VI
Up to about the middle of the seventeenth century, before modern physical science had rigorously defined its field, the breach between literature and science, which Aristotle had made, was not altogether complete; and while the humanist ideal was intact both literature and science were regarded as coeval phases of man’s intellectual activity. The two dominating figures of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, were artists, technicians, and men of science; and in a comparison between a translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets and a photograph of St. Peter’s the sonnets come off rather well.
The great contribution of the Renaissance was the ideal of fully energized human beings, able to span life in all its manifestations, as artists, scientists, technicians, philosophers, and whatnot. This ideal exercised a powerful influence on lesser figures, like the Admirable Crichton and Sir Walter Raleigh, and even down to the time of Descartes it contributed to that exuberance of the intellectual life which was the Renaissance at its best. When John Amos Comenius wrote his remarkable little book called The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart in 1623, he combined the outlooks of science and art in a remarkable synthesis; for the first part of this work is a picturesque survey of the actual world as Comenius found it, and the second a picture of the transition to the heavenly world promised in the Christian religion. The idea behind Comenius’ Labyrinth was the same that inspired Andreae; and were it not for the complete otherworldliness of this theological utopia, the Paradise of the Heart, Comenius’ discourse would take a high place in the history of utopian thought.
There is no genuine logical basis, as far as I can see, in the dissociation of science and art, of knowing and dreaming, of intellectual activities and emotional activities. The division between the two is simply one of convenience; for both these activities are simply different modes in which human beings create order out of the chaos in which they find themselves. Such is the humanist view. As an instance of this, when the Royal Society was projected in England in the middle of the seventeenth century, Johann Andreae advised his friend Samuel Hartlib, then in London, not to neglect the humanities while furthering the pursuit of the physical sciences. Unfortunately, the men who gathered together to form the Royal Society were specialists in physical science; and in the lapse of the humanist tradition through the religious acerbities of the time, they had lost some of their desire for a complete life. As a result, the original charter of the society confined its work to the physical sciences.
Insignificant as it now appears in the annals of science, this decision seems to me to mark a definite turning point in human thought. Henceforth the scientist was to be one sort of person and the artist another; henceforth the idolum of science and the idolum of art were not to be cemented together in a single personality; henceforth, in fact, the dehumanization of art and science begins. It is interesting to note that with the divorce of the humanities from science, art and science entered upon separate careers which, for all their diversities, are curiously similar. Both art and science, for example, ceased to be the common property of the community; and each of them split up into a multiplying host of specialisms. In this process, art and science made many notable advances; so that this period is usually spoken of as a period of enlightenment or progress; but the result on the community was what we discovered in our examination of Coketown and the Country House.