“Research” and the Humanities

Methods and object can no longer be separated. 

                                           – Werner Heisenberg

We have to learn to think, not less but more logically,

without ever forgetting that the terms we are logically

combining are not labels, but that each of them in itself

is a symbol that flouts, by transcending, the requirements

of logic. 

                                              – Owen Barfield

I

The word research is a noun.  Nouns, being functionally inert, tend to be “thingy” – that is, they seem to stand for “things” even when they represent abstractions.  Groups of nouns often indicate conceptual distinctions that do not correspond to “real differences”; serious error can arise from mistaking conceptual distinctions for real divisions.  Yet it is difficult to avoid the assumption that a noun – simply by existing – not only “means something” but also “stands for something”; that “some thing” stands over against it, that the noun refers to that “thing,” and that therefore the “thing” can be readily distinguished and defined or that a “meaning” can be uncritically assumed for it.  Such an assumption is not always sound.  Many nouns refer to abstract and elusive notions, yet by being nouns (and “thingy”) they beguile us into supposing that the notions they refer to are neither abstract nor elusive.  Indeed it is particularly those nouns that refer to vague, abstract, and ill-defined notions that, out of sheer convenience, commend themselves most in fashionable jargon.  Jargon-words provide a handy and often unnoticed way of avoiding or concealing the need for precise definition.  By a “jargon-word” I mean, not a special or technical term (the virtue of which is its precise and single reference), but a term which seems to be precise when it is not, and which is attractive to use because it appears to be a special or technical term with an arcane meaning that can be grasped by “insiders” but has to be accepted uncritically by “outsiders.”  For example, it is now a favourite device of “human engineers” to claim to make a complex abstract notion or function “intelligible” or manageable by providing – another depressing jargon-word – a “model”; but they do not always notice that a “model” constructed on Newtonian principles is a little crude for delineating functions more subtle than clockwork or the movements of billiard balls, and that an appropriate “model” can do momentous violence to the matter under inquiry.

When there is no accepted precise definition or agreed ambience of meaning for a term, the unexamined “common-sense” use of an abstract noun can lead to cumulative confusion, equivocation, and even deliberate deception.  The equivocation can be unintentional, yet it will occur whenever we approach the word in one sense and leave it in another.  Words, by their very nature, behave in a chameleon fashion; few words have single meanings, and most words carry manifold meanings in any context except quasi-mathematical technical exposition; words define themselves in use.  Influential users of language have some responsibility to make sure that they are in control of the precise implications and functions of the words they use.  The use of jargon-words is often a symptom of an irresponsible or meretricious use of language.  Careful discussion of the nature and purpose of learning and education does not require jargon, and is likely to be the more honest and perceptive the less it relies upon jargon and other imprecise uses of language.  The fault is not with the word but with the way the word is used: the same word can be a “jargon-word” in one context and an elegantly precise term in another.  Our need is to recognize which terms tend to be used as “jargon-terms” and to be careful that we use them scrupulously.

The word research has been a fashionable jargon-term for quite a long time.  The imprecision with which it is commonly used has ominous implications for the present discussion of the function of universities and the growth of learning and culture in Canada.  To describe the variable envelope of meaning of this one word in its loose variability is almost impossible because – being a jargon-word – it is used on the tacit assumption that “everybody knows what it means.”  It is even more difficult to discern the precise meaning of the word as used in official reports if the tone of authority is voiced in a style that manages at once to conceal the writer’s intention and to prevent the language from clarifying itself as it goes.

The Oxford English Dictionary offers three definitions of the word research (other than the meaning “to search again”).  The first two emerge in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: “The act of searching (closely or carefully) for or after a specified thing or person”; “An investigation directed to the discovery of some fact by careful study of a subject; a course of critical or scientific inquiry.”^[i]  These two definitions together (as far as I can make out) contain the indissoluble nucleus of implication most commonly present in the unexamined use of the word research; that “research” is a matter of looking for a specific thing and that it is to do with discovery of demonstrable facts; and that consequently we can tell sooner or later whether or not the research has been “successful” – that is, whether or not what was being looked for has indeed been found.  It is in this sense alone that I intend to use the word here, both because it happens to be the latent meaning of the word as it is widely used at present, and also because it allows the word to be used with some precision.  In the simplest terms we could say that whenever it is not possible to say that what is sought can be identified and “found,” we are not dealing with “research.”  (Could we say then, that Einstein’s formulation of the theory of relativity was not the product of “research,” and that the formulation of the structure of the DNA molecule was?)  Positively we could say (in these terms) that “research” is cumulative, empirical, and deductive, and that the inferences, lucky guesses, and insight into possibilities that from time to time guide a sustained inquiry is not properly within the field of “research” so defined.

