137 - Arthur I. Miller [5]
All this was taking place at a time when philosophy was shifting from a positivistic approach, which excluded anything that could not be reduced to sense perceptions, to a search for a reality beyond appearances. The search for this reality became a passionate quest in the arts as well: Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky were discovering new ways to represent reality as they developed cubism and abstract expressionism; composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schönberg were rebelling against the traditional canons of music; while writers such as James Joyce were incorporating relativity into their fiction.
PAULI told very few colleagues about his discussions with Jung. He feared their derision. Nevertheless his sessions with Jung convinced him that intuition rather than logical thought held the key to understanding the world around us. Many scientists see Pauli as the epitome of rationality and logical thinking. They assume that a scientist who worked as hard as he did, and achieved as much, must have lived strictly a life of the mind, devoted to physics. This still tends to be the image that both ordinary people and scientists themselves have of scientists.
It is important to remember Isaac Newton, who laid the foundations of modern science. For over two hundred years after his death people imagined he was a man devoid of emotions—“with his Prism and silent Face,” as William Wordsworth wrote—who sat at his desk day after day working out equations.
A colleague once asked Newton what he was working on. He replied that he did physics—but only in his spare time. In the 1930s, a bundle of papers which he had kept secret came to light. These revealed that Newton had been very much a man of his time, concerned less with physics than with issues such as how big the new city of Jerusalem would have to be to receive the souls on Judgment Day, with biblical chronology and how to discern the motion of material objects relative to God. As far as he was concerned, his famous laws of motion were simply a means to work toward this end.
As the English economist John Maynard Keynes, who bought many of Newton’s newly discovered papers, wrote, “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last magician.”
Newton’s first biographer, the nineteenth-century Scottish scientist David Brewster, was adamant that there was “no reason to suppose that Sir Isaac Newton was a believer in the doctrines of alchemy.” But Newton’s papers reveal just the opposite—that Newton was among the most knowledgeable alchemists of his day. We now take for granted that he should be understood as a man of his time, who lived in a world of alchemy, magic, and mysticism, like his near-contemporary, the seventeenth-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler, whom Pauli saw as an image of himself.
Scientists who have not examined Pauli’s vast correspondence and writings still place him in the old Newtonian straitjacket. But Pauli was alive to the alchemical roots of science. Modern science, he believed, had come to a dead end. Perhaps the means to break through and to develop new insights was to take a radically different approach and return to science’s alchemical roots.
Although a twentieth-century scientist, Pauli felt an affinity with the seventeenth century—perfectly natural to anyone who, as he did, accepted that there was, as Jung postulated, a collective unconscious.
Today a vocal minority of scientists believe in paranormal phenomena. For twenty eight years a laboratory at Princeton University tried to establish evidence for extra-sensory perception (ESP)—using card-guessing methods—as well as evidence for telekinesis, the ability of the mind to move objects. It had been privately funded to the tune of ten million dollars and closed down in 2007. Its founder, Robert G. Jahn, a pioneer in jet propulsion systems said,