Address given to the Humanities Club at Reading, February, 1942
The quarrel between the sciences and the humanities is chiefly a quarrel of words. And when I say that, I do not mean to suggest that it is a quarrel about nothing. Both parties are setting out to explore reality, each by its own method. But they have only one set of tools between them. And because they use these tools very differently — because they cannot even agree together about the nature and purpose of the tools — the accounts which they present to the world as the result of their explorations are apt to appear mutually unintelligible and violently antagonistic. You would scarcely think they could both be examining the same reality.
Let me say at once that the scientists are working under peculiar difficulties, and deserve our deepest sympathy. For the words — the tools — which the scientist is obliged to use were forged by the other man, and have few or none of the qualities which the scientist desires in an instrument of precision. The modern scientist is chiefly interested in measurable quantities, and is sometimes apt to suppose that nothing is quite real unless it can be measured. But to measure, let us say, the length of anything, he requires a yardstick; and his task will not be an easy one if the yardstick, instead of remaining rigid and uniform, develops a nasty trick of expanding, shrinking, bulging, curling about, or throwing out offshoots in different directions. But this is precisely the way in which language behaves. Words alter their meaning in course of time and in various contexts: to change the metaphor a little, they are like magnets charged with power that affect and deflect all the instruments of precision which come within their field of influence. The desperate attempts of scientists to reduce language to a kind of algebraic formula in which the same symbol has always the same meaning resemble the process of trying to force a large and obstreperous cat into a small basket. As fast as you tuck in the head, the tail comes out, when you have at length confined the hind legs, the fore paws come out and scratch; and when, after a painful struggle, you shut down the lid, the dismal wailings of the imprisoned animal suggest that some essential dignity in the creature has been violated and a wrong done to its nature. Or let us take another image: to make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver; it is using language for a purpose that defies the very nature of its being. The whole history of modern scientific terminology is that of a struggle to make language conform to a rule of behaviour which is not its own — a struggle, let me suggest, which has in itself something irrational and unscientific about it, since it is scarcely scientific to endeavour to wrest any substance out of truth to its own nature. Indeed, of late years, scientists have grown more and more inclined to abandon the unequal conflict, and to present their discoveries in terms and formulæ of their own devising, which are not subject to the peculiar mutability which affects human language. They talk to one another in long strings of mathematical symbols, or in those unpronounceable polysyllabic formulæ which enshrine the nature of new chemical combinations, or in diagrams. The only objection to these symbolic notations is that they communicate nothing except to other scientists in the same line of business. To take the instance I used just now: the substance known as quicksilver. This word, invented by the poet who dwells in every common man, means “living silver.” Taken in its literal meaning, it tells the world two things about the substance, both of which are false: it suggests that it is something organic, and that it is a form of the metal called silver. But, taken in its poetic meaning, it tells two other things about it, both of which are true: namely, that its shape is changeable like the shape of a living thing, and that its appearance is metallic, white, and shining like that of silver. Thus the word “quicksilver” conveys to the ordinary man, together with a certain measure of scientific falsehood, an equal amount of poetic truth. To the scientist, however, the poetic truth appears, for his special purposes, irrelevant, and the mixture of falsehood definitely objectionable. The word “quicksilver” is of no assistance to him. Nor is the alternative “mercury” any better. It regrettably recalls the superstitions of the alchemists, by which this metal was associated with the god Mercury; and by which the planets were supposed to influence the make-up of the human organism, so that one spoke of a “mercurial” temperament. Words of this kind merely darken scientific counsel. In the hope of getting rid of these unfortunate verbal associations, the chemist falls back upon giving the stuff, not a name, but a symbol. He writes down the letters Hg, and hopes that this time he has finally escaped the influence of the poet. The symbol Hg is (or is intended to be) pure symbol. It does not describe, or interpret the substance — it merely stands for the substance; and it has the merit, or the drawback, according to the purpose for which it is used, of conveying absolutely nothing about the substance to anyone who is not previously acquainted with the substance itself.
