“The great masters do not take any model, or any theory, quite so seriously as the rest of us. They know that it is, after all, only a model, only a theory, and as such possibly replacable.”

Theories and Poets

In every period the particular Model of the Universe which is accepted by the great thinkers helps to provide what we may call the backcloth for the arts. But this backcloth is highly selective. It takes over from the total Model only what is intelligible to a layman and only what makes some appeal to imagination and emotion.

Thus our own backcloth contains plenty of Freud and little of Einstein. The medieval backcloth, for instance, contained the order and influences of the planets, but not much about epicycles and eccentrics. Nor does the backcloth always respond very quickly to great changes in the scientific and philosophical level.

Not only epistemologically but also emotionally the Model probably means less to the great thinkers than to the poets. This, I think, must be so in all ages. Quasi-religious responses to the hypostatised abstraction Life are to be sought in Shaw or Wells or in a highly poetical philosopher such as Bergson, not in the papers and lectures of biologists. For instance, delight in the medieval Model is expressed by Dante or Jean de Meung rather than by Albertus and Aquinas.

This is partly so, no doubt, because expression, of whatever emotion, is not the business of philosophers. But this is also so, as already said, because it is not in the nature of things that great thinkers should take much interest in Models.