25
The Times of the Signs

27 November 1973

From SM, 66–96. Written as a paper for a special conference of the Royal Society of Canada held in Ottawa in November 1973 to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543). Originally published under the title “The Times of the Signs: An Essay on Science and Mythology,” in On a Disquieting Earth: Five Hundred Years after Copernicus (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1974), 59–84. Clean typescripts are in NFF, 1988, box 4, files ii–jj. The version in SM provides two notes and corrects a number of typographic errors.

To say the solar chariot is junk

Is not a variation but an end.

Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor

Is still to stick to the contents of the mind

And the desire to believe in a metaphor.

(Wallace Stevens, The Pure Good of Theory [sec. 3, ll. 15–19])

The seventy years of the life of Copernicus were, as we all know, the time when the Middle Ages ended and the modern world came into being. Educated men had known for many centuries that the earth was a sphere, and that one could get to the east by sailing to the west. Perhaps a jealous God would see to it that one got to hell instead, as he did Ulysses in Dante: when there is no reason for crossing the Atlantic, there are any number of reasons for not doing so. But with the voyages of Columbus, da Gama, and Magellan, humanity as a whole began to realize that the earth was round, and to order their lives on that assumption. Up till then, the centre of the world had been, as the word itself makes obvious, the Mediterranean, and the people who sat like frogs around a pool, in Plato’s phrase, on the shores of the sea in the middle of the earth.¹ But after 1492 the nations on the Atlantic seaboard began to realize that it was they who were now in the middle of the world.

In an age which went through this gigantic spatial displacement, it was appropriate that someone should put forward the thesis that the earth is not the unmoved centre of the universe, but one of the planets or wandering stars, and that we must look for another centre for the earth. In the age of Humanism and the increased authority of ancient writers, it was also appropriate that someone should revive the ancient Greek doctrine, propounded by Aristarchus of Samos in the third century B.C., that the earth went round the sun. So when Copernicus published a tentative summary of his views, the Little Commentary (Commentariolus), he attracted a good deal of friendly attention, including the encouragement of the Pope. But as the Reformation began to split Christendom down the middle, the mood changed, and Copernicus changed with it. His later book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies, which appeared in the year of his death, began with a weaseling preface, not by Copernicus, explaining that it contained only hypotheses to be studied by mathematicians, and that what it said was perhaps not true or even probable, only a device to simplify the calculations. Although Copernicus’s central thesis eventually destroyed the old Ptolemaic picture of the world, Copernicus himself clung to the two Ptolemaic principles of circular motion and uniform speed for all heavenly bodies. Hence the book, though its essential idea is a simplifying one, got into bewildering complications, and it has been very little read. The first English translation (a very bad one, apparently) was published in 1952, as part of a relentless search for “Great Books” carried out by a then fashionable program at the University of Chicago.²

So Copernicus had little impact on his own time, and nearly a century had to pass before the work of Kepler and Galileo consolidated his thesis and removed most of the serious objections to it. It is at this point that the first references to Copernicus begin to enter English literature. Most of the references are in a context of utter disbelief: the heliocentric view was not universally accepted in England until Newton’s time, two centuries after Copernicus was born. Francis Bacon refers to Copernicus very slightingly, almost contemptuously, as promoting a tremendous hypothesis on very inadequate grounds.³ Bacon was wrong, but he was wrong for some good reasons. In his Novum Organum he enumerates four great fallacies, which he calls “idols,” that stand in the way of scientific advance. One, probably the subtlest, of these fallacies is the idol of the theatre, or aesthetic thinking, the desire to impose elegantly symmetrical patterns on an untidy mass of facts, instead of patiently waiting to see what general principles really do emerge from them. Copernicus, for Bacon, was typical of the kind of pseudoscientific speculator who gets a hunch and rebuilds the universe on the strength of it, making the earth go around the sun only because the mathematics of that situation look nicer. And when we remember that curious preface to Copernicus’s book, we can at least see what Bacon means. It may even be true that Copernicus was not primarily an observer of the stars, but primarily a speculative mathematical philosopher.

By that time there were strenuous efforts being made to stop the new philosophy. Bruno was burned alive in 1600, and Copernicus’s book placed on the Index in 1616, the year in which the first attempt was made by the Inquisition to silence Galileo. As always happens in revolutionary situations, there was a swarm of revisionists putting forward compromise solutions, such as keeping the earth at the centre but having the other planets revolve around the sun. In the superb “Digression of Air” in the Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, whose tremendous erudition never blunted the edge of his sense of humour, began to suggest that some of the resulting complications had a funny side. He is speaking of an astronomer named Roeslin, who had attacked Copernicus (Burton himself seems to have been, however reluctantly, rather impressed with Copernicus):

Roeslin censures all, and Ptolemaeus himself as insufficient…. In his own hypothesis he makes the earth as before the universal centre, the sun to the five upper planets, to the eighth sphere he ascribes diurnal motion, eccentrics and epicycles to the seven planets, which hath been formerly exploded; and so, Dum vitant stulti vitia in contraria currunt, as a tinker stops one hole and makes two, he corrects them and doth worse himself, reforms some and mars all. In the meantime, the world is tossed in a blanket amongst them, they hoist the earth up and down like a ball, make it stand and go at their pleasures; one saith the sun stands, another he moves; a third comes in, taking them all at rebound, and, lest there should any paradox be wanting, he finds certain spots and clouds in the sun, by the help of glasses….⁴

The situation reminds one a little of the various atomic cosmologies in physics during the early part of this century.

A third reference to Copernicus in the English literature of this period is, to my mind, the most deeply significant of all. It occurs in John Donne’s anti-Jesuit satire, Ignatius His Conclave, where Copernicus clamours for entry into a distinguished place of authority in hell. He says to Lucifer:

I am he, which Pitying thee who wert thrust into the Center of the world, raised both thee, and thy prison, the Earth, up into the Heavens; so as by my means God doth not enjoy his revenge upon thee. The sun, which was an officious spy, and a betrayer of faults, and so thine enemy, I have appointed to go into the lowest part of the world. Shall these gates be open to such as have innovated in small matters? and shall they be shut against me, who have turned the whole frame of the world, and am thereby almost a new Creator?⁵

The full implications of this passage may not have been clear to Donne himself, but it will serve me as a text. The dispute between the geocentric and the heliocentric views of the solar system looks to me, being a literary critic, essentially a collision between two mythologies, two pictures or visions, not of reality, but of man’s sense of the meaning of reality in relation to himself. The geocentric or Ptolemaic view had on its side the religious feeling that the moral and natural orders had been made by the same God, that man was the highest development of nature, that God had died and risen again for man, and that therefore the notion of a plurality of worlds could be dismissed. It was too much to ask anyone to believe that Christ had had to die again to save the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter, much less accept an infinite number of inhabited worlds.