So far, so good. But in point of fact, the chemist has not got rid of the poet altogether. For one thing, he was careless at the outset in choosing his symbol. The letters Hg are merely the abbreviation of a Greek word — hydrarguros — meaning “fluid silver” — a word only one degree less picturesque and inaccurate than the English “quick” or “living” silver. Had the chemist been less lazy, less ready to take the line of least resistance, he could, of course, have avoided this association by selecting some quite arbitrary symbol. The fact that he did not only shows that there is more of the common man and the common poet left hanging about the scientist than he is always willing to admit. But the thing goes deeper than that. Even if the symbol Hg were quite arbitrary and meaningless in origin, it will only remain pure scientific symbol so long as the common poet refrains from tinkering about with it. If it should occur to the poet to lay hands upon it and transfer it to his own poetic vocabulary, it will cease to be scientific formula and will again become language, charged with all the emotional associations, all the mutability, and all the vague magnetic power which belong to the nature of language. If the poet, correctly associating the expression Hg with the substance it denotes, chooses to talk of an Hg temperament in the sense of a mercurial temperament, no bitter outcry from the outraged chemist can prevent him, or disentangle the letters Hg from the literary and emotional accretions that will promptly gather about it. Even if a fortuitous alphabetical similarity should cause popular imagination to see a poetical resemblance between the fluid adaptability of Hg and the activities of the Home Guard, the scientist will be helpless to prevent it. If his symbol is to remain pure, he must be constantly changing it — or else must be at pains to choose a symbol so abstract and unpronounceable that neither he nor anybody else can ever introduce it into ordinary conversation. For anything that can be used in conversation is language, and has to submit to the natural law of language.
It is fascinating to watch the never-ending struggle as language and scientific method develop side by side. The process is always the same. The scientist seizes upon a word originally made by the common poet, and endeavours to restrict it to a single, definite meaning which shall be the same in every context. The physicist, for instance, takes a word like “force” or “energy” and uses it to denote a particular factor in physics that can be mathematically expressed. To his horror, the general public refuses to restrict the word in this manner, and innumerable misunderstandings occur. Not only does the common man continue to use the words in metaphorical meanings which they cannot bear in scientific contexts: he also reads those meanings into the scientist’s expositions of physics, deducing from them all kinds of metaphysical conclusions quite foreign to the physicist’s intentions. Or, if the scientist does succeed in capturing a word and restricting its meaning, some other word will arrive and take over all the former meanings of the original word; so that the same pair of words may be used in successive centuries to mean totally different things, and may even become substituted for one another, without anybody’s noticing what has happened.
Let me give one or two examples of this: —
In the eighteenth century, the word “reason” was taken hold of by scientists, and was used by them to mean something practically identical with the method of reasoning which at that time was scoring so great a triumph in the field of scientific discovery. But that was not the meaning of “reason” to a philosopher of the Middle Ages. To him, “reason” included very much more — for example, the qualities we now call “intellect,” “intuition” and “imagination,” as well as the faculties of observation and deductive logic. When a medieval theologian called God the Son “the Divine Reason,” he did not mean that the Creator of the world was an inductive process: he meant something much nearer to what the modern Russian theologian Berdyaev meant when he said: “God created the world by imagination.” In the Middle Ages, the word “imagination” meant primarily the faculty of producing mental images — something more like what we now mean by “visual fancy.” But as the word “reason” became more and more identified with “scientific method,” the word “imagination” had to take over more and more of the work previously done by the word “reason.” The various uses of these words are still found side by side in common speech. When we say contemptuously that a thing is “all imagination,” we mean that it is mere fancy — an image corresponding to no reality. But when we say that a scheme of — let us say — post-war construction, displays “real imagination,” we mean, not merely that it is seen vivid and complete like an “image” or picture, but that it shows profound insight and intellectual grasp of the whole subject. The two adjectives “imaginary” and “imaginative” correspond to the older and the later use of the word “imagination.” The word “image” itself has different meanings in different contexts: compare, for instance, its meaning in the phrase “to make a graven image” and in the phrase “God made man in His own image” and then compare both of them with the optician’s technical use of the word when he says that the appearance formed on a screen by an optical lens is a “true image,” whereas that formed in a mirror is not. The optician is using the word in a restricted sense — he is using it, that is, as a technical term — one word, one meaning. When the common man reads a scientific book, he has to learn what is the precise technical use of the terms employed by the scientist. When the scientist reads a work of literature, he has to remember that every word in that book must be interpreted — not absolutely, as though it were a technical term, but relatively to its context.
