dwelt at some length on the subject of abstraction and dis-
crimination because although most of what I have said would seem
self-evident to the layman, this would not be the case with students
of experimental psychology or of philosophy, if it comes to that.
Already in the twelfth century a.d. John of Salisbury remarked that
the world had grown old discussing the problem, and that it had spent
more time on it than the Caesars took to conquer the world. But
Pavlov, Watson, and those direcdy or indirecdy influenced by them
have certainly made confusion worse confounded.*

From the genetic point of view, abstraction and discrimination
appear (cf. pp. 608 f.) as the latest extensions of the basic principles which
we saw at work on all levels of the hierarchy, starting with the inte-
gration of functions and differentiation of structures in morphogenesis.
Abstraction, by creating pattern and order out of the chaotic stream
of experience, corresponds to the former; discrimination in perception
and the consequent differentiation of response correspond, as language
indicates, to the latter. If we wish to indulge in analogies, we might say
that the categories of Aristotle acted as embryonic inductors on the
self-differentiating morphogenetic fields of conceptual thought.

The Magic of Names

We have so far distinguished several stages in the child's progress:

(a) the abstraction of pre-verbal object concepts (and action concepts);

(b) attaching a verbal symbol, which soon acquires central importance,
to the concept; (c) the discovery, signalled by the appearance of the
naming question, that all things have names, that the words previously
learned are only particular instances of a general relation between
words and things. The next step consists in the concretization of this
relation itself in the concept name'. The child has realized that not
only have all things verbal handles and labels attached to them, but
that these labels and handles are called names.

A characteristic feature of this development is that at each step a
relation has been abstracted and turned into a relatum. At the first step

6i4

THE ACT OF CREATION

the relation between the varied particular appearances of the mother
was turned into a single relatum 'mama', which now enters as a unit
into other relations; at the last step the relation between words and
things was abstracted and turned into the conceptual entity 'name'.
'Name is the verbal symbol attached to the relation of verbal sym-
bolism; by being made explicit and conscious the relation is now
experienced as a concrete relatum.

In fact, an over-concrete relatum. To quote Piaget: 'Names are,
to begin with, situated in objects. They form part of things in the
same way as do colour and form. Things have always had their names.
It has always been sufficient to look at things to know their names. . . .
To deform the name is to deform the thing/ 14 When a child of four
and a half was asked how one knows that the sun's name is *sun\ it
answered: 'Just because one sees it*. And when a child of nine was
asked whether one could have given another name to the sun, he
answered: 'No because the sun is just the sun*. Another child of six
and a half, when pressed, admitted that God could have given the sun
another name, but in this case 'God would have done something
wrong'. 16

When Herschel discovered Uranus, the German naturalist Sachs
remarked sceptically: 'What guarantee have we that the planet found
by him really is Uranus?' Equally inspired was this philosophic re-
flection of an Englishman: 'English is the most logical language; a
knife, for instance, is called by the French couteau, by the Germans
Messer, and so on, whereas the English call it "a knife" which is after
all what a knife really is.'

In the mentality of primitives, the person and his name are magically
related. In Eastern religions, evocation of the names of deities the
recital of mantras fulfils a magic function; in Tibetan Buddhism
the work is left to the prayer mill. This attitude lingers on in medieval
philosophy (Realists versus Nominalists); in all forms of magic, and,
more covertly in modern science in the unconscious belief that
words like gravity, entelechy, or electro-magnetic 'field', etc., some-
how have an explanatory value an sich (cf. Book One, VII). Such
is the power of verbal symbols to focus attention that it confers on
hazy concepts in statu nascendi the appearance of hard, tangible
concreteness, and 'gives to airy nothing /a local habitation and a
name'. The name is then experienced as a self-evident explanation, a
saturation of free valencies as it were.

The Rise of Causality

During its first years the child does not discriminate between nominal,
attri butive, and causal predications as earlier it did not differentiate
words according to grammatical categories.

When children between five and six are asked: 'Why does the sun
not fall down?', they will answer: 'Because it is hot', 'Because the sun
stops there*, 'Because it is yellow'. 15 And the moon does not fall down
'Because it is very high up', 'Because the sun is not there', etc. The sig-
nificant aspects of an experience are connected as 'going together*
in an undifferentiated 'feeling of relation'. 16 Goethe's 'Connect, always
connect' seems to be the motto of the child as, out of the fluid raw
material of its experiences, it selects and shapes patterns and relations
relations which will be re-classed and re-grouped later on according
to shifts in motivation and interest leading to the emergence of new
criteria of relevance until the final, more rigid but not always more
perfect adult relation-categories emerge. The urge to connect, to
aggregate matrices of experience into more comprehensive ones; the
fumbling for hypotheses about the way things are held together, the
tentative formulation of rules of the game in all these fertile activities
we see the participatory tendencies at work: intimations of the funda-
mental unity of all things. Later on they will crystallize in magic
causality, with its correlates: animism and 'mystic participation* (to
use an expression coined by Levy-Bruhl for the mentality of primi-
tives, and applied by Piaget to the mentality of the child). Needless
to say, the self-asserting tendencies too play their obvious part both
in the child's overt behaviour and its fantasy world.

It seems that the first relational patterns which arc discriminated are
relatively static forms of attri bution (of names and other properties),
and of dynamic changes-in-time. The latter give rise to a vague 'feeling
of causal relations' 20 derived from the cumulative experience that
'things make other things do things'. At this stage, word-classes begin
to emerge which roughly correspond to substantive-nouns, adjective-
attri butes, and action-words or verbs. But these classes, and the types
of relations implied in them, remain for a long time fluid. The child's
progress towards grammatically more correct forms of speech is
mainly due to imitation and conventional training which mask the
fact that behind the increasingly adult forms of expression, magic
ways of thought survive. They survive, of course, even in the adult,
and never vanish completely. Thus the stabilization of the codes of

615

6i<5

THE ACT OF CREATION

grammar and syntax in no way corresponds to the dynamic evolution
of thought, and inferences drawn from the former to the latter have
for a long time misled child psychologists. 21

"With the momentous realization that 'one thing leads to another',
intimations of causality emerge from the fluid pool of perceived
'togetherness* and ^elatedness*. The homo novus has now set out on a
long and tortuous road, which has in fact no end, except where, of his
own choice, he will come to rest theological causality, mechanical
causality, statistical probability gods playing billiards or throwing
dice. But children are philosophical optimists, and the same process of
empirical induction which earlier on led to the discovery that all
things have names, now leads to the discovery that all things have
'becauses'. The sequel is a familiar one: the naming question is re-
placed by the 'why* question which is many a parent's despair; just
as a thing was incomplete without a name, so now an event has a free
valency which must be filled by a 'because'. The actual content of the
proffered explanation, the when, and how, and how much, is as yet
of secondary importance; 'the sun does not fall down because it is
yellow' is accepted as quite as satisfactory an answer as 'the dolly is
called dolly because that's her name'. Just as, at the earlier stage, when
a name was not immediately offered, it was invented to fill the vacancy,
so now, when no 'because' is proffered at once, an explanation is
provided ad hoc by the child itself. And just as the invention of names
is guided by onomatopoeia or private associations, so the causal ex-
planations of children are derived from their private matrices of
thought.

The questioning mania is reinforced by the desire to attract atten-
tion and to be in the centre of events; it is a typical mixture of par-
ticipatory and self-assertive motivations. Lorimer made a record of all
the why's asked by a child of four years, eleven months, in the course
of four days, 17 which is both charming and instructive. (One asterisk
signifies that no answer was given; two asterisks: no answer given,
question not repeated):

1. "Why do you have this box for your feet?

2. Why did they bring the bed down from the attic?

3. Take your dollies in now, Joyce! Why?

4. Fix the rug! You caught your feet under the edge of it! Why? Why
did I?

5. Why did you take two cookies?

LEARNING TO THINK

617

6. Why does the watering-pot have two handles?

7. "Why did he put the solder in so many places?

8. The song-sparrow isn't pretty to look at Why isn't he pretty?

9. The bobolink has a brown coat in winter. Why?* Why?

10. It was careless of you to lose your shovel. Why?* Why?

11. This is your orange juice. Why?**

12. You are to sit here, in Daddy s place. Why?* Please, Mother, tell
me why.

13. Do we have bangs at the back of our heads? No! Why?* Why,
Mother?

14. And then he made a mast for his little boat. Why? Please tell me why
he made a mast.

15. Why do you wash the hair off (the razor)?

16. (Putting on bathrobe without putting her arms in the sleeves)
Is this good? No. Why?* (impatiently) Why? Speak out! (but then
without waiting for an answer) Because it wouldn't stay on. There,
you thought it out for yourself, didn't you?

17. Why did you stub your toe? Because I wasn't watching out. Why?
18. 1 will tell you a story about this willow plate Why?**

19. Please hurry, Joyce! Why?* Because you want me to wash?*
Why didn't you wash first? Because you knew I wanted to go with
Daddy?

20. See the little tea things! Why did we buy them? Why do you
think? Because we might use the others all up.

21. Why did you use both a fork and a spoon in making that cake?

22. Why did you sit in that chair, Mother?

23. Please don't climb in that chair! Why?**

24. Why are you putting up that screen?**

25. Why are you opening that window?**

26. Why does the little chicken grow in the shell?

27. You can't win by jumping up and down! Why?

28. Jeremiah, Jeremiah. He got into a pit, didn't he? Why did they
put him into a pit?

29. Please be careful not to break the bean-plants. Why?

30. 1 saw your blue apron through a crack in the door. I thought it
was a spider. A spider isn't blue, dear! Why?* Please, Mother, tell me
why a spider isn't blue.

31. You shouldn't talk about a visitor's beard, Joyce, until he has gone!
Why?* Please tell me why.

32. Why don't you have a beard, Mother?

6i8

THE ACT OF CREATION

33.I want to cut my eyebrows in half! Oh! You wouldn't want to do
that! Why? Because I would look funny?

34. Why do we have eyebrows?

35. Why must I hurry?

36. Why should I wait for candy until after supper?

37. Why did you speak to that man?

38. Please dont bang the car-door! Why?*

39. Why did the chickens walk in front of the car?

40. It is time to go home for dinner now! Why?*

A certain number of these questions are obviously motivated by the
desire to attract attention or intended as a protest; others are quasi-
automatic exercises of the questioning habit they remind one of
Leerlauf activities in vacuo. But others, such as Nos. 2, 9, 26, 32, are
expressions of genuine curiosity; Lorimer put thirteen out of forty
questions into this category, judging them by content and the child's
expression. It is curiosity of a new type, no longer directed at the
practical or playful uses of things only, but at the mystery of their
'becauses'.

The word 'because* now plays a similar part to that which the
word name* did before: an abstracted relation has become a relatum,
concretized in a verbal symbol. The child's concept of 'becauseness',
i.e. causality, will undergo a series of changes, but not the verbal
symbol which refers to it. Later on, the causal relation will enter as a
relatum into the higher matrix of logical categories'; and even later
this class, in its turn, will become a member of the matrices of epis-
tomology, psychology, and so on.

Explaining and Understanding

This leads us to the question of the nature of explanation.

Earlier on I quoted Craik's suggestion that the nervous system's
main function is 'to model or parallel external events', and that 'this
process of paralleling is the basic feature of thought and explanation. 18
In terms of the present theory the 'model* consists of hierarchies of
flexible matrices with fixed codes, abstracted by the organism accor-
ding to its lights. Insight and understanding then become relative
terms, the degree of understanding depending on how many different
aspects of reality have been abstracted, how sharply they are dis-

LEARNING TO THINK

6l9

criminated, to what extent the abstract codes lend themselves to
explicit formulations, and the degree of precision and error which the
model reveals when subjected to the test of empirical verification.

We have seen that it is necessary to distinguish between progress
in understanding the acquisition of new insights, and the exercise of
understanding at any given stage of development. Progress in under-
standing is achieved by the formulation of new codes through the
modification and integration of existing codes by methods already
discussed: empirical induction, abstraction and discrimination, bi-
sociation. The exercise or application of understanding the explanation
of particular events then becomes an act of subsuming the particular
event under the codes formed by past experience. To say that we have
understood a phenomenon means that we have recognized one or
more of its relevant relational features as particular instances of more
general or familiar relations, which have been previously abstracted
and encoded.

The conventional test of understanding is verbal explanation the
subject is invited to name the general rule of which the event to be
explained is a particular instance. But the availablility of such neat and
ready explanations is the exception rather than the rule unless the
explanation was learned by rote because, in the first place, the
codes which govern perception and cognition function below the
level of focal awareness; in the second place because a great number of
codes which govern thinking are unverbalized including the codes
of verbal thinking, grammar, and syntax; thirdly because there are
emergent, 'nascent* codes which are still unstable and cannot be 'pinned
down', but are sometimes nevertheless of decisive help to understand-
ing. We thus arrive at a whole series of gradations in understanding
and explanation such as:

(a) Unconscious understanding mediated by the dream a form of
internal discourse in which specific experiences are subsumed under
very old, emotion-charged matrices with pre-verbal codes. The
transformations and disguises which people and events undergo in the
dream may be described as acts of recognition of different appearances
as the 'same thing* on the scales of symbolic relevance peculiar to the
dream. Myth, folklore, fairy-tale, the fantasy world and magic
causality of the child are rnainly inspired by this type of understand-
ing; and the explanations offered by primitives and children for
their beliefs are true explanations in the sense defined,

(b) Tentative explanations, which indicate that the matrix into which

620

THE ACT OF CREATION

the event is to be incorporated is still in the process of construction
by trial-and-error learning and hypothesis-formation.

(c) Half-understood explanations referring to matrices in statu nascendi
which, unlike (b), are being formed mainly by unconscious guidance,
by unverbalized analogies, etc.

(d) Explanation by explicit analogy its validity depending on
whether it is arrived at by selective or Procrustean methods.

(e) Implicit understanding, when the phenomenon is recognized as
an instance of a relation which has been abstracted but cannot be made
verbally explicit.

(f) The same as (e) plus a verbal label. The abstracted pattern can
now be named but not otherwise verbally described, ('sweet', 'pungent',
'beautiful' visceral, kinesthetic, aesthetic experiences).

(g) Explicit verbal explanations and definitions which sound precise
and convincing, but where the codes to which they refer contain
some hidden axiom, idee recue, unwarranted assumption.

(h) Over-explicit, rigid definitions which explain away problems as
meaningless by taking the verbal components of the symbolic model
to pieces forgetting that the 'exact' sciences have always operated
with fuzzy concepts, that good cooks work in dirty kitchens, and that
the sterilization of verbal concepts leads to sterility.

Other headings could be interpolated into this list. Compared with
the relatively few levels of understanding in the rat and even the chim-
panzee, man's explanatory hierarchies represent a veritable tower of
Babel; not merely because they reach higher, but because there are
more finely graded levels between the unconscious processes at the base,
and the abstract symbolism at the top.

Thus instead of talking of insight and understanding as all-or-
nothing processes, and making verbal explanation a test for passing
school exams, we should proceed by more cautious statements, such
as: Johnnie has now understood that a phenomenon P is a particular
instance of a general relation R which he can name; he has also under-
stood that R is a particular instance of S, which he can also name. He
may further have grasped that S is a particular instance of T which he
has abstracted but which he cannot verbalize; or it may dawn on him
that experiences of the type S have something in common, and are
perhaps particular instances of some general relation T, which, how-
ever, he has not yet abstracted.

It follows that the degree of clarity and penetration of Johnnie's
understanding must not be judged by the 'absolute height' he has

LEARNING TO THINK

621

reached in any 'vertical* abstractive hierarchy, but by the mastery he
has attained on his own particular level. This depends on the factors
already discussed, where the multi-dimensionality of experience (the
intersection of several abstractive hierarchies in it) was taken for
granted. Thus a garage mechanic may have a more complete under-
standing of the structure and function of motor cars than a theoretical
physicist, in spite of the latter's more extended abstractive hierarchies;
and an experienced Nanny may know more about children than an
experimental psychologist. 'Vertical' progress in abstraction is of
primary importance in the theoretical sciences only, but not in other
domains of experience which are of greater significance to the majority.
This may be the reason why the abstractive hierarchies were built up
so very slowly in the learning process of the human species although
the native equipment for it was given millennia ago and are acquired
at an equally hesitant rate by the child.

Theoretically the building of the tower of Babel, of hierarchies of
abstractions, can go on indefinitely, or until the most general patterns
of events are subsumed as particular instances under one all-embracing
law a lapis philosophorum, or the unified field equations which
Einstein hoped to find. But in fact individuals and cultures have their
own ceilings of abstraction, where their quest for ultimates reaches
saturation point in theism, pantheism, vitalism, mechanism, or
Hegelian dialectics. In less exalted domains the ceiling can be sur-
prisingly low. Some primitive languages have words for particular
colours but no word for 'colour* as a class. The abstraction of Space
and Time as categories independent from the objects which occupy
them (i.e. from duration and extension) is only some three hundred
years old; so are the concepts of mass, force, etc. The slow, fumbling
emergence of abstract concepts which in retrospect appear so self-
evident, is best illustrated by the beginning of mathematics a domain
where pure abstraction seems to reign supreme.

The Dawn of Mathematics

To quote Russell's famous dictum once more, 'it must have required
many ages to discover that a brace of pheasants and a couple of days
were both instances of the number two'. In fact, evidence indicates
that the discovery was not made in one fell swoop, but in several hesi-
tant steps; and when it was achieved, some cultures were quite content

622

THE ACT OF CREATION

to stop there and rest on their glories: Australian aborigines have only-
three number-words in their vocabulary: one, two, and many. 1 *
Most European languages show the traces of this stage of development:
the Latin ter means both 'three times' and 'many* (cf. 'thrice blest').

At the earliest stage the number concept is not yet abstracted from
the objects which are numbered: 'two-ness' is a feature situated in
particular twosome objects, not a general relation. Language bears
witness to this 'embeddedness': a 'brace* of pheasants is not a 'pride*
of lions; a 'pair', when married, is a 'couple', when engaged in singing,
a 'duo'. In some primitive languages not only the number two but all
numerals adhere to the type of object counted; in the Timshian tongue
of New Guinea there are seven different classes of number-words
referring, respectively, to flat objects, round objects, long objects,
people, canoes, and measures; the seventh, used for counting in general,
was the latest to develop. 20

Children go through a similar stage; Koffka mentions several three-
year-olds who understood and used the words 'two apples', but did
not understand 'two eyes', 'two ears'. One child, over four, when
asked by hisf grandfa ther, 'How many fingers have I?', replied, 'I
don't know; I can only count my own fingers.' There is an old joke
about the new arithmetic teacher who, when he asked the class, 'How
many oranges would Johnnie have if . . . etc.', received the indignant
reply, 'Please, sir, we have only learned to count in apples'. The num-
ber-matrix, once adherent to the object-matrix, has gained such
lofty independence, that their re-union is experienced as a bisociation
of incompatibles.

The next step is the abstraction of individual numbers, which are not
yet regarded as parts of a continuous series. The first 'personalized'
number-concept abstracted by primitive and child alike is almost in-
variably the number two. Next follow the concepts one' and 'many'.
Some cultures, as mentioned, stop there; others retain traces of this
stage in their languages; Hebrew and Greek have retained separate
grammatical forms for the singular, the dual, and the plural. Koffka
mentions a child who played with combinations of 'two and one',
'two and two', etc., until early into its fifth year; only then did the
number-word 'three* become firmly established.

These first individual number-concepts are only semi-abstract;
they emerge as it were reluctantly from the womb, and retain for a
long time the umbilical cord which attaches them to concrete objects
or favourite symbols. In some primitive languages the word for five

LEARNING TO THINK

623

is 'hand', for ten 'two hands'. Each number primarily refers to some
such 'model collection' of practical or mystical significance: the four
cardinal points, the Holy Trinity, the magic Pentagram. Each number
has its preferential connotation, its personality and individual profile;
it is as yet unrelated to other numbers and does not form a continuous
series with them. The number sense of Otto Koehler's birds who
can identify at a glance object-collections up to seven, and the same
faculty of human subjects (to whom heterogeneous objects are shown
on a screen for a time too short for counting) give us some idea of the
character of our own earliest number-concepts. They could be des-
cribed as qualities rather than as quantities in a graded series; the identi-
fication of numbers in experiments where counting is excluded, con-
sists apparently in recognizing the quasi-Gestalt quality of 'fiveness'
(I say 'quasi' because the objects are distributed at random and do not
provide coherent figural unity). In other words, each of the first
individual numbers up to perhaps seven or eight, is represented by
a separate matrix its associative connotations and a perceptual
analyser-code which enables us to recognize 'fiveness' directly, at a
glance. The analyser probably works by scanning, as in the perception
of triangles and squares; but this process is automatic and unconscious,
as opposed to conscious counting.

Thus the first 'personalized' number-concepts 'do not constitute a
homogeneous series, and are quite unsuited to the simplest logical or
mathematical operation'. 21 Those first operations are, apparently,
carried out not by counting, but by matching the collection of objects
to be counted against 'model collections' of pebbles, notches cut into
a stick, knots made in a string, and above all the fingers and toes. The
'model collections' are usually those to which the individual number-
concept originally referred. The earliest model collections seem to have
been pebbles; 'to calculate' is derived from calculus, meaning pebble;
to tally, from talea, cutting. Relics of other model-collections abound
in our weights and measures: feet, yards, furlongs, chains, bushels,
rods. The Ayepones in Australia hunt wild horses; when they return
from an excursion nobody asks them how many horses they have
caught but 'How much space will they occupy?'. Even Xerxes counted
his army by this method at least, if we are to believe Herodotus:

All the fleet, being now arrived at Doriscus, was brought by its
captains at Xerxes* comm and to the beach near Doriscus . . . and
hauled up for rest. In the meanwhile, Xerxes numbered his army at

024 THE ACT OF CREATION

Doriscus. What the number of each part of it was I cannot with exact-
ness say, for there is no one who tells us that; but the count of the
whole land army showed it to be a million and seven hundred
thousand. The numbering was done as follows: a myriad [10,000]
men were collected in one place, and when they were packed
together as closely as might be, a line was drawn round them; this
being drawn, the myriad was sent away, and a wall of stone built on
the line reaching up to a man's navel; which done, others were
brought into the walled space, till in this way all were counted. 22

It seems that as a general rule matching precedes counting in the
most varied cultures.

The next great advance was the integration of individual numbers
into a homogeneous series the transition from cardinal to ordinal
numbers, from 'fiveness* to 'the fifth'. The activity of counting seems
to originate in the spontaneous, rhythmic motor activities of the small
child: kicking, stamping, tapping, with his hands and feet; and the
repetitive imitation of patterned series of nonsense syllables: 'Eeny
meeny miny mo' a kind of pseudo-counting. Even more important
is perhaps the spontaneous, rhythmical stretching of fingers and tapping
with the fingers. Here was the ideal 'model collection out of which,
in the course of something like a hundred thousand years, the skill of
finger-counting must have emerged. Danzig 23 calls attention to a
subde distinction:

'In his fingers man possesses a device which permits him to pass
imperceptibly from cardinal to ordinal number. Should he want to
indicate that a certain collection contains four objects he will raise or
turn down four fingers simultaneously; should he want to count the
same collection he will raise or turn down these fingers in succession.
In the ist case he is using his fingers as a cardinal model, in the second
as an ordinal system. Unmistakable traces of this origin of counting are
found in practically every primitive language.' A fascinating account
of counting methods in primitive societies can be found in Levy-
Bruhl, How Natives Think (1926, Chapter V).

I have tried to re-trace the first two steps at the base of the mathe-
matical hierarchy. The first was the slow and hesitant abstraction of
individual number concepts from the concrete objects to which they
relate; the second was the abstraction of the sequential relation between
numbers, which establishes the basic rule of the mathematical game:
counting. A posteriori it would seem that the road now lay open to the

LEARNING TO THINK

62$

logical deduction of the whole body of the theory of numbers; in fact
each advance required the exercise of creative imagination, jumping
over hurdles, following up crazy hunches, and overcoming mental
blocks. Centuries of stagnation alternated with periods of explosive
progress; discoveries were forgotten and re-discovered; within the
same individual, brilliant insights could be followed by protracted
snowblindness. It took several hundred years until the Hindu inven-
tion of zero was accepted in Christian Europe; Kepler detested and
never accepted the 'coss' i.e. algebraic notation; his teacher Maestlin
showed the same hostility towards Napier's logarithms. Progress in
the apparently most rational of human pursuits was achieved in a
highly irrational manner, epitomized by Gauss' 'I have had my solu-
tions for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at
them'. The mind, owing to its hierarchic organization, functions on
several levels at once, and often one level does not know what the
other is doing; the essence of the creative act is bringing them together.

The Dawn of Logic

Let us turn to the genesis of logical codes and take as an example the
so-called law of contradiction in its post-Kantian formulation: A is
not not-A. To disregard this law used to be considered as a mortal
sin against rationality; chief among the sinners were primitives and
children, with their notorious imperviousness to contradiction plus
all of us who dream at night being A and not-A in a single breath.

Now in order to tell A from not-A, I must discriminate between
them. Once I have discriminated between them 'A is not not-A' be-
comes tautologous, and you cannot sin against a tautology. But dis-
crimination, as we saw, is a function of relevance. Functionally irrele-
vant differences between experiences may go either entirely unnoticed,
or may be noticed but not retained, or they may be implicidy retained
without arousing the need for explicit discriminatory responses, verbal
or otherwise.

Once upon a time I had a sheep farm in North Wales, and my
Continental friends kept addressing their letters to: Bwylch Ocyn,
Blaenau Ffestiniog, near Penrhyndeudraeth, England. The postman,
a Gaelic patriot, was much aggrieved. Had he consulted Lord Russell
(who was my neighbour and lived in Llan Ffestiniog), he would no
doubt have learned that since Wales is not-England and Ffestiniog

626

THE ACT OF CREATION

is Wales, it followed that foreigners had a pre-logical mentality and
were unable to understand the law of contradiction. Thus, if the criteria
of relevance of X, determined by X's patterns of motivation, values,
and knowledge, are significantly different from Y's, then Y's behaviour
must necessarily appear to X as irrational and 'indifferent to contra-
diction. Hence the mass of misinterpretations which missionaries have
put on the mentality of primitives, and grownups on the mental world
of the child.

To the primitive mind the most significant relations between per-
sons, objects, and events are of magical character; in totemistic societies
the existence of a magic link is assumed between members of the
group and the totem. The Bororo tribe in northern Brazil, whose
totem animal is the red arara, a kind of parakeet, affirm that they are
red araras. Naturally, the Bororo can see the difference between a
red bird and his fellow tribesman; but when referring to his conviction
that both participate in a mystic unity, the difference between them is
treated as irrelevant just as the child who calls all pointed things 'nose',
chooses to ignore the difference between noses and shoes as irrele-
vant for its purpose. The difference between primitive and modern
mentality is not that the former is indifferent to contradiction, but that
statements which appear as contradictory to one, do not appear so to
the other, because each mentality abstracts and discriminates along
different dimensions of experience or 'gradients of relevance', deter-
mined by different motivations. This applies not only to so-called
^^1^' cultures (which, of course, are often far from primitive).
European thought in the Middle Ages, and Aristotelian physics in
particular, appear to us full of glaringly evident self-contradictions.
The same applies to the philosophical systems of Buddhism and
Hinduism, which do not discriminate between object and subject,
perceiver and perceived, and in which the value of the discriminatory
act itself is discredited by the dogma of the unity of opposites. 24 Vice
versa, if we tried to see ourselves through the eyes of a Buddhist or
medieval Christian, our notion that random events exert a decisive
influence on an ordered and lawful universe would appear as self-
contradictory. To them as to the pre-Socratians apparent coin-
cidences were the vital gaps in the trivial web of physical causation
through which the deus ex machine manifested its will; these gaps caused
a kind of porousness in the texture of reality through which destiny
could infiltrate. In the modern European s universe, our critics would
say, the figure-background relation in the porous texture is reversed.

