Critically evaluate the third book of Gulliver’s Travels as a satire on Science.
Why does Swift satirize science in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels? Illustrate with textual  reference.
How far is the Flying Island significant in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels?
Comment on Swift’s attitude towards science as enumerated in Gulliver’s Travels.
What does Swift satirize in the third part of Gulliver’s Travels? Answer with illustrations.

Gulliver’s Travels is Jonathan Swift’s most comprehensive and brilliantly worked out satire on man and civilization. The book is a satire on four aspects of man: the physical, the political, the intellectual, and the moral.

The book III which is titled as ‘A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan’ is a bitter satire on the impractical scientific enterprises undertaken in Swift’s time. In this book, especially through his voyage to Laputa and Balnibarbi, Swifts cynically exposes how sometimes man crosses his intellectual limits pursuing worthless theorizations and how sometimes practical knowledge can be misused doing impractical scientific experiments.

As we see, after his ship is attacked by pirates, Gulliver is marooned close to a desolate rocky island, near India. Fortunately he is rescued by a flying island called Laputa. Now, this Laputa is a peculiar island and more peculiar are its king and inhabitants.

The island is exactly circular and consists of 10,000 acres of land. At the center, there is a cave containing a lodestone six yards long which moves the island with its magnetic force. Interestingly, the King and his court of this flying island are devoted entirely to two subjects, music and mathematics, the most abstract sciences. They are all philosophers.  The minds of these people are so occupied with intense speculations that they can neither speak nor attend to the discourse of others, unless their attention is attracted by a flapper. Swift most poignantly criticizes the absurdities of the Laputans, when he describes the dinner, “there was a shoulder of mutton, cut into an equilateral triangle, a piece of beef into a rhomboid, and a pudding into a cycloid”.  Not only that, when these people want to praise the beauty of a woman or any other animal, they describe it by geometrical terms such as circles and parallelograms, or by musical terms.

Now, all these descriptions, though comic have a tough satiric purpose behind them. The Laputan king and inhabitants are devoid of human feelings and it is only abstract theory which dominates all aspects of their life. They disdain practical geometry and consequently have failed to develop any purposeful projects. The result is that the king is oblivious to the real concerns of the people who live below in Balnibarbi. Thus Swift here uses science as a metaphor to show the ruling class’ incapacity to think and work constructively for the people ruled.

However, Swift’s satire on science does not end here. Things get worse, when we see Gulliver visiting the Lagado academy in Balnibarbi. The academy in Lagado is a direct satire on the kind of works which the Royal Society in England was engaged upon in those days. We can visualize Swift’s contempt for the contemporary scientific experiments, when the different projects of the Lagado academy are described.

As Gulliver visits the academy, he meets a man engaged in a project to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. He also meets a scientist trying to turn excrement back into food. Another is attempting to turn ice into gunpowder and is writing a treatise about the malleability of fire, hoping to have it published. An architect is designing a way to build houses from the roof down, and a blind master is teaching his blind apprentices to mix colors for painters according to smell and touch. An agronomist is designing a method of plowing fields with hogs by first burying food in the ground and then letting the hogs loose to dig it out. A doctor in another room tries to cure patients by blowing air through them.
Not only that, on the other side of the academy, people are engaged in speculative learning. One professor has a class full of boys working from a machine that produces random sets of words. A linguist in another room is attempting to remove all the elements of language except nouns. Another professor tries to teach mathematics by having his students eat wafers that have mathematical proofs written on them.
Now the descriptions of these comic projects may lead to the conclusion that Swift as a writer bears a deep apathy for science. However, the real implication is not like that.  Swift only ridicules those parts of science which are impractical and which instead of benefiting people cause them suffer. It can be mentioned in this connection that much of Swift’s inspiration for the scientists in this voyage came from the Royal Society of London, a scientific society founded in 1660. Interestingly, most of the experiments parodied by Swift had actually been proposed or carried out by British scientists at the time of his writing. Besides, Swift also sincerely exposes the damaging effects of these impractical experiments. Laputa symbolizes the absurdity of knowledge and as a result, the Laputans suffer from the ruin of agriculture, architecture and the impoverishment of the population.
Thus, it is seen that Swift’s satire on science has deep humanitarian motives behind it. Through his satire, Swift allegorically expresses his views that the goals of science should be embedded in the real world. The aim of science should be purposeful, pragmatic and people friendly.

