valéry-paul--introduction-to-the-method-of-leonardo-da-vinci

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Introduction to the method ofLEON RDO D VINCI


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ntroductiont the method ofLEONARDODA VINCIt ranslated from the french ofP U L V A L R Yof the acadmie f r ana i seBY THOMAS M GREEVY

LONDON JOHN RODKER 929


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PRINTED IN ENGL ND T THE CURWEN PRESS


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TRANSLATOR S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTMy friend, Mr. William MacCausland Stewart, M.A., my pre-decessor s Lecteur d Anglais at the cole Normale, now of St.Andrews University, whose knowledge of the French languageand of the work of Monsieur Valry are much more exhaustivethan mine, has read through the first draft ofmy translation andmade many suggestions which 1 have been glad to adopt.cole Normale Suprieure, ParisFebruary 929

T McG


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EDITION LIMITED TO 875 COPIES OF WHICH 50SPECIALLY BOUND AND PRINTED ON HAND-MADEPAPER AND SIGNED Y THE AUTHOR NUMBERED 1 50THIS COPY IS NUMBER 05


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ONTENTSage

1 Note and igression 1919)II Introduction 1894) 31


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1NOTE ND DIGRESSION

Why, people ask, did the author send his hero to Hungary? Becausehe wanted to introduce piece o instrumental music the theme o whichwas Hungarian. He would have sent him to any other country as wellhad he found the slightest musical reason for doing so.

H. BERLIOZ. Foreword to The Damnation o Faust.

1 ought first to apologize for a title which is not only pretentious, but positively deceptive. 1 did not mean it to bedeceptive when 1 gave it to this little study. But that wastwenty-five years ago. And now, chilled by twenty-five years,1 find it too ambitious. Were 1 to re-write the work to-day 1should moderate its pretensions. And s for the text 1 shouldnot dream ofwriting such a text to-day. Impossible my reasonwould say. For at the nth move in the game of chess thatknowledge plays with the mind, a player flatters himselfthat he has learned something from the adversary; that he canadopt its manner. 8 one becomes hard on the young manwho w s once oneself: whom, willy-nilly, one must accept sone's progenitor; hard on his ineXplicable weaknesses-theyseemed at the time audacities; on his ingenuousnesses, now sopatent. Yet this is to become more imbecile than ever. Butimbecile of necessity, for reasons of State. There is no temptation that stirs one so deeply, none more intimate, and also,perhaps, none more fruitful, than that of self-repudiation.Every day is jealous of every other day. It is its duty to be.Thought defends itself desperately against any suggestion that


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10 I N TR O D U C TI O N TO THE METHODunnecessary terrors. No fear ofanalysis he carries analysis-or it carries him to its farthest conclusions; and he cornes backto reality without effort. He imitates innovates; he does notreject the old because it is old; nor the new because it is new;he studies in both something that is eterQally of the present.

He is not in the least degree cognizant of that so crudeand so ill-defined opposition which three half-centuries afterhi m was to be proclaimed between wit and geometrical geniusby a man entirely insensitive to art who was incapable ofimagining so delicate and natural a co-ordination of distinctqualities; who considered that painting is vanity and that trueeloquence despises eloquence; who launched us on a questwhere all insight and all geometry are suppressed; and whohaving changed his new lamp for an old one gave himself upto sewing prayers into his clothes when he should have beengiving to France the glory of finding a calculus of the infinite. . . .

But no revelations for Leonardo. No abyss yawns at his feetan abyss would make him think of a bridge an abyss could

be used for experiments with sorne great mechanical bird.Himselfhe cou d regard as an ideal realization ofthe beautifuland intelligent animal absolutely supple and free; capable ofmany methods of progression; knowing on the slightest indication from its rider without difficultyor delay how to changefrom one method to any other. Spirit of wit or spirit of geometry one identifies oneself with it or one abandons it as theclever horse changes from this rhythm to that. The supremelyco-ordinated being needs only to prescribe to himself certainsecret and very simple modifications with regard to will andimmediately he passes from an order where changes arepurely formaI and acts purely symbolical to a world of imperfect knowledge and undisciplined reality. To possess this


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OF LEO N A RD O DA VIN Iliberty in profound change, to be able to utilize this machineryof adjustment, is merely to possess such a sense of humanintegrity s we imagine the ancients possessed.

A superior elegance is disconcerting. The absence of embarrassment, of a prophetic air or a pathetic; these preciseideals; this temperament in which the balance betweencuriosity and potentiality is always being re-established by amas ter ofequilibrium; this disdain ofhocus-pocus and artifice,and, in the most inventive ofmen, this absence ofa sense of thetheatre these we find scandalous. What could be harder toconceive for people such s we, who make a sort of businessof sensibility , who daim to possess everything in a few elementary effects of contrast and nervous repercussion and tograsp everything when we succeed in giving ourselves theillusion of dentity with the transient iridescent material ofourlife here?But Leonardo, proceeding from research to research, attainsquite simply to a steadily more perfect mastery over his ownnature; unceasingly he modifies his ideas, unceasingly looksdoser; unceasingly elaborates his notes; he teaches one hands weIl s the other to draw with the most absolu te precision;

he takes himself to pieces and puts himself together again,establishes a doser correspondence between will and potentiality, brings reason into the arts yet retains his grace.

So detached an intelligence is bound to arrive at curiousattitudes in the course of its movement as a ballerina willastonish us by achieving and sustaining for several momentsposes of utter instability. His detachment is a shock to ourinstincts and a mockery of our preconceived ideas. N othingcould be more free, that is to say nothing could be less human,than his judgements on love, on death. We may divine themfrom a few fragments in the notebooks. Love in its fury , he


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 13facile comparison enough. For a student oforganisms such ashe, the body is not a piece ofrubbish to be utterly despised. Ithas too many properties, it solves too many problems. t pos-sesses too ma 9 functions, is capable of too ma 9 resources, not tocorrespond to some transcendental necessity that is sufficiently powerfulto construct it but not sufficiently powerful to be able to dispense withits complexities. It is the creation ofsome one who has need ofitwho does not willingly cast it aside, who laments its loss asone laments the loss of power Such is the feeling of daVinci. His philosophy is wholly naturalistic, markedly opposedto the purely spiritual, very much given to word-for-wordphysico-mechanical explanations. When the subjeet is thesoul, observe how very close he is to the philosophy of theChurch. The Church, at least in so far as the Church isThomist, does not allow to the separated soul a very enviableexistence. Nothing is poorer than this soul when it has lostits body. t has little more than bare existence, the logicalminimum, a sort of latent life in which it is for us, and nodoubt for itself, unimaginable. It has put away everything,power, will, perhaps knowledge. We do not even know whetherit can remember that it was, in time and in some place, theform and the deed of its body. Remains to it the glory of itsautonomy. So vain and so insipid a condition is happily onlytransitory-if the word, used of astate beyond time, retainsany meaning. Reason demands, and dogma imposes, therestoration of the flesh. No doubt the qualities of this last fleshwill be quite different from those possessed by our flesh. Here,1 think, one must imagine something other than a simplereversaI of Carnot s principle, than a mere realization of theimprobable. But it is useless to venture to such extremes inphysics, to dream of a glorious body, the substance ofwhichwould be in a different relation from our own to the law of


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14 I NT R ODU T I ON TO THE METHODattraction in aU things, and so changed in relation to the speedof light that the swiftn ss predicted for it would be realized.However it be, the naked soul must, according to theology,recover, in a certain body, a certain functional life and,through that new body, sorne species ofmatter that aUows ofits activities, and fiUs its unoccupied intellectual divisions withincorruptible wonders.

A dogma which concedes this not exactly secondary importance to bodily organization, which, to a remarkable degree,minimizes the soul, which forbids us, and spares us, the follyof trying to imagine what it is like, which goes so far as toinsist on its re-incarnation in order that it may participa te ineternallife, this dogma, so exactly contrary to the exclusivelyspiritual, separates the Church in the most striking mannerfrom the generality ofother Christian confessions. But it seemsto me that for two or three centuries no article offaith has beenpassed over so lightly in religious literature. Preachers andapologists scarcely refer to it The reason for this semisilence is unknown to me.

1 have wandered so far into Leonardo that 1 do not knowfor the moment how to get back to myself. What matterEvery road leads back to oneself--that is the definition of theself--it cannot lose itself absolutely, it loses only time.