LEARNING TO THINK

627

In the magic world of the child, physical causation and abstract
categories play an equally subordinate and uncertain part, and cannot
be regarded as a test for contradiction. When a child makes contradic-
tory statements, for instance, 'the sun is alive because it gives light'
and 'the sun is not alive because it has no blood', this is simply due to
the fact that the word 'alive' was learned before the concept of aliveness
was formed; it is a case, as so often found at that age, of a symbol in
search of a referent. Piaget, from whose experiments with a child of nine
I have been quoting, emphasized that children are apt to forget their
previous judgements and then give a contradictory one. Yet obviously
the word 'alive' is used on each of the two occasions with a different
meaning, based on different criteria: in the first case on the discrimina-
tion between hot and cold bodies (A and not- A), in the second between
bodies with and without blood (B and not-B). Thus there is no contra-
diction between the two statements, only confusion regarding the mean-
ing of the word 'alive'; what the child intended to say was: 'the sun is
alive in so far as it is hot, but not alive in so far as it has no blood*. Implicit
discrimination between contrasting alternatives is often blurred in the
explicit statements of the child owing to its linguistic inexperience.

The child's attitude to its experiences is discriminatory within its
framework of relevant relations, and its apparent contradictions are
due partly to the fact that its scales of relevant values are different from
the adult's, partly to the inadequacy of its symbolic equipment. But
although the child experiences certain facts and relations as mutually
exclusive and reacts accordingly, the relational concept of 'contradic-
tion itself is only abstracted at a much later stage of development;
just as the child uses names before the name-thing relation as such is
abstracted.

There seem to be three stages in the emergence of the 'law of con-
tradiction. The first is training the child to respond to the commands
'Yes' and 'No' and their equivalents; the second is the child's use of
these symbols as levers to control the actions of others; the third is the
use of 'Yes' and 'No' with reference to verbal activities. Stern's daughter
used the word *Nein at eighteen months in answer to the question,
'Shall we take Hilde away?'. But when she was asked 'Is this a doggie?*
while the wrong animal was shown her, she remained silent, then
echoed 'doggie*. Four months later, however, she began to contradict
a wrong name by substituting the right one; and another two months
later at two yearsshe firmly said 'No' in denial of blatantly false
verbal statements.

628

THE ACT OF CREATION

Thus we see that the principle of contradiction is applied to sym-
bolic activities precisely at the stage where symbolic relations as such
become relevant to the child and call out discriminatory reactions.
Once this stage has been reached the child uses 'No' not only to prevent
undesirable action, but to reject incorrect symbolic propositions. This
new verbal device is for the child a source of satisfaction comparable
to the discovery of the naming game. It is expressed by the frequent
use of antithetic statements which are characteristic for this age; three-
year-olds delight in phrases which sound as if they had been borrowed
from the Proverbs of Solomon: 'I am fast runner, not slow runner',
*I not old boy, new boy', etc. The use of such paired antithetic state-
ments marks the beginning of the process of abstracting the relation of
mutual exclusion as such, foEowed by the other, now familiar, stages:
the gradual downing of the generalized relation; the implicit grasp of
the principle; and finally its explicit naming though this last stage
may never be reached. But regardless of whether or not the subject is
able to give a verbal definition of it, the principle of the mutual ex-
clusion of opposites. previously discriminated as such, will enter as an
important rule of the game into all matrices of rational thought.

Thus the so-called 'laws of thought' in traditional logic are, from
the point of view of developmental psychology, merely the explicit
formulations of implicit relations, abstracted by the usual procedures
characteristic for all forms of learning. We may say that the principle
of contradiction exists a priori in the organization of the nervous
system, because the power to discriminate is built into that organiza-
tion, and contradiction is merely an epi-phenomenon of discrimina-
tion. But we may also say that our judgements of what is a contradic-
tion and what is not are empirically derived, because the gradients of
relevance along which abstraction and discrimination proceed, are
subjective and differ according to individual and culture.

But this subjectivity does not detract from the great power which
the principle of contradiction exercises over the mind. And not only
over the human mind; the experimental neuroses which Pavlov in-
duced in his dogs testifies to it. The dog is trained to discriminate
circles, or nearly circular ellipses, from flat ellipses, the former sig-
nalling food, the latter 'no food'. So long as the two types of signals
are comfortably distinguishable from each other, the dog shows no
sign of strain. But when intermediary forms are shown which could
be interpreted as belonging to one class or its opposite, experimental
neurosis sets in: the dog goes wild, then becomes apathetic, and

LEARNING TO THINK

629

seems to lose altogether its power of discrimination; it goes emotionally
and intellectually to pieces. One might say that the dog has lost con-
fidence in a world in which the law of the excluded middle has ceased
to operate, and A is no longer not not-A.

It appears that dogs are not only emotionally more stable and loyal,
but also more orthodox logicians than their masters. For the powers of
discriminatory judgement are more diluted on the level of symbolic
thought than in perception; and when thought is dominated by emo-
tion and faith, the Red and White Queens always score agamst reason-
able Alice, who asserts that 'One cant believe impossible things';
whereas the White Queen, after a little practice, managed to believe 'as
many as six impossible things before breakfast'.

Which is, all things considered, quite a modest estimate.

NOTE

To p. 613. Once upon a time Lashlcy and Wade (1946) tried to make a
distinction 'between the "so-called generalization" which means only a failure to
observe differences and the generalization which involves perception of both
similarities and differences. The amorphous figure, lacking in identity, is genera-
lized in the first sense only/ The quotation is from Hebb (1949, p. 27), who
seemed to share Lashley's view, although Lashley himself later dropped the
distinction. The 'amorphous figure' in the quotation refers to 'an irregular mass
of colour or a pattern of intersecting lines drawn at random*. Being amorphous
it does jper definitionem lack identity, i.e., the prerequisites for the formation of an
object-concept; but it is nevertheless seen as some kind of figure on a background
that is discriminated. In fact, abstraction without discrimination is a contradiction
in terms. The abstracted quality whether 'nose*, 'dolly', or 'sound of the tuning
fork' is always differentiated from non-nose and non-dolly and no-sound. (If
the sound of the tuning fork is very weak, it will approach the limen of no-sound;
about the effect of simple gradients of intensity, see Hebb (1958), p. 189; about
pitch and octave gradients, see Osgood, op. cit., p. 361. Since perception of in-
tensity, pitch, etc. is part of the animal's perceptual organization, they must
influence the functioning of the analyser-codes.)

XVI

SOME ASPECTS OF THINKING

Multi-Dimensionality

n the preceding chapter we have discussed the processes by which
the rules of the game of symbolic thought are acquired; let us
. now turn to adult thinking and problem-solving.

Thinking is a multi-dimensional affair. The Sterns recorded all the
questions asked by their little daughter in the course of four days;
but the record gives us only the scantiest pointers to what went on in
the child's head. Perhaps one day a super-EEG will be constructed,
which will record all the thoughts or at least all verbalized thoughts
which the stream of consciousness carries through the subject's
wired skull; yet even such a record, far more complete than anything
James Joyce could dream of, would be but a poor pointer to the multi-
dimensional patterns underlying the linear stream. The oscillating
curve on the gramophone record needs a human auditory system to
yield all the information it contains. The super-EEG would record
larger units of information entire words; but it would still need a
psychoanalyst or a Joyce-interpreter to divine the meaning behind the
meaning: the connotations of individual words, their unconscious
echoes, the motivation behind it all, the rules of the patient's game,
hidden to himself, and the memories which crop up as landmarks in
his internal, mental environment.

We must nevertheless try to sort out some of the dimensional
variables in this immensely complex, multi-dimensional activity;
these variables will then yield gradients of different kinds; for instance:

(1) Degrees of consciousness;

(2) Degrees of verbalization;

(3) Degrees of abstraction;

(4) Degrees of flexibility;

630

SOME ASPECTS OP THINKING

6 3 I

(5) Type and intensity of motivation;

(6) Realistic versus autistic thought;

(7) Dominance of outer or inner environment;

(8) Learning and performing;

(9) Routine and originality.

Each of these headings has been repeatedly discussed in various
contexts in various chapters. Most of them cut across the conventional
classifications of thought such as 'associative' versus 'directional'. All
variables are inter-dependent.

Now if variables depend on each other, there must be a function
which defines their iriter-dependence a rule of the game. The question:
'If y = (x) and at is 7, how much is y? is meaningless unless I define
Similarly, if in the experimental laboratory the subject is given the
stimulus word: S = 'big' and is asked for the 'response', the question
is meaningless unless f is defined as 'synonyms' or 'opposites' or
'rhymes', or whatever game is to be played.

One of the main contentions of this book is that organic life, in
all its manifestations, from morphogenesis to symbolic thought, is
governed by 'rules of the game' which lend it coherence, order, and
unity-in-variety; and that these rules (or functions in the mathe-
matical sense), whether innate or acquired, are represented in coded
form on various levels, from the chromosomes to the structures in
the nervous system responsible for symbolic thought. The codes are
assumed to function on the trigger-release principle, so that a relatively
simple signal-pattern releases complex, pre-set action-patterns, as the
referee's whistle initiates or stops the activities of the football players.
The rules are fixed, but there are endless variations to each game, their
variability increasing in ascending order; this lends elasticity to habit,
and gives rise to the subjective experience of freedom of choice between
alternate possibilities of action. There is also an overall-rule of the
game, which says that no rule is absolutely final; that under certain
circumstances they may be altered and combined into a more sophisti-
cated game, which provides a higher form of unity and yet increased
variety; this is called the subject's creative. potential.

Faced with the imaginary EEG record of the patient's stream of
thoughts, the only way of interpreting it would be to find out what
game the patient is playing at any moment, and why. This actually
is the procedure of the free-association method in psycho therapy: the
patient's words provide the record, and his dreams, it is hoped, will

632 THE ACT OF CREATION

provide the interpretation of the underlying patterns of his individual
matrices of thought. We follow, as we saw earlier on, similar methods
in perceptual analysis: the sequence of pressure-variations reaching the
ear-drum must be dismantled, analysed, and reassembled if we want
to get at the underlying patterns of timbre, melody, and speech. The
stream of sounds, like the stream of thoughts, yields its meaning only
if the percipient knows the rules of the game.

The Experience of Free Choice

Let us consider some of the dimensions of thinking listed on pp. 630-1.
Regarding consciousness I proposed to make a distinction between the
'linear scale* of awareness on the one hand, and hierarchic levels of
consciousness on the other (Book One, VII, VIII). The former was to
be regarded as a continuous gradient extending from completely self-
regulatory physiological processes, through more or less automatized
skills, to peripheral, and lastly, focal, awareness of events; the latter to
be represented by quasi-parallel layers of mental organization
comparable to geological strata which are discontinuous and governed
by codes formed at different stages of phylogenetic and ontogenetic
development. All this has been discussed at length in the previous
volume, and need not be recapitulated; but I must append two
additional points.

The first concerns 'linear* awareness. I have described, somewhat
perversely, awareness as that dimension of experience which diminishes
and shrinks away with the progressive automatization of a skill. For
'awareness* is an irreducible term, a black box like that other which
contains the power of organic life to extract energy and information
from its environment and, in fact, continuous with the latter. On
the other hand, the progressive automatization of motor skills, per-
ceptual skills, verbal and mathematical skills, is an observable and to
some extent even measurable factor of behaviour epitomized on its
lowest level by sensory habituation. Thus by expressing awareness by
the inverse ratio of the automatization of the ongoing process, a certain
strategic advantage is gained. Other things being equal (i.e. under
stablized environmental conditions), automatization manifests itself
in predictable, stereotyped performance, where the matrix has no
degrees of freedom left for strategic decisions, because these are made
by pre-set feedback controls, and do not require the attention of

SOME ASPECTS OF THINKING

higher centres. Conversely, the less automatized the skill, the greater
the freedom of choice between alternatives, to be decided on higher
levels according to more complex feedbacks 'loops within loops'
from the outer and inner environment. Thus the logic of the argument
led first to a negative criterion of awareness as the reciprocal of habit-
formation, and now to the positive criterion of awareness as being
directly proportional to the degrees of freedom of the centre control-
ling the activity to make alternative choices, based on its estimate of
the lie of the land. We must assume that the higher in the hierarchy
the centre is placed, the more vivid will be the subject's experience of
his 'freedom of choice'. Freedom of the will is a metaphysical question
outside the scope of this book; but considered as a subjective datum
of experience, Tree will' is the awareness of alternative choices.

Degrees of Self-Awareness

The above was related to degrees of awareness on the continuous,
'linear' gradient. The second addendum relates to the hierarchic levels
of consciousness. At any moment of our existence, we carry on activi-
ties on various levels, simultaneously and more or less independently
from each: we breathe, metabolize, drive the car, and talk to the passen-
gers all at the same time, 'in parallel' as it were.

But there are moments when a person perceives what he is doing
from a bird's eye view as it were; from a parallel' level of conscious-
ness which is not at all involved in the activity in hand. Take a simple
example: you are absorbed in a game of chess; you concentrate on a
stratagem to defeat your opponent. You look up for a moment to
light a cigarette, and at that moment your awareness jumps to another
plane, as it were; you say to yourself 'what fun I am having playing
chess with old Henry on a Sunday afternoon'. Then you go back to
your game. It was a brief break-through from the activity in hand to
the contemplation of that activity from an upstairs balcony a vertical
shift of awareness which enabled you to look down at the top of your
own head. To put it in a different way, attention has been displaced
from the object of the ongoing activity to the subject engaged in
carrying it out that elusive entity, the self.

It is a paradox as old as Achilles and the Tortoise, that the subject
who is aware can never become the object of his awareness; at best he
can, if so inclined, achieve successive approximations which form a

634

THE ACT OP CREATION

convergent series. One may call this the paradox of the dog at dinner.
The dog is eating his dinner; the wagging of his tail indicates that he is
enjoying himself; but does he know that he is enjoying himself? . . .
A little boy is watching a Western on the TV screen. He is enjoying
himself. He knows perhaps that he is enjoying himself. Does he know
that he knows? . . . The philosopher is thinking of a problem. He is
aware that he is thinking of this problem. Is he aware that he is aware,

etc ? The known is always one step ahead of the knower, and they

chase each other up a spiral staircase, as it were. In Craik's terminology
one might say that the model can never make a complete model of
itself.* Regarding verbal models in particular, we have seen (pp. 592 F.)
that verbal statements are initiated by unverbalized intentions on higher
levels, so that we again arrive at a receding series. This seems to indi-
cate that the mind-body problem is not amenable to any solution in
explicit, verbal terms.

On the other hand, the fact that the subject who is aware can never-
theless become, to some extent, the object of his own awareness, is of
course of outstanding importance in mental life. Animals, apparently
from planaria onwards, display attention and expectancy which indicate
varying degrees of 'linear* awareness; primates, as well as domestic
pets, may also have some rudiments of self-awareness. But the many-
layered hierarchies of man, and particularly his symbolic hierarchies,
place him on a lonely peak, and impose on him the impossible com-
mand to 'know thyself'. Awareness of awareness is a tantalizing gift;
and 'I think therefore I exist' is a hopeful beginning. But the end, the
identification of the knower and the known, which alone would
constitute complete consciousness of existence, though always in
sight, is never achieved. The successive forms of self-identification,
starting from the child's fluid world of experience which knows as yet
no firm boundary between self and not-self, can be likened to a mathe-
matical series converging towards unity, or to a spiral curve converg-
ing towards a centre which it will only reach after an infinite number
of involutions.

The aim of certain mystic practices such as Hatha Yoga is to
permeate the self with awareness of itself by gaining voluntary control
over visceral processes and isolated muscles. It would seem that this
focussing of consciousness on the self, the inward core of the contrac-
ting spiral, is the direct opposite of the self-transcending aspirations of
other schools of mysticism the expansion of consciousness in an un-
folding spiral, and its final dissolution in the 'oceanic feeling'. In fact,

SOME ASPECTS OF THINKING

635

however, the Yogi's effort to gain conscious mastery of the body is
considered as merely a detour towards attaining 'pure consciousness*
that is, 'consciousness without object or content other than conscious-
ness itself '.Thus turned upon itself, pure consciousness is supposed to
penetrate the Real Self which, unlike the transient self, is part and
parcel of the Atman, the universal spirit. 1 Both methods, therefore,
each with a long historical ancestry, share the same ultimate aim
situated at the point where opposites meet; after all, as the bright little
boy said, 'the infinite is where tilings happen which don't*.

'Self-awareness', in the sense of the preceding paragraphs, has of
course nothing to do with 'self-consciousness' in the sense of gauchery,
stage-fright. The latter is our old friend, the paradox of the centipede
the disorganization of behaviour which results when higher centres
interfere with the autonomous functioning of parts on lower levels.
'Self-consciousness', used in this sense, is a typically English coinage;
it provides an amusing and rather revealing contrast to the equally
malapropos German coinage ' Selbstbewusstsein meaning self-con-
fident, conscious of one's own value. As for the French, faithful to
the Cartesian spirit, they use conscience to designate both conscious-
ness and moral conscience.

Master-Switches and Releasers

Motivation has been discussed in Chapter VIII. It determines what
kind of game the subject will engage in, and activates the proper codes.
If he feels the need to build castles in Spain, day-dreaming will replace
the routines of planning ahead. The rules of day-dreaming impose a
minimum of restraints and leave a vast choice of strategies to reach
the desired goal, wish-fulfilment. Thus even day-dreaming is 'goal-
directed', but the direction of thought is determined by emotional
gradients, not by a concrete target.

At the opposite end of the motivational spectrum are activities like
problem-solving, governed by complex and precise rules. The goal
to be reached is sharply defined, but has in itself no emotional sig-
nificance; the reward is not contained in the target but in the act of
reaching it. Some textbooks make a distinction between 'associative*
and 'directive' thinking; but directiveness in the sense described is
present even in the daydream, and controlled association enters into
problem-solving; the difference is one of degree. Similar considerations

636

THE ACT OF CREATION

apply to other classifications: abstract concrete, realistic autistic,
etc.

Most ordinary thinking is of a mixed kind; it may pursue a set
directional course for a while, according to strict rules, then go off at a
tangent and drift along, until some higher centre enters into action,
and discipline is restored. We have discussed these general aspects of
ideation before; it remains to consider briefly some specific patterns
of verbal thought.

At the base of all hierarchies which enter into our universes of dis-
course operate the implicit sub-codes of grammar and syntax; 'im-
plicit' because they are automatized and we are not aware of their
functioning. Lashley's dictum on perception is equally applicable to
speaking and listening: 'We are aware of an organized structure; the
organizing is never experienced.' The rules which determine how
thoughts are put into words cannot themselves be put into words
except by the patient labours of logicians and semanticists to 'break
the code*.

Next come the rules of common sense or common-or-garden logic,
which are also empirically acquired, abstracted relations codified
modus operandi which the majority of people are no more able to define
than they can define how they ride a bicycle. But as we move upward,
towards more specific universes of discourse, the codes, too, become
more explicit.

The simplest examples of explicit codes are the verbal commands in
word-association tests, e.g.: name opposites!'. The experimenter
then says 'dark', and the answer 'light' pops out promptly, as if pro-
duced by a slot-machine although in a free-association test the sub-
ject would probably associate 'dark' with 'night' rather than with
'light', and 'hot' with 'Italy' rather than with 'cold'. Thus the verbal
comm and 'opposites* has acted as a master-switch, as it were, which
changed the entire pattern of verbal organization. Even more striking
is what happens to my verbal matrices si je continue de developer ma
pensie en francaisi I continue to develop my argument, but use
French words and French grammar to express it. My line of thinking
has remained the same (or almost entirely so) but that single command-
word 'French' has triggered off an instant reorganization affecting
millions of neurons and their mode of inter-action. Not only has the
vocabulary been changed, but also the method of converting ideas into
syntactic language-units according to the sub-codes of French grammar.

I do not want to go into neuro-physiology, but let us note that the

SOME ASPECTS OF THINKING

<537

model of the telephone-switchboard plugging into another localized
'language-area* simply will not do. Let us return for a moment to word-
association tests. 'Light-dark', 'hot-cold' are primitive examples of
matrices governed by codes with a single parameter in semantic space.
Even so, are we to assign, by analogy with the 'language-areas',
different cortical territories to operations controlled by the commands
'opposites', 'synonyms', 'super-ordinate class', etc.; not to mention
'inter-polation', 'extra-polation', and the mighty hierarchies of
symbolic logic or of mathematical operations? Moreover, if the
comm and is again 'opposites', and the stimulus-word 'Napoleon; or if
the comm and is 'supraordinate class' in the species-genus game, and the
stimulus-word nail' or 'birth' what is the 'correct' response? Seman-
tic space is multi-dimensional and cannot be represented by purely
spatial connections activated by all-or-nothing signals in the three-
dimensional rind of the brain; a model must include at least specific
signals (e.g. frequency modulation pulses) and chemical (RNA)
changes in the neurons to account for selectivity of response. 2

In all controlled associations and symbolic operations we again find
a principle confirmed which we found operating on all levels namely,
that a relatively simple 'releaser' signal from higher quarters fopposites'
'speak French', 'find the square root of. . .') triggers off the operation
of a complex code a whole universe of discourse in fact, with a
hierarchy of implicit sub-codes, and a flexible strategy. (Even to find
an 'opposite' to the word hairpin requires complex operations governed
by individual 'strategies', perhaps involving visual images a process
continuous with problem-solving). The trigger-releaser may be a
verbal or visual, or even chemical comm and a tumblerful of gin or
an amphetamin tablet: yet look what remarkably new rules of the
game are triggered off by them.*

Explicit Rules and Implicit Codes

The implicit codes of grammar and syntax were, as we saw, acquired
empirically 'as the gypsy learns to fiddle'. But the rules which govern
more advanced symbolic skills mathematics or chemistry, or Law
are learned in explicit verbal form. They may be acquired by rote-
learning, or by guided learning, but at some stage they must be stated
in explicit form. Take an example from elementary algebra: the
average student learning the rule for solving quadratic equations:

638

THE ACT OF CREATION

x lt 2= p/2 sj p 2 /4.q. For the next few days or weeks, every
time he has to use the formula, he must look it up in his textbook (or,
if he is very brilliant, derive it afresh). At this stage of the learning pro-
cess the formula is not yet an automatically functioning rule of the
game; it is not yet a 'code' impressed on his nervous system. But after
some practice, a single glance at an expression of the form x 2 -\-px-\-
q =o will tell him that it is a member of the matrix of quadratic equa-
tions and trigger off the rule by now an automatized code for
solving it.

Thus rules which at first have to be looked up, or reconstructed by
a conscious effort, become codified and automatized by routine. It is
irrelevant in this particular context whether the student has by now
forgotten the derivation of the formula and merely uses it as a mechani-
cal gimmick; or whether he is aware of its binomial ancestry. This
makes a vast difference in terms of understanding, but need not affect
the process of automatization.

I have emphasized before that the term 'code* is used in this book
not in the metaphorical way in which Freud, for instance, used the
word 'censor', but to refer to concrete processes or patterns of organi-
zation in the central nervous system. However, it sounds somehow
more plausible to attri bute physiological reality to codes on lower
levels of the organic hierarchy the genetic code, the codes of instinct-
behaviour and sensory-motor skills than to claim that the rules of
such esoteric games as non-Euclidian geometry or quantum mechanics
are physiologically represented, by appropriate coding methods, in the
nervous system, and can be triggered off by simple releasers (such as
the comm and 'let's talk shop'). I must therefore underline once more
that the term code' is meant to apply only to those rules of behaviour
which govern established routines and function automatically with-
out conscious effort. In the initial stages of learning a complex symbolic
skill, the rules of the game (laws, theorems, mathematical or chemical
formulae) must be constantly memorized, looked up, or consciously
recalled; so long as this is the case they are not yet incorporated into
the physico-mental organization and are not to be called 'codes'.
Codes are only those fixed stable rules which, once switched on,
automatically govern the thinking routine. The problem in problem-
solving consists firstly in discovering which routine is appropriate to
the problem what type of game is to be played; and secondly, how to
play it Le. which strategy to follow, which members of the flexible
matrix are to be brought into play according to the lie of the land.

SOME ASPECTS OP THINKING

<*39

We learn, or discover, with strenuous effort, a new method of
thinking; after a while, with practice, the novelty changes into semi-
automatized routine, based on an invariant code with an adaptable
matrix, and is incorporated into our repertory of habits. It is astonish-
ing how soon, once a new railroad is built across desert and mountains,
the passenger-trains start running on schedule.

But the process of habit-formation does not stop^there: not only the
rules of the newly learnt game become soon automatized to such an
extent that it becomes increasingly difficult to go against them, but
strategy, too, tends to become stereotyped and incorporated into the
code. Take progress in chess, an example I have mentioned before. The
beginner is uncertain about the rules; then the rules become automatic
codes and it becomes almost impossible for him to move his men in
impermissible ways; after protracted practice certain tactical prin-
ciples, which are no longer 'rules' in the formal sense, also begin to
operate automatically in his mind e.g. to avoid pins, to seek open
rook-files. But this reification of tactical pseudo-rules into auto-
matized sub-codes contains a mortal danger, because considerations
of strategy on a higher level demand that each of these tactical rules
should be broken if the occasion warrants it. Sacrifices in material,
and moves which look cockeyed (that is: positionally unsound), are
signs of combinative power, i.e. originality; the mediocre player
always remains a slave of habit and cautious orthodoxy.

At this point the argument merges into that of Book One (IX-XI),
concerning the pitfalls of orthodoxy, over-specialization, and one-
sided development in the history of science and philosophy. In biology
or theoretical physics there are no clean-cut distinctions between
canonical rules of the game and heuristic rules of strategy and tactics.
We are inclined to believe, as popular books on science tell us, that the
'permissible moves' are laid down for ever by the laws of formal
logic and the criteria forjudging evidence; and that strategy is deter-
mined only by the lie of the land, that is, the data of observation. In
fact, however, the rules turn out to be infiltrated with implicit assump-
tions and 'self-evident axioms' which as often as not are specious contra-
band; and the empirical strategies are often weighted by a stubborn
adherence to methods of interpretation and biassed techniques, pro-
moted to canonical status. Habit is heir to originality; without the
hierarchies of organized habits life would be chaos; creativity means
breaking up habits and joining the fragments into a new synthesis.

Matrix Categories

I have tried to outline the hierarchic organization of levels of under-
standing, levels of consciousness, and levels of habit and flexibility
the last ranging from implicitly acquired codes, through the master-
switches of controlled association, to the explicitly learned rules and
pseudo-rules in the universes of discourse of science and philosophy.
To avoid giving undue dominance to the abstractive hierarchies in the
mental landscape, I must briefly mention some different types of
language matrices without aspiring at anything like a complete
catalogue.

Phonetic matrices (of rhythm, meter, alliteration, assonance, rhyme,
and euphony) do not properly belong to symbolic thought, though
they interact with it not only in poetry and word-games but also
in ordinary discourse, often more persistently than we are aware of.

Chronological matrices, naively regarded, seem to be linear chains of
events, but are of course nothing of the sort. They are multi-dimen-
sional structures in semantic space, governed by a diversity of selective
codes, whose criteria of relevance are often quite indifferent to tem-
poral order. This applies to personal memories, which always unfold
within specific frames of reference, but also to written History:
historians organize their material according to highly idiosyncratic
rules for sifting and interpreting evidence, and for constructing causa-
tive theories.

Classijicatory codes in taxinomy, indexing systems and in certain
branches of mathematical logic are hierarchic par excellence but rigid;
they resemble stone pyramids in the mental landscape.

