2:10 p.m. - 2010-02-09
Mister Mister Butterfly Man Himself.

On the Art of Knowing
By Andrey Avinoff

"Learning becomes steadily more imaginative and dramatic; at no other time has knowledge been so fascinating as now. We may be only at the Alpha of our alphabet, without any Omega in sight. We hear frequently about the art of living, the art of thinking, the art of loving, the art of learning, the art of education; but it is not so much the acquisition and the transmission of knowledge that I would like to consider, as the gift of keeping knowledge aesthetically balanced, harmoniously attuned to the things in life that matter. In the first place let us look into the make-up of knowledge as part of our mental, spiritual and emotional equipment. The quest of knowledge, rooted in human nature, has to be assimilated by human nature lest it become an alien tumor on the brain. Learning should be borne easily and lightly, never as a ponderous distinction of impressing importance. Neither should it be looked upon as a mere instrument for practical purposes, devoid of an organic amalgamation with our own selves. Overestimation, underestimation, and misadaptation arise primarily from a lack of sense of proportion. Here enters the question of an esthetic balance in distributing the weight of our learning over our mental and psychic frame, in making out of it a vital, living problem, and in heightening it to the significance of values. It is customary to stress an attitude of mutual distrust between scientific and artistic circles. Scientists do not conceal their fear that artists might work havoc in the orderly precincts of learning. They frown at the implicit faith artists put in the power and value of intuition. The spark of inspiration is looked upon with suspicion as a dangerous will-o'-the-wisp that promises to shorten a lengthy but reliable road to the goal. Yet no scientific cogitation is deprived of a true element of fancy, of an imaginative ingredient. Logic and knowledge themselves belong to an order of beauty. On the other hand, art has its own laborious preparation not less exacting than the path of science, and masterpieces require a latent incubation. What we should like to achieve, for the good of all concerned, is a more sober knowledge, on the part of those who profess and practice art, of the surrounding world of forms and structure� and a more sympathetic appreciation of the artistic angle by those who dwell on scientific problems. The values of art lie in making people happier, if a statement of purpose can take the place of elusive definition. Among the forces responsible for bringing about our knowledge we may distinguish roughly three main agencies: inquisitiveness, exploration, and the stimulus of collecting. Let us take them up in turn. Inquisitiveness. Question marks should be at the beginning and at the end of every research. Every scientific investigation starts with a question and leads to one. It is only some-where midway that it sounds like an answer. The signs of query hedge the sentence of research in Spanish-fashion. And perhaps, as in the Spanish language, one question will � turn out to be the reverse of the other. It is doubtful whether the persistent interrogation mark of re-search can ever be straightened out ! into the triumphant sign of exclamation. Its hesitating curve endures in spite of all forging and hammering, though we might now and then vociferously express our delight at sundry attainments, and sprinkle our investigatorial phraseology with exclamation points. But the spirit of research must continue under the aegis of the everlasting question sign. The "what" and the "why" are not confessions of weakness and defeat. They are far more humanly noble than a "that's that," which is not even an exclamation, but a full stop without any promise of further development. So let us not feel worried for not being able to give a conclusive answer at a given moment. "Articles found and no questions asked" is not an end of an honorable career. It is also not even a happy ending. Scientific investigation should boldly resort to the figure of silence when it cannot do better. This sounds a hopeless truism, but we observe so much at present to the opposite effect when science attempts to settle matters beyond its competence. in Asserting our right for curiosity as a driving power of knowledge, let us not misplace it. To be curious should be a function of the observer, not a predominant character of the object. We should not be constantly on the search of the curious and especially of curios. The paradoxical, the aberrant, and the out-of-the-ordinary, are less attractive to the scientific investigator than a commonplace which reveals the everlasting laws of nature. Explorations. Great explorers invariably arouse our imagination. Humanity is generous and willing in glorifying its heroes of exploration. In the stellar firmament is indicated the cruise of Argo, a constellation in our home galaxy; and the name of Magellan is projected outside of the boundaries of our Milky Way, being assigned to a disrupted spiral nebula which has probably had a more lengthy and eventful existence than our own universe. Yet successful explorations should not, at all cost, be directed into far-away lands. Scientific argosies are quite fruitful and inspiring in our own immediate vicinity. As far as the scope of results is concerned, an exploration does not necessarily depend on the length of its itinerary. The same applies to the field of research. It would be misleading to favor in research the foreign and remote. Highly concentrated spices from distant lands as a rule lack reliable