In the years since sputnik-panic canonized research as the prime hope for the Western World, and the Canada Council was founded for rather different reasons, humanists making claims for financial support for their work have often found themselves in the strange position of pretending to carry out what is officially called “research” when they knew perfectly well that their main purpose was not research.  Worse than that, they have found that their work has been misinterpreted and misunderstood by being referred to a “model” of “research” that humanists cannot acknowledge as representing the central nature and purpose of their work.  (Which is not to say that humanists do not at times legitimately carry out research – in the strict sense – or that research is foreign or hostile to their work.)  Malfunctions of the word “research” have led to a widely accepted misunderstanding of “the humanities”; they have also deflected an appreciable amount of intellectual energy away from the central purpose of humane studies.  Since misunderstanding about “the humanities” can have serious consequences for the health of universities and the cultural growth of the community, it is well that the two terms “research” and “the humanities” be closely examined without reference to the “models” that seem to have taken roots unchallenged wherever policy is being formulated at present both outside and inside the universities.  It would be well to establish (a) that research is indeed an activity with definable purpose and function, so that we can decide whether a person is (or should be) “doing research”; (b) that the functions of research are specialized and limited; and (c) that the word research is not a suitable term for referring to the central initiative and purpose of sustained inquiry in “the humanities” – or perhaps in any field.

II

“The humanities” is what “humanists” do; not only what they study, but how they study, and why.^[ii]  The work of humanists is distinguished primarily not by what is studied but by the “way of mind” they bring to their inquiry.  For this reason it would be well to avoid the term “the humanities”: it seems to point to certain “subjects” or kinds of material, and some unwary persons might suppose that “the humanities” (? a plural noun) can be subdivided into a number of single areas each of which is a “a humanity.”  The less handy phrase “humane studies” is preferable if only because it points to the quality of inquiry intended.

The humanist’s way of mind is distinguished by its willingness to pay serious attention to evidence that lies beyond the normal range of what is demonstrable or veridical; it is guided by a “sense of value,” paying close attention from moment to moment to the quality of knowing; it finds its central analogies in the functions of the human mind and in the known capacity of human beings to act inventively (though they may not always do so) and to act with moral intent (that is, with a sense of the nature and implications of their actions and relations).  The humanist’s activity encompasses and often relies upon empirical, experimental, and demonstrative evidence and procedures; but it also characteristically tends at all levels of its inquiry to engage “imagination” – that state of the person which (in Coleridge’s phrase) “brings the whole soul of [a] man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity.”

The way of mind peculiar to humane studies finds its deepest satisfaction among the clear and vivid records of human experience; records, that is, of relations between persons, between individuals and groups of persons, between persons and “ideas,” and between persons and the physical and moral world in which we find ourselves.  A humanist tends to be concerned with anything to do with actions, thoughts, desires, aspirations, feelings, judgments, and choices of human beings, and is therefore as likely to be concerned with political institutions as with autobiography, with the rigours of philosophy as with the textures of poetry, with psychology as with the arts of persuasion.  But a great deal of his concern in any subject-area will be with the use of language – the most specifically human of all human accomplishments; and his concern for language will tend to draw his attention particularly to those most highly developed and elusively direct uses of language that are called “imaginative” or “poetic.”

Humane studies arise from life, and turn back upon life to nourish and clarify it.  For the humanist there are three typical or ideal figures: the poet, whose purpose is to secure our sense of delight and wonder, to engage a clear and profound insight into life, and continuously to “purify the language of the tribe”; the philosopher who can gaze upon “all things in heaven or earth” – not least the mind and its activities – and find an intricate and reasonable order there; and the wise counsellor whose judgments, founded upon accurate perception, fine discrimination, and compassionate engagement, are informed by a sense of the integrity and “otherness” of persons and the nature and dignity of man.  Since all knowing occurs through the human senses and in “the mind of man,” anything that arises from human activity and the quality of it, or has any bearing upon human activity, is proper to humane study.  This is to say that anything that can be studied is appropriate matter for human study; but it is not to say that all study is humanist, or that the humanist’s way of mind is the only acceptable way of mind.  Nevertheless, the humanist’s way of mind is an “ideal” way of mind in as much as it embraces all ways of mind.  Although the humanist’s way of mind is most readily induced and most finely controlled in certain areas – language and literature, philosophy, certain kinds of history – it would be incorrect to suppose that some of the subject-areas that in recent years have sought to represent themselves as separate “disciplines” – psychology, economies, political “science,” sociology, mathematics – are closed to the humanist, or that the humanist’s way of mind is outmoded in those areas of inquiry, or indeed in any area of inquiry.