The possibilities of confusion are very great — especially when one bears in mind that a scientist in one department is himself only a “common poet” in his use and understanding of the technical vocabulary of another department of science. Theology, for example, is a science with a highly technical vocabulary of its own; and when (for example) a biologist ventures (as he frequently does) into criticism of other people’s theology, he is apt to tumble into errors quite as grotesque as those made by popular preachers who adorn their sermons with misapplied scraps of biology. I remember reading with fascination and malignant joy a prolonged argument between a distinguished scientist and a theologian on the subject of transubstantiation. It occupied a great deal of paper, and went on for months. But from beginning to end of the correspondence, it never occurred to the scientist to suspect, nor to his opponent to inform him, that the technical theological meaning of the word “substance” was not merely different from its meaning in current contemporary speech, but almost its direct opposite. It could scarcely even be called a quarrel about words — it was a random exchange of words which prevented them from ever discovering what the subject was they had undertaken to quarrel about.
Or take again the case of the word “reality.” No word occasions so much ill-directed argument. We are now emerging from a period when people were inclined to use it as though nothing was real unless it could be measured; and some old-fashioned materialists still use it so. But if you go back behind the dictionary meanings — such as “that which has objective existence” — and behind its philosophic history to the derivation of the word, you find that “reality” means “the thing thought.” Reality is a concept; and a real object is that which corresponds to the concept. In ordinary conversation we still use the word in this way. When we say “those pearls are not real,” we do not mean that they cannot be measured; we mean that the measurement of their make-up does not correspond to the concept “pearl,” that, regarded as pearls, they are nothing more than an appearance; they are quite actual, but they are not real. As pearls, in fact, they have no objective existence. Professor Eddington is much troubled by the words “reality” and “existence”; in his Philosophy of Physical Science he can find no use or meaning for the word “existence” — unless, he admits, it is taken to mean “that which is present in the thought of God.” That, he thinks, is not the meaning usually given to it. But it is, in fact, the precise meaning, and the only meaning, given to it by the theologian.
I have taken up a lot of your time with this talk about words — which may seem very far removed from the subject of creative mind. But I have two objects in doing so. The first is simply to warn you that my use of words will not always be your use of words, and that the words of the common poet — the creator in words — must never be interpreted absolutely, but only in relation to their context. They must be considered as fields of force, which disturb and are disturbed by their environment. Secondly, I want to place before you this passage from the works of Richard Hard — an eighteenth-century English divine:
“The source of bad criticism, as universally of bad philosophy, is the abuse of terms. A poet they say must follow nature: and by nature, we are to suppose, can only be meant the known and experienced course of affairs in this world. Whereas the poet has a world of his own, where experience has less to do than consistent imagination.”
It was the Royal Society who announced in 1687 that they “exacted from their members a close, naked, natural way of speaking . . . bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can.” Words, they imply, are not to be metaphorical or allusive or charged with incalculable associations — but to approximate as closely as possible to mathematical symbols: “one word, one meaning.” And to this Hard retorts in effect that, for the poet, this use of language is simply not “natural” at all. It is contrary to the nature of language and to the nature of the poet. The poet does not work by the analysis and measurement of observables, but by a “consistent imagination.” He creates, we may say, by building up new images, new intellectual concepts, new worlds, if you like, to form new consistent wholes, new unities out of diversity. And I should like to submit to you that this is in fact the way in which all creative mind works — in the sciences as everywhere else — in divine as well as in human creation, so far as we can observe and understand divine methods of creation. That is, that within our experience, creation proceeds by the discovery of new conceptual relations between things, so as to form them into systems having a consistent wholeness corresponding to an image in the mind, and, consequently, possessing real existence.
Let us take a few instances quite at random. The physicists have been exciting us a good deal lately by horrible revelations about the stuff the visible universe is made of. They tell us that it is not “really” full of solid things as we suppose, and that it is not “really” full of the different kinds of things we suppose. Everything (if I understand them rightly) is composed of the same thing — namely (I must go very carefully here for fear of committing them to some too positive statement) — namely, certain items of a more or less electrical nature, moving about (whatever motion may be — or would it be better to say “functioning”?) in a great deal of empty space, whatever that may be. Boiled down to the last proton and neutron, everything in the universe is the same thing. There is no clear-cut dividing line between one thing and another. There is only some kind of related activity and a numerical relation to distinguish the atom of helium from any other of the ninety-two elements, or you and me from the air we breathe. Indeed, there is, in a sense, nothing very much to show where you and I leave off and the rest of the universe begins. When we ponder this too closely, we may begin to wonder whether we possess any reality at all. But (escaping from the hypnotic power of words) we may console ourselves with the thought that the reality of the atom, or of ourselves, consists precisely in the relation that binds us into a recognisable unity. Our behaviour corresponds to a mental concept which sees us as a whole. The atom and ourselves are as it were created out of an undifferentiated universe by an act of consistent imagination which holds us together as one thing. It does not matter for our purpose whose imagination is supposed to be involved — the important thing for our reality is that we can be thus imaged into existence.