Let us then, follow a little farther the bent and the temptations of the mind. Unfortunately, we may follow them without fear: following them leads to no real depth. Even our mostprofound thought is limited by the invincible circumstanceswhich make all thought superficial. One only enters a forestof transpositions, or, rather, a palace walled with mirrorswhich multiply to infinity the light of a solitary lampe

But let us try again whether our unaided curiosity can throwany light on the secret method of sorne individual who is of


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 5primary importance for us. And let us imagine how more orless he must appear to himself when sometimes in the courseof his work he stops and considers himself as a whole. Firsthe sees himself as bound by common necessities and realities;afterwards he reconstructs himself in the secrecy of his sep ar-ate knowledge. He sees like us and he sees like himselE He hasa theory ofhis nature and a sense ofhis craft. He is absent andpresent. He sus tains that kind of dual role that a priest has tosus tain. He sees clearly enough that he cannot define himselfto himself altogether in terms of ordinary happenings andordinary motives. To live even to live weIl that is for himonly a means: when he eats he nourishes sorne other marvelthan his life and the half of his bread is consecrate. To act itis for him only an exercise. To love 1 wonder whether it ispossible to him. And as for glory-no To shine in the eyes ofothers is to shine with the brightness of false gems.

Nevertheless he must find in himself sorne landmarks soplaced as to bring his private life and this generalized lifewhich he has discovered in himself into harmony with eachother. The calm clairvoyance that seems though not abso-lutely convincingly to make him quite clear to himself wouldwish to escape that relativity which it cannot but recognizein everything else. In vain it transforms itself in vain from dayto day it reproduces itself as clear as the sun. The sense ofidentity with its successive transformations always carries withit a sense of falseness. It knows in its unchangeableness that itis subject to another mysterious law and to modifications thatare not apparent; and knows therefore that it includesalways even when it is at the very clearest stage ofits luciditya hidden possibility of weakness and of utter ruin-as thedream that seems most real will suddenly include an elementof inexplicable unreality.


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16 IN T R O D U T IO N TO THE METHODt is a kind ofclairvoyant agony to fee1 that though one sees

everything one remains oneself visible possibly even theobject of outside attention; that one cannot find a place aviewpoint which has nothing behind it.Durus est hic sermo the reader will say. But in these matterswhat is not vague is difficult what is not difficult is nothing.Let us go on a little farther.

For so se1f-conscious a presence of mind which makes adetour round the universe to come back to itse1f aIl events ofaIl kinds life and death and ideas are subordinated symbols.As each visible thing is to what sees it at once alien indispens-able and inferior so the importance ofthese symbols howevergreat it may at any given moment seem lessens on reflectionbefore the mere persistence of attention itse1f and is trans-ferred to that pure universality to that unconquerable capacityfor generalization which consciousness fee1s itse1f to be.

Such events as have the power to suppress consciousnessare by the same law robbed of aIl significance; when theyconserve it they become part of its system. Intelligence knowsnothing ofhaving been born as it knows nothing of dying. Itis enlightened certainly as to its fluctuations and its ultimatedisappearance but mere1y through a notion that is no differ-ent to aIl other notions. It might very easily be1ieve that itwill survive and that it will not change were it not that itrecognizes from its experiences day after day the existence ofmany fatal possibilities; and of one certain slope that leads tothe lowest depths of aIl. This slope causes a presentiment of apower that may become irresistible announces the beginningofpermanent exile from the spiritual sun from the maximumof clarity and solidity from the power to distinguish andchoose; who descends the slope has a sense of it obscured bya thousand psychological impurities beset by echoings and


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OF LEON RDO D VINCI 17dizzinesses across the confusion of times and disorders of thefunctions; one goes on feebly through an indescribablederangement of the dimensions ofknowledge until one reachesthe state of immediacy and unity in which chaos disappearsbefore the nothingness of death.

But the more a complete system of psychological substitutions opposed to death as weIl as to life becomes self-conscious replacing itself by itself the more it becomes detachedfrom aIl beginnings the more it eliminates in a sense aIl riskof disintegration. Comparable to a ring ofsmoke a system ofaltogether interior energies astonishingly lays claim to perfectindependence and indivisibility. In a very clear consciousnessmemory and phenomena find themselves so closely related sotaken for granted so responded to; the old is so much utilized;the new so promptly appreciated; and the value of totalrelationships so clearly re-established that it seems as thoughin this realm of almost pure activity nothing can begin andnothing end. The perpetuaI change in things which constitutes activity assures to it an appearance of indefinite conservation. It is not attached to any of them. nd it contains nohorderline element no singular object of perception or ofthought so much more real than aIl the others that it could notbe replaced by sorne one of them. Within it there is no ideawhich fulfils the unknown conditions of consciousness to thepoint of making consciousness disappear no thought whichcan destroy the power of thought and bring it to an n -there is no point in the turn of the key at which the lock setsfor ever. There is no thought which can be for thoughtinevitably as a r s u l ~ of its own development an end; a finalresolving ofthat permanent disharmony.

Since mind has found no limit to its activity and since noidea marks the end of the business of consciousness t must


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18 IN T R O D U T IO N TO THE METHODmost likely perish in sorne incomprehensible climax foreshadowed and prepared by those terrors and odd sensationsof which 1 have spoken; they give us glimpses of worlds thatare unstable and incompatible with fullness of life: inhumanworlds feeble worlds worlds comparable to those that themathematician calls forth when he plays with axioms thephysicist when he postulates constants other than thoseadmitted. Between the clarity of life and the simplicity ofdeath dreams anxieties ecstasies all the semi-impossiblestates which introduce what one might call approximatevalues and transcendental or irrational solutions into theequation of knowledge all these form curious stages variations phases that it is beyond words to describe-for there areno names for those things amongst which one is completelyalone.As the elusive art of music unites the liberties of sleepwith the development and consistency of extreme attention

and makes a synthesis of intimate things which last only amoment so the fluctuations of the psychic equilibrium giveone a glimpse ofdeviating modes of existence. We have in usforms ofsensibility which though they may be born may notdevelop. They are instants snatched from the implacablecriticism of the passage of time; they cannot survive if ourbeing is to function fully: either we perish or they disperse.But they are monsters full of lessons for us these monsters ofthe intelligence these transitory stages these spaces in whichthe continuity the relation the mobility we know arealtered; empires in which illumination is associated withsorrow; power-houses where the orientation of fears anddesires sends us on strange circuits; matter which consists oftime; abysses literally of horror or love or quietude; regionscuriously attached to themselves; non-archimedean realms


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 9which defy movement; perpetuities in a flash of lightning;surfaces that shape themselves to our nausea, bend under ourlightest decisions One cannot say that they are real; onecannot say that they are not real. Who has not experience ofthem does not know the value of natural intelligence and ofeven the most ordinary environment; he does not understandthe true fragility of the world which has no relation to sosimple a thing as our alternative of being or not being. Thewonder is not that things should be; it is that they should besuch things and not such other things. he image o this worldis part ofa family of mages, an infini te group, aIl the elementsof which we possess but unconsciously-consciousness ofpossession is the secret of the inventors.

The consciousness as it emerges from these gaps, thesepersonal deviations in which weakness and the presence ofpoisons in the nervous system, but also the power as weIl asthe subtlety of the attention and a most exquisite logic, a cultivated mysticism, aIl, severally, direct it, the consciousness,then, cornes to suspect aIl accustomed reality of being onlyone solution amongst many others of universal problems. Ittells itself that things could be somewhat different from whatthey are without its being very different from itself. It dares toconsider its body and its world as almost arbitrary restrictionsimposed on the range of its functions. It sees itself as corresponding, or as responding, not to a world, but to sorne systemof a higher order the elements of which may themselves beworlds. It is capable of more interior combinations than arenecessary for living; of more rigour than any occasion in lifewould need or tolerate; it judges itself deeper than the abyssof physical life and death. And this attitude to its ownposition cannot react back on itself, so far is it withdrawn,placed beyond aIl things, so much has it applied itself to the


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2 I N T R O D U C T I O N TO THE METHODit was once more vigorous. The illumination of the momentdoes not, if it can help it, extend to moments in the past thatwere brighter than itself. The first words that contact with thelight causes the awakening intelligence to stammer soundfrom that Memnon as: Nihil reputare actum

To re-read them, to re-read having forgotten, without ashadow of sympathy, without a sense of one s own responsibility, coldly, with analytical penetration, with an expectationof finding oneself ridiculous and contemptible (in itselfcreative of ridicule and contempt), with a detached air, adestructive regard this is to do one s work over again, or,rather, to feel that one would do it over again, very differently.To do it in this case would be worth the trouble. But it is stillbeyond my capacity. The more so as 1 have never definitelymade up my mind to the effort. The little essay owes its existence to Madame Juliette Adam, who, towards the end of theyear 1894 at the suggestion of Monsieur Lon Daudet, waskind enough to ask me to write for her Nouvelle Revue

Although 1 was twenty-three 1 was extremely embarrassed.1 was only too weIl aware that my understanding ofLeonardowas much slighter than my admiration for him. 1 saw in himthe leading character in that Intellectual Comedy which, sofar, has not found its poet, and which, to my mind, would beso much more precious a thing than the Comdie Humaine oreven theDivina Commedia 1 felt that this mas ter of his medium,this virtuoso in design, in iconography, in mathematics, hadfound that key-position from which explorations in the domainofknowledge and experiments in artistic creation are equallypossible; at which fruitful exchanges between action andanalysis are specially likely to occur.

