A Genius Is A Man Who Has

The Hand Is The Cutting Edge Of The Mind.

Da Vinci Was As Great A Mechanic And Inventor As Were Newton And His Friends. Yet A Glance At His Notebooks Shows Us That What Fascinated Him About Nature Was Its Variety, Its Infinite Adaptability, The Fitness And The Individuality Of All Its Parts. By Contrast What Made Astronomy A Pleasure To Newton Was Its Unity, Its Singleness, Its Model Of A Nature In Which The Diversified Parts Were Mere Disguises For The Same Blank Atoms.

The Discoveries Of Science, The Works Of Art Are Explorations - More, Are Explosions, Of A Hidden Likeness. The Discoverer Or Artist Presents In Them Two Aspects Of Nature And Fuses Them Into One. This Is The Act Of Creation, In Which An Original Thought Is Born, And It Is The Same Act In Original Science And Original Art.

We Are All Shot Through With Enough Motives To Make A Massacre, Any Day Of The Week That We Want To Give Them Their Head.

Progress Is The Exploration Of Our Own Error. Evolution Is A Consolidation Of What Have Always Begun As Errors. And Errors Are Of Two Kinds: Errors That Turn Out To Be True And Errors That Turn Out To Be False (which Are Most Of Them). But They Both Have The Same Character Of Being An Imaginative Speculation. I Say All This Because I Want Very Much To Talk About The Human Side Of Discovery And Progress, And It Seems To Me Terribly Important To Say This In An Age In Which Most Non-scientists Are Feeling A Kind Of Loss Of Nerve.