The counterpoise of illusion: Why art is necessary to narrate scientific decline

“ A people elated by pride, or soured by discontent, are seldom qualified to form a just estimate of their actual situation. The subjects of Constantine were incapable of discerning the decline of genius and manly virtue, which so far degraded them below the dignity of their ancestors; but they could feel and lament the rage of tyranny, the relaxation of discipline, and the increase of taxes. The impartial historian, who acknowledges the justice of their complaints, will observe some favorable circumstances which tended to alleviate the misery of their condition. ”

“ But even in Philosophy and Science the art is both subtle and necessary; the choice and arrangement of the fitting symbols, though less difficult than in Art, is quite indispensable to success. If the distinction which I formerly drew between the Scientific and the Artistic tendencies be accepted, it will disclose a corresponding difference in the Style which suits a ratiocinative exposition fixing attention on abstract relations, and an emotive exposition fixing attention on objects as related to the feelings. ”

“ A fear seems to be abroad that the inquisitiveness and exactness of science will deprive literature of imagination and sympathy and will destroy artistic expression; and it is said that we are in danger of losing the devotional element in literature. If these apprehensions are well founded, then do we have cause for alarm, seeing that literature is an immeasurable resource. ”

“ The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by, slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation. ”

“ Ideals ought to aim at the transformation of reality—no less! When you defer to what you suppose a certain authority in scientists as confirming these negations, I am surprised. Of all insufficient authorities as to the total nature of reality, give me the "scientists," from Münsterberg up, or down. Their interests are most incomplete and their professional conceit and bigotry immense. I know no narrower sect or club, in spite of their excellent authority in the lines of fact they have explored, and their splendid achievement there. ”

“ Take again the notion of immortality, which for common people seems to be the touchstone of every philosophic or religious creed: what is this but a way of saying that the determination of expectancy is the essential factor of rationality? The wrath of science against miracles, of certain philosophers against the doctrine of free-will, has precisely the same root,—dislike to admit any ultimate factor in things which may rout our prevision or upset the stability of our outlook. ”

“ But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus the so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life. ”

“ Young America is not fond of the subtleties of history, hence these realists take their stand upon the “unimpeachable truth of the accredited results of science” at a time when, by the irony of history, science herself has begun to doubt.
To thwart idealism, psychology must be rewritten. While consciousness exists there is always the chance that our world of facts may fade into subjective presentations. ”

“ We have thus already come within sight of a conclusion, which the progress of the inquiry will, I think, bring before us with the clearest evidence: namely, that in the sciences which deal with phenomena in which artificial experiments are impossible (as in the case of astronomy) , or in which they have a very limited range (as in mental philosophy, social science, and even physiology) , induction from direct experience is practiced at a disadvantage in most cases equivalent to impracticability ”

“ If, in this imperfect state of the scientific theory, we attempt to frame a rule of art, we perform that operation prematurely. Whenever any counteracting cause, overlooked by the theorem, takes place, the rule will be at fault: we shall employ the means and the end will not follow. No arguing from or about the rule itself will then help us through the difficulty: there is nothing for it but to turn back and finish the scientific process which should have preceded the formation of the rule. ”

“ As, then, you burst the bonds of a narrow ecclesiastical tradition, by insisting that no fact of sense or result of science must be left out of account in the religious synthesis, so may you still be the champions of mental completeness and all-sidedness. May you, with equal success, avert the formation of a narrow scientific tradition, and burst the bonds of any synthesis which would pretend to leave out of account those forms of being, those relations of reality, to which at present our active and emotional tendencies are our only avenues of approach. ”

“ Art, then, is as it were the return of abstraction to life; science, on the contrary, is the perpetual immolation of life, fugitive, temporary, but real, on the altar of eternal abstractions.
Science is as incapable of grasping the individuality of a man as that of a rabbit, being equally indifferent to both. ”

