I
Helmholtz observed, in a lecture of 1869 that has become famous, that “the final aim of Natural Science is to discover the motions underlying all alteration, and the motive forces thereof; that is, to resolve itself into Mechanics.” What this resolution into mechanics means is the reference of all qualitative impressions to fixed quantitative base-values, that is, to the extended and to change of place therein. It means, further—if we bear in mind the opposition of becoming and become, form and law, image and notion—the referring of the seen Nature-picture to the imagined picture of a single numerically and structurally measurable Order. The specific tendency of all Western mechanics is towards an intellectual conquest by measurement, and it is therefore obliged to look for the essence of the phenomenon in a system of constant elements that are susceptible of full and inclusive appreciation by measurement, of which Helmholtz distinguishes motion (using the word in its everyday sense) as the most important.
To the physicist this definition appears unambiguous and exhaustive, but to the sceptic who has followed out the history of this scientific conviction, it is very far from being either. To the physicist, present-day mechanics is a logical system of clear, uniquely-significant concepts and of simple, necessary relations; while to the other it is a picture distinctive of the structure of the West-European spirit, though he admits that the picture is consistent in the highest degree and most impressively convincing. It is self-evident that no practical results and discoveries can prove anything as to the “truth” of the theory, the picture.[[463]] For most people, indeed, “mechanics” appears as the self-evident synthesis of Nature-impressions. But it merely appears to be so. For what is motion? Is not the postulate that everything qualitative is reducible to the motion of unalterably-alike mass-points, essentially Faustian and not common to humanity? Archimedes, for example, did not feel himself obliged to transpose the mechanics that he saw into a mental picture of motions. Is motion generally a purely mechanical quantity? Is it a word for a visual experience or is it a notion derived from that experience? Is it the number that is found by measurement of experimentally-produced facts, or the picture that is subjected to that number, that is signified by it? And if one day physics should really succeed in reaching its supposed aim, in devising a system of law-governed “motions” and of efficient forces behind them into which everything whatsoever appreciable by the senses could be fitted—would it thereby have achieved “knowledge” of that which occurs, or even made one step towards this achievement? Yet is the form-language of mechanics one whit the less dogmatic on that account? Is it not, on the contrary, a vessel of the myth like the root-words, not proceeding from experience but shaping it and, in this case, shaping it with all possible rigour? What is force? What is a cause? What is a process? Nay, even on the basis of its own definitions, has physics a specific problem at all? Has it an object that counts as such for all the centuries? Has it even one unimpeachable imagination-unit, with reference to which it may express its results?
The answer may be anticipated. Modern physics, as a science, is an immense system of indices in the form of names and numbers whereby we are enabled to work with Nature as with a machine.[[464]] As such, it may have an exactly-definable end. But as a piece of history, all made up of destinies and incidents in the lives of the men who have worked in it and in the course of research itself, physics is, in point of object, methods and results alike an expression and actualization of a Culture, an organic and evolving element in the essence of that Culture, and every one of its results is a symbol. That which physics—which exists only in the waking-consciousness of the Culture-man—thinks it finds in its methods and in its results was already there, underlying and implicit in, the choice and manner of its search. Its discoveries, in virtue of their imagined content (as distinguished from their printable formulæ), have been of a purely mythic nature, even in minds so prudent as those of J. B. Mayer, Faraday and Hertz. In every Nature-law, physically exact as it may be, we are called upon to distinguish between the nameless number and the naming of it, between the plain fixation of limits[[465]] and their theoretical interpretation. The formulæ represent general logical values, pure numbers—that is to say, objective space—and boundary-elements. But formulæ are dumb. The expression s = ½gt² means nothing at all unless one is able mentally to connect the letters with particular words and their symbolism. But the moment we clothe the dead signs in such words, give them flesh, body and life, and, in sum, a perceptible significance in the world, we have overstepped the limits of a mere order. θεωρία means image, vision, and it is this that makes a Nature-law out of a figure-and-letter formula. Everything exact is in itself meaningless, and every physical observation is so constituted that it proves the basis of a certain number of imaged presuppositions; and the effect of its successful issue is to make these presuppositions more convincing than ever. Apart from these, the result consists merely of empty figures. But in fact we do not and cannot get apart from them. Even if an investigator puts on one side every hypothesis that he knows as such, as soon as he sets his thought to work on the supposedly clear task, he is not controlling but being controlled by the unconscious form of it, for in living activity he is always a man of his Culture, of his age, of his school and of his tradition. Faith and “knowledge” are only two species of inner certitude, but of the two faith is the older and it dominates all the conditions of knowing, be they never so exact. And thus it is theories and not pure numbers that are the support of all natural science. The unconscious longing for that genuine science which (be it repeated) is peculiar to the spirit of Culture-man sets itself to apprehend, to penetrate, and to comprise within its grasp the world-image of Nature. Mere industrious measuring for measuring’s sake is not and never has been more than a delight for little minds. Numbers may only be the key of the secret, no more. No significant man would ever have spent himself on them for their own sake.
