Both Human and Humane: The Humanities and Social Sciences in Graduate Education [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512814569

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BOTH HUMAN AND HUMANE The Humanities and Social Sciences in Graduate Education

John P. Gillin Max Black S. S. Wilks Howard Mumford Jones Charles Frankel Leo Gershoy Henri Peyre Pendleton Herring Whitney J. Oates Daniel Η. H. Ingalls Donald Young

PHILADELPHIA

BOTH HUMAN AND HUMANE The Humanities and Social in Graduate

Edited

Sciences

Education

Charles E. Boewe and Boy F. Nichols by

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

© j 960 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan by the Oxford University Press London, Bombay, and Karachi Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-8593

Printed in the United States of America

INTRODUCTION WHILE

CELEBRATING

ITS

SEVENTY-FIFTH

ANNIVERSARY,

THE

Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania has been re-examining its educational program in the light of the needs of contemporary society. A series of conferences was organized at which members of the graduate faculties could take counsel with some of their colleagues from other universities. One of these symposia was concerned with graduate education in the area of the humanities and the social sciences, and the papers here presented were read at its sessions in 1958. Mankind is always finding new patterns of behavior and the passing years add constantly to the sum total of what has happened. Searchers for understanding have to deal increasingly with quality more difficult to understand and quantity more arduous to control. Each generation is confronted by data which multiply geometrically in quantity. Man and his activities are distinctively historical and his experience cumulative. Thus, the sheer enlargement of society is accompanied by an augmented complexity of new relationships, tensions, and the like, which in turn produce ever new data upon which to base reflections about social institutions and their growth, and upon which to base selfconscious proposals about their direction and organization. A l l this adds up to a successive series of new patterns of thought and action. When to this are added similarly increasing series of new insights in art and literature, the perennially new horizons of mathematics and physics, and the totally new domains available for exploration in psychology and linguistics, we seem in a fair way to be swamped by data, and the temptation is to resign ourselves to the 5

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fact that no man will ever again command the knowledge of his day as did a Leonardo or a Leibnitz. B u t such a welter of information does not stand, as Bacon might have thought, as a series of discrete items. It presents the creative mind with an opportunity to forge generalizations of increasing power and simplicity. M a n y of the greater, as well as the lesser, achievements in the history of ideas have been due less to the discovery of novelty than to the making of unanticipated connections (e.g., analytic geometry) and relating isolated areas (e.g., learning theory). N e w dimensions are exposed and filled out by the abstract generalizations, models, achieved through mathematics and by the substantive relating of new fields; e.g., chemistry to psychosis, psychology and sociology to law. It is the responsibility of graduate education to keep both kinds of opportunities before students and faculty alike. For the university is a community where each shares the pursuit of specialized knowledge with his fellows in the hope that the insights gained f r o m his work may have broader application. Graduate instruction is the means devised by universities to initiate each generation into these problems. T h e task is increasingly difficult, and it is essential that faculty-student enterprise keep in continuous step with the constantly changing conditions of society. T h i s constant adjustment is difficult to face, for it is often less troublesome to continue old programs than to create new ones. B u t what time is more appropriate than an anniversary at which to revise blueprints? T h e discussions at this conference were m u c h concerned with interdisciplinary relationships. T h e y dealt in part with conditions arising from the fact that the study of human behavior long has been influenced by theories and modes of operation used by scholars in the sciences. In the course

INTRODUCTION

η

of this association much has been made of the laws of nature and the principles of biological evolution. It was at one time hoped that laws similar to those held to be dominating physical and biological phenomena might be discovered for human behavior. But questions have arisen whether the relationship is not dominated by old ways of thinking now no longer so fruitful. A second connection invited exploration. In more recent years much has been made among social scientists—particularly those in sociology, social anthropology, and social psychology—of a common association known as "behavioral sciences." T h i s phrase implied, whether wisely or not, a special concern with human behavior, a preoccupation with the patterns of action of individuals and groups rather than with the influence of external conditions. Has this interest in people qua human beings, rather than in institutions, meant that there is a new need for cooperation with humanists and for the knowledge of the evolution of society which is the province of the historian? Should there not be a greater concern with knowledge about the historical evolution of contemporary behavior patterns? Also, modern civilization invites a new orientation because the old geographical barriers are no longer so formidable and societies no longer living in ancient isolation are more conscious of interrelationships. In view of these circumstances the question is asked: Should not more stress be laid on the use of the concept "total civilization" as a basis for analysis? Should not the unity and value of ancient culture be stressed as a base for analyzing and understanding modern cultures? Could not the same use be made of the study of non-Western cultures by a comparative approach which would make both West and East more comprehensible to mankind and give a clearer understanding of the meaning of civilization and

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the values inherent in it? If there can be a more effective perception of the relationship between the tradition of Western culture and the nature of twentieth century behavior, East and West, might we not have a better way of relating traditional wisdom to contemporary human problems? Could we not then provide a frame of reference in the form of concepts of the evolution and operation of patterns of human behavior in the cultures that together constitute civilization? Would not this reorientation make instruction in research method and in transmission of interpretation of the understanding of human behavior more meaningful to students, and therefore stimulate them to be more constant in their search for understanding, not only of human behavior but also of the values that can and do shape it? T h e participants in this conference, in discussing the relationship between the natural sciences and the social sciences, recognized the widely held view that the laws of science are now statistical probabilities rather than absolutes, and that human beings can rarely be made susceptible to the controls necessary to satisfy the conditions laid down for laboratory experiments, which must depend upon consistently similar conditions to make successive repetition predictable. Rather, the science now most valuable is that which teaches rigorous methodology and makes use likewise of "the imaginative aspects of scientific thought," to use Black's phrase. Models and archetypes can be most useful. Investigators in the fields of the social sciences may well construct models or abstract systems bearing some faint resemblance to reality but containing fewer variables and worked out in complete logical detail. Understanding will come more completely when the investigator discovers some correspondence between a segment of the immeasurably complex operation of the real world and some model which he or someone

INTRODUCTION

g 1

else has created in the world of the imagination. As Wilks points out, the growth of econometrics, psychometrics, and most recently sociometrics has not only introduced static models, but latterly these models by including the variable of time represent dynamic situations and make possible valid predictions about economic phenomena; i.e., as in game theory and input-output analysis. In psychometrics these developments have opened up new possibilities in the theory of choice behavior and in decision and learning theory as well. Mathematical model-building in psychometrics enables significant attention to be given "to the matter of testing the models for faithfulness to reality." In considering the verdict of philosophy when confronted by the question whether the objective methods of the natural sciences must give way to the "subjective methodology allegedly required for the study of human society," Frankel emphasizes the fact that logically there is not the sharp distinction sometimes assumed between the "objective" methods used in studying non-human phenomena and the "subjective" methods presumably used in studying human phenomena. Natural science has much indeterminism and subjectivism too. Likewise, biology recognizes the relativity of functional explanations and thus can be associated with the study of society. In all branches of exploration the basic requirement is rigorous search for truth using the most precise instruments which human intelligence can produce. In the natural sciences, in the social sciences, and in the humanities philosophy prescribes the greatest rigor of investigation which the mind can muster. Precision of thought is the answer. T h e papers of Black, Frankel, and Wilks all indicate that 1 Kenneth E. Boulding, "Economics as a Social Science," in The Social Sciences at Mid-Century: Essays in Honor of Guy Stanton Ford (Social Science Research Center of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota, 195a), p. 73.

ΙΟ

BOTH HUMAN AND HUMANE

we are developing more precise methods of definition, discovery, and communication, which place a great responsibility upon graduate schools. These instruments are intricate. T h e y are difficult to teach, to learn, and to use. Do w e really face the problem of how well we can teach them? Pressure is upon us to turn out more scholars more quickly; and yet the tasks which are involved are increasingly difficult and the conditions of present-day life, notably the prevalence of earlier marriage, make the concentration of attention, which is an essential of effective learning, more difficult to command. These papers likewise indicate a new concept of cooperation and sharing of insight, particularly in the fields of the social sciences and the humanities. Whatever gap exists between them should be bridged by the faculty, and the students should be led constantly back and forth across the bridge. Gillin describes the need for the bridge and gives some specifications for planning and building it. In this matter of specifications, Oates, Ingalls, Gershoy, Peyre join with him in stressing the "cultural" concept. T h e r e are entities in space and time, population aggregates, which have folkways and characteristics of behavior which can be defined, analyzed, and compared. T h e use of concepts which are available in the study of cultures and civilizations give graduate students more significant goals. From the study of Classical civilization comes a sense of meaningful research against a background of philosophical social unity. It should be possible to stand off and see the relationships of groups and ideas in the ancient world and to plot research programs to fill in gaps in an overall structure, rather than merely to pile stones up upon an even higher wall which may hide what it cannot reveal. These insights into social and cultural dynamics are sharpened by new opportunities to work in the civilizations

INTRODUCTION

11

of the East. Here the comparison between East and West serves as a tool; so does study of the relationship between institutional and social custom as East meets West. We and our students are of necessity obsessed with Western ways and concepts, and these obsessions cannot be corrected unless there is some outside control factor to be introduced. T h e instruments of cultural analysis can now be made more precise, and therefore more effective graduate instruction can be developed because of the possibility of study of civilizations other than our own. T h e cumulation of the study of civilization, ancient, Eastern, or modern, demonstrates that a more or less common situation exists for the scientist and the historian. Neither can approach problems with complete objectivity. All their researches are interdependent, all disclose but parts of the unitary pattern of life and body of thought. Gershoy recommends the study of tensions, revolutions, international rivalries, power struggles, patterns of behavior rather than national justifications. Such research will aid in abandoning parochialism and in approaching greater understanding of the nature of human action. T h e humanist has much in common with the social scientist in the study of human behavior. Peyre points out that literature is an institution, that history and criticism are close to behavioral science. T h e r e is a sociology of literature, a complex relationship between art and literature and the public for which and amid which works of art are created. Humanists should be much more interested in behavior, in how ideas are created, in what is the mechanism whereby seminal ideas reach the public consciousness; in the question, How do ideas "succeed"? Humanists, he contends, must not be complacent about the autonomy of their disciplines and should welcome the use of scientific methods where they are applicable. T h e implications as well as the definite recommendations

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of these papers underline the inadequacies of much of our orientation toward present Ph.D. training and add greatly to the difficulties of our situation. If we are to place the study of any phase of human behavior in its proper setting, we must provide our students with a cultural frame of reference which most of them do not now have. We are beset by an obsession with Western culture patterns dominated by a concept of nationalism as a chief determinant. The study of the ancient world, Eastern cultures, recurrent behavioral patterns, and the intricate process of the creation and transmission of ideas all provide guideposts along a new road which society should demand that we travel. But it is a hard road, a long road, and one on which it will cost much in strength, money, and spirit to travel. And yet we seem so much of the time content with back roads and bypaths leading but short distances to places hardly worth visiting. Herring, Jones, and Young give us suggestions, sometimes rather at variance with one another, as to the philosophy which should direct us in scholarly reorientation. It is obvious that our counsellors place before us a new sense of responsibility, a challenge to reconsider our present modes of procedure. A need exists for more careful attention to the implications of a graduate school as an association of a mature group of scholars with a younger generation who are being trained to carry on. There should be a greater sense of men and women of varied skills working together and sharing their curiosities as well as their information, their thoughts as well as their discoveries. Seventy-five years ago a group of scholars, influenced by a concept of purpose founded in an active center of Western European culture and embodied in the German Ph.D. program, organized a school to meet a need. The need today is much more complex and should be much more compelling. There are many signs that we need reorientation.

INTRODUCTION

13

Our counsellors advise us to gird ourselves to undertake a new effort of the intellect so that we may better guide those who come to us for instruction and inspiration. From the standpoint of extending the frontiers of knowledge, for sharpening the tools of analysis, and particularly for making more real any sense of understanding the patterns of human behavior there is need for a new unity in the so-called fields of the social sciences and the humanities. There must be a sincere realization that, as Boulding puts it, "the study of any institutional segment of society requires the cooperation of literally all the disciplines." Should we not, in graduate training, change from the study of "subjects" to the study of institutional aggregates evolving in time, such as cultures or civilizations, basing more of our research on the use of models, on the application of the most rigorous instruments of thought and analysis, and upon a more effective assessment of value? Should not faculties organize themselves more consciously and consistently for their own continuous education and therefore for a more perceptive guidance of their students? Should we not regard these students not as mere apprentices learning skills, but as disciples to be inspired to transmit understanding? Planning Committee: W. Norman Brown Thomas C. Cochran W. R e x Crawford Lloyd W. Daly Kenneth M. Setton Robert E. Spiller Roy F. Nichols, Dean

CONTENTS The

Planning

Committee

INTRODUCTION John P.

Gillin

HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Max

Black

MODELS AND ARCHETYPES S. S.

Wilks

MATHEMATICS AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Howard, Mumford

Jones

DEVELOPMENT IN HUMANISTIC SCHOLARSHIP Charles

Frankel

PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Leo

Gershoy

HERITAGE AND HORIZONS IN MODERN HISTORY

i6

BOTH HUMAN AND HUMANE

Henri

Ρ eyre

TWENTIETH CENTURY CIVILIZATIONS AND CULTURES Pendleton

Herring

ON TRENDS AND TENDENCIES Whitney

169

J. Oates

THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE AND MODERN SCHOLARSHIP Daniel Η. H.

182

Ingalls

THE HERITAGE OF ASIA AND ASIA TODAY Donald

139

194

Young

IN PRAISE OF SPECIALIZATION

213

BOTH HUMAN AND HUMANE The Humanities

and Social Sciences

in Graduate

Education

H U M A N

B E H A V I O R

A N D

T H E

SOCIAL

S C I E N C E S

John

P. Gillin

University of Pittsburgh IN

OUR STUDIES OF

PRIMITIVE

AND PEASANT SOCIETIES

WE

cultural anthropologists have been trained to see each culture in historical perspective, as a total functioning configuration—which means that we have had to play the roles of humanists as well as social scientists. Our efforts as humanists have occasionally been sufficiently amateurish, even in the simpler cultures, to suggest at once the need for a closer tie-up in training and investigation with the more specialized followers of these studies. In fact, there are some anthropologists who insist that we should not be considered social scientists at all but humanists. T h i s position, however, is seldom reflected in university departmental or curricular organization, other than by occasional cross-listing of courses and cooperation of faculty in folklore, linguistics, ethnomusicology, and primitive art. T h e other behavioral and social sciences, taken as a group, seem to be even farther away from the humanities, and a gap has opened which has tended to widen alarmingly in recent times. One is inclined to speculate about the kind of report a Soviet spy or some other outside observer might make regarding the United States. He would probably state that in this country there are two kinds of secrets. On the one hand, there are those which are classified as having to do with the national security. T h i s material is guarded by the most elaborate precautions Americans can devise. Yet a good many of these secrets seem to leak out, are pried out, »9

so

B O T H HUMAN AND HUMANE

or are otherwise diffused. A highly placed American general stated, in October 1958, that Soviet progress in nuclear and aeronautical science was not due to Russian ingenuity but to the fact that the Russians had stolen all their basic knowledge and techniques from us. Discounting the appeal to national pride in this statement, and assuming that only a fraction of the general's estimate of stolen goods is verifiable, it does seem to be true that some of our classified secrets do get loose and are spread about. O n the other hand, our spy might report, the Americans have other secrets that seem to stay safely bottled u p without the use of security guards, policemen, detectives, or the FBI. These secrets, he would say, are the specialized knowledge, data, and interpretations of the several disciplines located in American university graduate divisions of the humanities and the social sciences. Only small groups of students and faculty are privy to these chunks of arcane material—one group to one chunk on each campus—and the students are so trained that their secrets will never pass beyond their circle, except to other similar small groups. Each coterie uses a code, sometimes called jargon, for communication among the members which no outsider can understand. These codes cannot be broken by ordinary cryptographic methods because, in addition to words with very cryptic meanings, they also consist of emotions arranged according to a tonal system that can only be mastered by several years of indoctrination. In Washington a " Q clearance" enables a person to know about many secrets. But in the universities even a high I. Q. clearance is not sufficient. Our spy might report himself perplexed as to why the American government, instead of classifying its materials as secret, top secret, and so on, does not classify them as "the lack of Parsonian verbal parsimony," "criticism of the New Criticism's criticism of other criticisms," "the existential status of non-existentialism," or in some other such category so

HUMAN

BEHAVIOR

AND

THE

SOCIAL

SCIENCES

gi

that they might be safely lodged in the impenetrable vaults of the graduate schools. Although this might have been a good idea until recently, the government would be illadvised to follow such a course now, because there is a subversive movement afoot to break through the walls of these secret storehouses and to spread the treasures about. Let us see why this form of housebreaking is needed and how it can be accomplished. In what follows I should warn you that I will probably make considerable use of the word "culture," spelled with a small "c." As Lynn White, a well-known humanist, has recently written, the anthropologists' notion of culture has "irrigated the whole field of humanistic study." 1 I am glad to hear it. Let us proceed. Even muddy water is useful for irrigation purposes. T h e first question that many may ask is: W h y should the humanities and the social sciences have their connecting doors pried open and be made to share the wealth? T h i s sounds socialistic if not somehow criminal. T h e y were getting along all right minding their own business and keeping out of each other's way. It may be that an anthropologist trying to understand a total culture will use some tools borrowed from his friends in the humanities as well as those of social science. But the number of anthropologists is statistically insignificant. Why should anyone else care? T o such questions there are several answers that appeal to me and that may have some general significance. First, sharing the wealth can be fun; it adds to the enjoyment of life. Second, we are interested in the truth about man and all that concerns him—and we want the whole truth, not merely bits and pieces, however highly polished they may be. Third, the world crisis we are facing demands for its 1

Frontiers of Knowledge

!956). Ρ· 302·

in the Study of Man

(Harper & Bros.,

22

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HUMANE

solution the coordinated application of every bit of knowledge and wisdom at our disposal if we and our children and our civilization are to come through it alive, and it is not going to wait until a slow process of seepage finally crumbles the interdisciplinary walls. In speaking of the pleasurable aspect of sharing some understandings I realize that I am running counter to certain current American values. I should say that it makes your life richer, it is good for you, it re-creates you. O n e should not place " f u n " or "pleasure" high on any scale of reasons for doing anything. Nevertheless, how to have healthy pleasure and relaxation seems to be an increasingly important problem for Americans, even university professors and graduate students, as the pace of life increases and as work becomes more and more specialized. For many people commercialized entertainment is more a bore than a pleasure. Has anyone seen a good movie lately? And how do you like those cowboy shows that have practically monopolized T V ? Actually, in most universities there is a good deal of dabbling with the other fellow's playthings, just for the fun of it. I have a musicologist friend, for example, who is enchanted by classificatory kinship terminologies; he likes to set them to music, which I in turn try to play on the marimba. Idiotic, you may say, but it amuses us and some of our friends on an off hour. O n the more serious side, I think of a very good ethnological study of a French community, Village in the Vaucluse, written by a teacher of French, Professor Laurence W y l i e of Haverford College. I am told that his interest in such studies began with reading for his own amusement. Yes, in the trying times ahead of us we shall need more people who are not at the mercy of boring commercial entertainments and who are able to find pleasure among the specialties of our culture. Especially is this true of the specialists themselves, who will need not only

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BEHAVIOR

AND

THE SOCIAL

SCIENCES

33

knowledge but also balance. There is already much sharing for pleasure. The trouble seems to start when we take ourselves seriously and get technical. I shall discuss the problems of the whole truth about man in a few minutes, but first I would like to call attention to some aspects of the world situation which seem to demand our concentrated efforts. All of us, if we live any length of time at all, are going to see some unprecedented changes, unprecedented in scope and in speed. There are no models of this revolution in the history books to show us how to act. Nevertheless, as a people we have the intellectual and scientific resources to bring us through the period of crisis standing up, provided we can get our resources coordinated and focused. If not, we may end up flat on our faces, if indeed we have any faces left. Volumes would be required to treat any of these matters adequately, but permit me a few brief pointing operations. In the first place there is a world-wide explosion of population. At present the best estimates hold that the total number of people alive is more than two billion eight hundred million. The most conservative guessers think that only forty-two years hence, at the end of the century, there will be at least four billion people. Many calculations, still regarded as relatively conservative, place the figure at six to seven billion. Julian Huxley figured in 1956 that the earth's human population was increasing at the rate of thirty-four million per year. United Nations estimates indicate that this year, 1958, the number of human beings will increase by about forty-five million, or nearly 130,000 each day, or about 5,400 every hour. These figures, you understand, represent the net excess of births over deaths. T h e rate of increase climbs steeply upward as Malthus long ago predicted it would. Whereas world population grew at an average rate of about 1 0 % per decade in the period

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1930-50, the present decade will probably show a net increase of 1 7 % , and the Sixties will show a much higher rate, if present trends continue. At the same time, people are living longer and the aged segment of the population constantly expands. Professor Wilton Krogman of the University of Pennsylvania has recently summarized some of the data in a challenging article entitled "Changing Man." 2 Although their populations are growing in absolute numbers, white people are definitely in the minority and their proportional share of the world's population will probably continue to decline. This, together with the fact that many formerly isolated colored peoples are entering the modern world in the cultural sense, means that the whites will have to find new ways of living with the colored peoples if peace is to be maintained. As is well known, this runaway population growth is largely the result of astonishing success in the application of the sciences of life preservation in every period of the cycle from conception to old age. Science has also perfected equally successful methods of population control, but for reasons that are familiar to most of us, the latter have enjoyed comparatively little diffusion and use. T h e new billions not only want to be fed and kept in good health; they must also find or be given ways and means of organizing themselves sufficiently well socially so as to keep out of each other's hair and off each other's toes. History has no detailed models which we may handily pick up and put to use for social, economic, and political organization of such masses. Nor does it seem at all likely that we may safely rely upon slow "evolution" or unplanned development of new forms of social life. As I have just indicated, the "numbers game" is moving too fast for such "natural solutions." Consequently, it appears inevitable •Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, V I (1958), 243-260. See also the Demographic Year Book (United Nations, 1958).

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BEHAVIOR

AND

THE

SOCIAL

SCIENCES

25

that if the sciences and the humanities dealing with human organization and human relations cannot speedily provide some help in these affairs, we shall enter a very unpleasant period of human conflicts, ranging from local disturbances to world-wide holocausts. Not only is it true that all the validated principles of human organization within our present ken, plus some more we hope to discover, will have to be applied to the problem of the peaceful coexistence of the new billions, but the application will have to be done also with due regard to diverse sets of traditional human values. I shall say more about the problem of values later. Although the life sciences have provided the conditions for the population bulge, in fairness I must point out that the life sciences, in cooperation with others, have also done something to help increase the food supply. This is especially true of new discoveries and applications in plant and animal genetics combined with methods for improving the fertility of the soil and techniques of cultivation. Yet, since World War II, food production of the world as a whole, although increasing, has continued to lag behind the production of viable human bodies, with the result that growing numbers of people in some parts of the earth are forced to a declining standard of food intake. Plankton, chlorella, and other products of the sea may help for a time. But until some radical new discoveries are made, such as converting rock or sunlight into foodstuff, the resources of the earth for human nourishment are definitely limited, whereas population growth per se is not. T h e fact that some regions, such as the United States, are able now to produce more food than they need, whereas others, such as China and India, produce far below their requirements only exacerbates international and interregional problems of a social, cultural, and political nature. T h e second foundation of the new age is a complex of

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breakthroughs in the physical sciences. Apparently the most far-reaching features are the harnessing of new sources of energy derived from atomic fission and fusion, radical developments in electronics in connection with communications, automation of industrial processes, and the storage and manipulation of knowledge. Innovations in chemistry, metallurgy, and aeronautics, to mention a few, have also opened new frontiers. T h e combination is bound to create novel conditions for the social life of mankind. Many of them are already visible in this country. For example, in large part because of automation and its attending changes, the job structure has turned itself upside down in ten years. In the past decade the number of laborers has increased only 4.1 % and the number of factory operatives only 4-4%, but the number of technical and professional employees has grown by 60.6% and clerical workers by 22.8%. In 1957 there were half a million more white collar workers than blue collar workers in the United States.3 T o take another instance, the number of television receiving sets in the United States has increased from practically none at the end of World War II to more than 46.1 million in 1957, 4 and they altered the patterns of evening diversion during the same period to the extent that more than 1,000 motion picture theaters had to go out of business. Now 8 3 % of all U. S. households have one or more T V sets.5 Twenty years ago interplanetary travel was discussed mainly by science fiction writers and crackpots. Soon the United States may place a missile in orbit around the moon; some wags are prophesying that our population pressure may soon be reduced by exporting the surplus to other planets. Countless other ramifications could be mentioned, and the experts in * Sylvia Porter's syndicated column, Durham, N. C., Morning November 4, 1958. * World Almanac, 1958. ' Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1958.

Herald,

HUMAN

BEHAVIOR

AND

THE

SOCIAL

SCIENCES

27

such matters tell us that the applications of new scientific developments are still in their infancy. T h e physically destructive possibilities of the new discoveries of course form the background of the most serious sociocultural problems of our own or any other time. Much of the pertinent data is "classified," but from an ordinary citizen's point of view it appears that the crucial questions have passed from the hands of the physical and life scientists to those of the social scientists and experts in the humanities. If the latter two types of specialists are unable to offer constructive help in solving the problem—which is basically one of differences in cultural values and goals—persons in authority will try to fill the gap with common sense, which is based on earlier conditions quite unlike those we face. T h e third major feature of the new era is perhaps an outgrowth of the other two. Observers have variously labeled it the urbanization, rurbanization, or standardization of mankind on a world-wide scale. T w o aspects are involved: a pattern of residential concentration in cities, and a standardization and impersonalization of certain portions of social life as a result of rapid communication and transportation. As Kingsley Davis, one of this country's outstanding students of population, has recently stated, "the human species is moving rapidly in the direction of an almost exclusively urban existence." 0 If the present rate should continue, he says, 4 5 % of the world's people will be living in cities having a population of 20,000 or more by the year 2000 and 9 0 % by the year 2050. In 1955, 2 1 % of the world's population lived in such centers (42% in North America, 3 5 % in Europe, only 9 % in Africa). 7 Urban communities, in the sense of residential concentrations, began to appear * " T h e Origin and Growth of Urbanization in the W o r l d , " can Journal of Sociology, L X (March 1 9 5 5 ) , 434. 7 Ibid.

Ameri-

28

BOTH HUMAN AND HUMANE

in some parts of the world five to six thousand years ago, but the modern city with its media of mass communication and its rapid transport facilities presents a totally different pattern of life. Until comparatively recently, moreover, the bulk of mankind has lived in villages, small rural towns, or the open country. Such communities were largely selfcontained, they were rather isolated from the patterns of organization and values of the urban centers, and the tone of their social life was set by face-to-face relationships. T h e placidity and human satisfactions of such a form of existence may have been exaggerated by romanticists, but for good or evil such communities now seem to be disappearing. About three-quarters of the world's people still live in small towns or rural communities, but even as diminishing numbers continue to do so, their life becomes more and more like that of their city cousins. T h e y already find themselves enmeshed in the network of modern standardization emanating from the urban centers, or they soon will. T h e latest fashions and other consumer goods arrive by the morning bus, train, or airplane. Children are educated in large, standardized consolidated schools. Households become dependent upon mass-produced consumer products sold in supermarkets or local stores. Recreation and diversions require technological equipment ranging from that used in sports through color television to stereophonic phonographic reproductions, equipment that no common citizen can design, produce, or maintain in repair. And, of course, human physical mobility becomes a commonplace thing. A family whose ancestral members never ventured beyond a fifteen-mile radius of their home use automobiles, buses, trains, or airplanes for frequent excursions to distant centers, Tanging from the provincial capital city to extensive visits to foreign countries. T h i s process is not confined to North America or Western Europe. I t is said to be progressing nicely in the western

HUMAN

BEHAVIOR

AND

THE

SOCIAL

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part of the Soviet Union, where the urbanization and standardization of the countryside were started shortly after the Revolution with the attempted liquidation of the kulaks and their incorporation into collective farms. At the present time the newly awakened leaders of the so-called underdeveloped regions are demanding to be incorporated into the modern world in this sense. They feel themselves underprivileged because they do not enjoy what they regard as the "modern conveniences" of communications and transportation, plus the technologies of the new power era, all of which will surely standardize and impersonalize them unless some mitigating measures are mixed with the new technological modernization. And, strangely enough, both the Soviet Bloc and the Free World are furiously competing with financial credits and "know-how" to provide them with these alleged benefits of civilization. O u r side, at least, seems to have given singularly little attention to the non-materialistic components of modernism that seemingly must be incorporated with such technological importations if the whole complex is to provide human satisfactions rather than turmoil. I am aware that we have done something with the technique of community organization in such regions as the Near East and India and Pakistan. But it is not clear that we have successfully competed with the Soviets in ideology and values, adjusted to the traditional aspirations of outlying peoples with cultures different from our own. It may be that we are inadvertently correct in this, that the different presently underdeveloped peoples should be left to develop their own new social and spiritual cultures adapted to the new technologies. But I do believe that we shall find ourselves grievously surprised if we do not at least keep track of what is going on and develop forward-looking policies to cope with it. A fourth feature of the new epoch is the "peaceful war-

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fare" in which the two major blocs of mankind are engaged. For nearly 100 years following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, diplomacy was the principal method for settling international disputes and preventing widespread conflict. Open competition between rival nations also permitted the pursuit of diverse aims without armed conflict. Both diplomacy and competition, however, involved general agreement on rules that set limits to the activities of the opponents. When such agreement could no longer be reached, resort was had to war. T h e unlocking of the atom and its applications to instruments of destruction have changed all this. When, as now, both potential opponents are equipped with thermonuclear weapons and able to retaliate on a scale never before realized, a stalemate is achieved, at least temporarily. Enormous sums of money are provided and formidable concentrations of scientific and engineering personnel are employed by both sides in an attempt to maintain this dangerous equilibrium. In the seventeenth century Thomas Hobbes, in his book Leviathan, expressed a view that at the time was regarded as rather quaint. "War," he wrote, "consisteth not in Battle only, or in the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to contend by battle is sufficiently known. . . . T h e nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary." In the early nineteenth century the well-known Prussian military theoretician Karl von Clausewitz, in his book On War, stated: "War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means." We are slowly realizing that the Soviet bloc has inverted this dictum to read: "Peace is the continuation of war by other means." For such a concept we may use the seemingly paradoxical term "peaceful war-

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fare." T h i s kind of contest is much too complex to be described here other than to say that up to now its battlegrounds have been mainly the uncommitted and neutral peoples, power over whom is sought as a means of weakening the principal opponent. However, peaceful warfare is also waged against ourselves and our allies, and we may expect to see it intensified. In any case it consists of an intricate series of maneuvers against the aspirations and values, the traditional forms of social organization, and the persons in positions of power in the target society. Defense against such attacks and achievement of true peace in such a world obviously require the utmost of our resources of knowledge concerning human societies and cultures. So much for a brief pointing at some of the features of the new age. Mankind has been through major sociocultural revolutions before—for example the Neolithic revolution and the more recent industrial revolution. Apart from the specific content of the innovations, however, two things distinguish the present atomic-age revolution from earlier analogous upsets in life conditions. One is the extreme speed of the changes. T h e second is the fact that the effects are practically world wide. All previous basic changes in technology and patterns of life began in one or more restricted centers and slowly diffused in a generally radial pattern, held back in various places by natural barriers and by cultural resistance. People could take some time— even several generations—to readjust. Such is not the present case. T h e new period will, I believe, accentuate the pressures already evident during the last fifty years to devaluate the individual. I have already mentioned that the new age presents serious problems in social and political organization for which we will need our best resources. It is possible, however, that these problems may be handled successfully on the mass level but that the individual human being

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will be lost somewhere in the shuffle. If we are to continue to hold among our highest values the dignity of the individual and his right to fulfill his potentialities, it would seem that a blending of the humanities and the social sciences is called for. Certain of the approaches of the social sciences are massoriented and are meant to be so. Attention is fixed upon norms, modes, and spread of the distributions and other statistical measures of opinion, patterns of behavior, family size, group organization, and other aspects of the mass society. Information developed and analyzed along these lines is necessary for public planning and policy, but it takes little account of individuals, their peculiar problems and products. Clinical psychology, psychiatry, certain aspects of social psychology, and studies of the personality in culture all deal to some extent with personality, but they are focused either on modal or ideal types, or upon what are regarded as pathological deviations and their treatment. This neglect of the individual in relation to the rich opportunities offered him by his culture may be a reflection of a sort of disease of life in modern large societies that has been noted by some sociologists, philosophers, and literary men. Kierkegaard called it the Law of Large Numbers, Dürkheim anomie—a concept elaborated by Merton. Ortega y Gasset spoke of the modern mass man's realization that he is but a "faceless figure in the crowd." Erich Fromm found that the freedom to be a nobody in German society was too much for many persons to bear, so they sought "escape from freedom" by joining Nazi clubs and identifying with "father figures" like Hitler. Riesman has shown us the loneliness of the crowd, and Whyte the narrowness and emptiness the "organization man" imposes upon himself in order not to fall into anonymity. The whole existentialist movement in philosophy and literature seems to center about the notion of

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reminding us that despite the despair, anxiety, and nothingness of modern life we human individuals do exist and we must find value in that fact itself. As Unamuno wrote, paraphrasing Senancour, "if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate." 8 From such a book as Jack Kerouac's On the Road one gets the notion that the individual of the so-called "beat generation" engages in a mad, unending series of restless wanderings and sensual indulgences whose only point is constantly to remind himself that he still exists. It seems to be an exaggerated form of pinching yourself to make sure you're still alive. Yes, for many a modern, it is a crazy, mixed-up world. Living in one of the richest cultural traditions of history, many Western men and women have become detached, and are unaware of the treasures of the spirit that lie all about them. It is here that the humanities in cooperation with the social sciences could, I believe, do much to reintegrate the individual. Much humanistic study is concerned exclusively with the productions and careers of individual gifted human beings, past or present. These branches of the humanities are not interested in the mass man as a field of study. They are concerned with how un-massed persons have given expression to the basic values and emotions of our tradition in words, drama, dance, painting, sculpture, music, and other media. If the beat generation and modern Western man in general could make the acquaintance of some of these figures through their works, not as highly abstract symbols but as vibrant human spirits, they would not worry so much about whether they themselves were alive or were anybody. We might think of this as personal-cultural therapy. But this sort of thing calls for what might be termed an "applied" branch of the humanities. All of the social 8

The Tragic Sense of Life

(Dover, 1954), p. 263.

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sciences, even anthropology, have their applied branches, which enjoy respectable standing; but "applied literature" or "applied art," for example, sound somehow vulgar. Perhaps we can think of better words. It would seem that the type of personality, generally speaking, which will be best fitted to cope with the stresses of the coming years is one which is flexible enough to face changes without breakdown or paralysis while still holding fast to such values as freedom for the individual to reach his full potentialities, respect for human intelligence, and appreciation of artistic creativeness in one's self and others. Such persons are easier to describe than to create. Yet we shall have more success in forming them in an atmosphere of free and well-balanced application of all of the appropriate knowledge at our disposal than in a setting in which various academic disciplines seem to be competing with each other, with some sulkily withdrawing into isolation. So far as the humanities are concerned, we must seek at once their enhanced cooperation. For certain branches of the humanities have been concerned with the "ideal" man and woman down through the ages. And it would seem also that the times call for increased practice and appreciation of literature and the other arts by the ordinary citizen if he is to maintain his balance in the atomic-electronic era. In the changing and upsetting conditions that are likely to face mankind tomorrow, the rigid, compulsive, insecure, fearful person will be most dangerous to the general welfare. We need people who can manage the future, and their own roles in it, without allowing themselves to be herded in whatever direction like sheep, without breaking into unreasoning mass movements of aggression, without giving way to terror-inspired apathy. Repeated studies have shown that peoples can change their material culture more rapidly than the social and philosophical portions of their mode of life. T h i s charac-

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teristic indicates that we ourselves as well as the other beneficiaries of the new materialism will probably learn to use the new gadgets and techniques while still trying to get along with our respective older forms of social organization, our traditional world views, and our accepted sets of values. Some writers call this "cultural lag." Whatever it is called, it promises to create serious difficulties. If we Americans are going to live with each other in a society transformed in size and technology, one of the first things required is for us to understand our own culture, and particularly our own values. Here again social science and the humanities can and must coöperate. In a complex culture whose roots reach through Europe into the deep soil of Classical antiquity the social scientists alone are not equipped to handle the enormous amount of data or to interpret their subtleties for modern times. Humanists are familiar with the material, but they need practice in focusing the light of their great knowledge onto the rushing stream of modern life, so that this light may help us all to see the enduring currents and to avoid the shallows and whirlpools. I am happy to say that one start in such collaboration between social scientists and scholars in the humanities has been made, with headquarters at the University of Pennsylvania, in the form of the American Studies Association. If we Americans are going to live with the other people of the globe in this confusing new epoch we must redouble our efforts to understand the foreigners' various cultural backgrounds. One of our common faults has been to assume that foreigners see the world much as we do, or that, if they manifestly do not, "there is something wrong with them." Foreign policies based on this notion have led repeatedly to needless difficulties. T h e fact is, however, that the great cultural traditions of Japan, China, India, Russia, and the Islamic areas are not identical with those

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of the West. A l t h o u g h this difference is well k n o w n in academic circles, little has been done to set out the practical implications for the present and the future. W h e n I speak of cultural values, I am concerned not alone with the basic canons of the desirable and undesirable as defined in different cultures—although these are fundamental to understanding and predicting the attitudes, actions, and policies of the people who adhere to them. T h e values of any given culture operate within a c o m p l e x of associated patterns. A m o n g these are the patterns of perception, the way the people of that culture see us and other portions of their universe. Literature and the visual arts are often invaluable reflectors of certain unconscious aspects of a people's world view which the average m e m b e r of the society cannot put into words explicitly. Scholars in the humanities who spend their lives with such materials often confine themselves to what they consider the aesthetic aspects and the artistic technicalities of these productions. W h i l e not neglecting such interests they could, if more broadly oriented and motivated, make invaluable contributions to our knowledge of how foreign peoples make decisions and how they orient their actions. T o mention only one example, I am sure that the authors w o u l d b e the first to admit that the excellent book entitled Themes in French Culture, by two anthropologists, R h o d a M e t r a u x and Margaret Mead, needs to be supplemented by contributions from professional students of French literature and art, scholars w h o have spent their lives acquiring a detailed and profound knowledge of the literary and artistic expressions of the French world view and basic cultural values. M a n y more examples of possibly fruitful collaborations between humanists and cultural analysts and other social scientists could be mentioned. B u t even this brief discussion

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has perhaps indicated that there is no lack of need or opportunity. \Vhy does the gap persist? T o use a currently popular advertising term, it looks as if American graduate schools need a bit of homogenizing. If we can have homogenized milk, why can't we have the contents of the graduate school sufficiently homogenized so that the fats, proteins, and liquids, so to speak, while retaining their identities, are well enough mixed to prevent curdling and to provide well-balanced nourishment with each mouthful? T e a c h e r s and researchers in all the different disciplines and departments of the typical American graduate school are dedicated to the search for truth and to its dissemination to the students under their tutelage. W e have tended to forget that truth does not consist of bits and pieces, shreds and patches, but that on the contrary it is a complex, interrelated whole. As we once more become aware that truth discovered through one line of study inevitably relates to truth reached by other approaches, we shall again find ourselves united and in communication with each other, despite differences in data and techniques of h a n d l i n g them. T h e social sciences and the humanities are all interested in man, his products, and his problems. As w e move into the misnamed "space age," in which the earth becomes more and more crowded, I hope that the students we teach, who will be the experts upon w h o m the n e w generation must rely, will be brought to see their respective specialized truths as part of the total context. If they are to do so, we professors of the present generation will have to teach them. W e ourselves shall have to learn to " t h i n k b i g " and to spend less effort on picayune competitions for funds, prestige, and disciples. Such an enterprise will also require the enlightened cooperation of university administrations, foundations, and other influences u p o n graduate school policy.