The Ptolemaic view was also supported by the powerful mythical analogy of the macrocosm. Man, the microcosm, was the epitome of the universe: he contained everything that it contained, and hence the universe was really a larger body like that of man. The Ptolemaic universe, with its onion shape and its concentric spheres, nevertheless had a top and a bottom, like the human body. The regular circling of the stars overhead suggested planning, order, intelligence, everything that goes with a human brain; down below was a world of death and corruption leading to hell. And hell had many characteristics of the less highly regarded aspects of the body: there was always a strong smell of sulphur about the devils, and their horns and tails suggested the kind of erotic interest that we should expect to find among such low forms of spirituality.

Further, the macrocosm was finite in both time and space. Just as man lives for only seventy years, so the universe was created to last for seven thousand years, six thousand years of history and a thousand years of millennium, corresponding to the six days of creation and the Sabbath of rest. Creation took place four thousand years before the birth of Christ, who was born in 4 B.C.: therefore the millennium will begin in 1996. Some of you will be around to check up on the statement. As for space, the universe was certainly thought of as vast, and Ptolemy himself had said that the earth was only a point compared to the whole natural order. The phrase is still echoing fifteen centuries later in the Elizabethan poet Thomas Campion:

Earth’s but a point to the world, and a man

Is but a point to the earth’s compared centre;

Shall then the point of a point be so vain

As to triumph in a silly point’s adventure?⁶

But still the universe was finite, and the finite is always comprehensible, no matter how big.

However, the heliocentric view had some mythological trump cards too. The sun is the source of light, and therefore the symbol of consciousness. And the Renaissance brought with it a new and expanded sense of consciousness, a feeling that consciousness represented something that tore man loose from the lower part of nature and united him with a higher destiny. For such a feeling the centrality of the sun, a much “nobler” object than the earth, was an obvious focus. The earth is rather a symbol of man’s fall into nature, and at its centre, according to Dante, is the devil, or more precisely the devil’s arse. This heightened sense of consciousness is not necessarily, as is so often said, a new sense of the dignity of the individual. The sun consciousness of Descartes is quite consistent with the absolutism of the Sun King, Louis XIV.⁷ It was rather a new sense of aggressiveness, a feeling that man was capable of dominating nature, exploring it and forcing his own logical patterns on it, the higher mechanism of the awareness which knows that it knows.

Of course, it happens to be true that the earth goes around the sun, and not true that the sun goes around the earth. When mythologies collide, it is doubtless an advantage to have the truth, or more of the truth, on one’s side. But it is not a clinching advantage. The words “sunrise” and “sunset” are as familiar to us as ever: we “know” that what they describe is really an illusion, but they are metaphorically efficient, and man can live indefinitely with metaphor. It is fascinating to read medical treatises of the pre-Harvey period and see the complete authority and lucidity with which they diagnose diseases in terms of what we should call the metaphor of the four humours. The psychoanalytical treatises of our day are based on hydraulic metaphors of drives and channels and blocks and cathects,⁸ and will no doubt look equally quaint in a few years, but they are no less implicitly accepted now. The autonomy of science goes along with its reliance on mathematics, which can apparently penetrate much further into the external world than words can do.

For mythology is not primarily an attempt to picture reality: it is not a primitive form of science or philosophy, however crude. It is rather an attempt to articulate what is of greatest human concern to the society that produces it. Myths tell us the names, functions, and genealogies of the gods; they explain how certain features in the social structure and organization came to be as they are. They do this mainly by stories or fictions. Mythology is a form of imaginative thinking, and its direct descendant in culture is literature, more particularly fiction, works of literature that tell stories. There is thus also a central place in literature for schematic thinking, an emphasis on design and symmetry for their own sakes. Such pattern-making is also inherited from mythology.

As society develops, however, mythology tends to project itself on the outer world, which means that science, at a certain stage of social development, finds itself imprisoned in a schematic, symmetrical, mythological framework of pseudoscientific presuppositions. This is Bacon’s idol of the theatre, already mentioned. Science cannot proceed further without destroying every trace of this mythological thinking in its own area. I emphasize the last four words because there is no reason why mythological thinking should be destroyed in areas where it belongs. Bernard Shaw remarks that if William the Conqueror had been told by a bishop that the moon was seventy-seven miles from the earth, he would have thought that a very proper distance for the moon, seven being a sacred number.⁹ This is an excellent example of mythological thinking in a place where it has no business to be. Dante uses all he can get of the science of his own day, and many passages in the Commedia, such as the early cantos of the Purgatorio, where Dante and Virgil are looking at a different set of stars on the other side of the earth and discuss what time it would now be in Jerusalem, are pure science fiction. But still Dante’s universe was held together by the Scotch tape of symmetrical correspondences, such as the correspondence of the seven planets with the seven metals that they were supposed to engender in the ground. There is not much left of Dante’s science today, but the feature that makes his science obsolete is also one of the features that make his poetry as contemporary as it ever was.

Why does a mythology keep such a stranglehold on the scientific impulse, and for so long a time? The simplest answer is that the mythology provides a humanly comprehensible structure, which for most people is far more important than a true or valid structure. It seems self-evident that man and his concerns are at the centre of time and space, and that time and space should be the narrative and setting respectively of a story told by God to instruct man, a story beginning with the creation and ending with the Last Judgment. Then again, if God made the world, the principles on which he made it would be drawn from human art, the only model for conscious creativity that we know. It is “natural” that there should be seven planets and twelve signs of the Zodiac: after all, our music is based on a diatonic scale of seven tones and a chromatic scale of twelve semitones. This analogy of music, astronomy, and mathematics was built into the medieval “quadrivium.”¹⁰ If a circle is the central human symbol for eternity, the heavenly bodies must move in circles: why would so conscientious an artist as God have them staggering around in ellipses? This principle, that the fundamental laws of the universe must be aesthetically satisfying, was incorporated into Plato’s Timaeus, which may well have done more to retard science than any other piece of writing in history:

Now if so be that this Cosmos is beautiful and its Constructor good, it is plain that he fixed his gaze on the Eternal; but if otherwise (which is an impious supposition), his gaze was on that which has come into existence. But it is clear to everyone that his gaze was on the Eternal; for the Cosmos is the fairest of all that has come into existence, and He the best of all the Causes.¹¹

The growth of science however destroys only what is unscientific: mythology has its own sphere and its own function, and what takes place is a separating of the two, not the replacing of one by the other. Dante was able to use the science of his day in his epic poem because the science of his day was still mythological in shape. As the two areas separated, symmetrical pattern-making went underground into the area generally called occult science, the area of alchemy, astrology, kabbalism, and magic. When we look at the sources of nineteenth-century poetry, we find that occultism has had a far more pervasive influence on poetry than actual science has had. The reason is not difficult to understand: occult thought is schematic thought, like the thinking of poetry.