It was a very exciting idea. But an idea that was too personal, of no practical use to me, absolutely unco-ordinated in


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2 I NT R ODUC T I ON TO THE METHODtask o neverfiguring in anything that t might imagine or agree to thas become no more than a dark body which absorbs every-thing and gives out nothing.

Drawing from these exact observations and from theseinevitable pre tensions a dangerous boldness; strong in this typeof independence and unchangingness that it has to admit itpossesses, it postulates itself in the end as the direct heir andimage of that being that has no form, no o r i i n ~ on whichdevolves, to which is related, the whole effort of the cosmos.A littIe more and it will admit as necessary existences only twoentities, both of them essentially unknown: itself and X bothof them abstracted from everything, implicated in everything,implicating everything; equal and consubstantial.

The man who has been led by a mind that works tirelesslyto this contact with living shadows, to this point ofpure being,sees himself naked and destitute, reduced to the supremepoverty of power without a purpose, victim, masterpiece,perfection of simplification and of dialectic order; his statecomparable to that reached by the richest mind when it hasbecome assimilated to itself, when it has recognized itself andconsummated itself in a littIe group ofcharacters and symbols.The work which we devote to the object of our reflections hehas expended on the subject which reflects.

Here he is, then, deprived of instincts, almost deprived ofimages; and he no longer has a purpose. He has no fellows. 1say he and 1 say man by analogy and for lack ofwords.)

He is no longer concerned to choose or to crea te, to main tainor to develop himself. There is nothing to conquer. Therecannot even be question ofdestroying himself. Genius is nowentirely consumed, cannot be used to any further purpose. 1was no more than a means to attain to the last simplicity.There is no act ofgenius which would not be less than the act


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 2of being. An imbecile is created and informed by a magnifi-cent law; the most powerful mind finds nothing better thanitself.To sum up being constrained to define itselfby the sum ofthings and excess of knowledge over the sum of things this

perfected consciousness which to establish itself has to beginby denying an infinite number offaiths an infinite number ofelements and by exhausting the objects of its force withoutexhausting the force itself this perfected consciousness differsas little as could be wished from nothingness. It reminds oneabsurdly of an audience invisible in the darkness of a theatrewhich cannot see itself which can see only the spectaclebefore it and which yet aIl the time invincibly f ls itself thecentre of a breathlessly interesting evening. It is completeimpenetrable absolu te night; but filled with things eagersecretly organized made up of organisms which limit andcompress themselves; a compact night its shadows packedwith organisms which live breathe warm themselves andwhich defend each according to its nature their places andfunctions. Before this intense mysterious assembly are aIl thethings of sensibility intelligibility possibility glittering andmoving in an enclosed framework. N othing can be born dieor exist in any degree or have time place form or meaningexcept on this stage which the fates have circumscribed andhaving separated which from nobody knows what primordialconfusion as on the first day darkness was separated from lightthey have opposed and subordinated to the condition of eingseen

f 1 have brought the reader to this solitude and to this des-perate clarity it is because it was very necessary to carry theidea that 1 have formed of intellectuai power to its ultimateconsequences. The human characteristic is consciousness; the


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22 I N TR O D U C TI O N TO THE METHODcharacteristic of consciousness is a process of perpetuaI ex-haustion of detachment without rest or exclusion from everything that cornes before it whatever that thing may be aninexhaustible activity independent of the quality s of thequantity of the things which appear and by means of whichthe man of intellect must at last bring himself deliberately toan unqualified refusaI to be anything whatsoever.

AlI phenomena being thus regarded with a sort of equalrepulsion and s rejected successively by an identical gestureappear to be in a certain sense equivalent to each other.Feelings and thoughts are included in the uniform condemnation extended to aIl that can be perceived. t must be quiteunderstood that nothing is exempted from the rigour of thisexhaustion that our attention should suffice to put our mostintimate feelings on the same plane s exterior objects andevents; from the moment that they become observable theygo to join the rest ofobserved things.

Colour grief memories; surprises and things expected; thetree outside the rustling of its leaves its yearly change itsshadow as weIl as its substance its accidents of shape andposition the far-off thoughts that it brings back to my wandering attention ail these things are equal . . . AlI things are replaceable by aIl things may not this be the definition of hings

t is impossible that the activity of the mind should not inthe end force it to this ultimate elementary consideration. Itsmultiplied movements its intima te struggles its perturbationsits analytic returns on itself do these leave anything unchanged? Is there anything that resists the lure of the sensesthe dissipation of ideas the fading of memories the slowvariation of the organism the incessant and multiform activity of the universe? There is only this consciousness and thisconsciousness only at its most abstracto


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OF LEO N A RD O DA V I N C I 3Our personality itself which stupidly we take to be our

most intimate and deepest possession, our sovereign good isonly a thing and mutable and accidentaI in comparison withthis other most naked ego; since we can think about it calculate its interests even lose sight of themalittle.itis thereforeno more than a secondary psychological divinity that lives inour looking-glass and answers to our name. It belongs to theorder of Penates. It is subject to pain greedy for incense likefalse gods; and like them it is food for worms. It expandswhen praised. It does not resist the power ofwine the charmof words the sorcery of music. 1 admires itself and throughself-admiration becomes docile and easily led. It is lost in themasquera de and yields itself strangely to the anamorphosis ofsleep. And further it is painfully obliged to recognize that ithas equals to admit that it is inJerior to some a bitter andineXplicable experience for it this.Besides everything convinces it that t s a mere phenomenon;that it must figure with aIl the accidentaI facts of the worldamongst statistics and tables; that it had its beginning in aseminal chance a microscopie incident; that it has runthousands of millions of risks; that it has been shaped by anumber of happenings and that however much it may beadmirable free acknowledged brilliant it is in sum theeffect ofan incalculable disorder.

Each person being a sport of nature a jeu e l amour et duhasard, the most beautiful purpose and even the most learnedthought of this re-created creature inevitably recall his origineHis activities are always relative his masterpieces are fortuitous. He thinks mortaIly individuaIly by fits and starts;and he finds the best ofhis ideas in casual and secret circumstances which he refrains from making public. Besides he isnot sure of being positively some one, he disguises and denies


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24 I NT R ODUC T I ON TO THE METHODmore easily than he affirms himself. Drawing from his owninconsistency sorne strength and much vanity he puts hismost cherished moments into fictions. He lives by romancesees himself in a thousand roles His hero is never himself.

And finaUy he passes nine-tenths of his time in what has yetto happen in that which no longer is in what cannot possiblybe; to such an extent that our true present has ni ne chancesout of ten ofnever being.

But aU the time each private life possesses deep down as atreasure the fundamental permanence ofconsciousness whichdepends on nothing. And as the ear catches and loses andcatches again and loses again through aU the varying movement of a symphony sorne grave and persistent moti whichceases to be heard from moment to moment but which neverceases to be there so the pure ego the unique and continuouselement in each being in the world rediscovering itself andthen losing itself aga in inhabits our intelligence eternaUy;this deep note of existence itself domina es the whole complication of circumstance and change in existence from themoment that it is heard.