How has Keats established the supremacy of art over life in his Ode on a Grecian Urn?

The Odes of John Keats basically deal with some of the conflicts that troubled Keats. As it is seen, one very peculiar feature of the Odes is the contrast between the permanence of Art and the transitoriness of human joy; and this feeling for the eternity of art finds it’s most complete expression in the Ode on a Grecian Urn. To Keats, it is Art which confers eternity on human passions; passions which otherwise cloy and leave behind, ‘a burning forehead and parching tongue’.

The poem Ode on a Grecian Urn deals with a metaphor namely the urn which has survived through many centuries and which therefore represents the immortality of Art. The ode opens with an invocation-

                                        ‘thou still unravished bride of quietness

                                         thou foster child of silence and slow time’

 These opening two lines strike the key note of the poem. In a very noisy and changing world, the urn is something beyond sound and beyond change. We are at once taken into an order of things remote from our daily existence. Then follows a string of questions, questions which are at the same time pictures,-

                                         ‘What men or god are these? What maidens loth?

                                           What mad pursuit? What struggle to scape?

As the poem develops with Keats answering the questions, we gradually come across the basic theme of the poem, which eventually certifies the permanence of art.

On the urn are carved numerous scenes like that of a Bacchanalian procession consisting of the flute players, the youth singing under the trees or the lovers about to kiss. These scenes make the poet think. To him this imagined life in the carved pictures appear to be more real than the human life of audible melody and physical embraces.

Human love and beauty are short lived. Even the fruition of human love never brings any real happiness. On the contrary, the love carved on the urn is happier, for he may not enjoy the fruition of love, but he would always love and his beloved would retain her beauty forever,

                       ‘She can not fade, though thou hast not thy bliss

                        For ever wilt thou love and she be fair’

Apart from the permanence of art and transitoriness of human life, the ode also suggests the superiority of the sculptor’s art over poetry. For example, the poet says-

                                    ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

                                     Are sweeter, therefore, ye soft pipes play on

                                     Not to the sensual ear, but more endeared

                                     Pipe to the spirit deities of no tone.’

The above lines are one of those passages in which Keats rises from mere sensuous enjoyment to the enjoyment of the spiritual and the ideal. In fact, the lines touch the philosophy of art and the ethics of human life.

One of the pictures of the urn is that of a lowing heifer being led to the sacrificial alters. With this picture, Keats almost goes beyond the animated world and creates a whole landscape of river and sea-shore city in which the carven figures can live and move. With this scene on, the poet’s imagination passes from the finite to the infinite. Human life is temporary and finite, while art is eternal and infinite.

                                                Thou silent form dost tease us ought of thought

                                                As doth eternity; cold pastoral!

Line like these suggest that works of art like the urn seduce us from the ordinary life of thought into the extraordinary life of the imagination. It is imagination alone that can enable us to see into the life of things. The works of art, like the urn, awakens our imagination and thus seduce us from thought. They are as remote and eternal as eternity itself. They lie outside the scope of ordinary thought as well as outside ordinary emotions. Hence the urn is spoken of as ‘cold pastoral’.

However, towards the end of the poem, we have two controversial lines which constitute the final message of Keats.

                                          ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,- that is all

                                           Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’

According to C.M. Bowra, here truth means reality, and he explains that there is nothing real but the beautiful and nothing beautiful but the real. A work of art is beautiful because it is an expression of the truth within the soul of the artist. The Grecian urn is a beautiful piece of art and therefore it represents a higher kind of reality. The lives and the rapture carved on the urn are eternal because they have been presented through beautiful works of art. In fact, this is the very message the urn leaves for human beings and it is this massage that Keats recommends his fellowmen to follow.