As an example of the gradual separating of poetic and scientific modes of thinking, let us take astrology. Astrology is, like the science of astronomy, a study of the stars, but it studies the stars from a geocentric point of view: it is interested mainly in the “influence” (this word was originally a technical term in astrology) that the movements of the stars have, or are believed to have, on human concerns.

1473. Astrology and astronomy are much the same subject, and most of those who study the stars are interested primarily in astrology.

1573. The situation is not very different, despite Copernicus. There had always been theological reservations about astrology, mainly on the score of an implied fatalism, and these had been increased by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. But still astrology was generally accepted as a reasonable hypothesis, and in the next generation Kepler was an energetic caster of horoscopes.

1673. This is the age of the Royal Society, and by now most of the star-gazers are interested only in astronomy. The astrologer is becoming a figure of fun in contemporary comedies (e.g., Congreve’s Love for Love), and Swift’s ridicule of the astrologer Partridge (1708) is a turning point in popular acceptance.¹²

1773. With the discovery of Uranus imminent, belief and interest in astrology is abandoned by most educated people.

1873. Astrology is firmly consigned to the scrap heap of exploded superstitions.

1973. Astrology is a major industry, with newspapers printing horoscopes, a large number of books expounding the subject, and a great many practising astrologers plying their trade.¹³ At the same time astrology has separated from astronomy: the two studies are carried on by different people and their literatures are addressed to different publics. There are many who “believe in” astrology, i.e., would like to feel that there is “something in it,” but I should imagine that relatively few of them are astronomers.

It is conceivable that astrology will eventually validate its claim to be a coherent subject, and, if so, 2073 may see it reunited with astronomy, as it was when Copernicus was born. In the meantime, the popularity of astrology indicates a growing acceptance, by society as a whole, of the schematic and symmetrical type of pattern-thinking which the poets use. Let us look a little more closely into this process of separation.

What Copernicus began was a revolution in perspective. If we confine his achievement to him, disregarding the long-term developments through Galileo and Newton, his revolution was a shift from an earth-centred to a sun-centred mythology, but it does not take us outside the area of mythological synthesis. For Copernicus still assumed the sun to be fixed and to be at the centre of the entire universe. Naturally these notions soon went by the board, and in proportion as they did so the shadow of something much more frightening began to appear, the shadow of a universe so huge, so totally unrelated to any human principles of construction at all, as to be, in human terms, alienating and absurd. This is of course the feeling encapsulated by Pascal’s famous aphorism, Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.¹⁴ But Pascal was exceptional here as elsewhere. For most people, including most poets, it was not until well into the nineteenth century that the new view of nature became imaginatively oppressive.¹⁵

Dante’s colossal vision ends with “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” The word “moves” indicates why Aristotelian physics kept such a grip on the medieval mind. To that mind, moving things don’t just go on until something stops them, as they do in Newton: motion for the Middle Ages was purposeful, directed toward a telos or end, and the ultimate end of all movement was the Great Unmoved Mover at the circumference of the universe, identified with the Christian God. The possibility of undirected movement begins with the Copernican hypothesis. One of the more reasonable objections to Copernicus was: if the earth rotates, why do we keep seeing the same stars in the sky, with no perceptible change in their positions except for the planets? The answer put more of a strain on the human imagination than it had ever been subjected to before, perhaps. It was all very well to say, “Earth’s but a point to the world”; it was all very well for Copernicus to say that the distance from the earth to the sun was insignificant compared to the distance from the earth to the stars. But to have to think concretely in terms of billions of miles was something else again. The next step, of course, is the possibility of reversing Dante’s final phrase. If the sun is one of the stars, it is at least conceivable that the stars are suns, centres of other systems with no relation to man. The espousal of this doctrine by Giordano Bruno was one of the reasons why he seemed so horrifying a figure to the jittery church of 1600.

Over the next three centuries we may see the three figures of Kepler, Newton, and Swedenborg as representing three stages in the gradual separation of science and mythology. Kepler backed into the discovery of his laws of planetary motion by way of an a priori theory that the distance of the five planets from one another was in proportion to the five solid figures of geometry. He eventually got away from this, but he never abandoned his astrological and other schematic beliefs. Newton was keenly interested in Biblical numerology, even in alchemy, and psychologically these interests must have been connected with his science. But as far as publication was concerned, he kept these interests in separate compartments. Still, it could be said that Newton’s religious interests had a good deal to do, not merely with his popular appeal in the eighteenth century, but with the cushioning of the shock of the emotional effect of the new scientific universe. That God was a good Anglican could be taken for granted, but that Newton was a good Anglican, if a somewhat heterodox one, was much more profoundly reassuring. By 1773 one of the leading spiritual influences in Europe was Swedenborg, who started out as a scientist, but changed completely over to visionary religion, Biblical commentary, and various occult doctrines. He represents a stage of culture in which the mythological and the scientific views are mutually exclusive, even if they coexist in the same mind.

If we compare Milton’s epic synthesis with Dante’s, we can see that poetic mythology has made a minimal accommodation to the new science. Milton disapproves of Dante’s devil-centred earth, on the ground that the earth had not been cursed before the fall of Adam, which came later than Satan’s fall, and so Milton puts heaven and hell outside the order of nature, whereas Dante had put them inside. Then again, the only person outside the Bible who is repeatedly and pointedly alluded to in Paradise Lost is Galileo, whose telescope is brought in several times, in rather curious contexts. Milton is well aware of the view of the universe that Galileo held (he had met Galileo in Italy), and sometimes, in discussing the movements of the heavenly bodies, he puts the Ptolemaic and the Copernican explanations beside each other without committing himself. But it is clear that the older model has more of his sympathy, and from what we have said we can see why: the Ptolemaic universe, however rationalized, is a mythological and therefore essentially a poetic construction; hence it makes poetic sense. Galileo’s world is much more difficult for a poet to visualize.