At what point does the creative imagination of the baby begin to select consistent unities out of the atomic material offered to his observation? The psychologists have not yet told us very much about this. We do know, however, from a study of the history of language, that perception of the unity of “this-tree-here” precedes the perception of the unity of “trees-in-general.” There has to be a mental gathering-together of like images before the creation of a great all-embracing image of “the tree” in the abstract. The realisation that this-thing is in many respects like that-thing leads to a concept of a thing-in-itself: the relation in which this-thing and that-thing and all the other like things are bound into a unity. At this point we begin to ask whether the word “tree” denotes any objective reality apart from the separate trees that make up the concept. We can measure individual trees, use them, do things with them; whether we can do anything with tree-in-general, except think about it, is another question. We will not stop to discuss that for the moment — merely noting that the concept “tree” is a great act of creative imagination, which at least enables us to think much more usefully about individual trees. We can reason about the concept “tree-in-the-abstract” as if it were an actual object, and, having thought about it, we can apply our conclusions to actual, measurable trees.
Note the words “as if” — because the moment we say those words we are coming very near to the thing called poetic creation. Let us take another instance. At some point the primitive savage, at some point the individual infant, having perceived a likeness among certain groups of related atoms, begins to make a further relation between these groups — this time a numerical relation: one tree, two trees, twenty trees, a hundred trees. And from the perception of this relation he creates a new concept: number-in-itself.
According to one great mathematician: “God made the integers; all else is the work of man.” And, according to many mathematicians, number is, as it were, the fundamental characteristic of the universe. But what is number, other than a relation between like things — like groupings of atoms — like unities? We say that we see six eggs (or we said so when eggs were plentiful). Certainly we see egg, egg, egg, egg, egg, egg in a variety of arrangements; but can we see six — apart from the eggs? No man hath seen an integer at any time. There has perhaps never been a greater act of the creative imagination than the creation of the concept of number as a thing-in-itself. Yet, with that concept, the mathematician can work, handling pure number as if it possessed independent existence, and producing results applicable to things measurable and observable.
I am trying to suggest to you what are the characteristics of creative imagination — creative mind, reason, intellect, or whatever you like to call it. In this rough survey of creative achievement, we may pick out these phrases: the perception of likenesses, the relating of like things to form a new unity, and the words “as if.”
I will now take two instances of a rather different kind of creation — the poet’s kind. The poet’s imagination creates by metaphor. It perceives a likeness between a number of things that at first sight appear to have no measurable relation, and it builds them into a new kind of unity, a new universe, that can be handled with power as if it possessed independent existence, and whose power is operative in the world of things that can be observed and measured.
When I said some time ago that the efforts of the scientist to use language as though it were mathematical symbol resembled those of a man trying to cram a cat into a basket, I was not actually using metaphor. But I was pointing out a series of likenesses from which a metaphorical image might be created. The poet will take this process a step further. He will write a line such as that famous line of Shakespeare’s about the honey-bees:
The singing masons building roofs of gold.
Now, the scientist who wants one word, one meaning, may very properly object to almost every word in this line. He will point out that the word “singing” would be better confined to the noise produced by the vibration of the vocal chords; that bees have no vocal chords; that the noise they make is produced by the vibration of their flight apparatus; and that it has no such emotional significance as the idea of “singing” implies. Further, that bees are not, in the strict sense of the word, masons, and that their manipulation of wax in their mandibles to make honey cells is quite unlike the action of masons in a stone-cutter’s yard; “building” he might allow; but “roofs” (he will say) is an inaccurate description of a conglomeration of hexagonal cells; while the word “gold” is preposterous, seeing that neither the atomic structure nor even the colour of the product in question is correctly indicated by such a misleading word. He will not, that is, recognise the poet’s new unity, constructed from a new set of likenesses, because it does not conform to scientific method. It is a different set of likenesses, not verifiable with a yardstick; and the unity is not one which can be separated from the surrounding universe by any tests which his technique can apply. But if he comes to test it with the technique which he possesses, not as a scientist, but as a common man, he will find that the metaphor behaves exactly like any other unity constructed by the creative imagination: it does establish a likeness; it does behave as a separable whole, and it produces observable effects as if it possessed independent existence. It can, for example, produce that observable effect on observable nerve and blood tissues that is known as “making one’s heart leap” — it may even produce an observable reaction from the tear-glands, resulting in a measurable quantity of brackish water. A scientific description of the process of cell formation by the worker-bee might produce other observable results, equally important: but it would not produce those.