Dogmatic matrices could be described as closed systems with dis-
torted feedback and impaired sub-skills of reasoning. They are ruled by
a fixed code derived from an act of faith, a circular argument, or
supposedly self-evident axioms. In other respects, however, they are
remarkably adaptable, and their dialectical strategies are of great
subdety. Related to these are frames of value which determine ethical
or aesthetic judgements or attitudes, and emotion-dominated matrices
which need not be discussed as a separate category, since emotion
enters in various guises and intensities into all form of thought.

Lastly, 'style codes' represent a person's idiosyncrasies, mannerisms,
etc., which, in their ensemble, constitute his individuality. Gait,
gesture, v6ice, hand-writing are all governed by stable automatic
codes. If a person, deprived by accident of the use of his right hand,

640

SOME ASPECTS OF THINKING

learns to write with the left, his signature, before long, recovers its
true character, 'Even the suspicious bank clerk will cash his cheque
because the old form of signature returns/ wrote Penfielcl, 3 who had
several such patients. 'The pattern of the signature and of the writing
is in the brain, not in the hand.'

This applies, to a considerable extent, even to the style of writing.
Hemingway or Proust can be identified and parodied after reading
a few lines as you identify the timbre of a drum or violin after a few
transients. Even the language of common mortals whose style is
undistinguished and seemingly indistinguishable, appears to have fixed
characteristic ratios .e.g. between the number of adjectives to verbs.

The total matrix, which comprises all these frames of behaviour, con-
stitutes the personality structure. But even here, the code can apparently
be triggered on and off by some super-master-switch as the spec-
tacular cases of multiple personalities indicate. Once more the hier-
archy fades into a receding series.

NOTES

To p. 634. Cyberneticists have discussed at length models which are supposed
to be capable of this feat. But they have no bearing on the question of awareness.

To p. 637. A summary of earlier work on controlled association tests, and
the controversies around it (e.g. complex theory versus constellation theory) can
be found e.g. in Woodworth (1939), pp. 790-800.

XVII

ASSOCIATION

'Multiple Attunements

A ssociationism is dead, but association remains one of the funda-
A-\ mental facts of mental life. So far I have considered mental
JL Jl organization chiefly in its 'vertical' aspect hierarchic struc-
tures formed by abstractive processes in ascending series. But each
verbal concept, apart from being a member of a 'vertical' hierarchy,
is also a member of several connotative matrices, each of which could
be represented by an inclined plane. The concept's place in the vertical,
abstractive hierarchy provides the dictionary definition as far as
that goes of its meaning. But the concept as a psychological reality,
its aura of connotations, and its individual significance to the person
who actually uses it, is determined by the multitude of matrices which
intersect in it. Each of them provides an associative context governed
by a, selective code; and the more there are of these inclined planes in
semantic space the richer and more multi-dimensional the concept.

If concepts are to be regarded as atoms of thought, they are certainly
not the hard lumps of classical physics. In the first place, they are un-
stable and subject to change to change both in definition and in
connotation. My concept of a 'gene* or a 'seductress', or of 'President
Eisenhower' is certainly not the same as it was ten years ago, though
the verbal label attached to each of these concepts has remained the
same. It is strange to reflect that a major part of our scientific and
philosophical vocabulary consists of old Greek bottles filled and re-
filled with new wine; that electron once meant a piece of amber, and
Homer's cosmos a flat disc covered by a vault. It is even stranger that
the same Sanskrit root matr split, by mitosis, as it were, into maya
the Oriental's web of illusions, and metron, metre, the Occidental's
yardstick to measure the world.

A concept has as many dimensions in semantic space as there are matrices
642

ASSOCIATION

of which it is a member. Let me return for a moment to the example of
the parlour game mentioned before, 'towns starting with M\ In
playing that game, I write down on my list 'Madrid* which proves
that the concept Madrid is a member of the phonetic matrix governed
by the code 'initial M\ Since I am bored with the game, I permit my
thoughts to wander, and at once an image arises: the crowd at the
Puerta del Sol stampeding in the panic of an air bombardment and
off we go along the emotion-charged matrix of my memories of the
Spanish Civil War. At this moment Brenda's little girl who was
watching the game, equally bored asks, 'What is Madrid?'; and I
oblige with the information: 'Madrid is the capital of Spain and of the
Province of Madrid, situated on the left bank of the river Manzanares,
which falls into the river Jarama' whereby I have produced a de-
finition of sorts of the concept 'Madrid*. A moment later I remember
the Prado, with its Goyas, Velasquezes, and El Grecos which are items
in a mental catalogue indexed under the code 'Painters', sub-code
'Painters, Spanish' (but also under 'Spain', sub-code 'Spain, painters
of). These connotations presented themselves more or less auto-
matically, but now my repertory of associations is nearly exhausted,
and my mind a momentary blank. Add to the repertory the printed
and auditory-vocal images of the word, plus the location of the town
on a mental map, and you get about half a dozen matrices which will
be activated by, and which will activate, the concept 'Madrid' without
effort. The associative contexts of a concept that are firmly estab-
lished in a person's repertory of thought-habits, are less numerous
than we are inclined to believe as free association tests demonstrate.

If, on the other hand, somebody asks me to talk about the geological
foundations of Madrid, I shall make an embarrassed effort, and recall
that the town stands on an undulating plateau and, by some inarticulate
analogy, perhaps arrive at the conclusion that the soil consists chiefly
of sand and clay. But that was an inference arrived at by the usual method
of problem-solving, and not of a spontaneous association. My matrix
of geological knowledge is scant; its code consists of the vague rule
'all that is relevant to the structure of the earth's crust'. This indi-
cates the direction in semantic space of the search for an answer; but
since the data of knowledge are lacking, there is little firm ground
on which to move about. 'Madrid' was not a member of my geo-
logical matrix; after this embarrassing experience, it has been recruited
to membership, but its ties to the matrix remain weak and tentative.

We have seen that the concept Madrid can be activated by any of

644

THE ACT OF CREATION

the matrices to which it belongs (for instance 'Civil War); and vice
versa, that any of these matrices can be activated by it. If we assign to
each matrix, metaphorically speaking, a specific wave-length* then
the concept may be represented as an aggregate of several oscillation-
circuits, each of which will receive and emit on the specific 'wave-
length' of its matrix. We may call this the 'multiple attunement' of the
concept to the various matrices of which it is a member.*

Now the aggregate of circuits, which is the concept, may receive
on one wave-length and emit on another, 'Madrid* was evoked by the
phonetic matrix 'initial M', and in its turn activated a different matrix,
'Civil War', which functions on a different wave-length. If the matrix
of the incoming signal is of a complex or abstract character, the
aggregate may tend to switch over to a circuit functioning on the wave-
length of an emotionally more appealing matrix. Thus a concept is a
member of several clubs, but it likes some clubs more than others.
Its 'multiple attunements' may be represented as a line-spectrum of
frequencies with a relatively stable energy-distribution. The fre-
quencies of maximum energy like the dominant partials in a sound-
spectrum would represent the concept's 'most-preferred' associative
contexts. As the years go by, new lines would be added to the spectrum,
while others would fade away, and the energy-distribution of associa-
tive preferences would change getting mellower perhaps, like an
old Stradivarius, or croaking, like an un-tuned piano. The effort to
'concentrate' on an abstract problem is probably proportionate to the
energy required to inhibit preferential associative contexts of high
energy-potential i.e. 'habit strength*.

The preceding paragraphs may have given an exaggerated impres-
sion of the subjectivity of concepts rather on the lines of Humpty
Dumpty's 'a word means what I intend it to mean'. The connotations of
concepts referring to individuals or places are of course largely per-
sonal; but on the other hand, there is experimental evidence to show
that the associative priorities and the connotative 'aura' of concepts
of a general character are surprisingly stable and standardized in indi-
viduals of the same culture. 'Marbe's Law' demonstrated the existence
of a logarithmic relation between an individual's reaction-time in giv-
ing a certain response to a stimulus-word in an association test, and
the frequency of the same response occurring in a group of people.**
Osgood has invented an ingenious method of measuring 'semantic
differentials'. The subjects were asked to assess the ratings of a concept
e.g. poute on ten different graded scales: e.g. 'angular-rounded',

ASSOCIATION

<545

'cold-hot', 'good-bad', 'wet-dry*. Two groups of twenty subjects
were used, and the mean ratings of each group were then plotted and
compared. Surprisingly enough, the two graphs were almost identical;
even more surprising, the greatest amount of disagreement (c. fifteen
per cent) was found in the ratings of politeness as 'good* or 'bad': one
group thought that to be polite deserved a goodness' rating of six
points, the other of six and a half points, on a seven-point scale. 1

To recapitulate: a concept may be regarded as a relatively stable
a gg re g ate or 'cluster* of receiving-transmitting circuits, with a kind
of nuclear core: the verbal label ('madrid'). Additional circuits may
be recruited, others may fade with disuse, and the relative energy
potentials of the circuits may be altered by long-term processes or the
person's momentary mood; but the auditory-vocal (and visual) trace
of the word Madrid remains unaltered, and thus preserves the
identity of the concept through all these changes in time. We may
further assume that any mcoming signal, regardless through which
circuit it is received, will activate the nuclear circuit the auditory-
vocal trace. If all goes well the response output will be emitted on the
same wave-length on which the input was received, and I shall happily
go on playing the 'towns with M' game. But since the cluster 'hangs
together' it is likely that some amount of excitation has nevertheless
spread to other circuits not concerned with the game and thus caused
the fleeting, fringe-conscious stirrings of my memories of the Civil
War. This is a minor, permissible kind of distraction; and perhaps even
a necessary one without such ripples the stream of thought would be
linear, colourless, all-too single-ininded. But if one of the circuits with
a high energy-potential gets excited, the control centres on higher
levels of the hierarchy must prevent it from taking over if chaos is
not to result; i.e., the code of the 'distracting' matrix must be blocked.
During strenuous efforts to concentrate, one seems literally to 'feel'
inside one's head the expenditure of energy needed to suppress diver-
sional thoughts which keep popping up like jacks-in-the-box. 'A
great part of our fatigue', Maxwell once remarked, 'often arises, not
from those mental efforts by which we obtain the mastery of the
subject, but from those which are spent in recalling our wandering
thoughts' particularly, one may add, during a long and boring lecture;
while the reverse phenomenon is produced by the (Hsinhibiting action
of alcohol and drugs. All this seems to indicate that our preferential
matrices of ideation are most of the time blocked by centres on higher

646

THE ACT OF CREATION

levels which agrees well with the predominantly restraining func-
tion of the hierarchic controls in perceptual and motor organization.

Types of Association

I have used the word Association loosely, as it is nowadays mostly
used. In Drever's Dictionary of Psychology, for instance, we find:

'Association: used generally of the principle in accordance with
which ideas, feelings, and movements are connected in such a way as
to determine their succession in the mind or in the actions of an indi-
vidual, or of the process of establishing such connections/

Or take Humphrey (1951):

'The term "association", or mental association, is a general name
often used in psychology to express the conditions under which
mental events, whether of experience or behaviour, arise.' 2

Hebb (1958) speaks at length about the association areas of the
cortex, but does not define association. Other authors, and textbooks,
differ widely in their definitions of the word, or prefer, wisely, not
to define it at all.

Hobbes was probably the first to draw a distinction between what
came later to be called 'free association' and 'controlled' association:

The train of thoughts, or mental discourse, is of two sorts. The first
is unguided, without design, and inconstant ... in which case the

thoughts are safe to wander, as in a dream The second is more

constant, as being regulated by some desire and design. 8

However, free association is never entirely free: there are motiva-
tions, conscious or sub-conscious, which give it direction. On the
other hand, association controlled by some rule of the game, such as
'towns with M\ is Tree* to the extent that the rule allows alternative
choices between permissible moves. The degrees of freedom of a
matrix vary from rigid automatism to the great adaptability of com-
plex mental skills; and the flow of associative thought will accordingly
vary in character: it may move along fixed canals, or follow, like a
rivulet, the accidents of the terrain and make detours round obstacles
with an air of earnest goal-directedness.

Since the attempts of the classic associationist school to reduce
thinking to association by contiguity and sirnilarity (plus the *secon-

ASSOCIATION

647

dary laws' of facilitation) had to be abandoned, the principles sup-
posedly underlying association have been classified and re-classified
over and again. Thus Wells 4 once made a catalogue of eighteen types
of association adapted from Jung, such as: 'egocentric predicate*
(example: lonesome never); 'evaluation* (rose beautiful); matter
of fact predicate* (spinach green); 'subject-verb* (dogbite), and

so forth, through 'object-verb*, 'cause-effect*, 'co-ordination*, "Sub^

ordination', 'supraordination*, 'contrast', 'coexistence', 'assonance',
etc. Woodworth (1939) suggested four classes: definition including
synonyms and supraordinates; completion and predication; co-
ordinates and contrasts; valuations and personal associations. He also
suggested an independent classification cutting across the one just
mentioned, according to a scale from 'meaningfulness' to 'super-
ficiality'. 5 Most of the experimental work refers to association tests
where the stimulus is a single word and the response is restricted to
one other word a condition not exacdy typical of ordinary verbal
discourse outside the laboratory.

The lesson which emerges from these elaborate and painstaking
attempts at classification is that the principles underlying associative
thinking are determined by the matrix in which the thinking takes
place; and that there are as many types of association as there are
codes which control verbal behaviour. In bilingual countries like
Switzerland, the response to a German stimulus-word will often be
its French equivalent; some people are addicted to metaphor, others
to punning; the chess player and the draughts player's associations
follow the rules of their respective games.

To sum up: associative thinking is the exercise of a habit. It may be
rigid or flexible, with a wide range of adaptability; yet it remains a
habit in so far as it observes certain invariant rules of the game. Associa-
tion, qua exercise of a skill, is thus distinguished from learning, which
is the acquisition of a new skill, and from bisociation, which is the
combination, re-shuffling and re-structuring of skills. But these
categories overlap as discussed in the next chapter.

NOTES

To p. 644. *Wave-length* is of course used metaphorically for much more
complex processes, including both structural and functional characteristics of
nervous tissue. 'Excitation-clang* or 'frequency-modulation signals* or Hebb*s
*phase-sequences in cell assemblies* would be closer approximations.

648

THE ACT OF CREATION

To p. 644. For a summary see Woodworth (1939) pp. 3<5o seq., Osgood
(i960) pp. 722 et seq. Osgood (p. 722), discussing the relative frequencies and
reaction times of verbal responses in association tests, speaks of a *hierarchical
structure of associations ; but he uses the word 'hierarchy' to refer to a linear
scale of gradations.

XVIII

HABIT AND ORIGINALITY

Problem-solving is bridging a gap between the initial situation
and the target. 'Target' must be understood in the widest sense
it may be an apple hanging high up on a tree, or a formula for
squaring the circle, or inventing a honey-spoon which does not drip,
or fitting a fact into a theory, or making the theory fit the facts.

Strictly speaking, of course, problems are created by ourselves;
when I am not hungry, the apple ceases to be a target and there is no
gap. Vice versa, the insatiable curiosity of Kepler made him see a
problem where nobody saw one before why the planets move as
they do. But the motivational aspect of problem-solving, and the
exploratory drive in general, have already been discussed.

There is also a different way of creating problems for others to
solve. Economy in art consists in implying its message in the gaps
between the words, as it were. Words, we saw, are mere stepping-
stones for thoughts; the meaning must be interpolated; by making
the gaps just wide enough, the artist compels his audience to exert its
imagination, and to re-create, to some extent, the experience behind
the message. But this aspect has also been discussed already, and no
longer concerns us.

Bridging the Gap

The process of bridging the gap between the perceived problem and
its solution is described in an oft-quoted passage by Karl Mach:

The subject who wishes for a tree to be laid across a stream to
enable him to cross it, imagines in fact the problem as already solved.
649

650

THE ACT OF CREATION

In reflecting that the tree must have previously been transported to
the river, and previously to that it must have been felled, etc., he
proceeds from the target-situation to the given situation, along a
road which he will re-trace in the reverse direction, through a
reversed sequence of operations, when it comes to actually construct-
ing the bridge. 1

This quotation has a long ancestry. It goes back as Polya (1938)
has shown in a remarkable paper to Pappus* classic distinction between
the analytical method, which treats the unknown solution of a geo-
metrical problem as if it were already known, then inquires from what
antecedent it has been derived, and so on backward from antecedent
to antecedent, until one arrives at a fact or principle already known;
and the synthetic method which, starting from the point reached last
in the analysis, reverses the process.

However, the traditional distinction between analytical and syn-
thetical method is full of pitfalls, and, though 'thinking backwards'
from the unknown to the given plays an important role in mathematical
reasoning, this is by no means always the case in problem-solving;
moreover 'forward' and 'backward' are often quite arbitrarily used by
taking topological metaphors too literally. If I aim my rifle at the
target and then pull the trigger, it would be ridiculous to say that I was
'thinking backward' from target to trigger; I was merely demonstra-
ting the trivial fact that in all goal-directed activities one always has
to 'keep one's eyes on the target' which can be taken either literally
or metaphorically. The chess player's aim is to capture the opponent's
king, either by directly attacking his defences, or by gaming such an
advantage in material that the king will be at his mercy. But the
player rarely reasons backward from an anticipated mate position
this happens only at dramatic combinative stages; as a rule he looks
around the board to see 'what's in the position', explores the possi-
bilities, and then considers what strategical or tactical advantages he
can derive from it.

If I wanted to find out whether I am a descendant of Spinoza (as a
crackpot uncle of mine once asserted), I could follow one of two
methods, or a combination of both. I could trace Spinoza's descen-
dants as they branch out downwards, or I could trace my own ances-
tors branching out and up; or start at both ends and see whether the
branches meet. The example is a paraphrase from the Logique de Port
Royal, whose authors seem to equate the upward process with analysis,

HABIT AND ORIGINALITY

the downward one with synthesis. Spinoza, incidentally, had no
descendants.

Returning to Mach's example, the following would perhaps be a
more realistic way of approaching the problem. To get to my target
I must cross this stream. This conclusion is arrived at by keeping my
eyes both on the target and on my own position by glancing in
alternation forward and back as it were. Since I must cross the stream,
let's look for a bridge. There is no bridge. Is there perhaps a boat
somewhere? No, there is not. Can I wade across? Yes no, it's too
cold. I have found three analogies with past methods of solving a
problem, in my repertory of simple routines. If I wish to be pedantic I
can say that the rules of the river-crossing skill allowed me three
choices, three different stratagems, each of which I tried out implicidy,
as a hypothesis. But surveying the lie of the land I find all three ob-
structed. What can be done? I must search for some other routine which
fits the situation. Mach's suggestion to fell a tree is not a very practical
one I saw only once a bridge across a swollen gully built that way,
by natives in Uzbekistan but I have no axe and we are not in Uzbeki-
stan. So, roll up your trousers, and let's hope the water is not too icy.

This is the hum-drum routine of planning and problem-solving in
every-day life. It means, firstly, searching for a matrix, a skill which
will * bridge the gap'. The matrix is found by way of analogy (or
'association by similarity'), that is to say, by recognizing that the
situation is, for my present intents and purposes, the same as some past
situations. I then try to apply the same skill which helped in those past
situations, to the present lie of the land hi the above example I have
tried three successive stratagems I have made three hypotheses and
after two have failed completely, I reverted to the third, which offered
the only solution, though a far from perfect one. In other words, I
have settled for an approximation. Most problems in practical life
and in the history of science admit of no better solution.

A point to be noted is that even in this trivial example, the solution
does not proceed in a single line from target to starting point, or vice
versa, but by a branching out of hypotheses of possible strategies
from one end, or both ends, until one or several branches meet, as in
the Spinoza example. Furthermore, in a real geneaological search, the
expert would eliminate unlikely branches and concentrate on those
which for geographical or other reasons seem more promising. We
have here, on a miniature scale as it were, that groping in a vaguely
sensed direction, towards the good combination', the 'hooking of

6$2

THE ACT OF CREATION

the proper atoms' (Poincare), which I have discussed in Book One,
Vin. However, in these trivial examples the groping and searching
is done on the conscious or fringe-conscious level, and what we are
looking for to bridge the gap is merely some routine trick in our
repertory; a practical skill which will fit the particular lie of the land.
In other words, the fanning out of hypotheses, the trial-and-check
procedures in simple thinking routines, reflect the flexibility of the
skill, which can operate through several sub-skills or equipotential
lines of action, according to feedback from the environment.

These sub-skills of symbolic thought have been discussed in various
contexts. They range from the implicit codes of grammar, syntax,
and commonsense logic, through the operational rules of extrapola-
tion, interpolation, transposition, schematization (exaggeration and
simplification), and so forth, to the special rules of such special games as
vector-analysis or bio-chemistry. But even these very special and com-
plex skills can be practised by sheer routine; and vice versa some of
the most original discoveries arose out of relatively simple problems.
Complexity of thought is no measure of originality.

Searching for a Code

Polya defines a routine problem as one 'which can be solved either
by substituting special data into a formerly solved general problem,
or by following step by step, without any trace of originality, some
well-worn, conspicuous example'. 2 He contrasts these routines with
the 'rules of discovery': 'The first rule of discovery is to have brains
and good luck. The second rule of discovery is to sit tight and wait
till you get a bright idea.' 3 And he defines a 'bright idea' as 'a sudden
leap of the imagination, a flash of genius'. 4

However, most practical and theoretical problems are solved at
some level between these two extremes. Polya's definition of routine
is too narrow and rigid; it does not take into account the great flexi-
bility, for instance, of sensory-motor skills such as rock-climbing, or
glass-blowing, or playing an instrument in an uninspired but tech-
nically accomplished manner. In symbolic thinking we find equally
flexible skills which are nevertheless routine: solicitors dictating a
document or brief; interpreters at public congresses dictating ad hoc
into the multi-lingual earphone-circuits; politicians on whistle-stop
tours reeling off variations on well-worn themes. These are routine

HABIT AND ORIGINALITY

<553

performances in Polya's sense- of 'substituting special data into general
equations'; but the equation, the code, leaves in these cases many
more degrees of freedom than does a mathematical formula, and the
act of 'substituting special data* has varying degrees of trickiness.
Even to a skilled and expert translator, for instance, it often happens
that he has no ready-made idiom or turn of phrase in his repertory to
substitute for the original. He must improvise some approximation,
perhaps a metaphor, to cover the meaning which is a much higher
skill, involving a degree of originality.

Turning to more difficult problems, of the type which Duncker and
Maier put to their subjects, we find routine solutions combined with
intimations of originality, and we shall recognize an increasing number
of those factors > in embryonic shape as it were, which we saw at
work in the creative process.

The degree of originality which a subject will display depends,
ceteris paribus, on the nature of the challenge that is, the novelty and
unexpectedness of the situation. Familiar situations are dealt with by
habitual methods; they can be recognized, at a glance, as analogous
in some essential respect to past experiences which provide a ready-
made rule to cope with them. The more new features a task contains,
the more difficult it will be to find the relevant analogy, and thereby
the appropriate code to apply to it. We have seen (Book One, VIII,
XVII) that one of the basic mechanisms of the Eureka process is the
discovery of a hidden analogy; but 'hiddenness* is again a matter of
degrees. How hidden is a hidden analogy, and where is it hidden? And
what does the word 'search* mean in this context? In the terms of the
present theory it means a process of scanning, of bringing successive,
perceptual or conceptual analyser-codes to bear on the problem; to
try out whether the problem will match this type of filter or that, as
the occulist tries out a series of lenses in the frame before the client's
eyes. Yet the word 'search', so often used in the context of problem-
solving, is apt to create confusion because it implies that I know
beforeh and what I am searching for, whereas in fact I do not. If I
search for a lost collar-stud, I put a kind of filter into my 'optical
frame* which lets only collar-studs and similar shapes pass, and re-
jects everything else and then go looking through my drawers. But
most tasks in problem-solving necessitate applying the reverse pro-
cedure: the subject looks for a clue, the nature of which he does not
know, except that it should be a 'clue* (Ansatzpunkt, point d*appui),
a link to a type of problem familiar to him. Instead of looking through

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THE ACT OF CREATION

a given filter-frame for an object which matches the filter, he must
try out one frame after another to look at the object before his nose,
until he finds the frame into which it fits, i.e. until the problem presents
some familiar aspect which is then perceived as an analogy with
past experience and allows him to come to grips with it.

This search for the appropriate matrix, or rule of the game to tackle
the process, is never quite random; the various types of guidance at
the fumbling, groping, trying stages have been discussed before. Among
the criteria which distinguish originality from routine are the level
of consciousness on which the search is conducted, the type of guidance
on which the subject relies, and the nature of the obstacle which he has to
overcome.

Degrees of Originality

In one of Maier's ingenious experiments the problem set to the subject
was to catch hold at the same time of two thin strings hung from the
ceiling so wide apart that he could only get hold of one at a time.
The only available tool was a pair of pliers. The solution is to tie the
pliers to one string and set it into pendular motion. The crucial point
of the experiment, however, is described as follows: 5

'If the subject had not spontaneously solved the problem within
ten minutes, Maier supplied him with a hint; he would "accidentally"
brush against one of the strings, causing it to swing gently. Of those
who solved the problem after this hint, the average interval between
hint and solution was only forty-two seconds. . . . Most of those
subjects who solved the problem immediately after the hint did so
without any realization that they had been given one. The "idea" of
making a pendulum with pliers seemed to arise spontaneously/ (My
italics.)

Here we have a beautifully ambiguous example of what looks like
'unconscious' guidance. Obviously there is a world of difference
between this kind of thing, and the nature of the sub-conscious pro-
cesses which produce Kekule's serpent dream or Poincare's discovery
of the Fuchsian functions. Maier's subjects seem to have 'cottoned on*
to the solution on the pre-conscious or fringe-conscious level of
awareness. Poincare's inspiration was derived from the creative
powers of the 'underground*.

Nevertheless, we notice that while trivial tasks, in so far as they re-
quire any reflection at all, are solved in full daylight as it were, with the

HABIT AND ORIGINALITY

65$

focus of awareness on the target, even problems of moderate difficulty,
such as Maier's, require a type of guidance on a different level. Fre-
quently the difficulty arises not from the objective novelty of the
problem, but from its 'embeddedness' in the subject's mind. In Book
One (p. 189) I have described an experiment of Duncker's in which an
object was so embedded in its visible role as a 'pendulum weight* that
the student was unable to conceive of it in the role of a 'hammer*.
'Embeddedness' is a trivial version of the occasional 'snowblindness'
of genius. In both cases the difficulty lies in going against routine in
discarding the most obvious or hkely matrix that offers itself and thus
gets into the way of the more unlikely one which will do the job. But
again there is more than a mere difference in degrees between over-
coming the perceptual attachment of the weight to the string, and over-
coming the millennial attachment of the human mind to the all-too-
plausible axioms of Aristotelian physics.

'Thinking aside' also occurs on all intermediate levels of difficulty.
It may take the form of switching to visual imagery as in the prob-
lem of the Buddhist monk (Book One, p. 183); or of re-stating the
problem in different terms; or letting one's attention wander, guided
by some nascent, cloudy analogy. A good example is the Duncker-
puzzle about the two trains and the bird. Two goods-trains, a hundred
miles apart, start moving towards each other, each at a speed of twenty
miles per hour. A silly bird, frightened by the starting hiss of one
of the trains, flies away at thirty miles per hour in a straight line along
the railway track until it meets the other train; it reverses its direction
until it meets the first train, then turns again, and so forth. What
distance will the bird cover in its flight to and fro until the two trains
meet?

To compute the sum of the series of flight-stretches is a rather
complicated task. But if we think aside, forget about the distances
covered by the bird, and compute the time until the two trains will
meet two and a half hours we see at once that the bird has also
flown for two and a half hours and hence covered a total of seventy-
five miles. The puzzle reflects in miniature Galileo's epocal discovery
of the laws of free fall by switching his attention from the spatial to
the temporal aspects of the process.