In book 1 of Paradise Lost we are introduced to the shield of Satan. Epics have to have shields, because of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, which is most elaborately and minutely described. The shield of Achilles depicts a world of security and peace, and forms a most effective contrast to the weary gut-cutting which goes on through most of the action. Satan’s shield has the opposite effect: it is an ironic anticipation of the catastrophe which is to follow with the fall of Adam:

The broad circumference

Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb

Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views

At evening, from the top of Fesole,

Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,

Rivers, or mountains, in her spotty globe.¹⁶

According to the Ptolemaic view, the moon has spots because it is nearest the “sublunary” world of death and corruption: it would not have been a “spotty globe” before Adam’s fall. The heavenly bodies above it are too far up to have spots: we remember that Burton, in the passage quoted from the Anatomy of Melancholy, regarded the discovery of sunspots as the last word in paradox. So Milton’s comparison of Satan’s shield to the moon gazed at by Galileo implies (a) that Galileo’s kind of knowledge is an insecure knowledge founded on the fallen state of nature and (b) that such knowledge is potentially idolatrous (hence the association with Satan), because it concentrates on the visible work of God without instead of on the invisible word within.

This attitude comes into focus in book 8, where Adam is being instructed by the angel Raphael. It occurs to Adam to ask whether other worlds than his own are inhabited by intelligent beings: after all, as even Raphael admits, it seems unlikely that the only function of the stars is to shine for man, considering how many of them there are and how little light each one gives. There follows what from one point of view might be considered as repulsive and ridiculous a passage as English poetry affords. Raphael obviously hasn’t a clue what the answer is, but instead of honestly saying so he harrumphs, hums and haws, and finally tells Adam that he needn’t, and therefore shouldn’t, ask such a question. “Solicit not thy thought with matters hid,” he says [l. 167]: one shouldn’t pry into God’s secrets. And Adam is “cleared of doubt” [1. 179], satisfied with the answer. The view that it is a sin, or at least a part of original sin, to want to know merely for the sake of knowing had been deeply entrenched in the Christian tradition since Augustine at least. But for the revolutionary Milton to be conniving at such notions seems very strange.

Yet, before we dismiss Milton, who is clearly endorsing Raphael’s attitude, as a tedious obscurantist, we should look at the historical context of this dialogue. It is, in effect, the first clear example in English literature of the drawing of battle lines between mythological and scientific world-outlooks, and the first clear statement that the poet belongs on the mythological side. Leave Galileo alone with his telescope, and he will eventually discover a universe in which man’s place gets smaller and smaller, until it seems so insignificant as to make it of no importance what he does or desires. Such a view must be counterbalanced by a more practical and existential view of things in which human life and human concerns are still central. Adam’s primary task is to preserve his state of freedom against the coming assault of Satan: if he does that, knowledge, including knowledge of the stars, will take its rightful place. For us, the most important thing is to attain the freedom which, according to Milton, God wants us to have, and the practical reason that helps us to do this is superior to the speculative reason that contemplates the nonhuman world.

However, Milton looks back to an earlier age: his younger contemporaries were beginning a policy of accommodating themselves to the new science by appeasement. When Milton was writing Paradise Lost, one of his chief rivals in poetry was Abraham Cowley, who wrote odes on Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of blood, on the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and on the Royal Society, in which he described Bacon as the Moses who had led the modern age out of superstition into reason. He was very much a man of the new age. In his unfinished epic on King David (Davideis), Cowley describes David as a youthful musician playing his harp before Saul to cure Saul’s melancholy, in a passage which I quote at some length because of the number of traditional symbolic topoi or commonplaces which it includes:

As first a various unform’d hint we find

Rise in some god-like poet’s fertile mind,

Till all the parts and words their places take,

And with just marches verse and music make;

Such was God’s poem, this world’s new essay;

So wild and rude in its first draft it lay;

Th’ ungovern’d parts no correspondence knew,

An artless war from thwarting motions grew;

Till they to number and fix’d rules were brought

By the eternal mind’s poetic thought.

Water and air he for the tenor chose,

Earth made the bass, the treble flame arose;

To th’ active moon a quick brisk stroke he gave,

To Saturn’s string a touch more soft and grave.

The motions straight, and round, and swift, and slow,

And short, and long, were mix’d and woven so,

Did in such artful figures smoothly fall,

As made this decent measur’d dance of all.

And this is music; sounds that charm our ears,

Are but one dressing that rich science wears.

Though no man hear’t, though no man it rehearse,

Yet will there still be music in my verse.

In this great world so much of it we see;

The lesser, man, is all o’er harmony.

Storehouse of all proportions! Single choir!

Which first God’s breath did tunefully inspire!

From hence blest music’s heavenly charms arise,

From sympathy which them and man allies….

Thus the strange cure on our spilt blood applied,

Sympathy to the distant wound does guide.

Thus when two brethren strings are set alike,

To move them both, but one of them we strike,

Thus David’s lyre did Saul’s wild rage control,

And tun’d the harsh disorders of his soul.¹⁷

Ever since Christianity had elaborated its doctrine of the fall of man, the stars in the sky had been the image of the original unfallen order of nature, as God had created it and designed it for man. I said earlier that human art supplies the models for the belief in a divine creation, and an integral part of the traditional imagery of the starry spheres was the analogy of music. The spheres gave out a “harmony” which symbolized their unchanging order, and Cowley associates the four elements of the creation with contrapuntal part-writing. The music was also often symbolized, as here, as an unending dance, into which Cowley manages to accommodate the new scientific realization that the heavenly bodies moved at different speeds. He goes on to make the commonplace analogy between the harmony of the spheres and the harmony which characterizes the soul of the good and wise man, the analogy based on the doctrine of the microcosm. David’s method of curing Saul was the Biblical proof of the genuineness of these metaphors of “harmony,” and of the therapeutic value of music. Cowley even accounts for the popular contemporary belief in sympathetic magic on the same principles.