“ It terrifies one to think for how short a time science has been methodical and of useful industry; and after all, is there anything on earth more marvelously easy than destruction? Who knows the new mediums it has laid in store? Who knows the limit of cruelty to which the art of poisoning may go? Who knows if they will not subject and impress epidemic disease as they do the living armies—or that it will not emerge, meticulous, invincible, from the armies of the dead? ”

“ There is only one answer—namely, that human experience is infinite in its possibilities and its capacity for renewal. If human [144] experience—these vague and subtle emotions, these violently real but inscrutable feelings, these tremulous questionings of existence encompassed with mystery—if human experience were no more than a hard and dry scientific fact, well, our novelists would have a poor time of it. But life knows no finality ”

“ They deny art, which is the instrument of the creative reason, to literature; for as soon as art, which is the process of creating a rational world, begins, the necessity for selection arises, and with it the whole question of values, facts being no longer equal among themselves on the score of actuality, nor in fitness for the work in hand. ”

“ Were this assertion true, yet there would be good reason to retain our illusion; for the mind delights in order, and will invent it. The mind is perplexed and disturbed until it finds this order; and in the progressive integration of its experience into an ordered world lies its work. Art gives pleasure to the intellect, because in its structure whatever is superfluous and extrinsic has been eliminated, so that the mind contemplates an artistic work as a unity of relations bound each to each which it fully comprehends. ”

“ Such works, we say, have form, which is just this interdependence of parts wholly understood which appeals to the intellect, and satisfies it: they would please the mind, though the order they embody were purely imaginary, just as science would delight it, were the order of nature itself illusory. Creative art would thus still have a ground of being under a sceptical philosophy; man would delight to dream his dream. ”

“ Our Ultimate Gratitude to Art.—If we had not approved of the Arts and invented this sort of cult 146of the untrue, the insight into the general untruth and falsity of things now given us by science—an insight into delusion and error as conditions of intelligent and sentient existence—would be quite unendurable. Honesty would have disgust and suicide in its train. Now, however, our honesty has a counterpoise which helps us to escape such consequences;—namely, Art, as the good-will to illusion. ”

“ It cannot be denied that Art has fulfilled some part of its mission on earth, if, but for one hour, thousands, marshalled by its music, as the children of Israel by the pillar of flame, have looked above the dull atmosphere where pain and loss and sorrow are, to feel in themselves that divine longing which is ecstasy, that soaring of the spirit which, in casting off fear and rising above doubt, can cry out in joy, "Oh, blessed spark of Hope—this soul which can so rise above sorrow, so mount above the body, must be immortal. ”

“ The artist’s mission is to live the complete life: success, as an episode (which is all it can be) ; failure, as the real, the final end. Death, analysed to its resultant atoms—what is it but the vindication of failure: the getting rid for ever of powers, desires, appetites, which have been a lifelong embarrassment? The poet’s noblest verse, the dramatist’s greatest scene deal always with death; because the highest function of the artist is to make perceived the beauty of failure.
R.R. But have Scotsmen of genius been any more successful, in a wordly sense, than [Pg 31] others? ”

“ The artist deceives himself into the idea that he is doing all he can to elevate his subject by treating it under rules of art, introducing into it accurate science, and collecting for it the beauties of (so-called) ideal form; whereas he may, in reality, be all the while sacrificing his subject to his own vanity or pleasure, and losing truth, nobleness, and impressiveness for the sake of delightful lines or creditable pedantries. ”

“ What good then to turn to art from the atavistic religionists, from a science doing slavey service upon gas engines, from a philosophy tangled in a miserable sort of dialect that means nothing if the full power of initiative be denied at the beginning by a lot of baying and snapping scholiasts? ”

“ So, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in their processes, are at a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, the quantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality. Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and decline in successive ages. The course of art is known; it has been run many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand ”

“ The history of art gives us abundant examples and warning in this matter. First clear, steady principle, then playing with the danger, and lastly falling into the snare, mark with the utmost distinctness the times of the health, the decline, and the last sickness of art. ”