Another famous Duncker problem is how to bring up exactly six
pints of water from a river, when you have only two containers, one
measuring nine, the other four pints. You fiddle around, decant in
your imagination the big container twice into the smaller one, throwing

656

THE ACT OF CREATION

the water each time back into the river. This leaves you with one pint
which you can keep in the bigger or put into the smaller container but
that does not help because now you cannot isolate the five pints to
which the single pint must be added. The solution is simply to switch
from addition to subtraction: you keep your pint in the smaller con-
tainer, and fill it up from the larger one it will now only take 41=3
pints, leaving 93=6 pints in the large jug. Different people solve
this problem by different methods. Polya gives an analytical ex-
planation; personally I found that with most people the click occurs
through the reversal of the direction of thought from addition to sub-
traction from figure to background a phenomenon we frequently
met in discovery.

At a certain level of problem-solving even a healthy kind of illo-
gicality, of disregarding apparent contradictions, makes its appearance
as in the image of the monk meeting his alter-ego. But enough has
been said to show that as the challenge becomes more provoking, the
nature of the guidance which directs the search for the right type of
matrix to bear on the problem, becomes more intuitive, more re-
mote from the normal routine of thinking, and that extra-conscious
processes play an increasingly important part. And thus, having started
from the base of the hierarchy, we arrive at last at the roof, which we
have surveyed in the first volume but had left hanging in the air: the
act of discovery.

The term 'bisociation* is meant to point to the independent, auto-
nomous character of the matrices which are brought into contact in
the creative act, whereas associative thought operates among members
of a single pre-existing matrix. But we have seen that this is a relative,
not an absolute criterion, because the members of a matrix are sub-
skills, i.e. matrices in their own right on a subordinate level of the
hierarchy, and the degree of their integration, i,e. the coherence of
the matrix, varies according to case. In matrices which have become
fully automatized, the code alone determines which member shall
act in which order the pedant always takes the same route to his
office, his strategy is fixed once and for all, and has become in-
corporated into the code. But the more flexible a skill, the greater
the part played by strategy. Thus in the problem about the trains and
the bird, the subject must compute the distance D flown by the bird,
and he knows that distances are computed by the rule of the game
D= v.t. The velocity v of the bird is given, and he could get the t in

HABIT AND ORIGINALITY

a jiffy by substituting for it the time taken by the trains until they
crash (t= 100/40= 2j). Both the formula, and the process of sub-
stitution, are familiar sub-skills in the subject's repertory of habits,
and should function as members of the matrix. However, owing to
the unusual He of the land i.e. the way the data are presented his
strategy breaks down, the matrix goes to pieces, and its members
function as independent entities. Once this has occurred it would
require a certain originality to combine them again. We might even
be generous and say, that to re-combine them would be a minor bi-
sociative act.

Thus the degree of independence of the matrices or submatrices
which combine in the solution of a problem, can only be judged with
reference to the subject's mental organization. Any boy of the sixth
form can derive the Pythagorean theorem, which he has previously
learned, as a matter of routine; but to discover it for himself would
require a high degree of originality.

I hope I have laid sufficient emphasis on the fact that originality
must be measured on subjective scales and that any self-taught novelty
is a minor bisociative act. This taken for granted, let me recapitulate
the criteria which distinguish bisociative originality from associative
routine.

Associatioti and Bisociation

The first criterion was the previous independence of the mental
skills or universes of discourse which are transformed and integrated
into the novel synthesis of the creative act. The student solving the
train-bird problem is entitled to shout Eureka because his mathematical
skills are so poorly integrated (or so easily dislocated) that the act of
'hooking them together appears to him a novel discovery. The more
unlikely or Tar-fetched* the mediating matrix M 2 i.e. the more
independent from M x the more unexpected and impressive the
achievement. The creative act could be described as the highest form
of learning because of the high improbability (or anti-chance proba-
bility) of the solution.

If we now turn from subjective originality to discoveries which are
new in actual fact, we again find the previous independence of the
components that went into the 'good combination to be a measure
of achievement. Historically speaking, the frames of reference of
magnetism and electricity, of physics and chemistry, of corpuscles and

6$$ THE ACT OF CREATION

waves, developed separately and independently, both in the individual
and the collective mind, until the frontiers broke down. And this
breakdown was not caused by establishing gradual, tentative connec-
tions between individual members of the separate matrices, but by the
amalgamation of two realms as wholes, and the integration of the
laws of both realms into a unified code of greater universality. Multiple
discoveries and priority disputes do not diminish the objective, his-
torical novelty produced by these major bisociative events they
merely prove that the time was ripe for that particular synthesis.

Minor, subjective bisociative processes do occur on all levels, and
are the main vehicle of untutored learning. But objective novelty
comes into being only when subjective originality operates on the
highest level of the hierarchies of existing knowledge.

The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because
we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it. When two
frames of reference have become integrated into one it becomes
difficult to imagine that previously they existed separately. The
synthesis looks deceptively self-evident, and does not betray the
imaginative effort it needed to put its component parts together. In
this respect the artist gets a better deal than the scientist. The changes
of style in the representative arts, the discoveries which altered our
frames of perception, stand out as great landmarks for all to see. The
true creativity of the innovator in the arts is more dramatically evident
and more easily distinguished from the routine of the mere practi-
tioner than in the sciences, because art (and humour) operate primarily
through the transitory juxtaposition of matrices, whereas science
achieves their permanent integration into a cumulative and hierarchic
order. Laurence Olivier in Hamlet is perceived as Olivier and as
Hamlet at the same time; but when the curtain goes down, the two
personae separate again, and do not become amalgamated into a higher
unit which is later combined with others into still higher units.

A further criterion of the creative act was that it involves several
levels of consciousness. In problem-solving pre- and extra-conscious
guidance makes itself increasingly felt as the difficulty increases; but
in the truly creative act both in science and art, underground levels
of the hierarchy which are normally inhibited in the waking state
play a decisive part. It is perhaps significant that the German word
for the Creator is Schopfe^ and for creating schogfen 'to scoop' in
the sense of drawing water in buckets from a well. The Creator is
thus visualized as creating the world out of His own depth, and the

HABIT AND ORIGINALITY

6$9

creative mind with a small c is supposed to apply a similar procedure.
But whatever the inner sources on which the Lord of Genesis drew
while his spirit hovered over the dark waters, in the case of humble
mortals the sources are in the phylogenetically and ontogenetically
older, underground layers of his mind. He can only reach them
through a temporary regression to earlier, more primitive, less specia-
lized levels of mentation, through a reader pour mieux sauter. In this
respect the creative act parallels the process of biological regeneration
the liberation of genetic potentials normally under restraint, through
the de-dirFerentiation of damaged tissues. Thus the creative process
involves levels of the mind separated by a much wider span than in
any other mental activity except in pathological states, which rep-
resent a reader sans sauter. The emotional manifestations of the Eureka
act sudden illumination followed by abreaction and catharsis also
testify to its subconscious origins; they are to some extent comparable
to the cathartic effects of the analyst's method of bringing 'repressed
complexes' into the patient's consciousness.

The re-structuring of mental organization effected by the new
discovery implies that the creative act has a revolutionary or destrudive
side. The path of history is strewn with its victims: the discarded isms
of art, the epicycles and phlogistons of science.

Associative skills, on the other hand, even of the sophisticated kind
which require a high degree of concentration, do not display the above
features. Their biological equivalents are the activities of the organism
while in a state of dynamic equilibrium with the environment as
distinct from the more spectacular manifestations of its regenerative
potentials. The skills of reasoning rely on habit, governed by well-
established rules of the game; the 'reasonable person' used as a
standard norm in English common law is level-headed instead of
multi-level-headed; adaptive and not destructive; an enlightened
conservative, not a revolutionary; willing to learn under proper
guidance, but unable to be guided by his dreams.

The main distinguishing features of associative and bisociative
thought may now be summed up, somewhat brutally, as follows:

Habit Originality
Association within the confines Bisocktion of independent
of a given matrix matrices

Guidance by pre-conscious or Guidance by sub-conscious

extra-conscious processes processes normally under restraint

660

THE ACT OF CREATION

Habit
Dynamic equilibrium

Rigid to flexible variations on a
theme

Repetitiveness
Conservative

Originality
Activation of regenerative
potentials

Super-flexibility (recukr pour
mieux sauter)

Novelty

Destructive-Constructive

And thus we are back where we left off in the first book; the circle
is closed.

APPENDIX I: ON LOADSTONES
AND AMBER

I have compared (Book One, X) the constructive periods in the
evolution of science to river-estuaries in which previously separate
branches of knowledge merge in a series of bisociative acts. The
present appendix is meant to illustrate the process by a few salient
episodes from the history of magnetism and electricity two fields of
study which, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, had
developed on independent lines, and seemed to be in no way related.
Their merging was due to the discovery of unitary laws of a previously
unsuspected kind underlying the variety of phenomena, and took
physics a decisive step forward towards a universal synthesis.

The Greeks, fortunately perhaps, had not paid much attention to
the antics of loadstones and amber; they had shrugged them off as
freak phenomena. Aristode had hardly anything to say about them
had he laid down the law on magnetism and electricity, as he did in
other domains of physics, the story might have been different. As it
happened, both sciences started from scratch in the seventeenth century,
just at a time when scholasticism had to yield to the empirical ap-
proach. This smoothed their path of progress but even so, progress
was neither smooth nor continuous.

Apart from some casual references in earlier sources, the first land-
mark in the history of magnetism in Europe is a manuscript, dated
1269, by a French crusader, Petrus Peregrinus from Picardy. It gives a
detailed description of two types of mariner's compass (which ap-
parently had been in use for at least a century): a magnetized needle
either floating on a stick in a bowl of water, or turning on a vertical
axle. Peregrine further described his experiments with a spherical
loadstone which he had fashioned, defining its poles and the attractive
and repellent properties of its surface; yet he shared the contemporary

661

662

THE ACT OB CREATION

belief that the source of the Virtue' which attracted the compass needle
was located in the skyin the Polar Star or the Great Bear.

During the next three hundred years no further progress seems to
have been made except for some improvements of the compass and
attempts to measure magnetic declination, caused by the puzzling dis-
covery that the direction of the needle deviated at different places to
different degrees from the direction of the Polar Star.

The next landmark is Dr. William Gilbert of Colchester, court
physician to Queen Elizabeth, the first great English experimentalist.
Gilbert put both magnetism and electricity on the map or rather, on
two separate maps; his influence on his younger contemporaries,
Kepler and Galileo, was enormous. Gilbert's fundamental discovery
in fact the only important discovery made in the whole history of
magnetism as an independent science is again one of those which, in
retrospect, appear deceptively simple. He found that the power which
attracted the magnetic needle was not in the skies but in the earth: that
the earth itself was a huge spherical loadstone. He arrived at this con-
clusion by making, as Peregrine had done, a spherical magnet, and
exploring the behaviour of a minute compass-needle on its surface.
As he moved the needle over his globe, he saw that it behaved exacdy
as the needle of the mariner's compass behaved on a sea journey both
with regard to its north-south alignment and to its 'dip', which in-
creased the closer the needle approached either of the poles. He con-
cluded that his spherical loadstone was a model of the earth which
therefore must be a magnet.*

So the secret of the compass-needle was solved by ascribing magnetic
properties to the earth there remained only the secret of the nature of
magnetism itself. Gilbert's book, De Magnete, was published a.d.
1600 the same year in which Kepler joined forces with Tycho de
Brahe to lay the foundations of the new astronomy; the symbolic
year which, like a watershed, divides medieval from modern philo-
sophy. Gilbert, born in 1544, stood, like Kepler, astride the water-
shed: with one foot in the brave new world of experimental science,
the other stuck in Aristotelian animism. His descriptions of how
magnetism works are modern; his explanations of its causes are
medieval: he regards the magnetic force as a living emanation from
the spirit or soul of the loadstone. The earth, being a giant loadstone,
also has a soul its magnetic virtue and so have the heavenly bodies.

'Magnetic force is animate, or imitates the soul; and in many things
surpasses the human soul while this is bound up in the organic body/ 1

APPENDIX I

663

The actions of the magnetic virtue are 'without error . . . quick,
definite, constant, directive, motive, imperant, harmonious ... it
reaches out like an arm clasping round the attracted body and drawing
it to itself. ... It must needs be light and spiritual so as to enter the
iron but it must also be a material, subtle vapour, an ether or
effluvium. Even the earth's rotation is somehow connected with
magnetism: 'In order that the Earth may not perish in various ways,
and be brought from confusion, she turns herself about by magnetic
and primary virtue/ 2

Thus Gilbert's book, which enjoyed uncontested authority for the
next two hundred years, postulated on the one hand action at a dis-
tance, but asserted on the other the existence of an effluvium or ether
which passes 'like a breath' between the attracting bodies. It was also
a major factor in creating semantic confusion: the word 'magnetism',
which originally referred to the properties of a type of ore mined in
Magnesia, a province of Thessaly, came soon to be applied to any kind
of attraction or affinity, physical, psychological, or metaphorical
('animal magnetism', 'Mesmerism', etc.). But as long as the study of
the behaviour of magnets remained an isolated field of research, no
further progress could be made. In 1621 van Helmont, and in 1641
Athanasius Kircher, published books on the subject which added
nothing new to it, but dwelt at length on the alleged wound-healing
properties of magnets; Kircher's book carried a whole section on the
'magnetism' of love, and ended with the dictum that the Lord is the
magnet of the universe. Newton took no interest in magnetism except
for some remarks in the third book of the Princtpia* to the effect that
the magnetic force seemed to vary approximately with the inverse
cube of the distance; while Descartes extended his theory of cosmic
vortices to cover both magnetic and electric phenomena. The main
subjects of interest were the variations in the positions of the earth's
magnetic poles which, to the navigators' distress, were found to wander
around like floating kidneys. This led to the kind of controversy
characteristic of most periods of stagnation in the history of science;
thus one $enry Bond of London town, a 'Teacher of Navigation',
published in 1676 a book, The Longitude Found, based on the theory
that the magnetic poles lagged behind the earth's daily rotation. This
thesis was torn to pieces in another book, The Longitude Not Found, by
Peter Blackborough.

Even the great Halley went haywire where magnetism was con-
cerned: he proposed that the earth was a kind of solar system in

664

THE ACT OF CREATION

miniature, with an inner core and an outer shell, both of them mag-
netized, and a luminous fluid between them to provide light for the
people living on the surface of the inner core; this luminous effluvium
escaping through the earth's pores gave rise to the aurora borealis.
Halley was the greatest astronomer and one of the leading scientific
minds of the age, who had published the first modern magnetic chart
in Mercator's projection, based on his own patient observations; but
his wild speculations indicate that the element of the fantastic was
firmly embedded in the concept of magnetism as it still is in our day.
Children are still fascinated by compasses and magnets, governed by a
force more mysterious than gravity because the latter is taken for
granted from earliest experience whereas magnetism cannot be sensed,
and not only attracts but also repels. No wonder that this unique
phenomenon, while considered in isolation, had led those who studied
it round in circles in a blocked matrix.

But although, for nearly two centuries, the study of magnetism made
no progress, Gilbert's work had a fertile influence on other branches of
science. The loadstone became the archetype of action-at-a-distance,
and paved the way for the recognition of universal gravity. Without
the demonstrable phenomena of magnetic attraction, people would
have been even more reluctant to exchange the traditional view that
heavy bodies tended towards the centre of the universe, for the im-
plausible suggestion that all heavenly and earthly bodies were tugging
at each other 'with ghostly fingers* across empty space. Even the magic
properties attri buted to magnetism, and the very ambiguity of its
concept, proved to be unexpectedly stimulating to the tortuous line
of advance which led via Mesmerism and hypnosis to contemporary
forms of psychiatry.

The next turning point is Coulomb's discovery, in 1785, that the
inverse square law applied to magnetism too, as it applied to gravity.
It must have looked at the time as if these two kinds of action-at-a-
distance would soon turn out to be based on the same principle as
Kepler and Descartes thought they were; as if a great merger of sciences
were in the offing. But that synthesis is still a matter of the future;
instead of merging with gravity, magnetism entered into a much less
obvious union with electricity.

The first mention of electricity on record occurs in the fragments of
the History of Physics by Theophrastus, the successor of Aristotle at the
head of the Athenean Lyceum. He innocently remarks that when amber

APPENDIX I

665

is rubbed it acquires the curious virtue of attracting flimsy objects. The
Greek word for amber is elektron. Although the Greeks were not
interested in the elektron s virtues, Forever Amber would be an appro-
priate motto for modern science.

For two thousand years little more is heard of electricity, until we
again come to Dr. Gilbert, who demonstrated that the peculiar
properties of amber were shared by glass, sulphur, crystals, resin, and
a number of other substances, which he accordingly called 'electrics'.
To account for electric attraction he created the concept of an electric
effluvium, as distinct from the magnetic effluvium but with an
equally lasting influence on further developments.

During the next century, advance again was slow. Members of the
Italian Academia del Cimento (a short-lived forerunner of the Royal
Society) continued Gilbert's experiments, and added a few observations
to them. The main events of the century were the discovery of elec-
tric repulsion and the construction, by Guericke, of the first machine
for the continuous production of electricity. The machine consisted
of a sulphur ball, the size of a child's head, which was rotated on
an axle while the experimenter's hand was pressed against its surface,
thus generating a frictional charge. Guericke also discovered, and
described, the phenomena of electrical conduction and induction but
nobody paid any attention to them, and they had to be rediscovered
in the next century. This illustration of discontinuity in progress was
followed, almost immediately, by yet another one. In the first years
of the eighteenth century an Englishman, Hawkesbee, invented a new
machine to produce electricity by replacing Guericke's sulphur sphere
with one of glass which was a vast improvement, but again passed
unnoticed. The glass-friction machine was re-invented and improved
in the 1740s; the sphere was replaced by a cylinder, pads were used
instead of. the hand, and the machine was equipped with insulated
wire conductors the conductivity of metal having been meanwhile
discovered by Gray and Du Fay, who also made the basic distinction
between conductors and insulators.

The fact that the electric virtue produced by this machine could be
carried by wires over distances of hundreds of feet led to the concept
of a flow or current the electric effluvium was now regarded as a
kind of liquid, or liquid fire, flowing through the wire. But the
phenomena of electric repulsion led Du Fay to assume two kinds of
electric fluid like kinds repelling, unlike kinds attracting each other,
on the analogy of magnetic poles. Benjamin Franklin did not like the

<5<56

THE ACT OF CREATION

idea of two fluids; he believed that the polarity could be explained by
a surplus or a deficiency of a single fluid, designated by a plus and a
minus sign a rather unhappy suggestion which, to this day, is apt
to confuse the minds of hopeful students. A further complication
arose from the fact that while the electric fluid was demonstrably
unable to flow across insulating substances such as glass or air, it
nevertheless induced electric charges on the other side of the in-
sulator; so one now had to assume that there were two kinds of
electricity: the first a fluid running through a wire, the second an
etheric effluvium acting at a distance.

Thus by the middle of the eighteenth century the whole science was
in a state of confused and creative anarchy as cosmology and mecha-
nics had been a hundred years earlier, before Newton. 'We cannot
follow the twists of theory in the rninds of these men', Pledge wrote
about Franklin and his contemoraries; 4 yet they went happily ahead,
theorizing in dirty kitchens and experimenting with kites, Hghtning
rods, luminous discharges in vacuum tubes, detonating inflammable
spirits, electrocuting birds, mice, and occasionally themselves. I have
mentioned before (p. 204) the sensation created by the discovery of
the condenser in the shape of the Leyden Jar due to accidental shock;
a few years later, the expression 'an electrifying effect' had already
gone into metaphorical use. According to the Oxford Dictionary,
armies were the first to be 'electrified' by courage (Burke); theatre
audiences came next (Emerson). Typical of the happy confusion
was Gray's theory, which he confined to the secretary of the Royal
Society on the day before his death, that the planets were moved round
the sun by a simple electric force. To demonstrate this, a small pen-
dulum weight was held on a string over an electrically charged globe,
and lo! the weight began to describe circles and ellipses round the
globe, always in the correct direction from west to east due, of course,
as was later proved, to small unconscious jerks which the experi-
menter imparted to the string.

The first indirect intimation of the shape of things to come was the
demonstration (around 1780) by Cavendish and Coulomb that the
action-at-a-distance type of electricity (i.e. the electrostatic field) was
governed by the same inverse square law as magnetism and gravity.
Thus mathematics entered into the study of electricity and magnetism,
although their physical nature was anybody's guess. The mathematical
tools were ready, in the shape of differential equations which French
mathematicians of the eighteenth century Lagrange, Laplace,

APPENDIX 1

667

Legendre had worked out for gravity and mechanics; then Poisson
lifted the basic equations of the gravitational potential out of their
original frame of reference, and applied them first to the electrostatic,
then to the magnetic field. He was able to import these rules of the
game from a foreign playing-field by the bold move of substituting
electric charge' and 'magnetic pole strength* for gravitational mass'
in the equation and it worked. Newton's inverse square law, Lag-
range's and Poisson's equations, were among the first striking in-
stances revealing the unity of mathematical laws underlying the
diversity of phenomena.

In the meantime, Luigi Galvani, Professor of Anatomy at the
University of Bologna, had spent some fifteen years working on a
theory of 'animal electricity'. On September 20th, 1786, he recorded
one of his experiments, which was to make history. He attached a
nerve-muscle preparation of a dissected frog to a copper hook and
hung the hook on an iron railing. Whenever one of the frog's legs
touched the iron, it jerked away and contracted violently. Now it
was already known that electric discharges from Ley den Jars or light-
ning rods caused muscles to contract; but since the iron railing could
not be a source of electricity, Galvani drew the logical conclusion that
the electricity which caused the contraction was generated in the
muscle itself under the stimulus of the metallic contact. Like so many
neat and logical deductions it happened to be wrong; but it was an
error which proved to be as immensely fruitful as Columbus* or
Kepler's errors. The muscle convulsion had indeed been an electrical
phenomenon; however, as Volta was soon to prove, the current had
been generated not inside the muscle but by tie contact of the two
different metals, copper and iron the prototype of the Voltaic battery
(the frog's leg touching the railing closed the circuit). Galvani's
theory had been a wrong move in the right direction, for the experi-
ment did demonstrate the sensitivity of certain living tissues to minute
electric currents; after a few decades of the usual detours, Sonimering
compared nerves to electrical telegraph wires; and from the middle
of the nineteenth century onwards electric phenomena played an in-
creasing part in physiology, until finally the electro-chernisty of
living tissues became a single, integrated matrix.

In the domain of inanimate matter, the Voltaic battery, inspired by
Galvani's frogs, led to a parallel synthesis of electricity and chemistry.
The battery gave the experimenters for the first time ample supplies
of electric current which neither the friction machines nor the

668

THE ACT OF CREATION

Leyden Jar had been able to do. It taught them not only that the
chemical interaction of metals produced electricity; but also that an
electric current sent through certain chemicals led to their decom-
position. In 1806 Davy tentatively suggested that chemical affinity
had an electrical basis. But nearly a century had to pass until, in 1897,
Thompson discovered that a certain type of electrical discharge the
so-called cathode rays consisted of particles smaller than atoms;
and that in these particles 'matter derived from different sources such
as hydrogen, oxygen, etc. is one and the same kind, this matter being
the substance from which the chemical elements are built up*. 5
Thompson's 'elementary corpuscles' were later named 'electrons'.

But let me return for a moment to the Voltaic battery. The abun-
dant flow of current which it produced was so startling that it was at
first doubted whether this 'electric fluid' was the same kind of thing
which came in sparks out of the older contraptions. Comparison of
their effects led to the realization that the discharges of static electricity
from a Leyden Jar had a higher potential or tension, whereas the flow
from the battery had a low potential but carried a greater quantity of
current. Thus the distinction was made between the potential (vol-
tage), roughly comparable to the gradient of a river-bed, and the
quantity of liquid (amperage) that passed through it. But only fifty
years later did Faraday realize that the spark from a Leyden Jar could
be regarded as a short-lived current; then came Maxwell, who treated
currents as moving charges, thus finally raiifying the two kinds of
electricity: 'frictional' and 'Voltaic*.

In the meantime, however, that other grand synthesis got underway:
the unification of electricity and magnetism. There were several steps.
The first link was established in 1820 by the observation of Hans
Christian Oersted in Copenhagen that if an electric current flowed
through a wire in the vicinity of a magnetic compass, the needle was
deflected and turned into a position at right angles to the wire. The
news created an immediate sensation in Paris, where Ampere's ex-
citable brain gave off a spark bigger than any Leyden Jar: he realized
in a single flash that if an electric current produced a magnetic field,
as the reaction of the needle indicated, then all magnetic fields may be
due to electric currents that magnetism was a by-product of elec-
tricity. He let a current run through a spiral coil inside of which he
placed a steel needle: it became magnetized, and the first electro-
magnet was born.*

But how, then, was the 'natural magnetism' of loadstones to be

APPENDIX I

669

explained, which had no currents running around them? Ampere's
answer was that minute currents were circulating in coils inside the
atoms of the loadstone. These sub-atomic currents produced magnetic
fields, which tended to align themselves with the magnetic field of
the biggest loadstone, the earth. The theory at the same time dis-
pensed with the necessity of explaining magnetism by the physical
action of poles; it was perhaps the boldest and most surprising idea in
this whole development. Unfortunately, Ampere's contemporaries
were not 'ripe' for it. To quote D. L. Webster:

Scientists should have reacted to this surprise better than they
did but scientists are human. The philosophical principle of parsi-
mony in hypotheses should have been their guide. Instead their guide
seems to have been habit. Parsimony would have dictated as follows:

1. Whatever we believe about magnets, we must recognize
currents in wires as currents.

2. The pole theory of magnets requires us to believe in two types
of field producers, poles and currents, whereas Ampere's theory
requires only currents.

3. The pole theory requires two very different sets of laws for
magnetic fields, one for fields due to poles and the other for fields
due to currents, whereas Ampere's theory requires only one set of
laws.

4. Therefore, we shall follow Ampere.

But poles were treated as real for nearly another century. 6

Yet Ampere's idea was never entirely forgotten. Maxwell compared
Ampere's sub-atomic coils to miniature spinning-tops which always
tend to preserve the direction of their axes; he tried to magnetize a
piece of iron by rotating it fast. In 191 3, when Niels Bohr invented his
model of the atom as a miniature solar system, it was thought that the
orbital motions of the electrons round the nucleus provided the
Amperean circuits. This turned out to be part of the truth; but the
principal source of magnetism was found to be, even more surprisingly,
a spinning motion of the electrons round their own axes. An electron,
of course, can hardly be said to have an axis since it is now regarded
as something in the nature of a blur; but mathematically the model
worked, and that is all one can ask for in the present state of physics.

670

THE ACT OF CREATION

A century after Oersted, magnetism and electricity were finally re-
duced to a common source.

But I have been anticipating the happy end. The next stage, after
Ampere had shown that an electric current will produce a magnetic
field, was the discovery by Faraday (in 183 1) that magnetism could be
'directly converted into electricity' by moving magnet and conduct-
ing coil relative to each other.* This led to the invention of the dynamo,
and later of the electric motor; but we are concerned with theory, not
with the ubiquitous applications of electric energy.

Faraday, as we know, was a visualizer, who saw the universe pat-
terned by lines of force like the familiar diagrams of iron filings
grouped round a magnet. James Clark Maxwell, who inaugurated the
post-Newtonian age in physics, was a super-visualizer. He took
Faraday's imaginary lines of force and put them into imaginary tubes
carrying a fluid; then he abolished the spaces between the tubes so
that they became 'mere surfaces, directing the motion of a fluid filling
up all space' the ether. Next, he applied to this model the rules of a
game which bore no relation at all to electro-magnetism hydro-
dynamics, with its vortices and eddies and changing pressures.** One
conclusion which emerged from this imaginary operation was that all
changes in electric and magnetic force (for instance, those caused by
an oscillating circuit) sent waves spreading through space; and that
these waves had the same transverse character, and the same speed,
as light. "We can scarcely avoid the inference', he wrote in a monu-
mental sentence, 'that light consists in the transverse undulations of the
same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.'

