The Humanities and Modern Science: Two Cultures or One?

Considering how few people in the world are strictly entitled to the name of either scientist or humanist, it is a little presumptuous to think of either science or the humanities as representing a “culture” and a little grandiose to think of civilization balanced in war to the death between the two.  For humanism is no more the heart of our civilisation than Christianity is the heart of our democracy.  It is true that those who share the mystique of some occupation or other tend to assume a certain cast of countenance, an inflection, a dialect, a way of dressing: engine drivers used to wear blue-striped cloth caps with extravagant peaks, Guards officers in mufti wear bowlers and are instantly identifiable, student engineers wear yellow tin hats even when neither rivets nor thunderbolts threaten.  But neither such trifling (if engaging) externals, nor even the existence of a mystique can seriously be regarded as a culture, if one thinks that a culture is a setting conducive to life rather than an exclusive club that pretends to encompass the only life worth having.  Perhaps only in a university, and not in the world at large, does one find two groups – scientists and humanists – large enough, coherent and permanent enough to feel that they must divide the world rather than share it.  Between individuals on either side there may be friendship; for the work of individuals and for the ideals of the other discipline there may be genuine respect and administration.  Yet at times the unformulated conflict hangs like an evil-smelling miasma over the conference table or in committee.  At certain times and in certain places there will be a tendency suddenly to stand and glower, to be exquisitely sensitive to insult and innuendo.  A blind irrational gulf opens – as real and indefinable as national hatred, as baleful as jealousy.  There may be historical reasons for this – certainly there are temperamental ones.  But misunderstanding and suspicion demand of intelligent and civilised persons reflection and cool consideration rather than alarm.  For only in the subtle techniques of marketing is it profitable to blur differences.

If the suspicion were indeed a struggle, and if the struggle were between two mutually exclusive groups or ideas, it could be settled by compromise or annihilation.  But the struggle, as far as it ever becomes an open struggle, is between two rival professional claims to make us one-sided.  As specialisation has deepened, both scientists and humanists – whether or not they have reason to complain against each other – have grown increasingly uneasy in each other’s presence: not (I think) because they do not share each other’s knowledge – for often they do, and an archaeologist may mate happily with a grammarian, and a physicist live at amity with a housewife – but because each, by his very presence, by his very existence, accuses the other of one-sidedness.  The enemy is inside the camp; the split is inside ourselves; and each accuses the other of the disease he knows he himself suffers from.

For the difference between scientists and their opposites is not that of different trade classifications – the difference between (say) gravediggers and cost-accountants.  Rather, each tends to represent one of two patterns of activity into which the human mind falls; together they project outward the two complementary functions of mind – to be or to do; to look or to command; to value or to control.  Each mode has its own way of knowing; each has its own way of using what it knows; each has its own kinds of knowledge, its own criteria of certainty, its own paradigm of truth.  The mind, to be fully human, needs to function appropriately in both modes.  But the modes are not identical; they are not even similar, being no more alike than analysis and synthesis; they are not concentric and they will never coincide.  The one pole represents the centre of action, power, prediction; the other of contemplation, wonder, grace.  These modes I call respectively technical and poetic.

All minds are capable of falling into both modes and move freely from one to the other: a change of intention, a move from will to delight, from repose to determination is change from one way of mind to the other, a transformation from one pattern of mental activity to another.  Neither way can permanently supersede the other without damage; neither can fulfil the function of the other; both together constitute the whole mind, each mode being evoked instantly according to circumstance or intention.  But most people – through upbringing, training, example, temperament, personal interest or psychological set – tend to fall dominantly into the one way of mind or the other; so that there seem to be two kinds of mind radically different and two different kinds of people.

