206 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



man give himself to science is precisely the same as 

 that which produces the poet or the composer — a pas- 

 sion for beauty and a desire to enjoy aesthetic pleasure. 



"The intense pleasure I have received from this 

 discovery can never be told in words. I regretted no 

 more the time wasted; I tired of no labor; I shunned 

 no toil of reckoning, days and nights spent in calcula- 

 tion, until I could see whether my hypothesis would 

 agree with the orbits of Copernicus or whether my 

 joy was to vanish into thin air." It is Kepler the 

 astronomer writing, and his discovery was of certain 

 harmonies and proportions obeyed by the planets, a 

 poetical and musical behaviour on the part of certain 

 stars, the next best thing to the "music of the spheres." 

 It so happens that Kepler was wrong, childishly 

 wrong, we would think now, in the particular matter 

 about which he speaks with such enthusiasm. But 

 the episode is an example of how the chief incentive 

 to all the earlier astronomers was to show that the 

 stars obeyed aesthetic laws, how their motions were 

 beautiful. Indeed beauty, nice conduct, harmonious 

 movement, are what every scientist looks for in nature, 

 and only when he finds them does he believe that he 

 has found something which is true. 



Since the urge to discover a scientific fact or to per- 

 fect a scientific theory is precisely the same as the 

 urge to write a poem; and since the pleasure to be 

 derived from understanding some one else's theory is 

 precisely the same as the pleasure to be derived from 

 reading some one else's poem, it is wrong to distin- 

 guish so vitally between science on the one hand and 

 art on the other: both are children of the imagination, 

 both of them ways of discovering and enjoying beauty. 