In the late nineteenth century in the University of Edinburgh (where, as in other Scottish universities, the singular noun “humanity” is still used to refer to the study of Latin language and literature) it was considered that “humanity is the key to the history, the thoughts, and the mind itself of civilized man.”  The nature and function of humane studies can be most clearly seen in its educational role.  For humane studies have been the foundation of all civilized education since at least the early Middle Ages – not by historical accident but simply because “humanity” is the only conceivable way of instructing and exercising the mind and sensibilities to discern the capacities of the individual and of mankind in their relation to their nature, circumstances, and aspirations, and to affirm certain specifically human capacities of the mind and of our nature.

The education end of humane studies is not primarily to provide “information,” or “conclusions,” or to “add to the store of knowledge” – though incidentally they do and can do all these –but to instruct (structure and exercise) the intelligence, to refine discrimination, to educate the mind by leading it through well-defined but intricate mental processes, and to encourage initiative in such matters.  Humane studies seek particularly to heighten awareness and discrimination – especially where evidence is elusive – in a way that applies not exclusively to the matter under inquiry but mutatis mutandis to any humane inquiry by placing emphasis firmly upon the quality of the mental action traced out.^[iii]  Humanists, in their most characteristic inquiries, are less concerned with “knowledge” than with “knowing”; they recognize various orders of knowing, and espouse orders of awareness which certain kinds of knowing alone make sustainedly possible.

What distinguishes one kind of study from another is not simply the subject matter under inquiry, but the reason for making the inquiry and the method adopted in order to make the inquiry serve as intended purpose.  Charles Sherrington’s Man on his Nature (1940), for example, is a humanist study even though it takes its departure from a sixteenth century medical treatise and deals extensively with the most recent medical and biological knowledge; and even though it is written by the same distinguished neurologist who had written The Integrative Action of the Nervous System more than thirty years earlier.  Incidentally, Man on his Nature is a stylistic triumph of great originality.  The notion that a certain “subject” had only one proper method of inquiry is acceptable only as long as “method” is understood simply as “the way of getting done what is to be done”; appropriate method can be developed only with sensitive reference to the evolving demands of the material under inquiry and the evolving perception of the inquirer.  The quality of a humanist’s inquiry depends not only upon the quality of the method used, but also upon the quality of the person using the method; and not only upon the quality of the person but also upon the quality of the inquirer’s purpose in making the inquiry at all – all of which are salutary reminders of the virtues proper to educational purpose.

Specialized methods of inquiry emerge depending upon (a) the nature of the matter under inquiry; (b) the purpose of the inquiry (which in general for humanists is “to see more clearly and to help others to see more clearly”); (c) the level of human reference that the inquiry is to be carried to.  I suggest that specialized methods of inquiry – and they are very few in number – should properly be called “disciplines”.  The distinction between “disciplines” (in this sense) depends primarily upon what we can do about the comparative inaccessibility of much that – in humanistic terms – we insist is important to think about.  The word discipline could then profitably be applied to the ways we have discovered for adjusting the mind to certain specific purposes of inquiry rather than to areas of study or alleged techniques of inquiry.  Poets are probably more familiar with strange devices for getting into a proper frame of mind to do their work than (for example) psychologists – or even psychiatrists – are.  Although there is a tendency for certain kinds of material to demand a certain disciplinary approach, any material examined by a humanist demands a variety of disciplines if a humanistic end is to be achieved.  The habit of referring to every university faculty, or even every university department, as a “discipline” has in it a certain amount of inflated advertising rhetoric and the black-box mystique that the Phoenician navigators found useful in securing their monopoly.  It also illustrates the process by which a respectable word gets changed into a jargon-word.  The question that needs to be ruthlessly pursued today, for the health of the universities, is “What is a discipline?”; and that can perhaps only be approached through a family of fundamental questions such as “How do we know?”, “How do we feel?”, “How do we perceive, recognize, judge, choose, discriminate?” – questions that might bring some philosophers and psychologists to their humanistic and medieval senses.  It is a mistake to confuse rigour, which is a matter of prescriptive limitation of inquiry, with discipline, which is a positive way of getting into an appropriate way of mind to carry out the inquiry.  From a humanist’s point of view it is less damaging to be determined not to misunderstand than it is to be determined to understand; and a person does well to take care of his ignorance because it is the matrix of his knowing.