Thus after electricity and magnetism had been united, both were
now united to light. Electro-magnetic radiations came to be regarded
as rapid alternations of electrical and magnetic stresses in space, where
each change in the electric stress gives rise to a magnetic stress, which
again gives rise to an electric stress and so on. Soon the range of these
radiations was shown to comprise not only the visible spectrum
between the ultra-violet and the infra-red of radiant heat, but to extend
to the ultra-short gamma rays of radioactivity, and to the kilometre-
long waves used in radio-communication.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Maxwell's genius is that as
soon as he had worked out the mathematical formulation of his
theory, he discarded the model by means of which he had reached it.
It was as if a man, after climbing a ladder to get a free view over his
surroundings, had kicked out the ladder from under him, and remained

APPENDIX I

67I

freely suspended in the air. Gone were the tubes, the vortices, the
ether; all that remained were 'fields' of an abstract, non-substantial
nature, and the mathematical formalism which described the propa-
gation of real waves in an apparently non-existent medium. It was the
great turning point in physical science, when the aspiration to arrive
at intelligible, mechanical models was abandoned. This renuncia-
tion, born of necessity, soon hardened into dogma a secular version
of the Commandment 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image' of gods or atoms.*

The transition from model-making to mathematical abstraction is
strikingly illustrated by the fact that Maxwell himself left it to others
(to Heinrich Rudolph Herz, as it came to pass) to give empirical proof
of his electro-magnetic waves. As Crowther wrote:

The General Equations of the Electro-magnetic Field were more
real to him than material phenomena he could know in the labora-
tory. Physicists have often wondered why Maxwell made no attempt
to prove experimentally the existence of electro-magnetic waves.
He probably felt he was better acquainted with the waves through
the medium of the General Equations, and would not have known
them any better, perhaps not so well/ if he had met them in the
laboratory. 7

Yet even Maxwell had his blind spots. The electron as a basic,
quasi-atomic unit of electricity was clearly implied in his model of
ether-vortices, and in his theory of electrolysis. Yet he rejected the
concept of 'particles* of electricity as Faraday before had rejected it.
Thus, as already mentioned, it was left, to J. J. Thompson to take the
next decisive step: the identification of the electron as an elementary
unit of electricity, and at the same time an elementary particle of
matter. Some fifteen years later Rutherford discovered that the atom
had a positively charged nucleus; Moseley discovered that the number
of electrons in an atom determined its place in the periodic system;
and Bohr made his famous model of electrons circling round the
nucleus like planets round the sun. Matter and electricity had merged
into a single matrix.

We have followed, though only in the scantest outline, the suc-
cessive confluences into a vast river-delta, of electricity, magnetism,
light, heat, and other electro-magnetic radiations; of chemistry, bio-
chemistry, and atomic physics. This development was, as we have seen

THE ACT OF CREATION

(p. 228), accompanied by the realization that the various powers of
nature* were merely different forms of energy. In earlier days, and
well into the nineteenth century, each of these 'powers' were thought
to be contained in a material substance, a subtle fluid or vapour or
effluvium: heat in the phlogiston; organic energy in the vital fluid';
gravity in the ether; electricity and magnetism in their separate effluvia.
The word 'energy* from the Greek en-ergos (work) was for the first
time used by Thomas Young in 1807 to designate kinetic energy only.
But by that time Rumford had already shown by an ingenious experi-
ment that mechanical energy could be converted into heat: he made a
blunt boring machine, driven by horses, work against a metal cylinder
underwater, and demonstrated that the heat thus produced actually
brought the water to the boil. By the middle of the century it became
evident that the powers of nature were convertible: mechanical
motion into heat, heat into motion, motion into electricity, elec-
tricity into magnetism, and so forth. Thus one by one the various
'subtle fluids' dropped out of the game, and were replaced by equa-
tions determining the exchange rates, as it were, for the conversion
of one kind of energy-currency into another. Lastly, Einstein and his
successors taught us that mass and energy, particle and wave, are
merely two aspects of one and the same basic process. Only in one
respect have they failed so far: in their attempts to link the gravita-
tional field and the electro-magnetic field in a single system of equa-
tions, a unified field theory.

NOTES

To p. 662. The 'dip', or magnetic inclination seems to have been dis-
covered independently by Georg Hartmann, a German clergyman, in 1544, and
by Robert Norman, a compass-maker from Wapping. Norman and Mercator
also anticipated Gilbert by placing the source of magnetic attraction in the earth.

To p. 668. The experiment was actually suggested to Ampere by Arago.

To p. 670, Faraday's original formulation was indeed entirely relativistic.
According to Newtonian mechanics, however, it did make a difference whether
the wire was moved or the magnet. This paradoxical asymmetry was one of the
pincipal considerations which led Einstein to the theory of special relativity
(cf. Polanyi, 1957, pp. 10-11).

To 670. Vortices had already appeared in Kepler's and Descartes' ex-
planations; and Helmholz, too, had compared the dynamics of fluids with
electric currents and magnetic fields; but Maxwell's electro-hydro-dynamics
were of an incomparably more refined order.

APPENDIX I

673

To p. 671. Maxwell himself was less dogmatic about it. Tor the sake of
persons of different types of mind, scientific truth should be presented in different
forms and should be regarded as equally scientific whether it appears in the
robust form and vivid colouring of a physical illustration or in the tenuity and
paleness of a symbolical expression.*

APPENDIX II: SOME FEATURES OF
GENIUS

1. THE SENSE OF WONDER

In one of his essays The Cutting of an Agate William Butler
Yeats voiced one of the silliest popular fallacies of our times:

Those learned men who are a terror to children and an ignomi-
nious sight in lovers' eyes, all those butts of a traditional humour
where there is something of the wisdom of peasants, are mathe-
maticians, theologians, lawyers, men of science of various kinds.

The fallacy consists in the identification of 'men of science of
various kinds* with the lowest kind: the figure of the uninspired
pedant in the waxworks of popular imagination* (p. 256). One might
as well identify 'the artist* with the factory-girls who put in the colour
on 'hand-painted' souvenirs.

It is a fallacy of relatively recent origin. Tillyard 1 and Marjorie
Nicolson 2 have shown how profoundly the Pythagorean revival
had influenced Shakespeare and transformed the Elizabethan world-
picture. Perhaps the greatest experience of Milton's youth was peering
for the first time through a Galilean telescope:

Before [his] eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary Deep a dark
Illimitable ocean, without bound,
Without dimension

And we remember John Donne's excitement caused by Kepler's
discoveries:

674

APPENDIX II

675

Man hath weavd out a net, and this net throwne
Upon the Heavens, and now they are his owne . . .

The sense of wonder was shared by mystic, poet, and scientist
alike; their falling apart dates only from the end of the nineteenth
century. In Book One, XI, I have discussed the scientist's motivational
drive, and the emotions to which it gives rise: the present appendix is
meant to illustrate these general considerations by concrete examples
from the lives of a few outstanding men.

Aristotle on Motivation

The mental image that one tries to form of a white-clad, sandalled
member of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, living around 530 B.C. in
Croton, southern Italy, is necessarily hazy. But at least we know that
the Brotherhood was both a scientific academy and a monastic order;
that its members led an ascetic communal life where all property was
shared, thus anticipating the Essenes and the primitive Christian com-
munities. We know that much of their time was spent in contempla-
tion, and that initiation into the higher mysteries of mathematics,
astronomy, and medicine depended upon the purification of spirit and
body, which the aspirant had to achieve by abstinences and examina-
tions of conscience. Pythagoras himself, like St. Francis, is said to have
preached to animals; the whole surviving tradition indicates that his
disciples, while engaged in number-lore and astronomical calculations,
firmly believed that a true scientist must be a saint, and that the wish
to become one was the motivation of his labours.

The Hippocratics followed a materialist philosophy; yet that won-
derfully precise ethical commandment, the Hippocratic Oath, pre-
scribed not only that the physician should do everything in his powers
to help the sick, but also that he should refrain, in the patient's house,
'from any act of seduction, of male or female, bond or free' a truly
heroic act of self-denial. The motivation of Greek science in general
was summed up in a passage by Aristotle, from which I have briefly
quoted before (my italics):

Men were first led to study [natural] philosophy, as indeed they
are today, by wonder. At first they felt wonder about the more super-
ficial problems; afterwards they advanced gradually by perplexing

676 THE ACT OF CREATION

themselves over greater difficulties; e.g., the behaviour of the moon,
the phenomena of the sun, and the origination of the universe. Now
he who is perplexed and wonders believes himself to be ignorant.
Hence even the lover of myths is, in a sense, a philosopher, for a
myth is a tissue of wonders. Thus if they took to philosophy to
escape ignorance, it is patent that they were pursuing science for the
sake of knowledge itself, and not for utilitarian applications. This is
confirmed by the course of historical development itself. For nearly all
the requisites both of comfort and social refinement had been secured before
the quest for this form of enlightenment began. So it is clear that we do
not seek it for the sake of any ulterior application. Just as we call a
man free who exists for his own ends and not for those of another,
so it is with this which is the only free man's science: it alone of the
sciences exists for its own sake. 3

It is amusing to note Aristotle's belief that applied science and
technology had completed their task long before his time as the
italicized lines and other passages in his writings clearly indicate. His
statement is somehow biassed, because it does not take into account
the utilitarian element in the origin of geometry: land-surveying, and
of astronomy: calendar-making. Nevertheless, his surnming up of the
motives which drove the Greek men of science seems to be by and
large true. Thus Archimedes, the greatest of them, was compelled by
necessity to invent a whole series of spectacular mechanical devices
including the water screw, and some engines of war which brought
him all the fame and glory an inventor can dream of. Yet such was his
contempt for these practical inventions that he refused to leave a
written record of them. His passions were mathematics and pure
science; his famous words, 'give me but a firm spot on which to stand
and I will move the earth' reflect a metaphysical fantasy, not an
engineer's ambitions. When Syracuse fell in 212 B.C. to the Roman
general Marcellus, the sage, in the midst of the turmoil and massacre,
was calmly drawing geometrical figures in the sand; according to
tradition, his last words were after being run through the body by a
Roman soldier: 'Pray, do not disturb my circles*. Apocryphal or not,
that tradition symbolizes the Greek attitude to science as a quest
transcending the mortal self.

The Leaders of the Revolution

After the long dark interlude which came to an end with the Pytha-
gorean Renaissance in Italy around a.d. 1500, four men stand high-
lighted on the stage of history: Copernicus, Tycho, Galileo, Kepler.
They were the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution, the men on whose
shoulders Newton stood: what do we know about their personal
motives which ultimately changed the face of this planet?

We know least about Copernicus (1473-1543); as a person, he
seems to have been a pale, insignificant figure, a timid Canon in the
God-forsaken Prussian province of Varmia; his main ambition, as far
as one can tell, was* to be left alone and not to incur derision or dis-
favour. As a student in Italy, he had become acquainted with the
Pythagorean idea of a sun-centred universe, and for the next thirty
or forty years he elaborated his system in secret. Only in the last year
before his death, at the age of seventy, did he agree, under pressure of
his friends and superiors, to publish it; the first printed copy of his
book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres reached him on the
day of his death. It is one of the dreariest and most unreadable books
that made history, and remained practically unnoticed for the next
fifty years, until Kepler took the idea up (the Church turned against
it only eighty years after Copernicus's death).

Copernicus was neither an original nor even a progressive thinker;
he was, as Kepler later remarked, 'interpreting Ptolemy rather than
nature'. He clung fanatically to the Aristotelian dogma that all planets
must move in perfect circles at uniform speeds; the first impulse of his
long labours originated in his discontent with the fact that in the
Ptolemaic system they moved in perfect circles but not at uniform
speed. It was the grievance of a perfectionist in keeping with his
crabbed, secretive, stingy character (which every Freudian would
gleefully identify as the perfect 'anal' type). Once he had taken the
Ptolemaic clockwork to pieces, he began to search for a useful hint
how to put it together again; he found it in Aristarchus's heliocentric
idea which at that time was much in the air.* It was not so much a
new departure as a last attempt to patch up an outdated machinery
by reversing the arrangement of its wheels. As a modern historian has
said, the fact that the earth moves is 'almost an incidental matter in the
system of Copernicus which, viewed geometrically, is just the old
Ptolemaic pattern of the skies, with one or two wheels interchanged
and one or two of them taken out.'*

677

678

THE ACT OF CREATION

For Tour times nine years', as he later confessed, Copernicus had
worked in secret on his book, hugging it to his aching heart it was
the timid Canon s only refuge from a life of frustrations. It was his
version of the harmony of the spheres.

Tycho de Brahe (1546-1601) was an irascible, boastful Danish
nobleman, trucculent and quixotic, born with a silver spoon in his
mouth to which a silver nose was added later, for his own had been
sliced off in a duel with another noble Danish youth, who had the
temerity to claim that he was the better mathematician of the two.
Devotion to science could hardly assume more heroic proportions.
Bufrwith Tycho everything was on a heroic scale: his figure (he kept,
perhaps for the sake of contrast, a dwarf as a court jester); his eating
and drinking, which led to his premature death from a burst bladder
because, with quixotic courtesy, he refused to leave the dinner
table to pass water (even his pet animal, a temperamental elk, died of
drinking too much beer); his quarrels with the kings he entertained,
with the fellow astronomers whom he slandered, and with retainers
whom he put in chains. On an even more gigantic scale were his
observatories and the instruments the likes of which the world had
never seen built on his island in the Sund.

At fourteen Tycho had witnessed a partial eclipse of the sun, and
'it struck him as something divine that men could know the motions
of the stars so accurately that they were able a long rime beforeh and to
predict their places and relative positions'. 6 From then onward his
course was set, and he became the 'Phoenix of Astronomy' against
the resistance of his family who thought such plumage unworthy of a
nobleman. The decisive revelation for him was the predictability of
astronomical events in contrast to the unpredictability of a child's
life among the headstrong Brahes (Tycho had been kidnapped from
his cot and brought up by his Uncle Joerge, a squire and admiral).
His passion for astronomy began much earlier than Copernicus' s and
Kepler's, and took a direction almost opposite to theirs: it was not a
passion for theory-making but for exact observation. Unlike those two,
he was neither frustrated nor unhappy, merely irritated by the trivia-
lity of a Danish nobleman's existence among 'horses, dogs, and luxury'.

He took to astronomy not as an escape or metaphysical lifebelt but
rather as a hobbywhich then turned into the only thing held sacred
by that Gargantuan hea then.

APPENDIX II

679

'You cannot help it, Signor Sarsi, that it was granted to me alone to
discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody
else/ 6 The most conspicuous feature in the character of Galileo (1564-
1642) and the cause of his tragic downfall was vanitynot the bois-
terous and naive vanity of Tycho, but a hypersensitivity to criticism
combined with sarcastic contempt for others: a fatal blend of genius
plus arrogance minus humility. There seems to be not a trace here of
mysticism, of 'oceanic feeling'; in contrast to Copernicus, Tycho, and
Kepler, even to Newton and Descartes who came after him, Galileo
is wholly and frighteningly modern in his consistently mechanistic
philosophy. Hence his contemptuous dismissal in a single sentence of
Kepler's explanation of the tides by the moons attraction: 'He
[Kepler] has lent his ear and his assent to the moon's dominion over
the waters, to occult properties and such like fancuillezze.' 1 The occult
little fancy he is deriding is Kepler's anticipation of Newtonian gravity.

Where, then, in Galileo's personality is the sublime balance between
self-asserting and self-transcending motives which I suggested as the
true scientist's hallmark? I believe it to be easily demonstrable in his
writings on those subjects on which his true greatness rests: the first
discoveries with the telescope, the foundations of mechanics, and of a
truly experimental science. Where that balance is absent during the
tragic years 1613-33, filled with poisonous polemics, spurious priority
claims, and impassioned propaganda for a misleadingly oversimplified
Copernican system in that sad middle period of his life Galileo made
no significant contri bution either to astronomy or to mechanics. One
might even say that he temporarily ceased to be a scientist precisely
because he was entirely dominated by self-asserting motives. The
opposite kind of imbalance is noticeable in Kepler's periods of de-
pression, when he entirely lost himself in mystic speculation, astrology,
and number-lore. In both these diametrically opposed characters, un-
sublimated residues of opposite kind temporarily dominated the
field, upsetting the equihbrium and leading to scientific sterility.

But in the balanced periods of Galileo, the eighteen happy years in
Padua in which most of his epoch-making discoveries in the study of
motion were made, and in the last years of resignation, when he com-
pleted and revised the Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences in these
creative periods we seem to be dealing with a different kind of per-
son, patiently and painstakingly experimenting and meorking on the
motions of the pendulum; on the free fall and descent along an in-
clined plane of heavy bodies; on the flight of projectiles; the elasticity,

68o

THE ACT OF CREATION

cohesion, and resistance of solid bodies, and the effects of percussion
on them; on the buoyancy of 'things which float on the water', and
a hundred related matters. Here we have a man absorbed in subjects
much less spectacular and conducive to fame than the wonders of the
Milky Way and the arguments about the earth's motion yet delight-
ing in his discoveries, of which only a select few friends and corres-
pondents were informed; delighting in discovery for discovery's sake,
in unravelling the laws of order hidden in the puzzling diversity of
phenomena.

That order was for Galileo, as it was for Kepler, a mathematical
order: 'The book of nature is written in the mathematical language.
Without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it/ 8
But unlike Kepler and the Pythagoreans, Galileo did not look at the
'dance of numbers' through the eyes of a mystic. He was interested
neither in number-lore nor in mathematics for its own sake almost
alone among the great scientists of his period, he made no mathematical
discoveries. Quantitative measurements and formulations were for
Galileo simply the most effective tools for laying bare the inherent
rationality of nature. The belief in this rationality (and in the rationality
of nature's creation, the human mind) was Galileo's religion and
spiritual salvation though he did not realize that it was a religion,
based on an act of faith.

His revolutionary methods of proving the rationality of the laws
governing the universe was later called 'experimental philosophy'
and even later, by the much narrower terms 'experimental science' or
'empirical science'. It was a fertile combination of experimenting and
theorizing, which had been tentatively used by some of Galileo's
precursors since the fourteenth century but it was Galileo who
elevated it to a modern technique and a philosophical programme. It
was a monumental bisociation of the valid elements in Greek thought,
transmitted by the Schoolmen (and particularly by the Occamists)
on the one hand, and of the experimental knowledge of engineers,
artisans, and instrument-makers on the other. The Dialogue Concerning
Two New Sciences characteristically opens with a most unusual
suggestion by Salviati (Galileo's mouthpiece): that, as a philosopher,
he had much to learn from mechanics and craftsmen.

Salviati: The constant activity which you Venetians display in your
famous arsenal suggests to the studious mind a large field for investi-
gation, especially that part of the work which involves mechanics;

APPENDIX II

for in this department all types of instruments and machines are con-
stantly being constructed by many artisans, among whom there must
be some who, partly by inherited experience and pardy by their own
observations, have become highly expert and clever in explanation.

Sagredo: You are quite right. Indeed, I myself, being curious by
nature, frequendy visit this place for the mere pleasure of observing
the work of those who, on account of their superiority over other
artisans, we call 'first-rank men*. Conference with them has often
helped me in the investigation of certain effects including not only
those which are striking, but also those which are recondite and
almost incredible. 9

We are reminded of Pythagoras visiting the blacksmith's shop to
discover the secret of vibrating chordsto learn from those dark,
sweaty, and ignorant men about the harmony of the spheres. This is
the point where hubris yields to humility; in his best and happiest
moments, Galileo achieves not only this transition, but is also trans-
formed from a scientist into a poet. In the midst of his formidable
polemical onslaught on the Platonist dualism of despair which con-
trasted the perfect, immutable, crystalline heavens to the earthy
corruption of generation and decay his imagination and language
suddenly grow wings:

Sagredo: I cannot without great wonder, nay more, disbelief, hear
it being attri buted to natural bodies as a great honour and perfection
that they are impassible, immutable, inalterable, etc.: as, conversely, I
hear it esteemed a great imperfection to be alterable, generable,
mutable, etc. It is my opinion that the Earth is very noble and
admirable by reason of the many and different alterations, mutations,
generations, etc., which incessantly occur in it. And if, without being
subject to any alteration, it had been all one vast heap of sand, or a
mass of jade, or ... an immense globe of crystal, wherein nothing
had ever grown, altered, or changed, I should have esteemed it a
wretched lump of no benefit to the Universe, a mass of idleness. . . .
What greater folly can be imagined than to call gems, silver, and
gold noble and earth and soil base? ... If there were as great a
scarcity of earth as there is of jewels and precious metals, there would
be no king who would not gladly give a heap of diamonds and rubies
... to purchase only so much earth as would suffice to plant a
jessarnine in a little pot or to set a tangerine in it, that he might see it

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sprout, grow up, and bring forth goodly leaves, fragrant flowers,
and delicate fruit. . . . These men who so extol inconuptibility,
inalterability, etc., speak thus, I believe, out of the great desire they
have to live long and for fear of death, not considering that, if men
had been immortal, they would not have had to come into the
world. These people deserve to meet with a Medusa's head that
would transform them into statues of diamond and jade that so
they might become more perfect than they are. 10

In another work, Galileo wrote a charming and profound allegory
on 'the motives, methods, and limitations of the 'experimental philo-
sophy' which he had created. The work is II Saggiatore, 'The Assayer'
which has only recendy been translated into English, presumably
because most of it consists of a querulous, scientifically worthless
polemics against the Jesuit scholar Grassi on the subject of comets
(which Galileo insisted on treating as optical illusions largely because
Tycho and Grassi held the opposite views). Yet hidden in this nasty
bunch of nettles are flowers of rare beauty:

Once upon a time, in a very lonely place, there lived a man en-
dowed by nature with extraordinary curiosity and a very pene-
trating mind. For a pastime he raised birds, whose songs he much
enjoyed; and he observed with great admiration the happy contri-
vance by which they could transform at will the very air they
breathed into a variety of sweet songs.

One night this man chanced to hear a delicate song close to his
house, and being unable to connect it with anything but some small
bird he set out to capture it. "When he arrived at a road he found a.
shephered boy who was blowing into a kind of hollow stick while
moving his fingers about on the wood, thus drawing from it a
variety of notes similar to those of a bird, though by a quite different
method. Puzzled, but impelled by his natural curiosity, he gave the
boy a calf in exchange for this flute and returned to solitude. But
realizing that if he had not chanced to meet the boy he would never
have learned of the existence of a new method of forming musical
notes and the sweetest songs, he decided to travel to distant places
in the hope of meeting with some new adventure.

Subsequently, the man discovered that there are many other ways
of producing musical notes from strings and organs, to the swift

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683

vibrations on the wings of mosquitoes and the 'sweet and sonorous
shrilling of crickets by snapping their wings together, though they
cannot fly at all'. But there was an ultimate disappointment waiting
for him:

Well, after this man had come to believe that no more ways of
forming tones could possibly exist . . . when, I say, this man believed
he had seen everything, he suddenly found himself once more
plunged deeper into ignorance and bafflement than ever. For having
captured in his hands a cicada, he failed to diminish its strident noise
either by closing its mouth or stopping its wings, yet he could not
see it move the scales that covered its body, or any other thing. At
last he lifted up the armour of its chest and there he saw some thin
hard ligaments beneath; thinking the sound might come from their
vibration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But
nothing happened until his needle drove too deep, and transfixing
the creature he took away its life with its voice, so that he was still
unable to determine whether the song had originated in those liga-
ments. And by this experience his knowledge was reduced to
diffidence, so that when asked how sounds were created he used to
answer tolerantly that although he knew a few ways, he was sure
that many more existed which were not only unknown but un-
imaginable. 11

Hubris is temporarily submerged by humility. Galileo was the first
of a race of modern experimental scientists convinced of the infalli-
bility of their 'exact empirical methods'; in fact he created the type.
It comes as a surprise to hear him talk about things 'not only unknown
but unimaginable'. But this dtimate modesty, derived from a sense
of wonder close to mysticism, is found in all great scientists even
if hidden by an arrogant facade, and allowed to express itself only on
rare occasions.

About Kepler I have said enough, in this book and elsewhere, to
show that mysticism was the mainspring of his fantastically laborious
life starting with the analogy between God the Father and the Sun,
continued in his lifelong conviction that the universe was built around
the frames of the five Pythagorean solids, and that the planetary motions
were regulated by the laws of musical harmony. But his mystic con-
victions, and the disarrningly child-like streak in his character, did not

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prevent him from casting horoscopes for money however much he
despised himself for it; from indulging in naive snobbery, and quarrel-
ling like a fish-wife with the overbearing Tycho. His vanity had a
perverse twist: he was very proud of himself when his astrological
forecasts of a cold spell and an invasion by the Turks came true; but
towards his real discoveries he was completely indifferent, and he was
astonishingly devoid of professional jealousy. He naively expected the
same of other astronomers; and when Tycho's heirs delayed publi-
cation of his priceless collection of observational data, Kepler simply
stole the material to put it to proper use his ethics did not include
respect for private property in Urania's domains.

"When Kepler had completed the foundations of modern astronomy
by his Third Law, he uttered a long Eureka cry:

The heavenly motions are nothing but a continuous song for
several voices (perceived by the intellect, not by the ear); a music
which, through discordant tensions, through sincopes and cadenzas,
as it were (as men employed them in imitation of those natural
discords), progresses towards certain pre-designed, quasi six-voiced
clausuras, and thereby sets landmarks in the immeasurable flow of
time. It is, therefore, no longer surprising that man, in imitation of
his creator, has at last discovered the art of figured song, which was
unknown to the ancients. Man wanted to reproduce the continuity
of cosmic time within a short hour, by an artful symphony for
several voices, to obtain a sample test of the delight of the Divine
Creator in His works, and to partake of his joy by making music
in the imitation of God. 12

Here we have the perfect union of the two drives: the vain-glorious
ego purged by cosmic awareness ekstasis followed by katharsis.

Newton, Monster and Saint

From the end of the seventeenth century onward the scene becomes
too crowded for a systematic inquiry into individual motivations;
however, I have said enough to suggest the basic pattern and though
the character of the times changed, that pattern rernained essentially
the same.

Look at Newton, for instance: he has been idolized and his character

APPENDIX II

685

bowdlerized to such an extent (above all in the Victorian standard
biography by Brewster) that the phenomenal mixture of monster and
saint out of which it was compounded was all but lost from sight. On
the one hand he was deeply religious and believed with Kepler and
Bishop Usher that the world had been created in 404 B.C.; that the
convenient design of the solar system for instance, all planetary orbits
lying in a single plane was proof of the existence of God, who not
only created the universe but also kept it in order by correcting from
time to time the irregularities which crept into the heavenly motions
and by preventing the universe from collapsing altogether under the
pressure of gravity. On the other hand, he fulminated at any criticism
of his work, whether justified or not, displayed symptoms of persecu-
tion mania, and in his priority fight with Leibniz over the invention
of the calculus he used the perfidious means of carefully drafting in his
own hand the findings, in his own favour, of the 'impartial* committee
set up by the Royal Society. To quote M. Hoskin:

No one supposes that the committee set up by the Royal Society of
which Newton had then been president for several years, was im-
partial. But we can only realize the extent of Newton's share in its
conclusions when we examine a much-corrected draft summary of
what were to be the findings of the committee. The draft is written
in Newton's own hand, and it is fascinating to watch Newton
debating with himself whether the committee ought to say 'We are
satisfied that he [Newton] had invented the method of fluxions
before' 1669, or whether it would sound better if they said 'We find
that he invented the method of fluxions before' 1669; or deciding
that to say 'We are satisfied that Mr. Newton was the first author of
this method' was too terse, and that several more lines of explanation
ought to be inserted before the conclusion 'for which reason we
reckon Mr. Newton the first inventor'. 13

Here is pettiness on a heroic scale combined with a heroic vision
of the universe worked out in minute detail: in other words, the
mixture as before.