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It is perhaps inevitable that, as a cultural anthropologist, I should suggest that we need an ethnological study of a typical American university graduate school as a sociocultural system operating within the larger context of the nation and of Western civilization. During the last few years several such studies of psychiatric hospitals have laid the basis for closing gaps between various specialties on the staff and for greatly improving the therapeutic climate for the patients. I am aware that several universities, including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina, have studied themselves with the help of outside observers and funds. But, in my experience at least, such studies have been mainly concerned with improving and balancing the several departments from professional points of view rather than with the customs, status systems, and forms of social organization that keep departments and divisions aloof from each other. It may be that some new cultural patterns will develop. For instance, one can envisage the organization of a regular seminar of the graduate faculty, held each month or week, in which members present and discuss concrete cases of bridging operations between disciplines, and especially between the social sciences and the humanities. One can also imagine the creation of special professorial chairs whose occupants do not remain comfortably seated but devote their full time to the sometimes dangerous and arduous tasks of bridge building. Other possibilities must be explored. We shall be told that such things take time. Although the pitfalls of unplanned haste should be avoided, I believe that we must move with "all deliberate speed," if we do not want the population, technological, and urbanization explosions—plus the weapons of the peaceful war—to exterminate us and our valued ways of life.

M O D E L S

A N D

Max

A R C H E T Y P E S

Black

Cornell University S C I E N T I S T S O F T E N SPEAK O F USING MODELS B U T SELDOM

PAUSE

to consider the presuppositions and the implications of their practice. I shall find it convenient to distinguish between a n u m b e r of operations, ranging from the familiar a n d trivial to the far-fetched but important, all of which are sometimes called "the use of models." I hope that even this rapid survey of a vast territory may permit a well-grounded verdict on the value of recourse to cognitive models. T o speak of " m o d e l s " in connection with a scientific theory already smacks of the metaphorical. W e r e we called u p o n to provide a perfectly clear and uncontroversial example of a model, in the literal sense of that word, none of us, I imagine, would think of offering Bohr's model of the atom, or a Keynesian model of an economic system. T y p i c a l examples of models in the literal sense of the word might include: the ship displayed in the showcase of a travel agency ("a model of the Queen Mary"), the airplane that emerges from a small boy's construction kit, the Stone A g e village in the museum of Natural History. T h a t is to say, the standard cases are three-dimensional miniatures, more or less "true to scale," of some existing or imagined material object. It will b e convenient to call the real or imaginary thing depicted by a model the original of that model. W e also use the word " m o d e l " to stand for a type of design (the dress designer's " S p r i n g models," the 1959 model F o r d ) — o r to mean some e x e m p l a r (a model husband, a model solution of an equation). T h e senses in which a model 39

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is a type of design—or, on the other hand, something worthy of imitation—can usually be ignored in what follows. It seems arbitrary to restrict the idea of a model to something smaller than its original. A natural extension is to admit magnification, as in a larger-than-life-size likeness of a mosquito. A further natural extension is to admit proportional change of scale in any relevant dimension, such as time. In all such cases, I shall speak of scale models. This label will cover all likenesses of material objects, systems, or processes, whether real or imaginary, that preserve relative proportions. T h e y include experiments in which chemical or biological processes are artificially decelerated ("slow motion experiments") and those in which an attempt is made to imitate social processes in miniature. T h e following points about scale models seem uncontroversial: (ι) A scale model is always a model of something. T h e notion of a scale model is relational and, indeed, asymmetrically so: If A is a scale model of Β, Β is not a scale model of/!. (2) A scale model is designed to serve a purpose, to be a means to some end. It is to show how the ship looks, or how the machine will work, or what law governs the interplay of parts in the original; the model is intended to be enjoyed for its own sake only in the limiting case where the hobbyist indulges a harmless fetishism. (3) A scale model is a representation of the real or imaginary thing for which it stands: its use is for "reading off" properties of the original from the directly presented properties of the model. (4) It follows that some features of the model are irrelevant or unimportant, while others are pertinent and essential, to the representation in question. There is no such

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thing as a perfectly faithful model; only by being unfaithful in some respects can a model represent its original. (5) As with all representations, there are underlying conventions of interpretation—correct ways for "reading" the model. (6) T h e conventions of interpretation rest upon partial identity of properties coupled with invariance of proportionality. In making a scale model, we try on the one hand to make it resemble the original by reproduction of some features (the color of the ship's hull, the shape and rigidity of the airfoil) and on the other hand to preserve the relative proportions between relevant magnitudes. In Peirce's terminology, the model is an icon, literally embodying the features of interest in the original. 1 It says, as it were: "This is how the original is." In making scale models, our purpose is to reproduce, in a relatively manipulable or accessible embodiment, selected features of the "original": we want to see how the new house will look, or to find out how the airplane will fly, or to learn how the chromosome changes occur. We try to bring the remote and the unknown to our own level of middle sized existence.2 There is however something self-defeating in this aim, since change of scale must introduce irrelevance and dis1 " A n Icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses, just the same, whether any such Object actually exists or not. . . . Anything whatever . . . is an Icon of anything, in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it." Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Harvard University Press, 1931-35), II, 247. ' A good example of the experimental use of models is described in Victor P. Starr's article, " T h e General Circulation of the Atmosphere," Scientific American, C X C V (December 1956), 40-45. T h e atmosphere of one hemisphere is represented by water in a shallow rotating pan, dye being added to make the flow visible. When the perimeter of the pan is heated the resulting patterns confirm the predictions made by recent theories about the atmosphere.

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tortion. We are forced to replace living tissue by some inadequate substitute, and sheer change of size may upset the balance of factors in the original. Too small a model of a uranium bomb will fail to explode, too large a reproduction of a housefly will never get off the ground, and the solar system cannot be expected to look like its planetarium model. Inferences from scale model to original are intrinsically precarious and in need of supplementary validation and correction. Let us now consider models involving change of medium. I am thinking of such examples as hydraulic models of economic systems, or the use of electrical circuits in computers. In such cases I propose to speak of analogue models. An analogue model is some material object, system, or process designed to reproduce as faithfully as possible in some new medium the structure or web of relationships in an original. Many of our previous comments about scale models also apply to the new case. T h e analogue model, like the scale model, is a symbolic representation of some real or imaginary original, subject to rules of interpretation for making accurate inferences from the relevant features of the model. T h e crucial difference between the two types of models is in the corresponding methods of interpretation. Scale models, as we have seen, rely markedly upon identity: their aim is to imitate the original, except where the need for manipulability enforces a departure from sheer reproduction. And when this happens the deviation is held to a minimum, as it were: geometrical magnitudes in the original are still reproduced, though with a constant change of ratio. On the other hand, the making of analogue models is guided by the more abstract aim of reproducing the structure of the original. An adequate analogue model will manifest a point-bypoint correspondence between the relations it embodies and

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those embodied in the original: every incidence of a relation in the original must be echoed by a corresponding incidence of a correlated relation in the analogue model. T o put the matter in another way: there must be rules for translating the terminology applicable to the model in such a way as to conserve truth-value. Thus, the dominating principle of the analogue model is what mathematicians call "isomorphism." 3 We can, if we please, regard the analogue model as iconic of its original as we did in the case of the scale model, but if we do so we must remember that the former is "iconic" in a more abstract way than the latter. T h e analogue model shares with its original not a set of features or an identical proportionality of magnitudes but, more abstractly, the same structure or pattern of relationships. Now identity of structure is compatible with the widest variety of content—hence the possibilities for construction of analogue models are endless. T h e remarkable fact that the same pattern of relationships, the same structure, can be embodied in an endless variety of different media makes a powerful and a dangerous thing of the analogue model. T h e risks of fallacious inference from inevitable irrelevancies and distortions in the model are now present in aggravated measure. Any would-be scientific use of an analogue model demands independent confirmation. Analogue models furnish plausible hypotheses, not proofs. I now make something of a digression to consider "mathematical models." 4 This expression has become very popular among social scientists, who will characteristically speak of "mapping" an "object system" upon one or another of a number of "mathematical systems or models." ' F o r a more precise account of isomorphism, see for instance R u d o l f C a r n a p , Introduction to Symbolic Logic (Dover, 1958), p. 7 5 . 4 T h e r e is now a considerable literature on this subject. See K e n n e t h J . A r r o w , Mathematical Models in the Social Sciences (Cowles C o m mission Papers, n.s. no. 48, 1 9 5 2 ) .

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When used unemphatically, "model" in such contexts is often no more than a pretentious substitute for "theory" or "mathematical treatment." Usually, however, there are at least the following three additional suggestions: The original field is thought of as "projected" upon the abstract domain of sets, functions, etc., that is the subject matter of the correlated mathematical theory; thus social forces are said to be "modeled" by relations between mathematical entities. The "model" is conceived to be simpler and more abstract than the original. Often there is a suggestion of the model's being a kind of ethereal analogue model, as if the mathematical equations referred to an invisible mechanism whose operation illustrates or even partially explains the operation of the original social system under investigation. This last suggestion must be rejected as an illusion. T h e procedures involved in using a "mathematical model" seem to be the following: (1) In some original field of investigation, a number of relevant variables are identified, either on the basis of common sense or by reason of more sophisticated theoretical considerations. (For example, in the study of population growth we may decide that variation of population with time depends upon the number of individuals born in that time, the number dying, the number entering the area, and the number leaving. 5 I suppose these choices of variables are made at the level of common sense.) (2) Empirical hypotheses are framed concerning the imputed relations between the selected variables. (In population theory, common sense, supported by statistics, suggests that the numbers of births and deaths during any brief period of time are proportional both to that time and to the initial size of the population.) (3) Simplifications, often drastic, are introduced for the " Further details may be found conveniently in V . A. Mathematical Biology (George G. Harrap 8c Co., 1939).

Kostitsyn,

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sake of facilitating mathematical formulation and manipulation of the variables. (Changes in a population are treated as if they were continuous; the simplest differential equations consonant with the original empirical data are adopted.) (4) A n effort is now made to solve the resulting mathematical equations—or, failing that, to study the global features of the mathematical systems constructed. ( T h e mathematical equations of population theory yield the socalled "logistic function," whose properties can be specified completely. More commonly, the mathematical treatment of social data leads at best to "plausible topology," to use Kenneth Boulding's happy phrase; 8 i.e., qualitative conclusions concerning distributions of maxima, minima, etc. T h i s result is connected with the fact that the original data are in most cases at best ordinal in character.) (5) A n effort is made to extrapolate to testable consequences in the original field. ( T h u s the prediction can be made that an isolated population tends towards a l i m i t i n g size independent of the initial size of that population.) (6) R e m o v i n g some of the initial restrictions imposed upon the component functions in the interest of simplicity (e.g., their linearity) may lead to some increase in generality of the theory. T h e advantages of the foregoing procedures are those usually arising from the introduction of mathematical analysis into any domain of empirical investigation, a m o n g t h e m precision in formulating relations, ease of inference via mathematical calculation, and intuitive grasp of the structures revealed (e.g., the emergence of the "logistic f u n c t i o n " as an organizing and mnemonic device). * "Economics as a Social Science," in The Social Sciences at MidCentury: Essays in Honor of Guy Stanton Ford (Social Science Research Center of the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota,

^δ«)- Ρ· 73·

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T h e attendant dangers are equally obvious. T h e drastic simplifications demanded for success of the mathematical analysis entail a serious risk of confusing accuracy of the mathematics with strength of empirical verification in the original field. Especially important is it to remember that the mathematical treatment furnishes no explanations. Mathematics can be expected to do no more than draw consequences from the original empirical assumptions. If the functions and equations have a familiar form, there may be a background of pure mathematical research readily applicable to the illustration at hand. We may say, if we like, that the pure mathematics provides the form of an explanation, by showing what kinds of function would approximately fit the known data. But causal explanations must be sought elsewhere. In their inability to suggest explanations, "mathematical models" differ markedly from the theoretical models now to be discussed. 7 In order now to form a clear conception of the scientific use of "theoretical models," I shall take as my paradigm Clerk Maxwell's celebrated representation of an electrical field in terms of the properties of an imaginary incompressible fluid. In this instance we can draw upon the articulate reflections of the scientist himself. Here is Maxwell's own account of his procedure: " T h e first process therefore in the effectual study of the science must be one of simplification and reduction of the results of previous investigation to a form in which the mind can grasp them. T h e results of this simplification may take the form of a purely mathematical formula or of a physical hypothesis. In the first case we entirely lose sight of the phenomena to be explained; and though we may trace 7

It is perhaps worth noting that nowadays logicians use "model" to stand for an "interpretation" or "realization" of a formal axiom system. See John G. Kemeny, "Models of Logical Systems," Journal of Symbolic Logic, X I I I (March 1948), 16-30.

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out the consequences of given laws, we can never obtain more extended views of the connexions of the subject. I f , on the other hand, we adopt a physical hypothesis, we see the phenomena only through a medium, and are liable to that blindness to facts and rashness in assumption which a partial explanation encourages. We must therefore discover some method of investigation which allows the mind at every step to lay hold of a clear physical conception, without being committed to any theory founded on the physical science from which that conception is borrowed, so that it is neither drawn aside from the subject in pursuit of analytical subtleties, nor carried beyond the truth by a favourite hypothesis." 8 Later comments of Maxwell s explain what he has in mind: " B y referring everything to the purely geometrical idea of the motion of an imaginary fluid, I hope to attain generality and precision, and to avoid the dangers arising from a premature theory professing to explain the cause of the phenomena. . . . T h e substance here treated of . . . is not even a hypothetical fluid which is introduced to explain actual phenomena. It is merely a collection of imaginary properties which may be employed for establishing certain theorems in pure mathematics in a way more intelligible to many minds and more applicable to physical problems than that in which algebraic symbols alone are used." 9 Points that deserve special notice are Maxwell's emphasis upon obtaining a "clear physical conception" that is both "intelligible" and "applicable to physical problems," his desire to abstain from "premature theory," and, above all, his insistence upon the "imaginary" character of the fluid invoked in his investigations. In his later elaboration of the procedure sketched above, the fluid seems at first to play the " The Scientific Papers of James versity Press, 1890), I, 155-156. 'Ibid.,I, 159-160.

Clerk

Maxwell

(Cambridge Uni-

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part merely of a mnemonic device for grasping mathematical relations more precisely expressed by algebraic equations held in reserve. T h e "exact mental image" 10 he professes to be seeking seems little more than a surrogate for facility with algebraic symbols. Before long, however, Maxwell advances much farther toward ontological commitment. In his paper on action at a distance, he speaks of the "wonderful medium" filling all space, and no longer regards Faraday's lines of force as "purely geometrical conceptions." 11 Now he says forthrightly that they "must not be regarded as mere mathematical abstractions. They are the directions in which the medium is exerting a tension like that of a rope, or rather, like that of our own muscles." 12 Certainly this is no way to talk about a collocation of imaginary properties. T h e purely geometrical medium has become very substantial. A great contemporary of Maxwell is still more firmly committed to the realistic idiom. We find Lord Kelvin saying: " W e must not listen to any suggestion that we are to look upon the luminiferous ether as an ideal way of putting the thing. A real matter between us and the remotest stars I believe there is, and that light consists of real motions of that matter. . . . W e know-the luminiferous ether better than we know any other kind of matter in some particulars. W e know it for its elasticity; we know it in respect to the constancy of the velocity of propagation of light for different periods. . . . Luminiferous ether must be a substance of most extreme simplicity. We might imagine it to be a material whose ultimate property is to be incompressible; to have a definite rigidity for vibrations in times less than a certain limit, and yet to have the absolutely yielding charIbid., II, 360. Ibid., II, 322. »Ibid., II, 323. 10 u

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acter that we recognize in wax-like bodies when the force is continued for a sufficient time." 1 3 T h e r e is certainly a vast difference between treating the ether as a mere heuristic convenience, as Maxwell's first remarks require, and treating it in Kelvin's fashion as "real matter" having definite—though, to be sure, paradoxical— properties independent of our imagination. T h e difference is between thinking of the electrical field as if it were filled with a material medium, and thinking of it as being such a medium. One approach uses a detached comparison reminiscent of simile and argument from analogy; the other requires an identification typical of metaphor. In as if thinking there is a willing suspension of ontological unbelief, and the price paid, as Maxwell insists, is absence of explanatory power. Here we might speak of the use of models as heuristic fictions. In risking existential statements, however, we reap the advantages of an explanation but are exposed to the dangers of self-deception by myths (as the subsequent history of the ether 1 4 sufficiently illustrates). T h e existential use of models seems to me characteristic of the practice of the great theorists in physics. Whether we consider Kelvin's "rude mechanical models," 1 5 Rutherford's solar system, or Bohr's model of the atom, we can hardly avoid concluding that these physicists conceived themselves to be describing the atom as it is, and not merely offering mathematical formulae in fancy dress. In using theoretical " S i r William Thomson, Baltimore Lectures (London, 1904), pp. 8-12. " S e e Sir Edmund Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity (2nd ed.; Τ . Nelson, 1951), I, especially chapter 9: "Models of the Aether." For further discussion of Maxwell's position, see Joseph Turner, "Maxwell on the Method of Physical Analogy," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, VI (1955-56)1 226-238. "Thomson, op. cit., p. 12.

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models, they were not comparing two domains from a position neutral to both. They used language appropriate to the model in thinking about the domain of application: they worked not by analogy, but through and by means of an underlying analogy. Their models were conceived to be more than expository or heuristic devices. Whether the fictitious or the existential interpretation be adopted, there is one crucial respect in which the sense of "model" here in question sharply diverges from those previously discussed in this paper. Scale models and analogue models must be actually put together: a merely "hypothetical" architect's model is nothing at all, and imaginary analogue models will never show us how things work in the large. But theoretical models (whether treated as real or fictitious) are not literally constructed: the heart of the method consists in talking in a certain way. It is therefore plausible to say, as some writers do, that the use of theoretical models consists in introducing a new language or dialect, suggested by a familar theory but extended to a new domain of application. Yet this suggestion overlooks the point that the new idiom is always a description of some definite object or system (the model itself). If there is a change in manner of expression and representation, there is also the alleged depiction of a specific object or system, inviting further investigation. T h e theoretical model need not be built; it is enough that it be described. But freedom to describe has its own liabilities. T h e inventor of a theoretical model is undistracted by accidental and irrelevant properties of the model-object, which must have just the properties he assigns to it; but he is deprived of the controls enforced by the attempt at actual construction. Even the elementary demand for self-consistency may be violated in subtle ways unless independent tests are available; and what is to be meant by the reality of the model becomes mysterious.

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T h o u g h the theoretical model is described but not constructed, the sense of "model" concerned is continuous with the senses previously examined. This becomes clear as soon as we list the conditions for the use of a theoretical model. (1) We have an original field of investigation in which some facts and regularities have been established (in any form, ranging from disconnected items and crude generalizations to precise laws, possibly organized by a relatively wellarticulated theory). (2) A need is felt, either for explaining the given facts and regularities, or for understanding the basic terms applying to the original domain, or for extending the original corpus of knowledge and conjecture, or for connecting it with hitherto disparate bodies of knowledge—in short, a need is felt for further scientific mastery of the original domain. (3) We describe some entities (objects, materials, mechanisms, systems, structures) belonging to a relatively unproblematic, more familiar, or better organized secondary domain. T h e postulated properties of these entities are described in whatever detail seems likely to prove profitable. (4) Explicit or implicit rules of correlation are available for translating statements about the secondary field into corresponding statements about the original field. (5) Inferences from the assumptions made in the secondary field are translated by means of the rules of correlation and then independently checked against known or predicted data in the primary domain. T h e relations between the "described model" and the original domain are like those between an analogue model and its original. Here, as in the earlier case, the key to understanding the entire transaction is the identity of structure that in favorable cases permits assertions made about the secondary domain to yield insight into the original field of interest.

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Reliance u p o n theoretical models may well seem a devious and artificial procedure. T h o u g h the history of science has often shown that the right way to success is to " g o round a b o u t " (as the Boyg advised Peer Gynt), one may well wonder whether the detour need be as great as it is in the use of models. Is the leap from the domain of primary interest to an altogether different domain really necessary? Must w e really go to the trouble of using half-understood metaphors? A r e the attendant risks of mystification and conceptual confusion unavoidable? A n d does not recourse to models smack too much of philosophical fable and literary allegory to b e acceptable in a rational search for the truth? I shall try to show that such natural misgivings can be allayed. T h e severest critic of the method will have to concede that recourse to models yields results. T o become convinced of this, it is unnecessary to examine the great classical instances of large-scale work with models. T h e pragmatic utility of the method can be understood even more clearly in the simpler examples. Consider, for instance, a recently published account of investigations in pure mathematics. 1 6 T h e problem to be solved was that of finding some method for dissecting any rectangle into a set of unequal squares—a problem of no practical importance, to be sure, and likely to interest only those w h o enjoy playing with "mathematical recreations." A c c o r d i n g to the authors' own account of their investigations, the direct path seemed to lead nowhere: trial and error (or " e x p e r i m e n t , " as they call it) and straightforward computation produced no results. T h e decisive breakthrough came w h e n the investigators began to " g o round " Martin Gardner (ed.), "Mathematical Games," Scientific American, C X C I X (November 1958), 136-142. T h e mathematicians were William T . Tutte, C. A. B. Smith, Arthur H. Stone, and R. L. Brooks.

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about." A s they put the matter: " I n the next stage of the research we abandoned experiment for theory. W e tried to represent rectangles by diagrams of different kinds. T h e last of these diagrams . . . suddenly made our problem part of the theory of electrical networks." 17 Here we notice the deliberate introduction of a point-forpoint model. Geometrical lines in the original figure were replaced by electrical terminals, squares by connecting wires through which electrical currents are imagined to flow. By suitable choices of the resistances in the wires and the strengths of the currents flowing through them, a circuit was described conforming to known electrical principles (Kirchoff's Laws). In this way, the resources of a well-mastered theory of electrical networks became applicable to the original geometrical problem. " T h e discovery of this electrical analogy," our authors say, "was important to us because it linked our problem with an established theory. W e could n o w borrow from the theory of electrical networks and obtain formulas for the currents . . . and the sizes of the corresponding component s q u a r e s . " 1 8 T h i s fascinating episode strikingly illustrates the usefulness of theoretical models. It is sometimes said that the virtue of w o r k i n g with models is the replacement of abstractions and mathematical formulas by pictures, or any other form of representation that is readily visualized. B u t the example just mentioned shows that this view emphasizes the w r o n g thing. It is not easier to visualize a network of electrical currents than to visualize a rectangle dissected into component squares: the point of t h i n k i n g about the electric currents is not that we can see or imagine them more easily, but rather that their properties are better known than those of their in"Ibid., p. 136. 18 Ibid., p. j38.

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tended field of application. (And thus it makes perfectly good sense to treat something abstract, even a mathematical calculus, as a theoretical model of something relatively concrete.) T o make good use of a model, we usually need intuitive grasp ("Gestalt knowledge") of its capacities, but so long as we can freely draw inferences from the model, its picturability is of no importance. Whereas Maxwell turned away from the electrical field to represent it by a better known model, subsequent progress in electrical theory now permits us to use the electrical field itself as a model for something else relatively unknown and problematical. It has been said that the model must belong to a more "familiar" realm than the system to which it is applied. T h i s is true enough, if familiarity is taken to mean belonging to a well established and thoroughly explored theory. But the model need not belong to a realm of common experience. It may be as recondite as we please, provided we know how to use it. A promising model is one with implications rich enough to suggest novel hypotheses and speculations in the primary field of investigation. "Intuitive grasp" of the model means a ready control of such implications, a capacity to pass freely from one aspect of the model to another, and has very little to do with whether the model can literally be seen or imagined. T h e case for the use of theoretical models is that the conditions favoring their success are sometimes satisfied; that sometimes it does prove feasible to invent models "better known" than the original subject matter they are intended to illuminate; and that it is often hard to conceive how the research in question could have been brought to fruition without recourse to the model. But there is also a formidable case against the use of theoretical models, which must now be heard.

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N o b o d y has attacked the use of models more eloquently o r more savagely than the great French physicist Pierre D u h e m . Here is a characteristic criticism: " T h e French or G e r m a n physicist conceives, in the space separating two conductors, abstract lines of force having no thickness or real existence, the English physicist materializes these lines and thickens them to the dimensions of a tube which he will fill with vulcanized rubber. In place of a family of ideal forces, conceivable only by reason, he will have a b u n d l e of elastic strings, visible and tangible, firmly glued at both ends to the surfaces of the two conductors, and, w h e n stretched, trying both to contract and to expand. W h e n the two conductors approach each other, he sees the elastic strings drawing closer together; then he sees each of them b u n c h u p and grow large. Such is the famous model of electro-static action designed by Faraday and admired as a work of genius by M a x w e l l and the w h o l e English school." 1 9 Behind such passages as this is a conviction that the nineteenth-century English physicists were corrupting the ideals of science by a b a n d o n i n g clear definitions and a taut system of principles in logical array. " T h e o r y is for h i m [the English physicist] neither an explanation nor a rational classification, b u t a m o d e l of these laws, a model not b u i l t for the satisfying of reason b u t for the pleasure of the imagination. Hence, it escapes the domination of logic." 20 D u h e m m i g h t have tolerated, w i t h a grimace, "those disparities, those incoherencies" 21 h e disliked in the work of his English con" The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener (Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 70. "Ibid., p. 81. a Ibid. Duhem took preference for working with models to be an expression of the English character. He thought the English, unlike the French, typically manifested 'Tesprit de finesse" rather than 'Tesprit g^omitrique."

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temporaries could he have believed that models were fruitful. But he held them to be useless. Oddly enough, Duhem applauds "the use of physical analogues" as "an infinitely valuable thing" and an altogether respectable "method of discovery." He is able to reconcile this approval with his strictures against models by purging reliance upon analogy of all its imaginative power. The two domains to be brought into relation by analogy must antecedently have been formulated as "abstract systems," and then, as he says, the demonstration of "an exact correspondence" will involve nothing "that can astonish the most rigorous logician." 22 This is a myopic conception of scientific method; if much in scientific investigation offends the "rigorous logician," the truth may be that the rigor is out of place. T o impose upon the exercise of scientific imagination the canons of a codified and well ordered logical system is to run the risk of stifling research. Duhem's allegations of lack of coherence and clarity in the physical theories he was attacking must not be taken lightly. But this does not require us to treat the use of models as an aberration of minds too feeble to think about abstractions without visual aids. It is instructive to compare Duhem's intemperate polemic with the more measured treatment of the same topic by a recent writer. In his valuable book, Scientific Explanation, Professor R . B. Braithwaite allows that "there are great advantages in thinking about a scientific theory through the medium of thinking about a model for it," but at once adds as his reason that ' to do this avoids the complications and difficulties involved in having to think explicitly about the language or other form of symbolism by which the theory is represented." 23 That is to say that he regards the use of models as a substitute for the available alternative "Ibid., pp. 96-97. " Scientific Explanation

(Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 92.

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of taking the scientific theory "straight." T h e dominating notion in Braithwaite's conception of scientific theory is that of a "deductive scientific system" defined as "a set of hypotheses . . . arranged in such a way that from some of the hypotheses as premises all the other hypotheses logically follow." 24 T h e ideal form of scientific theory, for Braithwaite as for Duhem, is essentially that of Euclid's Elements —or, rather, Euclid as reformed by Hilbert. It is natural, accordingly, for Braithwaite to agree with Duhem in attaching little value to the use of models in science. Braithwaite says that "the price of the employment of models is eternal vigilance," 25 yet as much could be said for the employment of deductive systems or anything else. T h e crucial issue is whether the employment of models is to be regarded as a prop for feeble minds (as Duhem thought) or a convenient short cut to the consideration of deductive systems (as Braithwaite seems to think) —in short as surrogate for some other procedure—or as a rational method having its own canons and principles. Should we think of the use of models as belonging to psychology—like doodles in a margin—or as having its proper place in the logic of scientific investigation? I have been arguing that models are sometimes not epiphenomena of research, but play a distinctive and irreplaceable part in scientific investigation: models are not disreputable understudies for mathematical formulas. It may be useful to consider this central issue from another point of view. T o many, the use of models in science has strongly resembled the use of metaphors. One writer says, " W e are forced to employ models when, for one reason or another, we cannot give a direct and complete description in the language we normally use. Ordinarily, when words fail us, we have recourse to analogy and metaphor. " Ibid., p. is. 'Ibid., p. 93.

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T h e model functions as a more general kind of metaphor." 28 Certainly there is some similarity between the use of a model and the use of metaphor—perhaps we should say, of a sustained and systematic metaphor. And the crucial question about the autonomy of the method of models is paralleled by an ancient dispute about the translatability of metaphors. Those who see a model as a mere crutch are like those who consider metaphor a mere decoration or ornament. But there are powerful and irreplaceable uses of metaphor not adequately described by the old formula of "saying one thing and meaning another." 27 A memorable metaphor has the power to bring two separate domains into cognitive and emotional relation by using language directly appropriate to the one as a lens for seeing the other; the implications, suggestions, and supporting values entwined with the literal use of the metaphorical expression enable us to see a new subject-matter in a new way. T h e extended meanings that result, the relations between initially disparate realms created, can neither be antecedently predicted nor subsequently paraphrased in prose. We can comment upon the metaphor, but the metaphor itself neither needs nor invites explanation and paraphrase. Metaphorical thought is a distinctive mode of achieving insight, not to be construed as an ornamental substitute for plain thought. Much the same can be said about the role of models in scientific research. If the model were invoked after the work of abstract formulation had already been accomplished, it would be at best a convenience of exposition. But the " Ε. H. Hutten, "The Role of Models in Physics," British Journal the Philosophy of Science, IV (1953-54), 289. 17 For elaboration of this and related points, see Max Black, "Metaphor," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LV (1954-55), 273-294.

for

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memorable models of science are "speculative instruments," to borrow I. A . Richards' happy title. 28 T h e y , too, b r i n g a b o u t a w e d d i n g of disparate subjects, by a distinctive operation of transfer of the implications of relatively well organized cognitive fields. A n d as w i t h other weddings, their outcomes are unpredictable. Use of a particular model may a m o u n t to nothing more than a strained and artificial description of a domain sufficiently known otherwise. B u t it may also help us to notice what otherwise w o u l d be overlooked, to shift the relative emphasis attached to d e t a i l s — in short, to see new connections. A dissenting critic might be w i l l i n g to agree that models are useful in the ways I have stated, and yet still harbor reservations about their rationality. " Y o u have compared the use of models in science to the use of metaphors," I imagine him saying, "yet y o u cannot seriously contend that scientific investigation requires metaphorical language. T h a t a model may lead to insight not otherwise attainable is just a fact of psychology. T h e content of the theory that finally emerges is wholly and adequately expressed by mathematical equations, supplemented by rules for coordination with the physical world. T o count the model as an intrinsic part of the investigation is as plausible as including pencil sharpening in scientific research. Y o u r inflated claims threaten to debase the hard-won standards of scientific clarity and accuracy." T h i s objection treats the relation between the model and the formal theory by w h i c h it is eventually replaced as causal; it claims that the model is n o more than a de facto contrivance for leading scientists to a deductive system. I cannot accept this view of the relation between model and theory. W e have seen that the successful m o d e l must b e * Speculative Instruments

(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955).

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isomorphic with its domain of application. So there is a rational basis for using the model. In stretching the language by which the model is described in such a way as to fit the new domain, we pin our hopes upon the existence of a c o m m o n structure in both fields. If the hope is fulfilled, there will have been an objective ground for the analogical transfer. For we call a mode of investigation rational w h e n it has a rationale; that is to say, when we can find reasons which justify what we do and that allow for articulate appraisal and criticism. T h e putative isomorphism between model and field of application provides such a rationale and yields such standards of critical judgment. W e can determine the validity of a given model by checking the extent of its isomorphism with its intended application. In appraising models as good or bad, we need not rely on the sheerly pragmatic test of fruitfulness in discovery; we can, in principle at least, determine the "goodness" of their "fit." W e may deal with any residual qualms about the propriety of condoning metaphorical description in scientific research by stressing the limitations of any comparison between model and metaphor. T h e term " m e t a p h o r " is best restricted to relatively brief statements, and if we wished to draw upon the traditional terms of rhetoric, we might better compare use of models with allegory or fable. But none of these comparisons will stand m u c h strain. Use of theoretical models resembles the use of metaphors in r e q u i r i n g analogical transfer of a vocabulary. Metaphor and model-making reveal new relationships; both are attempts to pour new content into old bottles. B u t a metaphor operates largely with commonplace implications. Y o u need only proverbial knowledge, as it were, to have your metaphor understood; b u t the maker of a scientific model must have prior control of a well-knit scientific theory if he is to do more than hang tin attractive picture on an algebraic

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formula. Systematic complexity of the source of the model and capacity for analogical development are of the essence. As Stephen T o u l m i n says: " I t is in fact a great virtue of a good model that it does suggest further questions, taking us beyond the phenomena from which we began, and tempts us to formulate hypotheses which turn out to be experimentally fertile. . . . Certainly it is this suggestiveness, and systematic deployability, that makes a good model something more than a simple metaphor." 29 I have tried to consider various senses of "model" in a systematic order, proceeding from the familiar construction of miniatures to the making of scale-models in a more generalized way, and then to "analogue-models" and "mathematical models," until we reached the impressive but mysterious uses of "theoretical models," where mere description of an imaginary but possible structure sufficed to facilitate scientific research. Now I propose to take one last step by considering cases where we have, as it were, an implicit or submerged model operating in a writer's thought. What I have in mind is close to what Stephen C. Pepper meant by "root metaphors." T h i s is his explanation of the notion: " T h e method in principle seems to be this: A man desiring to understand the world looks about for a clue to its comprehension. He pitches upon some area of commonsense fact and tries if he cannot understand other areas in terms of this one. T h e original area becomes then his basic analogy or root metaphor. H e describes as best he can the characteristics of this area, or, if you will, discriminates its structure. A list of its structural characteristics becomes his basic concepts of explanation and description. We call them a set of categories. In terms of these categories he proceeds " The Philosophy PP· 38-39·

of Science (Hutchinson's Universal Library, 1953),

BOTH

62

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to study all o t h e r areas of fact w h e t h e r u n c r i t i c i z e d o r prev i o u s l y criticized. H e u n d e r t a k e s to i n t e r p r e t all facts in terms of these categories. A s a result of t h e i m p a c t of these o t h e r facts u p o n his categories, he may q u a l i f y a n d r e a d j u s t the categories, so that a set of categories c o m m o n l y c h a n g e s a n d develops. Since the basic a n a l o g y o r r o o t normally

metaphor

(and p r o b a b l y at least in part necessarily) arises

o u t of c o m m o n sense, a great deal of d e v e l o p m e n t a n d ref i n e m e n t of a set of categories is r e q u i r e d if they are to p r o v e a d e q u a t e f o r a h y p o t h e s i s of u n l i m i t e d scope. S o m e r o o t m e t a p h o r s p r o v e m o r e fertile than others, h a v e g r e a t e r p o w e r of e x p a n s i o n a n d a d j u s t m e n t . T h e s e s u r v i v e in c o m parison w i t h the others a n d g e n e r a t e the r e l a t i v e l y a d e q u a t e w o r l d theories."

30

P e p p e r is t a l k i n g a b o u t h o w m e t a p h y s i c a l systems ( " w o r l d hypotheses," as h e calls t h e m ) arise; b u t his r e m a r k s h a v e w i d e r a p p l i c a t i o n . Use of a d o m i n a t i n g system of c o n c e p t s to describe a n e w r e a l m of a p p l i c a t i o n by a n a l o g i c a l e x t e n sion seems typical of m u c h theorizing. " A n y area f o r investigation, so l o n g as it lacks p r i o r concepts to g i v e it s t r u c t u r e a n d an express t e r m i n o l o g y

with

w h i c h it can b e m a n a g e d , appears to the i n q u i r i n g m i n d i n c h o a t e — e i t h e r a b l a n k , or an elusive a n d t a n t a l i z i n g conf u s i o n . O u r usual recourse is, m o r e o r less d e l i b e r a t e l y , to cast a b o u t f o r objects w h i c h offer parallels to d i m l y sensed aspects of the n e w s i t u a t i o n , to use the b e t t e r k n o w n

to

e l u c i d a t e the less k n o w n , to discuss the i n t a n g i b l e i n t e r m s of the t a n g i b l e . T h i s analogical p r o c e d u r e seems characteristic of m u c h

intellectual

enterprise.