In the past and by tradition the humanities have controlled education and have claimed to instruct and cultivate wholemindedness.  But at present we usually find, at all levels of educated society, under-development of one side of the mind or the other – probably because of the increasingly specialised and technical nature of education at all levels.  As science – or some views of science – has crowded more and more importunately into public attention, education has tended to become technical in a way that proves to be as hostile to science as to the humanities.  For pure science is not exclusively technical.  Art is its own end; but science can be studied as an end in itself and pure science must be an end in itself.  The scientist – like anybody else – has two ways of mind: in his poetic mode he tends towards mathematics; in his technical mode he tends towards technology.  Yet science tends inevitably toward technique whether the pure scientist wants that or not; for science becomes fully meaningful only when it becomes instrumental.  But the technical way of mind is not peculiar to the scientist nor the poetic to the artist or humanist.  Each on a different basis of professional knowledge may suffer from the same obscurantism.  And what appear to be two radical kinds of people, two kinds of temperament, can be seen more properly as two kinds of lopsidedness, the difference exacerbated by aggressive and disjunctive behaviour on both sides by those who rationalise their asymmetrical condition by pretending that the other side does not matter.  Both attitudes are equally reprehensible; but one is probably more lethal than the other, simply because the scientist forces himself to be guided by logic and not by value.

I wish I were a scientist so that I could say my next sentence without seeming to be arrogant or guilty of an intolerable bias.  I suggest with whatever modesty and detachment I can muster that it is up to humanists to educate and civilise scientists; and it is up to scientists to let this happen.  The humanities – as far as they have a professional function and competence – must do what they can to encourage scientists (and others) to exercise and extend their judgment and humane concern – instilling a respect for the present because the future is a very dark horse indeed, instilling respect for the individual because mankind is a statistical abstraction and the public is a commercial fiction.  Scientists are not by nature less human or less responsible than other sorts of people, but like anybody else they develop the habits of their profession.  Somebody must do something to counteract the dehumanizing tendencies of a science that is continuously transforming itself into a haphazardly directed technology.  This – among other things – is the humanist’s task.  Not because humanists know the scientist’s job, but because they know their own; because their experience and devotion for centuries has been centred upon the cultivation of man – his mind, his sensibility, his taste, his affections, his judgment.

Since for a soldier the naming of the parts of his musket is the first step towards target-shooting, we may now try to sort out some terms.  As for the two polar activities between which the mind swings, “Science” will do for one extreme, but with the qualification that science in this sense is to be considered as dominantly technical – perhaps prototypically technical – though not identified simply with technology.  On the other side the opposed term used by Snow – “literary intellectual” – is far too narrow and special (even when the insulting or patronising overtones are removed), and “humanities” is too broad and indeterminate.  The opposite to Science is not the “humanities” but Art.  And the best thing about Art is that it cannot possibly be mistaken for science.  The reverse is probably also true.

Pure science and art are both, in their own ways, “making” activities: each seeks to make an image of the universe.  The one universe is delineated in mathematics, the other in language; the one universe is world-centred, the other man-centred.  Each of these universes is complete, and each is hollow in as much as it is an image of a world and not the world itself; each can be said to be abstract, fictitious, unreal, since the precise relation between the constructed world and the real world is never with certainty known though in both areas the prime and continuous task is to reduce the fictitious elements, to be faithful to what can be thoroughly known.  The universe constructed by science and the universe constructed by art seem to be the only two general patterns of construction the human mind is capable of – in the same way that human perception seems to be incorrigibly Euclidian.  The world-centred universe may be called materialistic, since its way of thinking is to try to see things without the interposition of human response; it is also tightly organized according to formulable principles called logic; and logical structure allows scientific knowledge to be cumulative.  The man-centred universe may be called imaginative since – without renouncing logic – it finds its central organisation in a coherence which functions uniquely rather than generally, a coherence whose principles cannot be formulated for prediction.  It is because the coherence of art is self-contained, and not because coherence is lacking, that art cannot be cumulative in the way science is.  The poetic attitude moves towards a more and more comprehensive and contemplative posture of mind, excluding as little as possible; its precision is in the unique rendering of what is particular, and so paradoxically it becomes so inclusive that it can evoke universals.  Science, seeking to be precisely general, excludes more and more of the particular and actual, and attempts for methodological reasons to exclude the human colouring even from observation.  The artist cultivates “imagination”, the faculty that “brings the whole soul of man into activity” with all its faculties in correct relation, seeing in imagination the supreme realising activity.  Imagination in this sense is not the prerogative of the professional artist, but discloses wherever possible the structure of reality.  The man-centred universe – the universe of art and the humanists – being inclusive and centred upon the cognitive centre from which the world and all worlds are known, does not reject science but finds science (in its rejection of the human centre) wonderful but neutral; ingenious but (in terms of value) empty; presenting human possibilities but, as science, giving no indication of how to act or choose because value judgments are excluded.  The world-centred universe, on the other hand, finds it cannot embrace the man-centred universe since science can regard man only as a phenomenon; but science, being associated with the technical way of mind, is prone to try to alter the actual world to the image it has constructed – to change the world into its own image.

