In science the uses of the imagination have been frequently commented on, not least by scientists. The patient collection of facts, the digging and measurement and inquiry that characterize so much of scientific investigation are not the whole of it. Inference, the forming of a generalization, is frequently described "as a leap from the known to the unknown," and this discovery of a binding principle that brings together a wide variety of disconnected facts is not unlike the process of the creative artist. The same unconscious method by which a poet hits upon an appropriate epithet, a musician upon a melody, a painter upon an effect of color or line is displayed in that sudden vivid flash of insight by which a scientist sees a mass of facts that have long seemed bafflingly contradictory, gathered up under a single luminous law. In his famous essay on "The Scientific Uses of the Imagination," Tyndall writes:
We are gifted with the power of Imagination, ... and by this power we can lighten the darkness which surrounds the world of the senses. There are tories even in science who regard imagination as a faculty to be feared and avoided rather than employed. They had observed its action in weak vessels and were unduly impressed by its disasters. But they might with equal justice point to exploded boilers as an argument against the use of steam. Bounded and conditioned by coöperant Reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was, at the outset, a leap of the imagination. When William Thomson tries to place the ultimate particles of matter between his compass points, and to apply to them a scale of millimetres, he is powerfully aided by this faculty. And in much that has been recently said about protoplasm and life, we have the outgoings of the imagination guided and controlled by the known analogies of science. In fact, without this power, our knowledge of Nature would be a mere tabulation of coexistences and sequences. We should still believe in the succession of day and night, of summer and winter; but the soul of Force would be dislodged from our universe; causal relations would disappear, and with them that science which is now binding the parts of nature into an organic whole.[1]
[Footnote 1: Tyndall: Fragments of Science, pp. 130-31.]
As we shall presently see, this imaginative leap is guarded and controlled, so that no flash of insight, however attractive, is uncritically accepted. But the origin of every eventually accepted hypothesis lies in the upshoot of irresponsible fancy, differing not at all from the images in the mind of a poet or painter or the melodies that unpredictably occur to a musician.
The æsthetic experience. Art is, on its creative side, as we have seen, the control of Nature in the practical or imaginative realization of ideals. The industrial arts are pursued out of necessity, because man must find himself ways of living in a world which he must inhabit, though it is not a prior arranged for his habitation. The fine arts are pursued as ends in themselves.[1] The genuinely gifted sing, paint, write poetry, apart from fame and reward, for the sheer pleasure of creation. But the products of these creative activities themselves become satisfactions on a par with other natural goods. The objects of art—poems, paintings, statues, symphonies—are themselves prized and sought after. They afford satisfaction to that large number of persons who are sensitive to the beautiful without having a gift for its creation.
[Footnote 1: Many industrial processes exhibit elements of the fine arts. This is the case whenever there is opportunity for the worker to feel, and to have some ground for the feeling, that he is not merely turning out a product, but turning out a well-made or a beautiful one, to which his own skill is contributing. The makers of fine books or bindings or furniture, of fine embroidery and the like, are examples. But such conditions occur chiefly in the so-called luxury trades. There is very little opportunity for the display of creative talent in quantity manufacture.
On the other hand, every fine art involves some elements of merely technical skill or craftsmanship, which is important in achieving an imaginative result, but is the skill of the mechanic rather than the vision of the artist. In surveying the finished product of art as it appears in a painting by a Turner or a Cezanne, we may forget the "dust and ointment of the calling," but it is none the less there. The drudgery of art, the practicing of scales. the mixing of colors, the rehearsing of plays, are, as it were, the necessary preliminary industry in art.]
Æsthetic appreciation is indeed shared by all men, and is called out by other objects than paintings or poems. There is hardly anything men do which is not affected by what has been called "an irrelevant access of æsthetic feeling." We saw in another connection how our estimates of persons and situations are qualified by love and hate, sympathy and revulsion. In the same way all our experiences have an æsthetic coloring. It may be nothing more than the curious jubilance and vivacity, the thrill and tingle of the blood that comes upon a crisp autumn day. It may be, as Mill pointed out, the largeness of thought and vision promoted by habitually working in a spacious and dignified room. Æsthetic influences are always playing upon us; they determine not only our tastes in the decoration of our houses, our choices of places to walk and to eat, but even such seemingly remote and abstract matters as a scientific theory or a philosophy of life. Even the industrial ideal of efficiency has, "with its suggestion of Dutch neatness and cleanliness," order and symmetry, an æsthetic flavor. Similarly is there an appeal to our æsthetic sensibilities in the grouping of a wide variety of facts under sweeping inclusive and simple generalizations. There is, as has often been pointed out, scarcely anything to choose from as regards the relative plausibility of the Copernican over the Ptolemaic system. The former we choose largely because of its greater symmetry and simplicity in accounting for the facts. Even a world view may be chosen on account of its artistic appeal. One feels moved imaginatively, even if one disagrees with the logic of those philosophies which see reality as one luminously transparent conscious whole, in which every experience is delicately reticulated with every other, where discord and division are obliterated, and the multiple variety of mundane facts are gathered up into the symmetrical unity of the eternal.
Appreciation versus action. Every human experience has thus its particular and curious æsthetic flavor, as an inevitable though undetected obligato. Æsthetic values enter into and qualify our estimates of persons and situations, and help to determine that general sympathy or revulsion, that love or hate for people, institutions, or ideas, which make the pervasive atmosphere of all human action. But in the world of action, we cannot emphasize these irrelevant æsthetic feelings. The appreciative and the practical moods are sharply contrasted. In the latter we are interested in results, and insist on the exclusion of all considerations that do not bear on their accomplishment. The appreciative or æsthetic mood is detached; it is interested not to act, but to pause and consider; it does not want to use the present as a point of departure. It wants to bask in the present perfection of color, word, or sound. The practical man is interested in a present situation for what can be done with it; he wants to know, in the vernacular, "What comes next?" "Where do we go from here?" The appreciator wishes to remain in the lovely interlude of perfection which he experiences in music, poetry, or painting.
The æsthetic mood is obviously at a discount in the world of action. To bask in the charm of a present situation, to linger and loiter, as it were, in the sun of beauty, is to accomplish nothing, to interrupt action. It is precisely for this reason that persons with extremely high æsthetic sensibilities are at such a discount in practical life. They are too easily dissolved in appreciation. They are too much absorbed, for practical efficiency, in the tragic, the whimsical, the beautiful, or the comic aspects of men and affairs. The same sensitivity to the innuendoes and colors of life that enable some of such men to give an exquisite and various portraiture of experience, incapacitates them for action. The practical man must not observe anything irrelevant to his immediate business. He must not be dissolved, at every random provocation, into ecstacy, laughter, or sorrow. There is too much to be done in business, government, mechanics, and the laboratory, to allow one's attention to wander dreamingly over the tragic, the beautiful, the pathetic, the comic, and the grotesque qualities of the day's work. To take an extreme case, it would, as Jane Harrison observes, be a monstrosity, when our friend was drowning, to note with lingering appreciation the fluent white curve of his arm in the glimmering waters of the late afternoon. The man to whom every event is flooded with imaginative possibilities and emotional suggestions is a useless or a dangerous character in situations where it is essential to discriminate the immediate and important bearings of facts. We cannot select an expert accountant on the basis of a pleasant smile, nor a chauffeur for his sense of humor.