There

is a d e a l

of

w i s d o m in the p o p u l a r l o c u t i o n f o r ' w h a t is its n a t u r e ? ' n a m e l y : ' W h a t ' s it like?' W e t e n d to describe the n a t u r e of s o m e t h i n g in similes a n d m e t a p h o r s , and the v e h i c l e s of these r e c u r r e n t figures, w h e n analyzed, o f t e n t u r n o u t t o b e " World

Hypotheses

(University of California Press, 1942), pp. 91-92.

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the attributes of an implicit analogue through which we are viewing the object we describe." 31 Here no specific structure or system is postulated by the theorist—there is not even a suppressed or implicit model. A system of concepts is used analogically, but there is no question of a definite explanation of given phenomena or laws. For reasons already given, I shall not follow Pepper in speaking of "metaphors." For want of a better term, I shall speak of "conceptual archetypes" or, more briefly, of "archetypes." 3 2 Others have perhaps had a similar idea in mind when they spoke of "ultimate frames of reference" or "ultimate presuppositions." By an archetype I mean a systematic repertoire of ideas by means of which a given thinker describes, by analogical extension, some domain to which those ideas do not immediately and literally apply. Thus, a detailed account of a particular archetype would require a list of key words and expressions, with statements of their interconnections and their paradigmatic meanings in the field from which they were originally drawn. This might then be supplemented by analysis of the ways in which the original meanings become extended in their analogical uses. A striking illustration of the influence of an archetype upon a theorist's work is to be found in the writings of Kurt Lewin. Ironically enough, he formally disclaims any intention of using models. " W e have tried," he says, "to avoid developing elaborate 'models'; instead we have tried to represent the dynamic relations between the psychological facts by mathematical constructs at a sufficient level of n

Μ. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 31-32. M T h e term is used in a rather different sense by literary critics as, for example, in Maud Bodkin's well known Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1934).

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generality." 33 W e l l , there may be no specific models envisaged; yet any reader of Lewin's papers must be impressed by the degree to which he employs a vocabulary indigenous to physical theory. W e repeatedly encounter such words as "field," "vector," "phase-space," "tension," "force," "boundary," " f l u i d i t y " — v i s i b l e symptoms of a massive archetype awaiting to be reconstructed by a sufficiently patient critic. In this I see nothing to be deplored on the ground of general principles of sound method. Competent specialists must appraise the distinctive strengths and weaknesses of L e w i n ' s theories; but an onlooker may venture to record his impression that Lewin's archetype, confused though it may be in detail, is sufficiently rich in implicative power to be a useful speculative instrument. It is surely no mere coincidence that Lewin's followers have been stimulated into making all manner of interesting empirical investigations that bear the stamp of their master's archetype. N o w if an archetype is sufficiently fruitful, we may be confident that logicians and mathematicians will eventually reduce the harvest to order. T h e r e will always be competent technicians who, in Lewin's words, can be trusted to build the highways "over which the streamlined vehicles of a highly mechanized logic, fast and efficient, can reach every important point on fixed tracks." 34 But clearing intellectual jungles is also a respectable occupation. Perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra; and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra. Of course, there is an ever-present and serious risk that the archetype will be used metaphysically, so that its consequences will be permanently insulated from empirical disproof. T h e more persuasive the archetype, the greater the 83 Kurt Lewin, Field 1 9 5 1 ) , p . 21. mIbid., p. 3.

Theory

in Social Science

(Harper & Bros.,

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danger of its becoming a self-certifying myth. B u t a good archetype can yield to the demands of experience; while it channels its master's thought, it need not do so inflexibly. T h e imagination must not be confused with a strait jacket. If I have been on the right track in my diagnosis of the part played in scientific method by models and archetypes, some interesting consequences follow for the relations between the sciences and the humanities. A l l intellectual pursuits, however different their aims and methods, rely firmly upon such exercises of the imagination as I have been recalling. Similar archetypes may play their parts in different disciplines; a sociologist's pattern of thought may also be the key to understanding a novel. So perhaps those interested in excavating the presuppositions and latent archetypes of scientists may have something to learn from the industry of literary critics. W h e n the understanding of scientific models and archetypes comes to be regarded as a reputable part of scientific culture, the gap between the sciences and the humanities will have been partly filled. For exercise of the imagination, with all its promise and its dangers, provides a common ground. If I have so much emphasized the importance of scientific models and archetypes, it is because of a conviction that the imaginative aspects of scientific thought have in the past been too much neglected. For science, like the humanities, like literature, is an affair of the imagination.

MATHEMATICS A N D THE SOCIAL SCIENCES S. S. Wilks Princeton University A

LOT OF M A T H E M A T I C A L THINKING A N D M E T H O D O L O G Y

HAS

spread into the social sciences in recent years. W h i l e mathematics has provided powerful tools for tackling social science problems in many instances, there are numerous cases where a layman in the social sciences like m y s e l f — m y specialty is mathematical statistics—finds it extremely difficult to assess the value to social science of the mathematical approaches which have been taken to some problems. I hasten to say that such doubts, I am convinced, w o u l d resolve themselves one way or the other in the minds of those w h o have a working knowledge of both social science and mathematics. In this paper I shall first, as a matter of background, try to give a brief description of the development w h i c h has taken place in recent years in the mathematical sciences. I believe this is necessary in order that we may m o r e f u l l y appreciate the current movement of the mathematical sciences into the social sciences. By mathematical sciences I mean the collection of all branches of pure and applied mathematics. I shall then narrow the discussion to the growth of mathematics in the social sciences with particular reference to economics, psychology, and sociology. T h e n I shall take a look at the various mathematical sciences w h i c h seem to be most relevant to social science problems. Finally, I shall discuss briefly some problems of mathematical training in the social sciences which seem to m e to be pressing for solution. D u r i n g the past twenty-five or thirty years, and especially 66

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since W o r l d W a r II, there has been a phenomenal growth in the mathematical sciences which has made itself felt not only in some of the social sciences but in the biological sciences and the earth sciences, not to mention its intensified impact on the physical sciences and engineering, the fields which have traditionally benefited from mathematics. T h e quickest way to present a sketch of this growth, I think, is in terms of the birth and growth of new societies strongly concerned with mathematical science. Twenty-five years ago the stereotyped image of mathematics was that of a subject some people learned in order to teach others, and others learned as a tool to be used in physics and engineering, where mathematics had had a long history of application. T h i s image was not far from the truth. It would have been almost strictly true except for the existence of several hundred actuaries—the mathematicians of the life insurance business. A t that time three mathematical organizations were in existence: the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, founded respectively in 1894, 1915, and in 1920. T h e s e three societies were and still are devoted mainly to pure mathematical research, college mathematics teaching, and secondary school mathematics teaching, respectively. T h e i r c o m b i n e d membership a quarter of a century ago was about 9,000 and nearly all their members were mathematics teachers. W h i l e these societies have themselves now grown to memberships of about 6,000, 8,000, and 16,000 respectively, we have witnessed since 1931 the organization of ten new societies strongly concerned with the application of the mathematical sciences. T h e first to be formed was the Econometric Society in 1931, whose members, now n u m b e r i n g over 1,600, are interested in economic research with n o inhibitions regarding the application of mathematical and statistical methods. In 1935 three new societies were organ-

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ized: the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Psychometric Society, and the Association for Symbolic Logic. These societies now have approximately ι ,900, 500, and 600 members respectively. The mathematical interests of the members of these groups are perhaps sufficiently well-described by the names of the societies, although I shall have more to say about the Psychometric Society later. We find after an eleven-year lapse a new series of organizations with mathematical interests coming into existence. In 1946 the American Society for Quality Control was organized by industrial statisticians and statistically minded engineers for the development and promotion of statistical methods of controlling the quality of manufactured products. It now has about 12,000 members. T h e Biometrie Society was formed in 1947 to cultivate mathematical and statistical methods in the biological sciences. Present membership: about 1,400. In the same year the Association for Computing Machinery was founded. Its more than 3,000 members are concerned with the mathematical and electronic problems of the design, construction, and operation of high-speed computers. In 1952 the Operations Research Society of America was formed by persons interested in the use of scientific methods in the study and analysis of operations of large business, industrial, government, and military enterprises. The methods which engage the interest of the 2,200 members of this group are heavily loaded with mathematical and statistical analysis, as any reader of their journal will discover. As an organized field of activity, operations research was literally born during the war in the form of small groups of scientists who, looking toward the improvement of strategy, tactics, and performance of men and equipment in combat, studied and analyzed military operations. In the same year, 1952, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics was formed. This group of more than 1,500 members is

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interested in the more strictly mathematical problems of industry and scientific research. Finally, I should mention a society with aims similar to those of the Operations Research Society; namely, the Institute of Management Sciences, which was organized in 1953 and now has about 1,500 members. T h i s group is concerned with the application of scientific methods, largely mathematical and statistical, to pricing, inventory control, production scheduling, renewal and replacement of equipment, plant location, and similar problems of business and industrial management. These new societies are bridge organizations between the mathematical sciences and other disciplines. T h e y are being highly influential in the cross-fertilization of mathematics and various substantive fields which until recent years were hardly touched by mathematics. In each case a society has been formed by mathematical experts with strong substantive interests on the one hand and substantive experts with strong mathematical interests on the other who were mutually interested in the application of mathematical methods to problem areas of a particular subject-matter field. T w o of these new societies lie clearly within the social sciences; namely, the Econometric Society and the Psychometric Society. T h e most sophisticated applications of mathematical and statistical methods to be found anywhere in the social sciences are printed in the pages of the official journals of these two societies. T w o others among these new societies—namely, the Operations Research Society and the Institute of Management Sciences—are concerned with some problem areas of interest to social scientists. Now let us examine some of the areas in the social sciences where mathematical methods are becoming the order of the day. T h e r e are three major areas and several minor ones. T h e first major area is econometrics—the application of the mathematical sciences to economics. Before the

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founding of the Econometric Society in 1931 most of the mathematical models in economics were static models; that is, models to describe equilibria of economic phenomena at a given instant in time. These models usually reduced to the study of rather simple mathematical functions of one or more economic variables including such items as quantity of goods, price, and profits—the problem often being to maximize or minimize the function subject to certain side conditions. Few mathematical tools beyond calculus were required for these models. T h e y were set up in an attempt to sharpen and clarify certain classical economic concepts. But I am afraid that very little attention was paid to the question of whether these models realistically described any economic phenomena. T h e y were rarely brought face to face with the economic facts of life. I do not want to imply that there was no realistic quantitative economic research in those days. T h e r e was a great deal of analysis of economic statistics and there were time series for descriptive purposes, both making use of classical statistical smoothing and averaging operations to reduce masses of data. In the last twenty-five years it has become recognized that economic quantities and the relationships among them are so dependent on time that virtually no mathematical model can be realistic unless time is taken into account. T h u s we now find many of the newer mathematical models of economic behavior to be dynamic in nature. T h e y are usually more complicated than static models since all variables and relationships among variables now become functions of an additional variable, time. Various kinds of mathematical machinery ranging from traditional statistical smoothing and regression methods to stochastic difference equations and systems of differential equations are utilized in these models. It is particularly noteworthy that more and more consideration is being given to the question of how effec-

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tively these dynamic models will actually describe economic phenomena and provide valid predictions about them. More recently completely new mathematical approaches such as von Neuraan and Morgenstern's game theory and Leontief's input-output analysis have been developed for the study of certain problems of economic behavior. Game theory has provided a completely fresh breakthrough on methods of analyzing joint actions of two or more competitors. Mathematical methods are now being used more naturally as an integral part of attacks on certain kinds of economic problems than ever before. T h e second of the mathematically most mature areas of social science is psychometrics—the application of mathematical methods to psychological problems. T h e earliest research in this field was done nearly a hundred years ago by Fechner in connection with the measurement and scaling of psychophysical phenomena. T h e n during the last thirty or forty years came the work of Spearman, Kelley, Thurstone, Hull, and others on the development of psychological test theory, psychological factor analysis, and learning theory. Since the formation of the Psychometric Society in 1935 research in this field has progressed steadily and with a kit of good mathematical tools such as matrix algebra, correlation theory, and multivariate statistical analysis. Within recent years, under the leadership of Thurstone, Lazarsfeld, Guttman, Gulliksen, and others, there has been a strong revival of interest in scaling analysis. A n excellent book by Torgerson has just appeared on this subject. Completely new mathematical approaches have been made in recent years to classical psychometric problems. For example, Luce has made an important new attack on the theory of choice behavior which has important implications not only for scaling analysis in psychometrics but for utility theory in econometrics and, more generally, for decision theory. Bush and Mosteller, Estes, and Miller have developed a promis-

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i n g n e w probabilistic a p p r o a c h to l e a r n i n g theory. O n e of the most i m p o r t a n t features of m a t h e m a t i c a l model-buildi n g i n psychometrics is that strong attention is b e i n g g i v e n to the matter of testing the models f o r faithfulness

to

reality. T h e third m a j o r social science area in w h i c h the mathematical sciences are b e g i n n i n g to play a significant r o l e is w h a t w e may expect to b e called s o c i o m e t r i c s — t h e q u a n t i tative w i n g of sociology. T h e d e v e l o p m e n t of this area seems to be f o l l o w i n g a pattern similar to that of econometrics and psychometrics except f o r a fifteen- to twenty-year lag. A s yet n o sociometric society has b e e n formed, a l t h o u g h does exist a j o u r n a l called Sociometry.

there

Research activities

w h i c h seem to b e n a t u r a l candidates f o r the d o m a i n

of

sociometrics i n c l u d e the m o r e mathematical and statistical aspects of d e m o g r a p h y , p u b l i c o p i n i o n a n d attitude analysis, g r o u p dynamics, a n d social organization. T h e

mathe-

matical methods i n v o l v e d in sociometric p r o b l e m s are thus far d o m i n a t e d b y descriptive statistical analysis of attributes of people, families, social groups, and o t h e r objects u n d e r study, and of relations b e t w e e n attributes. T h e results of such analysis show u p i n statistical tables, graphs and charts, a n d in conclusions d r a w n f r o m them. It w i l l b e some years b e f o r e mathematical m o d e l - b u i l d i n g becomes generally as prevalent and as sophisticated in sociometrics as in econometrics and psychometrics. O n e of the difficulties seems to b e that, e x c e p t possibly f o r d e m o g r a p h y and o n e or t w o o t h e r areas, m e a s u r e m e n t processes are n o t yet as h i g h l y d e v e l o p e d in sociometrics as in the other t w o social science fields.

B u t in spite of less m a t u r e m e a s u r e m e n t processes,

some g o o d m a t h e m a t i c a l attacks are b e i n g m a d e in sociometrics. Lazarsfeld's latent structure analysis;

Anderson's

stochastic models f o r t i m e changes in attitudes; Rashevsky's social behavior models; Bush's k i n s h i p models; G u t t m a n ' s attitude

scaling theory;

and

Blumen,

Kogan,

and

Mc-

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Carthy's stochastic labor mobility models are all examples of ingenious and productive mathematical approaches to current sociometric problems. Looking into the social sciences beyond econometrics, psychometrics, and sociometrics we find very few instances of the use of mathematical methods. One finds statistical studies of voting behavior now and then in the political science journals. I imagine that if we had a decent national system for collecting voting statistics there would emerge a sizable community of political science scholars with strong interests in the analysis of voting behavior by mathematical and statistical methods. I would also venture to believe that such an effort would result in some good solid contributions to political science. Occasional excursions into rudimentary symbolic logic can be found in journals of law and jurisprudence. T h e historians seem to be getting along very well so far without mathematical methods, although, as I shall mention later, I do not think they will remain untouched by highspeed data processing technology. A field which seems to lie at least partly in the social sciences and to be vulnerable to mathematics is linguistics. Chomsky, for example, has shown how to formalize linguistics with a mathematics-like precision. I would now like to look briefly at mathematics in the social sciences from the point of view of the mathematical methods involved. I think there is no doubt that the most widely used branch of mathematics in the social sciences at the present time is mathematical statistics. In the most elementary mathematical approaches to social science problems, the most prevalent methods are those of descriptive statistics which use such devices as means, standard deviations, frequency distributions, and correlation coefficients. Sampling, randomization, experiment design, curve fitting, regression

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analysis, analysis of variance, testing the adequacy of mathematical models for prediction purposes—all of these a n d many others constitute the tools of mathematical statistics, and we find them throughout the social sciences w h e r e mathematical methods are used. Differential and integral calculus and differential equations are of fundamental importance in the mathematical model-building business, especially in econometrics. L i n e a r algebra and matrices are basic tools for multidimensional analysis and have been extensively used in econometrics and psychometrics. T h e y are also important in connection with the stochastic models which are appearing more and more frequently in the social sciences. In order for the social scientist to set u p and operate stochastic models he needs a greater knowledge of probability theory than in the past. In studying the structures of social groups and related problems, even in those fields where measurement processes are still in their infancy, the concepts of sets and operations on sets, which form the basis of modern abstract algebra, will become increasingly important. T h e methods of linear programming are indispensable in game theory, input-output analysis, job assignment analysis, decision theory, and other modern problems in the social sciences. T h e r e is a completely new field of mathematical science w h i c h is already playing an important role in social science investigations and which I am confident will have an even greater impact in the future. I refer to modern high-speed digital computing and data processing. Modern c o m p u t i n g machines are now solving large systems of equations and processing huge masses of data in a matter of minutes which were intolerably time-consuming only a few years ago. T h e s e machines bring many problems within the range of solution which until now could only be contemplated because

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of computational infeasibility. T h e computational and data processing capabilities of modern computers now make it possible to begin tackling difficult problems by Monte Carlo methods; that is, by setting up a working model of a system in which the known essentials of the behaviors of individual elements in the system are simulated, appropriate machine computations or "observations" being made on each element as it goes through the simulated behavior. T h e possibilities of such Monte Carlo procedures when understood and effectively used in terms of machine operations could, in some cases, yield results on social science problems too intractable or costly for full-scale experimental or observational methods. These methods are already being used on difficult problems in physical science. A great deal of thinking is now going on concerning the possibilities of using high-speed data processing systems for the cataloguing and rapid retrieval of information. If this can be accomplished, even to a moderate degree, social science researchers, especially in history and political science, as well as some scholars in the humanities, may find the method highly valuable in reducing time spent in the search for and collation of material. It is believed by authorities that high-speed machine methods for translating one language into another are not far away. T h e preceding remarks may leave some with the impression that I believe anyone intending to go into research in economics, psychology, or sociology must get into it loaded with a working knowledge of calculus, differential equations, matrix algebra, modern abstract algebra, mathematical statistics, probability, linear programming, and highspeed digital computing and data processing. If so, I would like to correct the impression by making two remarks. I n the first place, I do not need to emphasize here that economics, psychology, and sociology are enormous fields in which great segments are in exploratory and descriptive

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stages not yet amenable to fruitful mathematical analysis. Not only that, but some areas may never lend themselves to sensible mathematical attacks. In the second place, whenever I have referred to segments of economics, psychology, and sociology where mathematical science is effective I have carefully called them econometrics, psychometrics, and sociometrics. These are still fairly small areas relative to their respective mother disciplines, but they are increasing in size. Even though these three sub-disciplines are relatively small, their contributions to the development of the mother disciplines are already crucially important and will become even more so in the future. T h e researchers in these subdisciplines, working in close collaboration with experimental or observational investigators in economics, psychology, and sociology, are playing indispensable roles in making major research breakthroughs in these social sciences. It is through such collaboration that scientific laws and systems are constructed from bodies of empirical knowledge which, in turn, suggest fresh directions of empirical investigation. In my opinion this collaboration will continue almost certainly in a more systematic and accentuated form. T h e roles of these mathematically equipped social scientists are entirely similar to those played by mathematical physicists in the community of physicists. Because of the increasingly vital part researchers in these three sub-disciplines will play in the development of the social sciences, I think it is extremely important for social scientists to be seriously concerned about the mathematical training of future researchers in the three sub-disciplines. In my opinion these future researchers really do need a substantial knowledge of the various fields of mathematics I mentioned above. Judging from the writings of the researchers in econometrics, psychometrics, and sociometrics, I think it is accurate to say that most of them do, in fact, possess a sound working knowledge of a wide range of mathematical methods. On

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the other hand, one finds that many of the best research men in this group received their mathematical training while preparing for careers in physics, mathematics, engineering, or some other discipline which has traditionally required strong mathematical training, and that they later decided to go into social science. These researchers have all suffered the handicap of having to learn the substantive content of their chosen field of social science late in their careers. This recruiting process, of course, will continue to supply good mathematical social scientists, but not enough of them. In view of the key roles which these researchers will play in the future development of economics, psychology, and sociology, I believe these three communities of social scientists have a deep obligation to take direct responsibility to see that social science students themselves have opportunity and encouragement—in fact, that they are required—to take adequate training in the mathematical sciences along with their social science training. In recent years a considerable amount of effort has been made to increase the mathematical preparation of potential social science researchers. Under the able and energetic leadership of W. G. Madow, the Social Science Research Council Committee on Mathematical Training for Social Scientists has been very effective in helping to raise the mathematical competence of young social scientists through conferences, summer institutes, and the preparation of special materials. The work of the Committee has stimulated social scientists in some universities to set up systematic programs of mathematical training for social science students. Much of this work, however, is conducted at the graduate level for students many of whom lack sufficient undergraduate training in mathematics. The problem requires a more fundamental attack. T h e basic problem, it seems to me, is to develop a required program in the mathematical sciences for all students

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intending to g o into economics, psychology, and sociology w h i c h would consist of a minimal set of perhaps three or f o u r one-semester courses for the vast majority of students interested in these fields, to be followed by additional courses for those with greater interest and aptitude in mathematics. T h e s e courses w o u l d be taken along with a program of social science courses. Such a c u r r i c u l u m w o u l d provide a broad base for selecting those students in economics, psychology, and sociology with the highest ability in mathematical science to go on to graduate study and research in econometrics, psychometrics, and sociometrics. Students, after taking the minimal part of the mathematics program, would drop out as their mathematical abilities and interests dictate. T h e relatively few social science researchers w h o are finally selected by such a system will, in my opinion, be well enough equipped and adequate in n u m b e r s to do mathematical and theoretical pioneering on the frontiers of econometrics, psychometrics, and sociometrics. T h e y will have a combination of social science substantive knowledge and facility in mathematical thinking which will enable them to penetrate new and difficult problems amenable to mathematical attack more naturally and effectively than any researcher without such a combination. T h i s combination is needed more than anything else in b u i l d i n g scientific systems from masses of empirical knowledge in a given field. A n d those students w h o drop o u t along the way will be better equipped to use elementary mathematical or quantitative methods in whatever careers they enter than they are under the present laissez-faire system of mathematics training in the social sciences. T h e general pattern of the proposed program is similar to that followed by students in engineering and the physical sciences. T o establish such a program, satisfactorily strong collaboration and backing is necessary from both the communities of social science and mathematics similar to that

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which has long existed between the communities of engineering and physical sciences on the one hand and mathematics on the other. A variety of efforts have been made in recent years to develop some of the courses f o r such a program as I have described above. Most of them, however, are experimental in character. It will probably take a number of years, even under conditions of full collaboration between the social scientists and mathematicians, to develop a satisfactory program of mathematics courses f o r social science students. T h e traditional mathematics curriculum which was developed with particular reference to the needs of physical science and engineering students is in a state of ferment at the present time, and can be expected to change considerably over the next five to ten years. T h e Committee on Undergraduate Program of the Mathematical

the

Association

of America has been working on this matter for several years and is now being reorganized in order to tackle the problem on a broader front, one which will cover the mathematical interests of the social and biological sciences as w e l l as those of the physical sciences and engineering. W h e t h e r a single program of basic courses can be developed to meet the mathematical needs of students in all of these categories remains to be seen. I have some doubts that this can be accomplished in the reasonably near future, and hence that it may be necessary to have two parallel programs. In conclusion, let m e say that mathematical

methods

which began spreading into the social sciences on a significant scale only a quarter of a century ago are

now

becoming a m a j o r factor in new and fruitful attacks on a wide variety of difficult problems, especially in economics, psychology, and sociology. T h i s trend is inevitable, its health will depend heavily upon the number of

and re-

searchers highly qualified in both social science substantive knowledge and in mathematical science. It is they whose

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insight will penetrate important social science problems on which mathematical methods can make a genuine contribution. It is they who can supply the criticism required to keep mathematical methods and model-building realistic and effective in the progress of the social sciences. While these researchers will tend to be regarded as belonging to the sub-disciplines of econometrics, psychometrics, or sociometrics, their work will play a vital role in the scientific progress of the mother disciplines. It is in the self-interest of the entire social science community to make every reasonable effort to produce first-class researchers in these areas. T o do this successfully will require the cooperation of both social scientists and mathematicians in developing a required program in the mathematical sciences to go along with the social science program of every student who intends to go into economics, psychology, or sociology. T h e pattern of the program, but not necessarily the mathematical subject matter itself, will be similar to that which has been traditional for engineering and physical science students. T h e pattern allows the student, after taking a minimal set of three or four mathematics courses, to drop out of the program at various points in accordance with his mathematical aptitude and interest. It is only through such a program that the social scientists themselves can establish a recruitment base sufficiently broad to meet their future needs for a small but extremely important group of mathematically competent social scientists.

DEVELOPMENT IN HUMANISTIC SCHOLARSHIP Howard Mumford Jones Harvard University A s I CANNOT CONSIDER HUMANISTIC SCHOLARSHIP A LONELY

or artificial activity, in order that we shall not misunderstand it or make wrong demands upon it, I begin by noting certain parallels and differences between humanistic scholarship on the one hand, and the sciences and the social sciences on the other. I t u m to science. T h e aim of science differs from the aim of scholarship, in the first place, in that the ideal of science is to play down or banish the personal equation. We invent instruments that operate with a lesser and lesser degree of human interference. We carry on scientific inquiry not subjectively but in public time and space. T h e essence of experimentation is that whatever A does can be repeated in like circumstances by B, C, D, and E; and when this is done we accept the results, if uniform, as a statement of or approximation to general truth. In the humanities, however, the personal equation plays a continuing role. T h e study of a great cultural period— for example, the Renaissance—takes into account and, indeed, rests upon the interpretations of scholars like Burkhardt, Symonds, and Bernard Berenson, not merely because of deference paid to authority but because the very data under inspection are, as it were, the creations of the judgment of scholars. It is true that works of art must please many and please long, but it is true also that masterpieces are created by opinion, that they serve as centers for collecting data concerning them, their predecessors, their 81

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rivals, their imitators, and in the long run this kind of information generates our notions of culture in a given period. Science is, in the second place, an activity principally in the present tense. It surrenders its own past to the humanities as part of history. T h e past is for the scientist a series of guesses at truth, and the enterprise of science is to refine the lucky hits and destroy the unlucky. T h u s the theory that a universal ether permeates all things is now an erroneous hypothesis that has for science only curiosity value. T o the cultural historian, however, this theory may be a fundamental datum. Great classes of scientific problems, to be sure, involve lapse of time; yet it is in general true that science lives in the present and looks to the future. Scholarship, however, tends to look backward. Humane learning does not ignore the living thinker, present art, or current developments in fields like semantics, theology, or theories of value, but the main staple of scholarship is the past. Indeed, only because this is true do we know anything reliable about history, and on this knowledge library, museum, and university depend. T h e masterpiece of tradition, the great thinker known by his influence, the cultural era to which we look back with desire—these are principal concerns of the scholar. In the third place, a large part of practical scientific enterprise is involved with predictive judgments. We want to know that the bridge will sustain its traffic, the building be safe, the chemistry of the dye invariable, the drug secure and relevant to the disease. We likewise desire to predict within statistical probability the chances of death or the percentage of recoveries from a given operation, and we shape policy by these predictions, which are predictions of utility. Non-utilitarian predictions, like the setting of a date for the return of a comet, also give us a strong feeling of

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intellectual peace, so much so that we accept a phrase like "scientific control" as natural and seemly, and are shocked by a term like "theological control." But theological control made excellent sense in the year 1000. Humanistic scholarship is on the whole incapable of trustworthy predictive judgments. In the first place, the principal concern of scholarship is with the past. In the second place, the humanist is helpless to prophesy the appearance of genius, and yet genius produces much of what he studies. In the third place, even though there is an admitted vague law of action and reaction in the history of culture, we cannot know in any present period what the opposing movement is going to be, since reaction may take any one of a number of possible forms. For example: in 1908 the hope of American music lay with the romantic rhetoric of Edward MacDowell, who died that year. N o musicologist could—at least no musicologist did—predict that in 1909 the unknown Charles Ives was to begin composing his "Concord Sonata," a piece of piano music revolutionary in its effect. T h i s is, if you will, a prediction of taste, but predictions of scholarship are equally at the mercy of accident, genius, guesswork, and the side-effects of something else. Accidents enable us to decipher the Rosetta Stone, discover the Sumerians, uncover temples in Yucatan, and learn about Greek life in the third century B.C. through the chance preservation of the mimes of Herondas in a papyrus from Fayoum. Looking back, the scholar can discover orderly development in time; looking forward, his guess is no better than yours or mine. If these considerations be valid, as I think they are, it is useless for administrators to expect from humanists the kind of program of development they are used to in fields like physics, medicine, or geology. In so far as he seeks the genetic explanation of social phenomena or adopts the historical point of view, the

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social scientist, particularly the anthropologist and anyone who strives like Pareto or Marx to shape a general theory, is committed to the temporal process and suffers from the same inability to prophesy as does the humanist. Extrapolation is a tool of limited use; and painful contrasts between what the world became and what it was expected to become are commonplaces in history. Nevertheless, we expect from the social sciences empirical predictions of great value. Our industrial economy, our social policies, and in some degree, at least, our political actions depend upon expert prophecy. T h e wide acceptance of planning in the twentieth century, however distasteful any particular plan may be, is a function of this confidence. Judgments take such shape as: "We may expect the population of the United States in 1988 to be of such-and-such magnitude"; and if this prediction differs toto caelo from the prediction "Halley's comet will return in 1985," it is nonetheless enormously useful. T h e predictions are of course subject to the interruptions of catastrophe, whether natural as in the case of an earthquake, or man-made as in the case of war. Despite their utility, we must, however, distinguish. We do within a certain tolerance of error fix insurance rates and plan highway systems. But we are less certain about long-range prophecy. Consider the current doctrine that social adjustment is a mark of a well-rounded personality, a theory that has had radical effects upon our schools, the managerial function, American fiction, and our attitude towards marriage. Who can say what the long-range result upon American society is going to be? We note historic revolutions in value judgments concerning slavery, women, laziness, and the control of government by a priesthood; but we cannot surely know whether a particular component of our culture makes for another historic revolution of like kind.

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In so far as the social sciences aspire to the condition of science, they seek to discover general habits, principles, modes, averages, means, or laws of behavior, with the purpose of diminishing the area of the unknown and increasing our knowledge of the motives and actions of men. Theoretically, knowledge is an end in itself; practically, however, advances towards general principles mean advances towards modes of control. It would be absurd to say that the social scientist desires to control our behavior. Nevertheless the feeling of uneasiness evident in books like Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 indicates genuine fear of the misuse of the results of research in social science, particularly in social psychology, nor is this fear confined to imaginative writers, for it helps to shape works like The Organization Man, The Power Elite, and others. T h e social scientist may retort that the potential misuse of knowledge is no reason for cutting off the pursuit of knowledge; and if the ideal of research in all fields were pure Aristotelian contemplation, his retort would be crushing. But the uses to which knowledge is put are part of the very data of social science; and in a culture of which television, radio, and advertising are components of that social pattern in which research is done, it may be that the governing ideals for which we work are to be discovered in other areas of experience and not in social science and in science alone. Quis custodiet custodes? When, to take a simple instance, institutions of higher learning seriously offer courses in advertising psychology—that is, expert instruction in ways to smother judgment and induce impulse-buying—one realizes with a shock that the expertise in such instruction depends upon the scholarship of men as remote from the course as Bagehot, Tarde, Trotter, and Gustave Le Bon. No social scientist worth his salt is in the least interested in the manipulation of research for shallow ends, and I am indicting neither social science

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nor the university; I am merely pointing to the cultural condition that led the late Edward Sapir to contrast the telephone girl lending her capacities to the manipulation of a technical routine of high efficiency value and n o spiritual nutriment, with the American Indian inefficiently spearing salmon but far freer of the sense of spiritual frustration that haunts our age, despite the brilliant w o r k of scientists and social scientists. N o w it is in no sense the fault of social science if mank i n d is suspicious of regularity and pattern. T h e fact that one can predict with security that χ thousands of Americans in my age bracket will die in i960 does not mean that I am going to die in i960. T h e hypothesis that the American power elite succeed, but succeed only within what their historian calls "the American system of organized irresponsibility" does not negate the worth of responsibility. Perhaps one of the most cogent comments upon the social sciences is Josiah Royce's great essay on "Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature." In vain does scholarship establish the most admirable patterns of identity and difference, in vain do we reduce social behavior to graph and curve, in vain do we talk about the relativity of value judgments and moral systems. I remain I, u n i q u e egotist, from the dawning to the d i m m i n g out of consciousness. It is upon this profound, and if you like subliminal truth, that humane learning is built. B u t humane learning immediately develops a paradox. Its purpose is to sustain and enrich the individual, but in order to do so it concerns itself with a mystical general concept called Man. By M a n it means neither the complex aggregations we k n o w as nations, societies, tribes, or clans; nor yet the equally complex integer, prisoner of time, space, and gravity; product of biology, physical chemistry, and inherited instincts; and former of habits, k n o w n to science as Homo sapiens, to medicine as a patient, and to social

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science as a sibling, a voter, a customer, or a captive o f tabu. By Man humane learning means man's best image of himself. T h a t the claim of humane learning has general validity can be inferred by a curious observation. T h e humanistic scholar is not perturbed if somebody says he is not a scientist, not a social scientist. H e may, indeed, retort that he has turned linguistics into a science and that as art historian, bibliographer, or archaeologist, he gladly uses tools and devices science puts into his hand, just as he may note developments in economics, sociology, political science, and anthropology to which he contributes and w h i c h contribute to him. B u t during the many years I have been concerned with the theory and practice of humanistic scholarship I have never known scientists or social scientists w h o failed to wince if somebody stated or inferred they were not humane savants pursuing humane ends. T h e y were right to protest. T h e i r sensitivity is no proof, however, of an innate superiority in humanists or of their depravity; it is evidence that intelligent men desire out of life something more than intellectual efficiency. T h e subject of humane learning is the distillation of human experience in time. T h e English vocabulary it uses includes terms like excellence, beauty, resignation, courtesy, wisdom, courage, duty, and insight rather than terms like know-how, elite, control, behavior pattern, exogamy, managerial, worthy leisure-time activity, and training for leadership. In other languages humane learning dares to use words like esprit and Geist; and if I were to choose from my limited knowledge a single noun that most nearly expresses its philosophical aim, I think I would g o to the Latin and select pietas, meaning reverence for life, for tradition, for individual honor, and for such hints at divinity as are vouchsafed imperfect man. T h e s e are individualized, not social, not scientific concepts.

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T h e purpose of humane learning is normative, not absolute; it accepts moral relativity without denying morality, just as it accepts comparisons in art and philosophy without therefore inferring that art and philosophy are mere social phenomena; and, in no sense hostile to contemporary achievement, it reminds living men not to confuse the state of art and thought in their own era with the total purpose of human experience. It offers, in sum, not a program nor a prediction, but a point of view, a philosophy broader than systems of philosophy, an insistence that wisdom is more than knowledge. For, at the ending end of science and of social science, the unanswered question is still: Why should we be trying to do what we try to do? Humane learning, essentially conservative, exists to remind Man that he is neither a mere animal nor a mere physical and psychological tropism, but a unique sensibility capable of what the Germans call Becoming, an individualized personality that may in time achieve moral character. If such be the ideal, what are our present pressing problems in reaching it? I omit all questions of the financial support of the humanities, wretched though that support presently is in comparison with our total national wealth; and insist that our culture faces at least two crucial issues, one internal and one external. T h e internal one is this: T h e humanities were once defined as polite learning, were once, in other words, the possession of an elite. How, for our classless society, shall we translate a tradition of aristocratic sensibility into popular terms? How shall we both offer exclusiveness to the masses and persuade them to accept it? This is a grave pedagogical problem we have not solved, which we are trying to solve sentimentally, and which is going to plague us for many years. T h e external problem is this: How, in a world situation in which our policy makers have obviously failed to check the growth of communism, can scholarship, democracy being on the defensive, help us to sustain a vigorous and affirmative

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culture? O u r present resources are clearly not enough. In the words of Dr. Robert R. Wilson: "Assuming that civilization survives the invention of this ultimate weapon [the hydrogen bomb], the human spirit will be challenged often and perhaps even more seriously by future developments in science and technology. For m e the question is: A r e scientists to attain the heightened sense of moral values which will enable them to determine the direction of these developments with humanistic and humanitarian ends in view, or will humanists and humanitarians attain an understanding of scientific values that will allow them to determ i n e the wise direction of science? I suspect that civilization will best be served by a true f u s i o n — a t least a close m u t u a l understanding—of sciencc, the humanities and politics." 1 I agree. T h e r e f o r e the first task of graduate work in the humanities is to raise, not lower, the intellectual water-table f r o m its present adolescent plane to something like maturity. Some three or more decades ago John Livingston Lowes, then president of the Modern Language Association, said in his annual address that in his observation the best m e n go into science, the second best into the social sciences, and the third-raters into the humanities. T h e r e are exceptions to all rules, but I have seen little since Mr. L o w e s spoke that leads me seriously to alter his judgment. If any of you has been recently involved in making a distinguished a p p o i n t m e n t in some branch of the humanities, you will, I think, sadly agree. W e cannot advance mature scholarship in this country so long as we are content with amiable persons taking mediocre degrees that meanly fulfill minim u m requirements. I, for one, am flatly opposed to current emotional drives to make the degree easier and shorter. K n o w l e d g e multiplies in all fields; the humanist is u n d e r greater pressure to deal with rich, exotic cultures; and I cannot for the life of me see how you increase depth and 1 Review of Brighter than a Thousand Suns, by Robert Jungk, Scientific American, CXCIX (December 1958), 149.