So far we have been thinking not of different people professionally opposed but of ways of mind which may come into conjunction in one person.  But when the scientist urges that the world be changed to his own image, the humanist – sometimes the humanist in the scientist – revolts because he cannot see how a scheme that methodically eliminates the individual value and humanity of man can make a world good for individual men to live in.  A logical conclusion, he says, may be unimpeachable and still not be a value judgment.  The artist is prepared to look at anything for what it is, and – as far as he can grasp it – he is as likely as anybody to be impressed and delighted by a fine scientific construction.  But human action springs from judgments of value; and action becomes human only as it flows out into an area of value.  In terms of value, scientific constructions are neutral; hence perhaps the agonising frustration of some scientists who are aware that they hold power yet lack the commanding will or purpose to use it.  In any case, the public charter to act authoritatively is withheld from the scientist as scientist.

The peculiar relation between science and art may be seen by considering mathematics and language, the graticule within which each delineates its view of the world.  A science in its early and relatively unsophisticated stages is descriptive and hypothetical, abstracting and generalising from observed data.  But eventually it will come fully into its own when it ceases to be empirical and arrives in mathematical expressions at the brilliance and clarity of some “free invention of the human mind”.  For mathematics is not only the basis, but also the prototype of science, even though except in its most elementary phases it is not itself a science, and is neither descriptive nor predictive.  On the one hand mathematics is guided by aesthetic principles and by intuition, though it is itself either (as Whitehead and Russell held) a pure pattern of logic, or (as others hold) the pattern upon which logic is formed; on the other hand it is not a humanistic study since it is abstracted as far from life and mankind as it is from the world (which it does not describe) being related to man only so far as it either is, or imposes, one of the persistent relationship organisations of the human mind.  “The supreme goal of all theory,” Einstein said, “is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”  Einstein insisted too that laws of physics are not “derivable by abstraction from experiments” but are “in the logical sense free inventions of the human mind.”  But, he continues, “Our experience up to date justifies us in feeling sure that in Nature is actualized the ideal of mathematical simplicity.  It is my conviction that pure mathematical construction enables us to discover the concepts and the laws connecting them which give us the key to the understanding of the phenomena of Nature.”  Mathematical expression then becomes something other than a lingua franca – a sort of Basic English – for all science.  It is the order of the world cast in a mental mode of the human mind, simple enough to be grasped, complex enough to be convincing, and clear enough to command delight.  Mathematics may be seen as a mode of lyrical freedom within the strict context of a limiting logic, finding form through deftly selected and firmly respected limitations.  Mathematics is then far closer to art than to any of the particular sciences, even though all sciences strive toward the condition of mathematics as all art strives toward the condition of music.

The possibility of discovering an order at once primordial and abiding, advancing beyond the neutrality of fact to the brilliance of truth, is what haunts the mind of man.  Mathematics and art – though they differ radically – are the two primary modes in which such orders are discovered and delineated.  Here delight and grace are dominant; not power, not use, not instrumentality, prediction, or application.  Power, use, instrumentality – those and other necessary perversions attendant upon the fall and condition of man and his presence in an alien world – turn up in the middle ground where we live between the two ways of mind.  That art and mathematics could ever come into conflict is inconceivable, or that artists and mathematicians should quarrel with each other is difficult to imagine.  Instead of showing their teeth or running away from each other, they are more likely to sit down and play a fugue together.  But science leans towards use and power, and though guileless enough when fully conscious is inclined to clench its fists in sleep.  For all science that has not achieved the condition of mathematics belongs not in the realm of mathematics but in the realm of technique.  Science is the technical aspect of mathematics: the humanities are the technical aspect of art.  Technique is the area where – to our loss often, and sometimes even to our danger – science and art now meet without speaking to each other.  For coherent and serious speech demands a strong and delicate use of language; and such a use of language is the peculiar field of art and the humanities, a field that the scientist is prone studiously to neglect.