Kant, it is true, says in a well-known passage: “I maintain that in each and every discipline of natural philosophy it is only possible to find as much of true science as is to be found of mathematics therein.” What Kant has in mind here is pure delimitation in the field of the become, so far as law and formula, number and system can (at any particular stage) be seen in that field. But a law without words, a law, consisting merely of a series of figures read off an instrument, cannot even as an intellectual operation be completely effective in this pure state. Every savant’s experiment, be it what it may, is at the same time an instance of the kind of symbolism that rules in the savant’s ideation. All Laws formulated in words are Orders that have been activated and vitalized, filled with the very essence of the one—and only the one—Culture. As to the “necessity” which is a postulate in all exact research, here too we have to consider two kinds of necessity, viz., a necessity within the spiritual and living (for it is Destiny that the history of every individual research-act takes its course when, where and how it does) and a necessity within the known (for which the current Western name is Causality). If the pure numbers of a physical formula represent a causal necessity, the existence, the birth and the life-duration of a theory are a Destiny.
Every fact, even the simplest, contains ab initio a theory. A fact is a uniquely-occurring impression upon a waking being, and everything depends on whether that being, the being for whom it occurs or did occur, is or was Classical or Western, Gothic or Baroque. Compare the effect produced by a flash of lightning on a sparrow and on an alert physical investigator, and think how much more is contained in the observer’s “fact” than in the sparrow’s. The modern physicist is too ready to forget that even words like quantity, position, process, change of state and body represent specifically Western images. These words excite and these images mirror a feeling of significances, too subtle for verbal description, incommunicable to Classical or to Magian or to other mankind as like subtleties of their thought and feeling are incommunicable to us. And the character of scientific facts as such—that is, the mode of their becoming known—is completely governed by this feeling; and if so, then also a fortiori such intricate intellectual notions as work, tension, quantity of energy, quantity of heat, probability,[[466]] every one of which contains a veritable scientific myth of its own. We think of such conceptual images as ensuing from quite unprejudiced research and, subject to certain conditions, definitively valid. But a first-rate scientist of the time of Archimedes would have declared himself, after a thorough study of our modern theoretical physics, quite unable to comprehend how anyone could assert such arbitrary, grotesque and involved notions to be Science, still less how they could be claimed as necessary consequences from actual facts. “The scientifically-justified conclusions,” he would have said, “are really so-and-so”; and thereupon he would have evolved, on the basis of the same elements made “facts” by his eyes and his mind, theories that our physicists would listen to with amazed ridicule.
For what, after all, are the basic notions that have been evolved with inward certainty of logic in the field of our physics? Polarized light-rays, errant ions, flying and colliding gas-particles, magnetic fields, electric currents and waves—are they not one and all Faustian visions, closely akin to Romanesque ornamentation, the upthrust of Gothic architecture, the Viking’s voyaging into unknown seas, the longings of Columbus and Copernicus? Did not this world of forms and pictures grow up in perfect tune with the contemporary arts of perspective oil-painting and instrumental music? Are they not, in short, our passionate directedness, our passion of the third dimension, coming to symbolic expression in the imagined Nature-picture as in the soul-image?