“ Nor is Art, as by way of corollary is sometimes maintained, a thing which had its’ function in the youth of the world, but with the development of Science becomes obsolete. It may very possibly decline and even disappear, but if it does a biological calamity of the first order will have occurred. ”

“ All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time, but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay. That this time is come for metaphysics appears from the state into which it has fallen among all learned nations, despite of all the zeal with which other sciences of every kind are prosecuted. The old arrangement of our university studies still preserves its shadow; now and then an Academy of Science tempts men by offering prizes to write essays on it, but it is no longer numbered among thorough sciences ”

“ So also that highest art, the art of government and social organization, may reach, unassisted by science, a high degree of perfection; but if it be simply an art it quickly culminates and declines, or else becomes petrified and immutable, as we see in the Chinese and Japanese. ”

“ But how can one begin to enumerate the elements in our society that contribute to form a selection constantly working against the survival of the creative type? By cutting off the sources that nourish it, by lending prestige to the acquisitive and destroying the glamour of the creative career, everything in America conspires to divert the spirit from its natural course, seizing upon the instincts of youth and turning them into a single narrow channel. ”

“ Our intellectuals have failed us as value-creators, even as value-emphasizers. The allure [136] of the martial in war has passed only to be succeeded by the allure of the technical. The allure of fresh and true ideas, of free speculation, of artistic vigor, of cultural styles, of intelligence suffused by feeling, and feeling given fiber and outline by intelligence, has not come, and can hardly come, we see now, while our reigning philosophy is an instrumental one. ”

“ What is particularly worthy of admiration is, that this terrible art, which has baffled the studies and researches of philosophers, astrologers, theurgists, and other sages, was chiefly confined to the most ignorant, decrepid, and ugly old women in the community, with scarce more brains than the broomsticks they rode upon.
When once an alarm is sounded, the public, who dearly love to be in a panic, are always ready to keep it up. ”

“ A rational pursuit of happiness—which is one thing with progress or with the Life of Reason—would embody that natural piety which leaves to the episodes of life their inherent values, mourning death, celebrating love, sanctifying civic traditions, enjoying and correcting nature’s ways. To discriminate happiness is therefore the very soul of art, which expresses experience without distorting it, as those political or metaphysical tyrannies distort it which sanctify unhappiness. ”

“ But again: all who have reflected much on the relation of science to art can not fail to have observed that while a mature science guides art with certainty, and continues to perfect it without limit, yet there is a certain stage in the development of science when its influence maybe even disastrous. In the passage from art to science there is a certain stage when the presumptuous application of an imperfect science interferes with the truer and better results of a perfect empiricism, and art is thereby hurt. ”

“ It must furnish an instrument for the study of nature. But that is not all: it has a philosophic aim and, I dare maintain, an esthetic aim. It must aid the philosopher to fathom the notions of number, of space, of time. And above all, its adepts find therein delights analogous to those given by painting and music. They admire the delicate harmony of numbers and forms; they marvel when a new discovery opens to them an unexpected perspective; and has not the joy they thus feel the esthetic character, even though the senses take no part therein? ”

“ Some rationalists, again, have been found to contend that the critical analysis of things æsthetic is destructive of æsthetic joy—an error of errors, involving blindness to the facts that even a science is in itself ultimately perceptible as an artistic construction, and that all the arts live and renew themselves by the sense of truth. ”

“ The great obstacle which art finds in attempting to be rational is its functional isolation. Sense and each of the passions suffers from a similar independence. The disarray of human instincts lets every spontaneous motion run too far; life oscillates between constraint and unreason. Morality too often puts up with being a constraint and even imagines such a disgrace to be its essence. ”

“ Obviously, only the immeasurable mass of a prosperity sunken in a self-satisfaction unstirred by conscience and unmoved by desire. But is that a reason why art should despair? Rather it is a reason why it should rejoice in an opportunity occurring not more than once in the ages to seize the likeness and express the significance of Arrival, the arrival of a whole civilization. To do this, art must refine and re-refine upon itself ”