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cultural range by decreasing the depth and range of a training program. In the second place, I am of opinion that we must demand a far more mature command of languages (including our own) than we are now getting. T h e decline and fall of foreign language requirements for the Ph.D. is understandable. At the opening of the century the old-line philologist, still wedded to a nineteenth-century evolutionary concept, reduced the Ph.D. in departments of literature to a philological pattern. Both the direct and the side-effects were disastrous. T h e teaching of foreign languages declined; departments other than literary ones found the requirements an impediment, not a help; and the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that most candidates in literature have now no real command of linguistic science and most Ph.D.'s no real control of any foreign language whatsoever. T h e present program of the Modern Language Association, by insisting that a foreign language must be begun in childhood, does something; and there are those who are cheered by current federal legislation favoring foreign languages as essential to national defense. I, too, am grateful. But a philosophy promoting linguistic study on the mere ground of utility does nothing for cultural insight. We need something richer than a minimum ability to interrogate a prisoner of war or inquire about iron and steel. Language is par excellence the instrument of humanistic scholarship. I submit that most Americans are innocent of the central meaning of this truth. Our scandalous lack of control over languages is the more serious because we need to know more rather than fewer languages, and to know them better. If the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, and other ancient Asian and African peoples can learn English, it is surely not beyond the capacity of young America to learn at least one foreign language thoroughly and well. T h e disservice wrought by the simple-minded belief that everything has been, or can

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be, translated is very great, especially in a period when we are trying to penetrate into the psychology of cultures remote from our own. In the third place, we must consider whether our present pattern for the degree is the only possible pattern. Inherited from nineteenth-century geneticism, that pattern is vertical, not horizontal; that is, most departments of the humanities expect the student to know the whole field in historical order before he specializes in any part of it. T h e r e is much to be said for this doctrine, especially in relatively unfamiliar cultural areas. But our departmentalization plays us false when the problem concerns a great, familiar cultural epoch. T a k e romanticism. In theory the musicologist interested in romantic music is required to get up a total knowledge of musical history before he gets around to, say, Schumann; a scholar interested in Schelling must master the historical aspects of philosophy before he travels to the J e n a of 1798; and similar are the cases of the student of poetry, linguistic theory, theology, painting, architecture, the history of ideas, or for that matter history itself. As a result, romanticism gets departmentalized out of existence. I constantly meet students of the eighteenth century without any musical knowledge; students of Horace with no slightest trace of interest in architecture; specialists in Renaissance poetry ignorant of Renaissance painting; Ph.D.'s in the Victorian novel who have never heard of the names of Eastlake, Frith, Pugin, Robert Stephenson, Maclise, Paxton, and other shapers of Victorian culture. T h e consequence is a lack of engagement between the specialist and a total cultural interpretation. Surely specialization can exist horizontally as well as vertically. I do not see that getting up sympathetic knowledge of eighteenthcentury music, eighteenth-century painting, eighteenthcentury philosophy, and eighteenth-century taste is any greater burden upon a student of eighteenth-century prose than getting up the total history of the English language

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and of English literature before he gets to the eighteenth century. I do not see that an incompatibility of taste with respect to music on the part of the philosophical specialist is any greater obstacle to a mature and flexible interpretation of learning than the incompatibility between, say, an interest in Schopenhauer and the requirement that the scholar shall be equally well grounded in Plato, Aristotle, medieval scholasticism, logical positivism, and the optimism of Leibnitz before he gets around to the World as Will and Idea. If we were to set up mature training programs in great cultural periods that would include the essential interests of these periods, we would do on a mature level what we are already fumbling after in our undergraduate courses in general education. I think we shall always have graduate programs shaped to historical perspective; surely, however, this does not mean we cannot also shape programs directed towards the interpretation in unified order of those great cultural epochs that have molded human destiny. We accept the Ph.D. in English language and literature: special field, romantic literature. Is this so changeless a concept that we cannot think of a Ph.D. in medieval culture: special field, Latin lyric poetry? I shall rest content with these three suggestions. It seems unnecessary to point out that with the passing of the European age, the history, the art, the moral systems and the philosophy of Islam, the Slavic world, and the vast and varied populations of Asia and Africa require us, without abandoning Greece, Rome, and the Atlantic community, to increase vastly the number of young humanists competent to work appreciatively in what used to be thought of as merely exotic material. We cannot indefinitely regard the new nations emerging in Africa as mere objects of missionary zeal or of anthropological inquiry only. I shall say nothing about what I feel to be the greatest need of humanistic scholarship in certain fields, including

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the modern one; namely, a knowledge of the theory and philosophy of science (something that must not be confused with an ability to understand scientific articles); and equally in certain fields, a comprehension, not of technical articles in the social sciences but of the cultural implications of forms of social theory. I shall likewise pass over another problem that would take long to discuss—that raised by the president of the American Historical Association in 1957 when he advised scholars to master certain forms of psychology and psychological theory, an idea of first moment in the interpretation of all the arts. I have likewise said nothing about possible new fields of learning, for, as I indicated earlier, I think predictive judgments in humanistic scholarship are almost impossible to make. Finally, I am convinced that it is sheer folly to talk about the Ph.D. in the humanities as an obstacle to teaching, or to assume that we are somehow going to steady and enrich American culture by a mere teaching degree. The concept of the scholar-teacher seems to me central and unshakable. I cannot conceive of teaching without scholarship, though I have seen it tried; and I cannot conceive of scholarship that does not give out or give forth or, if you will, simply give—and that, on any mature level, is teaching. What I would most deeply and persistently urge is that scholarship is a public duty, not a private delight; that if it is the duty of the state—by which I mean res publica in general —to support humane learning, it is the reciprocal duty of humane learning to support the state, by which I mean the Great Society Josiah Royce dreamed about, not the evasive here and now of the noisy politician. The prospects before humane learning are the most exciting in my lifetime. Can the graduate schools and the learned societies rise to the great occasion? With the hope that they can and will, I conclude my case.

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Charles Frankel Columbia University THE

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deal relate to the problem whether the methodology of the social sciences is so different from that of the natural sciences that philosophy may be expected to play a special röle in the social sciences which it does not play in the study of the physical universe. T h e second major question I wish to discuss is whether philosophy has a function as a synthesizing discipline for the social sciences. It is a commonplace that the emergence of modern physical science has meant more than an extraordinary breakthrough in man's knowledge of his natural environment, and more than a considerable increase in man's comfort and in the scope of his desires and expectations. It has also meant the rise of new methods of acquiring and validating beliefs, methods which depart radically from cherished ways of carrying on the intellectual life. T h e conflict has been felt most sharply in the field of the humanistic and social studies, and the quarrel between humanists and scientists has become a normal feature of the Western intellectual scene. T h e issue is technical and methodological, and something more. It is a debate about the style which our civilization's intellectual activities should take, and about the character of the beliefs to which we should attach the greatest authority. In this debate most humanists and many social scientists have argued that the disparity between physical phenomena and human affairs is too great to permit the extension of the methods of the natural sciences to the study of human 94

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behavior. Many have insisted, indeed, that the attempt to extend the methods of the natural sciences to fields where they do not belong is a source of that peculiar combination of technical efficiency, esthetic tastelessness, and moral callousness which—allegedly—characterizes contemporary societies. In fact, it is said to be one of modern civilization's major heresies. T h e heresy is known as "Scientism," and it has been defined by one of its most eminent critics as a "slavish imitation of the method and language of Science, . . . a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed." 1 There is surely something to be said for the view that "Scientism" has produced some bizarre results. T o find examples one need go no farther than the grandiose claims now regularly made that psychology, psychoanalysis, or cultural anthropology has laid the groundwork for a genuinely "scientific morality." T h e forays of many of the worshipers of the natural sciences into humanistic areas exhibit, indeed, the same "mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed" that marks the comments which many literary critics and social scientists have allowed themselves to make about the natural sciences. No methods, however, possess built-in protection against being used foolishly or unimaginatively, and the question, therefore, still remains: Can the methods of the natural sciences, when rightly used, be legitimately extended to the study of human affairs? Let us consider some of the principal issues that have been raised in connection with this question. 1. The need for a "subjective" approach in the social sciences. It is fairly obvious that the ability to identify 1 F . A. Hayek, The Counter-Revolution 1952), pp. 15-16.

of Science (The Free Press,

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with what is being studied is frequently a major aicd in forming significant hypotheses, and that the difference: between the capacities of different observers for sympathetic projection is in many fields the difference between a ffirstrate and a second-rate mind. It is also fairly plain that the human studies offer a more promising field for the exeircise of empathy and what has come to be known as Verstehen than, say, astronomy or geology. Does this mean that the method we employ to understand the behavior of uniconscious objects must be radically different from the metthod we employ to understand conscious beings? In conttrast with the former, which we can understand "from the outside," can we explain the latter only "from the insitde"? T h e answer to these questions, it seems to me, is No. Quite apart from the fact that sympathetic imagination has its uses in many fields in the natural sciences suclh as zoology, the possibility of exercising sympathetic imagination in the humanistic disciplines is a mixed blessingg. It can make the creation of hypotheses easier; but it can also make the creation of false hypotheses easier. Mlost important of all, we cannot tell whether sympathetic imagination has in a specific case led us to error or to trruth by using the method of sympathetic imagination as our ι test. Professor Friedrich Hayek has given a representative statement of the case for a "subjective" approach in the social sciences. According to Professor Hayek, we can understand human ideas and emotions "only because tthey are known to us from the workings of our own minids." In consequence, the method of empathy or Verstehern is the distinguishing characteristic of correct procedure in ι the social sciences and sets them off sharply from the nattural sciences. He writes: "When the scientist stresses thatt he studies objective facts he means that he tries to study thiings independently of what men think or do about them . .. . , [but] so far as human actions are concerned the things s are

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what the acting people think they are. . . . A medicine or a cosmetic, e.g., for the purposes of social study, are not what cures an ailment or improves a person's looks, b u t what people think will have that effect. . . . W h a t is relevant in the study of society is not whether [the] laws of nature [in which people happen to believe] are true in any objective sense, b u t solely whether they are believed and acted upon by the people. . . . " 2 N o w the extension of the methodology of the natural sciences into the study of human affairs does carry the implication that human ideas or feelings can be credited with causal significance only when appropriate physical or biological agencies for forming and transmitting them are present. But this implies neither that human ideas and beliefs are without influence in human affairs nor that the meaning of an emotion or an idea is explained by talking about their physiological or chemical aspects. W h a t , then, distinguishes what Professor Hayek calls "the objectivist approach of the natural sciences" from the "subjectivist approach" he thinks proper to the social sciences? So far as I can see, there are two main differences, and on both scores the "objectivist" approach seems preferable. In the first place, the "objectivist" approach cannot accept the dictum that " w h a t is relevant in the study of society is not whether [the] laws of nature [in which people happen to believe] are true in any objective sense, b u t solely whether they are believed and acted u p o n by the people." T h e fact that a group of people believes and acts upon certain alleged laws of nature is obviously a part of the data which must be included in an accurate account and explanation of their behavior. But in explaining the birth rate in a society like that of the Australian A r u n t a , for example, w h o happen not to believe that children are born as a result of sexual intercourse, it is 'Ibid., pp. 23-24.

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surely necessary, in addition to mentioning the Arunta's beliefs, to invoke our own external knoΛvledge about the causes of human birth. It is at the very least an overstatement to write as Professor Hayek does that "any knowledge which we may happen to possess about the true nature of the material thing, but which the people whose action we want to explain do not possess, is as little relevant to the explanation of their actions as our private disbelief in the efficacy of a magic charm will help us to understand the behavior of the savage who believes in it." 3 It is doubtful that anyone can follow this principle consistently. For example, Professor Hayek himself claims to know certain things about the actual consequences of "Scientism" which its advocates do not know; and in explaining their addiction to totalitarian forms of social planning he employs this knowledge. Indeed, Professor Hayek has argued with considerable cogency that it is the special business of the social sciences to discover and explain the unintended consequences of purposive individual behavior. But such unintended consequences cannot be brought to light if we restrict ourselves only to statements about the ideas and feelings which the individuals whose behavior we are studying happen to possess. We also have to make statements about objective social laws of whose existence these individuals may be unaware. T h e second main difference between an "objectivist" and a "subjectivist" approach lies in the special cognitive status which the latter approach assigns to empathy or Verstehen. T h e use of this method, like the use of any other method from reading Holy Scripture to asking the corner policeman, cannot be ruled out a priori as a technique of discovery. But this is not at all the same thing as saying that this technique carries its own certificate of validity—which is what the "subjectivist" approach asserts. Since we can never literally have another person's feelings, * Ibid., p. 30.

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we need to have some criteria by which we can determine, when we think we are identifying with him, whether the feeling we have is really like the feeling he has. W h a t can these criteria be if they are not overt and publicly observable physical and verbal events? When Shylock argues that he has feelings like other men, he asks, "If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" It will be news if Shakespeare can be accused of the "Scientistic" heresy. T h e appeal to the method of Verstehen reflects, it seems to me, an honorable antipathy towards the policy of treating h u m a n beings like lifeless puppets. It speaks also for the feeling that most of us have that "something is left o u t ' when we hear certain abstract and general statements about h u m a n affairs. But an "objectivist" approach to h u m a n affairs does not require the denial of either the significance or the poignancy of human feelings and aspirations; and no method of disciplined inquiry can dispense with the necessity of selecting certain salient features in a gross complex of events and dealing with them in abstract terms. If "understanding" a subject-matter were the same thing as identifying with that subject-matter, knowledge would be an idle reduplication of experience and not a clarification of it. Sympathetic identification, in short, is neither sufficient nor essential to guarantee the discovery of truth in the h u m a n studies. It is not sufficient because the mistakes that people make when they think they have identified with others are notorious; it is not essential because it is possible to explain another person's behavior without identifying with him. It would be something of a nuisance if we tried to be schizophrenic while we studied schizophrenia. I conclude, therefore, that it is false to say that we understand the actions of other h u m a n beings "only because they are known to us f r o m the working of o u r own minds." Indeed,

such a special use of the word "understanding" invites the

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erection of personal and parochial intuitions into criteria of truth. 2. The teleological character of human affairs. T h e social sciences are frequently said to b e different from the physical sciences because they deal Avith teleological events. T h e r e is an identifiable difference between events that are teleological in character and those that are not. Subjected to a wide range of changes in their environing conditions, teleological systems exhibit considerable constancy with respect to certain traits; non-teleological systems do not. T h u s , the temperature of a piece of metal changes w h e n its environment grows colder; the temperature of the h u m a n body remains constant. A rolling ball that comes to the edge of a hill will roll more rapidly; a human pedestrian is likely to maintain a relatively constant speed. T e l e o l o g i c a l systems are thus quite obviously different from non-teleological systems, and teleological explanations w h i c h account for the behavior of teleological systems by referring to their "goal" or " f u n c t i o n " call attention to this difference. Is the difference such, however, that the methods of the natural sciences are wholly inappropriate for dealing with what is teleological? I am not persuaded that this is the case. T h e fact that teleological systems have certain objectively distinctive properties, and that the most important aspects of human behavior are teleological in character, has led many to argue that there is an impassable barrier between the natural and the social sciences. T h u s , one spokesman for this point of view has written, " H o w e v e r successful in the outlying provinces mechanistic explanation may be, mind itself is irreducibly purposive and will elude the grasp of mechanism always." 4 T h e r e are three reasons why this view seems to me to be mistaken. ' B r a n d Blanshard, The Nature of Thought

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(Macmillan, 1940), I,

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(1) We may gTant that teleological events are different from non-teleological events without granting that the former offer instances in which the future determines the present. In the case of purposive human action, for example, it is not exact to say that it is a future state of affairs that activates conduct in the present. It is rather feelings and thoughts that exist in the present about that future state of affairs. Furthermore, concepts like "immanent purpose" or "elan vital/' which are invoked to express the alleged causal influence of the future over the present, merely dignify the mystery with a name. For they give us no concrete information about how any specific teleological process takes place. (2) Teleological explanations account for events as means to the production of certain ends. But explanation in terms of means and ends is a sub-class within the larger class of explanations in terms of cause and consequence. We can say, " T h e function of shivering is to maintain a constant body temperature"; or we can say, "Shivering is followed by the body's return to its normal temperature." These two ways of speaking give different emphases to different parts of the process concerned, but they convey the same information. T h e teleological statement suggests the additional fact, to be sure, that the normal body maintains a constant temperature; but this additional information can also be supplied by a statement that is non-teleological in form. (3) T h e attribution of a teleological character to a particular system of events is always specific and relative. T h i s is another reason why the use of concepts like "immament purpose" or "elan vital," which obscure this feature of teleological statements, is dangerous. For a system may be teleological with respect to certain characteristics, but not teleological with respect to others. T h e human body, for example, is teleological with respect to broken bones

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but not with respect to lost teeth: it does not grow new ones. Moreover, while a great deal that happens in the body can be explained as a means to the maintenance of the so-called "vital functions," it has to be remembered that this is true only within limits. Certain changes in the environment produce the breakdown of these functions; and certain events in the body, quite independently of the environment, lead to the death of the body. Teleological explanations, in short, are always selective and limited. If the alleged teleological relationship is to be substantiated, a particular set of constant traits has to be specified which are not identical with all the traits of the system under examination, and a specific environment which varies greatly, but within definite limits, also has to be specified. In another context the same system may have no teleological characteristics whatsoever. T h e teleological characteristics of human behavior do not justify the claim, therefore, that there is a categorical difference between the study of human affairs and the study of physical phenomena. 3. The "wholistic" character of human aßairs. Both the argument for Verstehen and the argument from teleology raise another fundamental issue. Biological phenomena, and, according to many observers, social phenomena as well, frequently exhibit special qualities of "unifiedness" and "hierarchical structure" which are lacking in the purely physical world. A dog can bark, and he could not bark if he did not have vocal chords; but his vocal chords alone cannot bark. Again, men may play together until they show a quality we call "team spirit." T h e y would not show this spirit if they were not individuals with certain necessary characteristics; but they show this characteristic only when they are members of the team. T o express the fact that biological and social systems have these undeniable features, it is frequently said that in such systems "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." A n d from this premise

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the conclusion is drawn that the methods of the natural sciences, which are allegedly "analytic" and "additive" in character, are inappropriate to the study of human affairs. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that "analytic" methods have already been shown to be m o r i b u n d in certain areas of the natural sciences. T h u s , the late R u t h Benedict wrote: " T h e whole, as modern science is insisting in many fields, is not merely the sum of all its parts, but the result of a u n i q u e arrangement and inter-relation of the parts that has brought about a new entity. . . . Cultures, likewise, are more than the sum of their traits. . . . T h e w h o l e determines its parts, not only their relation but their very nature. Between two wholes there is a discontinuity in kind, and any understanding must take account of their different natures, over and above a recognition of the similar elements that have entered into the two. . . ." 5 B u t while it need not be denied that biological and social phenomena exhibit traits which justify the use of the phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," it is not always clear just what those w h o use this phrase mean to convey by it. A n d it is even less plain, once the meaning of the phrase has been clarified, that any permanent and important distinction has been established between the natural and the social sciences. (1) T o begin with, there are empirical considerations which give us prima facie reason to doubt that societies or cultures can really be regarded as "integrated wholes." Even simple biological organisms leave a great deal to be desired in this respect. T h u s , the ordinary starfish, w h e n placed on its back, uses some of its arms to turn in one direction and some to turn in the opposite direction. A s Robert Merton has remarked, "If this is true of single organisms, it w o u l d seem a fortiori the case with c o m p l e x ' R u t h Benedict, Patterns of Culture

47·

(Pelican, 1946), pp. 42-43, 46-

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social systems." T h e notion of cultures as "integrated wholes" by no means provides a self-evidently desirable model for anthropological or sociological research. (2) On at least one interpretation of the phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," what is being asserted is that an individual part of a complex system behaves differently when it is a member of that system than when it is not. But if all that is being asserted is that a thing which acts one way in one environment acts differently in another environment, this is a truism which is recognized by the natural sciences as well as the social sciences. No theory in any field can explain a concrete object or event unless restrictions are placed on the scope of the theory's application, and unless specific initial conditions are also indicated. It is therefore as true for physical events as it is for biological or social events that we cannot explain the characteristics of any part of a system without taking account of those aspects of its environment that are relevant. (3) A more precise meaning can perhaps be given to the phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" by making a distinction in the following terms. A " w h o l e " may be said to be "equal to the sum of its parts" when from the theory which explains the behavior of the parts we can also deduce laws that will explain the behavior of the whole; and a "whole" may be said to be "greater than the sum of its parts" when the theory which explains the parts does not allow us to deduce the laws that govern the system's behavior as a whole. T h u s , the kinetic theory of matter is a theory about molecules, and with this theory we can explain the thermal behavior of gases, which are "wholes" containing molecules as their constituent parts. Accordingly, the thermal behavior of gases represents a • R o b e r t K. Merton, Social Theory Press, 1949), p. 29.

and Social Structure

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"whole" which is "equal to the sum of its parts." But while solids are also aggregates of molecules, the kinetic theory of matter fails to explain their thermal behavior. For this we must invoke another theory—quantum mechanics. T h u s , the thermal behavior of solids, from this point of view, represents a "whole" that is "greater than the sum of its parts." But as this example makes plain, three conclusions follow from this more precise rendering of the meaning of the phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." T h e first is that the phrase can also be applied to purely physical phenomena. T h e second is that branches of science which are ordinarily regarded as supremely "mechanistic" and "analytic" are perfectly capable of recognizing a distinction between "additive" and "nonadditive" systems and of dealing with both types. T h e third and most important is that distinctions between systems whose behavior can be reduced to the sum of their parts and systems that cannot are always made relative to some specific theory. These distinctions, therefore, are subject to alteration by further empirical inquiry. In no case can a wholesale and logically necessary distinction be established between phenomena that are "in themselves" "wholistic" and those that are not.T (4) It may well be, however, that those who insist on the dictum that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" mean a good deal more by this phrase than has been indicated by the foregoing analysis. T h e y stress the fact that human personalities and human cultures are peculiarly "integrated wholes" which, in Miss Benedict's words, determine not only the "relations" of the parts they 7 Cf. Ernest Nagel, "Mechanistic Explanation and Organismic Biology," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, X I (March 1951), 327-338, and also his "Wholes, Sums, and Organic Unities," Philosophical Studies, I I I (February 1952), 17-32.

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contain but the "very nature" of these parts; and in stressing these claims they seem to wish to condemn any method which studies a system of events by analyzing it into its parts. For this, they appear to say, inevitably distorts the nature of these parts. But the statement that "the whole determines its parts, not only their relation but their very nature," if we take it literally, involves the most fundamental logical difficulties. If we cannot even define the part's nature separately from the whole, we obviously cannot show how its membership in the whole has affected it. Furthermore, on this supposition, if an individual or a culture is unique (as all individuals and cultures in fact are), then all their parts are unique. But then no two wholes would have any properties that could be compared, and all generalizations and all language would be impossible. One can only conclude that those who oppose "analytic" methods as such are merely taking an exaggerated way of expressing their objection to some particular mode of analysis. For the selective isolation of parts or aspects of a complex whole is inevitable in any method that seeks to arrive at determinate and warrantable conclusions. 4. The relation of value-judgments to social inquiry. T h e natural sciences and the social sciences differ in an obvious respect. T h e physical universe is neutral and unconcerned about human life, and human beings, in consequence, can (though with difficulty) take a neutral and detached attitude towards the physical universe. In contrast, however, human beings are both the agents and the objects of the social studies. Is it reasonable or desirable to expect, then, that the social studies can be objective in the same sense in which the natural sciences are? T h e doctrine that the social sciences differ sharply from the natural sciences because value-judgments play a crucial role in their development may be broken down, I think,

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into the following propositions: (1) All social inquirers have preferences whether they acknowledge them or not; (2) these preferences are inevitably part of the initial "intuition," "ideology," "vision," or "theory" with which the social scientist begins; (3) since "facts" so-called do not automatically announce themselves, such an initial "theory" must be present when anyone embarks on a course of social investigation; (4) accordingly, the questions with which a social science is concerned have been determined by antecedent value-judgments, and since the conclusions which any science reaches can only be answers to the questions it chooses to ask, this means that the account of its subject-matter which any social science gives is inevitably biased or slanted; (5) furthermore, it cannot even be assumed that a social science provides us with factual and value-free information about the means by which we can attain our previously stipulated ends, for this rests on the premise that means can be sharply distinguished from ends, and this is not the case; (6) finally, what is determined to be true in the social sciences obviously depends on the criteria of proof and evidence that are employed, and these are part and parcel of the original value-loaded "ideology" with which inquiry began. Although such arguments appear to be skeptical, the motive behind them, it seems to me, is usually the opposite of skepticism. In stressing the fact that the study of human affairs is carried on by human beings, and that it is inevitably saturated with the preferences and desires that human beings have, the proponents of the doctrine that truth in the social sciences is relative to one's values are in most cases trying to assert the political and moral responsibilities of social inquiry. By attacking the belief that social science can aim at a detached and immaculate objectivity, they are trying to restore a vital connection between theory and practice and to draw the social sciences

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into dealing with controversial, and therefore important, issues. T h e s e seem to me to be entirely laudable objectives. T h e r e is much in the current situation of the social sciences which suggests that their practitioners have mistaken the inconsequential for the impartial. Nevertheless, I am not convinced that the social sciences can attain a significant role in the redirection of h u m a n affairs by adopting the principle that "objectivity," in the classic sense of the term that figures in the natural sciences, is for them a will-o'the-wisp. T h a t all social inquirers have preferences, that these preferences influence the ideas with which inquiry begins, and that inquiry begins with an initial hunch or hope, are all propositions that may be readily accepted. T h e y do not distinguish the social sciences from the natural sciences, however, and they do not show that there is a logical connection between the genesis of social inquiries and the validity of the conclusions that such inquiries may reach. N o r does the fact that value-judgments may influence the questions which a social science asks bear directly on the truth or falsity of the answers which are given to these questions. G u n n a r Myrdal writes, " W i t h o u t questions there are no answers. A n d the answers are preconceived in the formulation of the questions. T h e questions express our interests in the matter. T h e interests can never be purely scientific. T h e y are choices, the products of our valuations." 8 B u t the fact that a question is "biased," in the sense that we might also have asked another q u i t e different question, does not imply that our answer to the question is also biased in the sense that another answer to it is equally possible. Suppose we hold a conservative ideology, for example, and therefore put to ourselves the question: " U n d e r what circumstances can large-scale poverty and a belief in the Tightness of the status quo co-exist?" W i t h •Value

in Social

Theory

(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 51.

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respect to this question, it is either true or false that bread and circuses will do the job. Furthermore, even though we may grant that the question itself is slanted, and is of the Are-you-still-beatingyour-wife? variety, it does not follow that the values which initially impelled it must remain unchanged throughout the course of subsequent inquiry. T h e inquirer's original values can be changed by the answers he reaches in the course of his inquiries. Moreover, as the history of the physical sciences suggests, when inquiry leads to the development of a full-fledged theory, the course of subsequent investigations is increasingly governed by the theory and not by day-to-day considerations of social expediency. Broadly speaking, the influence of explicit social valuejudgments tends to recede in proportion to the pow : er of the theories possessed by a science. Finally, even if we grant that questions limit answers, and that values limit questions, it does not follow that a science which gives a "partial" picture of its field therefore gives a distorted picture. T h i s would hold universally and necessarily only if omniscience was the only alternative to error. T h e argument that it is impossible to separate means from ends is also much less than conclusive. Mr. Myrdal has argued that "means are not ethically neutral. . . . Value judgments . . . refer to whole sequences, not merely to the anticipated final outcome. . . . But as soon as we admit that values can be attached to means independently, every single link in the chain of argument is opened." 9 T h e r e are, however, two quite different senses in which one might say that "the means are neutral." One might mean that no moral questions will be raised about the means that are employed to reach a given end; if the end is accepted, any means that will really attain it is justified. If one takes this point of view, however, one cannot any 'Ibid,., pp. 210-212.

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longer even evaluate his end-in-view; for the only way in which a projected end can be judged, obviously, is by assessing the cost of attaining it. O n the other hand, one might merely mean by the expression "the means are neutral" that the only way to evaluate a means is by the consequences that follow from it. From this point of view, the choice of a means is governed, not simply by its relationship to an antecedently stipulated end-in-view, but by the collateral consequences which it also has. And in this way the examination of our means also serves to redetermine the ends we set ourselves. But if the choice of means and the choice of ends are interdependent, this does not signify that a logical distinction between means and ends, in any given context of inquiry, cannot be made. On the contrary, the recognition that means as well as ends must be evaluated rests on making this distinction. For if a specific means is to be regarded as having value apart from its consequences, it then becomes an end-in-itself. And if it becomes an end-in-itself, it then falls among the assumptions or stipulations that are not themselves under examination in the particular inquiry in question. Accordingly, if we wish to examine the means we employ, we have to distinguish between means and ends—just as, if we wish to examine the ends we seek, we have to appraise them as means to other stipulated ends. There is no eternal law, to be sure, that requires us to make such a distinction. T o refuse to make it, however, is to choose to keep our valuations wholly arbitrary in character. Finally, we must consider the proposition that the criteria that are employed to assess the soundness of our conclusions in the social sciences are so embedded in antecedent value-judgments that the validity of our thinking cannot be separated from its genesis. T h i s is not a proposition that can be consistently maintained. For the state-

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m e n t that the truth of all social beliefs is relative to the changing values that prevail is itself the statement of a social belief, and is clearly intended to be an exception to the rule it pronounces. T h e arguments that fact and value cannot be distinguished in the social sciences therefore seem to me to be mistaken. In fact, if we wish to give the social sciences a vital place in moral and political education, the indispensable condition is to make a distinction between fact and value. For if we take the position that the social sciences are merely the instruments of our antecedent moral and social attitudes, these sciences lose their critical function. If the social sciences have had less influence in m o l d i n g our values than we should wish, this is not because they have mistakenly aimed to restrict themselves to factual assertions. It is because they have not concerned themselves with m a k i n g factual assertions about the conditions and consequences of the important values that people hold. W e cannot derive statements of value from statements of fact alone: in this sense the social sciences are "neutral." B u t assuming that people do have v a l u e s — w h i c h seems a safe a s s u m p t i o n — t h e factual conclusions of the social sciences tend either to challenge or to support such values. T h u s , if we think that the apathy of a considerable portion of the electorate is a bad thing for political democracy, w e may change our minds w h e n a study of voting reveals that the presence of an apathetic group is one of the conditions for the maintenance of peaceful disagreement in the community. 1 0 O n the other hand, if we value democracy because it invites widespread political participation, such a study may lead us either to revise this judgment or to seek new ways and means of encouraging participation " Cf. Bernard Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (University of Chicago Press, 1954).

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while retaining the processes of peaceful change. In either case, however, purely factual conclusions have served to redirect our choice of social objectives. For the social sciences to exercise this function more vigorously than they have in the past, it is not necessary that they adopt the maxim that since they are biased anyway they may as well make a virtue of it. A l l that is required is that they not dodge the issues. 5. Control and manipulation in the social sciences. T h e discussion of the relation of the social sciences to o u r values frequently leads to the discussion of a cluster of related issues surrounding the reliability of the results of social inquiry, and the uses to which such results may be put. T h e social sciences are frequently damned with faint praise as inherently "soft" sciences which cannot control their experimental situations well enough to provide the sort of reliable and precise knowledge that the physical sciences can give us. O n the other hand, the social sciences are also regarded fearfully as instruments for manipulating human beings and producing a H u x l e y a n Brave N e w W o r l d . T h e s e two sorts of criticism tend to cancel each other out, but their incompatibility has not prevented many critics of the social sciences from offering both of them simultaneously. It would be difficult to defend the position that the social sciences can create the same sort of highly controlled laboratory situation which physicists and chemists can produce. In the social sciences the variables which should be controlled are too frequently beyond control; the experimenter himself disturbs the situation; the human beings w h o are the subjects of investigation understandably resist the process; not least, there are definite ethical limits beyond which the experimental manipulation of human behavior cannot go. A l l these restrictions clearly distinguish the social sciences from the natural sciences.

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It docs n o t seem to me, h o w e v e r , that the difference is m o r e than o n e of degTee. T h e discussion aroused by Heisenberg's P r i n c i p l e of I n d e t e r m i n a c y m a y r e m i n d us, not only that physicists m a y

also b e t r o u b l e d

by

the

interaction

b e t w e e n t h e o b s e r v e r a n d w h a t he observes, b u t that ways can be

found

to

formulate

testable

theories

about

p h e n o m e n a i n v o l v e d n o n e the less. F u r t h e r m o r e ,

the

modern

statistical t e c h n i q u e s such as " r a n d o m i z a t i o n " have to some e x t e n t m e t the p r o b l e m of p r o v i d i n g e x p e r i m e n t a l controls in situations w h e r e the r e l e v a n t variables c a n n o t be directly manipulated.

It is o n l y if w e restrict the n o t i o n of

an

"experiment"

to the classic l a b o r a t o r y e x a m p l e s w e

find

in t e x t b o o k s in physics that w e can c l i n g to the view that the social sciences c a n n o t be e x p e r i m e n t a l . 1 1 T h i s r e m a r k suggests a n o t h e r . C r i t i c s of the c l a i m that the social sciences are g e n u i n e sciences f r e q u e n t l y

hold

a strictly " d e t e r m i n i s t i c " m o d e l of e x p l a n a t i o n as the tacit c r i t e r i o n b y w h i c h they d e t e r m i n e w h a t is a n d w h a t is n o t a genuine

science. C o n s i d e r a system S %vhich has

perties P], P 2 . . .

pro-

at a g i v e n t i m e T 0 . S u b j e c t this system

to certain e x p e r i m e n t a l variations, a n d at a s t i p u l a t e d later t i m e T j it w i l l s h o w n e w properties P a , P b . . . . T h e n recreate the o r i g i n a l situation a n d repeat the same experim e n t a l variations. If a f t e r the same interval of t i m e the system a g a i n s h o w s the same properties P tt , P b . . . , it is a " d e t e r m i n i s t i c " system in the strict sense. N o w since it is p l a i n that r e l a t i v e l y f e w e x p e r i m e n t s in the social sciences c a n b e so d e s i g n e d as to y i e l d k n o w l e d g e of d e t e r m i n i s t i c systems i n this strict sense, the social sciences are r e j e c t e d as less t h a n scientific. To

s o m e e x t e n t , of course, this is a m a t t e r of

B e n t h a m c a l l e d " e u l o g i s t i c " or " d y s l o g i s t i c "

what

terminology.

N e v e r t h e l e s s , t h e w o r d s w e choose to use c a n g u i d e us o r u Cf. J o h a n G a l t u n g , "Notes on the Differences between Physical and Social Sciences," Inquiry, I (1958), 7-34.

