Notes and References Preface 1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Translator's Preface to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 2. Paul Valery, Eupalinos or the Architect, in Dialogues, translated by William McCausland Stewart (New York: Pantheon, 1956). 3. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (London: Phoenix, 1978) p. 3. 4. Raymond Tallis, The Enemies of Consciousness (London: Macmillan, forthcoming). 5. Matthew Arnold, 'The Study of Poetry', in Essays in Criticism, Everyman Library (London: Dent, 1964) p. 235. 6. Ibid. p. 235. 7. Grevel Lindop, 'Newton, Raymond Tallis and the Three Cultures', PN Review, 1991; 18(1): 36-42. 1 Omnescience 1. Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber, 1992). 2. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 3. F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures: The Significance of C. P. Snow (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962). 4. Bryan Appleyard, Understanding the Present (London: Picador, 1992). 5. Alan Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Harvard University Press, 1990). 6. Malcolm Dean, 'How to stop the sun going round the earth', Lancet, 336, 1990, pp. 615-16. 7. For critiques, see Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure (London: Macmillan, 1988) and In Defence of Realism (London: Edward Arnold, 1988). 8. C. Bell, 'A hundred years of Lancet language', Lancet, ii, 22/29 December 1986, 1453. 9. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Penguin: London, 1962). 10. Wolpert. 11. Raymond Tallis, The Explicit Animal (London: Macmillan, 1991). 12. Quoted in Lewis Wolpert and Alison Richards, A Passion for Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) P: 2. 13. J.G. Merquior, From Prague to Paris (London: Verso, 1986) p. 308. 14. Quoted in James Cleick, Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics (London: Little, Brown & Company, 1992) p. 364. 2 Poets, Scientists and Rainbows 1. William Blake, letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802, in Complete Writings, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) p. 818. 214 Notes and References 215 2. See, for example, Erich Heller, 'Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth', in The Disinherited Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961) for a witty and penetrating, as well as scholarly, discussion. 3. Coleridge's attitude to science is particularly complex. After his initial enthusiasm for the mechanistic quasi-Newtonian associationist psy­ chology of Hartley et al., he became disillusioned with psychological atomism. Then he dreamt of reconciling the 'mechanico-corpuscular system' of the British Empiricists with the 'organic' and 'active' philo­ sophical psychology of contemporary German philosophy - as part of a larger project of 'reducing all knowledges into harmony'. However, he was also arguably - and very quotably - hostile to science: in, for example, Biographia Literaria, his philosophical chefd'oeuvre, where he deplored the fact that 'we have purchased a few brilliant inventions at the loss of all communion with life and the spirit of nature'. Professor John Beer (personal communication) has drawn my attention to another instance of the inconstancy of Coleridge's attitude to science. A letter, in which Coleridge sets out a disparaging view of Newton's status, is followed by another in which he begs his correspondent to destroy such a set of arrogant assertions. Professor Beer adds: 'Needless to say the correspondent did not and the letter was preserved for posterity!' Most interesting of all is Blake's own ambivalence (and here I am again indebted to Professor Beer for pointing out the relevant passages). In Europe, Plate 13, Newton is described as 'A mighty spirit leap'd from the land of Albion' (Oxford, Complete Writings, p. 243). In A Descriptive Catalogue, Newton is ranked with Chaucer and Linnaeus: 'As Newton numbered the stars and Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men'. Professor Beer's interpretation of the Newton plate reproduced on the cover of this book is that, for Blake, Newton is 'a basically beautiful figure who has restricted his vision'. Although he is a manifestation of Urizen, who closed people's eyes to the divine vision, by 'contracting and bounding', bending over the fallen world, marking out its limits with a pair of compasses, he is not thoroughly evil nor an unredeemably negative force: he is great but misguided. In Blake's system, the physics of Newton was lumped with the meta­ physics and meta-science of Locke and Bacon, with the aesthetics of Reynolds, the poetics of Pope, Dryden and Dr Johnson, with the political theory of Burke and with the theology of the English State Church. Many of those who approve Blake on Newton seem judiciously to forget Blake on Pope, Burke, etc. 'The aggregate of all this', as Harold Bloom points out (in his Headnote to Blake in The OxfordAnthologyof English Literature, vol. II, p. 12. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 'quite unfairly but wholly unforgettably, Blake fused together as the Accuser of Sin, the spectral torturer of English man, of Albion'. 'Unfair but unforgettable' seems to do Blake's version of Newton precise justice. 4. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Third, lines 61-4. These lines are found only in the 1850 edition. 216 Notes and References 5. The Prelude, Book Third, line 270. This is found in both the 1805 and 1850 editions. Grevel Lindop, in the mistaken belief that I was arguing (in an earlier version of this essay published in PN Review) that the Romantics were uniformly hostile to science, has usefully documented Romantic enthusiasm for science and technology (Lindop, 'Newton Raymond Tallis and the Three Cultures', PN Review, 18 (2), 1991). 6. 'Wordsworth at the Barbican', in Gerald Weissman The Doctor with Two Heads and Other Essays (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990). Reading this superb essay - one of several in a brilliant book - I was tempted to echo Donatus' cry: 'Cursed be those who make our remarks before us!'. However, I have found Weissman strengthens my case rather than makes it superfluous. He quotes M. H. Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946),who reminds us of those poets such as Thomson, for whom Newtonian science was an inspiration rather than a target. 7. Though, of course, the only true paradise is paradise lost. Blake's Ecchoing Green is a figment of the imagination. 'Old John, with white hair, laughing away care, 'Sitting under the oak, Among the old folk' hardly corresponds to the documented reality of old age in the pre­ industrial organic communities of the past (see, for example, Peter Laslett's The World We Have Lost, London: Methuen, 1965). Brutal and punitive attitudes to the elderly in times past have been well­ documented in more recent literature (see, for example, M. Feath­ erstone, M. Hepworth, 'Images of Ageing', in J. Bond, P. Coleman, S. Peace, (eds) Ageing in Society. An Introduction to Social Gerontology, 2nd ed., London: Sage, 1993). Blake's vision of village life without fear, tyranny, bullying, illness, hunger, pain, is a poignant fantasy of a Golden Age - of a childhood in an organic community we have been taught to feel we might have had and have somehow lost. Certainly, there is little reason to assume that modern factories are necessarily more hateful places to work in than the village smithy, with a boss unconstrained by a tradition of health and safety at work and untroubled by any legislation on employees' rights. The lot of the apprentice, the servant or the farmer's boy was not a happy one. There would be no redress against a drunken bully; and sexual harrassment would be more than just a suggestive comment next to the xeroxing machine. A study of the period 1300-1840 (A. MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) has dramatically illustrated how individuals with diminished physical, financial and social resources were often neglected and despised. 8. Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber, 1992). 9. See Lindop (Newton, Raymond Tallis and the Three Cultures' cited in note 5) for a fascinating brief account of some of the factors that deepened the divide between arts and science education in Victorian England. The rival claims of influential and charismatic figures such as Spencer and Huxley on behalf of science education, and Matthew Arnold on behalf of education in literature, and the wider in-fighting and position-taking (not to speak of vested interests in educational Notes and References 217 institutions), are fascinatingly set out by Lindop. His conclusion is worth quoting: The structure of academic disciplines in these institutions [the new universities such as those of London and Manchester] was established by men passionately aware of the latest moves in the ideological battle between established Christianity and the world of modem learning . it is in these struggles that the battle between the Two Cultures has its roots. In a secular intellectual world, where is the source of value and authority to lie? Religion once dead, who takes over? To put it plainly: the Humanities and the Sciences believe that together they have slain Religion. Now they tum on each other and fight for succession. 10. Popper's views are presented most rigorously in The Logic of Scientific Enquiryand most accessibly in Objective Knowledge. The latter (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1971) contains 'The Bucket and the Search­ light: Two Theories of Knowledge', as an Appendix. 11. Quoted in J.L. Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) p. 52. 12. Quoted in Heilbron, ibid., p. 57. 13. Against this, Wolpert (op. cit., note 8 above) has emphasised the differences between creativity in the arts and sciences: 'Creativity in the arts is characteristically intensely personal and reflects both the feelings and the ideas of the artist.