Is it not the chief and secret achievement of the greatestmind to isolate this substantial permanence from the strife ofeveryday truths? Is it not essential that in spite of everythinghe shaU arrive at self-definition by means of this pure relationship changeless amongst the most diverse objects which willgive him an almost inconceivable universality give him in asense the power of a corresponding universe? 1 is not hischerished self that he elevates ta sa high a degree since bythinking about it he has renounced it and has substituted forit in the place of subject this ego which is unqualified whichhas no name no history which is no more sensitive no less


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OF LEON ARDO DA VINCI 5real than the centre of gravity of a planetary system or ring,but which is a result of the whole-whatever that whole mayh

A moment since, and the obvious purpose of this wonderfulinteIlectuallife was still to astonish itself. Its preoccupationwas to produce offspring that it could admire; it limited itselfto what is most beautiful, most sweet, most bright, mostsubstantial; and it was untroubled-save for its resemblance toother existing organisms, the strangest problem that one canpropound to oneself; which is put to us by the existence ofthose who resemble us, and which consists simply in thepossible existence of other intelligences, in the plurality of thesingular, in the contradictory coexistence qf lives indepen-dent amongst themselves tot capita tot tempora a problemcomparable to the physical problems ofrelativity but infinitelymore difficult.

But now, carried away by his anxiety to be unique andguided by his ardour for omnipotence, this same being haspassed beyond aIl creations, aIl works, beyond even hisgreatest designs at the same time that he has put away fromhim aIl tenderness for himself and aIl preference for his owndesires. He immola es, in one instant, his individuality. Hefeels himselfpure consciousness; and two of that cannot existeHe is the l the pronoun ofuniversality, the name of thatwhich has no relation to appearance. Oh to what a point haspride been transformed How it has arrived at a position thatit did not even know it was seeking How temperate thereward of its triumphs A life so firmly directed, and whichhas treated as obst;l cles to be avoided or to be mastered aIlthe objects it could propose to itself, must, after aIl, haveattained an unassailable end, not an end to its duration, butan end within itself. Its pride has brought it as far as this. And

c


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26 I NT R ODU T I ON TO THE METHODhere its pride is consumed. Pride, which conducted t, leavesit, astonished, naked, infinitely simple at the pole of itstreasures.

These thoughts are not mysterious. One might say quiteabstractly that the most general group of our transformations, which inc1udes aIl sensations, aIl ideas, aIl judgements,everything that manifests itself intus et extra admits of aninvariable.1 have let myself transgress the bounds of aIl patience andaIl c1arity. 1 have succumbed to the ideas that came to mewhiIe 1 was writing of the task 1 undertook long ago. 1 shaIlfinish the somewhat simplified picture of the state 1 was inin a few words: there are a few moments more to spend in

94.There is nothing so curious as lucidity at odds with in-sufficiency. Here, more or less is what happens, what wasdestined to happen, and what did happen, to me.1 ~ placed in the position ofhaving to invent a charactercapable ofmany activities. 1 suffered from the mania ofcaringonly for the functioning ofbeings. In the matter ofworks of art1 cared only for their genesis. 1 knew that these works arealways falsifications, arrangements, the creator, fortunateIy,never being the man. The life of the former is not the life of helatter: coIlect aIl the facts that can be collected about the lifeof Racine and you will never learn from them the art of hisverse. AIl criticism is dominated by the outworn theory thatthe man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law thecriminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both theeffects. But the pragmatic principle lightens the task of thejudge and the critic. Biography is simpler than analysis. Butof what interests us most it teaches absolutely nothing. . . .And further The true life of a man, always ill-defined for his


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8 I N T R O D U C T I O N TO THE METHODmuscles than we they were only larger muscles. 1 cannot evenmove the rock which he carried away but our machineriesare not different in construction; 1 correspond to him bone bybone fibre by fibre act by act and our likeness permits me toimagine his labours.

A little reflection makes one realize that there is no othercourse that one can follow. We must put ourselves deliberatelyin the place of the being we are concerned with And whoelse but oneself can respond when one calls up a spirit? Onenever finds it except in oneself. It is our own activity alonewhich can teach us anything about anything. To my mindour knowledge has for its limits the consciousness that we canpossess of our own being-and perhaps of our hodies What-ever X may be the idea that 1 have of t ifpressed brings meto myself whatever 1 am. One may not know it or one mayknow it one may submit to it one may desire it but there isno point where one can escape from it no other issue. Thepurpose of every thought is in us. It is from our own substancethat we imagine and that we make a stone a plant a move-ment an ohject no image whatever is more perhaps than abeginning ofourselves

lionardo mioo lionardo che tanto penate

As for the true Leonardo he was what he was. . . . Alwaysthis myth stranger than all others gains infinitely by beingremoved back from fable into history. The farther one pro-ceeds the greater precisely he grows. The experiments ofAderand of the Wrights have given a radiance of retrospectiveglory to his Treatise on the Flight o Birds the germ of thetheories of Fresnel is to be found in certain passages of themanuscripts at the Institute of France. During these last years


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OF LEON RDO D VINCI 29the researches of the regretted M. Duhem on the rigins oStatics have made it possible to attribute to Leonardo thefundamental theorem of the composition of forces and a veryclear though incomplete notion of the principle of virtualwork. 19


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OF LEONAR DO DA VINCI 3its application an idea that might be utilized to good effectin conversation but not in writing.

1 was ravished to the heights of my being by this Apollo.What could be more alluring than a God who repudiatesmystery who does not erect his authority on the troubles ofour nature nor manifest his glories to what is most obscuresentimental sinister in us who forces us to agree rather thanto submit whose mystery is self-elucidation whose depth anadmirably calculated perspective. Is there a better sign ofauthentic and legitimate power than that t does not operatefrom behind a veil? N ever had Dionysos an enemy moredecided or one so pure or so armoured with light as this herowho was less concerned to rend and destroy dragons than toexamine the springs of their activity; disdaining to riddle themwith arrows when he could riddle them with questions: theirsuperior rather than their vanquisher he represents less anassured triumph over them than perfect comprehension ofthem he understood them almost to the point of being ableto reconstruct them; and once he had grasped the principle atwork he could leave them having mockingly reduced themto the mere category ofspecial cases and eXplained paradoxes.

Lightly as 1 had studied him his drawings and his manuscripts had left me dazed. From these thousands of notes andsketches 1 gathered an impression of an unbelievable displayoffireworks set free by the most diverse methods ofstriking onsorne fantastic anvil. There are maxims recipes; advice tohimself; trains of thought which will be taken up again andagain; sometimes there is a fully elaborated description; sometimes he talks to himself familiarly

But 1 had no desire to say over again that he was this andthat: painter geometrician and

And in a word th artist of the world. Everybody knew it.


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INTRODU TIONTo Marcel Schwob

There remain ofa man those things ofwhich one is set dreaming by his name and by the works which make ofhis name amark ofadmiration ofhate or of indifference. Rememberingthat he was a thinker we are able to discover in his worksideas which reaIly originate in ourselves: we can re-create histhought in the image ofour own. An ordinary man we represent to ourselves with ease: we can reconstruct his elementaryactions and reactions from our own simple experience. Wefind the same processes in the indifferent acts that constitutethe exterior aspect of his life as in our own; we are the connecting link between our acts as he was between his and theradius of activity that his existence suggests to us does notextend farther than the radius ofour own. But ifwe aIlow thatthis individu al excels in sorne respect we shaIl have moredifficulty in imagining to ourselves the works and the waysofhis mind. n order not to be confused in our admiration weshaIl be forced to stretch our imaginative perception of thequality that dominates in him and of which we no doubtpossess only the germ. But if aIl the faculties of his mind arewidely developed at the same time or if the results of hisactivity seem to be considerable in aIl fields his characterbecomes thereby more and more difficult to comprehend inits unity tends to escape from our efforts to understand it.There are distances from one extremity to another of thisinteIlectual area such as we have never covered. The continuity of the whole escapes our perception as do formless


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3 IN T RO D U T I O N TO THE METHODscraps of space which are divided from each other by objectsthat we know and which are for us no more than chanceintervals; as at each instant, myriads of facts, over and abovethe small number established by language, are lost. Nevertheless we must go slowly, take time before them and conquerthe difficulties that the conjunc tion of apparently heterogeneous elements lays on our imagination. Every intelligencehere gives itself up to inventing a unique order, a singleactivity, and desires to impose its own image on the systemwhich it imposes on itself--a clear-cut image. With a violencewhich depends on its range and its lucidity, it finishes byreconquering its own unity just as by the operation of sornemechanism a hypothesis becomes clear and proves itself to bethe thing which has made the whole, the central revelation inwhich aIl has had to happen, the monstrous intelligence orstrange animal which has woven thousands of pure connections between many forms, and ofwhich those puzzling andvaried constructions were the creations-instinct building itshabitation. The production of the hypothesis is a phenomenonwhich admits of variations but not of chance. Its value is thevalue of the logical analysis ofwhich t must be the objecte Itis the basis of the method with which we are going to occupyourselves and whiCh we are going to utilize.