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confuse us, and in this case the definition of "science" that is operative is unduly narrow and misleading. T o begin with, even in the so-called "deterministic" sciences, the results for a series of repetitions of the same experiment normally vary within a definite range. What we choose to regard as "the same result" is in part a matter of convention. Further, even if we cannot give a fully deterministic account of why, say, Hamlet the Dane was suicidally inclined, we can make statistical predictions about the incidence of suicidal tendencies among Danes as a group. T h e success of insurance companies with actuarial tables may suggest that this is not useless information, and that it is different enough from mere opinion to be called "knowledge." Indeed, if major dependence on statistical techniques and probability statements, together with the rejection of strict "deterministic" explanations, are to be taken as alien to science in the "true" sense, then the most distinctive parts of modern physics would fall under the axe. These observations bring us finally to the much debated question concerning the "manipulative" character of the social sciences. It is a question which would benefit considerably, it seems to me, if certain evident distinctions were kept in mind. First, in the pejorative sense in which the term "manipulation" is ordinarily used, it should not be confused with all forms of deliberate control of human behavior. T h e orderly movement of automobiles around a traffic circle—a process which has a clearly acceptable objective and which is not hidden from those who participate in it—would not, presumably, be called "manipulation." Yet it is a deliberate application of engineering techniques to the control of human behavior. Secondly, "manipulation" is not restricted to the scientific control of human behavior. Influencing other people's behavior by processes of which they are unaware and for purposes which

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they would not normally accept is an art as ancient as the existence of witch doctors, gamblers, confidence men, and politicians. Finally, "manipulation" is not a bogyman that threatens to invade the contemporary scene if we give the so-called "behavioral sciences" their head. It is already with us, from Moscow to Madison Avenue. It cannot be controlled by ignorance of the processes that make it possible any more than the effective control of nuclear weapons can be brought about by ignorance of physics or the condemnation of physicists. If the growth of reliable knowledge about the springs of human conduct makes the manipulation of human beings easier, it can also be used to make such manipulation harder. Knowledge in the hands of powerful and selfish men is dangerous; but when power and selfishness are joined with ignorance, the situation is not greatly improved. T h e behavioral sciences, like any other sciences, can be used for good ends or bad. T h a t depends, not on the sciences themselves, but on their social and moral setting. We come finally to the question whether philosophy has a synthesizing role with respect to the social sciences. T h e question seems to me to be susceptible to three distinct answers, depending on the meaning we give to the term "synthesis." (1) Probably the most traditional and normal interpretation of the term "synthesis" when it is used to stand for an intellectual rather than a material process is as follows: a "synthesis" is an organization of the conclusions of different intellectual disciplines so that they can all be shown to follow logically from a single set of premises. If philosophy provides these basic premises, then philosophy acts as a synthesizing discipline with respect to the departments of knowledge involved. Now if philosophy is to perform such a role with regard to sciences whose findings are empirical in character, then obviously philosophy must also contain principles that are

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empirical in character; at the same time, however, these principles must also be peculiarly "philosophical" and not capable of discovery or validation by methods available to other disciplines. Despite the promises which philosophers have so often made to produce principles of this peculiar sort, I myself am not persuaded that any of these promises have been made good. It is unclear to me, indeed, just what intellectual method would be available that would permit philosophy to play this sort of synthesizing role. (2) As the above remarks may have suggested, I myself do not believe that philosophy is a concrete subject dealing with a distinctive class of objects or events and yielding positive knowledge about them. It seems to me, rather, to be an intellectual activity of a certain sort. I must put the point dogmatically, for my time is limited. Philosophy, I would argue, grows out of blocks and discordancies within and between our systems of belief, and its task is the integration of belief. Broadly, philosophy can perform this task in either of two ways. It can address itself to specific collisions between concepts—for example, the concept of "freed o m " and the concept of "causation"—and attempt to eliminate the conflict by analyzing, clarifying, and perhaps redefining the concepts involved; or it can create artificial languages through which our beliefs can be rationally reconstructed and the paradoxes and difficulties that set the inquiry in motion eliminated. T h i s view of philosophy offers a possible second answer to the question whether philosophy can serve a synthesizing role with respect to the social sciences. T h e s e sciences contain a variety of freely floating terms—"motivation," "attitude," "welfare," "the public interest"—which are imperfectly understood. By clarifying the meaning and interconnections of these and other basic concepts, philosophy can serve to indicate the places at which the different social sciences may meet, and the uses to which results in one

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domain may be put to enrich inquiry in another. T h i s is a more modest role, perhaps, than has frequently been assigned to philosophy; but it is nevertheless a role which justifies the traditional view of philosophy as a synthesizing discipline. (3) But there is a final sense in which philosophy may also be a synthesizing discipline. Philosophy has been traditionally regarded, as Samuel Alexander once put it, as the habit of seeing things together. And in particular, philosophy has been the habit of seeing things together in relation to human aspirations, the habit of being explicit about the bearing of what men know on the values they hold. N o philosopher, to my mind, can claim to have special knowledge which inquirers in other domains do not have; and no philosopher can claim an absolute status for the values he chooses to hold. But he can make the responsible attempt to draw on knowledge in various fields, to put this knowledge together as consistently and comprehensively as he can, and to use it to appraise the conditions and prospects of his society or his race in terms of some orderly scheme of ideals. If it is shorn of its traditional arrogance, if it is carried on as one man speaking to other men, this enterprise has a necessity, an enchantment, and a permanent place on the human scene. Within this general view of philosophy, there is a special röle for social philosophy. Its role is the explicit use of the materials of the social sciences to formulate a coherent image of a good society and a strategy for attaining it. Social philosophy is not at all the same thing as social science; but it is the activity of putting social science to work.

HERITAGE AND HORIZONS IN MODERN HISTORY Leo

Gershoy

New York University F R O M T I M E TO T I M E , RESPONDING TO CHANGES IN T H E C L I M A T E

of opinion as it is called, the historian finds it necessary to take a new look at his old heritage. Altered perspectives, novel problems bid him re-examine how the tradition by which he lives has used him. Equally important, how he has used it. Such moments have been before; such a moment has come again. T h e effective elements of the tradition of Western European culture came to us sometime within that historical period which we are accustomed to call the A g e of the Renaissance; putting it more strikingly, with the gradual disruption of the medieval synthesis. T h i s disruption of course was long in the making. Its agents and its manifestations were many. Intertwined in a complicated relationship, which we need only mention and pass on, were such elements as the pressure of population growth; the revival of commerce; the rise of towns and the crafts; the ethical, economic, and political protest which tore apart "the seamless robe of Christ" as woven in the res publica Christiana; and the formation of the centralized territorial state. T h e s e elements, working together and sometimes against one another, eventuated—here rapidly, elsewhere with a considerable time lag—in a striking new attitude. A t least a striking new attitude among the cultural elites. Superior individuals, cutting themselves loose from the old collectivity, shifted the axis of their thinking away from considerations of the purposes of things to how things behaved. T h e y turned 118

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from preoccupation with life eternal to life terrestrial, finding as they did so, a point of reference and validation in new knowledge of how men had lived and thought in preChristian days. Concern with practical things, with material values, with the here and now, with making man the measure—such concern introduced itself as a novel and significant factor in an emerging pattern of values. W i t h i n the frame and under the continuing impact of favorable material circumstances this concern deepened and matured in time into a great synthesis. Cumulative knowledge, largely b u t far f r o m exclusively in physics and mathematics, and the methods of observation and experimentation on which that knowledge was based, gave to men's thinking new data and fresh procedura! techniques. By the time Europe reached the Age of the Enlightenment— which we can situate between Locke and Newton at the one end, and, for convenience's sake, Condorcet at the other—a broad, exhilarating conception had implanted itself of the universe. T h e universe was conceived as one, governed by the immutable laws of nature and nature's god. Those laws themselves, susceptible of discovery by observation and experimentation, could be formulated in precise mathematical expression. Between the processes inherent in this tidy world of matter and energy and rational man who inhabited it there could be, even if regrettably at the moment there was not, a harmonious correspondence. Endowed by nature with certain unalienable and imprescriptible rights and reintegrated by Locke and Condillac into nature, man could place his thoughts and institutions in rapport with the assumed regularities and harmony of the cosmos and make them both as rational and natural as they ought to be. For the more hopeful, this capacity of man to make changes for the better was infinite; its realization could conceivably not stop short of establishing on earth the heavenly city that Augustine and Aquinas, with

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a different sense of sin and grace, had situated elsewhere. How much this idea of progress, this extraordinary new hope that now was born how much it was a repudiation of Christian faith, a secularization and accommodation with it, I leave for others to debate, and elsewhere. Sufficient to note that it took root and was widely disseminated among elites far greater in n u m b e r and far more militant in their ardor than the earlier humanists from whom they had taken so much. T h a n k s to media of communication earlier unavailable and now increasingly effective, the heartening prospect of having mankind, with the benign guidance of the Supreme Being, effect its own salvation became the ideology of men of good will, of men with bowels of compassion for the ills that still afflicted humanity. And of men of substance, too, of the descendants and successors of those stout burghers—the bourgeoisie as they were called —who long before had begun the effort to relocate more favorably for themselves the limits between the claims of authority and new demands for freedom in the direction of man's affairs. T h e affairs of government and economic enterprise, of religious belief and ethics, and of social classification they endeavored to make their affairs. T h e soil in which this credo took root was the soil of material expansion, an irrepressible and many-sided expansion of h u m a n vitality as violent as it was dynamic. T h i s expansion, this explosion, manifested itself within Europe in many ways. Among them were vast accumulations of capital that technology with and without the aid of science put to work to enrich the few; badly rewarded work opportunities for the many; and a sharpened struggle for social pre-eminence between the landed aristocracy and the new groups deriving their power from commerce, finance, and industry. T h i s explosion of re-enforced h u m a n energy found expression, too, in the deep and destructive power conflicts of national states within Europe, and, outside

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Europe, in a fierce and unprecedented competition for empire, for control of trade routes and colonies, for sugar and slaves, dyestuffs and furs, tobacco and coffee. And as militarism in its largest sense became an essential element of the European state system, though ill sustained by an economy of scarcity to which its demands gave stimulus for growth, the great states vigorously and violently sought to set their houses in order. T h e rationalization of public life did not everywhere take place in accord with the hopes which inspired it. T h i s , the tragically defeated revolutionary emperor Joseph II was to realize before his reign ended; this, the pathetically inept Louis X V I discovered even as his reign began. B u t everywhere in Europe, while Europe itself expanded abroad and made its ideas, its institutions, and its men commodities of export, an empirical answer was offered to an old question: the boundaries between authority and liberty were shifted far to one side, to the side of the leviathan state. T h e shift was less than accepted in some parts of the Old World, and soon another strand was introduced into the pattern of Western civilization, the strand of revolution. First in England, then in the revolutionary upheavals of the late eighteenth century of which the revolutions in America and in France were the foremost and most important, men arose to translate into reality their confidence in the sovereign right of people to order their own destiny. T h u s to the world of our great-grandfathers was transmitted a diverse legacy of thought and forms. It embodied immense confidence in scientific method and systematic use of the cumulative data that such method gave. O n e of its pillars was the faith in the capacity of rational man to minister to his needs and solve his problems. T h e wide diffusion of this faith through popular media of communication such as press and pamphlet and book, school and club, entered into the legacy, while meantime the Christian

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tradition also persisted tenaciously. T h e characteristic forms of modern life were already present: nationalism and the national state; militarism and war; rival embodiments of views on how man should be governed; diverse and transient social strivings; the reality of European imperialism and the ideal of anti-colonialism. In the hundred years which followed, this heritage fell afoul of weighty challenges. J a c o b i n terrorism and Bonapartist dictatorship, set in the frame of twenty-five years of convulsion and violence, raised doubts to which neither Rousseau nor Condorcet gave satisfying reassurance. Antidemocratic philosophies or ideologies, some based upon Christian authoritarianism and others incorporating the protests of romanticism and insights from the newer psychology, raised the question whether human progress was anything more than a myth. M e n were summoned to venerate where they were unable presently to comprehend. A n d attacks upon middle-class progress were unleashed from the opposite flank, from democrats who felt strongly that it had not gone far enough. Utopians with their duodecimo versions of the New Jerusalem, Christian socialists, and above all others, scientific socialists of the school of M a r x , savagely underscored the deficiencies of the eighteenthcentury version of the natural rights of man. From them all, despite their mutual distaste and diversity of recommendations f o r action, stemmed another broad, new ingredient of our tradition, the movement to make democratic progress deeper, more rich, and more real. A t the same time the sustaining ideas and forms of the tradition worked themselves out in accordance with the inner elements that constituted them; and science, mainly in biology, again came to the rescue of progress. T h e high priests of the church of scientific evolution intoned the gospel. T h e great Sir J o h n Herschel gave authoritative assurance that " M a n ' s progress towards a higher state need

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never fear a check, but must continue till the very last existence of history"; while Herbert Spencer, in a nod of Homeric proportions, informed the rich and poor alike that "Progress is not an accident but a necessity. What we call evil and immorality must disappear. It is certain that men will become perfect." But what followed after 1914 made the ironic title of Aldous Huxley's book, Brave New World, a shorthand expression of the skepticism, even the despair, with which he and thousands of other disillusioned readers viewed the future. T h e forms in which this mood manifested itself are legion, and there is no need to lacerate ourselves anew by itemizing or cataloguing them. Some are searching and provocative, some disturbing for their overtones of renunciation, and others banal to the point of tedium. Angry young men and several beat generations discovered that life can be absurd, and, unlike more philosophically minded existentialists, let it go at that. Yet the significance of this mood and this attitude of mind remains: much of our literature is Utopia in reverse; science fiction expands our universe to demolish it more effectively. We cannot deny that the tradition has in many ways failed to supply organizing principles to cope with urgent needs. T w o devastating world wars, a harrowing depression of almost global dimensions, counter-revolutions and continuing communist revolutionary expansion highlight the failure. Henry Miller's taunt about America as "an airconditioned nightmare," Hitler's appeal to mass emotionalism on a primitive level of fears and tribal taboos, Orwell's 1984 sounded the alarms whose bells are being rung by learned studies which disclose the depths of man's irrationality. And Huxley's Brave New World Revisited frighteningly emphasizes again how much human freedom and democracy are threatened from every direction. As a reviewer, summing up Huxley's argument, points out: "In-

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creasing overpopulation, chemical coercion by hypnotic drugs, drowning of the mind in nonsensical irrelevancies, verbal seduction, opinion engineering, mass hypnosis, subliminal persuasion, unobtrusive brainwashing and more overt mental coercion . . . have stealthily enveloped the entire world." A n d we may add such developments as the frightening imbalance between runaway population growth and limited food resources; massive breakthroughs in scientific research on and application of atomic energy and electronics; and, not least, the state of endemic war, not q u i t e hot in the bad old familiar way, yet always more than merely cold. Perhaps all this makes history obsolete. Perhaps a change of phase has come in the direction of human affairs, an irreversible trend of events, as Roderick Seidenberg maintains in his brilliantly grim Posthistoric Man, a period " i n which the individual . . . will find himself encased in an endless routine and sequence of events, not unlike that of the ants, the bees, and the termites . . . entombed in a perpetual round of perfectly adjusted responses. . . ." Perhaps so, but it is permissible as well as comforting to doubt the inevitability of this bleak denouement of man's adventure. A n d in any case, so far as the immediate f u t u r e of all of us is concerned, we are still the inheritors of the eighteenth-century legacy. We work with what we have. T h e tattered banner of human progress still flies, a little askew, over o u r domiciles; the Hellenistic-Judaic-Christian faith persists; faith in scientific method is more eroded than shattered, tinctured by misgivings over its application; nationalism tilts fiercely against the united nations of the world; the regenerative strength of the individual resists the pressures of the automatized horrors that assail it; our conception of the good life by and large still holds. So, viewed by the historian, the heritage, whether sound or limping, exists and uses him as it does us all, fashioning

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us to discharge our responsibilities. But if it, the tradition, could only address the historian it might conceivably ask him the embarrassing question whether he has used it as effectively as he might. It might ask him what it is that he knows and understands of the past and what he consciously proposes to do about it. Not too long ago—a mere fifty years—Lord Acton in a ringing manifesto confidently predicted a great role for the historian. Knowledge of the past, he asserted, would make history "an instrument of action and power that goes to the making of the future." It is not surprising that a man so acutely aware of his professional status and so extraordinarily equipped to speak for his colleagues should have written as he did. As far back as had been recorded, men groping for understanding of processes of life greater than their own endeavors have turned to history for guidance, expecting from it salvation or consolation. Not to history alone, obviously, b u t to history none the less. While it is only fair to note that historians have not been u n i q u e in meeting such appeals with unsatisfactory responses, the fact remains that as far back as can be traced, they have endeavored, bound in professional honor if sometimes unwittingly, to satisfy those longings. For that they are not to be blamed: since the whole dignity of the h u m a n endeavor is bound u p with historic issues and those issues obstinately refuse to remain constant, history, reacting in a kind of sympathetic vibration to the changes in man's strivings and hopes, becomes charged with different meanings for different generations. Yet in the light of the half century which followed Acton's bold expectation, a half century of violent shock and conflict, the f u t u r e that was to be made by historical inquiry appears to many as a bleak and grim present. It is patent that something went wrong. T h e r e are at least two possible explanations. Perhaps the forces with which we work can not be controlled by knowledge of their processes, and per-

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haps knowledge of the past has proved itself a baleful power. Perhaps, on the other hand, historians have not used it well. Ex-officio, I prefer an explanation which only impugns my effectiveness to one which demolishes my reason for being. This preference to impale myself on the softer horn of the dilemma has the advantage of offering me, and us all, an opportunity to mend the error and the weakness of our ways. Concerning those ways there have been searching criticisms from our own professional ranks and outside them, and valuable recommendations too. Accusing fingers have been shaken at the spectacle of fragmentized and specialized research and writing that does not even genuflect with respect toward the ideal of seeing the past as a whole. Our conception of the stuff that history is made of, it is said, is thin and anemic because all we do is pay due deference at the appropriate moment for acknowledgment to our newer associates in the social sciences and our old valuable allies in the humanities, and then go our way as before. We reorient our thinking about man and nature—to go on with the critique—by reading, or at least by reading books about, contemporary philosophers and scientists, and then lock away the insights thus gained for uses to which they are rarely if ever put. More frequently than might be suspected from the published professions of faith in presidential addresses, we still fail to imbue our research and our teaching with assumptions that give to the processes of history values and meanings that are far from inherent in the processes themselves. We do not seek for a criterion of judgment outside those processes and we continue, though we say the contrary, to act as though it is not we who are speaking but history speaking through us. T o o often, by our refusal to write history in the grand manner, we behave like a lobby, complacently leading our autonomous existence and arrogantly defend-

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ing a vested interest to have history continue as an affair of the historians, by the historians, and for the historians. With a kind of injured virtue, say the critics, too many of us guard our purity by insisting that reassessment and interpretation must wait upon scholarship—Ο blessed word!— while we continue to ask questions which effectively set up roadblocks between the past and the present. Naturally, we might meet those charges with the quip of Hilaire Belloc: while our sins are scarlet, our books are read. But that is not good enough. If the criticism has substance, and I feel that much of it has, we must answer it by making our research and our teaching more meaningful, even begin by making our working knowledge of the past more meaningful to ourselves. We can insist, to start with, that our conception of history as inquiry cannot be made anything less than a summa of research on man's activities, of what he did and thought. Perhaps it is too much to say that the stuff of history is also the stuff of auxiliary and autonomous disciplines like sociology, economics, politics, and psychology. It is not too much to argue that history ideally speaking is a synthesizing endeavor, seeking to close the gaps between the other disciplines and to utilize them in a humanistic way.1 We no more aspire to foretell the future than we claim any longer to say wie es eigentlich gewesen. But to meet the future and help others to meet it lies within our power and is indeed our responsibility. T o meet the future we must be more than guardians and caretakers of a great tradition. We must 1 Professor Oates, as will be seen, directs attention to the desirability of synthesizing human experience " o n a sufficiently generic level," making this endeavor the function of humanistic philosophy. I endorse his insistence but trust that he will allow the historian to share in that endeavor. F o r after all, Lord Bolingbroke did define history in a way which permits both the philosophically oriented historian and the historically grounded humanist philosopher to cooperate. He called history "philosophy teaching by examples."

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go beyond helping mankind judge of what it is doing and what it hopes to do. T h e historical process is no ultimate, and it explains nothing by itself. We cannot, like the great classical historian, J. B. Bury, maintain that "it contains within itself the explanation of the development of man from his primitive state to the point which it has reached." T h e facts do not speak for themselves, and the historian must look outside the process to relate the facts to some purpose or purposes not innately present in them. We must assume the task, by throwing the light of historically disciplined intelligence upon the conditions which govern the play of man's capacity, of tentatively advising mankind of the range of the possible that lies before it. T h e historian must not shrink from the effort required to extract from the myriad recorded facts of the past the clues and the insights which can heighten understanding of comparable or roughly analogous situations confronting us today. Do the postulates and the procedures of science validate the effort of the historian to renounce omniscience and settle for less than Acton and Bury assigned to him? T h e question has been asked before, and in fact there is no avoiding it. Between the assumptions and the methods of science and history there has always been a correspondence of sorts if not always a harmonious accord. Newton, Locke, and Condillac set the frame for the inquiries of historians in the eighteenth century. Drawing upon the time-space quantitative view of nature governed by universal law and upon the conception of rational man competent and eager to cooperate with the processes of that world machine, the historians of the Enlightenment wrote excellent history, but history in the main that dealt with a type man in a type universe. In the following century history again leaned upon and reflected science. Under the impact of assumptions and methods which yielded impressive new knowledge, histori-

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ans refurbished earlier notions of the laws of nature and nature's god and earlier beliefs in the perfectibility of man. Retooled, in today's idiom, by a refresher course in biology and arming themselves with concepts of evolution, struggle for survival, and natural selection, they conceived of their history as truly scientific. Facts properly certified for their authenticity explained how things became that w h i c h they would presently cease being. In due time, as we know, "the new history" of R o b i n s o n and Beard, of Becker and Barnes, and of T u r n e r too, rebelled against the fallacies and the determinisms of genetic explanations. D r a w i n g upon philosophy, psychology, and literature, and dramatically opposing the procedure of the historian to those of the scientist, they made the manifestly relativist conception of history as inquiry equivalent more or less to an acknowledgement of its frailty as a mode of knowledge, and dynamited the foundations of R a n k e ' s "scientific history." W r i t t e n history became an act of faith (Beard); history a blend of truth and fancy, the most convenient form of illusion (Becker). W e owe m u c h to the great relativists of yesterday. B u t to the relative truths of history they gave rather less and to the absolute truths of science rather more than in either case was warranted. A n d as the time of troubles descended u p o n us for which the skepticism of relativist history had no balm, the inevitabilities of the historic process that had been expelled from the front door re-entered the mansion of history by the back. Against this new determinism a second generation of relativists fights again, w h e t h e r against the morphological parallelisms of Spengler, the dialectical determinism of M a r x canonically fixed by L e n i n and Stalin, the cyclical sinuosities of T o y n b e e , or the stark finale of posthistoric man. A l l these variations on the theme that the capacity of the individual is slighter than we think, invoke the high

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authority of scientific method. Now only a presumptuous layman would dare betray his ignorance by attempting to single out implications that contemporary science holds for the historian. But some of them even a layman can perceive even when he lacks competence to understand the subject matter itself. Einstein's theory made matter and energy interchangeable and profoundly modified earlier conceptions of time-space relations. Since individuals moving at different rates of speed see things quite differently, since things looked different to observers at different places and at different times, the layman drew the inference that truth depends on the point of view of the men who make the inquiry, that the observer is part of the observed. Instruments participate in modifying the structure they are intended to reveal. " I n science," said Eddington, "we study the linkage of pointer readings with pointer readings." Quantum mechanics, study of the elusive mysterious atom, Heisenberg's principle of indeterminancy (deriving from the inability to determine accurately both the position and velocity of an electron at the same time), all suggested that there are no absolute truths, only relative ones, only statistical probability. From biology new clues to the mysteries of living cells are leading some researchers to a unified and workable psychological and neurological theory concerning the relationship of mind to body and life. On the postulate that the body of every living thing is a physico-chemical system, they argue further that within the brain cells, as in every other living cell, there is probably a protoplasmic pattern of some sort, a dynamic equilibrium of particles and processes which guides the cell's development along a definite path as it does all organisms. By this hypothesis mind and life are both manifestations of the same basic homeostatic process of living matter to reach and maintain a core of norms and hold in a constant course to a given end. Mind is pulled

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and not only pushed by drives. Freedom of direction is limited, but it exists. Man may choose. Exactly how this freedom of the mind to choose is exercised, how far it can go or how little, we do not learn either from neurology or psychology. These sciences confirm with a wealth, or welter, of detail what a Joyce or a Proust in their way already had made clear, that the procedures of mind are voluminous, exhaustive, infinitely complex. But the vastly improved techniques for probing into the inner workings of human personality have not yielded absolute answers universally agreed upon. Here, too, our truths remain relative. What is clear, here, I believe, if I read these implications correctly, is that a more or less common situation exists for scientists and historians. Neither can approach his problem with complete objectivity. All their researches are interdependent; all disclose only parts of the unitary pattern of life and body and thought. All researchers, astro-physicists, bio-chemists, bio-physicists, neurologists and psychologists, are more like the historian than was dreamed on in earlier views. All of them work with certain artistic and imaginative creativcness; all their truths are relative and contingent, all in part the work of their minds, the working of minds distressingly complex. T h e historian, following the accepted canons of his profession and seeking modestly only to chart the range of the possible or even to suggest, from what he understands of the past, some probabilities of the future, is not scientifically out of step. Science does not underwrite certainties; experience does not validate inevitabilities; the future is open. T h e historian need not feel defensive because in some ultimate and formalistic sense his inquiries only transform problems without solving them. He has no pact with the future to relish the bitter-sweet of knowing that his permanent contributions, like his present conceptions, are the

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appropriate tricks that he plays upon the dead, bound tomorrow to be supplanted. Sufficient unto the day are the problems thereof, the truths thereof—even the ignorance thereof. So the historian, certified by science, embarks upon his quest, humble before his difficulties but emboldened by awareness of his limitations. Holding the tradition still strong, the gap between the ideal and the real notwithstanding, and viewing varied human experience as parts of a unitary and continuing pattern, he selects from present dislocations tensions which have already challenged modern man, diagnosing current difficulties and making prognoses as best he can from the solutions once attempted, and gaining deeper understanding of the past itself as he does so from the light that the present throws upon it. T h e topics that may be re-examined and retaught from this angle of approach are many, and I shall in concluding suggest several analogous or comparative situations and problems that lend themselves to such an inquiry. First, I think it would be in order for the historian to lay on the table his assumptions about man's capacity for solving his problems. It may well be, as many people fear, that forces and forms of the modern cultural tradition which have taken command can no longer be controlled this side of their destruction and ours. Things may be in the saddle riding mankind, things in the forms of nationalism, the capitalist ethos, soviet drives, and scientific power and technology, which will ride on to the anguish of Orwell's 1984 or the indignities of Huxley's Ape and Essence, where baboons put dog collars on Faradays and Einsteins and lead them on leashes. It is not altogether unnatural that we recoil in horror from such phantasmagorias; it is not intelligent for us to evade taking thought on the prospects ahead. Must we accept the repudiation of the now battered credo that to serve and save humanity all that is required

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is for men to come together under the banner of reason and good will? Is Mary McCarthy's jibe true that "Bertrand Russell is out," to which she adds "and God is in"? Is Sartre's No Exit, starkly underscoring the absurdity of life, the alternative to what Dean Inge caustically called "the superstitution of progress"? Do we go along or back with Toynbee in holding that the appropriate response to the challenge of the dehumanizing of life is for God to become incarnate in man? Do we go forward with Seidenberg and see the individual ultimately "encased in an endless routine and sequence of events, not unlike that of the ants, the bees, and the termites . . . "? Or do we take our stand with the botanist E. W. Sinnott that there is a fundamental identity between life and mind, that the integrating action of the brain as protoplasm, by setting up purposes which translate themselves into thought and overt behavior, makes man his own master? I do not know the answer. I feel strongly that it would not make the historian's response to challenge less meaningful if he acted upon one assumption or another. As we teach our present courses by period or region, and as we insist that our graduate students acquire the technical competence to carry on their specialized research, we should also go beyond. T a k e the study of revolutions by way of one example. Revolutions are today. Statesmen have to cope with them, and taxpayers are baffled and frightened by them. But revolutions are core ingredients of our heritage. Americans made one too. Manifestly, circumstances today are not identical with those obtaining in the Western world between 1763 and 1800. Yet something is gained, if we are soberly reminded that an earlier generation, like the generation since 1 9 1 7 , also lived under the shadow of revolutions that swept over the thirteen colonies, Ireland, the Rhineland, and France. We lose nothing in understanding by examining how those revolutions came, whether they were

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inevitable or could have been staved off, who their protagonists were. Perhaps there is also a natural history of revolution. I'm not too sure about anatomy, but I am sure that the study of the impact of the revolution that was widely exported, the revolution in France, throws light on how revolution today falls out upon neighboring countries, what falls out, and how and why it is received. A tempest in a teapot arose recently when some one on Capitol Hill patriotically unearthed the existence of studies on national surrender. But the ensuing hue and cry was surrender, surrender to emotionalism. Surrender, too, comes within the range of the possible in human affairs. No one advocates surrender, but in one way or another we have to come to terms with realities, with revolution too. England learned that the hard way with the Americans. Europe, by not learning, came to disadvantageous terms with the French. Thousands of Americans welcomed the French Revolution and continued to do so, though President Washington disapproved. T h e Tammany Society of New York, which has no reputation for radicalism, endorsed the following wish in a metrical form of dubious poetic validity: May heaven continue still to bless The arms of freedom with success Till tyrants are no morel And still as Gallia's sons shall fly From victory to victory We'll, shouting, cry Encorel What was good enough for Tammany and Francophiles in 1793 is good enough for millions of Russophiles today. Why? T h e historian can say a word here. He can say a word, too, to use another illustration, about the eighteenth-century reforming activities called enlightened despotism. That they fit into the pattern of eighteenthcentury developments is undeniable. Considered within the continuity of the European heritage they are also particular

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embodiments of a unitary process that has taken various forms. T h e process is the larger one of fixing the limits between the claims of authority and the demands of freedom. T h e opposing conceptions lay at the heart of the seventeenth-century struggle in England. T h e i r overtones were heard in the resistance movement of the thirteen colonies. Colonial governors, as Carl Becker in one of his penetrating and charming asides noted, were not kings, b u t "a certain flavor, clinging as it were to their official robes and reviving in sensitive provincial minds the memory of bygone battles, was an ever-present stimulus to the eternal vigilance w h i c h was well known to be the price of liberty." Rousseau's general will and Robespierre's insistence that France should be governed under the joint aegis of terror and v i r t u e — t e r r o r without which virtue was impotent, virtue without which terror was b a l e f u l — w e r e concerned with that problem. In Napoleon I l l ' s organization of power the struggle found an answer; in Bismarck too, in Stalin, and in De Gaulle's sibylline sense of grandeur. A score of years ago Bertrand Russell sensitively put his finger on the heart of the matter in giving to his v o l u m e on modern history the title Freedom versus Organization. T h e historian, by presenting these experiences comparatively, can throw fresh light upon the persistent oscillations in o u r culture between these two poles of human aspiration. T h e tensions of international relations, to pass rapidly to a third illustration, cast a shadow today deeper than ever before because of the very interdependence of the world and the publicity which attends the effort to relax them. But those tensions are not radically different in kind from the power struggles of half a m i l l e n n i u m ago. M u c h can be learned to fortify our understanding of contemporary dilemmas and impasses from relating those earlier global struggles to the present. T h e issues concerning control of vital materials and strategic locations are not new. For

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Gibraltar and Malta, read North Africa and Korea, if not also outer space; for rubber and oil, read atomic energy. Conquest and occupation, economic-financial penetration, and ideological competition are at least as old as the Catholic Philip II, the republican Girondists, and the dictator Napoleon. Peace congresses and conferences of ambassadors endowed with stout nerves, flexible tactics, and a realistic grasp of high strategy antedate meetings on the summit or the late Mr. Dulles. T h e study of the continuity of power struggles in diverse forms suggests a fourth illustration to help close the gap between research and teaching. It needs no laboring, since it has been so largely adopted already—the study of the European experience in an extra-European setting, possibly today in an anti-European setting. W e may be premature in examining the contacts and the expansion of Western culture from the point of view that the European age is waning. But the suggestion is not hopelessly unrealistic or even defeatist. T h e historian would be guilty of a kind of Continental parochialism if he did not take it into consideration and look more closely at the elements that entered into the making of the tradition, among them the Byzantine influences introduced by imperial Russia, the Arabic contribution, even the place of "India, Tibet and Malaya as Sources of Mediaeval Technology," to cite the title of a paper on the program of the last meeting of the American Historical Association. And his Continental parochialism would be compounded if he did not take into consideration the sudden and dramatic impact of Asia and Africa upon the Western tradition, which he hitherto viewed exclusively with European eyes. Finally and possibly most important of all for us, there is the astounding compartmentalizing in the teaching of American history and the history of Western Europe. Is it not high time to teach, with appropriate modification, what

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Adam Smith long ago recognized, that the discovery of America and the opening of the Cape of Good Hope route to the East Indies were the "two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind"? We need no reminder of how inextricably America is tangled today with all the world in a complex of arms, finance, ideas, and, thanks in part to Sol Hurok, in aesthetics and the arts too. In a vague way, too, people recognize that patterns of life on both sides of the Atlantic were profoundly altered and a new civilization was established within the two hundred years from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, between the pioneers of the New World and their Old World homelands. But the continuing and persisting exchanges within that Atlantic community—from the founding of America as a national state and without interruption for the following centuries, the nineteenth and the twentieth—certainly merit greater attention than they receive. W e do not divide thought, literature, technology today between America and Europe. Does Proust belong to France, Joyce to Ireland and the Left Bank, Oppenheimer to us, Pasternak to Kruschev? Do we deny the Greek tragedies, Plato, Shakespeare, Milton, or the Bible to the United States of yesterday? Can we situate the Monroe Doctrine uniquely on this side of the Atlantic and the British fleet during the nineteenth century on the other, or British export capitalism? Can we explain American developments in terms of the westward movement without also taking into consideration the sense of frustration and alienation, at the very least of contradiction, which runs straight from Cooper and Poe and Melville to Pound and Hemingway, to Wolfe and Scott Fitzgerald? If our cultural ambiance is one or overlapping, what of the manifestations of the American experience in economics, science and technology, painting, religion? No, it is hard to deny that the American experi-

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ment in democracy has always been joined with the Europe where it began. In these few suggestions I have tried to indicate some of the ways in which the historian can discharge his responsibility. T h e first aid that he offers may not be sufficient. T h e result may be nothing more than reaffirming that man cannot escape history, and this reaffirmation would be neither much nor novel. Perhaps at a moment when amateurs generously offer troubled man peace of mind, this reaffirmation would be reward enough to the historian for his efforts.

TWENTIETH CENTURY CIVILIZATIONS AND CULTURES Henri

Peyre

Yale University THE

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scope as to dampen and indeed to drown the audacity of anyone who, trained in the sciences or in the social sciences, is accustomed to treat with prudence only of what he may claim to know with some degree of certainty. But a humanist who has proudly and glibly repeated since childhood that nothing human is alien to him may foolishly step in with his cloddy feet where more angelic scientists deign not tread. Since he happens to be a Frenchman, he mutters to himself Danton's motto, "Toujours de l'audace!" —which seems to have been coined for co-drinkers (and generous pourers) of words in American symposia on educational issues. His approach to the daunting and colossal topic proposed to him is bound to remain fragmentary and to be colored by his own special interest in one discipline, literature. Linguistics, cultural anthropology, philosophy, history, art criticism, and other muses will remain unbidden at this feast. A foreign professor and adopted son of American universities enjoys, however, one advantage: he feels freer to underline, neither with any nationalist arrogance nor with obsequiousness, the gigantic achievement of American scholarship in the present century. Americans, who may in other realms be frequently charged with bragging, are in truth afflicted with a timidity, almost crystallized into a complex of inferiority, where their education is concerned. T h e y perhaps attempted an impossible task in >39

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trying to educate everybody at a time when the population of the country was more heterogeneous and less aware of the need for culture than that of other civilized lands; not being able then to provide every child with a good education, they may—as Robert M. Hutchins claimed— have settled for a mediocre one, even for the gifted children at the secondary school level. But the strides taken by American universities since 1920 or so have been gigantic. A dozen or more institutions of higher learning in this country are today the equal to the very best in the world. More exacting teaching is offered, more assiduous guidance in research. Ampler facilities for equipment and libraries account in part for the prodigious growth of higher education in America. But the progress has been mainly a progress in the quality of men. N o other country, not even Germany at the height of her expansion in science, history, and philology in the last century, could ever boast of an achievement comparable to the one which has taken place in the New World, from Boston and Philadelphia to the Pacific coast. Yet the temptation is resisted to be content with the recent past which witnessed such astonishing progress. In the domains of advanced research and teaching, the leading men in this country refuse to rest on their laurels, or even to rest. Expansion is necessary in a growing country with an ever expanding economy. T h e challenge of new institutions of learning spurs the older ones to new reforms. T h e munificence of foundations incites academic administrators to devise innovations and to shake off the lethargy into which the more traditional subjects are liable to lapse. Restlessness has its faults, and it may be that a perpetual nomadic discontent with the here and now lurks behind the appearance of American optimism. T h e core of the curriculum in our colleges, and not only in our schools, must too often withstand the onslaught of fringe upstarts.

