Science, Like Art, Is Not

When Coleridge Tried To Define Beauty, He Returned Always To One Deep Thought; Beauty, He Said, Is Unity In Variety! Science Is Nothing Else Than The Search To Discover Unity In The Wild Variety Of Nature,-or, More Exactly, In The Variety Of Our Experience. Poetry, Painting, The Arts Are The Same Search, In Coleridge's Phrase, For Unity In Variety.

Every Animal Leaves Traces Of What It Was; Man Alone Leaves Traces Of What He Created.

I Call That Brilliant Sequence Of Cultural Peaks The Ascent Of Man.

The Private Motives Of Scientists Are Not The Trend Of Science. The Trend Of Science Is Made By The Needs Of Society: Navigation Before The Eighteenth Century, Manufacture Thereafter; And In Our Age I Believe The Liberation Of Personality. Whatever The Part Which Scientists Like To Act, Or For That Matter Which Painters Like To Dress, Science Shares The Aims Of Our Society Just As Art Does.

The Painter's Portrait And The Physicist's Explanation Are Both Rooted In Reality, But They Have Been Changed By The Painter Or The Physicist Into Something More Subtly Imagined Than The Photographic Appearance Of Things.