1 propose to imagine a man whose activities seem sodistinct from each other that if 1 can find a unifying idea ofthem it may weIl seem more comprehensive than aIl otherideas. 1 wish him to have an abnormally lively perception ofthe difference between things the adventures ofsuch a perception could weIl be described as analysis. Everythinginterests him. It is of the universe that he thinks always. Andhe thinks of rigour.1 He is so made that he misses nothing of

1 Hostinato rigore obstinate rigour. Leonardo's motto.


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 33all that enters into the tangle of what exists not a singleshrub. He goes down into the depth of that which is for allmen to see but there he wanders away and studies himse1f.He learns the habits and organizations of nature works onthem from every angle. And he cornes to be the only man whoconstructs calcula es sets in motion. He leaves behind himchurches and fortresses; he fashions ornaments-full ofsweetness and strength and a thousand machines; and he makesrigorous calculation along many unsurveyed lines. He leavesthe remains of no one knows what great playthings. In thesepastimes mixed up with his scientific studies-themse1vesconstituting something not distinguishable from a passion-he has the charm of always seeming to be thinking of something e1se. 1 shall follow him through the rude unity anddensity of the world where he will become so familiar withnature that in order to keep in contact with it he will imitateit and will finish by finding it diflicult to conceive an objectwhich is not in nature.

1 remains to give a name to this creature of hought in orderto set a limit to the e1aboration of terms ordinarily too farapart and like1y to escape from any attempt to associate them.No name seems to me more suitable than that ofLeonardo daVinci. Whoever imagines a tree to himse1f must also imaginea sky or a background against which to see it standing. Thatis logic ofa kind that is almost se1f-evident and almost unrealized. The figure 1 imagine reduces himse1f to an inference ofthis nature. Little ofwhat 1 say of him must be considered asapplicable to the man who has made the name illustrious: 1am not following up a coincidence that seems to me impossibleto make clear. 1 am trying to express a point of view withregard to the detail of an intellectuallife to make one suggestion as to the methods which every discovery implies one


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34 I N TR O D U C TI O N TO THE METHODchosen amongst the multitude of things that may be imagineda model that may weIl be thought a rough one but in everyway preferable to strings of doubtful anecdotes to commentaries in the catalogues of art collections to dates-eruditionof that sort would only falsify the purely hypothetical aim ofthis essaye 1 am not altogether ignorant in such matters butthem above aIl 1 must refrain from discllssing in order not tocause confusion between a surmise as to conditions that arequite general and the outward fragments of a personalitywhich has vanished to a point where we are given by thefragments-the certitude of a thinking existence and equallythe certitude that we can never know it better.

Many an error which dis torts the judgements made onhuman achievements is due to a singular forgetfulness of theirgenesis. One forgets often that they have not always been inexistence. From which has arisen a kind ofreciprocal coquetryofsilence on the part ofartists as to the origins of their work-to the extent of too carefully hiding them even. We fear thatthey are humble these origins even that they are merenature. And though very few artists have the courage to sayhow they produced their work 1 believe that there are notmany more who take the risk of understanding it themselves.Such understanding commences with the very difficult abandonment of the notion of glory of the laudatory epithet; ittolerates no idea of superiority no delusion of greatness. tleads to the discovery of the relative beneath the apparentperfection. And it s necessary i f we are not to believe thatminds are as profoundly different as their products make themappear. For example certain works of science and mathematical works in particular show such c1arity in their construction that one would say they were not the work of anyperson at aIl There is something unhum n about them. And


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36 I N TR O D U C TI O N TO THE METHODcurious character of his own variety. It is the way madmenbehave before the world.

Such examples relate definite, measurable, physical movements immediately to the personal comedy of which 1 spoke.The actors in this drama are mental images, and it is easy tounderstand that if the peculiarities of these images be eliminated, and i f only their succession, frequency, periodicity,their diverse capacities for association; and, finally, theirduration, be studied, one is at once tempted to find analogiesin what is called the material world, to compare them withscientific analyses, to give them an environment, a continuity,properties of displacement, of speed, and then mass andenergy. One cornes to the conclusion that many such systemsare possible, that no one ofthem is worth more than another,and that the use of them which is important since it alwaysthrows light on something-ought to be at every instant undersupervision and its purely verbal role kept in mind. For, inreality, analogy is only the faculty of varying the images, ofcombining them, of making part of one coexist with part ofanother and perceiving, voluntarily or otherwise, the similarities in their construction. And that renders it impossible todescribe the mind which is their world. Here words lose theirvirtue. t is here that they are formed and spring to the mind seye it is the mind that describes words to us

ln this way man cornes to have v s ons whose power is hispower. He relates his history to them. They bind it geometrically. And from that come those decisions which surprise, theperspectives, the blinding divinations, precisions ofjudgement,illuminations, and also the incomprehensible anxieties, thestupidities. In certain outstanding cases one invokes abstractgods, genius and inspiration and a thousand others, and asksone self with stupefaction how these accidents arise. And once


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 37more one believes that something has created itself--for manadores mystery and the marvellous precisely as he likes to shuthis eyes to what is going on behind the scenes at the theatre.One treats what is logical as if it were a miracle. But the'inspired' author had been ready to perform his task a yearbefore it was done, had been ripe, had been thinking of italways, perhaps without being conscious of the fact, andwhileothers could not yet see he had studied, arranged, and nowhad only read what was already in his mind. The secretLeonardo's as Buonaparte's, as that which all highest intelligences possess once-is and can only be, in the relationshipthat they can find-that theywere forced to find between thingswhose laws o continuity escape us It is certain that at the decisivemoment they had only to perform sorne definite acts. And theachievement that impressed the world, the supreme achievement, was quite a simple affair-like comparing two lengths.This attitude makes it possible to grasp the unity ofmethodwith which we are so concerned. Here it is natural, elementary. It is life and the explanation of life. And thinkers aspowerful as he ofwhom 1 think as 1 write these words, havingmastered the resources implicit in this method, may wellwrite at this clearer and more conscious point: Facil cosa e arsiuniversale it is easy to make oneself universal They can fora moment admire the prodigious instruments that they are,though the next moment they must deny anything in thenature ofprodigy.

This final clarity, however, is only found after long wanderings, inevitable idolatries. The consciousness of the operationsof thought, the u.nrecognized logic ofwhich 1 have spoken,exists but rarely, even in the most powerful minds. Thenumber of conceptions, the power to extend them, and theabundance of discoveries made, are another thing and are


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 9this progress to carry its terms to their limit the limit of theirimaginable expression-after which il shall be changed. Andif this mode of being conscious becomes habituaI one willcome to consider at once aIl the possible results of a contemplated act aIl the implications of a conceived object and inthis way to achieve their annihilation to achieve the facultyofdivining always a thing more intense or more exact than thething allowed to attain the powerofshaking oneself free ofanythought that has lasted too long. No matter what it be athought that has become fixed takes on the characteristics ofhypnosis and becomes in the language of logic an idol; inthe domain ofpoetic construction and art a sterile monotony.The sense of which 1 speak which leads the mind to foreseeits own activities to imagine the structure of what has to beimagined in detail as a whole and the effect of the sequencethus calculated this sense is the condition ofaIl generalization.It is that which in certain individuals appears as a veritablepassion and with an energy that is remarkable; which in thearts permits of progress and explains the more and morefrequent employment of concentrated terms abridgementsand violent contrasts; and it exists implicitly in its rationalform as the basis of aIl mathematical conceptions. It is anoperation very similar to it which under the name ofreasoningby recurrence l extends the range of these analyses and whichfrom simple addition to infinitesimal achieves somethingmore than merely to spare the necessity for an indefinitenumber of useless experiments; achieves existences morecomplex for the conscious imitation of an act is a new actwhich comprehends. aIl possible modifications of the first.

The philosophie importance of this method of reasoning was demonstrated for the first time in a recent article by M. Poincar. The distinguished mathematician confirmed the priority attributed to him whenconsulted by the author.


