76 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



scientist says : "If you can measure the thing, you are beginning 

 to know something about it, if not . . . " but the artist answers, 

 "What about beauty and love?" 



Science is essentially international, or perhaps we should say 

 supernational. Men of science of all times and places cooperate 

 together; they cannot help cooperating, even if they don't particu- 

 larly wish to do so, because their task is essentially the same. They 

 are ascending the same mountain, and even when their trails di- 

 verge they are aiming at the same goal. Art is tribal, national. To 

 be sure, it may transcend local peculiarities and reach the bed- 

 rock of human nature. Yet when we speak of Spanish painting or 

 Russian music we evoke fundamental differences, which may be 

 difficult to analyze, not to say measure, but are as tangible as the 

 air we breathe. Sometime ago I had to write a study on Borodin, 

 who was a distinguished chemist as well as one of the leading 

 Russian composers. In order to reconstruct his background, I had 

 to investigate the contemporary state of international chemistry 

 and of Russian music. 



The scientific procedure is essentially analytic; the artistic one 

 synthetic, intuitive. Scientific discoveries are the result of long 

 evolutions, artistic achievements of short involutions. This applies 

 not only to the creation of scientific or artistic works, but also to 

 their interpretation. We cannot penetrate the thought of Faraday 

 or Poincare without a sustained effort, but a Greek statue reveals 

 to us immediately the best of Greece, and a Gothic cathedral il- 

 luminates the Middle Ages. Science is the field of arduous and 

 unremitting work; how beautiful the flowers in it are if we have 

 earned them with honest travail of limbs or spirit! Art, by con- 

 trast, is the paradise of immediate intuitions. 



VIII 



All of which is very true, but it is not the whole truth, and I 

 knew it all the time. Now let us look together at the other side of 

 the picture. 