The Mysticism of Franklin

As we move on into the eighteenth century the towering genius of
Benjamin Franklin sticks out of it like his Hghtning rod. Printer,

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THE ACT OF CREATION

journalist, pamphleteer, politician, wire-puller, diplomat, and states-
man; pioneer of electricity, founder of the physics of liquid surfaces,
discoverer of the properties of marsh gas, designer of the chevaux de
frise which halted the advance of the British fleet on the Delaware,
inventor of bifocal spectacles and of improved fireplaces, advocate of
watertight bulkheads on ships and of chimney-shafts for the ventila-
tion in mines the list could be continued. And yet this 'first civilized
American', as one of his biographers called him, 14 for all his incompar-
able clarity of thought and lucidity of style, had formed his meta-
physical outlook at the age of sixteen when he read a book by Tryon,
a member of the group of British Pythagoreans. The members of this
sect were chiefly known for their vegetarianism because, like the
ancient Brotherhood, they believed in the transmigration of souls and
wished to avoid the risk of feasting on some reincarnation of a human
being. Franklin became a convert to vegetarianism and believed in
transmigration to the end of his life. At the age of twenty-two he
composed a Pythagorean epitaph for himself; at the age of eighty-four,
the year of his death, he ordered that it should appear, unchanged, on
his tomb. It reads:

The Body
Of

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Printer

(Like the Cover of an Old Book
Its Contents Torn Out
And Stript of its Lettering and Gilding)
Lies Here, Food for Worms.
But the Work Shall Not Be Lost
For It Will (As He Believed) Appear Once More
In a New and More Elegant Edition
Revised and Corrected
By

The Author

His conviction that souls are immortal, that they cannot be des-
troyed and are merely transformed in their migrations led him, by
way of analogy, to one of the first clear formulations of the law of the
conservation of matter. The following quotations will make the
connection clear:

APPENDIX II

687

The power of man relative to matter seems limited to the dividing
it, or mixing the various kinds of it, or changing its form and
appearance by differing compositions of it, but does not extend to
the making or creating of new matter, or annihilating the old.

This was written when he was seventy-eight. The following was
written one year later:

I say that when I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of
water wasted, I cannot suspect the annihilation of souls, or believe
that He will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready made
that now exist, and put Himself to the continual trouble of making
new ones. Thus finding myself to exist in the world, I believe I
shall, in some shape or other, always exist.

The argument seems to indicate that what one might call the prin-
ciple of the 'conservation of souls' was derived from that of the 'con-
servation of matter'. But in fact it was the other way round. As
Kepler had transformed the Holy Trinity into the trinity of Sun
Force Planets, so in Franklin's case, too, a mystical conviction gave
birth, by analogy, to a scientific theory. And could there be a more
charming combination of man's vanity with his transcendental
aspirations than to pray for a 'more elegant, revised, and corrected
edition of one's proud and humble self?

The Fundamentalism of Faraday

The nineteenth-century landscape is crowded with giants; I shall
briefly comment on four of them. In the physical sciences Faraday and
Maxwell are probably the greatest: Einstein, who ought to know, has
put them on a par with Galileo and Newton; and Crowther, who
wrote short biographies of both, makes the fine distinction of calling
Faraday 'the greatest physicist of the nineteenth century' and Maxwell
'the greatest theoretical physicist of the nineteenth century'. To these
let me add, from the biological sciences, Darwin and Pasteur, to make
up a foursome.

Faraday, whom Tyndall described as 'the great mad child', was the
most inhuman character of the four: the son of a sectarian blacksmith,
self-taught, with a passionate temperament which was denied all

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THE ACT OF CREATION

human outlets except religion and science. This was probably the cause
of the protracted episode of mental disorder, comparable to Newton s,
which began when he was forty-nine. Characteristic of the coyness of
science historians is the Encyclopaedia Britannicas reference to Faraday's
clinical insanity: 'In 1841 he found that he required rest, and it
was not till 1845 that he entered on his second great period of
research/

At thirty, shordy after his marriage which remained childless-
Faraday joined an extreme fundamentalist, ascetic sect, the 'Sande-
manians', to which his father and his young wife belonged, and
whose services he had attended since infancy. The Sandemanians con-
sidered practically every human activity as a sin including even the
Victorian virtue of saving money; they washed each other's feet,
intermarried, and refused to proselytize; on one occasion they sus-
pended Faraday's membership because he had to dine, by royal
command, with the Queen at Windsor, and thus had to miss the con-
gregation s Sunday service. It took many years before he was forgiven
and re-elected an Elder of the sect.

In his later years Faraday withdrew almost completely from social
contacts, refusing even the presidency of the Royal Academy because
of its too worldly disposition. The inhuman self-denials imposed by
his creed made Faraday canalize his ferocious vitality into the pursuit of
science, which he regarded as the only other permissible form of
divine worship.

The Metaphysics of Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell was of an altogether different, balanced, and
happy disposition. In his case, too, religious belief became a spur to
scientific activity, but in more subtle ways. He was a double-faced
giant: he completed the classical edifice of the Newtonian universe,
but he also inaugurated the era of what one might call the 'surrealistic
physics of the twentieth century.

As Kepler had embraced the Copernican system 'for physical or if
you prefer, metaphysical reasons', so Maxwell confessed that the
theories of his later period were formed 'in that hidden and dimmer
region where Thought weds Fact. Does not the way to it pass through
the very den of the metaphysician, strewed with the remains of former
explorers and abhorred by every man of science?'

The metaphysician in Maxwell had by that time long outgrown the

APPENDIX II

689

crude materialism of mid-nineteen. th-cenrury science, and its equally
crude forms of Christianity. Maxwell's religious beliefs were con-
ceived in symbolic, almost abstract, terms; they compared to Faraday's
fundamentalist creed as his abstract equations of the electro-magnetic
field compare with the lines of force which to Faraday were 'as real
as matter*. The connection between Maxwell's religious and scientific
views is indeed just as intimate as in the case of Franklin or Kepler.
I have mentioned before how, once he had arrived at his twenty
general equations, Maxwell kicked away the scaffolding from under
him the physical model of vortices in the ether and thus inaugurated
the post-Newtonian era in physics, with its renunciation of all models
and representations, in terms of sensory experience.

There is a characteristic passage in one of his letters to his
wife:

*I can always have you with me in my mind why should we not

have our Lord always before us in our minds If we had seen Him

in the flesh we should not have known Him any better, perhaps not so
well/ In another letter to his wife, he says that he had been re-reading
Ephesians vi. This is not a very inspiring chapter, dealing with re-
lations between parents and children, masters and servants; yet Max-
well comments: 'Here is more about family relations. There are things
which have meanings so deep that if we follow on to know them we
shall be led into great mysteries of divinity. If we reverence them, we
shall even see beyond their first aspect a spiritual meaning. For God
speaks to us more plainly in these bonds of our life than in anything
that we can understand/

J. G. Crowther who, as an adherent of the Marxist philosophy
of history can hardly be accused of mystic inclinations remarks on
this curious passage: 'Here Maxwell accepts material relationships with
the belief that acquaintance with them will lead to spiritual under-
standing. He proceeds from the contemplation of material relation-
ships to spiritual truth, from the model of the electro-magnetic field
to the equations. The influence of the New Testament is seen also in
hi sinterpretation of self-sacrifice. During the last years of his life, his
wife was an invalid. He nursed her personally with the most assiduous
care. At one period he did not sleep in a bed for three weeks, though
he delivered his lectures and superintended the laboratory as usual.
The modernity of Maxwell's science, and the antiquity of his sociology
and religion appear incongruous. But it may be noted that though

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his views on sociology and religion were antique, they were superior
to those of nearly all his scientific, contemporaries. He at least thought
about these problems, and if he was unable to find modern answers
to them, he learned enough of them to avoid the intellectual phili-
stinism of his time/

It was the time when Berthelot proclaimed: 'The world today has
no longer any mystery for us'; when Haeckel had solved all his
Weltratsel and A. R. Wallace, in his book on The Wonderful Century,
declared that the nineteenth century had produced Wenty-four
fundamental advances, as against only fifteen for all the rest of recorded
history*. The Philistines everywhere were 'dizzy with success* to
quote once more Stalin's famous phrase of 1932, when factories and
power dams were going up at great speed while some seven million
peasants were dying of starvation. It had indeed been a wonderful
century for natural philosophy, but at its end moral philosophy had
reached one of its lowest ebbs in history and Maxwell was well
aware of this. He was aware of the limitations of a rigidly deterministic
outlook; it was he who, in his revolutionary treatment of the dy-
namics of gases, replaced mechanical causation by a statistical approach
based on the theory of probability a decisive step towards quantum
physics and the principle of mdeterminism. Moreover, he was fully
aware of the far-reaching implications of this approach, not only for
physics but also for philosophy: 'It is probable that important results
will be obtained by the application of this the statistical method, which
is as yet litde known and is not familiar to our minds. If the actual
history of Science had been different, and if the scientific doctrines
most familiar to us had been those which must be expressed in this
way, it is possible that we might have considered the existence of a
certain kind of contingency a self-evident truth, and treated the
doctrine of philosophical necessity as a mere sophism.' 15

Already at the age of twenty-four he had realized the Hmitations of
materialist philosophy: 'The only laws of matter are those which our
minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it
by matter.' 16 Twenty years later, at the height of his fame, he gave full
rein to his hobby, satirical verse, to ridicule the shallow materialism
of the Philistines. The occasion was the famous presidential address by
John Tyndall to the British Association meeting in Belfast. TyncLall,
a generous soul but a narrow-minded philosopher, attacked the
'theologians' and extolled the virtues of the brave new materialist
creed. Maxwell's satire is still valid today:

APPENDIX II

691

In the very beginning of science,

the parsons, who managed things then,
Being handy with hammer and chisel,

made gods in the likeness of men;
Till Commerce arose, and at length

some men of exceptional power
Supplanted both demons and gods by

the atoms, which last to this hour.

From nothing comes nothing, they told us,

nought happens by chance but by fate;
There is nothing but atoms and void,

all else is mere whims out of date!
Then why should a man curry favour

with beings who cannot exist,
To compass some petty promotion

in nebulous kingdoms of mist? . . .

First, then, let us honour the atom,

so lively, so wise, and so small;
The atomists next let us praise, Epicurus,

Lucretius, and all;
Let us damn with faint praise Bishop Butler,

in whom many atoms combined
To form that remarkable structure,

it pleased him to call his mind.

In another poem he wrote:

. . . While down the stream of Evolution

We drift, expecting no solution

But that of the survival of the fittest.

Till, in the twilight of the gods,

When earth and sun are frozen clods,

When, all its energy degraded,

Matter to aether shall have faded;

We, that is, all the work we've done,

As waves in aether, shall for ever run

In ever-widening spheres through heavens beyond the sun.

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And thus in the nineteenth century's most advanced scientific mind
we meet once again, in a sublimated and ratified form, the ancient
belief in the indestructibility of the numinous.

The Atheism of Darwin

Dr. Robert Darwin was an atheist who chose for his son Charles the
career of a country clergyman simply because this seemed to be the
most gentlemanly occupation for a youth so obviously devoid of any
particular ambition and intellectual excellence. Charles himself fully
agreed with this choice. As a student at Cambridge he had read Pearson
on the Creeds, and had come to the conclusion that he did not 'in the
least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible'. 17
Even during the voyage of the Beagle he amused the officers by his
naive orthodoxy, and he was deeply shocked when one of his ship-
mates expressed doubts concerning the biblical account of the Flood.
Such a rigid fundamentalist belief could not be reconciled with specu-
lations about the origin of species; his loss of faith coincided with his
conversion to the evolutionary theory. For a while he fought a rear-
guard action against his doubts by day-dreaming about the discovery
of old manuscript texts which would confirm the historical truth of
the Gospels; but this did not help much. In the months following his
return from the voyage the new theory was born and his faith in
religion was dead.

Darwin's arguments against religion were as crude and literal-
minded as his belief had been: 'the miracles were not credible to any
sane man'; the Old Testament gave a 'manifestly false history of the
world, with the -Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc/ 18
He took strong exception to the 'damnable doctrine' that non-believers,
'and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best
friends', will be everlastingly punished. As for Hinduism or Buddhism,
and the persistence of religious aspirations throughout human history,
he explained them in an oddly Lamarckian argument as the result
of 'inherited experience*.

Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation
of a belief in God on the minds of children by producing so strong
and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains, not as yet fully
developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their

APPENDIX II

693

belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and
hatred of a snake.

Before the great turning point in his life, 'the nuclear discovery' of
his theory, he had not only been an orthodox believer, but at least on
one occasion, in the grandeur of the Brazilian forest, he had also felt
that quasi-mystical, 'deep inward experience 5 that there must be more
in man than 'the mere breath of his body.' 1 But after the turning
point such experiences did not recur and he himself wondered some-
times whether he was not like a man who had become colour-blind.
At the same decisive period, when he was about thirty, Darwin suffered,
in his own words, a 'curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic
tastes'. An attempt to re-read Shakespeare bored him 'to the point of
physical nausea'. 30 He preferred popular novels of the sentimental
kind so long as they had a happy ending. In his autobiography he
complained:

But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry.
My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding
general laws out of a large collection of facts, but why this should
have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain on which the higher
tastes depend, I cannot conceive. The loss of these tastes is a loss of
happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more
probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part
of our nature.

Darwin's 'religious tastes', if the expression may be permitted, had
been of an equally unsubtle nature. 'His sensibility was of that inverted
order that is unable to extend to human beings the same sympathy and
respect it has for animals. As a zoologist Darwin was naturally more at
home in the realm of animal behaviour than of philosophy. This may
be why so much of his discussion of religion, morality and aesthetics
seems painfully naive/ 21 The concept of 'religious experience' did not
mean to Darwin what it did to MaxweE the intuition of an 'unknown
reality which held the secret of infinite space and enternal time'; it
meant to him believing the story told in Genesis, and also in eternal
hellfire. In The Descent of Man, he had denied that language was a unique
attri bute of man because animals too use sounds and gestures to com-
municate emotions. This confusion of sign and symbol equally pervades
his discussions of religion. In his youth he had believed in the 'strict and

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THE ACT OF CREATION

literal truth of every word in the Bible'; later on he considered himself
an atheist because he did not believe in the Tower of Babel. Neither
attitude has much relevance to the unconscious, inner motivation of his
work. More relevant is the fact that the kind of undefinable intuition
which he had experienced in the Brazilian forest went out of his life at
the same time as the 'atrophy of the higher tastes' set in. This was at the
time when he made his basic discovery. The remaining forty odd years
were spent on the heroic labours of its elaboration.

Darwin, as we have seen, was like Copernicus, essentially a one-
idea man. Each had his 'nuclear inspiration' early in life, and spent the
rest of his life working it out the ratio of inspiration to perspiration
being heavily in favour of the second. Both lacked the many-sidedness,
that universality of interest and amazing multitude of achievement in
unrelated fields of research which characterized Kepler, Newton,
Descartes, Franklin, Faraday, Maxwell, and hundreds of lesser but
equally versatile geniuses. It is perhaps no coincidence that both Darwin
and Copernicus, after the decisive turning point when their course
was set, led a life of duty, devotion to task, rigorous self-discipline, and
spiritual desiccation. It looks as if the artesian wells of their inspiration
had been replaced by a mechanical water supply kept under pressure
by sheet power of will.

In Darwin's case, the magnitude of this power must be measured
against the handicap of forty years of chronic ill health, which also
afflicted his large family. The sense of duty which kept him going
became his,, true religion. After the publication of the Origin and the
Descent, he became one of the most celebrated personalities in Europe,
but he continued to lead the same rigorously scheduled life, without
allowing himself to bask in the sun, without getting spoilt or dis-
tracted from his work. 'While others used the prestige of Darwinism
to promote their social or political views, Darwin himself forebore
doing so;' aia and when Marx proposed to dedicate to him the English
translation of Das Kapital Darwin refused the honour.

His last years were spent in churning out a number of technical
books and papers; his very last book was called The Formation of Vege-
table Mould through the Action of Worms. He had started this research on
earthworms at twenty-eight, after his return from the voyage of the
Beagle; now, after this momentous detour, he finished it at the age of
seventy-two, one year before his death. It is a measure of the enormous
vogue which Darwin enjoyed that the worm book, in spite of its un-
prepossessing tide, sold eight thousand five hundred copies in the first

APPENDIX II

69S

three years after publication which would be quite a respectable
success for a novel in our own days.

On one occasion in his late years Darwin was asked to state his
opinion on religion. He answered that while the subject of God was
'beyond the scope of man's intellect', his moral obligations were
nevertheless clear: 'Man can do his duty.* On another occasion in an
addendum to his autobiography he explained that, even without a
belief in God, a man 'can have for his rule of life . . . only to follow
those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to

him the best ones By degrees it will be more intolerable to hiir to

obey his sensuous passions rather than his highest impulses, which when
rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may
occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others,
whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the
solid satbfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost judge
or conscience.' He never realized that statements of this kind destroyed
the very foundations of any strictly materialistic and deterministic
philosophy, including his own according to which human morality
was derived from innate 'social instincts'. 'It can hardly be disputed',
he wrote in his disastrous controversy against Mill, 'that the social
feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals: and why should
they not be so in men?' But from what source, then, would man derive
the power to follow those instincts 'which seemed to him the best ones',
to obey his 'highest impulses' as opposed to his 'sensuous passions';
and even 'to act in opposition to the opinion of others'? The source of
that power must evidendy be the 'innermost judge, or conscience'
concepts of a transcendental nature and quite heretical from the point
of view of a purely materialist world-view.

It has been said that Darwin's philosophizing was 'painfully naive*.
Yet his life bore witness, not to his philosophical rationalizations, but
to his transcendental beliefs he was a croyant malgri lui. The proof is
in the closing passages of his two great books:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many
plants of many kinds, with bkds singing on the bushes, with various
insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp
earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so dif-
ferent from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex
a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. . . .
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most

6g6 THE ACT OF CREATION

exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the
production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur
in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally
breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst
this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most
wonderful have been, and are being evolved. 22

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though
not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic
scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been
aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher
destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with
hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to
discover it; and I have given the evidence to the best of my ability.
"We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with
all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most
debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but
to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has
penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system
with all these exalted powers Man still bears in his bodily frame
the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. 28

Here is humility and wonder, and a sense of participation which
transcends not only the individual self but the collective pride of
homo sapiens.

The Faith of Pasteur

Louis Pasteur's character and life is an almost perfect illustration of
ambition, pride, vanity, self-righteousness, combined with self-sacri-
fice, charity, humility, romanticism, and religion, to make a happy
balance of opposites. At the height of his fame, Pasteur related with
evident relish that at an official reception the Queen of Denmark and
the Queen of Greece had broken etiquette by walking up to him to
pay their homage. But he also spent several months every year for
five years in the mountains of Cevennes, to find a cure for an epidemic
disease of silkworms. When he had found its cause, and saved the
French silk manufacturing industry from ruin, the Minister of Agri-
culture sent him for examination three lots of eggs which a famous

APPENDIX II

<597

silk-worm breeder was distributing throughout the country, ignoring
Pasteur's recommendations of his method to obtain healthy strains.
Pasteur replied:

M. le Ministre These three samples of seed are worthless They

will in every instance succumb to corpuscle disease For my part

I feel so sure of what I affirm, that I shall not even trouble to test, by
hatching them, the samples which you have sent me. I have thrown
them into the river.

And to a sceptical breeder, he wrote about the same time:

M. le Marquis You do not know the first word of my investiga-
tions, of their results, of the principles which they have established,
and of their practical implications. Most of them you have not read
. . . and the others you did net understand.

in his polemics against scientific adversaries he used the same im-
passioned language the style sometimes reminds one of Galileo. But,
unlike Galileo, he engaged in controversy only after he had established
his case beyond all possible doubt in his experimental laboratory, and
had hardened it by countless painstaking repetitions. As a result,
again unlike Galileo, he was invariably, and to his opponents infuria--
tingly, proven right. He even wrote an article in the Galilean dialogue
style for a wine-growers trade journal. The dialogue was meant to be
a report of Pasteur's conversation with the mayor of Vblnay, M.
Boillot which resulted in the conversion of M. Boillot to the Pas-
teurization of Burgundy wines. This epic dialogue starts with:

Pasteur: Do you heat your wines, M. Make?

M. Boillot: No sir. ... I have been told that heating may affect
unfavourably the taste of our great wines.

Pasteur: Yes, I know. In fact it has been said that to heat these
wines is equivalent to an amputation* Will you be good enough, M.
Maire, to follow me into my experimental cellar?

For the next two pages M. Boillot is shown what's what. He has to
taste the treated and untreated wines of a score of vintages and vine-
yards, until he capitulates and admits the superior quality of the

698

THE ACT OF CREATION

pasteurized wines including those which came from his own vine-
yards:

M. Boillot: I am overwhelmed. I have the same impression as if I
were seeing you pouring gold into our country.

Pasteur: There you are, my dear countrymen, busy with politics,
elections, superficial reading of newspapers but neglecting the serious
books which deal with matters of importance to the welfare of the
country. . . . And yet, M. Maire, had you read with attention, you
could have recognized that everything I wrote was based on precise
facts, official reports, devastations by the most competent experts,
whereas my opponents had nothing to offer but assertions without
proof.

M. Boillot: ... Do not worry, Monsieur. From now on I shall no
longer believe those who contradict you and I shall attend to the
matter of heating the wines as soon as I return to Volnay. 24

Pasteur had grown up in the Arbois; he was a connoisseur of wine,
and he despised beer. But after the defeat of France by the Prussians
in 1871, he considered it his patriotic duty to improve the quality of
French beer with the declared intention to produce a 'biere de la
revanche' , superior to the Germans* cherished national drink. He even
invaded, armed with his microscope, the sacred premises of Whit-
bread's in London; his laconic account of that historic visit makes one
appreciate the drama that took place.

Pasteur was reverently handed two casks of the famed brew. He put
a drop of one under the microscope and 'I immediately recognized
three or four disease filaments in the microscopic dd. These findings
made me bold enough to state in the presence of the master-brewer,
who had been called in, that these beers would rapidly spoil . . . and
that they must already be somewhat defective in taste, on which point
everyone agreed, although after long hesitation. I attri buted this
hesitation to the natural reserve of a manufacturer whom one compels
to declare that his merchandise is not beyond reproach. "When I re-
turned to the same brewery less than a week later, I learned that the
managers had made haste to acquire a microscope.' It was not the least
of the rmracles that Pasteur achieved.

Silkworms, wine, beer and before that studies on the souring of
milk, the turning of wine into vinegar, of vinegar into acid, of beet-
sugar into alcohol. *Louis ... is now up to his neck in beet-juice*,

APPENDIX II

699

Madame Pasteur complained in a letter. Each, of these campaigns was
conducted with the same crusading zeal, the same showmanship, the
same patience and precision in method. Pasteur's father had been a
sergeant in the Napoleonic army; after Waterloo he had become a
tanner in the Arbois. He had probably heard the Emperor's famous
speech at the Pyramids: 'Soldiers, from these summits forty centuries
look down upon you/ Louis Pasteur, crouching with his microscope
on top of one of the gigantic vats at Whitbread's, may have spoken
the same words to the awe-stricken master-brewers.

And that is hardly an exaggeration, for in Pasteur's work we see
clearly how the trivial by a short step can lead to the momentous,
and how the two are inextricably mixed up in the scientist's mind and
motives. One of the landmarks of science is the publication, in 1877,
of Pasteur's book with the unprepossessing tide, Etudes sur la Biere,
Ses Maladies, Les Causes qui les Provoquent. Procede pour la Rendre
Inalterable . . . followed, almost as an afterthought, by . . . Avec me
Thiorie Nouvelle de la Fermentation. It contains the first complete
statement of Pasteur's revolutionary discovery that yeast and all other
agents which cause fermentation and putrefaction, are living beings of
very small size that is, micro-organisms, germs. In a similar way, his
work on the silkworms had confirmed that contagious diseases were
caused by microbes of different varieties. The principles of steriliza-
tion and partial sterilization (pasteurization'); of immunization, of
antisepsis and asepsis; our knowledge of the causative agents of
disease and of the general conditions which determine the organism's
receptivity for those agents; lasdy, the 'domestication of microbes
and their use as antibiotics all this grew out of Pasteur's often far-
fetched researches into some specific technical problem, undertaken
for apparently trivial motives.

Yet there were other motivational factors at work which lent urgency
and drive to each of these technical research projects, from the earliest
(On the Turning of Milk) onward: the intuitive vision of a grand unitary
design underlying all biochemical transformations, a design which
embraced not only the utilization of energy by living organisms in
health and disease, but alsoas we shall see in a moment the secret
of the origin of life. And finally, each particular project whether it
was concerned with silkworms, wine, or the inoculation of cattle
against anthrax though carried through with consummate show-
manship and a Gallic flourish, was nevertheless a crusade for the
public benefit; the resulting self-gratification was no more than a

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THE ACT OF CREATION

delicious by-product. Through the same interaction of the trivial and
monumental which led to Pasteur's intellectual triumphs, the pro-
ponent of the hihe de la revanche became the greatest benefactor of
mankind since Hippocrates.

I have mentioned Pasteur's hope to discover 'the secret of life*.
This is to be taken quite literally.

The earliest discovery of Pasteur, and for him the most exciting in
all his life, was the asymmetry of molecules as a specific characteristic of
living organisms in other words, the fact that the molecules of living
matter come in two varieties which, though chemically identical, are
in their spatial structure like mirror images to each other or like
right and left gloves. 'Left-handed' molecules rotate polarized light to
the left, 'right-handed' molecules to the right; life substances are thus
'optically active'. "Why this should be so we still do not quite know; but
it remains a challenging fact that 'no other chemical characteristic is as
distinctive of living organisms as is optical activity'.

1 am on the verge of mysteries, and the veil which covers them is
getting thinner and thinner. The night seems to me too long. . . .
Life as manifested to us is a function of the asymmetry of the universe.
, . . The universe is asymmetrical; for, if all the bodies in motion which
compose the solar system were placed before a glass, the image in it

could not be superimposed upon the reality Terrestrial magnetism

... the opposition between positive and negative electricity, are but
resultants of asymmetrical actions and movements. . . . Life is domi-
nated by asymmetrical actions. I can even imagine that all living species
are primordially in their structure, in their external forms, functions
of cosmic asymmetry.' 25

These intoxicating speculations caused Pasteur to embark on a
series of fantastic experiments, aiming at nothing less than the creation
of life by means of imitating the asymmetric action of nature in the
laboratory, using powerful magnets and all kinds of optical tricks. It
was this alchemist's dream which gave birth to the 'grand design*
which I have mentioned and which like a blue-print drawn in in-
visible ink remained the secret inspiration behind his researches.
Luckily, circumstances compelled him to descend from the monumen-
tal to the trivial level: Pasteur had to give up trying to create life and
had to get 'up to his neck in beet-juice'. He had been appointed Pro-
fessor of Chemistry in Lille; and no sooner was he installed than
Monsieur Bigo, an industrialist engaged in the production of alcohol

APPENDIX II TOI

from beet-sugar, came to consult him about certain difficulties en-
countered in the process. Since this was one of the main industries of
the region, Pasteur embarked on the task with patriotic fervour it
was the first in the series of this type of venture, long before the silk-
worms, the wine, and the beer.

