Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-68ccn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-08T08:45:46.144Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Science and Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

My object in these lectures is to show that Science is a form of Art, though not of fine art; in other words, that it is one example of a process of which fine art is the most obvious example, the process of making out of certain materials a result into which the mind itself enters. Clearly enough the material of the artist, whatever it be, marble or paints or tones or words, is moulded by the artist into a shape which it would not possess unless something in the artist’s mind found expression in it. Science also is a product of the mind’s interference and is artificial. But it differs from fine art, I shall try to show, in this respect: in fine art the material is controlled from the mind, or at least it is principally controlled from the mind. In science the material is the facts of nature (including of course the mind itself as a natural object); but while science would not be except for the mind of the scientist, the work is controlled from the side of the material itself, and his mind is instrumental to the product rather than in some sense intrinsic to it as in fine art.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1930

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Page 331 note 1 Delivered in the University of Manchester, November 1929, and in London for the British Institute of Philosophical Studies, February 1930.

page 336 note 1 Paris, 1925.

page 350 note 1 I have, however, to observe that Mr. Whitehead in Process and Reality not only accepts Hume’s admission as true, but takes it as an instance of a fundamental principle. But I leave the text, written before I knew Mr. Whitehead’s book, unaltered.