Science, concerned for “systematic coherent formulation”, requires a system of notation which will be unambiguous, exact, and “the same to all men”; and finds it in what it calls a “symbolic” notation – a system of signs which are meaningless until meaning has been assigned to them.  Scientific and algebraic symbolism is a matter of descriptive and manipulative convenience; but language, as practiced by developed human beings, is used in a great variety of ways for a great variety of purposes few of which are to do with description or manipulative convenience.  Even though words are to some extent units of meaning, the irreducible unit of meaning is an utterance; for that which means is not the language or the units of language but the person speaking.  But since meaning is not by some simple procedure “translated into words” but discloses itself even to the speaker in particular form of his speaking, so the use of language is not technique but art.  The symbols of art are distinctive in that they “partake of the reality which they render intelligible”.

Language is the prime humanistic instrument and the prime subject matter of the humanities; in the humanities one thinks with, speaks with, works upon the intricate subtleties of language constantly.  The materialist says “In the beginning was the world”; the humanist and artist says (though often enough without theological implication) “In the beginning was the word.”  Pieces of verifiable information may be coded satisfactorily in signs and numerals, or – as is the case in most descriptive scientific writing – in words.  But scientific-descriptive writing is the last vestigial trace of language before it disappears into algebra; and mathematics, being logical, gives little indication of the dynamic of language, which is incorrigibly poetic.  No humanist, no poet, no artist could assume or predict what relation exists between a passage of language and the reality it may evoke.  For convenience he tends (following Aristotle) to call the relation mimesis: to discover the precise relation that one word stands for in a succession of unique cases in his constant care.  A scientist seeking to understand art scientifically will make the radical mistake of assuming that mimesis is a definable and uniform relation.  For the same sort of methodological reasons, the scientist’s desire for definitive mathematical expression is continuously hostile to his development of language.

Yet the very qualities the scientist values are prized in the artist’s use of language: extreme precision, the finest possible control of meaning, the disciplining and rejection of the gratuitously personal.  Good art, I believe, is not self-expression.  Imaginative language is not emotive language.  There are degenerate uses of art as there are degenerate uses of science.  Emotive language is the technical preserve of propagandists and of those who wish to confuse the focus of meaning and call up powerful but uncontrolled and untargeted emotion.  Art is not a description of Nature, but exists to assert that there can be something other than Nature; and if art in any sense describes, it does so through the continuously unresolved relation called mimesis.  Different kinds of art can stand poles apart – that is, as far apart as they can get without abandoning the same world – and yet each in its own way (and not simply in its own degree) be astringent, impersonal, sharp, devoted to the world and to man, yet not given to the enervating projection of desire or the specious exercise of influence.  Even humanists do not always or everywhere understand this.

In the not very distant past some of the old-time scientists – men like Whitehead and Sherrington – could still, in the humanistic sense, read and write.  But specialisation has now gone so far that scientific and artistic genius are unlikely ever to unite again in one person.  That civilisation cannot dispense with either science or the humanities is certain if troublesome; for the relation between the two is not easy to define.  Since in the field of power everything sooner or later begins to masquerade as its opposite, popular scientism seeks now to represent materialism as man-centred or humanistic and to hint that technology (like advertising) is the pure offspring of a parthenogenetic world-beneficence.  The influence of science is, in the abstract, neutral: it can be for better or for worse.  But in historical fact the influence of science, with its constant drift towards technique and instrumentality, has “turned many men from contemplation to manipulation, from love of objects for themselves existing in a particular context, with right and functions with which they would not interfere, to a love of power for its own sake, or for private and personal advantage”.  Such a deflection, detrimental as much to science as to the humanities, has occurred not because of what science is but because of what ignorant persons have been led to suppose science is for.