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But the most insidious of evils is eschewed: the slumber of the soul. A conference like this one in Philadelphia serves as a salutary reminder to us that the challenge to American education, as we march more steadily into the third quarter of this century, is the severest yet encountered. Programs all around the world are clamoring for more Americans of uncommon ability. Industry, diplomacy, government, science, and education need thousands of gifted men, and hope that they will long retain a capacity to groAv after having been adequately trained. From all sides, eyes are turned toward graduate schools, where the teachers of teachers, of engineers, of statesmen, of experts of all kinds are being equipped to assume their role—a role, as America realizes today, second to none in crucial essentiality. T h e few specific questions to which this paper will be directed may be formulated thus: new challenges are today being thrown to the humanities as traditionally conceived; what gain can be effected from some of the strictures levelled at us? Can we, as a Greek moralist who helped train generations of humanists, Plutarch, advised us to do, derive profit from the happy circumstance that we have enemies? W e also live in a collective era, in which men multiply each other's power instead of dwelling in proud isolation. W e are more attentive than ever before to the sweep of huge gregarious forces, more aware of their potentialities for evil, b u t also for good. New disciplines attempt to alter man, perhaps to save his civilisation, through a wider knowledge and a greater control of social factors. Can the humanities gain from associating with social studies, or at least from understanding them with sympathy? A confrontation of literature (or of history, or of art history) with other disciplines is thus constantly in order. It should be undertaken with tolerance and open-mindedness, b u t with no u n d u e humility or in a spirit of subservience. T h e meeting ground is extensive. "More consciousness" is

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the goal of any intelligent person today, a goal which implies a keener understanding of what differs most from him. But a sympathetic confrontation with other disciplines would, and probably should, lead humanists to define their goals and their methods anew, but also to preserve the originality of their own branch of knowledge and the validity of their own approach. T h e true scientific attitude for them is not to parade as imitators of scientific methods and achievements where those are out of place. At no time in history have the humanities been so much talked about, lauded in more passionate and florid speeches, redefined with more conviction, and also with more effulgent haziness than in America today. Incoming freshmen, departing seniors equally patient under the admonitions showered at them, alumni, parents, councils of educators listen to their praise. Seldom if ever is a word heard indicting them. If humanists however "protest too much," it can only be due to a sense of guilt hidden in them or to their consciousness of an undefined peril which they attempt to avert with humanistic eloquence. It may not be amiss to state the implicit charges against the humanities baldly and to air grievances on both sides. In the eyes of many, the humanities as traditionally conceived are too aristocratic and too exclusive: they are the privilege of a few who used to wear their knowledge of Latin as a badge pointing to their class superiority. A familiarity with English poets, French novelists, German philosophers, with art and music is likewise taken to be the mark of genteel refinement, available only to those who enjoy leisure and indulge Epicurean tastes. It can only arouse invidiousness in the more practically directed individuals whose goal is success and whose training is technical and vocational. Others, less harried by pressing drives in their careers, concerned with the position of America as a world power

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supporting allies in five continents and anxious for their friendship, would submit that this country has failed to broaden the humanities geographically and otherwise, that it remains obsessed by what may be termed "a Mediterranean fixation." If there is, however, any universal validity in the Christian-Hellenic-Roman heritage which lies at the core of liberal education in the Western World, that heritage should not be cherished as an exclusive possession by the Western nations which are at present reduced to a minority on our planet. One of the startling phenomena of our age is the spread of Western science, technique, political thought, even of separation between Church and State and of agnosticism, and of the new religion of nationalism to the continents of Asia and Africa. But the best of Western humanism and whatever wisdom accrued to the West from its Mediterranean legacy have not spread accordingly. It is now imperative that we extend to the lands of Asia and of Africa the benefit of what has been tested by time as the most precious in the humanities and, without diluting that elixir overmuch, that we generously let many non-Western peoples drink from our once exclusive fountain. We cannot afford to leave too many "barbarians" from the outside untouched by our values and ideals, or we should soon be overrun by an invasion from the wrathful populations of underprivileged lands which would far outrange the invasions which, fifteen centuries ago, overran the Roman empire. T h e danger is just as great that the humanists and traditionalists in our midst be crushed or reduced to impotence by the "barbarians of the interior." The humanities have barely extended their beneficent influence to a thin layer of our most democratic societies. T h e proportion of true humanists (and of statesmen, and even of inventive scientists) in a country of 170 million people, set in contrast to the same proportion a century or two ago in a country

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of a few million people, is not a flattering one for us. It is reckoned that two-thirds at least of those who read comics (and hardly anything else) are adults. Adult education and a cultural utilization of leisure are the most gravely deficient features of our democratic societies. T h e truest friends of labor who had set such high expectations on the beginnings of the unions several decades ago, when they envisaged them as a potential focus of cultivation of the arts and of ideas, have been disillusioned. If the humanities constitute the fittest training for an elite, they should be made accessible to growing numbers among us and become democratized. A final charge has lately assailed humanists: that of complacency and aloofness. It is contended that they refuse to evince any interest in the sciences which should be altering their picture of the world today; their humanism is thus cramped and lacks the courage to build a philosophy upon the sciences and upon the techniques of their day, a courage that Greek thinkers and humanists of the times of Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Hume once possessed. They affect scorn for the practicality which is supposed to obsess those \vho "think with their hands," but seldom do they try to meet them half way. Their outlook upon the exterior world is thus an outdated and a timid one. They do not display much more curiosity for the behavioral sciences or for the category of the collective, which nevertheless permeates all the walks of life around them and molds the moods of most people. T o o much that is human, if not always expressed in polished language, thus remains alien to them. T h e partition walls which absurdly separate cognate disciplines in our universities are often of their own erecting. Even if they will not listen to inimical arguments from those who grudge them, in the modern world, the place their ancestors once occupied, humanists are constrained

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to painful avowals. T h e y no longer attract, from the colleges or from the schools, the very best young men. Those gifted and ambitious youngsters are rather seduced, not even by science b u t by the managerial professions: they study law, business administration, corporation finances, economic growth. T h e country's interest commands that such professions be staffed by men who have been submitted to a liberal arts training and understand the motives which move individuals and nations, and have always moved them. But the persistence of a power elite conversant with humanistic values also requires that a substantial portion of the most brilliant young men elect the teaching of humanities as a vocation. T h e current dissatisfaction with our schools suggests that such m2y n c longer be the case. O u r failure may be even more woeful in that we humanists do not take sufficient advantage of the captive audiences of thousands of young men and women who, at a most receptive age, sit at our feet and imbibe our words. We should be imparting to them a passion for continued reading and for the enjoyment of beauty which should outlast the ordeals of competition and the stresses of middle age. It may be understandable that the enthusiasm aroused by poetry should flag after the years of passion have passed, a n d that men of forty should prefer to come to terms with reality and to alter it through action. As Yeats mockingly o r enviously puts it: For those that love the world serve it in action Grow rich, popular and full of influence; And should they paint or write, still it is action, T h e struggle of the fly in the marmalade. . . .

Yet it is to be lamented that, ten or fifteen years after graduation, men and women should be deprived of poetry when it is most needed in their lives. But philosophy, political thought, even history are, by

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the nature of things, forced upon the young or greedily devoured by them when they are not yet fully able to understand them. Aristotle in the sixth book of his Nicomachean Ethics had already noted that while young men do become mathematicians easily, they are hardly fit to be students of politics, for they have little experience, and the first principles in political and social disciplines come from experience. " T h e young men have no convictions about the latter, but merely use the proper language." Unless college education provides the young men with more than an "exposure" to accumulated knowledge— namely, with a hunger for more learning and a readiness to mature or to revise their views at middle age—it has failed to fulfill its purpose. T h e sad fact is that the elimination of illiteracy and the spread of college education to all those who seem, at eighteen, to be equipped for it, have not multiplied, in Western countries, the number of those who, in middle age, can become the leaders of politics, of diplomacy, of education, or even of business. If we are not afflicted with arrested development at thirty or thereabouts, we only remain malleable in a few lobes of our brains, while others yield to inertia if not to premature sclerosis. O n the university faculties, as in most branches of business where progress hinges upon executives with independent ideas and where discoveries demand imagination and a challenge to conformity, we suffer from a shortage of men of considerable stature aged 40 to 55, and have to bid high for the few of them there are. A noxious breeze withers, in the middle thirties, the fresh promises of our young graduates. T h e education of many a humanist, like that of a social scientist or of a political thinker, should be undertaken anew twenty years after he has left college. If he was truly trained in the spirit and not just in the letter of the humanities, he should then have remained plastic enough to learn again and to interpret his broadened

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experience of life through the lenses, or the code, with which his formal studies had provided him. W e cannot expect o u r contemporaries, with the prospect of twenty more years of active life than their great-grandparents had enjoyed and in a world twenty times more complex, to go on living from twenty-five to seventy-five on the lore accumulated in their years of physical growth. W e should serve society far better if we insisted, in the middle of o u r lives, u p o n deepening or extending our education. T h e test of the validity of the humanities lies in their b e i n g lived. More specifically, American educators should some day undertake a drastic re-estimation of the terminal degree of graduate education, the sacrosanct Ph.D. Ritually, deans of graduate schools devote their annual report to a few perfunctory lines on the subject, concluding that the Ph.D. dissertation must remain with us and that its completion be accelerated, b u t acknowledging that the ambitious formula defining it as a substantial contribution to knowledge is more honored in the breach than in the observance. T h e social background of our graduate students has radically changed over the last hundred years: relatively few are persons of independent means belonging to the leisure class and in a position to travel from one university to another, to haunt libraries and laboratories for half a dozen years before securing their degrees. Fewer still are wholeheartedly dedicated to a youth of prolonged celibacy and to a monachal penurious existence until they secure the coveted doctorate. T h e pressure hurrying them on is not only economic; it is social, for they are needed by their country to serve as soldiers, as technicians, or to staff the schools and colleges struggling with a teacher shortage. Most dissertations written at twenty-five are hasty and immature. In probably eighty-five per cent of cases, they are never f o l l o w e d by a second and maturer work, w h i c h should constitute the real contribution of the scholar to

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knowledge. If anything, they sterilize the apprentice who has to produce an excessive effort too soon in his career, realizes the inadequacy of what he then wrote, and is intimidated or sterilized for ever after. It might well be more candid to admit that but for a few very gifted men who, at twenty-four or five, can indeed prove to be perceptive critics, original philosophers, archaeologists with flair and audacity, historians of unusual range, and who should be encouraged to develop into teacher-scholars and eventually into graduate school teachers, we should lose little if we gave up the requirement of a formal thesis and replaced it with a more thorough preparation for teaching itself, and with a few essays on varied aspects or periods of their field. T h e immensity of the country, its heterogeneousness, and its traditions of private universities and of state universities umbrageously jealous of their indepedence from anyone but their state, preclude America from ever developing anything like an "agregation" or a "Staatsexamen" which has served other countries satisfactorily. Still a little more uniformity, secured through a friendly agreement among the twentyfive leading graduate schools in the country, might insure that the new degrees in English, history, philosophy, classics, or modern languages serve the needs of higher education in America. Revision of the curricula and of the standards might be undertaken every five years. T h e imployers of those graduates (chairmen of departments, deans, presidents of small colleges and even of large ones) should have a voice in the matter, more so than they have today. Steps would be taken to provide for the young teachers thus graduated with a less pretentious but a truer Ph.D. who want to pursue research and writing, the leaves of absence, the fellowships, and the other encouragements needed. Those men would work for a later and higher doctorate, with a thesis, which should be published and

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to which not only honor but some increments would be attached. T h e holders of that higher doctorate would have the privilege of fewer hours of teaching, of a favored salary scale such as is already in practice in schools of law and of medicine. T h e y would normally constitute most of the staff of graduate schools in this country. T h e separation between graduate and undergraduate school teachers may at first appear regrettable to some of us. But it is hypocritical not to acknowledge that it already exists, and that the country can no longer cling to the fiction that a productive research man who trains several Ph.D.'s a year can also administer, lecture for another three or six hours a week to undergraduates, read their papers, and correct their English as well as their substance (if the word may be used without irony). Requiring all that, plus the research man's availability to youngsters during office hours and his attendance at sundry academic functions, prandial or oratorical, borders on inhumanity and evinces lack of respect for the intellectual, whom older (and younger) countries honor more worthily. Humanists are not especially addicted to self-pity or to moaning over their fate and to casting envious glances at colleagues more amply favored with material goods. T h e y have the right to say, however, that the progress achieved in their field and in others in America would have been even more commensurate with the immense facilities enjoyed here if fewer impositions of a secondary nature had not been made upon them. T h e work load of professors in America is probably the heaviest of any great country; the time allowed to scholars to avail themselves of the opportunities of libraries, well-equipped seminar rooms, contacts with other scholars is probably the scantiest anywhere. B u t humanists are, or should be, humble enough to practice some breast-beating and to admit their wrongs.

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Our concern here is specifically the relationship between the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. That relationship is not always very cordial, very intelligent, or very fruitful. It would be idle to blind ourselves to evidence. T h e humanists affect to sneer at the social scientists, with their specialized and often jargonic language, and to consider the scientists as deficient in spiritual values and only concerned with technicity. T h e scientists distrust the eloquence of teachers of literature, the vagueness of their reasoning, the vapid rhetoric under which they at times disguise their amateurishness, the poverty of their tools, their inability to marshal factual evidence. Such clashes among persons devoted to the life of the mind are not in themselves deserving of censure. Creativeness is seldom fostered by approval and by complacent applause. Dean Inge used to submit that the role of boredom in history has always been underestimated. T r u e enough; the biography of many a great man shows that because he was impatiently waiting for the circumstances in which he could display his full measure, a future statesman or warrior (Bonaparte, Lyautey exemplify this) vented his "tadium vitae" in the letters of his youth. Our students may well owe more to the boredom that we inflict upon them than they realize at the time, and Alfred North Whitehead may well have rightly argued that the most urgent need in American education is not for good teaching (there is much of it, and it sterilizes the potentialities for research of the teachers) but for good learning. Likewise, confronting our views and our methods (or the lack of them) with those of our colleagues in the sciences or in social disciplines should prove as beneficent for us as it would be for them. With all the facilities for interdisciplinary communication afforded by life on our campuses, by our "houses," "colleges" or faculty clubs, by our lipservice to Integration with a capital " I " (on the definition

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of which our deans try as desperately, and as vainly, to agree as theologians once did on sin), we all work in regrettable isolation and fail to learn from opposing each other, if not from mutual borrowing. Listening to the doubts and to the prejudices which the study of literature and of philosophy arouses in the scientists and the social scientists would in no way imply that the humanists are surrendering to their rivals. T h e y would probably acquire a keener awareness of the original residue of their own discipline, of its authenticity where it is not reducible to other methods, for having willingly entered into the laboratories of their challengers. M o r e harm is probably done to literature and criticism by those who inscribe on their pediment "Noli me längere" and only want to treat "literature as such" or in its purest "se" than by those w h o question its goal and methods from the outside. T h e clown's reply, in the last act of Twelfth Night, to the D u k e who asks him how he fares, is more profound than comic: " T r u l y , sir, the better for my foes and the worse for my friends." It must be confessed outright that, while humanists have for the last few decades stood on the defensive, the scientists and even more the social scientists have not concealed their arrogant conviction that they were riding the wave of the future. T h e i r devotion to their disciplines, their fervor in p r o m o t i n g them, their fanatical zeal in converting neophytes, their tireless energy in publishing volume after v o l u m e on "modern sociological theory" or "the behavioral sciences today" should invite us to emulate them: they have arrogated to themselves the mission of saving the modern world through changing it. A century ago, or even less, a similar faith swelled the hearts of the Symbolist poets in France or of W a l t W h i t m a n when, in his Democratic Vistas, in 1871, he proclaimed that literature had "become the only general means of morally influencing the world." A contribution to their seizure of a position of strength

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was provided to the social scientists by the reluctance of h u m a n i s t s to come to terms with the present a n d to deal boldly with the history, the thought, the art, the music, the books of their own time. T h e oft-quoted charge levelled at philosophers by Kierkegaard is not undeserved; nor is it by other humanists: " W e live forward, b u t Ave understand b a c k w a r d . " It was m o r e c o m f o r t a b l e to study Sophocles, Dante, Montaigne, D o n n e over again than to venture a j u d g m e n t on the as yet unrecognized creators struggling in o u r midst. T h e best in the past, of course, is constantly alive, and its study enriches the present and affords us perspective and discernment. Even small details may lead to m o m e n t o u s conclusions when a synthetical or imaginative m i n d comes later to reinterpret them. B u t the indictment of antiquarianism is not undeserved by us. T h e scornful epithet of A l e x a n d r i n e is used by some to characterize our preoccupation with too m i n u t e details of a r e m o t e past. T h e collecting of data by some of us can b e a hobby, as harmless but hardly m o r e exalted or more b r o a d e n i n g to the m i n d than the collecting of stamps or matchboxes. If we d o not sufficiently revitalize the past, we also give to many the impression that o u r concern lies primarily with the stock-taking of accumulated knowledge. It Avas necessary, when the Renaissance humanists first rediscovered antiquity, then when the industrious scholars and editors of the T e u b n e r or the L o e b or the G u i l l a u m e B u d i classical libraries, the compilers of Pauly-Wissowa or of D a r e m b e r g a n d Saglio classical encyclopedias accomplished their a d m i r a b l e work of recension, translation, and publication that the legacy of Greece a n d R o m e b e made readily available to us. New dictionaries (of music, of architecture), new glossaries and concordances, even new bibliographies will be needed. B u t too many humanistic scholars devote

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themselves to those tasks and eschew the more creative reinterpretation of the ancient or the modern writers and artists, which requires less ant- or beaver-like patience but more imaginative boldness and greater insight. T o o many departments of English consider themselves as factories turning out volume after volume of Milton's m i n o r works, of Dr. Johnson's or his biographer's complete (and over-complete) writings, of the notebooks or diaries of every great and small American author. Exhaustive bibliographies of all articles treating of Goethe or of Gide or of Faulkner in the last decade are a worthy labor of love on the part of their authors. B u t they do not promote the stock of the humanities with our students or with our colleagues. T h e y even discourage young talents through frightening them away from a fresh reinterpretation of the texts of great writers by the sad conviction that all has already been said or that they first must read every article, note, and review perpetrated on the writer whom they admire. T h e r e is a time for accumulating data and there is one also for syntheses which will stimulate newcomers to the scaling of greater heights. Humanists have been paralyzed by timidity and diffidence. Historicism, as the Europeans call it, has corroded too many creative talents since it afflicted the modern world in the first years of the nineteenth century, in the same way as too much attention paid to the lessons of the past has waylaid statesmen and generals whose insight into the mistakes of others discouraged fresh and audacious thinking and acting. Must the humanists remain antiquarian and often Alexandrian, and stubbornly reject any accretion of prestige from the pursuit of objectivity, of scientific precision, of methods insusceptible of a general application? T h e c o m p l e x questions involved in the application of scientific methods to history, philosophy, art history, linguistics can-

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not here be raised. A separate essay would be needed to deal with each of them. T h e remarks which follow will be limited to literature. A century or so ago, most conspicuously with the generation of T a i n e , R e n a n (in his youth), and with their successors such as Emile H e n n e q u i n w h o advocated scientific criticism, students of literature, permeated with positivistic influences, eyed the achievement of science with jealousy. T h e y tried to formulate laws codifying the relationship of literature to society; the determination of talent or of genius by race, environment, and by the spirit of the age or the m o m e n t u m of tradition. A controlling force from which all other qualities stemmed was supposed to be hidden at the center of any great man. T a i n e ' s celebrated manifestos constitute the most remarkable endeavor to f o u n d criticism scientifically. T h e y have proved frail, and nothing was easier for T a i n e ' s successors than to demolish his systematic structure. Still, with all his dogmatism and the eloquent logic with which he covered u p his romantic fervor, T a i n e remains, if not the shrewdest critic, at least the most considerable sower of ideas on literature of the French nineteenth century. E d m u n d Wilson has acknowledged that T a i n e ' s work "was what we call creative" and that the moral convictions of the critic who was branded in his day as an immoralist give his writing emotional power. Harry Levin, in 1948, praised T a i n e likewise for ridding us once for all of "the uncritical notion that books dropped like meteorites from the sky." T a i n e ' s undertaking was imitated or emulated several times after him; it retains today its prestige with many y o u n g scholars w h o m the amateurish approach to literature discourages. If he understressed the aesthetic value of literary works, T a i n e taught us not to sever the work of art altogether from life, and that literature, in Harry Levin's phrase, is, in one of its aspects, "an institution."

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History and criticism are not, as Taine had rashly asserted in April 1864, in a letter to Ernest Havet, comparable to physiology and to geology. They are, however, very close to social or, as we prefer to say today, to behavioral sciences. It would be idle to deny that several of our most distinguished works of intellectual history have, lately, been written by men who had been drawn to the social sciences in their discontent with traditional history or with pure but overrefined and barren criticism. No influence (except that of Lanson, who himself conceded much to sociology) has been so seminal on the French school of historians and critics, between 1890 and 1920, as that of the renovator of French sociology, Emile Dürkheim. Through him, the interpretation of ancient China, of ancient Egypt, of Greece and Rome, of primitive cultures, of French, English, German letters received a powerful stimulus. Social scientists have occasionally erred in America in naively viewing literature as a faithful mirror to the moods and "mores" portrayed in it. But the originality of the American historians of their literature since 1930 has been in their vast and social treatment of works which they seemed almost reluctant to rate as works of art comparable to those of Europe. Only with difficulty, and without converting the general public to their views, have a few academic critics raised Melville and Henry James to the pinnacle of literary greatness. However, excellent scholars have lately brought forth historical studies of original merit through the broadminded and modest attention they paid to the contemporary progress of social sciences: David Potter in People of Plenty (University of Chicago Press, 1954) and Henry Stuart Hughes in Consciousness and Society (Knopf, 1958) stand high among those builders of bridges between disciplines. T h e questions which the practitioners of the behavioral sciences ask themselves and ask us have probably little validity for literary scholars at the present time. They

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may well, however, lead us to be less complacent about the autonomy of our own disciplines and to welcome the use of scientific methods whenever those methods prove applicable. Social scientists have sharpened their tools in such enterprises as the collecting of information in objective ways, the formulation of hypotheses resting on accumulated and as yet unexplained series of facts, the need to verify hypotheses when that can be done, the diffidence of unrestrained subjectivity and of vagueness in terminology, the limited ability to make predictions in certain circumstances. In their fervor for emulating the more precise sciences, they have often affected a haughty rigor which ill-disguised the consciousness of their inferiority to the scientists w h o dealt with less capricious material than individuals, societies, or primitive cultures. T h e y have developed a vocabulary which horrifies those of us w h o still cling to the prejudice that anything can be expressed clearly if it is thought clearly enough and that the terminology once used by Plato or by Spinoza is adequate for any thinking which goes on today. "Goal-oriented," "outward-directed," "organizational pattern," even the ubiquitous monster-verb "to verbalize" may at some not very remote time appear to all of us as acceptable as "subjectivity" and "objectivity," against which the purists among humanists vituperated sixty years ago. T h e social scientists resent o u r sneer at their language and at their foolhardy claims. T h e y behave at times like unacknowledged prophets or irate superannuated maidens eager to be liked by their literary confreres and to be humanized by them, and resentful at their isolation in the traditionally liberal colleges. W h e r e the humanists tax them with imperialist arrogance, they, in fact, often suffer from insecurity and undergo periodic crises of self-indictment. O n e of the most vigorous thinkers among sociologists and one of the least intimidated rapists of that coy mistress of foreign-born American writers,

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the American language, Pitirim A. Sorokin, also became, as he reached the age of retirement from Harvard, the severest grand inquisitor of the shortcomings of modern sociology, in a bulky and ruthless "mea culpa": Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology (Regnery, 1956). Literary scholars would be mendacious if they borrowed the language, the tools, and the methods of science when presenting the results of their research which cannot be reduced to quantitative data. Graphs, charts, statistics, questionnaires, even psychological inquiries practised by psychologists upon living writers, even psychoanalytical analyses, are of real but very modest avail in the study of literary creation or of literary influence. Willing as we may be to welcome science in our discipline and to sharpen in our turn our very amateurish tools, we can never yield on a few essential points; it would be churlish not to admit it unambiguously or to deceive social scientists and ourselves. Those points are: ι. Much of our interest is in the past—a past which is already alive, eternally present, more timely for us than a great deal which in the present is half-dead and imitative. We can never be, like the social scientists, ahistorical. 2. Our concern is not primarily with similarities, recurrences of analogous phenomena, features which make one artist similar to another one in his own age and country or of another land and of another era. It is not even with influences of one writer upon another or with borrowings. Indeed, literary and artistic criticism has erred whenever it laid undue stress on borrowings and influences. "Poetry," said the poet Francis Thompson, "is a rootedly immoral art, in which success excuses well-nigh everything. . . . A great poet may plagiarize to his heart's content, provided he plagiarizes well." So may, and often does, a great critic, if any critic ever deserved that adjective. We deal with differences primarily. A keener insight into singularity is our

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goal. Our knowledge of history and of an author's background cultivates an historical taste which is essential in our studies. We learn how to appreciate historically a past era, a style, a mood, and to shun the narrow confines of him who is a willing prisoner of one culture and of one age. 3. But that historical taste through which many an eminent art or literary historian has illuminated and explained the past for us has little in common with another taste: that which makes it possible for us to discover, to appreciate and to appraise, to enjoy, and to interpret for others what is new, fresh, vivid, deep in the works appearing now in our midst. T h a t personal taste, not very dissimilar at the start from the taste of a gourmet, of a wine taster, of a lover of women, of clothes, of perfumes has not often been the privilege of those who knew most about the past or who proposed the most elaborate concepts on art and letters. T o know is not to feel. But to feel is not necessarily to know. A n d if impressionism is an inevitable adjunct of all criticism, that impressionism must not shirk the embarrassing questions of the social scientist: " W h y do you feel thus?" "Can you be sure that your impression is to be lasting, shared by others, susceptible of being reasoned about, legitimized?" " C a n you in all fairness set up your own impression, and that of a few others who feel as you do, as a general rule?" 4. T o distrust the subjective impressions of a cultured and presumably refined observer of art and letters and to take refuge under the "judgment" of others or of a larger group of readers would be not only shirking our duties as critics but bowing to the impressions, no less subjective and often less independent, of others: for others may be swayed by publicity, hasty reviewers, tides of fashion, superficial charm. A trained and an honest critic may derive assistance from his having studied the past as well as the present, literatures other than his own, the society and his-

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torical context behind the literature; in a word, he should have ascertained that he knows most of what there is to be known. But his knowledge should not be exhaustive to the point of dulling the vividness of his perception or antiquarian to the point of instilling into him the distrust of novelty. Goethe, when he failed in his assiduous attempt at composing an epic Achilleid, confessed sadly that "only faulty knowledge is creative." American critics, even more than their British cousins such as Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, and Pater, in whom the proximity to the wine tasters across the Channel maintained some sensuous delight in art, will too often view art and literature as sons of missionaries in search of souls to be saved or as engineers anxious to be reassured by finding solidity, structure, the "resolution of tensions" in a work of art. Lord David Cecil, who likes to mock his puritanical colleagues of the New World, wrote in The Fine Art of Reading (Bobbs-Merrill, 1957) that "Art is not like mathematics or philosophy. It is a subjective, sensual and highly personal activity in which facts and ideas are the servants of fancy and feeling; and the artist's first aim is not truth but delight. . . . It follows that the primary object of a student of literature is to be delighted; his duty is to enjoy himself." That Epicurean message, aimed at arousing the ire of grave graduate students who read only to evaluate and seldom to enjoy, is a timely one. In a world which prizes its anxiety too highly and wallows in its tragic sense of life and of men, the now disregarded French advice of cultivating pleasure and turning it into happiness may be more than flippant cynicism. 5. Whether it be a weakness or a strength of their studies, humanists are forced to formulate value-judgments at every step of their pursuits. Let them do so with all the honesty and the conscientiousness, with all the precautions dictated by diffidence of fleeting impressions that they can muster. Let them define their vocabulary whenever they can, and

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not just words like "classical," "romantic," "modern," but words of praise or blame which they bandy about with glibness: "great," "poor," "personal," "sincere," "intense," "profound," "moving." We may well have to confess that ultimately we never know why a work is "great" and that a novel may be "good" and lasting while having very few, or even none, of the features which we usually list as elements worthy of praise: structure, tension, symmetry of parts, perfection of form, justness or depth of underlying ideas, psychological insight. Literature is closer to life in this respect than other sciences or disciplines, for we likewise fail to pin a name upon the virtues or faults which make a man more alive, more powerful, more creative than others. When all is said and while pursuing their quest for precision, for intellectual rigor and submission to facts and to texts, literary scholars must proclaim with no undue shame that they do not judge according to fixed standards; for standards, usually established from past practice, would have the corrosive effect of closing our taste to the new, the unprecedented, the irrational, the chaotic in which the seeds for new greatness are perhaps germinating. Art, like life, is often irrational in its essence, and criticism should be irrational also if it is not to divorce itself perilously from creation. Impulse and emotion may be viewed as destructive in engineering, in chemistry, in the behavioral sciences. Only the quantitatively measurable may be deemed acceptable there. But even scientists do not inhabit a rigidly mechanical world. They are as emotionally directed as other human beings whenever they deal with politics, affections, education. T h e value of literary and artistic studies lies in averting the prejudice that emotions, impulses, value-judgments can be shunned in the life of the spirit—even stern T . S. Eliot avowed in Poetry

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and Poets that "we do not fully understand a poem unless we enjoy it." Once the humanists, typified here by the students of literature, have made it clear that the very nature of their subject precludes surrendering their originality to social scientists, they are, or should be, all the readier to cooperate with sociologists in exploring the border provinces of their domain. Much remains to be done in attempting a sociology of literature or a social history of art. The Sociology of Literary Taste by Levin L . Schucking, translated from the German in 1945; Robert Escarpit's lively sketch of a Sociologie de la litterature in French (1957); Arnold Hauser's Social History of Art (reprinted in 1957 in four volumes); or the fragmentary views of a widely cultured pianist, Arthur Loesser in Men, Women and Pianos, A Social History (1954) are only approximations to the systematic studies on the interrelations of arts and social disciplines which should be undertaken. T h e most intelligent program for such interdisciplinary studies was sketched as early as 1904 by a French scholar, Gustave Lanson, who cannot be suspected of ever having betrayed literary history, in a remarkable article on literary history and sociology first printed that year in the Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale. T h a t program has not yet been fulfilled. Literary study deals with individuals in the more original aspects of their individualities and with works which are singled out by posterity as differing from the mass of mediocre books daily published. Yet we view those writers and their books as representative of their culture and of their age at the same time that we call them "great" because they transcended their age. Do they indeed express, consciously or unwillingly, the group in which they appeared? Are they the mouthpieces, or as Victor Hugo phrased it, the sonorous echoes of their culture, or the anticipators of a social and

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intellectual state of things as yet unborn but which their work helps create? Answers to such questions require painstaking inquiries on a great many cases, the classification of those cases into categories, the careful attention to the distinctions to be traced between isolated and relatively independent creators (poets, painters) and those who depend upon the observation of a social group for their material (novelists of manners, realistic novelists); between those who can afford to wait for their public and gradually to mold it (poets) and those who cannot survive without being understood, appreciated, assisted by collaborators and interpreters (composers of operas and symphonies, architects, dramatists). Not social scientists, necessarily, but rather literary historians who have willingly learned from the techniques of behavioral disciplines should be the men to undertake the patient research necessitated by such questions. Similarly, much loose talk has gone on and goes on around the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, which we conceive anthropomorphically as a force animating all the practitioners of the different literary or artistic kinds at work at the same time. We imagine that there was one common spirit permeating the writers or artists whom we now call baroque, or the English poets living around 1815-30 (gladly forgetting J a n e Austen, the Utilitarians, the many unromantics of those same years, the rifts among the so-called romantics, the mutual hostility of successive generations, etc.). We do not wonder why, if there ever was such a thing as a Symbolist atmosphere in France around Laforgue, Verlaine, Villiers, Mallarme, Debussy, Odilon Redon, Gauguin, it was breathed by such a small band of unrecognized men and failed to affect fiction, philosophy, the drama, most of the painters, the musical enthusiasts of Wagner, of Offenbach, and of Charpentier. In our opinion, few assumptions are more frail than that which, long after the event, assigns

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a common social context and a similar Zeitgeist to the several creators of a certain age and of a given country. A few pioneers, usually ignored by their contemporaries, who banish them as abnormal, obscure, delirious, asocial, unrepresentative eccentrics (Shelley or Manet or Baudelaire or Gide or Proust or Joyce or Lawrence), are, long after they have reached success or the refuge of the grave, exalted by historians as the mirrors to their age. T h e question of the representativeness of creators and of their relations to their own era is an infinitely complex one, on the elucidation of which literary scholars familiar with sociological research should launch concerted efforts. Again, in several branches of literature and of the arts, masterpieces can be created only after a language has been gradually formulated and a technique has been evolved: atonal music, Greek or French tragedy, Elizabethan drama, the psychological novel, romantic poetry. Hamlet is hardly conceivable in 1580 or le Cid in 1620 or Monet's "Impression" in 1830. Several abortive but useful attempts had to precede those works, and in not a few cases public discussion on the doctrine underlying them or on the technique perfected around them had to take place before they could emerge. Most great artists inherit a form or a technique and use it in an original way which either reorients the tradition which they had inherited or derives strikingly novel results from it. T h e r e is a collective element even in the most individual of masterpieces, in Rimbaud's Illuminations or Alban Berg's Wozzeck. Gustave Lanson rightly acknowledged it: " T h e most important problems of literary history are sociological problems and most of our research rests on a sociological basis or reaches a sociological conclusion. What do we want to do? T o explain the works. And can we explain them otherwise than through resolving individual facts into social facts, through replacing works and men into social series?"

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Lastly, the complex relationships between art or literat u r e and the public for which or amid which works are created constitute an immense a n d almost untilled field for research. A very few books exist, such as the now antiq u a t e d thesis by Alexandre Beljame, translated with a fifty year lag as Men of Letters and the English Public in the 18th Century in L o n d o n in 1948, or Mrs. Q u e e n i e Leavis on Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), or Erich Auerbach's small volume in G e r m a n , Das französische Publikum des XVII Jahrhunderts (1933). N o student of literature could ever contend that the most u n p r e d i c t a b l e a n d the freest of activities, imaginative creation, can be accounted for in a deterministic fashion by outside d e m a n d . B u t at the source of the stimulant which first unleashed the creative energy of a writer there often lies an impulse provided by a review editor, a publisher, organizers of lecture series, or some d i m perception on the author's part of a latent need in his audience which he wants to satisfy, perhaps to deflect, even to contradict. T h e r e lurks more t r u t h than many of us suspect in Goethe's oft-quoted assertion that great works are often dictated by circumstance. Even t h e most detached f r o m worldly links a m o n g p o e t s — M a l l a r m i , when he composed his stately "Toast f u n £ b r e , " specifically requested by the friends of T h e o p h i l e Gautier, just then deceased (1872); Val£ry when he composed essays or poems with punctilious coquettishness in o r d e r to fulfill a request f r o m a publisher; Gide, as his Journals repeatedly show—were p r o m p t e d by a d e m a n d f r o m a strategist of literature who was sensing a n d voicing, or anticipating, the collective needs of a limited public. T h e use of the singular, "a public," is misleading. T h e r e are at any given time several publics coexisting, and the bold creator is he who divines the as yet u n f o r m u l a t e d aspirations of the ascending generation and crystallizes them, t h u s antagonizing the champions of established taste. A good

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deal has been loosely asserted, in the last hundred years, on literature as a way of knowledge and on literature as prophecy. A systematic yet not over rigid examination of those claims and of the many cases when men of letters (Balzac, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Proust, to mention French writers alone) seem indeed to have anticipated, perhaps to have molded, what was to come would be in order. In all such cases, the prophet whose literature or art, as Oscar Wilde's famous saying has it, was imitated by life should be studied in relation with the group around him. T h e multifarious means through which his impact upon a narrow, then a gradually growing audience was felt should be analyzed. It is shocking that, after m o centuries of attention to literary mechanisms and of repetitious assertion of the socalled dependence of literature upon society, we still know so very little about the mechanism of that collective fact, success, and, with success, which can be measured, of a more imponderable phenomenon, influence. T h e r e should exist a social and, as it were, secondary history of ideas and of literature which, paying relatively scant attention to the intrinsic qualities of the works, would be concerned with their fecundity and their prolongation of themselves in their age and country, or in later eras and foreign lands. W e affect to smile complacently at the fame of Delille and of B^ranger even, on a much higher level, at that of Byron, Alexandre Dumas the elder, or Poe outside their native lands. At the wide influence of Th&>phile Gautier on English, American, and Hispanic poets; of secondary German thinkers on Spain; of Sinclair Lewis on Blasco Ibanez. Yet the collaboration of history, sociological techniques, and literary perceptiveness should help courageous research men to inquire into those collective groups of events. Intellectual history, which has lately tempted many historians away from the recording of facts, has too exclu-

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sively t u r n e d into a history of thinkers and of men of letters more or less loosely related to each other and to a hypothetical spirit or mood of the age, which they supposedly expressed and created at one and the same time. T h e true province of intellectual history, however, is the more complex research into the varied mechanisms through which ideas of Bergson, Dürkheim, Pareto, Max Weber, Nietzsche, Croce (to take a few names prominent in Stuart Hughes' excellent monograph on Consciousness and Society) filtered through t o teachers, journalists, intermediaries of all kinds, and eventually became dynamic ideas, exercising an impact u p o n society, often upon politics, and changing the Western European world. T h e degeneracy of " p u r e " ideas into beliefs, creeds, myths, superstitions (Ideas y Creencias is the apt title of one of Ortega y Gasset's most pregnant essays) should be the theme of many sociological-literary monographs today. T h e abundance of the materials is overwhelming, as in all that pertains to modern history; qualitative criteria have to be added to the collecting and the weighing of the data available. But there are enough men of good will and of talent among humanists who everlastingly rewrite the same volumes on Leopardi, Melville, Joyce, and Camus and in so doing bring scant credit to the pioneering spirit of their profession. If it be true that our century is one of wars of ideas or of myths—i.e. high-powered emotional concepts applied like levers to life—humanists, to whom n o t h i n g h u m a n is alien, should cooperate with specialists of behavioral sciences in projecting a little more light into seas of darkness. Many great ideas lay dormant i n Hegel, Marx, Gobineau, Husserl, and before them in the forerunners of the American and of the French revolutions, until collective beings and masses became fired by those concepts, crudely distorted them, b u t also instilled life into them. Such studies, building bridges between the social sei-

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ences and the humanities, are in no way unworthy of humanists, and would not detract from their individual enjoyment of the beauty and of the depth of great works of art and of literature. It would be idle to contend that, after two or three centuries of sharpening of our critical faculties and elaborating aesthetic ideas, we can still approach a work of art as the contemporaries of Shakespeare or of Calderon approached their plays, or the amateurs who first looked at the Sistine Chapel or at pictures by Vermeer and Hogarth. Imaginative creators can no longer ignore the existence of mass media around them. They have, since the Romantic era, wailed their living and feeling in a desert in which the so-called elite from the middle classes failed to encourage them or to understand whatever was revolutionary in their message, be they Berlioz or Hugo Wolf, Delacroix or Cezanne, Keats or Baudelaire. They may well indeed pin their hopes on a broadened public, less sophisticated, less obsessed by its cult of tradition, less fearful of innovations. Proletarian art, even in the lands most attached to social realism, has thus far disappointed us. T o o often, it debased itself through attempting to effect crude propaganda and to palm off the meretricious and tawdry upon a public which deserved a better fare. America, however, prides itself on being less conscious of class distinction than European societies. T h e attempt to democratize education has gone farther here than in Western Europe. T h e number of young men and women who go through college, and later through our graduate schools, is higher here than in most other lands. They are probably more malleable, more receptive to the teaching imparted to them than are European audiences, less deflected from the pursuit of science and knowledge by ardent political passions and feuds than in Europe, Asia, or Latin America, more impelled by feelings of fraternity and of solidarity with the rest of the world, and more earnest in their touching deter-

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mination to improve the fate of their fellow beings elsewhere. Yet the number of Americans who are vitally concerned with understanding their own age through those splendid factors of broadening of sensibility, of deepening the mind, of stimulating the imagination, which are literature and the arts, is not growing at a pace commensurate with the increase of population or the plentifulness of educational facilities offered. A very great American literature, a painting and a sculpture second to none at the present time in vitality and energy, a rich critical movement affect a woefully small portion of the American public. Humanists have erred, and failed in part, in talking and writing to and for their ilk, proud of their own subtlety, and, like the medieval scholastics, content to encircle knowledge within the walls of their seminar rooms and to disdain the possibilities for the life of the spirit outside the academic campuses. T h e very best among the American literary scholars, historians of culture, art critics, musicologists are at least the equals of the best in any other country. But they do not fire their students with enough enthusiasm and generosity so as to lure more of them to preferring the pursuits of the mind and the excitement of research to other careers. T h e y have not succeeded, or tried strenuously enough, to expand the American public which might appreciate and encourage still more imaginative creation. Less scholasticism, less complacency to be satisfied by the narrow perspectives of university life, less unjustified fear of the social disciplines with which the humanities may fruitfully ally themselves in the pursuit of a well-defined common goal will serve the country, and the humanists themselves, best in the years to come.