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4 IN T R O D U T IO N TO THE METHOD1 was not learned enough to think ofworking out the details

ofhis discoveries-to try, for instance, to detennine the precisemeaning of the mpeto which he utilized to such a degree inhis dynamics; or to give a dissertation on the Sfumato whichhe strove to realize in his painting. Nor did 1 believe myselfsufficiently erudite (stillless, ready to be) to think of contributing even the little that 1 might to themere accumulationoffacts already established. 1 did not find in myself the ferventpassion for erudition that 1 should have. The astonishing conversation of Marcel Schwob won me to the unique channrather than to its sources. 1 drank as long as there was drink.1 had the pleasure and not the pain. But in the end 1 cameback to myself; my indolence asserted itself against the idea ofdispiriting readings, interminable tests; against those doubtingmethods which keep us from the truth. 1 said to my friend thatthe learned run far more risks than the unlearned, that theygive hostages to fortune while we remain unimplicated, thatthere are two ways ofdeceiving oneself, ours, which is easyandtheirs, which is laborious; that i hey have the good fortune toproduce results, the very number ofmaterial facts establishedputs in danger the reality for which they are searching. Thetruth ofmaterial fact is more false than falsehood s self. Documents give us information at random on both the rule and theexception. Even a chronicler prefers to hand down the oddoccurrences of his epoch. But the SUffi of things that are trueofan epoch or ofa personage does not always help us to understand it better. Nothing is identical with the exact total of itsappearances, and which of us has not said, which of us notdone, something which is not characteristic? Now an imitativegesture, now a slip of the tongue, sorne chance, or the veryaccumulated weariness of being so precisely one s own selfand precisely that self is for a moment, changed; ifsomebody


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40 IN T R O D U C T IO N TO THE METHODThis picture, drama, whirl, clarity, opposes itself naturally

to other movements and other stages which we call natureor the world , things that we do not know what to do with,except distinguish ourselves from them and then we immediately reincorporate ourselves in them.

Philosophers have generally ended by implicating ourexistence in this notion and it inversely in our notion of ourselves; but they rarely go farther; we know that their businessis to con tend against the thought of their predecessors ratherthan to look into it for themselves. Scientists and artists haveused the notion of nature variously: scientists finishing bymeasuring and then constructing; artists by constructing as ifthey had already measured. Everything that they have madetakes its place of itself in the sum of things and plays its partthere, continuing things through the new shapes it gives to thematerials that constitute them. But, before considering andbuilding, one observes; the characters of the senses, theirdifferent ways of accommodation, distinguish and choose,amongst the qualities offered in the aggregate, those which areto be retained and developed by the individual. The processis at first submitted to, almost without thinking, with a feelingof letting oneself be filled, ofslow circulation, as ofhappiness;then one begins to be interested and to give different values tothings that had seemed settled, simple; one adds to them,takes more pleasure in isolated details, explains them to oneself and what happens is as the re-emergence of an energythat the senses had absorbed; s ~ this dis torts the aspect ofthings in its turn, using for the purpose the considered thoughtof a human being.

The univers al man begins also by simple contemplation,but he always retums to be impregnated by what he seesreturns to the intoxication of the particular instinct and to the


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 41emotion which the least of things real arouses if one keeps inmind the two, thing and instinct, in every way separate fromeach other and yet combining, in so many ways, so manydifferent qualities.The majority of people see with the intellect much morefrequently than with the eyes. Instead of coloured spaces theybecome aware ofconcepts. A high, whitened, cubic form withholes filled with the glitter ofglass, is at once for them a house:the house a complex idea, a concurrence of abstract qualities.When they move they miss the movement of the rows ofwindows, the transformation of the surfaces continually changingtheir aspect for the concept does not change. They seethrough a dictionary rather than through the retinre, theycome so ill to an object, so vaguely to knowledge of thepleasures and pains of sight, that they have had to inventbeautiful views Of everything else they are unaware. But atthe beautiful view they regale themselves on a concept swarming with verbal associations. A generallaw of that weaknesswhich exists in all domains of knowledge is precisely thechoice of the viewpoint that is obvious; the settling down intocomfortable ready-made systems that make things easierIt is for this reason that the work of art may be said to bealways more or less didactic.) The beautiful view itself ismore or less lost on them. And all the modulations broughtabout by slight movement, light, weariness coming on theeyes these do not touch them. They neither do anything withtheir sensations nor undo anything. They know that the lineof still waters is horizontal, so they never notice that the seastands up before t h i ~ gaze; if the gleam of a shoulder, the tipof a nose, two fingers, are caught by chance in an isolatingbeam oflight they never turn them into a new jewel enrichingto the vision. The jewel is no more to them than the fragment


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42 IN T R O D U T I O N TO THE METHODof the person, the person alone exists for them. And as theyreject as nothing that which has not a name, the number oftheir impressions is limited in advance. The use of the giftwhich is opposed to this blindness leads to true analysis. tcannot be sa id to exercise itself in nature this word nature,which seems to be general and to contain aIl possibilities ofexperience, is on the contrary, absolutely particular. Itevokes personal images determined by the memory or historyof an individual. Most frequently it calls forth a vision of thegreen eruption, vague and continuous, of a great elementarywork opposed to what is human, of a monotonous quantitywhich will one day coyer us of something stronger than weare, something tangled, torn, something that sleeps, but workson, and which, personified, the poets endow with cruelty,kindness, and other motives. He who looks and is able to seeweIl must therefore be placed in a corner-any corner-ofthat reality.

The observer is caught in a sphere which is never broken,where there are differences which will be movements andobjects, and ofwhich, though the surface is never broken, aIlthe parts move and are renewed. At first the observer is no

See proposition CCLXXI of the Treatise on Painting: Impossibile che unamemoria possa riserbare tutti gli aspetti 0 mutationi d alcun membre de qualunqueanimal si sia . E perche ogni quantit continua divisibile in infinito. It isimpossible for any memory to retain all the aspects ofeven one organ ofanyanimal whatsoever Geometrical demonstration by the infinite divisi-bility of a continuous magnitude.What 1 have said of sight applies to the other senses. 1 chose it because

it seems to me more spiritual than the others. Visual images predominatein the mind. V s in relation to them that the faculty of analogy is mostfrequently exercised. The inferior expression of this faculty which is thecomparison of two objects can even have for its origin an error of judge-ment accompanying an indefinite sensation. The form and colour of anobject are so obviously primary that they enter into the conception of itformed by one of the other senses. Ifone speaks of the hardness of iron, it isnearly always the visu al image, rarely an auditory one, that is produced.


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OF LEON ARDO DA VINCI 4more than the condition of this fini te space: he is this finitespace each instant. No memory, no capacity, troubles him,so much is he at one with what he looks at. And in so far as 1can conceive his remaining so, 1 can weIl conceive that hisimpressions do not differ the least bit in the world from thosehe receives in a dream. He cornes to feel good, ill, calmnesscoming to him1 from these chance forms-amongst whichcounts his own body. And now, slowly, these begin to be for-gotten, are hardly seen any more, while others begin to beseen-to be seen there where they had been aIl the time. Avery subtle confusion of the movements that steadiness ofgazeand the consequent tiredness entail, with the changes due toordinary movement, must be noted. Certain spaces in the areaof this vision become enlarged, just as the sick member seemslarger and, through the importance given to it by suffering,dis torts the idea that one has of one s body. These enlargedspaces will seem easier to survey, pleasanter to the eye. It ishere that the observer attains to reverie; and after this he willbe able to extend to objects more and more numerous thepeculiar characteristics of the first and best understood. Hewill perfect a given space from the memory ofa preceding one.Then at his pleasure he arranges and dissects his successiveimpressions. He can appreciate odd combinations; he regardsas one whole and solid being a bunch offlowers, or a group ofmen, a hand a cheek that he isolates, a spot oflight on a wall,a chance union of animaIs. He puts himself to the task offiguring out the invisible wholes ofwhich he has been given theWithout touching on physiological questions 1 may mention the caseof an individu al afHicted with maniacal depression whom 1 saw at a clinic.He was in astate ofretrded life, recognizing objects with an extraordinaryslowness. Sensations reached him after a long delay. He was conscious ofnoneeds. This form of insanity, sometimes called stupidity mania, is exces-sively rare.


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44 IN T R O D U T IO N TO THE METHODparts. He divines the planes cut by a bird in its Bight, thecurve followed by a stone that has been thrown, the surfacesdefined by our gestures, and the extraordinary rents, the Bu idarabesques, the formless chambers, created in an all-embracing network from the scratching noise ofhumming insects, thebending of trees, wheels, the human smile, the tides. Sometimes traces of things he imagined may appear on the sands,on the waters; sometimes his own retina itse f may later oncompare the form of his movements with sorne object.

