Time & Perspective Quote by John Desmond Bernal

Bernal is smuggling libido into the lab and calling it a production plan. The line doesn’t treat sexuality as private heat or moral problem; it treats it as social energy that can be routed, converted, and disciplined. “May go to research” is a chilly verb choice: desire becomes a resource stream, one that can be directed toward discovery. But he immediately tilts the emphasis: a “much larger part must lead to aesthetic creation.” That “must” gives the game away. For Bernal, science alone is not a sufficient outlet for modern appetites; without art, the surplus desire generated by a technologically accelerated world curdles into distraction or destruction.

The context is a 20th-century scientist steeped in Marxist-inflected optimism about planning, material conditions, and the shaping of consciousness. He’s writing in an era when mass media, industrial production, and new scientific instruments were exploding the palette of what could be made and seen. His argument is that abundance creates its own problem: more “opportunities and materials” do not automatically yield better culture. They can just as easily yield louder noise, gaudier spectacle, more novelty without form.

That’s why the second sentence pivots to discipline: the future’s art will “need an infinitely stronger formative impulse.” Bernal anticipates a world of limitless tools where the real scarcity is not material but attention, taste, and organizing vision. The subtext is almost anxious: without stronger form-giving powers, art becomes mere byproduct of technology rather than its human counterweight.