Science and Art 187 



art at all? I think it does. In the first place, both science 

 and art are at base concerned with the same thing — the 

 building up of some sort of shared picture of the world. The 

 subjective nature of sensation and perception dooms all of 

 us to what is ultimately a lonely existence, but science and 

 art provide us with means for reducing the circle of loneli- 

 ness which separates us from others. Science does it by 

 reducing subjective sensations to measurable objective 

 quantities. For example, it quickly got around the color- 

 blind difficulty by pointing out that different objects reflect 

 light of different wavelengths. It then devised instruments 

 to measure both the wavelengths and the intensity of the 

 reflected color. All sorts of what we loosely refer to as 

 elementary sensations have been similarly reduced to pointer 

 readings in a way that greatly increases the range and accu- 

 racy of our individual observations and facilitates the shar- 

 ing of such observations with others. 



The great theories of science extend this process of shar- 

 ing to a much more profound level. In other words, they 

 enable us to share not only the details of observations but 

 complete pictures of how the details are put together. For 

 example, all reasonably well informed people now share 

 the same picture of the solar system and think of life as 

 a constantly evolving pyramid with man as one of its more 

 interesting products. 



As we have seen, there are other parts of experience 

 which have proved extremely resistant to reduction to num- 

 bers on a scale. Artistic creation may be looked upon as 

 a method for breaking into the circles of subjective loneli- 

 ness without reducing subjective qualities to objective quan- 

 tities. Though it is less successful than science in developing 

 general agreement, it has the enormous advantage of main- 

 taining and deepening the individuars direct awareness of 