From forms begotten of movement there is a transitiontowards movements which, with the help of a slight change induration, become forms. Ifa thousand vibrations seem to be acontinuous sound, ifa drop of rain looks like a descending line,or the roughnesses of this paper appear to be one polishedplane; and if the duration of the impression be the sole cause,then inversely, a stationary form may be replaced by a corresponding dynamism in the periodical transference of a carefully chosen thing or element. Mathematicians will be able tointroduce time and speed into the study of forms as they caneliminate them from the study of movements; languages makea jetty stretch a mountain Tise a statue stand. And the madness ofanalogy, the logic of continuity, transports these actionsto the limit of their tendencies, beyond the possibility ofstopping. For the imagination, everything moves in sornedegree. Here in my room, because 1 isolate this one thoughtand let it continue, objects act like the Bame of the lamp; thearmchair consumes itself in its place; the table describes itsshape so swiftly that it remains motionless; the curtains hangendlessly, continuously. Here is infini te complexity; to regainone s real self across the notion of these forms, the movementof contours, the tangle of knots, the roads, the descents, thewhirlwinds, the varying speeds, we must have recourse to our


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 45great faculty for deliberate forgetfulness, and, without des troy-ing the notion acquired, install an abstract conception, thatof orders of greatness.

Thus in the aggrandisement of that which is given disap-pears the intoxication of personal things, of which there is noscience. If one has these before one for sorne time and thinksof them, they change; if one does not think of them one fallsinto a state of torpor which lasts, and which is like a tranquildream where one stares as though hypnotized at the angleof a piece of furniture, the shadow of a leaf--and one wakensonly when they are seen. Certain men are specially acutelyconscious of sensuous pleasure in the individuality of objects.They insist with delight on this quality of uniqueness in any-thing-all things have it. Here is a curiosity which finds itsultimate expression in the fictitious and in the arts of thetheatre, and has, at that point, been described as the facultyo identification. Nothing is more deliberately absurd thanthe temerity ofa person who describes himself as at one with acertain object and capable of identifying himself with itsimpressions. Suppose it was a material object.2 Nothing in thelife of the imagination is more powerful. The chosen objectbecomes the pivot of this life, a centre of associations thatbecome more and more numerous according as the object ismore and more complex. Fundamentally, the faculty can onlybe a means of exciting imaginative vitality, of transforming apotential energy into an actual, until it becomes a pathologicalcharacteristic and domina tes horribly the growing stupidityof a disappearing intelligence. From the mere observation ofthings to these states the mind does no more than enlarge its

1 Edgar Poe, O n Shakespeare . Marginalia.)f one could explain why identification with a material object seemsmore absurd thJ n with a living object, one would have advanced a step inthis matter.


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6 INT R OD U T I ON TO THE METHODfunctions, crea te ideas relating to the problems which arisefrom aIl sensations, and which it resolves more or less easilyaccording as the demand for further production is more or lessinsistent. t is evident that here we touch on the practice ofthought. Thought consists, during most of the time that wegive to it, in wandering amongst themes of which we know,more than anything else, that they are already more or lessfamiliar. Things can therefore be classified according to thefacility or difficulty that they offer to our understanding andthe diverse resistance to the attempts of our imagination toregard the conditions of their existence and their accidentstogether. t remains to make a surmise as to the history ofthisgradation of complexity.

The world is irregularly scattered with regular forms.Crystals are an example; so are flowers, leaves, stripe decora-tions, spots on furs, on wings, on animais shells; the tracesof wind on the sands and the waters. Sometimes these effectsdepend on sorne changing perspective or grouping. Distancecan produce them or alter them. The times may show them orhide them. Thus the number of deaths, births, crimes, andaccidents shows a regularity in variation which becomes moreevident as one follows the record over a greater number ofyears. Events that seem most surprising and most asym-metrical when related to the flow ofcircumstances about them,return to a semblance oforder when considered in relation tolonger epochs. One might add to these examples those ofinstincts, habits and manners, and even that apparent period-icity which has given rise to so many systems of historicalphilosophy.

Knowledge ofregular combinations belongs to the differentsciences, and when it cannot be established through them,then to the calculation of probabilities. For our purpose we


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 7need only remember the remark made at the beginning of thelast paragraph: regular combinations, whether of time.or ofspace, are irregularly distributed over our field of investiga-tion. From the standpoint ofmind they appear to be opposedto a quantity offormless things.

1 think they might be described as the first guides of thehuman mind , if only such a proposition were not so imme-diately convertible into other terms. In any case they repre-sent continuity l An idea permits of a change or transfer ofattention, for instance) between elements assumed to be in afixed relation to it and which it selects from memory or fromactual perception. If these elements are quite similar, or if thedifference between them reduces itself to a question of meredistance, to the elementary fact of their separateness from eachother, then the work to be done consists only in this notion ofdifferentiation. Thus a straight line will be the easiest of alllinesto conceive, for there is no slighter effort for thought than thatmade in passing from one ofits points to another, each of thembeing similarly placed with regard to all the others. In otherwords, all its parts ~ r so homogeneous, however short wemay imagine them to be, that they reduce themselves to one,always the same; and it is for this reason that one alwaysreduces the dimensions of figures to straight lines. At a higherstage of complexity it is periodicity that one calls upon torepresent continuous qualities, for this periodicity, whether itoccurs in time or in space, is nothing other than the divisionof an object of thought into such fragments as under certain

1 The word is not here used in its mathematical sense. It does not meanthe insertion in an interval of a numerable and innumerable infinity ofvalues; it simply means the simple intuition ofobjects that set one thinkingof laws, of laws that are perceptible to the eye. The existence or thepossibility of su ch things is the first f ct of this rule and not the leastastonishing.


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48 IN T R O D U T IO N TO TH E M ETH O Ddefinite conditions may be replaced by each other or by themultiplication of the object under the same conditions.

Why is it that of an that exists only a part can be thusreduced? There cornes a moment when the figure becomes socomplex or the occurrence appears so new that one mustrenounce both the effort to grasp it as a whole and thepursuit of its translation into continuous values. At whatpoint have the Euclids halted in the comprehension of forms?At what stage amongst the obstacles to figured continuityhave they stumbled? This is the final point of a study inwhich one cannot help feeling tempted by the doctrines ofevolution. One does not wish to admit that this limit may bedefinitive.

What s certain is that aIl speculation has for basis and forend the extension of continuity by the aid of metaphorsabstractions and forms of speech. The arts use them in afashion ofwhich we shan shortly speak.

We come to represent the world to ourselves as beingreducible here and there to intelligible elements. Sometimeswe can do this through the senses at other times the mostingenious systems have to- be employed. But voids remain.Our attempts do not coyer an the ground. And this is whereour hero takes possession of his kingdom. He has an extra-ordinary sense of symmetry which sets everything before himas a problem. At each gap in understanding his mentalactivity appears. One sees how useful he can be. He is like ahypothesis in physics. It would be necessary to invent him ifhe did not existe But he does existe And now the universal manmay be imagined. A Leonardo da Vinci may as a notionexist in our minds without our being too bewildered. We maydream over his powers without losing ourselves too quickly inthe fog of words and the pretentious epithets that are so


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 9favourable to inconsistency of thought. Could one possiblybelieve that such mirages would satisfy him?

That symbolic mind held the most enor:r;nous collection offorms, a storehouse, as it were, of attitudes of nature, alwaysbright, a potentiality always immediate and which increasedwith the extension of its domain. It was constituted of a hostof images, of possible memories, of the capacity to recognizein the compass of the world an extraordinary number of thingsand to arrange them in a thousand ways. Leonardo is masterof faces, anatomies, machines. He knows how a smile isbrought about: knows how to introduce it into the faade of ahouse or the lines of a garden; he can intermingle or straightenout channels of water, tongues of flame. f his hand sketch thevicissitudes of the attacks that he has planned, the trajectoriesof thousands of bullets wiping out the defences of cities-which he has scarcely taken the trouble to construct or fortifyin full detail are described as though the bullets were frightfuI bouquets. He adores battles, tempests, floods, as if, intranquillity, the variations in things seemed to him to be tooslow. He has risen to seeing them as vaster mechanisms, tosensing them in the apparent independence or life of theirfragments: in a handful ofsand dissipated by a breath ofwind,in the wandering idea of each soldier writhing in passion andexquisite pain. t He identifies himself with the timid andbrusque bodies of children; he knows the constraint in thegestures of the old and of women, the simplicity of a corpse.He possesses the secret of composing fantastic beings and canmake either their existence seem probable or the logic whichharmonizes their parts so rigorous that it suggests life and

See the description of the Deluge, etc., in the Treatise on Painting andin the manuscripts at the Institute of France. (Ed. Ravaisson-Mollien.)In the Windsor manuscripts are the drawings of tempests, bombardments,etc.


