The essential conflict: Observation, imagination, and the nature of scientific truth

“ Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human senses and human soul.8 Her work is to portray the appearance of things, and to deepen the natural impressions which they produce upon living creatures. The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions. Both, observe, are equally concerned with truth; the one with truth of aspect, the other with truth of essence. ”

“ But these observations of Macaulay have the merit of showing us that induction has its foundation in nature, and afford a further confirmation of our views, that observation is the source of our knowledge, and that it is the province of logic to teach us to systematise our thoughts. Observation, experiment, hypothesis and induction, are but different names for the operation—varying in degree, in method, in expedient, and elaboration—whereby we discover truth. Nature is the treasure-house of truth, and the sole fee of appropriation is attention. ”

“ But, if the methods of science are observation and induction, if it proceeds according to the principle of the uniformity of nature, and does not utterly belie its claim of resting upon factual realities rather than the figments of fancy, then all this hypothecation, which is so flagrantly at variance with the actual data of experience and the unmistakable trend of inductive reasoning, is not science at all, but sheer credulity and superstition. ”

“ Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no botanist knows of, birds that no museum possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the ‘forms more real than living man,’ and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. ”

“ IMAGINATION AND FACT. ———
BY A NEW CONTRIBUTOR.
———
Imagination’s world of air,
And our own world.
Halleck.
The world is of such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is bounded by a sleep.
Shakspeare.
S’ai che lá corre il mondo ove piu versi
Di sue dolcezze il lusinghier Parnaso
E che ’l vero condito in molli versi,
I piu schivi allentando ha persuaso.
Tasso.
People seem to have an idea that facts are every thing in the business of the world—the only considerations in the philosophy of human progress. Opposed to what is merely imaginary, facts are allowed to have much dignity. ”

“ The imagination enlarges little objects so as to fill our souls with a fantastic estimate; and, with rash insolence, it belittles the great to its own measure, as when talking of God. ”

“ THE IMAGINATION.
Of the deceptive powers.—Man is only a subject full of natural error, which is indelible without grace. Nothing shows him the truth, everything deceives him. These two principles of truth, reason and the senses, in addition to the fact that they are both wanting in sincerity, reciprocally deceive each other. The senses trick the reason by false appearances, and gain from reason in their turn the same deception with which they deceive; reason avenges herself. The passions of the soul trouble the senses, and make on them false impressions. ”

“ One of the chief causes of the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction. ”

“ But wherever we have returned to life and nature, our work has always become vulgar, common, and uninteresting. Modern tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty whatsoever. ”

“ Enjoy nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that art makes us love nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped us. My own experience is that the more we study art, the less we care for nature. What art really reveals to us is nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. ”

“ It is fortunate for us, however, that nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in nature herself, but in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness, of the man who looks at her. ”

“ The history of the sciences shows that the slow and laborious path of induction has not always been that of inventors. The imagination, impatient to arrive at the causes, takes pleasure in creating hypotheses, and often it changes the facts in order to adapt them to its work; then the hypotheses are dangerous. But when one regards them only as the means of connecting the phenomena in order to discover the laws ”

“ Imagination, on the contrary, which is ever wandering beyond the bounds of truth, joined to self-love and that self-confidence we are so apt to indulge, prompt us to draw conclusions which are not immediately derived from facts; so that we become in some measure interested in deceiving ourselves. Hence it is by no means to be wondered, that, in the science of physics in general, men have often made suppositions, instead of forming conclusions. ”

“ There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober aspect of truth. ”

“ If an independent system essayed to rear its head, it would be crushed by coming into collision with some statement that brooked no question. Such scientific investigation as would be possible could only proceed by deduction from truths authoritatively delivered. Observation and induction, which have led up to the knowledge of nature we now possess, would find no place. ”

“ Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s natural utterance. He forgets that when art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders everything. Goethe says somewhere, —
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,
‘It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,’ and the limitation, the very condition, of any art is style. However, we will not linger any longer over Shakespeare’s realism. ”

“ Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new æsthetics; and it is this, and not any vital connection between form and substance, as Mr. Pater fancies, that makes music the true type of all the arts. Of course, nations and individuals, with that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of life, are always under the impression that it is of them that the Muses are talking, always trying to find in the calm dignity of imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid passions, always forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo, but Marsyas. ”

“ Remote from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave, art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the marvellous many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expression in a new form But it is not so The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness. ”

“ A short primer, ‘When to Lie and How,’ if brought out in an attractive and not too expensive form, would no doubt command a large sale, and would prove of real practical service to many earnest and deep-thinking people. Lying for the sake of the improvement of the young, which is the basis of home education, still lingers amongst us, and its advantages are so admirably set forth in the early books of the ‘Republic’ that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them here. ”

“ But life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual breaking up of the blank verse in the later plays, by the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterization. The passages in Shakespeare — and they are many — where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are due entirely to life calling for an echo of its own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful style, through which alone it should be allowed to find expression. ”

“ but, from the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing) ; or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation. ”

“ We have exhorted you to use your eyes, and your judgments, never your imagination; to abstain from theory, and rest with facts; and to understand that in the accumulation of facts, as regards the nature and properties of substances, the order of occurrences, and the consequences of actions, lies the whole science of philosophy, physical and moral. We have seen, in the course of our enquiry, that in matter itself, exist all causes and effects ”

“ The imagination is always restless, and suggests variety of thoughts, and the will, reason being laid aside, is ready for every extravagant project; and in this state, he that goes farthest out of the way, is thought fittest to lead, and is sure of most followers: and when fashion hath once established what folly or craft began, custom makes it sacred, and it will be thought imprudence, or madness, to contradict or question it. ”

“ For, in fine, whether awake or asleep, we ought never to allow ourselves to be persuaded of the truth of anything unless on the evidence of our reason. And it must be noted that I say of our reason, and not of our imagination or of our senses: thus, for example, although we very clearly see the sun, we ought not therefore to determine that it is only of the size which our sense of sight presents; and we may very distinctly imagine the head of a lion joined to the body of a goat, without being therefore shut up to the conclusion that a chimaera exists; ”

“ But when the poet or the story-teller invades the province of the man of science, he is on dangerous ground. I need say nothing of the blunders he is pretty sure to make. The imaginative writer is after effects. The scientific man is after truth. Science is decent, modest; does not try to startle, but to instruct. The same scenes and objects which outrage every sense of delicacy in the story teller's highly colored paragraphs can be read without giving offence in the chaste language of the physiologist or the physician. ”

“ Under this head come all those phenomena to which science denies an objective value: illusions of the senses, mental hallucinations, and the normal non-scientific representations of things, the creations of the imagination in music and in art, the entire subjective life of feeling and of aspiration, regarded only as a particularly characteristic association of representation, irrespective of all objective truth, which lies beyond the limits of psychology as such. ”

“ The imagination is precisely the mind at work, pursuing and exploring the possibilities suggested by the connection of its experience. It may operate, of course, in the service of logical enquiry, and of exact science itself — the scientific use of the imagination is a well-known topic. The only difference is that when imagination is free, when the mind is operating, for instance, not in the service of theoretical truth, but in that of aesthetic feeling, .then it altogether ceases to be bound by agreement with what we call reality as a whole. ”

“ It is difficult to know what to admire most—the clearness of perception, the precision of the statement, the strictness of the logic, the aptness of the illustration, or the argumentative skill with which the whole is marshalled and presented. As a piece of induction, the memoir is a model of its kind, and as an exercise in “the scientific use of the imagination” it has few equals. ”