and constant nutrition. They might possess some appetizing stimulus as mental pabulum but they are doubtful as a preferred and exclusive diet for a researcher. The important thing that counts is the thrill of a successful investigation, the consciousness that we are on the track of something original, refreshing, and significant. We cannot refrain from saying a word of encouragement to the amateur� if he needs it. Whatever is said and done he will proceed with his endeavor because his interest is driven by love, as the derivation of this name from amateur implies. What did the amateur ever accomplish for science? So much that it would be quite safe to say that a professional is only useful and productive when he acts as an amateur at heart, in the best sense of this word. The array of illustrious names of amateurs in every path of scientific endeavor is truly stupendous, covering the whole of the glorious soil of research. Astronomy, mathematics, biology, all are beset with names of men and women who have substantially advanced the progress of these disciplines. In the field of entomology alone the hall of fame has a wide circle of justly celebrated amateurs. All these people derive real joy out of their avocations� and we must not forget that joy and sublimity merge in devotion. The next incentive of learning is the instinct of collecting. It is ingrained in varying degrees in every human being. A museum is only a civic aggregate of this instinct of hoarding, preserving, and showing. Alongside an orderly accumulation of objects and data we must not overlook the process of repudiation and annihilation. We must learn to collect and to reject. Memory can act properly only hand in hand with the power of oblivion. Plato used to speak of true knowledge as anamnesis, as a resurrection out of the limbo of the forgotten. Accumulated piles of facts are liable to grow cumbersome and unruly. To forget productively in order to know productively we must first properly place the individual fact. We must file it somewhere; then we can remove it from our daily sight, so that the file does not encroach on life. Furthermore a properly organized file should be in close cooperation with a wastepaper basket. This latter is a great institution and should be wisely patronized, for it is the Shiva of destruction functioning jointly with the Vishnu of perpetuation for the benefit of sensible knowledge. It is only through judicious elimination of the trivial that we can give esthetic proportions to the B| body of our knowledge. The evolutionary development of the physical type of living beings is a good example of a gradual discarding of the outgrown. Art altogether is a species of inspired elimination. The etching is a cobweb of black lines precariously projected over the vacuity of white paper, a graphic gossamer spread over a predominating negation. What would music sound like if there were neither pauses nor intervals, no beneficial moments of silence and recuperation? Modem music grows often over-efficient in filling all interspaces, promulgating a disquieting and deafening "horror of the void." The very mercy promised by religions is forgiveness, thus? forgetting of our embarrassing and unedifying past. Thus the beautiful of art and the good of faith imply, under certain circumstances, creative and sane oblivion. In search of truth we should banish the redundant. We are entitled to do it, not for the sake of destruction of records, but for the sake of rising above details and facts into the realm of values. To be correct is not actually a discarding but a transmutation of all evidence, data, and isolated facts into significance. We should primarily aim at such a transfiguration. Education should teach us not only how to assemble facts but should also indicate a constructive way of disposing of them. Let us look upon our learning as a pass-key into the sanctuary of values�if we may use such a formal expression as "sanctuary," conveying as it does a sense of aloofness, and of sacerdotal refrigeration. It is to these altars within us, in the chambers of our hearts, that mind can make an occasional pilgrimage of recognition. The meeting will only prove to be mutually invigorating. Values lead us to quality and craftsmanship as the mark of uncompromising excellence. The sense of sacred dissatisfaction will vigilantly safeguard us from the doldrums of stagnation. In our age of mass production and of all-pervading quantity, a worship of craftsmanship in assembling and preserving knowledge is the main road of salvation from recrudescence of crudity and a lapse into a new wilderness�the machine jungle and 11 the rule of our myriad mechanical Frankensteins. In order not to misunderstood it is important to make it plain that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the machine itself, but with our own attitude toward it. We are liable to throw upon the shoulders of mechanical robots the responsibility for our indolence and lack of originality. A bright point in our times is the spirit of modern science. Learning is becoming steadily more imaginative, interpretive, and dramatic. At no other time has science been so fascinating, so captivating as now. Biology is discovering startling vistas in heredity and variation. Medicine is penetrating deeper into the baffling mysteries of the human body. Wonders of discoveries are fast accumulating in these eventful recent years of accelerated scientific progress. We may be only at the Alpha of the scientific alphabet, without any Omega in sight, but we have the right to believe with Santayana that, "what we know are scattered syllables of a single eternal