III

The principal business in humane studies – which happens also to be the principal business of a university – is to explore any area of inquiry philosophically.  The end and aim is not “the accumulation of knowledge” – though a good deal of that must go on along the way – but to find out how to establish and adjust those “ways of mind” that are appropriate to particular questions and inquiries and phases of inquiry.  To insist upon the “practical” results of humane studies is to undermine the scope of humanistic inquiry and progressively to depress and degenerate the philosophical habit of mind.  The “practical” value of humane studies arises from the way of mind they encourage, not from the “products” of the study; the “results” of humane studies are to be seen in a certain quality of perception, judgment, and action.

Because humane studies are a continuous process of self-education, it is virtually impossible to separate the effect of a scholar’s personal study and reflection from the effect of his formal instruction.  Nevertheless, humane studies provide the basis for all human education and bring educational forces into exceptional focus for two reasons: (a) they can be carried out at a cultivated level only by using a wide variety of “techniques of inquiry” which need to be subtly accommodated to the inquiry; (b) they can be carried out satisfactorily only by getting into an appropriate frame of mind.  These two are inseparable because the “techniques” can seldom be applied appropriately without adopting an appropriate way of mind; and humane study – through its own peculiar “discipline” – proceeds by discovering (in each instance) an attitude of mind that makes the inquiry possible at all, by holding elusive, fugitive, and non-veridical material (usually in functions of language) within a field of sustained attention.  (It is true that instructors, as well as students, can fail to engage such momentous forces; but that is a comment on the vanity of human wishes rather than on the virtue of the humanist’s discipline – and an ideal might as well be stated if it can be discerned.)  University “instruction” or “teaching” can certainly give advice and guidance in acquiring the sort of “knowledge” without which serious inquiry can scarcely begin.  But the most valuable thing that happens in the relation between a student and a good instructor is that they engage in inquiry together, the instructor tracing out in a process of discovery the intricacies and possibilities of serious inquiry; showing that such inquiry is possible and that it is worthwhile in its own right; conveying an infectious sense that – no matter how local and specialized a university may be – the habit of philosophical inquiry is an exhilarating way of mind that can touch, enliven, and illuminate any aspect of every kind of life.

The dominant emphasis in humane studies differs from the emphasis in other activities of getting-to-know in two senses: (a) the level at which essential “facts” – or, more properly, events – are apprehended and tests; (b) the publicity or intimacy of the events crucial to the study.  For example, one kind of history, concerned to study patterns of political and military causes and effects, will be concerned (depending on its scale in time and space) to relate public events to inferred private motives and concealed “causes.”  Another kind will be indistinguishable from biography, and might well find a “causal” or “behavioural” analogy an insensitive, or even degenerate, instrument of inquiry.  The first kind may easily become doctrinaire, abstract, and unreal unless the scholar has a keen biographical sense – a sense of how individuals acted and decided in certain circumstances being-what-they-were-at-that-moment.  Furthermore, the historian who is primarily a biographer will find his emotional and mental field seriously limited if he does not command both a broad social and historical perspective and the resources usually ascribed to an “imaginative writer.”  Indeed in any kind of historical study, the historian’s capacity for sustained and subtle revelation will be a function of his ability to write in a way appropriate to the full scope of his mental demands.  (And it is to be remembered that empirical observation and testing also occur in the humanist’s field.)  When events can be verified in the form “It is a fact that...,” the event is translated into a “fact” and the “fact” is treated as a “thing” or “meter-reading” or “photographic snapshot.”  In humane studies “facts” disclose themselves for what they are: judgments of value about events.  For example, to say that “It is a fact that it is 1:13 pm” is a reliable and verifiable statement of “fact” but in itself of little or no importance; if in a matter of life-and-death the last aircraft from Budapest left at 1:10 pm the “fact” could be of harrowing importance to the individual involved in the event.  The neutrality of “fact” and the dominance of human implication as an index of value can be readily seen in such a sequence of statements of fact as these: “It is a fact that I am thirty-seven years old” – “It is a fact that I am white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant” – “It is a fact that I am married to this woman” – “It is a fact that I killed that man.”  For the humanist, “events” are recognitions of relation and value; he tends to see all events as (at least potentially) events-of-value because his preoccupation is with the ways events hold or touch a human being in their field of relations.  He tends to see events-of-value as clustering in emergent patterns of relation and value; even his learning is always potentially shapely.  For the humanist, the crucial “facts” for an inquiry are not at a uniform level of emphasis, and they are not equally accessible.  The peculiar value of humane studies in education is to be seen in this: that the student has to “quality” in order to carry out his inquiry – that is, he has to assume a way of mind comparable in quality to the inquiry he is conducting.   To “qualify” is not a matter of technical accomplishment or even (in itself) of hard work, but of “grace” and submission.  Humanist teachers generously suppose that all people have a capacity for “grace” even though most have not discovered it and many will vigorously resist the self-inquiry and self-losing that is involved in serious humane study.  In the humane studies one does not “acquire skills”; one learns to be skillful – and the onus is always on the learner.

