The philosophy of genius

171E ACT OF CREATION, by Arthur Koestler (Hutchinson, 42s.).
CREATION STILL GOES ON, by F. L. Boschke, translated by L Parks (Hodder & Stoughton, 30s.).
Reviewed by FR. J. H. CREHAN, S.J.
ARTHUR KOESTLER'S new work has been heralded by three talks on the Third Programme and is indeed something of an event. It is a search into the problem of creative genius and of how men come to conceive those ideas which transform the lives of their fellows; creation in the theological sense of a divine activity is not under discussion.
What Mr. Koestler finally settles upon, after a wealth of illustration from the discoverers, the humorists, the artists, is that a "creative leap" makes a man experience reality on two or more planes at once and the hidden connection of similar processes or configurations of ideas comes borne to him.
His approach, as an historian of science, is from the bottom upwards and he does not pause to ponder whether there is any filtering of knowledge downwards from the source which theologians have come to call revelation. If he had done so, he would perhaps have come to agree that what theologians call analogical knowledge of God answers very well to his description of the spark of genius. But its source is other.
He would have found an enrichment for his theme if he had examined the processes of stripping and extrapolation of ideas
that go to make up the analogical approach to God.
It is just as fascinating to see how genius fails to work as to see how it succeeds, and there are many cautionary tales here of what the near-genius just failed to grasp. Galileo, Freud, Darwin, all receive some black.marks for what they missed. and this will not please some of the author's critics who in America have reacted savagely to his earlier work The Sleepwalkers.
In defending himself at that time (1960) he wrote: "In taking down Copernicus or Galileo from the pedestal on which sciencemythography has placed them, my motive was not to debunk but to inquire into the obscure workings of the creative mind".
It is this inquiry that he reports on now. It has led him through a lengthy and exceedingly critical examination of Behaviourist psychology which he found wanting at various junctures. The picture of man as a rigid mechanism of chained reflexes, fashionable both in USA and USSR between the wars, he finds to be the very denial of creativity, and, if his book helps behaviourist theories into the limbo of scientific lumber, it will do well.
Loose talk about "the rat race" for the rising generation shows that some of its concepts, like those of Freud earlier, have a tendency to stick, even when they have been scientifically exploded.
The appendix in which he gives portrait-sketches of some of the specimens of genius under con
sideration is going to stir the ire of men with one-track minds: Galileo as "a fatal blend of genius plus arrogance minus humility" whose middle years were filled "with poisonous polemics, spurious priority claims and impassioned propaganda for a misleadingly over-simplified Copernican system" is hardly the hero whose shrine is tended by Professor Santillana.
The book is a courageous attempt to bridge the gap between the Two Cultures. Naturally, on this side and that, there will be small points of detail to be chalknged, but the main line of argument is to be welcomed, even if a Catholic would wish it to be prolonged.
There are one or two survivals of outdated thinking or information on religious matters. Thus no one would now think of deriving the Christian Eucharist from Orphic or Dionysiac mysteries in the manner of M. Levy-Bruhl, and the supposed scientific stagnation which is said to follow the alliance between Aquinas and Aristotle is belied by the existence of the Merton school in the fourteenth century whose leader, Bradwardine, was primarily a theologian.
Elsewhere Mr. Koestler observes that the real conflict is of habit against originality, not of religion against science.
The work of F. Boschke is a highly-illustrated popular science review of the universe, organised in the framework of the Genesis account of creation. It is not, as its title might suggest, a tract in aid of Professor Hoyle.
The seven days of creation allow the author, who is by training a nuclear chemist and editor of a German magazine of practical chemistry. to give chatty summaries of the state of scientific opinion about the age of the earth, radio-astronomy. Continental drift, life on other planets, and other such problems.
Some of the biographical information. for instance that on Galileo. could do with an application of the Koestler treatment. The author does not mention Teilhard, but he is eager to canvass opinions for the possibility that new forms of life are continually starling up, whereas Koestler is content to write that the biological evolution of the species with which we are concerned has to all intents and purposes come to a standstill.