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premise for my remarks, I propose to speculate on this anniversary occasion about the humanities and the social sciences in the light of current tendencies and possible trends. I shall do so even at the risk of not taking sufficiently into account the influences of the past, and incurring thereby the wrath of the planners of this symposium. I was invited to consider the gap between the humanities and the social sciences and how to improve this relationship. T o me the important relationship is not so much between these broad fields of learning but rather the relationship of each discipline to the larger society and the nature of its contribution to this society. T h e relevance of the humanities and of the social sciences is determined (a) by what these fields have to offer and (b) by what the larger society is ready to receive, to feel a need for, and to welcome. Here is my thesis: As the humanities and the social sciences increase knowledge relevant for human needs and aspirations they draw closer to society itself, and probably and incidentally draw closer to one another. T h e vital relationship is that of the larger society itself to the higher learning. And looking ahead I think there are many reasons for believing that such ties can be more and more significant. These fields can be expected to fulfill a role that is more important, more influential, because they can meet needs more central, more integral if you will, to the social context of which they are a part. There can be, I think, a strik169

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ing convergence of what the humanities and the social sciences stand for and what the larger society requires. During the past seventy-five years in this country the humanities and the social sciences, taking their start from the tradition of scholarship of the great European universities, have advanced to a stage both distinctive and mature. During these years social science departments emerged from the fields of law or philosophy or history within our graduate schools. Jurisdictional battles for recognition have long since been won. All have gained, we may expect, a clearer understanding of what each approach has to offer and a greater tendency to value and respect each other's distinctive strengths. I think one can discern a new awareness of the community of scholarship and of the relationship of knowledge to the larger community. A new generation of social scientists can appreciate afresh the common roots in philosophy and history from which the social disciplines have sprung. Or if we turn to the humanities today, do we not find students of art and literature and language more rather than less inclined to view their subject matter in relation to the culture of which it is one expression? Such views indicate how fields of knowledge find a natural and easy convergence when human problems and social factors are taken into account by the scholar whatever his discipline. In these terms, is there not apparent a new humanism? That is to say, a fresh disposition to carry on inquiries that may differ in method and assumptions but that relate to the human condition, to the problems, the capacities, the accomplishments and the aspirations of man. I recently read a survey concerned with the state of knowledge about a major world area and based upon widespread discussions with both humanists and social scientists. The authors of the report, in commenting upon the closer bonds between the humanities and social sciences, state: "There

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is abroad in academic circles today a tendency toward what might be called 'responsible concern' for public affairs, as against the more ideological and Utopian tone of, say, twenty years ago." T h i s "responsible concern" is not to be confused with crash programs of applied research but is identified with research efforts that are directed by a sense of relevance either with respect to advancing a field of knowledge or contributing greater coherence to an area of public policy. From the program of the Social Science Research Council I could cite our current concern with theories of social change, the nature of economic growth, or that of political development comparatively viewed. How can we better understand political processes in this country? How add to our knowledge of what goes on in the Soviet Union? How better analyze the problems of other major world areas? Every university in the country offers a wealth of examples of the responsible concern on the part of the faculty for public affairs in the broadest sense. Now, as the skills of specialists in the humanities and the social sciences are called for increasingly in public affairs, all faculties share a responsible concern. T h e concern of the physical scientists for public affairs needs no elaboration here. Science raises a wide range of policy issues on the domestic front as well as in international relationships. Moreover, the economics and politics of science become matters of immediate concern to scientists increasingly dependent for support on governmental funds. T h e linkage of the sciences to the general welfare opens u p questions that bring about a natural commingling of specialists from both the natural and social science fields. Physicists find themselves pondering the same problems and phenomena that are the preoccupation of many social scientists. T h e r e is, however, a deeper sense in which the

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human factor is seen to have a new centrality. Let me quote a distinguished physicist and philosopher of science: "One has the impression that it is not too crude a simplification of the state of affairs to assert that for the first time in the course of history man on earth faces only himself, that he finds no longer any other partner or foe. In earlier epochs man saw himself opposite nature. Nature, in which dwelt all sorts of living beings, was a realm existing according to its own laws, and into it man somehow had to fit himself. We, on the other hand, live in a world so completely transformed by man that, whether we are using the machines of our daily life, taking food prepared by machines, or traveling through landscapes transformed by man, we invariably encounter structures created by man, so that, in a sense, we always meet only ourselves. . . . "This new situation becomes most obvious to us in science," the writer continues, "in which it turns out . . . that we can no longer view in themselves the building blocks of matter which were originally thought of as the last objective reality; that they refuse to be fixed in any way, in space or in time; and that basically we can only make our knowledge of these particles the object of science. T h e aim of research is thus no longer knowledge of the atoms and their motion 'in themselves,' separated from our experimental questions; rather, right from the beginning, we stand in a center of the confrontation beuveen nature and man, of which science, of course, is only a part. T h e familiar classification of the world into subjects and objects, inner and outer world, body and soul, somehow no longer quite applies, and indeed leads to difficulties. In science, also, the object of research is no longer nature in itself but rather nature exposed to man's question, and to this extent man here also meets himself." 1 1 Werner Heisenberg, " T h e Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics," Daedalus, L X X X V I I (Summer 1958), 104-105.

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T h i s confrontation taking place at the very outer frontiers of physical research suggests that the dilemma of the social scientist inevitably involved in the very process of observation can hardly be regarded as unique. T h e human factor in the very process of research itself must be reckoned with by both sociologists and physicists. T h i s is no news, I grant, to the humanist! T h e more scientific the research into human behavior becomes and the more the dependability of such knowledge warrants application to the conduct of human affairs, the greater is the influence of social research, and the more involved the research man in the social consequences of his findings. Both objectivity of approach and focus on restricted areas of inquiry are essential and desirable for precision in research. But from the standpoint of the social responsibility of social scientists, a breadth of view and a sense of involvement are appropriate. T h e r e is need to be highly sensitive to the social implications of social science research. It is not enough for the social scientist to react simply in accordance with the value system of his craft when his research activities affect other value systems. W e can put the point this way: T h a t the social scientist can scarccly operate at all in empirical research without being mindful of the social implications of his activity. Before any of his findings are in he may be caught up in the social impact created by the mere process of inquiry itself. T h e r e may have been a period in the history of scholarship when the deeper the investigator pressed his quest for new knowledge the farther he withdrew from the world about him. W e seem now to b e at a stage where the opposite consequence holds. I conclude my first point with the thought that the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities never before held so much of such high relevance for their society. T h e second point to consider is the receptivity of

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the community toward their respective contributions. In part the answers to the problems created by technology must be sought in more technology—let's grant that the missile calls for the anti-missile missile and probably the anti-anti-missile missile. But this ascending spiral of scientific and engineering advance, if it is not to become an end in itself (and not only unconcerned with human values but even detrimental to the human condition), must be accompanied by more thought, energy, and attention to the areas of concern to social scientists and humanists. A great proportionate change in the attention accorded different fields of learning seems necessitated by trends already well under way. T a k e by way of illustration the forecast offered by Harrison Brown and two colleagues at Cal T e c h in their volume The Next Hundred Years. After analyzing a formidable mass of data on natural resources, the authors point out that from a technological standpoint, "man can, if he wills it, create a world where people can lead lives of abundance and creativity within the framework of a free society." And they conclude: " W h e n we take the very long view of man's world in the next century we see that the main problems are less those of technology than they are those of men's getting along with other men, communicating with other men, and organizing themselves in such a way that their genius and imagination can be vigorously applied to the problems that confront them. " O u r major problems involve the enriching, enlarging, improving, and mobilizing of our intellectual forces." 2 A t the Parliament of Science in Washington last spring we were told that science "is entering a new and accelerated stage of advancement which will give to man the possibility of control over his environment, over himself, and over * Harrison Brown, James Bonner, and John Weir, The Next dred Years (Viking Press, 1957), pp. 153-154.

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his destiny which we have yet only vaguely sensed. T h i s scientific revolution will totally dwarf the industrial revolution and the other historical instances of great social change." T h e distinctive problems arising from this stage of technological advance make of more strategic social importance the disciplines that extend our knowledge for reckoning with these new problems. Certainly extensive basic research is called for. These needs are too extensive for elaboration here; let it suffice that no research can be more pertinent as we look ahead than that concerning man himself: whether that dealing with population pressures or arms control or more theoretical aspects of human behavior and social organization. In other words, I do not think the effects of a technological revolution of the magnitude envisaged can be dealt with simply by improved social engineering, nor will the answer be greater dependence upon conventional concepts of social welfare. I think the issues are more profound. Change such as that predicted involves questions not only of political rivalry or economic power or legal organization but also philosophic beliefs and values. T h e point might be summarized by stating that the most profound effect of technology upon civilization has been to stimulate the purposive element in human affairs. T h i s effect is illustrated by the repudiation by the people of the underdeveloped countries of poverty and disease as conditions decreed by fate and to be borne indefinitely with patience. In industrial countries the purposive element is expressed in the concept of the welfare state whether the purposes be formulated under conditions of freedom or dictatorial rule. Scientific advance makes possible the attainment of social purposes heretofore denied to man. But how is purpose to be determined? In a free society, the determination of social purpose is a responsibility shared by citizens.

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T h e right of an individual to determine his own purposes is the essence of liberty. But consider for a moment basic matters such as choice and motivation in our kind of society. One great change brought about in the United States in the last seventy-five years has been an easing of the harsh pressures of necessity. A concomitant of this is a greater widening of choices for the individual. This has meant more responsibility for deciding among alternatives. T h e individual freed by technology from the restraints imposed upon his forebears has more rather than less need for whatever guidance he can get from science, from religion, from philosophy, from all the uses of wit and reason. Indeed, technology not only liberates man from past constraints; it plunges him into a new world of diversity, mobility, and communication. From the rigors of constraint, we pass to the hazards of distraction. Mass media bring all manner of trivia before us. T h e shoddy and banal in print, picture, and sound impinge at every turn. Such stimuli are easily dismissed by the sophisticated; more menacing to time and attention and energy are the diversions that tempt by their quality: plays, books, concerts, lectures, courses in crafts and the arts are spread before us like a great feast. Can we not liken the array of cultural resources available to us in this country today to a vast college catalogue? We face this college catalogue of our culture like freshmen in the Harvard of President Eliot's free elective system. While some of us may be content with seeking out snap courses, the main question is how to contrive a meaningful education from the abundance before us. As technology provides for some needs, other problems emerge from the changes brought about in social interrelations. For example, increased productivity has made

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possible a more equitable distribution of goods by an upward leveling toward less economic inequality. In a society moving toward equality in economic and social terms, how shall we sustain a striving for excellence in intellectual matters? In a democracy how do we reconcile the virtues of egalitarianism with the very special conditions needed for the nurturing of intellectual, scientific, and artistic excellence? Of course, equality of educational opportunity need not obstruct the persistent search for improved quality in the education provided; but the tolerance of mediocrity is too often the compromise. There is still another problem for a technological society committed to equality of opportunity and enriched by diversity, and that is how to maintain the motivation for achievement when the age-old drives of want or of fear are removed, when equality may be corrupted into conformity. We have much to learn about the drives toward achievement when both economic need and reward are less of a factor than they were in the nineteenth century. It is perhaps more pertinent to inquire about the values that set the patterns of prestige now that we need not rely on fear and want as crude incentives. We must extend our psychological and sociological knowledge of incentives and creativity if we are to reckon with the problems of motivation that our very success has created. I have no doubt that a better understanding of motivational factors can lead to the more effective development of our human resources than the crude and haphazard pressures upon which we have relied in the past. But admittedly a great deal remains to be learned and applied. A greater reliance on the "rational factor" seems inescapable. In this country we already have some inkling of the social disadvantages that could ensue were the easy availability of means of diversion and communication to verge

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upon distraction, the attainment of equality to mean little more than conformity, and satiety in material terms to endanger the drive to achieve. What guidelines for the attainment of human satisfactions are consonant with a society marked by longer life, greater leisure, and more affluence? Surely the goals of a technologically mature society cannot simply be more consumption indefinitely projected ahead. Surely the model for the good life in such an age is not just something shinier, bigger, faster, and more costly. For the kind of society we can anticipate—granted a world at peace during the decades ahead—the skills, the knowledge, the values of the higher learning in our graduate schools of arts and sciences take on a new and wider relevance. Our graduate faculties at their best stand for the pursuit of excellence, for concentration of intellectual attention, and for a devotion to research motivated by the pursuit of knowledge and of truth as an end in itself. Here are values to be widely shared. Given the widespread popular faith in the virtues of education as a foundation upon which to build, it requires no great feat of imagination to envisage the continued importance of the sciences, the increased significance of the social sciences, and a renewed dependence on the humanities. One way to emphasize this point is to say that our universities, particularly our graduate schools, may well occupy as crucial and central a position during the next seventy-five years as our steel mills and oil refineries came to fulfill during the past seven decades. The steep upward climb of crude oil production and of pig iron began in the i88o's just as graduate education was getting under way in this country. Now "we require and produce each year, for each person, about 1,000 pounds of steel, 23 pounds of copper, and 16 pounds of lead." 3 That is a lot of weight per capita. Simi* Ibid., p. 18.

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larly, during the past seventy-five years agricultural production has grown and by now has created national problems of surplus disposal and personal problems of weight control! How shift and reallocate energies to fields where other types of production are needed, other kinds of concentrated attention required? We have hardly begun to reckon with the magnitude of the effort involved for understanding and making such social adjustments. T o meet the full needs of the not too distant future will entail a redirection of the human energies released by an expanding technology. Granted a very large and significant increase in the resources and attention that must be directed to what might be called the public-service component of cur society as over against the private profit-seeking sector, the question arises: Can this be done without a very large centralized bureaucratic structure? T h e corporation can be seen as an institutional form developed, if not invented, during the nineteenth century for turning human energy to economic purposes. T o this end, the resources of the society were joined with the authority of the law to achieve a highly esteemed social goal: industrial productivity. This enormously enriching activity went forward without state planning or centralized control. It seems to me that the university is another traditional institutional structure flexible and capable of expansion and elaboration in order to meet a variety of oncoming intellectual and research needs that go far beyond present-day conventional views of education. Contract research has reached very large dimensions already in the physical sciences. In language and area studies a beginning is under way that could have far-reaching significance. A new survey has just revealed that during the academic year 1957-58, 184 universities and colleges in the United States were conducting 382 international programs around the world. T h e experi-

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ence under the Fulbright and similar programs has been sufficient to indicate further possibilities. T h e improvised arrangements of recent years simply serve to suggest what might be gained from adequate organization and support. T h e universities offer an institutional means that seems well adapted to performing a wide range of functions in intellectual and cultural affairs and on a decentralized basis. Given the necessary resources they can shoulder greater responsibilities. Education for the nation's service is a tradition of our system. T h e r e is much thought given currently to calculating the cost of and to devising means for handling larger student enrollments. Sights I think should be lifted even beyond these very obvious needs. Faculties might well be greatly enlarged so that their members could be more readily available not only for teaching but also for many forms of activity at home and abroad for research, for consulting, and administering in governmental and other public affairs. Career opportunities could be provided within the congenial institutional setting of the university but with periods of service, in many parts of the world, that would be meaningful to the scholar as well as useful to the country" T h e r e is certainly a fresh appreciation in this country of the value of education. T h e demands from government, industry, and the public generally are insistent. T h e utility of science is recognized beyond question. More debatable is whether the higher learning is regarded as a value in itself as well as a means to greater security, productivity, or some other utilitarian end. Yet the higher learning is the yeast for the society, and preservation of this yeast calls for special care—it must be very much alive in order to produce the results expected. Above all, it must have the conditions suitable for healthy growth and expansion.

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Perhaps my final comments are best put as a series of questions. Is there not a sharper need to maintain within our graduate faculties the atmosphere conducive to reflection and supportive of research effort? At the same time, can it not be said that the values inherent in research and scholarship have a wider relevance now that technology opens up both new opportunities and also fresh problems? A n d in conclusion: Can we not draw from the arts and sciences as disciplined fields of learning both knowledge that is transforming society and also values that can help guide mankind in reckoning with the new world science is creating?

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M O D E R N

S C H O L A R S H I P

Whitney

J.

Oates

Princeton University A N Y O N E W H O BELIEVES DEEPLY, AS I DO, T H A T T H E PRINCIPLE

of the unity of knowledge is valid, that the various objects of our thought have profound and identifiable interrelations, welcomes the theme of this symposium and its purpose of bringing the humanities and the social sciences into more effective communication with each other. And it may be that those of us who have received our professional education in the classics of Greece and Rome can perhaps be of some assistance in closing the gap that needlessly and unfortunately has existed in recent years between these two great areas of learning. Actually, the classicist in his training in what might rightly be called the oldest and most venerable area study program is continually forced by the very nature of his material to realize that in fact no such gap does exist. Often to his despair, a classicist knows that a terrifying omnicompetence is demanded of him. Not only must he master the Greek and Latin languages, but also he must control to the best of his ability the whole range of GrecoRoman culture and civilization from Minoan times to the reign of Justinian in the sixth century after Christ. Ideally he must be a historian and function in all the subdivisions of history—political, military, economic, and intellectual. He must be a literary scholar and critic with a broad knowledge of the great monuments of Greek and Roman letters. He must know his art, archaeology, and architecture, as well as the philosophies, science, and mathematics which 182

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emerged from the time of the Pre-Socratics on down to the Neo-Platonists. Or to express the d e m a n d for omnicompetence in a somewhat different perspective, consider for a moment the kind of e q u i p m e n t a scholar must have in order to comprehend and interpret adequately Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. Such a scholar should know the history of atomic theory from Democritus to Planck, Einstein, a n d beyond, and he also should have enough of a capability in the enterprises of physics and mathematics to understand in some measure the scientific significance of the theory in its various forms. T h e Lucretian scholar also must be sensitive to the literary qualities of the poem, in particular as they appear in the images with which it is replete. H e must be a student of ethics, evolution, a n d anthropology, and so on and on. I realize, of course, that anyone from any scholarly field could draw u p an equally discouraging picture concerning the impossibility that any single individual can attain an ideal degree of excellence in that field. My point in elaborating on the case of the classicist is merely to emphasize the fact that, as he practices his profession, he is never invited nor is he expectcd to see a real distinction between the humanistic and social-science aspects of his work. T h i s view may perhaps be labelled as far too optimistic, b u t I would tend to defend it as being generally true, though of course there will be certain highly specialized scholars who might be regarded as exceptions. On the other hand, I think that one can be categorical in affirming that the truly great classicist would never countenance the split under consideration. If the foregoing analysis is at all sound, the classicist ought to be able to help in resolving the problem before us. But there is another split which I consider to be much more serious, at least so far as the Classics are concerned, and I suspect it is present t h r o u g h o u t all fields of learning,

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from the natural sciences and social sciences to the humanities. This is the split between what I would call "philology" and philosophy. Perhaps "split" is the wrong word and we should rather say that in the last hundred years or so too many scholars in all fields have been content to stop at "philology" and have refused to move on to philosophy. By "philology" I mean the establishment of facts or the basic data relevant to the field in question whether it be mathematics, economics, history, or literature. A case in point in the latter might be the establishment of a text or the determination of the facts of an author's life. N o one would question the absolute indispensability of philology as I have tried to define it. We all know the wit underlying the statement "These are the conclusions on which I base my facts." By philosophy I mean not merely interpreting facts, but also seeing them in context, appraising their significance—in short, reflecting upon them and evaluating them. These indeed are the tasks of philosophy. We in the humanities are all too familiar with the way in which German philology, a peculiarly virulent form, exercised its tyranny over the study of literature from the late eighteenth century on through perhaps the first quarter of the twentieth. In the understandable effort to transfer the so-called scientific method, which had been so brilliantly productive in the sciences, to the material of the humanities, considerable damage was done, for the application of this method is appropriate only in part. In the study of the Classics, the result was particularly damaging, for a large quantity of nineteenth and early twentieth century Classical scholarship is spectacularly sterile and pedantic. And, it might be added, this condition was no help to the cause of the Classics when their dominance in university curricula was quite rightly being challenged by newly emerging subjects. But be that as it may, about thirty years ago there was a revolt on the part of younger classicists, and I believe

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it is safe to say that in the last three decades, Classical scholarship has tended to become more and more "philosophical" in the broad sense in which I am using the term. I have in mind such works as Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture, first published in 1940. Or take the trend in Homeric studies, away from the quarrels about unitary or multiple authorship, or from the full-time open season for athetizing lines and passages in the Iliad and Odyssey, over to a solid consideration of such subjects as the philosophical or religious significance of these great epics. Harvard's Cedric Whitman has produced such a book in his recent Homer and the Heroic Tradition (1958), which has just received the Phi Beta Kappa Gauss Award. And exactly the same kind of thing has happened in the field of Aeschylean and Sophoclean studies. I personally regard these new trends as healthy and desirable in an absolute sense. In the first place, they are doing justice to the richness and timeless relevance of the great monuments of Classical antiquity, and if we classicists are unable to accomplish this for the world of scholars and the general public we ought to be buried. In the second place, the trends are healthy because, at least in the case of the works I have cited, they are philologically sound, but at the same time they have appropriate philosophical dimensions. If I were asked whether the pendulum has swung too far in this direction, I should say, No. In fact, it can't swing too far, for what I am recommending implies a proper balance between philology and philosophy in my sense of these terms. In other words, philosophy without philology is dreadful to contemplate, and per contra, may God spare us from a swing back to philological antiquarianism. And please don't misunderstand me. I in no sense wish to demean the work of those individuals who establish the texts and compile the indices. All I am saying is that this work must be carried on in the perspective of "philosophy," and

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indeed will be the better for it, since under these circumstances, ends and means will not be confused. Perhaps what I have been talking about may be illustrated by a brief account of a demonstration, presented by the American Council of Learned Societies January 1958 at Indiana University, entitled " T h e Present-Day Vitality of the Classical Tradition." We selected the tragic sense of life (surely a philosophical notion) as developed by the Greeks as that aspect of the Classical tradition to which the twentieth century has been peculiarly responsive. We presented a dramatic reading of Sophocles' Antigone, followed immediately by a full-dress production of Jean Anouilh's modern adaptation. H. D. F. Kitto of Bristol University lectured on the vitality of Sophocles, and then, with an abrupt shift of gears, Professor Otto Brendel lectured on the Classical and non-Classical elements in Picasso's Guernica painting, in which he was able to demonstrate the presence of the Classical in respect to both form and content. Next Professor Herbert Muller discussed freedom and the Classical tradition, with special emphasis on the political implications of the tradition. And finally contemporary music, inspired in theme or idea by the Greek tragic sense, was performed after an introduction by Roger Sessions. Sessions pointed out that from the birth of opera to the mid-eighteenth century composers frequently sought inspiration in the Classical tradition. This phenomenon virtually disappeared in the nineteenth century, but it has reappeared in the twentieth in great volume in the works of such artists as Stravinsky on down to the youngest of our contemporary composers. And throughout, those attending the demonstration were able to inspect an exhibition of original painting and sculpture, both ancient and modern, which was mounted in the foyer of the auditorium where most of the sessions took place. May I repeat that it was basically a philosophical notion—the Greek tragic sense of life—which gave the whole enterprise its unity.

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If the Classical heritage is viewed in the perspective which I have suggested, perhaps its greatest contribution to modern scholarship lies in underscoring the necessity of developing the "philosophical" dimensions of all scholarly activities. Recently I had a conversation with a brilliant young theoretical economist which may help to bring into focus the point I am trying to make. He opened by saying that he had just finished a paper in which he was continually talking about and contrasting the man who was very fond of gambling and the man who was distinctly allergic to it. Feeling that these phrases were too awkward to be continually repeated, he decided to go to the Greek and coin his necessary terms. (Incidentally, I suppose we classicists will never be totally out of work so long as there are scholarly fields which desire to expand their technical terminology.) My friend then reported that he had concocted "philokybe" and "misokybe," and asked if they would do from the linguistic point of view. I said that they seemed all right to me, but out of curiosity was constrained to ask why he wanted to investigate philokybes and misokybes. He replied that von Neumann and Morgenstern's studies of the theory of games would only work for people who were temperamentally neutral with respect to gambling, and that he himself wanted to extend the field of fire of the theory to include not only the gambling neutrals, but the philokybes and misokybes as well. I then asked, perhaps naively, whether the purpose of the whole theory was predictive. He replied in the affirmative but then went on quickly to say that he was himself deeply worried about the deterministic philosophical implications of the theory, engagingly adding that he personally had a considerable stake in the validity of the notion of free will. He then offered two ways in which he felt he might extricate himself from his dilemma. One lay in the fact that prediction is statistical in nature. In other words, so

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long as you say eight out of ten men in a certain situation will behave in a certain way, you are not predicting anything about what one particular man will do, and thus the freedom of the individual will is preserved. He bolstered this point by saying that, after all, foreknowledge did not determine future action. Here interestingly enough he reproduced in essence Boethius' argument in the fifth book of the De Consolatione Philosophiae, which he had never read. His other method of resolving the dilemma, and the one which, I think, he preferred, was to assume a radical bifurcation in the nature of man. One area of his activity was to be dealt with via the methods of strict philosophical positivism. T h e other sharply dissociated domain was to be the bailiwick of such things as ethics and religion. Perhaps I have reported this coloquy at too great length, and no doubt it may appear painfully unsophisticated to the professional philosopher. Be that as it may, it impressed two points on me that I believe could be endlessly illustrated from many if not all the various fields of learning. T h e first is that the contemporary professional scholar habitually tends to ply his trade without reference to or frequent reflection upon the philosophical assumptions which are fundamental to it. T h e second point is that professional philosophy itself has tended to become atomized, a fact which indeed gives support to my young economist's notion that it is valid to assume a radical bifurcation in the nature of man. Why should we not face it? Extremely stated, philosophy itself is now broken u p into anywhere from six to eight independent and autonomous states; or at least this is the way it appears to me, and some of my philosopher colleagues assure me that this is the case. There are logic, philosophy of science, theory of knowledge, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and the history of philosophy, and there seems to be rather widespread in the profession a pretty rugged no-trespassing rule.

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However bold or presumptuous it may be, I would like to suggest that scholars now take as their prime task the attempt to do all they can to create a united states of philosophy, to effect a federal union of these autonomous states. All scholars have a contribution to make to this end, for by definition nothing that goes on in the human intellect can be alien to philosophy. Another way of putting it would be to urge all scholars to bring out into the open the question of the nature of man for explicit examination and study, for every scholar carries on his work in the context of some kind of view of man's nature which has been consciously articulated to a greater or a lesser degree. I have another suggestion to make; namely, that a potent force to help create a new united states of philosophy could come from a widespread and deepened critical study of the works of one or another of the great synthesizing philosophers in the history of Western thought. And by widespread, I mean a critical study by scholars in all fields, not merely in the field of philosophy proper. This may be a hopelessly quixotic notion, but I am inclined to believe that such a study would prove to be the most effective means of stimulating in the minds of scholars a real sense of the interrelatedness of things. Permit me to illustrate by asking you briefly to recall the position of Plato, who surely is one of the great synthesizers. It will be readily admitted that the views of several other thinkers would serve the purpose equally well. (And please don't think I am advocating by this suggestion the creation of large broods of Platonists or Aristotelians or Kantians. Quite the contrary.) Let us first take Plato's view of man. According to him, man possesses an immortal soul, and lives his life in the realm of time and flux against the background of a realm of eternity in which abide changeless principles, which he called Forms or Ideas. In this life man must strive to achieve the good life by attaining as

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complete a grasp as he can of the Forms or Ideas, and by acting accordingly. So far as man's moral life is concerned, Plato believes that there is something in the paradoxical notion that knowledge equals virtue, or that man acts wrongly through ignorance, or that no man willingly does evil. But Plato does not hold that this paradox is the whole story, for he presents us with a view of the human soul as somehow divided into three constituents. There is the reason, or the rational part; the part containing the nobler emotions; and third, the part made up of the baser desires. We all can recall the familiar image in the Phaedrus of the soul as a charioteer (the reason) driving an ill-matched team, a fine white horse (the nobler emotions) and a mean, ugly, unruly black beast (the baser desires). So the moral life of man is prefigured as the struggle of the reason, with the help of the nobler emotions, to overcome the anarchic actions of that black beast. And at the same time, in his moral life man must try to gain a knowledge of the first principles in reality; that is, the Forms or Ideas. Plato's view of man is a function of his over-arching metaphysical hypothesis, his theory of Ideas or Forms, which is remarkable for its philosophical economy, as my friend Harold Cherniss has pointed out. T h e theory actually serves simultaneously four distinguishable purposes: logical, ontological, epistemological, and axiological. T h e Ideas function as logical universals and thus are the ground for a theory to account for the phenomena of predication. T h e theory of Ideas presents an ontology which avers that all things in the world of sights and sounds exist, to be sure, but are in some sense less real than the Ideas themselves which possess full reality. T h e epistemology suggested by the theory of Ideas is to the effect that one cannot achieve knowledge but only opinion about the realm of time and space where all things are in flux. One can have knowledge only of that which does not change; namely, the Ideas. And

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finally, the theory of Ideas presents a theory of value, for there are Ideas of aesthetic and ethical values which may serve as norms for judgment in these areas. Plato further suggests that the Ideas are somehow hierarchically arranged, that they are the entities which are both fully real and fully valuable, and at the apex of the hierarchy is the Idea of the Good, the principle which is ultimately real and valuable, and which gives Reality its teleological character. Of course, this Platonic synthesis is not without its serious philosophical difficulties, but the notable point for our purpose is that within it there is no philosophical isolationism or separatism or secessionism. Studying it is perforce a study of interrelations. And only by such study on a sufficiently generic level will we be able to communicate with one another across the broad fields of learning. Robert Oppenheimer has often discussed this point in the light of the vast increase in scientific knowledge in recent decades. He asserts that maybe such intercommunication is impossible, but that nonetheless we must make the effort. For my own part, I believe that it is possible to communicate with one another, provided that we have wits enough to reach what I have called a sufficiently generic level. Let me give one more illustration of the way in which interrelations of fields may be explored. From time to time each year Princeton holds conferences for the benefit of the general public. These are often on rather specialized topics in science or engineering or economics, but once each year we try to offer a subject that will have the widest possible appeal. Some of us in the Classics Department were asked to suggest a suitable topic. After some discussion, we proposed that a conference be held to consider the problem of Neutralism and Neutrality. Our idea was accepted and the affair took place in March 1959. Here is the bill of fare. Professor Hans Morgenthau, political scientist, opened with a systematic and philosophi-

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cal analysis of the problem. He was followed by Professor Eric Havelock, Chairman of the Department of Classics at Harvard, who presented a case from the Peloponneisan War. Next, Professor Gordon Craig of Princeton's History Department analyzed a case from the nineteenth century. Then Professor John Wheeler of our Physics Department spoke to the question: T o what extent have scientific and technological developments in the mid-twentieth century altered the essential nature of the problem? Sir Llewellyn Woodward, modern historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, then commented on Neutralism and Neutrality as it looks through the eyes of a citizen of Western Europe. Satchidananda Murty, Professor of Philosophy at Andhra University, spoke from the point of view of a citizen of India, and Professor Eric Goldman of our History Department spoke as a citizen of the United States. And finally, Professor Morgenthau returned as a summarizer. My point in rehearsing this program should be clear. If you ask a university or academia to turn its attention to a complex problem of tense immediate interest, to give a sophisticated answer, the university or academia must bring to bear all its resources—humanities, social sciences, and science alike. May I conclude by quoting a passage from Thucydides which I dare say my friend Eric Havelock could have used in his part of the program. And I want now all the more to quote it because it contains just those philosophical overtones which I have attempted to discuss. T h e passage, one of the most savage indictments of unrestrained imperialism ever written, comes from the famous Melian debate at the end of the fifth book of Thucydides' history. The Athenian envoys wish to compel the Melians to join their alliance in the war against Sparta, whereas the Melians wish to remain neutral. Here are Thucydides' words:

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"Athenians: A n d we will now endeavour to show that we have come in the interests of our empire, and that in what we are about to say we are only seeking the preservation of your city. For we want to make you ours with the least trouble to ourselves, and it is for the interests of us both that you should not be destroyed. "Melians: It may be your interest to be our masters, b u t how can it be ours to be your slaves? "Athenians: T o you the gain will be that by submission you will avert the worst; and we shall b e all the richer for your preservation. "Melians: B u t must we b e your enemies? W i l l you not receive us as friends if we are neutral and remain at peace with you? "Athenians: N o , your enmity is not half so mischievous to us as your friendship; for the one is in the eyes of o u r subjects an argument of our power, the other of our weakness. As for the gods, we expect to have quite as much of their favour as you: for we are not d o i n g or claiming anything which goes beyond c o m m o n opinion about divine o r men's desires a b o u t h u m a n things. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a law of their nature wherever they can rule they will. T h i s law was not made by us, and we are not the first w h o have acted u p o n it; we d i d b u t inherit it, and shall bequeath it to all time, and we k n o w that you and all mankind, if you were as strong as we are, w o u l d do as we d o . " T h u c y d i d e s concludes his narrative with laconic starkness: " T h e Athenians thereupon put to death all who were of military age, and made slaves of the women and children. T h e y then colonised the island, sending thither 500 settlers of their o w n . "

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T O D A Y

Daniel Η. H. Ingalls Harvard University T H E HERITAGE OF ASIA DIFFERS FROM THE TWIN HERITAGE OF

Greece and Rome in several respects. In the first place, there are three major cultures which are still living in Asia and which differ from each other just as sharply as each one differs from ours: Islam, India, the Far East. Besides this, several minor living cultures of Asia and a host of dead ones have contributed something to the modern world. Finally, the time span of those cultures at least which arose in India and China and of which the remains still continue in those lands is several times that of our Classical antiquity. I wish to emphasize the diversity of Asia, for it is often overlooked or denied by otherwise intelligent people. Every year brings us articles and books with such titles as " T h e Conflict of East and West," " T h e Meeting of East and West," and so on, as if the term "East" could refer to a culture as unified as that of the modern industrialized West. There are differences enough in the West, God knows, but they are as nothing compared with the cultural differences of Asia. Take, for instance, the traditional cultures of India and China. Certainly they differ from the mercantile and monotheistic cultures of the Near East. But the most that one can say of their similarity is that they are both Iron Age cultures which covered a large extent of time and space. Beyond this everything is difference. China has always tended toward political unity, India toward political fragmentation. Cities have played an important part in the development of Chinese civilization; India has been predominantly rural. In China the indi»94

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vidual culture-bearers have been gentlemen-administrators; in India they have been priests. Except under the Ch'ing dynasty, Iron Age China never developed a stable aristocracy of birth. India, on the other hand, developed a stable class and caste system more than 2,000 years ago. T o pass from social factors to intellectual ones: China has shown an aptitude for invention in the techniques of production and administration, in canal building, paper-making, pottery, harness. India, on the other hand, has shown little aptitude in this respect but has produced genial works of abstract thought: in mathematics, logic, metaphysics. T h e heritage of Asia, then, is a complex of many different heritages and the understanding of one of them is of little or no help to the understanding of the others. In order to prevent false pretenses I should say that my own knowledge of the Asian heritage is chiefly of India, and to a modest extent of China and Japan. T h e farthest that I ever got in Near Eastern studies was in Afghanistan, where I learned to speak what I thought was fluent Persian. Later, when I found that it was just sufficient to read Persian schoolbooks written for second-grade pupils, my Near Eastern studies came to an end. When we pass from the heritage of Asia to Asia today our first view seems to reveal a greater unity. In every land of Asia one may witness similar symptoms: the breakdown of traditional society and religion; organized attempts to raise the standard of living and educate the people; the rise of nationalism; a new inferiority complex among the educated and a new dissatisfaction among the ignorant. One could add to the list but I hesitate to do so, for it seems to me that this whole view of modern Asian unity is misleading. A deeper view will show, I think, that the separate cultures of Asia have not become one nor are they likely soon to do so. T h e fact is that Asia is starving and that starving men present a great appearance of similarity.

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When such men regain their health, however, there is no reason to think that they will still appear so similar. One should judge a culture, I think, as one should judge a man, not by a temporary condition but by an abiding nature. In saying this I would not have you suppose that I foresee a future where the Ch'ing dynasty, the Moghul Empire, and the Caliphate will again hold sway. I am aware that history does not repeat itself. But I guess that the future China will be far more like the China of the past than it will be like the India of the future. T h e only reasonable view of coming Asian unity that I have met is the Marxist view. Marx argued briefly and Engels in detail that the nature of a civilization depends entirely on its means of production. If one accepts this premise one will conclude that with the coming of the industrial age all civilizations will become alike. T h e logic is sound, but I think the premise is wrong. Civilizations were not alike in the days of Iron Age production. Russia and America are rather unlike at present although their systems of production are both industrial. While it is true that communications and the techniques of government control have grown more efficient in modern times, one must remember that these techniques may be used to keep foreign influences out as well as to drive them in. We may expect more iron curtains in the future as well as more exchange programs. I am afraid to proceed further in so general and dogmatic a vein. I should like to concentrate on one group of Asian heritages and on one Asian land of today. In this way I may be able to express a few concrete notions before we revert to a discussion of the general topic. T h e heritage and land that I shall take are those of India. Although with some diffidence, I shall make brief comparisons occasionally with China. I take it that the word "heritage" covers all the products

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of human thought and skill and effort that have been preserved from the past. It would be difficult to classify so large a body of material. But among the many sorts of heritage that might be discussed there are three that I should like to speak of, at least so far as they are preserved in India. T h e r e is the heritage of techniques. Among these are the techniques of crop-growing, of house-building, of weaving, dyeing, carpentry, in fact an enormous number of tightly patterned actions, the description of which has kept a class of anthropologists busy for decades. Most of the techniques of Iron Age India and not a few even of the Stone Age are preserved in some fashion. T h e great majority, however, are dying. It is interesting to note that the mortality proceeds at different rates. Quickest to die are the survivals of the Stone Age. T h e Pardhls, a hunter caste living about Poona, used to make beautiful wooden frame traps for catching game. 1 Within the present generation this skill has disappeared. T h e game is about hunted out; what little is left is caught in steel traps. Next to disappear, as though history were repeating itself in reverse, are Iron Age techniques. None of these, so far as I can think, has disappeared entirely. But here again a different rate of mortality is found. T h e first skills to languish were those which commanded a wide market. Already at the beginning of the nineteenth century the Abbe Dubois remarked 011 the desolation of South Indian weaver villages. 2 Hand spinning has proved stronger because it has a stronger local market. T h e indigo industry, which once gave the world its only fast colors, began to languish by the mid-nineteenth century; within the twentieth it has almost disappeared, driven out by the competition of aniline ' D . D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1956), p. 28. 'Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, trans. Henry K. Beauchamp (3rd edition; Oxford University Press, 1906), pp. 94-95.