oracle," and that, "intelligence is but one centrifugal ray darting from slime to stars." Sciences are all allies. They are brought closer together at present as we realize deeper and clearer the continuity of the cosmos. If some of the scholars investigating certain fields prefer to remain isolated, imprisoned in an ivory tower of their own choice, they still can unlock their cells at any time. Though science has not circumnavigated the lands of its constantly growing discoveries, the mutual drift of these continents of unexplored knowledge is quite apparent. We can only dimly guess their ultimate volume and their expansion, but we perceive already how closely inter-woven and germane are all the domains of knowledge. A majestic vision of a wide, wide world�wider than anyone could ever dream before�is a polyphonic unity. The music of the spheres is manifestly not a chaotic jazz on a universal scale. Rhythm and meaning permeate the world and belong to the realm of beauty and reason. The tremendous conceptions of modem astronomy, expounding the depths of stellar swarms, have demonstrated the universality of fundamental laws and basic types of celestial objects. The excessively large and the infinitesimally small have to be interpreted in kindred terms. Or to be more explicit, the stars and atoms explain each other in many ways. Mathematics, astrophysics, physics (on the terrestrial station of a||| world-wide laboratory), chemistry, biochemistry, and further on into the higher realm of organic life, all these departments of knowledge follow an uninterrupted sequence. There is, however, the reverse of the medal. The public grows accustomed to startling discoveries and develops an exaggerated taste for novelty. There is a growing hunger for the sensational. Responding to this demand, alongside of harrowing detective stories newspapers print largely garbled and sufficiently blood-curdling accounts of monsters of the infinitesimal, or the impending destruction of the earth by knowledge we should feel ourselves at home. In other words, we should all be specialists somewhere and preserve, at the same time, a general perspective. We have to devise a way of cultivating first-hand contact with the world of learning without losing sight of the broader art� integrating the general aspects scientific conception. Even if our vocation would was not supply appropriate occasions, a reconstructive, exhilarating hobby may provide the remedy. Unfortunately it cannot be ordered by prescription. It is a mental attitude rarely contagious, scarcely ever hereditary, and fortunately almost always incurable. The happiest thing that can happen in life is to discover our hobby in our own vocation. Work we love contains in itself both the most diligent exertion and its own repose, for any one who contemplates embracing a pedagogical career, an unfailing satisfaction will be derived from being instrumental in developing lasting interests and noble hobbies in pupils. To transmit learning to others is, perchance, one of the most enticing of callings. The torch of knowledge should pass from hand to hand. The brightness of its light depends on the interest in the subject no less than on the personality of the teacher. Here again human equation remains paramount. Summing up, we should endeavor to assign to science some particular place in the totality of our ideology, in the set of our intellectual and moral convictions. This is the very core of the art of knowing. Art becomes an object of definition only in the past when it has assumed form; but what it should be in the making must be left to our own creative spirit. We shall have to discover for ourselves the art in the making of knowledge, mindful that even though science is not all of the truth, it is a lofty road to it. Animals that were NOT by Andrey Avinoff "Out of this world of bizarre compounds emerges the beautiful enigmatic figure of the unicorn." The Carnegie Museum as a museum of science� and applied arts is, in the first place, a repository of actual and authentic objects pertaining to these fields, yet we come sometimes in touch with a cycle of things which cannot be described otherwise than as belonging to a fictitious world. Such are legendary entities as recorded in decorative art or exemplified in natural objects, which were ascribed by popular beliefs to fabulous beings, like the "horn of the unicorn." It is in keeping with our service to truth that we should not overlook the realm of legends, at least as far as documents of colorful folklore are concerned. In that sense our population of odd creatures preserved in the collection for study and display is slowly, but constantly, growing. A few days ago we received as a gift from Mrs. Thomas R. Hartley, together with extensive ethnographic material, an articulate Japanese dragon, cunningly carved out of wood and denoting the precision, persistence, and patience of Oriental craftsmen. This object has been added to the scattered set of harpies, griffins, and the like, which are owned by our institution. Perhaps one might attempt to introduce some species of orderly classification into this world conjured by human imagination. Some systematizing is feasible chiefly because the fantasy of mankind is infinitely less prolific than the variety of living forms. In fact, it is surprising that in a field where ample opportunity is reserved for an unbridled fancy the results are so conventional. The usual procedure for producing an accepted fictitious creature is to assemble parts of different beings into a composite unit, in accordance with the symbolic significance attached to those original forms that help to build