Studies in language and literature are radical to humanist education, not only because humane studies function continuously in the field of language, but particularly because the student can easily tell, at any moment in his inquiry, whether or not he is dealing with an appropriate “level of fact.”  If the level is “too low” he will find that he is no longer studying literature – events of value constructed in language – but has drifted us to the surface or out to the periphery of the matter under inquiry.  Since literary inquiry, in all its aspects, involves a wide variety of orders of “fact” and does not deal exclusively with events-of-value, it makes continuous demands upon the sense of relevance and relation as well as upon the sense of value.  The human mind, like running water, seeks the little of least resistance and flows downhill if it is allowed to do so.  Literary studies face a student squarely with the decision whether he will stay with the inquiry or run downhill into the cat-tails and swampland; it helps him to tell whether or not he is indeed staying with the inquiry; and it provides him with the means of sustaining the inquiry by placing the responsibility on his own capacity and his ability to “qualify” for the inquiry he has taken in hand.

Literary studies in a university need to be kept under close scrutiny to be sure that they are effecting their prime educational function; they can easily get cornered in a number of specialized technical and interpretative procedures that inhibit or preclude heuristic inquiry of the kind that has the greatest educational virtue.  In general, the “greatest” writers and writings are most likely to engage us in the most valuable educational activities, and to hold us to them; in the end what matters is not what is studied, but how it is studied – the choice of material to be studied turns upon the quality of mental activity the material is likely to encourage.  But serious literary studies make too heavy a demand upon the personal resources of students to be regarded as an educational panacea; not all students are equally educable.  And the same is true of philosophy, another study traditionally important in education.  Philosophy provides means of testing and manipulating “ideas” and propositions, and exploring their relations.  By a stylized procedure called “logic” philosophers can demonstrate the relations between statements, and the relations between statements and what the statements are “about”; and have found ways of ordering and sustaining coherent and verifiable thinking in patterns which are in fact rather different from the patterns in which heuristic “thinking” goes on in the mind.  Here, however, excessive concentration upon something approaching mathematical precision can induce defiance of language and neglect of certain readily observed functions of language; and there is danger that in the end, even in the pursuit of profound ethical questions, one will simply ask of the philosophizing (though not of the question) “What does it matter?”  The philosopher or student who for long neglects to take into account the ways we think, feel, recognize, judge, and speak can find himself as far removed from “human life” or human values as a pure mathematician working at esoteric functions that cannot be expressed in language or in any intelligible non-mathematical figure.

The success of humanist education depends upon the quality of inquiry an instructor can beguile his students into; for that, both instructor and student need to be more than a little learned and to be informed by a sense of wonder.

IV

In any complex humane study a number of fields of mental activity are engaged, and a number of subsidiary “methods” are used in order to arrive at the comprehensive and subtle method peculiar to the study.  By studying the way such things have been done by others, successfully or with distinction, a scholar often finds a clue to a good way of tackling a new piece of work.  The profit that comes from one’s predecessors and masters, however, is less a heritage of “technique” than an extension and clarifying of perception, a heightened sense of possibilities.  The guiding principle in the method peculiar to the humanist is the reciprocal adjustment that occurs between the inquirer and the matter to be inquired into, an adjustment that progressively brings into tune the inquirer in a knowing state and the subject in a knowable state.  The variety of aims open to an inquirer in humane studies is so wide that the choice of aim has important bearings upon the forming of method, and particularly in ensuring whether or not the method will provide a state of heightened (if only momentary) awareness, or whether it will simply produce another of the nauseating tautologies that come from pursuing “method-oriented problems” instead of “problem-oriented method.”  A humanist not only has to have a flair for asking fruitful questions; he has to have a special nose for the questions that, if answered, will deflect him from his aim.