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dyes. By contrast, the village carpenter throughout India still flourishes. In the heritage of techniques there is a great similarity between India and the rest of Asia. One could even use the term East here in contrast to the West if it were not that large areas of Africa, South America, and even Europe agree with the East. T h e contrast is this: the modern tools of an American or Western European can be traced back through a succession of Western inventions to simple hand tools, whereas the tools of an Asian, if they are modern, are foreign or built on foreign models, being of native origin only if they are primitive. In techniques the heritage of Asia is almost everywhere giving way to the heritage of Western Europe. T h e r e are a very few reverse cases. At least one important technique of the modern West originated in India. I refer to our system of numeral notation. We call our numerals Arabic because the Arabs transmitted them to us, but the Arabs did not invent them. T h e decimal system of notation with a symbol bearing place-value for the concept zero is one of the greatest of human inventions, almost equal in importance to another Asian invention, the alphabet. W e can trace the progress of our numeral system from India to the West quite clearly by unimpeachable evidence. 3 It had assumed its present form in India by A.D. 400. By the seventh century it had passed to Persia and Syria, thence to the young Moslem world, and finally to Europe. T h e first example of Indian numerals in a European text is found, I believe, in a Spanish manuscript of the tenth century. 4 Since then this portion of the heritage of India has been accepted by the whole of the civilized world. It is now " A brief and excellent account is that by Walter E. Clark, "HinduArabic Numerals," in Indian Studies in Honor of Charles Rockwell Lauman (Harvard University Press, 1929), pp. 217-236. ' Ibid., p. 220.

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so much a part of o u r life that we do not normally recognize it as a heritage. Incidentally, acceptance without recognition of borrowing is typical of the heritage of techniques. W e use gunpowder and paper without thinking that the Chinese first invented them. W e eat chickens without thanks to the pre-Aryan Indian who first clipped their wings. W e use tobacco with little thought of the Mexicans who used it to cure disease and excite religious fervor. I turn next to the heritage of philosophy and religion. In this area the world is more historically minded. W h e n the Indian nationalist T i l a k wanted a philosophy of action to combat the passive fatalism prevalent in his time, he refused to teach from Locke and Mill and O r m e and Macauley, who had been his real teachers, and instead of this attributed their ideas to the god Krishna, interpreting by every device he knew the words of Krishna as reported by the Bhagavadgitä to suit his meaning. T h e amount of ancient Indian writings on morals a n d philosophy and religion that has been preserved to us may surprise you. Probably not one tenth of the total material has been published, but the published material would easily fill a thousand stout quarto volumes. I take it that you do not expect from me a survey of this material b u t that you would like some statement as to what I think its use may be to present-day India or the modern world. I must admit that the use to which it is currently b e i n g put, both in Asia and Europe, is slight. T h i s is not to say, however, that the heritage is valueless. A family may own a precious diamond without displaying it or using it i n any way. And yet when a year of famine comes the family by means of this diamond may preserve themselves. Such stories at any rate are told in India. An actual case to my point is well known to Latin scholars. T h e poems of Catullus were preserved for many centuries in a single

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manuscript which for all those years no one appears to have read. In the thirteenth century this manuscript was discovered and copied by the humanist Poggio, since when this particular heritage has been a joy and delight to thousands of men. Many ideas that one finds in Sanskrit literature are passed over by non-Indians not because they are worthless, as the textbooks on magic and astrology are essentially worthless, but because they were produced for the use of a caste society which has existed nowhere except in India, and because they are associated with a number of beliefs which are no longer held by educated men anywhere. I might point out, though, that precisely the same strictures can be levelled against the ideas of Plato. Plato wrote for the people of a small slave-holding city-state politically and socially quite unlike anything in the modern world. Again, he held notions of the nature of the stars and the planets that are now patently ludicrous. And yet Plato's ideas, when they refer to men rather than planets and to morality rather than to formal logic, are still taken seriously by his cultural descendants. One might argue from the analogy that an Indian philosopher, say Samkara, while he might be rejected in China or Islam or England because of the family-mindedness of cultures, would still be honored and studied and understood in India. T h e analogy does not quite hold, however. Samkara is honored in India, it is true. But he is little studied and even less understood. Indian political and university speeches are loaded with praise of Indian spirituality as opposed to Western materialism, and in these the great Samkara often figures as a sort of guardian angel of Indian culture. T h e pity is that the speechmakers take so little time to read the man they admire. T h e men who really know the ancient Indian tradition, who have studied in the tols as rabbis study in

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rabbinical schools, pine for lack of employment. T h e poor fellows can't make a rousing speech and they can't write English. But let me hold back my cynicism. There are also motives of virtue which prevent the study of the ancient Indian philosophers. A young Indian whom I much admire wrote to me on this subject, " W e only read Samkara if we believe we will be saved by him. W e cannot read him as you do out of historical interest or to broaden our knowledge of mankind. W e are too poor. When we are rich then some of us may do that." His meaning was not that he was poor himself, but that in the present condition of India the first duty of an intelligent man was to help fight India's poverty. After that there might be time for historical scholarship. But is there anything of the Indian tradition of philosophy that can be used, either by India in the happy day of her recovery or meanwhile by more fortunate lands? This, of course, is matter for debate. My own opinion is that a considerable treasure lies scattered in the attic of Sanskrit literature, and that the future, both in the West and in Asia, may make use of much that is now neglected. Among the contents of the Sanskrit attic is the traditional Indian evaluation of human life. T h i s arose in a society regimented in the caste system, a society that is gradually disintegrating. It is associated with beliefs in rebirth and karma which are about as difficult nowadays to accept as the Christian doctrine of original sin. And yet the evaluation seems to me one that may again come to be popular in many lands. Pray forgive me now for some vast generalizations. Human life in traditional Indian thought is no more sacred than any other form of life. Man is not modelled after the image of God nor have his desires anything to d o with the desires of God. Desire springs only from previous life and has as its goal chiefly the prolonging and

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multiplying of life. T h e r e are thousands of other forms of life intimately connected with ours because they are sparks or reflections or manifestations of a common unitary source of energy. T h i s energy cannot be characterized as either good or bad, for it is larger than such small categories. T h e Indian imagined that this energy at some time would cease—not permanently however. T h e period of rest would be followed by another period of energy. T h e process, like the individual life-process, would be cyclical. T h e actions of our present life are of extraordinarily little importance in the framework of the cosmic cycle. After all, a single man in the course of his rebirths would be all things that a life can be: Brahmin, Südra, dog; kind father, murderer, and saint. In the framework of the cosmic cycle all lives evened out and everybody's history eventually was identical. Only from a close point of view did actions become important and moral choice necessary. T h e close point of view, of course, is what we regularly see by. O u r knowledge of the world nowadays has come to a point where this Indian evaluation of life may seem to many persons even outside of India to fit the evidence better than that which is based on the Christian myth. W e may laugh at rebirth and karma and the hierarchies of awkwardly multiple-handed gods listed in the Puränas. B u t one can take all this away and the Indian evaluation of life is not much affected. On the other hand, if one takes away from man his claim to be made after the image of God the very basis of Judaism and Christianity seems to me to crumble. T h e Jew and the Christian may well ask how there can then be any morality left. At this point it may be worth observing that other men without the basis of which we so fear to be deprived have continued to act not less morally than we. From the close-range social point of view the rule that the Hindu felt should be followed was essentially the same

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as the Christian one: Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you. Dr. Schweitzer has tried to make out from similar dicta a case for Hinduism's being negative where Christianity is positive. 5 But I d o u b t that he makes his case. A perusal of Sanskrit inscriptions leads one to conclude that there was just as much positive charity— founding of almshouses and hospitals, planting of shade trees, digging of wayside wells—in India as there was in Europe under the guidance of Christianity. T h e important thing is not whether the golden rule is phrased with negatives or without, but whether it is obeyed. And I conclude that there has been little difference between Europe and India in this respect. T h e Indians set things into different categories from ours. W h e r e the Greeks tried to categorize all things as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, the Indians tried to categorize facts as true or untrue, and actions as useful or unuseful. T h e y have been called pessimistic and negativistic because most of their authors insist that worldly life is unsatisfactory. But I believe that one should not use these terms of them. Of traditional Indian authors very few characterize the world as bad in itself. It is bad or, to use the Indian phrase, u n t r u e only by comparison with the state of freedom beyond it. Nowhere is it suggested that the pleasures of the flesh are works of the Devil. One might continue to enjoy them without grief if only desire did not so o u t r u n one's ability to perform and experience. As the Mahäbhärata puts it, " T h e r e is not enough gold nor enough horses n o r enough women in the whole world to satisfy the desires of a single man." 6 Actually, the Indians of former centuries looked at the world of pleasure with a straighter eye than most Europeans have d o n e between the centuries of Ovid "Die Weltanschauung der indischen Denker V e r l a g s b u c h h a n d l u n g , 1934), chapter 1. * Mahäbhärata ( B O R I edition), 5. 39. 69.

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and Freud. T h e y wrote textbooks on cooking and horsemanship and hunting and sex which showed that they derived not infrequent pleasure from these enjoyments. But they were appalled at how much more they wanted than they were able to enjoy. T h e cure for frustration, it seemed to them, was a limiting of desire rather than an increase in their effort at performance. In another context it might be to the point to speak of the vices of the Indian view: that it led to conservatism and inaction, that it favored acceptance of the status q u o rather than an attempt to remedy injustice and interfere with the law of karma. But I am speaking of the Indian heritage that may still prove of use. Whatever we are promised in the way of performance by our modern advertisers and politicians, the fact remains that desire outruns performance in America as much as it does in India, as much now as it did twenty-five hundred years ago. In order to be happy we must curb not only those desires which would injure other people but those desires also which would deify ourselves. There are a good many Sanskrit authors on this subject who will be worth reading, I think, in five hundred years just as they are worth reading now. One cannot speak of the Indian heritage without some mention of their highest ideal. As opposed to the world of ever-recurring rebirth they spoke of another world of removal, of freedom. T h e attainment of this world went by many names, among them nirvana, which meant literally a dying out as of fire, and brahma, which might be translated supernatural truth. Much of the impression which European scholars have gained of Indian pessimism derives from the contrasts which Indian authors were fond of making between the worldly world and the world of freedom. T h e world we live in is changeable, the world of freedom is changeless. T h e world we live in contains suffering and misery and ignorance and the parting of friends,

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sickness, death-—and then the whole miserable cycle repeated and repeated. But the world of freedom lies outside the cycle. What is remarkable about this Indian world of freedom is that most authors refuse to grant it any material attribute. It is not a heaven. There are no angels in it nor sweet running waters. T h e more rigorous theologians even denied that it was joyful, though others disagreed, for joy like grief implies change and diversity. T h e world of freedom was what is, and thereby it was unlike anything else. How much use the modern world may make of this ideal I do not know. I might add a comment or two, however. It seems to me clear from the reading of Indian descriptions of the state of freedom that what is being described is a universalization of a state of religious trance. T h e inducing of a trance state by long-practiced techniques is characteristic of Indian religion. Your Indian mystic consciously pinpointed his mind, to use the Sanskrit phrase, whereas the Christian mystic typically opened his mind wide for God to work within it. T h e universalization of this peculiar trance state may be a vast delusion. It is difficult to find a criterion by which to judge. But Indian descriptions of brahma or nirvana have one advantage over many non-Indian descriptions of heaven. T h e Indians who wrote of nirvana, I think, had most of them been there. I have said that India herself, despite professions to the contrary, is not now making much use of these heritages. I have spoken of starvation as a reason for this abandonment. T h i s is an oversimplification which I should now qualify. India has always had starvation of a sort. Physical starvation was a concomitant of the monsoon climate, for large sections of fertile land are occasionally missed by the monsoon rains. T h e r e are harrowing accounts of famine in India for centuries before the coming of the British.

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Indeed, the British by constructing an efficient railroad system for a while softened this ancient scourge. But with the lessening of local famines and the abolition of internal war the population grew to a size unparalleled in earlier Indian history. T h e subcontinent of India may have had roughly one hundred twenty million people before the advent of British power. It now has over four hundred fifty million. T h e result is a new sort of starvation. Perhaps no greater percentage of the population per year now dies of famine than in the eighteenth century. But a very much larger percentage of the population is now on a constant semi-starvation diet. T h e Indian standard of living appears to be appreciably lower now than it was in 1760. T h e same problem occurs throughout much of Asia, in Java, China, Japan. Only Japan has made any real stride toward solution, though the stride may not have been taken soon enough. That is to say, the standard of living though it has risen may not be able to rise faster than the rate of population. One may ask whether this problem has arisen before. T h e answer is yes, but probably not in its present magnitude. Actually, it is only for China that we have accurate records. China, we know, has passed through several periods of over-population, and some of these produced political revolts. But none of them produced the sweeping revolution that is occurring in China at the present. T o relieve their sufferings most men of Asia in the past appear to have turned to religion. Perhaps the greatest factor making for a different reaction in modern Asia is the knowledge that other nations do not starve. And not only this. These other nations have a thousand possessions which the Asians want, possessions which Asia can obtain only by changing her whole system of production. In addition to poverty Asia now suffers from desire and from the frustration of knowing that others enjoy the objects of this desire.

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O n e can observe the reaction to the basic problem through a long succession of Indian nationalists. A l l of them advocate the d r o p p i n g of part of the Indian heritage. As one follows the history of the past century, decade by decade the portion to be d r o p p e d grows steadily greater. A t first it was m i n o r religious practices which had proved shocking to the British invaders. N e x t it was local customs which interfered with a unified state, for only by unity could India become strong. N e x t it was more widely held caste prejudices, which again interfered with unity. W i t h T i l a k and Ranade India finally dropped her suspicion of desire and began to advocate energy and action-mindedness. Each leader tried to hold the line at some point, but the persistence of the basic problem forced the next leader to go farther. T h e last great leader to insist on holding a substantial part of the Indian heritage of philosophy and religion was G a n d h i , but he compensated for this by being the most successful abolitionist of Indian caste and class distinctions u p to his time. A n d since the time of G a n d h i the leader of India has been a man who would not hold the line at any point. N e h r u has read widely on Indian tradition and history b u t his reading on these subjects has been entirely in English books. Of the literature of India, ancient and modern, he knows almost nothing at first hand, and his t h i n k i n g is as Western as his studies have been. I might make a brief comparison here with China. It seems to me that C h i n a has rejected much less of her heritage than India. For one thing, the ideal of a unified state was already a part of the Chinese heritage before C h i n a came in touch with the industrialized West. T o achieve unity in modern C h i n a only a political revolution was required, not a philosophical revolution as well. A g a i n , Marxist democracy fits the Chinese heritage better than British democracy fits the heritage of India. T h e Chinese have always claimed that government should be for the

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benefit of all the people. Several times in the past they have even carried out rigidly egalitarian land distributions. T h e distinction between a Confucian bureaucracy and a Marxist elite is not wide in theory, and the future may show an increasing similarity in fact. It is worth remarking that Mao Tse Tung is just as accomplished a scholar of classical Chinese as he is of Marxist dialectics. T h e contrast with Nehru is striking. I should like to take up a third type of heritage, though I must treat it more briefly than the last. I would call it the heritage of form as opposed to heritages of content. T h e distinction is one of shading rather than clear demarcation. The two always occur together, but certain products of human emotion and thought are more valuable or impressive for their form than for their content; one might say they are more heavily shaded with form. T h e distinction I would make is that between the poems of Horace, say, and the treatises of Aristotle, or between the ceremony of welcoming a guest and the information concerning family or friends that one may impart to him after the welcome. In the literature of modern India the departure from traditional form has been considerable, but less, I believe, than appears at first sight. Indeed, it is here, and in the emotional and ceremonial life of the people of which this literature is a reflection, that I think the Indian heritage remains strongest. It is true that the classical language is employed for literature only seldom, and then only by professors of the classical language. It is furthermore true that since the middle of the nineteenth century the trend has been away from types of literature that were used in Sanskrit and in the vernaculars of past centuries and toward modern English or other European patterns. Of modern patterns the most successful has been the short story and next to it the novel. But when one reads these novels and short stories one is surprised by how much of

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the old is left. T h e similarity of language, of course, is inescapable, for language is one of the most conservative of human products. A l l the names of beauty, for example, of which Sanskrit distinguishes so many varieties and by criteria so different from those of Latin or English, remain the same in the modern languages of North India. Beauty that appears in motion is still distinct from beauty viewed at rest. A special word is used for beauty that causes excitement and for beauty that is connected with wealth. T h e r e is still a special name for that sort of beauty in a woman that is both the cause and effect of her holding her husband's love. In the same way the words for love are still distinguished into the twenty or more categories which the Indian has always employed in the place of our single ambiguity. Accordingly, it happens that the plot of a modern Indian novel may be suggested by that of a recent novel in English or Russian; but the author, in describing a situation demanded by the plot, brings to life emotional patterns and personal relationships which could never have occurred outside the author's homeland. It is a thousand Indian lovers of the past who speak through his hero, and the heroine, no matter how Western her situation, assumes the peculiar combination of modesty and sensuousness of an ancient tradition. T h i s happens whether the author intends it or not. T h e author of merit, of course, intends it, for though he may borrow plots where he finds them, he tries consciously to reveal the persons and situations he has known at first hand. T h e similarity of old and new goes farther than mere vocabulary. Whole phrases, the succession in which different images come to mind, conditioned reflexes of politeness or propriety, of dislike or fear, remain precisely the same. Especially in the expression of the emotions is this similarity noticeable, and it appears in daily life just as strikingly as

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in literature. T h e birth of a son, the homecoming of a bride, a death, a lament produce the same verbal reactions that they produced centuries ago. This is not from any universality of emotions, for the reactions are often different from ours. A wife after the death of her husband cries out to his friend. "Ah! His poor brother, who loved him so dearly!" Her heart has demanded an exclamation, an expulsion of breath. But centuries of training have prevented her from an egoistic phrase that would refer first to her own grief. This is a single example from the year 1952, which happens to be duplicated in a passage of Valmiki written before the time of Christ. It would be instructive some day to compile a collection of such coincidences. T h e late Benjamin Whorf in a number of remarkable essays argued that persons who speak different languages see different worlds.7 T h e actual world of reference may be the same but the selection of fact to be noticed which each language imposes on its speakers is different. In one of these essays Whorf furnishes an example. He gives the words by which two persons, a Shawnee and an Englishspeaking American, describe the cleaning of a rifle. T h e words are accompanied by pictures, which show very vividly that the parts of the gun and the individual motions of the loader that are noticed by the language of one speaker are not noticed by the language of the other. Curiously, Whorf does not remark on the equally interesting fact that both speakers are equally capable of cleaning the gun and firing it. T h e contrast, it seems to me, is extraordinary. We can cut the world into utterly different patterns and yet work upon it with precisely the same effect. I have quoted Whorf's example because it seems to me to bear out precisely the contrast that I wish to show of ''Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (The Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956), p. 208.

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India. T h e Indians are accepting our Western techniques almost in entirety, and have proven quite capable of employing them. But their doing so does not alter their immediate views of the world. T h e million selections of what to single out for observation that every man unconsciously makes every day of his life remain the same. T h e heritage of form has remained constant while the heritage of techniques has changed. Finally, in order to bring all my types of heritage together let me summarize what I said of the heritage of religion and philosophy. T h i s appears to be in decay, but may some day revive in modified form. T h e three types of heritage that I have discussed are by no means all the types of heritage that could be discussed or that arc worth studying. One might discuss the heritage of family relationships, of children's games, of types of humor, of the reasons and methods of committing suicide. I have intended only to give you a suggestive selection. I shall now conclude with a very few words concerning the relation of the two parts of my topic. I wish first to repel a misconception. It is frequently claimed that the study of antiquity belongs to the humanities, while the study of a modern nation belongs to the social sciences. But the distinction as so made is wrong, and even has no use, except for purposes of university administration. Much of the study of ancient India cannot be brought under the proper sense of the word humanities. T h e collation of ancient manuscripts, the chronological listing of the uses of a particular numeral notation are scientific, even statistical pursuits. On the other hand, essential portions of the study of modern India are not scientific and only indirectly social, as for example the study of poetry or religious enthusiasm within a modern Indian community. Mind you, there may be some areas of human knowledge which one can bring wholly into one or another of these administrative categories. I only insist that neither the

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heritage of Asia nor Asia today is such an area of knowledge. While they cannot be so distinguished, the two parts of my topic are nevertheless distinct. One can study the heritage of Asia and modern Asia separately, for taken by itself each of these studies serves a separate purpose. T h e first is a quest of knowledge for its own sake, the second a quest of knowledge on which to base action. One can go farther, to weigh these two purposes and in accordance with the resulting preponderance support one form of study or the other. It may be necessary sometimes for educational administrators to weigh such matters and make such decisions. T h e scholar, on the other hand, will be guided by the relative delight he derives from the two fields. For your true scholar chooses his field because he is happy in it, and looks around to justify its usefulness only afterwards. For myself I should be unhappy entirely to lose either field, for within the general study of mankind each supplements the other. As a subject of abiding research I happen to prefer the India of the past. I find more of its inhabitants from whom I can learn and I take more delight in their art than I do in that of their descendants. But one cannot quite love the dead. What I mean is that one cannot fully share in their griefs or their hopes. Accordingly, I would take modern India, if not as a field of research, perhaps as a field of love.

IN PRAISE OF SPECIALIZATION Donald

Young

Russell Sage Foundation IN T H E PAST S E V E N T Y - F I V E YEARS AN UNPRECEDENTED E X P A N -

sion of knowledge resulting in a growth in understanding of man's environment and of man himself has brought a pattern of compartmentalization in a multiplicity of academic disciplines which are grouped, as though in a struggle for self-protection and advantage, under the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Clearly this threefold g r o u p i n g has been found useful or it would not have reached its present importance in our universities and in the t h i n k i n g and ways of working of both research and teaching personnel. However, it also has disadvantages. T h e stated purpose of this symposium has been to examine the implications of the following sentence: " O n e of the intellectual problems characteristic of this age of specialization which has had a most unfortunate influence upon educational programs in graduate schools is a gap which has developed between social scientists and students of the humanities." A n assumption in this statement is that the A m e r i c a n graduate school has encouraged the development of intellectual specialization to the disadvantage of research and teaching and of society as a whole. T h i s belief is so commonly held that one hardly expects to hear the word "specialist" without the critical companion term " n a r r o w . " Actually specialization as such may have less responsibility for disciplinary isolationism than is ordinarily attributed to it. If responsibility for the existing gap between the social sciences and the humanities is to be assessed, the variety S13

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of specific consequences of specialization commonly offered in explanation of the unfortunate separation between the two groupings of disciplines should be reviewed. They may be conveniently considered under three overlapping and interlocking classifications: (1) the pejorative, which frequently contain an appreciable element of invective and are often inherently snide in intent; (2) those growing out of the nature of academic and professional institutions; and (3) those concerned with differences in method and substance. Disparagement by name-calling, a technique we discourage in children, is still evident in academic circles. There are those who believe that the humanists have been put in their proper place well below the salt when they are referred to as "antiquarians." Social scientists are supposed to have been disposed of when they are described as "problem solvers" who would have us depend on "crude materialism" and "scientism" for guidance in human affairs. T h e social scientists are accused of ignoring humane, aesthetic, and moral values, except perhaps as subjects for sterile study; the humanists in turn are charged with violation of academic ethics by departure from objectivity for the purpose of indoctrinating students with values of mere personal preference. Humanists speak condescendingly of the "jargon" of the social scientists and brush aside the rejoinder that what they regard as "jargon" is an instrument of precision, a quality not to be achieved by persons who value style of expression above verifiable accuracy. There is, of course, a kernel of truth in each of these charges; numerous individuals may be found in any academic community whose published works and classroom utterances may be used to illustrate such criticisms. However, if it is the disciplines with which we are concerned, rather than selected individuals, then there is no need

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to discuss such allegations, for they are irrelevant references to the foibles of particular persons. T o attribute the gap between the humanities and the social sciences to the limitations of American institutions of higher learning is to use the university as a scapegoat. It must be conceded that various aspects of university organization and operation permit and encourage disciplinary separatism, but they do not require it. Budgets, lines of administrative authority, specialized courses and their prerequisites, degree requirements, appointment and promotion patterns, academic tenure, emphasis on individual independence, the inertia of tradition all help to make interdisciplinary cooperation unnecessary if they do not strongly discourage it. But they are far from absolute barriers to interdepartmental collaboration, and they exist by faculty sufferance if not by faculty preference. Superficial acquaintance with the substance and methods of the various humanistic and social science fields of specialization has convinced many leaders in education that there is insufficient common ground for extensive collaboration. It is indeed difficult to discover what if anything may be held in common by Classical archaeology and contemporary urban sociology, between the study of Elizabethan literature and economics and government, or between philology and social psychology. Yet these combinations and any other that can be conceived do have much in common, at least potentially; for the humanities and the social sciences and all the subdivisions thereof are concerned exclusively with human experience and behavior in its various but tightly interrelated aspects. Increasingly these disciplines are drawing upon each other for data, technique, and findings. Contradictory findings in any two disciplines require reconciliation or discard. T h e separate histories of development of the social

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sciences and humanities have led to diverse ways of looking at essentially common problems. Here is a major source of interdisciplinary confusion. Research is impossible without a scheme of concepts which enables movement from the particular to a degree of generalization. Any human question, however, can be viewed with any one of various frames of reference in mind, and properly so. Harm results when the conceptions with which the specialist attacks his problems come to be regarded by him as though they were fixed qualities of the data under study. Even when there is no such misunderstanding, the specialized concepts which have developed in all fields of study constitute a linguistic barrier to interdisciplinary communication. Concepts, however, are merely man's ideas about the nature of things, and as such must change with experience and growing knowledge. Methodological differences between the humanities and the social sciences may be regarded as no more than a special case of difference in conceptualization. T h e way a person works to establish a "fact" or a generalization depends fundamentally on what he believes will be regarded by his colleagues as satisfactory supporting evidence of a finding. T h e actuarial approach so widely used and accepted by social scientists seems not to be convincing to many humanists. T h e compliment is returned by social scientists, who express skepticism about interpretations of economic activity and social problems by means of literary analysis. Arguments about the inherent relative merits of research techniques are, of course, evidence of lack of research sophistication, for there is no one technique or "method" which alone is valid even within any single discipline. How one attacks a research problem depends not only on personal intelligence and skills but also on the nature of the problem, the data obtainable, the available research tools, and the standards imposed by one's own colleagues and by society.

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T h e gap between the social sciences and the humanities is in fact narrower than is often alleged, and many bridges already have been built across it. T h i s is expected when consideration is given to the limited applicability and flexible nature of the explanations for the existence of a gap which have just been reviewed. Illustrations of cooperation and even of integration are innumerable. T w o disciplines, history and anthropology, for example, have built-in bridges. T h e distinction between history as one of the humanities and as a social science has faded to the point of inconsequence. T h e subdivisions of anthropology reach into biological science, the humanities, and the social sciences; and anthropologists, regardless of specialty, are expected to have some technical familiarity with all three aspects of their discipline. A n o t h e r illustration of integration is to be found in the numerous area study programs such as the South Asia Regional Studies or the A m e r i c a n Civilization program at the University of Pennsylvania. A third type of collaboration has resulted from the l i n k i n g of two fields of specialization because one or the other had reached a stage of development where cross-disciplinary effort was essential. H e r e one may cite the growth of work on the relation between personality and culture, that involving psychology and linguistics, or the National Science Foundation program in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science. Institutional collaboration also is q u i t e common, as illustrated by the various joint committees of the A m e r i c a n Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research C o u n c i l and many university interdepartmental committees and programs. T h e gap is not nearly so wide, deep, and f o r b i d d i n g as stand-offish partisans at the polar extremes would have us believe. Furthermore, the trend is toward more bridges over a narrowing gap. T h i s is the certain consequence of advance in highly specialized research. Scholars all give lip-service

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to the simple fact that there are n o d i v i d i n g lines in nat u r e a n d that there exists n o inherent s h a r p distinction between the humanities a n d the social sciences. Perhaps w e n e e d not go so far as to concern ourselves here with the s u p p o s i t i o n that the world can b e conceived in a single e q u a t i o n . T h e r e is need, however, to have faith in, a n d to act in accordance with, the principle of the unity of knowledge. If we have this faith there can b e n o logical reason for f e a r i n g that scholarly specialization will lead to intellectual isolation. B y specialization is not m e a n t the a c q u i s i t i o n through practice of dexterity or rote expertise in a repetitive operation such as the d e t e r m i n a t i o n of statistical correlations, the d e c i p h e r i n g of ancient L a t i n manuscripts, the administering of p u b l i c opinion questionnaires, the recitation of any a n d every known detail a b o u t a war, a c o m m u n i t y , or the private life of an obscure poet. Such skills are indeed v a l u a b l e in the pursuit of knowledge, b u t they m a y best b e r e g a r d e d as means for the a d v a n c e m e n t of learning a n d not as intellectual ends in themselves. T e c h n i c a l dexterity a n d intimate familiarity with data are r e q u i r e m e n t s for scholarly specialists, b u t they may also b e possessed by technicians who have n o claim to scholarship. It is characteristic of the scholarly specialist that he drives his inquiry a l o n g whatever course he can a n d just as far as he can. H e does not stop short because he is so delighted with s o m e t h i n g he has d o n e that he is content to keep doi n g it over a n d over again, or perhaps j u s t keep talking a b o u t it. T h i s d r i v i n g ahead wherever the question leads a n d o p p o r t u n i t y permits sooner or later r e q u i r e s the crossing of m a n - m a d e boundaries, a n d demonstrates the unity that is nature. T h i s crossing of disciplinary b o u n d a r i e s by specialists intent on getting answers to their questions wherever and by whatever means they m a y be f o u n d occasionally leads to

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the creation of new disciplines. In the natural sciences such specialties as physical chemistry and biophysics come readily to the layman's mind. Social psychology is a product of specialization in sociology and in psychology. Economic history is a flourishing specialty in which both the economic and the historical components are strong. Social history is much more history in content and method than sociology, but it nevertheless links two disciplines. Examples of new hyphenated specialties are psycho-linguistics and social physiology, both promising but still with uncertain academic futures. T h e s e almost random examples of interdisciplinary fusion are mentioned to illustrate an important way in which seemingly wide gaps between disciplines have been bridged or narrowed. T h e y have not always been welcomed either by their parent disciplines or by academic institutions. It is particularly important that the newer specialties be given every opportunity to prove themselves. Intensive specialization in the physical and biological sciences not only has created new hyphenated specialties such as biophysics, but also has played havoc with longestablished distinctions between such ancient separate sciences as physics and chemistry. In the social sciences it is also the intensive specialists, not the "generalists," who have blurred the distinctions between sociology, social psychology, and social anthropology, so that today they are commonly grouped under the heading "behavioral sciences," a term that also includes an appreciable element of biological science. It is the intensive specialists again who are bringing knowledge of human behavior to bear on problems previously considered strictly the property of economists and political scientists traditionally content to draw their data from documents without much concern for the human complexities which created them. As the social sciences have drawn together in recent decades with the increasing depth of knowledge about human behavior, so

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increasing integration with the natural sciences and the humanities is in prospect. Universities and their graduate schools have been sensitive to the charge of overspecialization, even though the standard of judgment is usually left quite vague by the critics. Possibly the concern of the critics, in so far as it has not stemmed f r o m naivete, has really been with pseudoscholarship rather than with specialization as such. A d m i n istrative and faculty resistance to the trend toward specialization has been partly in response to such criticism. I n the social sciences, for example, it is common practice to encourage and require graduate students to spread

their

courses over all or nearly all subfields within a department, and also to enroll for work of peripheral interest offered by other departments. T h i s avoids the charge that specialists are being produced. Evidence browsing

narrow

that

extensive

is intellectually advantageous at the

graduate

level is elusive. T h a t such diversification of courses has been advantageous from the standpoint of employment, at least in the short run and certainly at the more disadvantaged educational institutions, seems clear. Probably most teaching positions at the lower ranks in a great majority of our institutions require instruction in areas far beyond the instructor's specialty. H e r e there is an unresolved conflict between the practical requirements for earning a living by teaching and effective scholarly specialization. It is perhaps this conflict, reinforced by the popular critical attitude toward specialization, that has led to the emphasis in American graduate education, particularly in the social sciences and in the humanities, on the acquisition of encyclopedic knowledge over the range of the student's major discipline and selected related fields as well. T h e consequent unavoidable sacrifice of depth of learning and of skill in imaginative research is

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a prime cause of the superficiality so commonly charged against holders of the American doctorate. The need for an increasing number of college teachers— traditionally the product of university graduate schools— because of increasing college enrollments is putting heavy pressure on graduate schools to produce more persons specifically trained for teaching. This already has led to strong recommendations that the period of study for the doctorate be reduced, that the doctoral thesis be made less of a burden on the student, that more emphasis be placed on the master's degree for college teaching, and that there be more active and effective recruiting of potential teachers into graduate school. None of these recommendations is new, but all are now being put forward in the new setting of a sharply expanded need for teachers in colleges unavoidably offering diluted collegiate education. What the result will, or should, be in terms of the traditional central function of the American graduate school remains unclear, but certainly education in preparation for the advancement of knowledge must not be debased. It may even be that depth in learning has its advantages in teaching. Whatever ameliorative measures are used to meet the problems of expansion now facing the graduate school, we should keep in mind that lack of specialization is not a qualification for teaching or research. T h e American graduate school should take pride in the role it has played in the development of specialized research and teaching in all the liberal arts disciplines; it should be embarrassed by its neglect of the specialized learned practicing professions. Society supports academic institutions because it has confidence that they are essential to the wellbeing of society, and are not mere luxuries. Academicians in turn pursue their careers in the hope that, even though learning may be justified for learning's sake, someone ulti-

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mately may be better off because of their labors. Yet far too little attention is given to the manner and means of translation of the product of scholarship in the social sciences and humanities into effective form for practical application in human affairs. T h e liberal arts graduate school itself is, of course, a vocational school, an obvious fact too often ignored by faculty members who perhaps prefer not to think of university teaching and research as vocations. In any event, the education of professional practitioners and applied scientists as such has been looked down upon as a lesser function, happily to be left to special schools or otherwise segregated programs clearly distinguished from the prestige of those granting the orthodox doctorate. This attitude has had unfortunate consequences for professional education and also for scholarship in the social sciences and humanities. Practitioner education to a great extent has been left to practitioner-oriented rather than research-oriented personnel, with consequent emphasis on what we have earlier referred to as "dexterity" or "rote expertise." At the same time, the liberal arts have suffered from their weakening of communication both with the learned applied professions and with the public, the ultimate consumers of their intellectual products and source of support for their vocation. All members of practicing professions are concerned with people, and therefore need to draw on the humanities and social sciences for the understanding of their clients, patients, patrons, or customers, and even of themselves and their profession. For them to do so effectively, however, requires more specialized interest on the part of social scientists and humanists in areas of specialized professional practice. For example, problems in psychiatry or social work, complicated by the fact that individuals have varying ethnic backgrounds, patterns of behavior, or value systems, may not be resolved by reading a general text in sociology or

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anthropology; the help of individuals familiar with the relevant findings of the behavioral sciences and also with the specific area of practice in which they are to be applied is needed. T h e social sciences and the humanities can be truly helpful in these fields of application and in others such as law, medicine, public health, or engineering only if there are individuals willing and qualified to serve as specialized middlemen somewhat in the sense that the engineer serves as a middleman between natural science and industry. Liberal arts graduate faculties do not yet seem fully aware of the advantages and benefits to be derived from rationally expanded participation in the education of professional practitioners. The applied professions can be an excellent source of research data; they offer a testing ground in lieu of a laboratory, and provide an avenue for demonstration of social worth. T h e development of these resources, however, requires a form of specialization which is as yet no more than embryonic. There is increasing awareness on the part of leaders in the practicing professions that better knowledge of human behavior results in better practice. Without doubt the demand they are creating for social research, for teaching materials on the human aspects of their fields, and for personnel to work on the social components of their practice is stimulating graduate school concern with the problem. There is indeed reason to boast about rather than to apologize for the accomplishments of the American graduate school in the development of specialization in research and teaching. There is also need to make certain that this prime function of the graduate school is maintained and expanded. Intensive study ultimately provides breadth along with depth of understanding, no matter how allegedly narrow the initial area of investigation. Similarly, intensive specialization in the applied professions has made obvious the need of each for help from a multiplicity of liberal arts

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disciplines, and has again made evident the artificiality of academic categories without destroying their utility. A broad outlook, interdisciplinary good will, and planned cooperation can be credited with numerous and crucial integrative accomplishments, and are indeed essential for continued progress toward the goal of intellectual unity. Underlying these accomplishments, however, is the thorough work of specialists in research and professional practice whose intensive search for answers to sharply focused questions carried them far beyond their disciplinary boundaries.