Science and Art 189 



that scientists are purely concerned with collecting facts 

 and that scientific generahzations emerge automatically 

 when enough facts have been collected. Indeed, Sir Francis 

 Bacon, who had a good deal to do with getting the modem 

 scientific era started, viewed science in this way. Since he 

 was a very persuasive writer (and lawyer), his views have 

 carried a good deal of weight. It is now clear, however, 

 that scientific concepts and generalizations do not arise 

 of themselves. They are acts of the scientist's imagination 

 which bring order and coherence to what was before a 

 meaningless or awkward collection of facts. In the same 

 way, a work of art is a creation which produces order in 

 the realm of subjective experience. 



As Alfred North Whitehead said, "Art is the imposing 

 of a pattern on experience, and our esthetic enjoyment in 

 recognition of the pattern." ^ But science proceeds in ex- 

 actly the same way and, as we have seen, the esthetic en- 

 joyment produced by a new scientific idea is frequently 

 one of the major reasons for preferring it to other less 

 beautiful hypotheses. 



The close relationship between scientific and artistic 

 creativity has recently been eloquently set forth by J. 

 Bronowski in a little book ^ that is so interesting and so 

 easy to read that it relieves us of the necessity for further 

 discussion here. 



Notes 



^Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, Boston, Little, Brown, p. 228, 

 1954. 

 'J. Bronowski, Science and Human Values, New York, Harper, 1959. 