It will be noticed that the words of that line —
The singing masons building roofs of gold
are far more powerful in combination than they are separately. Yet each word brings with it a little accumulation of power of its own — for each word is itself a separate unity and a separate creative act. “Singing” has the suggestion of a spontaneous expression of joy and physical well-being, and — since the singing creatures are a whole hiveful — it also suggests social rejoicing, a gladness felt in common. “Masons” and “building” bring with them associations of the joy of skilled craftsmanship, the beauty of great buildings, and a further social suggestion, in that buildings are commonly designed to be the homes, or working-places, or shrines for worship of all sorts of people. “Roofs of gold” carries a special reminiscence of the Golden City of the New Jerusalem — together with such romantic names as the Golden City of Manoa and so on; and “gold” has, of course, innumerable rich and glowing suggestions, ranging from the light of the sun to the common association of worldly wealth. All these are welded in one line into the image of the joyful craftsmen singing over their task as they build the golden city; and this, by a metaphor, is identified with the sensation of standing in a sunny garden, hearing the drone of the bees as they pack the honeycomb with sweetness. Two images are fused into a single world of power by a cunning perception of a set of likenesses between unlike things. That is not all: in its context, the line belongs to a passage which welds the fused image again into yet another unity, to present the picture of the perfect State:
for so work the honey-bees,
Creatures which by a law in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
This is not scientist’s truth; it is poet’s truth, like the truth latent in that unscientific word, “quicksilver.” It is the presentation of a unity among like things, producing a visible, measurable effect as if the unity were itself measurable.
The creation of a whole work of art proceeds along the same lines. A work of fiction, for example, possesses poetic truth provided that the author has rightly seen which things can be so related as to combine into a convincing unity — provided, as Hard says, the work is an act of consistent imagination. If the imagination is consistent, the work will produce effects as if it were actually true. If it is not consistent, then the effects produced will be the wrong ones — they will not work out properly — any more than Kepler’s circular solar system would work out properly in observation, because it was wrongly imagined. As soon as Kepler had imagined his system consistently, the calculations came out right; it is, of course, open to the relativist to say that Kepler’s system with its central sun and elliptical planetary orbits is no more absolutely true than any other system, and, indeed, that whether the earth goes round the sun or the sun round the earth is merely a question of how you look at it. That may be perfectly true; but it does not affect the issue. To a relativist, no doubt, the Ptolemaic, earth-centred system with its elaborate epicycles is as relatively true as the Copernican — only, it is much less convenient, much less simple, much less productive of good results in practice; in a word, it is much less powerfully imagined. Similarly, one may say that the most preposterous story in Peg’s Paper has just as much or little claim to be called scientifically true as Hamlet. Neither set of events ever happened in any verifiable or provable sense of the words. If Hamlet has a truth that the Peg’s Paper novelette has not, it is because it is created by a more consistent imagination, and its measurable effects on humanity are richer and more valuable.
For the next instance of “consistent imagination” I will ask you to wander with me down a very curious little bypath. It was during the last century that the great war was fought between churchmen and men of science over the theory of Evolution. We need not fight afresh every battle in that campaign. The scientists won their victory; chiefly, or at any rate largely, with the help of the palæontologists and the biologists. It was made clear that the earlier history of the earth and its inhabitants could be reconstructed from fossil remains surviving in its present, and from vestigial structures remaining in the various plants and animals with which it is now peopled. It was scarcely possible to suppose any longer that God had created each species — to quote the text of Paradise Lost— “perfect forms, limb’d and full grown,” except on what seemed the extravagant assumption that, when creating the universe, He had at the same time provided it with the evidence of a purely imaginary past which had never had any actual existence. Now, the first thing to be said about this famous quarrel is that the churchmen need never have been perturbed at all about the method of creation, if they had remembered that the Book of Genesis was a book of poetical truth, and not intended as a scientific handbook of geology. They got into their difficulty, to a large extent, through having unwittingly slipped into accepting the scientist’s concept of the use of language, and supposing that a thing could not be true unless it was amenable to quantitative methods of proof. Eventually, and with many slips by the way, they contrived to clamber out of this false position; and to-day no reasonable theologian is at all perturbed by the idea that creation was effected by evolutionary methods. But, if the theologians had not lost touch with the nature of language; if they had not insensibly fallen into the eighteenth-century conception of the universe as a mechanism and God as the Great Engineer; if, instead, they had chosen to think of God as a great imaginative artist — then they might have offered a quite different kind of interpretation of the facts, with rather entertaining consequences. They might, in fact, have seriously put forward the explanation I mentioned just now: that God had at some moment or other created the universe complete with all the vestiges of an imaginary past.
