Read The Act of Creation for Free Online Page B

transposed,
along a horizontal line as it were, across the triptych, into the
panels of science and art. His 'homme-automate', man and artefact at
the same time, has its lyric counterpart in Galatea -- the ivory statue
which Pygmalion made, Aphrodite brought to life, and Shaw returned
to the comic domain. It has its tragic counterpart in the legends of
Faust's Homunculus, the Golem of Prague, the monsters of Frankenstein;
its origins reach back to Jehovah manufacturing Adam out of 'adamåh',
the Hebrew word for earth. The reverse transformation -- life into
mechanism -- has equally rich varieties: the pedant whom enslavement to
habit has reduced to an automaton is comic because we despise him; the
compulsion-neurotic is not, because we are puzzled and try to understand
him; the catatonic patient, frozen into a statue, is tragic because we
pity him. And so again back to mythology: Lot's wife turned into a pillar
of salt, Narcissus into a flower, the poor nymph Echo wasting away until
nothing is left but her voice, and her bones changed into rocks.

In the middle panel of the triptych the 'homme-automate' is the
focal, or rather bi-focal, concept of all sciences of life. From their
inception they treated, as the practical joker does, man as both mind
and machine. The Pythagoreans regarded the body as a musical instrument
whose soul-strings must have the right tension, and we still unwittingly
refer to our mortal frame as a kind of stringed guitar when we speak of
'muscle tone ', or describe John as 'good tempered'. The same bifocal
view is reflected in the four Hippocratic 'humours' -- which were both
liquids of the body and moods of the spirit; and 'spiritus' itself is,
like 'pneuma', ambiguous, meaning also breath. The concept of 'catharsis'
applied, and still does, to the purgation of either the mind or the
bowels. Yet if I were to speak earnestly of halitosis of the soul, or
of laxatives to the mind, or call an outburst of temper a humourrhage,
it would sound ludicrous, because I would make the implicit ambiguities
explicit for the purpose of maliciously contrasting them; I would tear
asunder two frames of reference that our Greek forbears had managed to
integrate, however tentatively, into a unified, psychosomatic view which
our language still reflects.

In modern science it has become accepted usage to speak of the
'mechanisms' of digestion, perception, learning, and cognition, etc.,
and to lay increasing or exclusive stress on the automaton aspect of the
'homme-automate'. The mechanistic trend in physiology reached its symbolic
culmination at the beginning of the century in the slogan 'Man a machine'
-- the programmatic title of a once famous book by Jacques Loeb; it was
taken over by behaviouristic psychology, which has been prominent in
the Anglo-Saxon countries for half a century. Even a genial naturalist
like Konrad Lorenz, whose King Solomon's Ring has delighted millions,
felt impelled to proclaim that to regard Newton and Darwin as automata
was the only permissible view for 'the inductive research worker who
does not believe in miracles'. [9] It all depends, of course, on what
one's definition of a miracle is: Galileo, the ideal of all 'inductive
research workers', rejected Kepler's theory that the tides were due to
the moon's attraction as an 'occult fancy'. [10] The intellectual climate
created by these attitudes has been summed up by Cyril Burt, writing
about 'The Concept of Consciousness' (which behaviourists have banned,
as another 'occult fancy', from the vocabulary of science): 'The result,
as a cynical onlooker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having
first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now,
as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness.' [11]

I have dwelt at some length on Bergson's favourite example of the comic,
because of its relevance to one of the leitmotifs of this book. The
man-machine duality has been epitomized in a laconic sentence --