In exaniining the fermented juice of the beet, he found in it a com-
ponent, amyl alcohol, which turned out to be optically active. There-
fore its molecules must be asymmetrical; but according to the grand
design, asymmetry is the privilege and secret of life; therefore fermenta-
tion came from the activity of living things, of microbes. At this point
the chain reaction set in which fused the germ theory of fermentation
to the germ theory of disease. Thus did the alchemist's pipe-dream
give birth to modern medicine as Kepler's chimerical quest for the
harmonies led to modern astronomy.

Here, I believe, is the clue to the scientist's ultimate motivation
the equivalent of the meeting of the tragic and the trivial planes in the
artist's mind. Peering through his microscope or polariscope, in a
never-ending series of dreary, technical, specialized investigations of
amyl acid, tartaric acid, butyric acid, Pasteur was attending on one
level to the business in hand the beets of Mr. Bigo; on another he
was scanning the secret of life 'through veils getting thinner and
thinner'. Thus did some early explorers nourish the secret, childish
hope to find at the North Pole a crater revealing the axis on which the
earth turns. So did the Phoenician seamen hope to find, beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, the island of Atlantis.

When he was thirty and newly married, Pasteur, though almost
penniless, embarked on an expedition through Central Europe a
treasure-hunt for an elusive commodity dear to his heart: paratartaric
acid, a chemical derived from the deposit in the vats of fermented
wine (p. 193 f). He returned and described this Odyssey in an article
in the Strasbourg newspaper La Veriti, ending with the epic words:
'Never was treasure sought, never adored beauty pursued over hill
and dale with greater ardour.*

The dream which turned the tartar-crystals into a symbol of the
secret of life proved immensely fertile. But since the actual experiments
of creating life had failed, Pasteur, in his later years, reversed his
opinions and embarked on another celebrated controversy to prove
that the alleged 'spontaneous generation' of micro-organisms (without
progenitors, out of fermenting or putrefying matter) was a legend.
'It is a striking fact/ writes Dubos, 'perhaps worthy of the attention

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THE ACT OF CREATION

of psychoanalysts, that Pasteur devoted much of his later life to demon-
strating that nature operates as if it were impossible to achieve what he

Pasteur had failed to do Just as he had failed in his attempts to

create or modify life, so he proved that others, who had claimed to be
successful where he had failed, had been merely the victims of
illusion/ 26

This may indeed have been a factor which contri buted to his change
of attitude, but only a superficial one, like his childish boastings and
showmanship. The obsession with the secret of life had bitten into
deeper strata, where opposites cease to be opposites, the law of con-
tradiction no longer applies, and a plus and minus sign become inter-
changeable. Among his unpublished writings there is a passage
written when he was approaching sixty:

I have been looking for spontaneous generation for twenty years
without discovering it. No, I do not judge it impossible. But what
allows you to make it the origin of life? You place matter before
life and you decide that matter has existed for all eternity. How do
you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel
scientists ... to consider that life has existed during eternity, and not
matter? You pass from matter to life because your intelligence of
today . . . cannot conceive things otherwise. How do you know that
in ten thousand years one will not consider it more likely that matter
has emerged from life . . . ? 26a

At the age of forty-six Pasteur suffered a stroke which left his left
arm and leg permanently paralysed. Yet his greatest work was done
during the following two decades, when he was an invalid and had to
use his assistants* hands to carry out his experiments. In old age he
would often browse in his earlier publications. 'Turning the pages of
his writings, he would marvel at the lands that he had revealed by dis-
pelling the fogs of ignorance and by overcoming stubbornness. He
would live again his exciting voyages, as he told Loir in a dreamy voice:
"How beautiful, how beautiful ! And to think I did it all. I had forgotten
it."'"

2. INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

I have been discussing the motivational drive of scientists. Can we
make any generalizations regarding their intellectual characteris-
tics in addition to those described earlier on (Chapters V-X)?

Precociousness

In the first place, such data as we possess confirm the popular belief
that scientists reach their peak of creativity at an earlier age thai?
artists. Most scientists made their basic discoveries when they were
under forty exceptions like Faraday or Pasteur always granted. In a
valuable study on Nobel Prize winners by L. Moulin 28 we find the
average age at which a person is awarded the prize to be fifty-one; but
for physicists it is forty-five. (The award, of course, often lags by a
number of years behind the discovery.) It is interesting to note that
the stupendous increase, over the last half-century, in the volume of
knowledge to be mastered had no significant influence on the age
at which the award is received: between 1901 and 1930 the average,
for physicists, was forty-five years, between 193 1 and i960, forty-six
years. The average for chemists was fifty years for the first, fifty-one
for the second period; for the award-winner in medicine it fell from
fifty-five in the first, to fifty-three in the second period presumably
as an effect of increasing team-work. The figures also indicate an age-
gradient from the more 'theoretical* to the more 'empirical' or 'applied'
sciences. This is in keeping with the well-known fact of the pre-
cociousness of mathematicians the most 'theoretical' among scien-
tists (unfortunately there is no Nobel Prize for mathematics).

A related phenomenon is the dazzling multitude of infant prodigies
among scientists: for every Mozart there are about three Pascals,
Maxwells, Edisons. To quote only a few examples: the greatest

703

704

THE ACT OF CREATION

Renaissance astronomer before Copernicus, Johann Mueller from
Koenigsberg, called Regiomontanus (1436-1476), published at the age
of twelve the best astronomical yearbook for 1448; was asked at
fifteen by the Emperor Frederick III to cast a horoscope for the im-
perial bride; went to the University of Leipzig when he was eleven,
and at seventeen enjoyed European fame; he died at forty. Pascal had
laid the foundations for the modern treatment of conic sections before
he was sixteen. Jeremiah Horrocks (1619-1641) applied Kepler's laws
to the orbit of the moon and made other fundamental contri butions
to astronomy before his death at the age of twenty-one. Evariste
Galois (1811-1832), one of the most outstanding geniuses in the history
of mathematics, was killed in a duel at the age of twenty-one (cf. p.
111). The notes which he left behind amount to no more than sixty
pages of his collected works'; but those sixty pages inaugurated a new
epoch in the theory of equations, and 'contain more mathematics
than is to be found in some libraries crammed with books bearing
mathematical tides'. 29 Clerk Maxwell, who lived to forty-eight, had
his first mathematical paper read before the Royal Society at the age of
fifteen; in the discussion, the geometrical construction which was the
subject of the paper was described .as superior to Newton's and Des-
cartes' discussion of the same problem.

In contrast to this streak of precocity, however, is the fact that the
majority of geniuses seem to have done rather badly in the normal
school curriculumoften including the very subject on which later
on they were to leave their mark^ 'In his student days Einstein had
been a lazy dog,' his erstwhile teacher Minkovsky remarked: 'He never
bothered about mathematics at all/ 80

Scepticism and Credulity

But the paradox is not too difficult to resolve. I have emphasized before
(Book One, X) that the scientific genius is a curious mixture of scep-
ticism and credulity. At school he is frequendy bored by and cynical
about orthodox doctrines which unimaginative and tradition-bound
masters try to cram into his head. To quote Einstein once more:
'Physics too [as taught in the classroom] were split into special fields
each of which could engulf a short life's work without ever satisfying
the hunger for deeper knowledge. For the examinations one haul to
staff oneself with sill this rubbish, whether one wanted to or not;

APPENDIX II 705

This compulsion had such a terrifying effect on me that after my final?
the consideration of any scientific problems was distasteful to me for a
whole year.' 31

The student's matrices of thought are still fluid later on, when they
have hardened, he will only be able to recapture his erstwhile inno-
cence at inspired moments. Under propitious conditions, inexperience
can be an asset: it entices the novice into asking questions which nobody
has asked before, into seeing a problem where nobody saw one before.
That is what young Maxwell probably did when he was lying on the
grass before his father's house, looking at the sky and wondering. That is
what Einstein did when at the age of sixteen he indulged in the fantasy
of travelling at the speed of light; and what Edison did when 'his
demands for explanations of what seemed obvious to his elders created
the belief that he was less than normally intelligent*.

Einstein has compared the intellectual appetite of youth 'to the
voraciousness of a healthy beast of prey*. When the child has learned
that eveiything has a name, it develops a 'naming mania'. When it
has learned that all events have 'becauses' it develops the mania of
asking 'Why? Why? Why?' A fool, says the Bible, can ask more
questions in a minute than a sage can answer in a week. But sages are
scarce, and the child soon learns to accept answers which are not real
explanations but conventional formulae or evasions, and to be content
with them; the keen edge of its appetite for knowledge has become
blunted. Only geniuses preserve their infantile voracity for 'becauses'
and the naive hope that there are real answers to every question.
'Why is the moon round? Why does the apple fall from die tree?
Why are there five planets instead of twenty, and why do they move
as they do? Why does milk go sour? Why could the dairymaid not
get the pox? Why is the colour of a sailor's blood in the tropics a
brighter red than in Hamburg? Why did the dead frog's legs twitch?*
One of the hallmarks of genius is that he has never lost the habit of
asking foolish questions like these each of which led to a momentous
discovery.

Abstraction and Practicality

The reasons for this peculiarity have already been discussed: scepticism
towards the conventional answers, the refusal to take anything for
granted, the freshness of vision of the unblinkered mind. Taken
together, these cceate an acuity ofpcxception^ a. gife for seeing the: banal

706"

THE ACT OF CREATION

objects of everyday experience in a sharp individual light as painters
and poets do, each in his own way; to observe details and notice
trivia which escape the attention of others. This leads us to a second
pair of complementary qualities (the first was scepticism paired with
credulity) in the scientist's make-up: the coexistence of abstract and
concrete moulds of thought, the faculty of combining high flights of
theory with a keen sense of the practical and down-to-earth a knack
for picking up trivial clues. Pythagoras in search of the harmony of
the spheres enters the blacksmith's workshop; Archimedes gets his
solution from observing a smudge in his bath-tub; Galileo exhorts his
friends to learn natural philosophy from the craftsmen in the arsenals of
Venice; Kepler notices that the slit in his roof which let the rain through
can be used as the aperture of a camera obscura to observe the sun;
Claude Bernard takes the temperature of a rabbit's denervated ear and
is led to the discovery that blood-vessels are controlled by nerves.

Throughout history, genius displays these complementary qualities
of making lofty generalizations based on humble clues. 'It is very
necessary', wrote Maxwell, 'that those who are trying to learn from
books the facts of physical science should be enabled to recognize these
facts when they meet with them out-of-doors. Science appears to us

with a very different aspect after we have found out that we may

find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gym-
nastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the
sea. This habit of recognizing principles amid the endless variety of
their action . . . tends to rescue our scientific ideas from that vague
condition in which we too often leave them buried among the other
products of a lazy credulity/ 32

To have one's head in the clouds does not prevent one from having
one's feet firmly on the ground. The scientist, as the artist, must live
on several planes at once look at eternity through the window of
time. All great geniuses of science were endowed with this particular
dualism of their faculties: a head for generalizations and an eye for
minute particulars; searching for the secret of life in the beet-juice of
M. Bigo; tilting at windmills without falling off the horse.

Multiple Potentiab

I must mention one more characteristic property shared, apparently, by
most great scientists: one may call it the multiple potential*. It helps to

APPENDIX II 707

explain the paradox of the apparently haphazard way in which scien-
tists are often launched on their career or on a particular line of re-
search.

Kepler was designated to become a theologian when he was un-
expectedly offered the job of a mathematician at a provincial school.
Haiiey was a botanist when the accident of dropping his friend's
precious spar crystal made him change to crystallography, and become
a pioneer in that field. Darwin, preparing to become a country curate,
had the good luck of being invited to join the expedition of the Beagle
without that chance it is extremely doubtful whether he would have
written The Origin of Species. The direction of all of Pasteur's later re-
searches was determined by his first discoveries about the optical
activity of paratartaric acid: he himself said that he had become 'en-
chained to the inescapable logic' by which one discovery gave birth
to the next. As for Alexander Fleming, the coincidences which deter-
mined his initial choice of career are about as fantastic as the actual
circumstances of his discovery. He had adopted the medical profession
because his brother was a doctor; he had gone to St. Mary's where he
was to spend the whole of his life, because he had played against their
water-polo team; and he chose bacteriology as his branch of research
because Freeman, the assistant of Almroth Wright, wanted to keep
Heming, who was an excellent shot, in St. Mary's rifle club.

The answer to the paradox is, apparently, that given the type of
mind which Fleming had, he would in all likelihood have left his
mark on any other branch of experimental science into which the
wind of chance had blown him. In Pasteur's case, for instance, Dubos
has convincingly shown that 'the inescapable logic' which his researches
followed was by no means inescapable; for in Pasteur's notebooks and
casual remarks there are projects and germs of discoveries which, had
he only had the time to follow them up, or had the wind of circum-
stance blown from a different direction, would have brought an
equally fertile harvest.

True genius, according to Dr. Johnson, 'is a mind of large general
powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction, ready
for all things, but chosen by circumstances for one'. Dubos, after
quoting the Doctor, fully concurs with his opinion: e It is often by a
trivial, even an accidental decision, that we direct our activities into a
certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions
of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of
the dtimate orientation or of the outlet towards which we travel, and

708

THE ACT OF CREATION

the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no
returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is
over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be/ 33
This moving confession of a great scientist seems to be based on the
assumption that creativity is a kind of convertible energy which can
be applied to various forms of activity as the pressure of steam can
be converted into electricity or motion. Stated in this extreme form,
it is certainly an exaggeration: you cannot convert the creative energy
of a painter into the composition of an opera. But it is nevertheless
true that the particular type of intuition which makes the scientific
genius can be focussed on problems as wide apart as colour-theory and
celestial mechanics in Newton's case, or electro-magnetism and the
theory of gases in Maxwell's with equally striking results. The versa-
tility, the quicksilvery mobility of minds like Archimedes', Galileo's,
Descartes', Franklin's, Faraday's, or Edison's is truly phenomenal; they
seemed to walk through life charged with static electricity, so that
whatever object they touched, they drew a spark. One-idea men, such
as Copernicus or Darwin, seem to be the exceptions among the truly
great, and multi-potentiality the rule. The ominous trend towards
over-specialization, its dangers to the creative mind, and the educa-
tional and administrative reforms needed to remedy it, are outside the
scope of this book. .

NOTE

To p, 677. The Artistarchian system and the motion of the earth had been
discussed or taught by Copemicus's forerunners, the astronomers Peurbach and
Regiomontanus, by his teachers Brujewski and Novara, and by his colleagues
at the University of Bologna, Calcagnini, Ziegler, etc. (cf. The Sleepwalkers
pp. 205-10).

REFERENCES

BOOK ONE
The Art of Discovery and the Discoveries of Art

PREFACE

I, The Sleepwalkers (1959). 2, The Lotus and the Robot (i960).

PART ONE THE JESTER

I. THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER

1, Sully, J. (1902). 2, Duchenne de Boulogne (1862). 3, Ribot, T. A. (1896).
4, Quoted in the *This England' column of the New Statesman and Nation, January
1946. 5, December 31, 1946. 6, Polanyi (1958), p. 50. 7, Bartlett (1958). 8, Bergson
(1916), p. 59. 9, Lorenz, K. L. in Whyte, L. L. ed. (1951), pp. 176-8. 10, SantiUana
ed. (1953). P- 469- 11, Br. J. Psychology (1962), 55, 3, p. 229.

II. LAUGHTER AND EMOTION

1, Gregory, J. C. (1924). 2, Quoted by Gregory, op. cit. 3, Foss, B. in the New
Scientist, 6.7.1961. 4, Bain, A. (1868). 5, Bergson (1916). 6, McDougall, W. (1920).
7, Freud, Gesammelte Werke, VI (1940). 8, Freud, op. cit. 9, The Guardian, 5.9.1962.
10, See Ref. 3. 11, Bergson, op. cit. 12, Huxley, Aldous, in Control of the Mind,
Farber, S. M. and Wilson, H. L. ed. (1961). 13, Auden, W. H. (1944).

III. VARIETIES OF HUMOUR

I, Love*s Labour's Lost, V. ii, 2, Sawyer, W. W. (1955), p. 143. 3, Gregory, op. cit.

IV. FROM HUMOUR TO DISCOVERY

I, SantiUana (1955), p. 124.

PART TWO THE SAGE

V. MOMENTS OF TRUTH

I, Kohler, W. (1957), p. 35- 2, Ibid., pp. 93-4. 3, Ibid., p. 94. 4, Ibid., p. 97. 5,
Merton, R. K. (1961). 6, Polanyi (1958), p. 11. 7, Hadamard (1949), p. 119. 8,
Ibid, p. 120. 9, Dubos (1960), p. 117. 9a, Ibid, p. 336, 10. Quoted in The Creative
Process, Ghiselin, ed. (1952). 11, Hadamard, op. cit., p. 8. 12, de Launay, L. (1925).
13, Montmasson (193 1), p. 77. 14, Polya, G. (I954-), p- 76. 15, Findlay A. (1948),
pp. 36-8.

709

7io

THE ACT OP CREATION

VI. THREE ILLUSTRATIONS

1, Histoire de V Invention de VImprimerie par les Monuments, ed. Hofer, Paris 1840.

2, Mysterium Cosmographicum, Preface. 3, Ibid. 4, Opera Omnia, Vol. XIII, pp. 33 fT.
5, Ibid., Vol. I, cap. 20. 6, Ibid., Notes 2 and 3. 7, Astronomia Nova, II, cap. 18.
8, Ibid., cap 44. 9, Op. Omnia, Vol. XV, pp. 134 seq. 10, Letter of 5.9.1857.
11, Footnote to the Historical Introduction to The Origin of Species. 12, Notebooks,
quoted by Himmelfarb, G. (1959), p. 153- *3> Life and Letters, II, p. 215.
14, To Lyell; ibid., II, p. 241. 15, To Fawcett, More Letters, 1, 195. 16, Ibid., I, 36.
I7 Origin, 6th ed., p. 2. 18, Ibid., p. 3. 19, Lamarck (1914), pp. 109-10.

20, Nordenskiold, History of Biology, p. 42, quoted by Himmelfarb, op. cit., p. 153.

21, British Medical Journal, 4.8.1956". 22, Himmelfarb, op. cit., p. 156. 23, Origin,
6th ed., p. 3. 24, Himmelfarb, op. cit., p. 234. 25, My Life, I, p. 359. 26, Ibid., I,
pp. 232, 362. 27, Ibid., I, pp. 362 fT. 28, Himmelfarb, op. cit., p. 239. 29, Ibid., p.
238. 30, Loc. cit. 31, Ibid., p. 331.

VII. THINKING ASIDE

I, Whyte, L. L. (1962), p. 25. 2, Ibid., p. 63. 3, Ibid., pp. 88-9. 4, Ibid., p. 90.

5, Ibid., p. 91. 6, Ibid., p. 93. 7, Ibid., p. 95. 8, Ibid., p. 107. 9, Ibid., p. 108.
io, Ibid., pp. 119-20. 11, Ibid., pp. 124-5. 12, Ibid., pp. 150-1. 13, Ibid., p. 104.
14, Ibid., p. 147. 15, Ibid., p. 154. 16, Ibid., p. 154. 17, Ibid., p. 152. 18, Ibid.,
pp. 160-1. 19, Herrigel (1959), 3rd ed., pp. 57-8. 20, Suzuki, D. T. (1959)* p- 94-
21, Principles of Psychology (1890), Vol. I, p. 255. 22, Inquiries into Human Faculty,
1883. 23, Findlay, A., op. cit., p. 42. 24, Kendall, J. (1955), p. 138. 25, Crowther,
J. G. (1940), I, p. 135. 26, Hadamard, op. cit., pp. 142-3. 27, Ibid., p. 85.
28, Quoted by Hadamard, p. 94. 29, Roman Jakobson, quoted by Hadamard,
p. 97. 30, Seelig (1954), p. 71. 31, Ibid. 32, Sidney Hook, Consciousness in Japan*,
Commentary, New York, Jan. 1959. 33, Whyte, L. L. (1962), p. 41. 34, Tractatus,
Prop. 4121.

VIII. UNDERGROUND GAMES

I, Civilization and its Discontents (1930). 2, Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist
(i949) p. 53* 3 Loc. cit. 4, Scientific American, June 1961. In fact the problem
originates with Carl Duncker. 5, The Integration of Personality (1940), p. 16.

6, Crowther, J. G. (1940) p. 325. 7, Loc. cit. 8, *Ow Psychic Research', ed. Gardner
Murphy and Bellon, R. O. (1961). 9, Ueber den Gegensinn, der Urworte, Ges.
Werke VIII, p. 216. 10, Die Verneinung, G. W. XIV, p. 1 1 . 1 1, Montmasson (1931),
p. 137. 12, Enc. Brit., 13th ed., article on Photography. 13, Beveridge (1950), p. 69.
14, Sachs, H. (1946), p. 98. 15, Bronowski (1961) p. 31. 16, Crowther (1937),
p. 77. 17, Ibid., p. 69. 18, Loewi, O. (i960). 19, Loc. cit.

IX. THE SPARK AND THE FLAME

I, Quoted by Ghiselin, op. cit.2, Beveridge, op. cit., p. 5. 3, Ibid. 4, Harmonice
Mundi, Introduction to Book V. 5, Quoted by Beveridge, op. cit., p. 105.
6, Astronomia Nova, IV. cap. 58. 7, The Sleepwalkers (i959). 8, Jones, E. (1953),
Vol. I, p. 55. 9, Ibid., p. 103. 10, Ibid., p. 101. 11, Ibid., p. 104. 12, Ibid., p. 97.
13, Lorimer (1929), p. 91. 14, Markey (1928), p. 42. 15, The Story of My Life
(1902).

X. THE EVOLUTION OP IDEAS

I, "Whitehead (1953). 2, The Sleepwalkers, pp. 515-16". 3 Pyke, M. (196*1), p. 215.
4, Pledge, H. T. (1939), p. 100. 5, Burnet, J. (1908), p. 29. 5a, Pope's Epitaph for
Newton, and Hilairc Belloc's Answer to it. 6, Bartlett (1958), pp. 98, 122, 134,

REFERENCES

711

I36-7- 7> (i94 8 )> P- 16 7- 8 ^ e Sleepwalkers, p. 70. 9, Taton, R. (1957), pp. 1 34-5-
10, Butterfieid (1949), pp. 1-2. 10a, The Sleepwalkers, 11, Butterfield, p. 7.
12, Heath, Th. L. (1932), p. 170. 13, For a critical account of the Galileo conflict
see Tke Sleepwalkers. 14, Polanyi (1958). pp. 156-8. 15, Dubos (i95o)> P* ^1.
id, Polanyi, op. cit., p. 168. 17, Ibid., pp. 12-13. *7a Scientific American, May
1963. 18, Popper (1959), p. 280. 19, Dubos (i960), pp. 133-5. 20, Voyage to
Laputa.

XI. SCIENCE AND EMOTION

I, Quoted by Kretschmer (1931), p. 136. 2, Beveridge, op. cit., p. 75. 3, Jones, E.
(1953). I, P- 348. 4 Quoted by Farrington, B. (i953)> PP- 130-1. 5, Quoted by
Seelig, op. cit., p. 45. 6, Harmonice Mundi, Lib. IV, cap I. 7, Whyte, L. L. (1962),
p. 66. 8, Op. cit., p. 105. 9, Seelig, op. cit., p. 44. 10, Planete. Paris, No. 1, 1961.

PART THREE THE ARTIST
A The Participatory Emotions

XII. THE LOGIC OF THE MOIST EYE

1, Hilgard (1957), pp. 129 f. 2, Cf. Gellhorn, E. (1943 and 1957). 3, The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals. 4, Cf. e.g. Valentine (1946), and Clarke, Hunt,
and Hunt (1947)- 5. Cf. Mutch, R. T. (1944)- 6, Montagu, A., Science, Vol. 130,
p. 1572. 7, Kling, C. (1933).

XIII. PARTNESS AND WHOLENESS

I, Penfield (i959)i p. 249.

XIV. ON ISLANDS AND WATERWAYS

I, Piaget (1930). 2, Civilization and its Discontents, p. 13 f. 3, LeVy-Bruhl (1923
and 1926). 4, Cf. Polanyi, op. cit., p. 55.

B. Verbal Creation

XV. ILLUSION

1, Compressed from The Observer, London, 2.12.1962. 2, Levy-Bruhl (1926),
p. 76. 3, Ibid., p. 385. 4, Fitzmaurice Kelly, J., article on 'Literature* in Enc. Brit.,
13th ed.

- XVI. RHYTHM AND RHYME

i (1927), p. 139. 2, Le CStS de Guermantes. 3, A.R.N.M.D. (1940), Vol. XX, p. 732.
4, The Name and Nature of Poetry. 5, Quoted from Ghisehn, ed. (1952).

XVII. IMAGE

1, Sachs, H. (1946). 2, (1925), p. 270 f. 3, Kretschmer (1934)-

XVIII. INFOLDING

1, What is Art? 2, Richards, I. A. {1924). J, Cohen, J. (1958).

XIX. CHARACTER AND PLOT

I, Memento Mori. 2, Brandt, G. W., in CasselVs Enc. of Literature (i953) VoL I,
p. 422. 3, (1930), pp. 25 seq.

712

THE ACT OF CREATION

XX. THE BELLY OF THB WHALE

I, See, for instance, Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious (191 6); M. Bodkin,
Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934); Toynbee, A Study of History (1947). 2, Jung
(1928), p. 395- 3 Op. cit.

C. Visual Creation

XXI. MOTIF AND MEDIUM.

I, Cf. Newton, E. (1941). 2, Listowel (1933). P- 217. 3 Beauty and Ugliness (1912).
4, Jaensch (1930)- 5. Gris, Juan, Horizon, August, 1946. 6, Picasso in a conversation
with the editor ofCahiers a" Art (1935), quoted by Goldwater and Treves (1945).
7, Wollberg, L. R. (1945). 8, Quoted by Reid, L. (1931). 9, Quoted by Gombrich
(1962B), p. 159. 10, A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original
Compositions of Landscape (1765). n, Gombrich (1962B), p. 123. 12, Ibid., p. 122.
13, Diirer und die italienische Antike (1905). 14, Gombrich (1962B), p. 75. 1 5, Ibid.,
p. 12. 16, Ibid., pp. 61 ff. 17, Ibid., p. 145. 18, Ibid., p. 12. 19, Ibid., p. 10.

XXII. IMAGE AND EMOTION

I, Kepes, G. (1956), p. 102. 2, Ibid., pp. 286-7.

XXIII. ART AND PROGRESS

I, (1949), p. 97. 2, Quoted by Gombrich (1962B), p. 246. 3, (1949), p. 105.
4, Gombrich (1962B), p. 20. 5, Ibid., p. 169. 6, Ibid., pp. 174-5-

XXIV. CONFUSION AND STERILITY

1, Some lengthy passages in this chapter are lifted without acknowledgements
from my essay on 'The Anatomy of Snobbery* in The Trail of the Dinosaur (1954).

2, Time, January 26, 1962. 3, See Note 1. 4, Quoted from 'This England', The New
Statesman and Nation, August 14, 1954.

BOOK TWO
Habit and Originality

INTRODUCTION

1, Jef&ess, A., ed. (1951), p. 113.

I. PRE-NATAL SKILLS

I, Woodger (1929)* P 327. 2, Hyden (i960), p. 307. 2A, Hyden (1962).
3, BertalanfEy (1952), p. 134. 4. Schrodinger (1944), p. 71- 5 Cf. e.g. Buttin, G.
1962. 6, Kschberg, M. and Bladder, A. W. (1961). 7, Sillier, Weiss, and
Hamburger {1955), p. 338. 8, Hamburger (1955A), p. 67. 9, Waddingtoa (1932),
quoted from Polanyi (1958), p. 350*. io Weiss (i939) P 290. 11, Hamburger
(?955b), p. 978. 12, Brachet (i955)> PP- 389 ff. 13, Hamburger, loc. cit. 14, Bert-
aianffy (1952), p. 47.