up the legendary conglomerate. The first group of fabulous beings treated in this brief sketch comprises creatures with a human element introduced in some way or other into their joint make-up. The most ancient example of this order is the sphinx, associated with Egypt since time immemorial. The great monument of Ghizeh near Cairo, harking from uncertain dates of the earlier dynasties, probably the fourth, and computes its age in several millenniums before our era. As everyone knows, the sphinx bears a human head on a lion's body, thus combining the attributes of wisdom and power. These monuments, hewn out of stone, not infrequently displayed the likeness of the reigning Pharaoh, and were usually the guardians of temples and sacred avenues. In a somewhat different form the sphinx spread over Asia Minor and Mesopotamia. Among the ancient Hittites, about 1000 B.C., we find the sphinx in an amplified version�to the body of the lion with the head of a man were added the wings of an eagle and the horns of a bull. To complete this manifold union the tail was sometimes made to look like a serpent. The Assyrian sphinx, called sometimes cherub, shows the same four fundamental forms�the bearded and horned human countenance represents the king, the body is that of a bull or lion, and the wings are those of a mighty eagle. Once in a while some Assyrian composite figures showed another arrangement of the same motives. Certain monuments in the earlier part of the first millennium B.C. recorded a human figure with a horned head of a lion and feet bearing the talons of an eagle, not unlike the Egyptian conception of their deities, which were portrayed as human beings with the head of an ibis, hawk, jackal, bull, lioness, baboon, or frog. The fourfold creature of Assyria and Babylon corresponds to the creatures described in Ezekiel, with the sole distinction that "the four beasts" of the Assyrian imagery are separated into the original elements according to the Old Testament. Instances of such an order betray a traditional connection of the Biblical imagery with the symbolism of Babylon. The Scriptures depict the tetra-morph as four individual winged figures: man as the angel; the lion, the roaring sovereign of beasts; the ox, preeminently the animal of sacrifice; and the eagle, the soaring king of the air. "The four beasts" appear again in the Apocalypse at the foot of the divine throne, and are also accepted as the emblems of the four evangelists� the winged lion of St. Mark being the most widely known, whereas the eagle stands for St. John, the ox is associated with St. Luke, and the winged human figure of an angel with St. Matthew. Such symbolic attributes have a special connotation reflecting certain characteristics of each of the four Gospels and alluding besides to the four elements of ancient teachings. The sphinx of Greece stands midway between those of Egypt and Assyria, since it joins three figures in one. It is a combination of a lion and an eagle with a human head, the latter being invariably that of a woman. Herodotus had already pointed out the difference between the Grecian and the Egyptian conceptions of the sphinx. Numerous winged sphinxes with feminine heads are found on ancient vases. These are often represented in the round as recovered in excavations on the Grecian territory and in numerous Greek colonies on the coast of the Black Sea. In the mythology of ancient Greece the sphinx of Thebes was especially famous. It was said to have been propounding a riddle that no one could answer and that was finally solved by Oedipus who guessed correctly as to what possessed four, three, and two feet. In a summary survey of different mythological conceptions we find numerous imaginary creatures involving a human element in some form or other. Greece had its centaurs� half men, half horses; tritons�half men, half fish; sirens and harpies�birds with feminine heads; gorgons with heads adorned with snakes instead of locks. In India we encounter a wide ramification of the serpent cult, depicting cobras with human heads, these beings called "Nag-hini" in the Hinduistic Pantheon. Gannesh, the benign and jolly Indian god, is featured with an elephant's head on a human body, which by a congenial touch of elephantiasis is permeating till its ponderous proportions. Another cycle of fabulous creatures omits the human ingredient altogether. Such are the chimeras of classical Greece with the features of a goat, a lion, and a snake. Cerberus was an infernal mastiff with a triple head. Pegasus, the most celebrated of all the hippo-griffins, was a winged horse. A special kind of fantastic entity bearing the name of griffin�half lion, half eagle�was believed to be watching over subterranean treasures of gold. In the Scythian art of South Russia of the period of the Greek colonies, and of Siberia some two thousand years ago, the griffin was frequently used as a symbol of superhuman faculties. Scythian objects from Central Asia and the northern coast of the Black Sea, as well as a few rare pieces of prehistoric textiles recovered in recent years in Siberia, show the same customary aspect of the griffin. Even the ears of a lion adorning the eagle's head are carried out with a persistent tenacity to tradition in articles scattered over a wide area of the European and Asiatic continents. Christian iconography has also figured the griffin in the same conventional style. Without any deviation from the pagan prototype it is sculptured on the Cathedral of St. Mark and on numerous structures of the Romanesque period. Alexander the Great driven to heaven by two surging griffins was a conventional theme for the