“ We might express all this by saying that Imagination is the mother of working-hypotheses: and this is true of all working-hypotheses, those of the observatory and laboratory as well as those of the nursery. No one who grasps this truth will henceforth deny the debt of science to Imagination. Knowledge is not worth calling knowledge till it is reduced to Law; and Law, as I have shown you above, is a mere idea of the Imagination. I do not deny the subsequent value of Reason; but Imagination must come first. ”

“ It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth? ”

“ The imaginative is not necessarily the imaginary; that is, the unreal. The proper function of imagination is vision of realities that cannot be exhibited under existing conditions of sense-perception. Clear insight into the remote, the absent, the obscure is its aim. History, literature, and geography, the principles of science, nay, even geometry and arithmetic, are full of matters that must be imaginatively realized if they are realized at all. Imagination supplements and deepens observation ”

“ In the course of scientific investigation, then, as I have tried to impress upon you, we make continual incursions from a physical world where we observe facts, into a super or sub-physical world, where the facts elude all observation, and we are thrown back upon the picturing power of the mind. ”

“ Simple people think of imagination as that quality of mind which revels in tales of fairies and hobgoblins, but imagination of this character is undisciplined and undeveloped. The scientist who deals with the sternest of facts must be highly imaginative, or his work is vain. ”

“ A scientific hypothesis often gives a new direction, suggests an untried method of observation, or hints at new ways of experiment, and, though it may not lead directly to truth, always brings us closer to methods of investigation and of criticism that are invaluable. ”

“ And having thus appealed to facts, we found further that in the nature of things no such destruction could follow; that what we call explanation in science is at bottom only a reduction of unfamiliar mysteries to terms of familiar mysteries, and that, since to the true imaginative mind, whether of poet or novelist, the mysteries of this world grow all the greater as they grow more familiar, the necessary effect of scientific explanations is at last the indefinite increase of food for the imagination. The modern imagination, indeed, shall still love mystery ”

“ Think, too, of the innumerable worlds amongst the stars, and the eternity of the past and future. Whether we look into the depths of space beyond the reach of telescope and microscope, or backward and forward along the vistas of time, we shall find ourselves surrounded with an impenetrable mystery in which the imagination is free to rove.
Science, far from destroying, will foster and develop poetry. It is the part of the scientific to serve the poetical spirit by providing it with fresh matter. ”

“ To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery. ”

“ Imagination is the dexterous and astonishing use of realities. It is a species of mental experiment, whereby, without permission of the line-and-rule men, we join strange things together, and to the surprise of every body, the junction is a happy one. 'Angelo's greatness lay in searching for untried existence.'** But observation primarily suggests the combination. If, as in the case of Angelo, imagination essays the highest flights of genius, and goes in search of untried existence, it is not existence out of nature, but founded upon nature—its success is a revelation of some hidden reality. ”

“ Science, the essence of truth; and Art, the essence of beauty.
Having thus endeavoured to show how the law which governs the progress of the human mind resides in the union of the ideal with the real, it now remains for me to give the counter-proof, by demonstrating the result of the separation and isolation of these two factors.
In art, mere realism is another word for slavish imitation. Utter idealism is the madness of fancy. In science, reality, by itself, is the enigma of fact unenlightened by its laws. Idealism alone is a ghostly conjecture, devoid of the confirmation of actualities. ”

“ For the objective basis of our conceptions scientific investigation is necessary. But this basis once obtained, the constitution of our mind is far better adapted to esthetic than to scientific study, provided always that imagination never disregard the truths of science, and degenerate into extravagance. ”

“ There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war -- memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism; graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species -- our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.
How often does material advancement or social innovation blind us to this truth. ”

“ The laws we claim for the prophetic imagination. “He hath set the world in man’s heart,” not in his understanding. And the heart must open the door to the understanding. It is the far-seeing imagination which beholds what might be a form of things, and says to the intellect: “Try whether that may not be the form of these things;” which beholds or invents a harmonious relation of parts and operations, and sends the intellect to find out whether that be not the harmonious relation of them—that is, the law of the phenomenon it contemplates. ”