I have said that this “seemed an extravagant assumption”; so it does, if one thinks of God as a mechanician. But if one thinks of Him as working in the same sort of way as a creative artist, then it no longer seems extravagant, but the most natural thing in the world. It is the way every novel in the world is written.
Every serious novelist starts with some or all of his characters “in perfect form and fully grown,” complete with their pasts. Their present is conditioned by a past which exists, not fully on paper, but fully or partially in the creator’s imagination. And as he goes on writing the book, he will — especially if it is a long work, like the Forsyte Saga or the “Peter Wimsey” series — plant from time to time in the text of the book allusions to that unwritten past. If his imagination is consistent, then all those allusions, all those, so to speak, planted fossils, will tell a story consistent with one another and consistent with the present and future actions of the characters. That is to say, that past, existing only in the mind of the maker, produces a true and measurable effect upon the written part of the book, precisely as though it had, in fact, “taken place” within the work of art itself.
If you have ever amused yourselves by reading some of the works of “spoof” criticism about Sherlock Holmes (e.g. Baker Street Studies, or H. W. Bell’s Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson), you will see just how far pseudo-scientific method can be used to interpret these “fossil remains” scattered about the Sherlock Holmes stories, and what ingenuity can be used to force the indications into an apparent historical consistency. As regards the past of his characters, Conan Doyle’s imagination was not, in fact, very consistent; there are lapses and contradictions, as well as lacunæ. But let us suppose a novelist with a perfectly consistent imagination, who had conceived his characters with an absolutely complete and flawless past history; and let us suppose, further, that the fossil remains were being examined by one of the characters, who (since his existence is contained wholly within the covers of the book just as ours is contained wholly within the universe) could not get outside the written book to communicate with the author. (This, I know, is difficult, rather like imagining the inhabitants of two-dimensional space, but it can be done.) Now, such a character would be in precisely the same position as a scientist examining the evidence which the universe affords of its own past. The evidence would all be there, it would all point in the same direction, and its effects would be apparent in the whole action of the story itself (that is, in what, for him, would be “real” history). There is no conceivable set of data, no imaginable line of reasoning, by which he could possibly prove whether or not that past had ever gone through the formality of taking place. On the evidence — the fossil remains, the self-consistency of all the data, and the effects observable in himself and his fellow characters — he would, I think, be forced to conclude that it had taken place. And, whether or no, he would be obliged to go on behaving as if it had taken place. Indeed, he could not by any means behave otherwise, because he had been created by his maker as a person with those influences in his past.
I think that if the churchmen had chosen to take up that position, the result would have been entertaining. It would have been a very strong position, because it is one that cannot be upset by scientific proof. Probably, theologians would have been deterred by a vague sense that a God who made His universe like this was not being quite truthful. But that would be because of a too limited notion of “truth.” In what sense is the unwritten past of the characters in a book less “true” than their behaviour in it? Or if a prehistory that never happened exercises an effect on history indistinguishable from the effect it would have made by happening, what real difference is there between happening and not-happening? If it is deducible from the evidence, self-consistent, and recognisable in its effects, it is quite real, whether or not it ever was actual.
I am not, of course, giving it as my opinion that the world was made yesterday all of a piece, or even that it first came into being at the point where prehistory stops and history begins; I am only saying that if it had, then, provided the imagination were consistent, no difference of any kind would have been made to anything whatever in the universe. Though, of course, if we were willing to accept such a theory, we might find it easier to deal with some of our problems about time. And, by the way, we should then expect a continuous deposit, as time went on into the future, of fresh evidence about the past. That is, new palæological and other records would be discovered from time to time as the author put them there and directed attention to them — much in the same way as evidential allusions to Peter Wimsey’s schooldays are apt to make their appearance from time to time as the series of his adventures continues. You will notice that palæological discoveries are made from time to time — this proves nothing either way; on either hypothesis they would be bound to occur. All I have tried to do in this piece of fantasy is to show that where you have a consistent imagination at work, the line between scientific and poetic truth may become very hard to draw.