Cowley shows us very clearly how dense the texture of this symbolic cosmology was, and how many values and beliefs were still bound up with it. And yet we cannot help wondering whether this highly enlightened and with-it poet really believes much of what he is saying. He provides immensely erudite footnotes to his poem, and in one of them he makes it clear that the “music of the spheres” is really a metaphor for the fact that the universe can be studied mathematically: “This order and proportion of things,” he says, “is the true music of the world, and not that which Pythagoras, Plato, Tully, Macrobius, and many of the Fathers imagined, to arise audibly from the circumvolution of the Heavens.”¹⁸ But if all this business about “harmony” is only metaphorical, can we really attach anything more to the conception of the microcosm, also invoked in this passage? Are there really only four elements? Does Cowley really believe in cures by sympathetic magic? We consult his footnotes again, and find that his footnote on the last point is exceedingly detached: “There is so much to be said of this subject, that the best way is to say nothing of it.”¹⁹ It is difficult to resist the conclusion that poets talk a good deal of nonsense because nonsense sounds well in poetry. If so, perhaps the language of poetry itself represents something that the human mind may soon outgrow.

This possibility is not consciously present in Cowley’s mind, but it is implied in some of the intellectual assumptions of his age. The imagery of music in the starry heavens, even if only metaphorical, suggests that, as Sir Thomas Browne had said earlier in the century, “Nature is the Art of God.”²⁰ If so, the art of man has a very restricted scope: this had always been true in theory, but had not affected the practice of the arts until the rise of science began to raise questions about the adequacy of the traditional mythological language of poetry. For the contemporaries of Newton, Pope and Swift, there seem to be two kinds of reality: the scientific kind, dealt with by reason and evidence, and the religious kind, which is a matter of revelation and is accepted by faith, but is interpreted by the same rational faculties of the mind. Poetry, strictly speaking, belongs neither to revelation nor to science, and its mythological language is hardly appropriate to either. It is puerile to go on repeating the exploded fables of the Greeks and Romans, and pretentious to assume that the poet can say anything about true religion that more conceptual language cannot say better. As Boileau, a great influence on English poetry in this period, had remarked:

De la foi d’un Chrétien les mystères terribles

D’ornemens égayés ne sont point susceptibles.

(L’Art poetique, pt. 3, ll. 199–200)

The poet’s proper sphere is a social and human one, and in this sphere we may look for a slow but steady improvement, as social manners continue to refine. We can see the influence of science here: science does improve, in the sense that it builds on the work of predecessors. One of the speakers in Dryden’s dialogue Essay on Dramatic Poesy remarks, “if natural causes be more known now than in the time of Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that poesy and other arts may, with the same pains, arrive still nearer to perfection.”²¹ The analogy is a false analogy, because literature cannot improve in the way that science does, but an age fundamentally satisfied with its cultural standards may assume that it is doing so. In fact this illusion of the improvement of the arts arises in every generation, whether consciously formulated or not, but its effect is invariably to develop an elite and in-group literature, and make that elitism a critical standard for assessing literature in general.

From about 1750 on, poets, critics, and literary scholars were in increasing revolt against this elitist conception of poetry. New discoveries in early Norse and Celtic literatures, new ways of looking at the poetry of Homer and the Old Testament, the collecting of ballads and the poetry of the oral tradition, all helped to popularize a new sense that there is something socially primitive about poetry.²² Poetry thrives on the simple sensational language which nature inspires in human emotion: myth, legend, the fabulous, superstition itself, are the very lifeblood of poetry. In his Ode to the Royal Society, Cowley had praised Bacon for his revolution in language:

From words, which are but pictures of the thought …

To things, the mind’s right object, he it brought.²³

But for the poets and critics of a later age it seemed rather that the pure and original language was the metaphorical language of poetry, and that Bacon’s effort to make language descriptively accurate was a later, secondary and derivative development of it. Still, what does all this do except confirm and make explicit the latent suspicions that poetry is falling out of line with social advance, and is fit only for the scrap heap of discarded notions and beliefs?

Let us go back to the traditional belief that the visible heaven is the appropriate image of the invisible one, that the sky symbolizes the world as it was originally created, and is now all that is left of that original. The impact of the new science on poets was, at first, to confirm them in this belief. Addison paraphrases the nineteenth Psalm in language reflecting a confidence that his own age is updating its great vision:

The spacious firmament on high,

And all the blue ethereal sky,

And spangled heavens, a shining frame,

Their great Original proclaim. [ll. 1–4]²⁴

And yet other imaginative influences were already at work eroding this acceptance of the sky as the symbol of divine order. To “proclaim” a personal creator one needs intelligent beings or angels, such as earlier cosmologies from Plato to Dante had liberally supplied, guiding the planets in their ordained courses. But now the starry heaven was dead, and the law of gravitation, however remarkable an intellectual achievement, could not bring it to life. The stars had not been made out of immortal quintessence, but out of the same substances as our own earth; they do not move in perfect circles around the earth, but attend to their own concerns in the vast depths of empty space. It was not that the symbolism was becoming untrue—truth and falsehood do not apply to mythology in this direct way—but that it was becoming emotionally unconvincing. What we appear to have, up in the sky, is an essentially mechanical order. Can an infinite personality be appropriately symbolized by a mechanism, however complex and well running? By the time we get to the Prologue to Goethe’s Faust, the conception of God as the infinitely skilful juggler of planets is only a subject for parody.²⁵ For an English equivalent, we may cite Byron’s Vision of the Last Judgment:

The angels all were singing out of tune,

And hoarse with having little else to do,

Excepting to wind up the sun and moon,

Or curb a runaway young star or two … [ll. 9–12]

Much more is involved here than the vitality of one particular poetic image. Once the starry heavens begin to go as a symbol of divine intelligence, we begin to wonder if the traditional images of divine and demonic do not need reversing. If the symbol of divine order is an empty, dead mechanism, perhaps the idealized cosmological image is merely a front for a political one, a rationalization of conservative authority. Perhaps the erotic and the rebellious are potentially good things, indications of a greater and fuller human freedom. And if the language of poetry seems to be a primitive language, may not that language be the language of human freedom itself, which is now smothered over by the autocracy of civilization and by the rationalizing parasites of that autocracy?