decoration of Christian churches in Central Asia during the early Middle Ages, following toward a Chin legend recorded by Pseudo-Callisthenes. The griffin contributed in a certain measure to the evolution of the Chinese and the Indo-Chinese dragon through the medium of Scythian art from the original Iranic boundaries of the source. The Chinese dynasties of Shu and Han, preceding and following the character of style present at the beginning of our era, denote a distinct imprint of Scythian influences in various stages of divergent branches of ornamentation. In the matter of the Chinese dragon, the snake element predominates, although the quadruped is still noticeable and the wings have been obliterated. While the pedigree of the dragon has to be traced through the line of the griffin, one should mention that on some of the polychrome decorations in ancient Babylon are shown sufficiently well-defined dragon-like monsters with the front paws of a lion, the hind legs with the talons of an eagle, and the body, head, and tail of a snake. It is worth observing that in India, China, and Japan mythological creatures in the form of a snake are especially popular, whereas the cycle of partly human composite beings is customarily associated with the classical Mediterranean culture. The wide geographic area between Mesopotamia through Persia, Central Asia, Siberia, and Mongolia, toward China, was the domain of the griffin, bridging together the Mediterranean kingdom of the sphinx and the Indo-Chinese empire of the serpent. It goes without saying that the boundaries of these territories were not fixed with clear-cut precision, and the character of styles and tradition prevailing within certain limits were not exclusive of divergent motives. It was rather a matter of predominance of varied symbols which nevertheless pointed toward the land between Asia Minor and the Persian Gulf, the old world of Assyria, Babylon, and Chaldea, as the hypothetical ancestral cradle of many of the fictitious creatures worshipped and pictured by early mankind. It may be a far-fetched conjecture to suggest that the plumed serpent of the Mayas is a faint reminiscence of the Chinese dragon carried to Central America in pre-Columbian ages, like the Oriental jade that apparently found a way of reaching Mexico and Costa Rica. One scarcely needs to revive the myth of the submerged Atlantis as some immoderate enthusiasts of this theory are prone to do upon every provocation, ready even to detect a distant echo of the north African Atlas in the very name of the foremost Mayan deity, the Quetzal-coatl. As we turn to the West we see that the dragon-like image has been treated there in a variety of ways discernible in heraldry as basilisks, cockatrices, and wyverns� all "abominable to behold," according to the old bestiaries. A special research on this subject is embodied in the work of John Vinycomb entitled "Fictitious Creatures in Art,'' but referring principally to British heraldry. Several painters of the Renaissance period depicting St. George and St. Michael had occasion to indulge in an interpretation of the dragon. Hieronymus Bosch, Breughel, and Callot have gone on record as the most convincing portraitists of incongruous monsters fit to stock the worst nightmare with every diversity of the gruesome and grotesque. The temptation of St. Anthony turns under their brush and etching needle into an assemblage of unimaginable, outlandish conundrums with parts of inanimate objects and mechanical accessories introduced into these strange portmanteau-beings of two, three, and many-in-one. Out of this world of bizarre compounds emerges the beautiful enigmatic figure of the unicorn. As early as in some Egyptian papyri the unicorn was associated from time to time with the lion, and ever since then they have been engaged in a joint career leading them to "fight for a crown" or to serve as "twin supporters of many coats of arms. According to a widespread legend the indomitable unicorn was amenable to docility only by a virgin. The unicorn has been magnificently glorified on many medieval tapestries of transcending beauty. A scholarly monograph creating at length the lore of the unicorn bears the epigram "Now I believe in unicorns." The only real article identified with the famous beast, however, is the solitary twisted tooth "of a certain whale. The narwhal of the northern waters is responsible for the supply of such huge tusks, accredited by superstition to possess the miraculous virtue of testing poisons and assuring immunity from any deadly concoction. Drinking cups out of ivory ascribed to unicorns were accordingly valued more highly than their weight in gold. A single tusk would fetch more than ten thousand dollars in modern (1942) currency. Our Museum, by the way, has a few pieces of narwhal tusks which would help to solve many of our current financial problems if this ivory could be disposed of at the price prevalent in the sixteenth century and registered in royal inventories of the period. Although this short sketch scarcely aspires to contain even a bare enumeration of all the fanciful beasts, it would be appropriate to embody in this assemblage of incredible animals the famed phoenix of classical antiquity and Oriental tradition. It was believed to be a resplendent bird which would be reborn every five hundred years after filling its wings with aromatic gums on Lebanon and burning itself to death on the Altar of Heliopolis. Then it would resurrect triumphantly to a new life and rise out or the ashes in order to resume the same miraculous cycle. Conventional figments of human imagination are not dropped into oblivion by our