You will probably be tempted, by your habit of mind, to ask — what does all this prove? It does not, in the scientific sense of the word, prove anything. The function of imaginative speech is not to prove, but to create — to discover new similarities, and to arrange them to form new unities, to build new self-consistent worlds out of the universe of undifferentiated mind-stuff.
Every activity has its own technique; the mistake is to suppose that the technique of one activity is suitable for all purposes. In scientific reasoning, for example, the poet’s technique of metaphor and analogy is inappropriate and even dangerous — its use leads to conclusions which are false to science, which builds its new unities out of quantitative likenesses, and things which are numerically comparable. The error of the Middle Ages, on the whole, was to use analogical, metaphorical, poetical techniques for the investigation of scientific questions. But increasingly, since the seventeenth century, we have tended to the opposite error — that of using the quantitative methods of science for the investigation of poetic truth. But to build poetic systems of truth, the similarities must be, not quantitative, but qualitative, and the new unity that will emerge will be a world of new values. Here, metaphor and analogy are both appropriate and necessary — for both these processes involve the arranging of things according to some quality that the dissimilars have in common: thus (to go back to my early simile) common language and an infuriated cat, though in quantitative respects very unlike, have in common a certain quality of intractability. And thus, too, the associative values of words, which make them such bad tools for the scientist, make them the right tools for the poet, for they facilitate the establishment of similarities between many widely-differing concepts, and so make easy the task of the creative imagination building up its poetic truths.
Perhaps I ought to add a caution about words. I said that words were, metaphorically, fields of force. May I, in my metaphorical, poetical and unscientific way, press this analogy a little further. It is as dangerous for people unaccustomed to handling words and unacquainted with their technique to tinker about with these heavily-charged nuclei of emotional power as it would be for me to burst into a laboratory and play about with a powerful electromagnet or other machine highly charged with electrical force. By my clumsy and ignorant handling, I should probably, at the very least, contrive to damage either the machine or myself; at the worst I might blow up the whole place. Similarly the irresponsible use of highly-electric words is very strongly to be deprecated.
At the present time we have a population that is literate, in the sense that everybody is able to read and write; but, owing to the emphasis placed on scientific and technical training at the expense of the humanities, very few of our people have been taught to understand and handle language as an instrument of power. This means that, in this country alone, forty million innocents or thereabouts are wandering inquisitively about the laboratory, enthusiastically pulling handles and pushing buttons, thereby releasing uncontrollable currents of electric speech, with results that astonish themselves and the world. Nothing is more intoxicating than a sense of power: the demagogue who can sway crowds, the journalist who can push up the sales of his paper to the two-million mark, the playwright who can plunge an audience into an orgy of facile emotion, the parliamentary candidate who is carried to the top of the poll on a flood of meaningless rhetoric, the ranting preacher, the advertising salesman of material or spiritual commodities, are all playing perilously and irresponsibly with the power of words, and are equally dangerous whether they are cynically unscrupulous or (as frequently happens) have fallen under the spell of their own eloquence and become the victims of their own propaganda. For the great majority of those whom they are addressing have no skill in assessing the value of words, and are as helpless under verbal attack as were the citizens of Rotterdam against assault from the air. When we first began to realise the way in which the common sense of Europe had been undermined and battered down by Nazi propaganda, we were astonished as well as horrified; yet there was nothing astonishing about it. It was simply another exhibition of ruthless force: the employment of a very powerful weapon by experts who understood it perfectly against people who were not armed to resist it, and had never really understood that it was a weapon at all. And the defence against the misuse of words is not flight, nor yet the random setting off of verbal fireworks, but the wary determination to understand the potentialities of language, and to use it with resolution and skill.
It is right that the scientists should come to terms with the humanities; for in daily life scientists also are common men, and the flight from language will never avail to carry them out of its field of power. They must learn to handle that instrument, as they handle other instruments, with a full comprehension of what it is, and what it does, and in so doing they will come to recognise it as a source of delight as well as of danger. The language of the imagination can never be inert: as with every other living force, you must learn to handle it or it will handle you. “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
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