II. THE UBIQUITOUS HIERARCHY

i e.g. Coghill (1929), Carmichael, L. (1954). 2, Needham, J. (1932). 3, Spencer H.
(1870-2). 4,Heidenhain (1923). 5 Jefrress, A., ed. (i95*)pp. 140 ff. 6, Pribram

REFERENCES

713

(i960), p. 6. 7, Hyashi, T. (1961), pp. 184 seq. 8, Pribram (i960), p. 8. 9, Hoist, V.
(1937, 1948). 10, Petermann (1932), p. 124. 11, Quoted from Petermann, op. cit.,
pp. 127 ff. 12, Ibid., p. 130. 13, Ibid., pp. 131 I4 Ibid., p. 132. 15, Quoted by
Miller et al. (i960), p. 92. 16, Jef&ess, op. cit., p. 141. 17, Quoted from Tinbergen
(I95i) p. 129.

III. DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM AND REGENERATIVE POTENTIAL

I, Pribram (i960), p. 4. 2, Tinbergen (1951)* p- 126. 3, Thorpe (1956), pp. 28-30.
4, Needham, A. E. (1961). 5 Child, C. M. (1924).

iv. 'reculer pour mibux sauter*

I, Child, C. M. (1924), p. 151. 2, Ibid., p. 150. 3, Smithers (i960), p. 108. 4, Ibid.,
pp. 106-7. 5 Lashley (i960), p. 239. 6, Lashley (1929). 7, Bertalanfty, op. cit.,
p. 114. 8, Loc. cit. 9, Kretschmer (1931), p. 138. 10, Miller et al, op. cit., p. 199.

II, Polanyi (1958), p. 400. 13, Needham, A. E. 1961.

V. PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZATION

1, Pribram (i960).

VI. CODES OF INSTINCT BEHAVIOUR

I, Tinbergen (1951), pp. 189, 195. 2, e.g. Spurway and Haldane (1953), quoted by
Thorpe (1956). 3, Tinbergen (i953) p- 55- 4 Tinbergen (1951), p. 9. 5, Sir Julian
Huxley. 6, Kuo, Z. Y. (1932). 7 Lehrman, D. S. (1961). 8, Beach, F. A. (1961).

9, Tinbergen (1951), p. 142. 10, Hilgard (1958), p. 3. 11, Thorpe (1956), p. 133.

12, Ibid., p. 18. 1 3, Ibid., p. 28. The term 'innate releasing mechanism' is a transla-
tion by Tinbergen of the German 'das angeborene, auslbsende Schema' (von Uexhitfl
Lorenz). 14, Tinbergen (1951). p. 103. 15. Loc. cit. 16, Tinbergen (1953). P- 9-
17, For a brief survey see 'The Concept of "Ritualization" ' by A. D. Blest in
Current Problems in Animal Behaviour, ed. Thorpe and Zangwill (1961). 18, Thorpe
(1956), p. 132. 19. Ibid., p. 31- 20, Woodworth (1918). 21, Tinbergen (1951),
pp. 105-6. 22, Ibid., p. no. 23, Ibid., pp. 104-5. 24, Thorpe (1956), p. 41. 25, Ibid,
p. 42. 26, Ibid., p. 19. 27, Loc. cit. 28, Thorpe (1956), p. 26. 29, Ibid., p. 262.
30, Hingston (1927), quoted by Thorpe (1956), p. 38. 31, Hingston, op. cit.,
quoted by Thorpe (1956")* p. 39- 32, Lindauer, M. (1952). 33, Tinbergen (1953),
p. 102. 34, Ibid., p. 116.

VII. IMPRINTING AND IMITATION

I, Hilgard (1957). P- 125. 2, Heinroth, O. (1938). 3 Thorpe (i95<5), P- 375.
4, Thorpe (1956), p. 356. 5, Lashley (1913). 6, McDougall (1936).' 7, Thorpe
(1956), p. 375- 8, Ibid., p. 374. 9, Ibid., p. 356.

VIII. MOTIVATION

I, Mowrer, O. H. (1952). 2, Freud (1920), pp. 3-5. 3, Hilgard (1958), p. 428.
4, Hebb (1949), pp. 178-80. 5, Cf. i.a., Zener (1957); Loucks (1935, 1938);
Hovland (1937); Hilgard and Marquis (1940); and for a concise summary Hebb
(i949) pp. 174-6. 6\ For a review of the literature, cf. e.g. Pribram (1960)-
7, Miller et al., op. cit., p. 30. 8, Pribram (i960), p. 3. '9, Skinner (1938), p. 9.

10, Ibid., pp. 40. 11, Miller et al., op. cit., p. 22. 12, Hilgard (1958), p. 105.

13, Humphreys, L. G. (1939). *4 (i95^), p. 350. 15, Hilgard (1958), p. 177.
16, Berlyne, D. E. (i960), p. 225. 17, Allport, G.W. (i957) 18, Goldstein, K.
(1939). 19. Cf. e.g., Jencks B. and Potter, P. B., Journal of Psychology, Vol. 49,

714

THE ACT OF CREATION

p. 139. 20, Nissen, H. W. (i954)- 21, Berlyne, op. cit., p. 115. 22, Ibid., p. 116.
23, Ibid., p. 127. 24, Ibid., p. 117. 25, Ibid., p. 117. 26, Ibid., p. 119. 27, Ibid.,
pp. 133-4. 28, Lorenz (1956). 29, Compressed from The Descent of Man (1913 ed.),
pp. 108-10; and The Expression of the Emotions (1872), p. 43. 30, Berlin, 1917;
London and New York 1925. 31, Berlyne, op.cit.,p. 148. 32, Harlow etal. (1950).
33, Harlow (1953), p. 25. 34, Woodworth (i947) P- 123. 35, Berlyne, op. cit.,
p. 170. 36, Loc. cit. 37, Pavlov (1927). 38, Darchen, R. (1952, 1954, and 1957),
quoted by Berlyne, op. cit., p. 104. 39, Thacker, L. A. (1950)- 40, Thorpe (1956),
p. 9. 41, Ibid., p. 12. 42, Craik, K.J. W. (1943). p. 61. 43, Allport, G. W. (1955),
p. 67.

IX. PLAYING AND PRETENDING

I, Thorpe (1956). 2, Berlyne, op. cit., p. 5. 3, Thorpe (1956), p. 87. 4, Loc. cit.
5, Ibid. p. 355-

X. PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

I, Galambos (1956). Cf. also 269. 2, Moray, N., The Listener, 19.4.1962. 3, e.g.
Hilgard (1958), p. 442 seq. 4, Ittelson, W. H. (195a), quoted fromPolanyi (1958),
p. 96. 5, Wever, E. G. (1949). 6, Osgood (1960), p. 111. 7, Pringle, J. W. S.
(1951). 8, Hyden (i960, 1962). 9, Whitfield (1949), p. 367. 10, Miller et al.,
op. cit., pp. 134 fF. ioa, Bartlett (1961), cap. V. 11, See e.g. Hebb (i949) cap. 2.
12, Ibid. 13, Ibid. 14, Ibid. 15, Exner (1891), quoted by Thorpe (1956), p. 129.
16, See, for instance, Miles *s (193 1) fascinating kinephantoscope. 17, Dubos, p. 94.
18, Babbage (1830), quoted by Hanson (1961), p. 184. 19, Barlow (1959), pp. 552
seq. 20, Quoted by KofFka (1935), p. 143. 21, Woodworth (1938), p. 561.

22, Cf. Osgood (1960), p. 641, Kluever, H. (1955) and Jaensch, E. R. (1930).

23, Kluever, op. cit. and Jaensch, op. cit. 24, Kluever, op. cit. 25, Pierre, T. H.
(i955)- 26, Kluever, op. cit. 27, Jaensch, op. cit. 28, Ibid., p. 97. 29, Semon, R.
1921), p. 149. 30, Woodworth (1938), p. 42. 31, Head (1926), p. 232. 32, Quoted
by Penfield (1959), p. 226. 33, Fry, D. B. and Denes, P., in Mechanization of
Thought Processes (1959), p. 378. 34, Paget (1930). 35, Fry and Denes, op. cit.,
p. 381. 36, Paget, op. cit. 37, Ladefoged, P., in Mechanization of Thought Processes
(1959), p- 407. 38, Ibid., p. 411. See also Mackay, D. M. and Sutherland, N. S.,
ibid., pp. 607-9. 3'9 Drever, J., 2nd. in Annual Review of Psychology (i960), p. 131.
40, Ibid., pp. 153-4. 4i Thorpe (1956), p. 119. 42, Loc. cit. 43, Thorpe (1956),
p. 411. 44, Ibid., p. 119. 45, Quoted by Wilenski, R. H. (1940), p. 202.
46, c Ladefoged, P., in Mechanization of Thought Processes (1959), p. 402. 47,
Bartlett (1961), p. 200. 48, Ibid, p. 213. 49, Time, March 2, 1962.

XI. MOTOR SKILLS

1, Psychological Review, 1899* 6, pp. 345-75- 2, Woodworth (1938), p. 159. 3,
Book, W. F. (1908). 4, "Woodworth (1938), p. 45. 5, New Scientist, March 1,
1962. 6, Miller et al. (i960), p. 86. 7, Lashley in the Hixon Symposium, p.
123. 8, Ruch, T. C. (1951), p- 205.

XII. THE PITFALLS OF LEARNING THEORY

I, (1927), pp- 32-3. 2, Skinner, quoted by Hilgard (1958), p. 117. 3, Ibid., p. 106.
4, Ibid., p. 152. 5, Kohler: The Mentality of Apes, Gestalt Psychology. KofFka:
Principles of Gestalt Psychology, The Growth of the Mind. 6, Watson (1928), pp. 198 fF.
7, Watson (1924). p- 281.8, Watson (1928), p. 199. 9, Loc. cit. 10, Hilgard (1958),
p. 121. 11, Guthrie (1935). P- 25. 12, Skinner (1953a), quoted by Hilgard (1958),
p. 115. 13, Hull (i945)r p. 56. 14. Hilgard (1958), p. 152. 15, Osgood (1953).
p. 655- i

REFERENCES

715

19. Polanyi (1958), p. 71 20, Craik (1943)* P- 121. 21, Hebb (1949), p. 127.
22, Thorpe (1956), PP- 96, 100, 106. 23, Ibid., pp. 229, 231. 24, Ibid., pp. 229, 231,
232, 235. 25, Ibid., p. 227. 26, Russell (1927), p. 41. 27, Osgood (1953), p. 451.
28, Rosenthal, R., and Fode, K. L., 'The Effect* of Experimenter Bias on the Per-
formance of the Albino Rat' in Behavioral Science, Vol. VIII, 3, July 1963. 29,
Earl Ubell in the New York Herald Tribune, January i960. 30, Thorndike (1913-
14), p. 134- 3i Osgood, op. cit., p. 604. 32, Hilgard (1958), p. 15. 32a, Tolman
(1937), P- 33, Hilgard (195S), p. 65. 34, Krechevsky (1932). 35, Ibid. 36,
Hilgard (1958), p. 470. 37, Osgood, op. cit., p. 604.

XIII. THE PITFALLS OF GESTALT

I, Kohler (i957) p. H3- 2, Ibid., p. 113 n. 3, Osgood (i960), p. 637. 4, Kohler

(1957) P- 164. 5, Yerkes (1943), p. 156. 6, Osgood, op. cit., p. 611. 7, Loc. cit.

8, Kohler (1957)* P- 43- 9, Ibid, p. 44. 10, Ibid., cap VII. 11, Ibid., p. 44. 12, Ibid.,
p. 45- 13, Ibid., p. 167. 14, Yerkes (1943)- 15, Birch H. G., in J. Comp. Psychol.,
I945 P- 382. 16, Thompson, W. R. and Heron, W. (1954), quoted by Hebb

(1958) , p. 219. 17, Kohler (i957) P* I<5 4- l8 , Ibid., p. 167. 19, Kohler (1930),
p. 277. 20, Ibid., pp. 272 seq. 21, Craik (1943). pp. 52. 22, Cf. e.g. Kohler (1957),
p. 27. 23, Piaget (1954). P- 359- 24, Craik, op. cit., p. 1. 25, Russell (1927), pp. 279-
80. 26, Ibid, p. 83. 27, Kohler (1930), p. 225. 28, Petermann (1932). 29, Hixon
Symposium, p. 69. 30, Polanyi (1958), p. 341. 31, Koffka (1935), p. 570.
32, Kohler (1930). P- 215. 33. Hebb (1949), P- 134- 34, Ibid., p. 164. 35, Hebb
{1958), pp. 204-5. 36, Hilgard (1958), pp. 475-<5, 477-8.

XIV. LEARNING TO SPEAK

I, James (1890), Vol. I, p. 253. 2, Ach quoted by Humphrey, G. (1951), p. 260.

3, Osgood, op. cit., p. 686. 4, Piaget (1954), P- 359- 5 Hilgard (1957), p. 315-
6, Piaget (1954). 7, Ibid., p. 92. 8, Penfield and Roberts (1959), pp. 228-9.

9, Quoted by Woodworth (1938), p. 148. 10, Thorpe, op. cit., p. 119. 11, Head
(1926), pp. in, 112. 12, Woodworth (1938), p. 809. 13, Humphrey (1951), p.
252. 14, Penfield and Roberts (1959), p. 226. 15, Loc. cit. 16, Ibid., p. 228. 17,
Chapter on language and Thought*.

XV. LEARNING TO THINK

i, Russell (1927), p. 58. 2, Lorimer (1929), p. 95. 3, Cf. Book One, p. 322.

4, Lorimer (1929), p. 94* 5 Markey (1928), p. 71- 6, Ibid., p. 50. 7, Hebb (1949),
p. 118. 8, Ibid., pp. 117 ff. 9, Quoted by Humphrey, op. cit., p. 25. 10, Osgood,
op. cit, <589. 11, Cf. e.g. Hebb (1949), p. 176. 12, Lorimer, op. cit., pp. 103 flf.
13, Koffka (1930), p- 347- I4 Riaget (1930), p. 243. 15, Piaget (1928), p. 229.
16, Ibid., p. 227. 17, Lorimer (1929), pp. 124-6. 18, Craik, op. cit., p. 121. 19,
See Levy-Bruhl (1926), pp. 181 seq. 20, Ibid. 21, Dantzig (1930). 22, Herodotus,
Historia, Bk. VII. 23, Dantzig, op. cit., pp. 9 ff. 24, Cf. e.g. Haas, W. S. (1956).

XVI. SOME ASPECTS OF THINKING

I, Cf. Koestler (i960). 2, Cf. Hyden (i960, 1962). 3, Penfield and Roberts, op. cit.,
p. 233.

XVII. ASSOCIATION

I, Osgood, op. cit. 2, Humphrey, op. cit., p. 1. 3, Quoted by Woodworth (1938),
p. 370. 4, Quoted by Woodworth (1939) pp. 350 5 Woodworth (1939) pp.
352 ff.

7i6

THE ACT OF CREATION

XVIII. HABIT AND ORIGINALITY

I, Quoted by Polya (1938), p. 164. 2, Polya (1948), p. 158. 3, Ibid., p. 58.

4, Loc. cit. 5, Osgood, op. cit., p. 633.

APPENDIX I. ON LOADSTONES AND AMBER

I, De Magnetic, Book V, cap. 12. 2, Ibid., VI, 4. 3, Cap 6. 4, Pledge (1939), p. 121.

5, Quoted from F. Sherwood Taylor (1949). p- 258. 6, Article on 'Electricity' in
Enc. Brit. (1955 ed.) VIII, p. 189. 7, Crowther (1940), p. 348.

APPENDIX II. SOME FEATURES OF GENIUS

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Tycho Brake (1890), p. 14. 6, II Saggiatore. 7, Dialogue on the Great World Systems,
p. 469. 8, 12 Saggiatore, Opere, VI, p. 232. 9, Dialogue Concerning Two Sciences, p. 1.
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16, Ibid., p. 316. 17, Himmelfarb, G., op. cit., p. 26. 18, Ibid., pp. 314-17.
19, Ibid., p. 317. 20, Ibid., p. 119. 21, Ibid., pp. 307-8- 21A, Ibid. p. 357. 22, Origin
of Species (1873), p. 429. 23, The Descent of Man (1913) ed., pp. 946-7. 24, Dubos
(1950), p. 72. 25, Dubos (i960), p. 36. 26, Dubos (1950), p. 114. 26A, Ibid, p.
396, f. 27, Ibid, p. 87. 28, La Personne du Prix Nobel (in the press). 29, Enc. Brit.,
13th ed. onjalois. 30, Seelig, op. cit., p. 28. 31, Ibid., p. 26. 32, Crowther (1940),
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Univ. Press, 1954.

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Annual Reviews, i960.
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1951.

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1927.

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Chicago Univ. Press, 1953.
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Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1962.
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und nach der Operation. Leipzig: Barth, 1932.
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1906.

724

THE ACT OF CREATION

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Livingstone, i960.
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1946.

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1962.

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Wade, M. See Lashley, K. S.

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New York: Macmillan, 1941.

WORKS MENTIONED IN THIS BOOK

72S

Whitehead, A. N., Science and the Modem World. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1953.
Whitfield, I. C, in Mechanisation of Thought Processes, 1959.
Whyte, L. L., ed., Aspects of Form. London: Lund Humphries, 1951.
Whyte, L. L., The Unconscious Before Freud. New York: Anchor Books, 1962.
Welenski, R. H., Modern French Painters. London: 1940.
Weuer, B. H., Weiss, P. and Hamburger, V., Analysis of Development. Phila-
delphia and London: W. B. Saunders, 1955.
Wilson, R. H. L. See Farber, R. M.

Wittgenstein, L., Tractates, Logico Philosophicus. London: K. Paul, 1922.

Wolberg, L. R., Hypnoanalysis. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1945.

Wolf, A., A History of Science, Technology and Philosophy. London: G. Allen &

Unwin, 1950 (2nd ed.).
Woodger, J. H., Biological Principles. London: K. Paul, 1929.
Woodworth, R. S., Dynamic Psychology. New York: Columbia Univ. Press,

1918.

Woodworth, R. S., Experimental Psychology. New York: Holt, 1938; London:

Methuen, 1939.
Woodworth, R. S., in Am. J. Psychol, 60, 1 19-124, 1947.
Woodworth, R. S. and Schlosberg, H., Experimental Psychology (revised ed.).

New York: Holt, 1954.
Ybrkes, R. M., Chimpanzees: A Laboratory Colony. New Haven: Yale Univ.

Press, 1943.
Zangwhx, O. L. See Thorpe, W. H. (1961).
Zener, K., in Am. J. Psychol., 50, 384-403, 1937.

SOME REFERENCES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY AND
PHYSIOLOGY OF WEEPING

A. General Psychology, Theories, etc.

Barnett, S. A., 'The expression of emotions*, New Biol 22, 73-90 *957
Dana, C. L., *The Anatomic Seat of the Emotions A Discussion of the

James-Lang Theory', Arch. Neurology and Psychiatry, 1921.
Darwin, C, The Expression of Emotions, D. Appleton & Co. 136, 208, 373,
1896.

Enroth, E., 'Om Graat\ Finska LakSallsk. Handl. 77, 76-88, 1935.
Kxineberg, Social Psychology, 196, 1940.

Lund, F. H., *Why do we weep?', J. Soc. Psychol 1, 136-51, 1930.
Lund, F. H., Emotions, etc. Ronald Press Co., New York, 47 ff., 1939,
Plessner, H., *Das Problem von Lachen und Weinen*, Tijdschr. Phil. 2,
317-84, 1940.

Plessner, H., Lachen und Weinen, Araheim, Netherlands, 1950.
Rtjckmick, C. A., The Psychology of Feeling and Emotion, McGraw Hill,

New York, 338 ft, 193&
Spitz, C, Zur Psychologie des Weinens, Zeulenroda, Sporn., 1935.
Sulley, J., An Essay on Laughter, Longmans Green, London, 67-70, 1902.

72(5 THE ACT OP CREATION

Young, P. T., 'Laughter and weeping, etc. in students*, J. Soc. Psychol. 8,
311-34, 1937

Young, P. T., Emotions in Man and animal, J. Wiley and Sons, London, 1943.
Weeping in chimps, 22;
Utility of, 58;

Cultural determination, 184;
Patterns of, 254-8;

Developmental, 164, 167, 177-9, 354. 255.

B. Physiology

Arnold, M. B., Emotion and Personality, Vol. 2, Neurological and Physio-
logical Aspects, Cassell, London, i960;
Weeping in thalamic disease, 12, 13;
Weeping and eeg, 162.
Chorobski, S., 'The Syndrome of Crocodile Tears', Arch. Neur. and Psy-
chiatry, 1951.

Ford, 'Paroxysmal lacrimation etc.', Arch. Neurol. Psychiat. Chicago, 29,
I933-

Geoffrey Walsh, E, Physiology of the Nervous System, Longmans Green,

London, 1957.

Crocodile tears, 408.
Kling, C, 'The Role of the Parasympa thetic in Emotions*, Psychol. Rev.,

1933.

Mutch, T. R., "The lacrimation reflex', Brit. J. Ophthal. 28, 317-36, 1944-
Rowbotham, G- F., 'Observations on the effect of trigeminal denervation',

Brain, 62, 364-80, 1939.
White, J. C. and Smithwick, R. H. et al (3rd ed.), The Autonomic Nervous

System, 40, 41, 250, 1952

C. Weeping and Personality Development

Hunt, J. Mc. V. (ed.), Personality and the Behaviour Disorders, Vol. 1, Ronald
Press, Chap. 3, Mowrer, O. H., Dynamic theory of personality, 89, 1944-

Riviere, Interntl.J. of Psychoanal. 17, 395-422 (Psychological development
in infancy.) 1936.

Sullivan, H. S., Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry, Tavistock Pbns., London,
15, 17, 89, 1953.

Symonds, P. M., Dynamic Psychology, Appleton Century Crofts, New York,
48, 280, 1949.

Symonds, P. M., The Ego and the Self, Appleton Century Crofts, New York,
13, 1951.

D. Ontogenetics of Weeping

Ames, L. B-, 'Motor correlates of infant crying*, J. Genet. Psychol., 59, 239-
47, 1941.

Bayley, N., 'A study of crying in infants etc.*, J. Genet. Psychol, 40, 306-29,
1932.

Borgquist, A., 'Crying*, Am. J. of Psychol., 1906.

Clarke, Hunt and Hunt,/. Gen. Psychol. 17, 398-402 (Weeping and startle
pattern.), I937-

Goodenough, F. L., Anger in Young Children, 66-9, 244-9, 1931.
Goodenough, F. L., J. Abn. Soc. Psychol. 27, 328-33 (Weeping in blind and

deaf children.), 1932.
Goodenough, F. L., Developmental Psychology (2nd ed.), Appleton Century.

201, 257; Individual differences, 273, 1945

REFERENCES

727

Kanner, L., Child Psychiatry, Tanner, Illinois. 35, 599, i960
Landis, C. and Hunt, W. A., The Startle Pattern, Farrar and Rhinehart, New
York, 141, 1939-

Landreth, C, 'Factors associated with crying in young children', Child

Dev. 12, 81-97, i4i-
Mowrer, O. H. and Mowrer, W. M., 'The meaning and measurement

of crying', Child Study, 15, 104-7, 1938.
Munn, N. L., Evolution and Growth of Human Behaviour, Riverside Press,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 407 ff., 1955.
Rosenzweig, S., 'Babies are taught to cry; a hypothesis/,. Ment. Hyg. New

York, 38, 81-4, 1954
Ruja, H., 'The relation between neonate crying and length of labour*, J.

Genet. Psychol 73, 53-5 (Test of Rankian birth cry hypothesis.), 1948*
Valentine, C. W., Psychology of Early Childhood (3rd ed.), Methuen, London,

1946.

Early Appearance, 86 f;
Inhibition of, 117;
Social, 293;
Resentment of, 297;
Sympathy, 298.

E. Psychopathotogy and Weeping

Davison, C. and Keiman, 'Pathological laughing and crying*, Arch. Neurol.

Psychiat. 42, 595-^33* 1939-
Greenacrb, P., 'Pathological weeping', Psychoandl. Quart. 14, 62-75, 1945.
Greenacrb, P., 'Urination and weeping', Am. J. Orthopsychiat, 15, 81-8,
I945-

Kbt.t.y, G. A., The Psychology of Personal Constructs, Vol 2 } Clinical Diagnosis
and Psycho therapy, Norton and Co., New York, 896 ft., 1113 ff., 1955.

Lacombe, P., 'A special mechanism of pathological weeping*, Psychoanal
Quart. 27, 248-51, 1958.

R Depth Psychological Formulation*

Abraham K., Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, Hogarth Press, 483 (Weeping
in women as unconscious wish to urinate like a man.), 1954

Breuer, J. and Freud, S., Studies in Hysteria, Hogarth InterntL Psycho-
analytical Library No. 50, 162 ft, 163 fh. (Weeping and abreaction arrears.),
1056.

Beldman, S. S., 'Crying at the happy ending*, J. Am. Psychoanal Ass. 4,

477-85, 195<5.
(See Greenacrb 1945, 2, in Section E above.)
Heilbrunn, G., 'On weeping', Psychoanal. Quart. 24, 245-55, 1955-
Montague, ML F. A., 'On the physiology and psychology of swearing',

Psychiat., 189-201 (Weeping in women as aggression outlet, substitute

for function swearing performs for men.), 1942.
Peto, E., 'Weeping and laughter*, Intern. J. of Psychoanal 27, 120-33, 1956.
Weiss, J., 'Crying at the happy ending*, Psychoan. Rev., 1952.

G. Relation of weeping to Psychosomatic Pathology.

Alexander, F., Psychosomatic Medicine etc., G. Allen and Unwin, London,
1952;

and Asthma, 139;
Hysterical, 58;
and Urticaria, 203.

728 THE ACT OF CREATION

Dunbar, R, Emotions and Bodily Changes, Columbia, New York, 43 (Weep-
ing and neurosis in Urticaria.), 1954-

Halliday, J. C, 'Approach to asthma', Brit. J. Med. Psychol. 17, 1, 1937.

Saul, L. J. and Bernstein, C, 'The emotional settings of some attacks-of
Urticaria', Psychosom. Med. 3, 349, 1941.

ACKNO WLEDGEMENTS

The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to quote
from various works: Basic Books, Inc., New York (The Unconscious Before
Freud, by L. L. Whyte); Doubleday & Co., Inc., New York {Pasteur and Modern
Science, by Rene Dubos, i960, by Educational Services, Inc. (Anchor Science
Study Series), and Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution, by Gertrude Himmelfarb,
1959, 19^2, by Gertrude Kristol); the Clarendon Press, Oxford [The Study of
Instinct, by Dr. N. Tinbergen); John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York (Cerebral
Mechanisms in Behaviour The Eixon Symposium, ed. L. A. Jeffress); Litde, Brown
& Co., Boston (Louis Pasteur, by Rene Dubos, 1950, by Rene Dubos); George
Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London (Thinking, by Sir Frederick Bardett); Europa
Verlag, Zurich (Albert Einstein, by Carl Seelig); Cambridge University Press,
New York (The Name and Nature of Poetry, by A. E. Housman); G. Bell, London
(Gestalt Psychology, by "W. Kohler); Allyn & Bacon, Boston (Psychology, ed.
A. D. Calvin, 1961, by Allyn & Bacon); Methuen & Co., London (Learning
and Instinct in Animals, by "W. H. Thorpe); Roudedge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London
(Personal Knowledge t by Michael Polanyi, Mentality of Apes, by W. Kohler, The
Symbolic Process, by J. F. Markey, The Growth of Reason, by F. Lorimer, and
Invention and the Unconscious, by J.-M. Montmasson).

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