Behind Appearance: A Study of the Relations Between Painting and the Natural Sciences in this Century

by C.H. Waddington, Conrad H.Waddington

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Conrad Hal Waddington was a British biologist, embryologist, palaeontologist, geneticist and philosopher.

Waddington had wide interests that included poetry and painting, as well as left-wing political leanings. In his book The Scientific Attitude (1941), he touched on political topics such as central planning, and praised Marxism as a "profound scientific philosophy".

Reviews

[Benji]

'Starting from the argument that science is not, after all, merely a one-eyed Cyclops, the conclusion we have come to is that man is `Argus with innumerable eyes, all yielding their overlapping insights to his one being, that struggles to accept them in all their variety and richness.'

Aldous Huxley has pointed out the narrowing effects of the usual reliance on book-learning:
'Training in the sciences is largely on the symbolic level; training in the liberal arts is wholly and all the time on that level. When courses in the humanities are used as the only antidote to too much science and technology, excessive specialization in one kind of symbolic education is being tempered by excessive specialization in another kind of symbolic education.'
Aldous Huxley 'Education on the Non-verbal level'. Daedalus, Spring (1962) 279.