The Act of Creation (22 page)

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 Kekulé described
one of the early but decisive quasi-hallucinations, 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
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. Kekulé'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 Fanday 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 Helmholz -- 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]

Kekulé's visions resemble hallucinatory flights; Faraday's, the
stable delusional systems of paranoia. Kekulé'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
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 mathematical 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 of homo sapiens, and the very foundation
on which mental evolution could build. 'Logic' derives from logos,
which originally meant 'language', 'thought', and 'reason', all in
one. Thinking 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 phylogenetically and ontogenetically older forms
of ideation, than verbal thinking. Kekulé's 'Let us dream, gentlemen',
is an invitation to regression and retreat -- but a regression which
prepares the forward leap, a
reculer 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 Geman 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:

Signs are a necessary support of thought. For socialized thought (stage
of communication) and for the thought which is being socialized (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 perfectly
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
indispensable 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: 'I 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 in a closed
universe with firm boundaries in space and time -- a few million miles
in diameter, and a few thousand years of duration. Space taken in itself,
as an abstract concept, did not exist; it was merely an
attribute
of material bodies -- their length, width, and depth; empty space was
unthinkable, a contradiction in terms; and infinite space even more
so. Time, similarly, was simply the duration of an event. Nobody in his
senses would have said that things move
through
space or
in
time -- how can a thing move in or through an attribute 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
absolute
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 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 Aristotle
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 Aristotle, 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; Rutherford had to
commit the contradiction in terms of asserting the divisibility of the
atom, which in Greek means 'indivisible'. Einstein destroyed our belief
that clocks move at the same rate anywhere in the 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
philosophers 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 suggestions, 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
To