02/23/12
Facts and Dreams Lawrence Lipking
Here is one of the Proverbs of Hell: “What is
now proved was once, only imagin’d.” When William Blake inscribed these devilish
words in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he meant to tweak the claims of
science. Imagination always came first, while facts and evidence bobbed in its
wake. From Blake’s point of view, the proverb laments a fatal historical shift
from “only” as all-encompassing to “only” as “merely.” At one time human beings
viewed the world as a reflection of their own desires and visions, but now they
disbelieve whatever cannot be proved; the Book of Nature has taken the place of
the Bible. The scientific revolution brings out the devil in Blake. He wants to
write a new bible, to loosen the iron grip of reason and put imagination back on
its throne.
Are imagination and science really at war? To some extent the so-called conflict seems bogus. A benevolent reading of Blake’s proverb might reduce it to common sense, or to a maxim that any scientist might follow in applying for a grant to test an idea. No idea, no funding; no imagined Higgs boson, no CERN. In this respect the hypothetical construct that drives attempts to prove or disprove it is not the opposite of science but its prime mover. Imagination and proof couple together as tightly as mind and body, or as Blake’s visions and the books that he makes with his hands. Great scientists are visionaries, too.
And yet the conjunction disturbs many people. During the seventeenth century, when modern notions of science first began to take form, polemics against the power of imagination rose often to fever pitch. Pascal thought that imagination, the “mistress of error and falsehood,” tragically ruled the world, seducing the wise and foolish alike with empty shows that prevailed over reason and substance; and he and Descartes accused each other of succumbing to it. In a famous passage of The Assayer, Galileo ridiculed an enemy for believing that natural philosophy—or what we now call science—“is a book of fiction created by some writer, like the Iliad or Orlando Furioso, books in which the least important thing is whether what is written there is true.” On the contrary, “philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.” Precise calculation trumps the most elegant fable.
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