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50 IN T R O D U T IO N TO THE METHODnaturalness in the whole. He creates a Christ, an angel, amonster, by putting what is already known, what is everywhere, into a new order, profiting by the illusion and abstraction of painting, which, producing only one aspect of things,evokes aIl

He leaves the movement sometimes precipitate, sometimesapparently slow) of landslides or of falling rocks, leavesmassive curves, as it were, to turn to those of voluminousdraperies; turns then from smoke rising above roofs to distantboscage, to beeches gleaming on the horizon; turns fromfishes to birds; from the glitter of the sun on the sea to thethousand fine reflections on the leaves ofa birch-tree; from thescales ofa fish to the flash ofwavelets in a gu1f; from ears andcuris to the frozen whorIs ofshells. He passes from the shell tothe roll of the swelling waves, from the surface of the smallpool to the channels leading to and from it, and from these toelementary crawling movements, to liquid serpents. He vivifies. In his drawings the water about a swimmer seems likescarves, draperies that reveal the effortof he muscles. Hemakesthe air behind the flight of larks seem like silken fragments ofshadow, like the gleam of bubbles burst by the winged passage, by the delicate breathing, leaving across the blue-tintedleaves of space the thickness of the vague crystal of spaceitself.

He reconstructs aIl buildings; he is attracted by aIl methodsof handling the most diverse materials. He rejoices in thingsdistributed through the different dimensions of space: vaultings, beams, spreading domes; galleries and loggias in rows;masses held in the air by means of arches; springs of bridges;depths of the foliage of trees merging into the atmospherewhich the foliage absorbs; the composition of the migratory

1 Sketch in the manuscripts of the Institute of France.


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCIknown that they had secret affinities. But astonishmentpasses all bounds when one realizes that the author himself,in the vast majority of cases, is unable to give any account ofthe lines he has followed, that he is the wielder of a power thenature of which he does not understand. He can never makesure of success beforehand. By what calculations do the partsofan edifice, the elements ofa play, the factors in a victory, fallinto their places with regard to each other? Through whatseries of dark analyses is the production of a work broughtabout?In such cases it is usual to explain everything by referenceto instinct. But it is not too clear what instinct itself is, andbesides, in this case, one would have to have recourse torigorously personal and exceptional instincts, that is to say toa contradictory notion of hereditary habit -which would nomore be habituaI than it is hereditary.

Construction, from the moment that the effort involvedattains to sorne comprehensible result, ought to set us thinkingofa common measure of the terms used, an element or princi-pIe, however, that the simple fact of consciousness alreadysupposes and which could have none but an abstract orimaginary existence. We cannot represent to ourselves a wholethat is made of changes, a single edifice of multiple qualities,except as common ground between different forms of sornesingle material or law, the hidden continuity of which weaffirm at the same instant that we recognize the edifice as aunity , as the enclosed domain of our investigations. Hereagain is that psychical postulate which in our consciousnessresembles the principle of inertia in mechanics. Purely ab-stract, purely differential combinations alone, those of num-bers, for instance, may be constructed by means of fixedunities; we should note that these are in the same relationship


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OF LEO N RD O D VI NCI 7variations which are sometimes known and characterizedobjects but of which the ordinary and significant uses areneglected so that only their order and mutual reactions maysubsist. On the order depends the effect. The effect is the orna-mental aim and the work thus takes on the character of amechanism created to impress a public to arouse emotionsand their corresponding images.

Regarded thus the ornamental conception is to the indi-vidual arts what mathematics is to the other sciences. In thesame way that the physical notions of time length densitymass are only homogeneous quantities in calculations andrecover their individuality only in the interpretation ofresultsso the objects chosen and arranged with a view to a particulareffect seem as if disengaged from most of their properties andonly reassume them in the effect in that is to say the mindof the detached spectator. It is thus by means ofan abstractionthat the work ofart can be constructed and this abstraction ismore or less active and is more or less easy to define accordingas the elements borrowed from reality for it are more or lesscomplex. Inversely it is by a sort of induction by the produc-tion of mental images that aIl works of art are appreciatedand this production must equally be more or less active moreor less tiring according as it is set in motion by a simple inter-lacing on a vase or a broken phrase by Pascal.

The painter disposes coloured pigments on a plane and hemust use their Hnes ofseparation thicknesses harmonies andcontrasts to express himself. The spectator only sees a more orless faithful representation of flesh gesture lands cape thingshe might see through the window of a museum. The pictureis judged in the same way as reality. One person will complainof the ugliness of the face others will fall in love with it; sorneindulge in the most verbose kind of psychological analysis;


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8 INTRODUCTION TO THE METHODothers only look at the hands, which theyalways think lookunfinished . The truth is that it is taken for granted that thepicture should reproduce the physical and natural conditionsofour environment. Volume must be weighty and light mustshine in the way we know, and gradually anatomy and perspective take a supreme place in pictorial resthetic. 1 believe,notwithstanding, that the surest method ofjudging a pictureis to begin by identifying nothing and then to proceed step bystep to make the series ofinductions that is necessitated by thepresence at the same moment of a number of coloured spotswithin a given area in order to rise from metaphor to metaphor, from supposition to supposition, to a knowledge of thesubject-sometimes only to a consciousness of pleasure-thatone has not always had to e g ~ n with.

1 do not think that one couId give a more amusing exampleof the general attitude with regard to painting than the fameof that La Gioconda smile , to which the epithet mysteriousseems to be irrevocably attached. That line on a face has hadthe fortune to produce the sort of phrase-making that sensations or impressions with regard to art have legitimized inaIl languages. t is shrouded behind a mass of words anddisappears amongst the many paragraphs that begin by caIling it disturbing and finish with a description of s u -generally vague. 1 would justify less intoxicating studies. Theywere no inaccurate observations or arbitrary symbols thatLeonardo utilized, or La ioconda would never have beenpainted. He was guided by a perpetuaI sagacity.ln the background of he Last Supper there are threewindows. The one in the middle, which opens behind Jesus, isdistinguished from the others by a cornice that describes anarc of a circle. If we continue this curve we get a circumference ofwhich the Christ is the centre. AIl the main lines of


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OF LEONARDO DA VINCI 9the fresco converge at this point the symmetry of the composition is relative to this centre and to the long line of thesupper-table. The mystery if there be one is to learn why weconsider such combinations mysterious. And it can 1 fear beexplained.

It is not from painting nevertheless that we shall choosethe salient example we need in order to study the intercommunications between different activities of the mind. The hostof suggestions emanating from the necessity to give diversityto to people a surface the resemblance between the firstefforts of this order and certain natural phenomena theevolution ofsensibility in the retina these will be disregardedhere so as not to lead the reader towards too arid speculation.A vas ter art the ancestor as it might be of painting willserve our purpose better.

The word construction which 1 employed de1iberately toindicate more definitely the problem of human interventionin the things of the world and to give the mind of the reader anorientation a material suggestion in the direction of the logicof the subject is now to be used in its more restricted sense.We shall consider architecture.

The building which composes the city which is practicallythe whole ofcivilization is a thing so complex that our understanding of it discerns successively first a changing decorative scheme that blends with the sky; then a ~ i h texture ofmotives following the vertical horizontal and receding linesand varying infinitely with different perspectives; then a thingthat is solid bold resisting that has the characteristics of ananimal; subordination of the parts to the whole; and finally itis a machine the operating principle ofwhich is gravity whichtakes us from notions of geometry to ideas on dynamics andto the most delicate speculations on the subject of molecularE


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6 I N T R O D U C T I O N TO THE METHODHowever powerful the passion may be it only becomes

active and useful when it is utilized upon a subject where artcan direct it. There must be well-placed checks to prevent itrom being dissipated and a delay must be adroitly imposedon the invincible movement back to equilibrium so that some

thing may be abstracted before the ardour diminishes.An author preparing a discourse and meditating on it

beforehand feels himselfat once source engineer and constraininginfluence. One part of him is the impulse; another foreseesarranges suppresses; another remembering and deductivekeeps an eye on the material preserves the harmonies makessure .of the permanence of the calculated design. Since to writeshould be to be to construct as solid