Science and technology have greatly altered the world and will no doubt go on doing so, even though the process of change continues to be as haphazard as it has been in the last hundred and fifty years.  Some element of chance may be an advantage: for we show no sign yet of having either the wisdom or courage to place the full resources of science at the disposal of society – which is not perhaps the scientists’ fault.  That scientists should be proud of their achievement is not remarkable; they have every right.  But science – as far as one can separate science from more distinctively human concerns – can do no more than place at the disposal of those who are capable of judging, resources for changing the physical world and the inhabitants of the physical world.  Science is not itself a training for government or for judgment; which is not to say that a scientist cannot govern or judge but that he does not do so in his character of scientist.  Nor does one have to be a professional scientist in order to be familiar with the scientific method or to adopt from time to time, as appropriate, the scientific posture.

The ability to govern and to judge is a distinctively human ability which machines (for example) are unlikely ever to master.  Judgment is a poetic achievement as distinct from a technical activity; though technical knowledge will shrink the penumbra of ignorance within which a judgment is to be made, judgment is a complex but instantaneous act.  The only possible training for it is imagination – that is, an acute sense of reality – and experience of living.  By tradition it has been the task of the humanities to develop imagination and to provide experience vicariously, largely through the focus of language, in the study of history, philosophy, poetry, in all the makings of imagination (works of science not excluded), wherever language is used sensitively, strongly, exactly.  Perhaps the humanities have not done their work well.  But it is not clear that science can give training in anything except science.  What is learned in the humanities is learning; what is learned in science is the sort of knowledge that may readily be converted into power for purposes not always beneficent and for reasons not necessarily admirable.

The universe of science and the universe of art do not have the same centre.  Each has its own paradigm of truth.  Neither is hostile to the other.  Neither is in itself sufficient.  Neither must be allowed to destroy the other.  Fortunately man is so made that he can, if he wishes, flit easily from one to the other; only he does well to remember which camp he is in at any particular moment.  It would be difficult to decide which is the more menacing to the world: the humanist who pretends that science is inaccessible, destructive, and worthless to him; or the scientist who pretends that he can be exclusively a scientist.  The scientist may (as Snow says) have “the future in his bones”.  But the future is not the only place worth paying attention to.  Thinking only of the present, the scientist in his ebullient self-confidence could do much by explaining to laymen the scope and purpose of scientific work and so do something to arrest the cynical exploitation of misunderstanding, ignorance, and greed.  (Nobody else but a scientist can give this explanation without being accused of spite.)  Also it would help if the word scientist were used as scrupulously as the word artist is used: this by implication at least would do much to destroy the illusion that all the affairs of the world – political, genetic, economic, psychic – could at any moment be triumphantly taken in hand by “scientists” to the infinite benefit of mankind, and that artists, humanists, and such like are now to be seen in their true light as some sort of superannuated bird-watchers.

Whatever the core of a scientist’s belief may be, the centre of the humanities is the conviction that what we love and the way we love determines what we are, and determines also the depth and permanence of what we do.  No discipline or inquiry seems to a humanist of prime importance unless – sooner or later, somehow or other – it throws light upon the mysterious relation between integrity of purpose and rightness of action, the relation between the quality of an act and the quality of the intention that informs it, so that fine action may flow out of contemplation and delight rather than be determined by the limitations of a prior will to act.  Humanists are not easily impressed by knowledge devoid of value or by action devoid of grace.  This, from the outside, may look perhaps like a dowager’s resentment.  Yet the scientist and artist (I am sure) were meant to go up Parnassus together; neither was cast for the cannibal role of praying mantis.  The scientist, in his world-changing dream, does well to go before the world with the humility and decorum that used to be expected of a privileged class.  Meanwhile, the humanists and artists – chastened, though not yet utterly discredited – will go on dropping pebbles in pools.  In the end, I think, something will come of it.