The Act of Creation (13 page)

The discovery may now be schematized as follows (Figure 8):

M1
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;
M2
is the matrix of associations related to
taking a bath; m2 represents the actual train of thought which effects
the connection. The Link
L
may have been a
verbal
concept
(for instance: 'rise of water-level
equals
melting down of my
solid body'); it may 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 constantly lurking on the fringe of his consciousness. The essential
point is, that at the critical moment
both
matrices
M1
and
M2
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. Without
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
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 -- 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 Cézanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than
they seem.
Chance and Ripeness
Nearly all of Köhler'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
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
understanding 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. Köhler 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
ofa species to
form a new adaptive habit or acquire a new skill, and the ripeness of
a
culture
to make and to exploit a new discovery. Hero's steam
engine could obviously be exploited for industrial purposes only at a
stage when the technological and social conditions made it both possible
and desirable. 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 genius in
history would be reduced from hero to midwife, who assists the inevitable
birth; and the act of creation would be merely a consummation of the
preordained. But the old controversy whether individuals 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 subsequently 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. Köhler's 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
independently 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 accomplishment 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 Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus, 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 Académie 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
transformation 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 ofthe problem of discovery -- both in science and in art.
Logic and Intuition
I shall briefly describe, for the sake of contrast, two celebrated
discoveries 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 immunology --
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 development. 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
!"
Now I must explain that the word 'vaccination' was at that time already
a century old. It is derived from
vacca
, 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 promptly 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 cattle. Although Jenner realized that cow-pox
and smallpox were essentially the same disease, which 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 approach to their
control. It was this conviction that made him perceive 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:
'Fortune 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 undergone
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, 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 occurred 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 application of Pasteur's discovery
was his anti-rabies vaccine. It was tried for the first time on a young
Alsatian boy by name ofJosef 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.' [9a] He was evidently predestined to become a victim
of one form of rabidness or another.