This way of looking at things, which gathered force after the American and French Revolutions, was seized on particularly by William Blake, who, though without influence in his own time, saw more deeply and clearly into the mythological situation of his day than anyone else. In his great poem Europe (1794), Blake summarizes the history of Europe from the birth of Christ to the French Revolution. In the Roman world at the time of Christ, the gods had finally become identified almost entirely with the stars. The spirits of the spheres, called intelligences in Plato and angels in the Middle Ages, are really, according to Blake, the exploiting ascendant class, their “dance” an expression of the carefree leisurely lives that are supported by the slavery and misery of others. In the symbolism of the music of the spheres, the trumpet spoken of by Paul as announcing the Last Judgment would be the last musical sound.²⁶ In Blake’s poem the last trumpet is blown by Isaac Newton, after several unsuccessful attempts by an angel. Blake means that after Newton’s time it is no longer possible to worship the sky as an image of deity. For worship there must be what in our time Martin Buber has called an “I–Thou” relationship, and science turns everything in nature, sooner or later, from a “Thou” into an “It.” It is natural for primitive people to worship the sun, but difficult to feel worshipful about a blast furnace ninety million miles off, however impressive it may be otherwise. And even though Christianity had transformed the idolatry of star worship into the iconology of star imagery, the principle remains: we cannot go on associating God with a subhuman mechanism. Newton has taught us too much about the deadness and remoteness of the objects in the sky. So after Newton, the reign of autocracies founded on a symbol of unchanging order is over, and the French Revolution, Blake thinks at this time, indicates an entirely new feeling spreading over humanity.

We remember that John Donne, in Ignatius His Conclave, had represented Copernicus as calling himself a “second Creator,” and as having put the earth at the top and the sun at the bottom of the creation, reversing the traditional order. He has thus emancipated the devil, he claims, because the devil’s habitation is conventionally at the centre of the earth. Donne is thus, however unconsciously, looking forward to an imagery in which the sky will be associated with Satan rather than with God, and in which a suppressed demonic figure may prove to be the image of human freedom. Paul had already associated the devil with the sky in the New Testament, calling him “the prince of the power of the air” [Ephesians 2:2]. The poetry of English Romanticism, beginning with Blake, greatly developed this symbolism. Blake was a painter and engraver as well as a poet, and his poems are illustrated by himself. The frontispiece to Europe depicts a naked old man with a pair of compasses (deriving from the description of Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs) setting bounds both to nature and the human mind. His name in Blake’s mythology, Urizen, is from the same root as “horizon.” The traditional Christian view is that the world was created by the Word of God, starting with the command “Let there be light,” and that this Word became incarnate later as a young God put to death by a reactionary society. Blake’s figure is the kind of cloud-gathering Zeus, or crabby old man in the sky, that all authoritarian religions eventually collapse on.

The same type of figure appears in Shelley as the Jupiter of Prometheus Unbound. Jupiter again is the old symbol of divine intelligence which is really a symbol of a political establishment relying on the belief in such a God for its support. The psychological effect of contemplating a symbol of changeless order as an image of deity is to make us feel that whatever happens is inevitable, and to accept all evil and disaster as the will of God. Poetry, which helps us to create rather than simply contemplate what is there, is for Shelley a powerful agent in helping to free the Prometheus in the human mind from the tyranny of Jupiter. A later poet, Thomas Hardy, is never tired of showing us what an imbecile God turns out to be if we create him in the image of the starry order. Hardy has a poem called God’s Education, in which God is represented as learning from the misery of man, in the manner of middle-class people reluctantly coming to realize that some people are not only poor but poorer than they should be. He has another called By the Earth’s Corpse, where God remarks, at the end of time, that he wishes he had never started on this creation business, for which he clearly has so little talent. The novels take the same view: here is the narcissistic and rather stupid heroine of The Return of the Native:

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, had she handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favours here, of contumely there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alternation of caresses and blows that we endure now.²⁷

Blake and Shelley belong to the Romantic period, but Hardy comes on the other side of Darwin, and it was Darwin who completed the revolution in perspective that Copernicus had begun. Copernicus started the displacing of man from the spatial centre of the universe, and by the nineteenth century his place in that universe looked small indeed. But for long it was still assumed, however vaguely, that the universe was finite in time: that there must have been a creation, and therefore at some time a conclusion to the whole operation. Thus Dryden, writing an ode in honour of St. Cecilia, the patron of music, begins with the customary image of the world as created from “heavenly harmony,” and ends with the corresponding image of the end of time:

The trumpet shall be heard on high,

The dead shall live, the living die,

And music shall untune the sky.

This passage rather frightened Samuel Johnson, who remarked that the image is “so awful in itself, that it can owe little to poetry; and I could wish the antithesis of music untuning had found some other place.”²⁸ By saying that it owes little to poetry Johnson means that Dryden’s conclusion is for him a simple statement of fact about a situation in which we shall all certainly find ourselves. Another result of this uneasy compromise was eighteenth-century Deism, which was essentially the doctrine that we need a creating God but not a sustaining one: the natural order runs itself automatically, though the perfection of that automatism guarantees its divine origin. Deism had a good deal of influence in America after 1776, as it seemed to provide a formula for uniting most religious groups around the argument that if the world exists, somebody must have made it.

The strength of millennial and apocalyptic movements in the same country seems to indicate something rather exhilarating in the notion of an approaching end of the world, despite Samuel Johnson’s attitude. For beginning and ending are human, finite, and comprehensible notions, and when the stars in the sky have become increasingly the image of something demonic and alienating, the sense of a beginning and an end becomes proportionately more attractive. I say this because it seems to me that in the various apocalyptic symbols of our time, annihilation warfare, the atom bomb, the increase of population and shrinking of natural resources, there is something that appeals to self-indulgence as well as genuine concern, and a latent nihilism that may prove to be more dangerous than the problems themselves.

The doctrine of evolution made time as huge and frightening as space: the past, after Darwin, was no more emotionally reassuring than the skies had come to be. Once the starry heavens become an image of mechanism, we are left with the organism as the highest development of existence we know of. But the behaviour of organisms in nature exhibits a process of cut-throat competition very similar to that of the worst aspects of the human community. Then again, by showing a creative process forming itself within nature, evolution made it unnecessary to assume a personal creator outside it: it made nature not only alien but autonomous, a self-regulating process needing no God to start it or man to improve it.

What conclusions are we to draw from the long historical process that we are here tracing back to the hypothesis of Copernicus? In the first place, man lives in two worlds, the worlds traditionally called the worlds of nature and art. We live in an actual world, our physical environment in time and space, and this is the world studied mainly by the natural or physical sciences. At the same time we keep trying to create a culture and civilization of our own. This represents the world we want to live in, as well as the world we are creating out of our environment. It is where our values and desires and hopes and ideals belong, and this world is always geocentric, always anthropocentric, always centred on man and man’s concerns.