own city of Pittsburgh, where sphinxes and griffins face each other in the vicinity of our institution� from the steps of the Syria Mosque and the roof of the Soldiers Memorial. An attentive observer will also discover in the halls of the Carnegie Institute many mythical creatures or all periods, and will be able to see a few original pieces of art and archeology with figures of that order among the collections of the Museum. So it may with right be said that we do not decline, under certain circumstances, to harbor animals that were not, although we endeavor to stay as matter-of-fact as any museum would be reasonably expected to be, rather favoring those that either were or are. Address of Welcome from the acting Director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh 1925-1945 Andrey Avinoff "What was always intuitively felt by every sensitive mind as a realm, impalpable but true, beyond the veil of immediate actuality, is now expressed by the language of science arriving at similar conclusions by another path." The many branches of science are more closely inter-connected at present than at any time since the cradle of scientific thought. This striving for comprehending the cosmos, for mastering the forces of nature, has been an age-long endeavor of mankind. In the light of modern achievements it is easy to belittle and even to ridicule the inconsistencies, insufficiencies and na�vetes of early Greek thinkers. It is a method of an intelligent approach to the understanding of the world. To know what to do, and to do what one knows to be best, are two aspects of one awareness. The creative spirit in scientific activity leads to sane practical idealism. It would be a truism to assert how extensive is the influence of science on general progress and happiness. Some rash social reformers imagine there exists a miraculous shortcut to a millennium. They are to propound the theory of an immediate redistribution of economic values� for something more than a fictitious improvement of exterior welfare, new values have to be laboriously created and science is a potent factor in this direction. Science through ceaseless, painstaking research, is helpful in creating leisure, as its precious crowning prize, the use of which should be governed by the pursuit of aesthetic, spiritual and emotional values, as well as intellectual ones, and should assist in building a sane mind in a sane body. Materialism received a severe blow from the hands of precise science, the very quarters of which were considered the citadel of an eternal and indestructible substance. On the other hand, the theory of relativity, in its epistemological conclusions, aims at a vulnerable point of positivism, erecting a system of legitimate metaphysics sui generis in the sense of a meta-geometrical universe. According to Einstein, time and space are not any more independent entities, neither does a world acquire a reality with a uniform time and space. This four-dimensional continuity should be complicated by local distortions, and these warped portions of superspace are known in ordinary parlance as matter. What we know as our world is but a section through a four-dimensional universe. The complete visualization of the true world is thus beyond the means accessible to the human mind which cannot envisage duration as an extension comparable to with the three perpendiculars of geometrical space. Paradoxical as it may be, the ultimate conclusions of precise sciences combining mathematics, physics and dynamics, lead to a construction of a reality transcending our ability of immediate understanding. Never in the history of science did such a situation occur, through this profound reversal of ordinary notions is scarcely perceptible in the usual conditions of experiments and observations on account of the slow rate of motions with which human experience is associated. One might compare this state of affairs with accepting a small section of an enormous circle as a straight line from which a short segment will scarcely deviate for all practical purposes as long as we do not continue the curved line too far. The basic revolution of thought created by the relativistic conception has to be somehow accounted for, by a future revised epistemology, by a readjustment of new problems of knowledge to whatever philosophical system we might accept to our satisfaction. It is not a hopeless impasse, however. We are not headed into a blind alley. On the contrary, there is an important message contained in the fact that scientific speculation has attained in a way a sympathetic accord with the insight of an artistic vision, with the inspiration of a poet, and the contemplation of a seer. What was always intuitively felt by every sensitive mind as a realm, impalpable but true, beyond the veil of immediate actuality, is now expressed by the language of science arriving at similar conclusions by another path. A philosopher has to take into consideration the facts of science, and the scientist can scarcely progress in his attainments without the aid of a certain metaphysical element. Science coming of age does not frown so much at what seemed to be mere vagaries and figments of groundless imagination. The postulate of aesthetic harmonies, the intuition of faith, have now more chance to be reconciled with a broadening science. When the fragile jewel-like symmetry of a snowflake catches the fancy of an admiring eye, the scientist knows that he is also confronted by a phenomenon that lies on the borderland of his comprehension, on the threshold of a domain which he can approach but with the strange gauge of the super-dimensional."

previous - next