It is obvious that the basis of the world we want to live in is mythological. That is, the world we construct is built to the model of a common social vision produced by the imagination. Poetry, which is at the heart of all mythology, finds its function in providing verbal imaginative models for human civilization, and seeing reality in terms of human desires and emotions. In the science that studies nature there is, of course, an essential place for the imaginative and creative powers, but still the ultimate end of science is verification, coincidence with an external reality. Similarly, in the mythology that expresses human vision, there is an essential place for reality: we do not believe the poet as such, but we applaud him for producing something credible. Yet the end of mythology is the conceivable, not the real, or, as Aristotle said, the impossible made probable.²⁹

We have to separate these two worlds in our minds, rigorously and completely, before we can address ourselves to the next question, of how to unite them again. Of course everything we do is in one aspect an attempt to unite them, but unless we distinguish them first we shall not know what we are trying to unite. On one side is the world of vision, the world presented to us by poetry and myth, which has being but not existence: it is real but it is not there. On the other side is the world that is there, presented to us in the constructs of science. This world has existence, but it is, so far as we can see, a subhuman, submoral, subintelligent world, with nothing in it that directly responds to human desires or ideals. In between is the world that we create, or try to realize, out of the merely internal reality of the one and the merely external reality of the other. We want a human community that will conform to our hopes and ideals and our sense of what might be; we need a knowledge of our environment that will give it foundations and keep it from being a castle in the air.

It seems clear that the uniting area must be something like an area of belief. But belief in this sense has to be rather precisely characterized. A genuine belief is an axiom of behaviour: whatever we may believe we believe, our behaviour shows what we really believe, and a belief which cannot become an axiom of behaviour is useless lumber in the mind. Thus genuine belief is the source of whatever is positive or creative in one’s life. It may be founded on the flattest truisms: a preference of life to death, freedom to slavery, happiness to misery, gentleness to brutality, truth to falsehood, cleanliness to filth. But it is genuine belief if it makes creative behaviour possible. If I believe something, then I should order my life on its practical consequences, and if I cannot do so, I must either discard the belief or recognize that it is discarding me. Assent to verified facts is not belief in this sense: I know that the earth goes round the sun, but it would be unbearably pretentious to say that that was part of my faith. Traditionally, belief has been connected with religion, and often conceived as an uncritical and unquestioning trust in something unproved or unprovable. But it is hard to see how belief in this sense can be a virtue. Neither does it seem to be the original emphasis in religion. Whenever faith is spoken of approvingly in the New Testament, for example, it seems to have something to do with the concentrating of one’s imagination or will power. It is defined in the Epistle to the Hebrews as the hypostasis, the substantial reality, of what is hoped for; the elenchos, the proof or evidence, of unseen things [Hebrews 11:1]. Belief so defined seems to be much the same thing as creativity, the power of bringing into existence something that was not there before, but which, once there, brings us a little closer to our model vision.

In Copernicus’s day the uniting force was unquestionably religion, and there was still a good deal of prestige attached to the great medieval dream of uniting the two worlds by making the axioms of faith, given by revealed religion, major premises from which to deduce a trustworthy philosophy and science. This dream is still with us, and revives in each generation, but things fall apart: that centre, it seems, cannot hold. At present, at any rate, it seems that religion has its roots in the model or mythological world only. This is the reason for the curious and persistent relationship between the language of poetry and the language of religion. They are both developments of mythology, verbal constructs made out of myth and metaphor. As long as God was assumed to have a functional place in scientific thought, as the Creator of the order of nature, this fact was concealed. But it seems clear now that for us, in our generation, the conception of God as a Creator has been projected from the fact that man makes things. The revolution that began with Copernicus has clearly ended in the abolition of the conception “God” from the world of time and space, so far as science deals with that world.

At the same time that the Romantic movement had begun the final separation of mythology and science, the Industrial Revolution was making technology a central factor in society. Both Marxism and the theory of progress in the democracies seized on industrial production as the central uniting force of society, and the realizing power of civilization. Their conception of technology was much the same: they differed only on whether a capitalist or a socialist economy should control it. The great advantage of having technology in such a role was that it seemed to develop automatically, with the minimum of reference to the nagging mythological question, Is this really what man most wants and needs? Marxist poets were urged to celebrate the glories of technology under socialism as their ancestors had celebrated gods and heroes. A magnificent Hungarian poem by Ferenc Juhász, The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets, translated by the Canadian poet Kenneth Mc-Robbie with Ilona Duczynska, thus describes the apotheosis of its transformed hero:

There he stood on the renewing crags of time,

stood on the ringed summit of the sublime universe,

there stood the lad at the gate of secrets,

his antler prongs were playing with the stars …

Mother, my mother, I cannot go back:

pure gold seethes in my hundred wounds …

each prong of my antlers is a dual-based pylon

each branch of my antlers a high-tension wire,

my eyes are ports for ocean-going merchantmen, my veins are tarry cables,

these

teeth are iron bridges, and in my heart the surge of monster-infested seas,

each vertebra is a teeming metropolis, for a spleen I have a smoke-puffing

barge

each of my cells is a factory, my atoms are solar systems

sun and moon swing in my testicles, the Milky Way is my bone marrow,

each point of space is one part of my body

my brain impulse is out in the curling galaxies.³⁰

There seem to be some lurking ironies even here, and in any case poets, at least in the democracies, have not responded to pylons and factories with much enthusiasm. Most of them appear to agree with the humanists who were scolded by Sir Charles Snow, in his famous “two cultures” lecture, for being what he called “Luddites,” reactionary machine-breakers, who for Snow were such a contrast to the scientists who “have the future in their bones.”³¹ It is instructive to turn to William Morris, because he was one of the relatively few English poets who was a socialist, even something of a Marxist, if a somewhat unorthodox one. We find that he quite explicitly prefers medieval to modern London:

Forget six counties overhung with smoke,

Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,

Forget the spreading of the hideous town;

Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,

And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,

The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green …³²

This is supposed to be Chaucer’s London, though Chaucer himself might have been startled to hear it described as “clean,” but it is not the reference to the past which is important. There are doubtless people even yet who would dismiss such writing impatiently as escapist fantasy, but it is just barely possible that in the age of pollution and the energy crisis we may feel that the poets may have some of the future in their bones too. In any case the real reason for the “Luddite” attitude of so many poets to technology is of some interest.

Technically, a machine is an extension of organic life: a telescope is an extension of the eye, an automobile of the feet, a computer of the calculating aspect of the brain. A car can run faster than a human body and a computer calculate faster than a human mind, but the machine left to itself has no will to do these things, despite all the science-fiction horror stories about malignant computers and insurgent robots. Nevertheless, there is a sinister tendency in the human mind to project itself into its mechanisms. The demonic is, like the divine, something within the human mind, not something out there, but it is peculiarly characteristic of the demonic to build itself an external prison in order to have the fun of crawling into it. The civilization produced by the automobile, with its network of highways, the blasted deserts of its parking lots, the grid plan of cities, and the human sacrifices offered to it on every holiday, clearly raises the question of who is enslaving whom. Again, every social “system” or “structure,” as these words imply, is essentially a mechanism for providing a human community, but the impulse to make a social structure into a divinely sanctioned prison has run consistently through history from Pharaoh’s Egypt to Stalin’s Russia. We remember that the great technological invention of primitive man was the wheel, and that the wheel promptly became in mythology a symbol of external compulsion, an emblem of fate or fortune.

When Blake or Morris or D.H. Lawrence attack or repudiate our technological culture, therefore, they are really saying that if man is too lazy to mould his world according to his real beliefs, and tries to abdicate his responsibilities by trusting to some kind of automated progress, he is actually releasing the most sinister and vicious impulses in himself, and the end of it is logically either the total destruction made possible by modern physics or, far worse, the unending tyranny made possible by modern communications. Hence the preoccupation of so many writers with the themes of mad scientists and parody Utopias like 1984. One thinks particularly of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, whose monster is popularly supposed to be a symbol of man’s enslavement to the mechanisms he has created. Actually the monster is portrayed with a good deal of sympathy: the many references to Milton’s Paradise Lost in her story make it clear that her real theme is the responsibility that man takes on when he recognizes the extent of his own creative powers. If what he creates is monstrous, merely viewing it with horror is hardly enough. The moral of such fables is that man can never avoid the challenge to examine his own beliefs, his desires, and his visions of society at every step of new discovery. The future that is technically possible is not necessarily the future that society wants or can accept. To be fatalistic about this, to assume that whatever can happen must happen, is the way to develop “future shock” into a coma.³³

The central issue of our own time, five hundred years away from Copernicus, is often described as a crisis in belief. I have no quarrel with this way of putting it, but I have a rather sceptical suggestion to make about it. Just as we have a principle of economy of means in the arts, and of economy of hypotheses in the sciences, so we need a principle of economy of belief. It is no light matter to adopt a real belief, or axiom of behaviour, and the loss of influence today of the traditional religions seems to me connected with a widespread feeling that a good many “believers” are rather frivolous people. I have a friend who taught for a year at a college in India, and was told by a genuinely worried student that because he ate beef the best he could hope for in his next incarnation was to be reborn as a dog. Now, of course, one cannot prove that one will not be reborn as a dog in one’s next incarnation, or even that one will or will not have another incarnation. But still his attitude was an impatient “to hell with all that stuff.” What is significant is that this is the only attitude for which one could possibly have the slightest respect.

It is relatively easy for us to see this when the beliefs are unfamiliar, but the general principle is inescapable that when belief is a matter of uncritical acceptance of the unprovable, the less we believe the better. Sin is traditionally countered by faith, but when we see Bunyan’s Christian, in The Pilgrim’s Progress, staggering off towards the Gate of Good Will under the burden of his sins, we cannot help wondering if the burden of his beliefs was not even heavier, and perhaps worse for him. The self-pitying moans exhaled from many nineteenth-century and later writers about the tragedy of their loss of faith never quite conceal an underlying exhilaration. In our time we are about to be faced with new scientific developments, in such fields as genetics, which will affect human life profoundly, and which will have to be met with genuine belief in what we can accept or reject for our own social life. To try to encounter such problems as clonal reproduction with a clutter of vestigial superstitions and polemical pseudo-beliefs inspired by an overactive superego, by resentments (e.g., “I feel this must be true because my parents, or my children, deny it”), or by expediency, is like trying to rely on the vermiform appendix for digesting our food.

My opposition of mythology and the physical sciences will of course remind you that we have developed the ability to study our own civilized institutions in the same detached and objective spirit with which we study nature. This development has given us the social sciences, which are obviously a powerful element in the process of realizing the kind of society we want. The social sciences are still gravely handicapped, it seems to me, by not realizing that they are also the applied humanities, but the importance of bringing the scientific spirit to bear on man himself is undeniable. What they represent is the power of criticism in society. We often speak glibly of the need for questioning and challenging our beliefs: it is the kind of thing we say to avoid any real thought or action. But of course the criticism of a genuine belief is not a negative activity, but is the same thing as the recreation and renewal of that belief.

This takes me back to the epigraph from Wallace Stevens with which I began this paper:

To say the solar chariot is junk

Is not a variation but an end.

Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor

Is still to stick to the contents of the mind

And the desire to believe in a metaphor.

Stevens is also opposing mythology to science, and is telling us that we cannot live wholly within either construct. The scientific perspective on reality is one that destroys mythology in its own field. In science there can never be any sun-gods or solar chariots: they are scientifically junk. It does not follow that they have no place in mythology, though it is true that as science extends our knowledge of the sun, poets get tired of solar chariots as no longer effective metaphors, so that they eventually become junk in poetry too. We cannot however live in a world where there is no mythology, where everything the imagination produces is junk. Yet there is no escape in running to the other extreme and retreating to a self-contained world of the imagination. Such a world, Stevens’s believed-in metaphor, would be not imaginative but imaginary, a narcissistic mirror of our own minds, a facile conquest of the unreal.

Ever since Copernicus began the displacement of man in space, we have been progressively discovering that the physical environment seems to be an order of existence without human value, including the supreme human value of finiteness. Hence it is easy for poets to call it alien or absurd, a world which, however we may have blundered into it, is not ours, except for the tiny piece that we have made ours for the time being. It may be better to think of it, however, as something other, something not ourselves which nonetheless extends and expands us. It is one of the primary functions of science to remind us of how much we still do not know, to present to us a universe of infinite scope and infinite possibilities of further discovery. Mythology does not expand and progress in the way that science does, but it keeps constantly transforming itself, as though there were a power of renewal within it as infinite as the galaxies. If the Royal Society of Canada survives to 2073, mankind may by that time have realized more clearly that there may be an otherness of the spirit as well as of nature, and that a tiny part of that too may become ourselves.