Even given the overarching impulse of a chaste purpose, different virtues will be needed in the various phases of the larger method.  If we look at the complex inquiry that a mature and imaginative scholar brings to his study of (say) a group of highly developed writings, we see that his perception and judgment fall into several different modes which may function in alternating phases or perhaps even simultaneously.  (The modes are seldom separable in practice: hence the humanist’s aversion from checklists and clipboards.)  A literary scholar may begin by establishing the integrity of his text, guided by his experience in paleography, in bibliography, literary history, and biography, and above all what he knows about his author’s way of thinking and writing.  He may also find it necessary to provide a vital context for the work he is studying – matters of biography, of social, political, and cultural history, often with outrides into highly specialized areas (such as Aquinas’s theology, Animal Magnetism, the theory of phlogiston, or Grimm’s Law).  If he is engaged in a process of literary criticism which aims to heighten his reader’s awareness of a piece of writing as somehow a living thing with an existence and integrity of its own, he may need to construct – or reflect again upon – a theory of the way such writings come into existence and why, what sorts of things they say, what order of “truth” they represent, how properly they affect us: that would be an excursus into poetics, epistemology, psychology, and some of the less specialized areas of philosophy; he might also – or alternatively – make an excursus to inquire about what criticism is, or is for, or can do, and he might also reflect upon varieties of critical method and scholarly technique in a largely theoretical manner.  And in the end he will engage the activity of critical reflection, at the same time inventing a means of sustaining, rendering coherent, and uttering either the process or the results of the process depending upon which of these will best serve the aim he has in mind.  In such matters one can seldom with much confidence stand on anybody else’s shoulders; and since a critical construct is shaped by a sequence of recognitions and judgments, the whole process may degenerate or be contaminated in any of these modes by the germ of false observation or unchaste and wilful intent (Aristotle’s proton pseudos).  In none of these modes, even the ones that look most digressive and farthest removed from “the main design,” will he be able profitably to lose sight of the matter of his main inquiry; the sense of why he is inquiring and what he is inquiring into will serve as selective and guiding impulse in all the modes of his activity and will also allow any mode to be revised by the peculiar exigencies of the particular inquiry.  There is no theoretical limit to the degree of minuteness to which any inquiry can fruitfully be carried; even though for practical purposes of exposition there is always a cut-off somewhere, humane studies are characteristically iceburgish.  Minuteness is not pedantry; the most scrupulous regard for accuracy and precision is as much the mark of a great artist as it is of a great scholar – yet nobody has any reasonable excuse for being a bore, in speech or in writing.  The only serious form of pedantry in humane studies is the emotional pedantry that purports to deal bluntly and commonsensically with matters too intricate for a blunt instrument and too fugitive to fall within the compass of common sense.

Since life is short, and since the most angelic human seldom stays long in an angelic state, a complex piece of literary inquiry is not always conducted in all detail from start to finish by the one person; and because the particular purpose that guides an inquiry colours the results of the inquiry, a complex piece of work can go adrift from having to rely upon work done by somebody else with different qualifications and with a different aim.  (In general, for example, the use of a computer to do all the donkey-work on the materials for a literary study would almost certainly deprive the scholar of the intimate and tactual sense of what his study is about, and might leave him like a pianist trying to play a Chopin Etude with hockey gloves on his hands.)  In any branch of study there will be a small number of persons of first-rate sensibility and intelligence who can also develop a sustained imaginative impulse; in any branch of study there will also be a large number of “honest toilers,” less brilliantly endowed, who nevertheless work very effectively at levels where the “quality of fact” is not crucial, where the evidential material is readily accessible and easily recognized, and where there is seldom any need to make imaginative leaps-in-the-dark.  By the sweet providence that seems to guide at least some parts of human affairs, the honest toiler can often identify and correlate bodies of material that will some time provide a launching pad for those who are better at flying; and there is no saying when an honest toiler will be transfigured from ant-like industry into a blazing vision of a wider mental landscape.  Yet there is no way of securing a specialization of function into honest toilers and fliers, the one modestly providing the fuel for the other’s escapades.  The flier who does not do his own groundwork thoroughly is in serious danger of becoming an Icarus or of disappearing promptly off the radar scan.  This has important implications for “research” in “the humanities.”

Humane studies tend to engage three phases of mental activity.  (a) “Reflection”:  the activity of mind induced when we encounter a mental obstacle that we know we must surmount if we are able to go forward with integrity of purpose.  Reflection is a matter of seeing a synthesis, catching a glimpse of possibilities, entertaining families of relations implied by those emergent possibilities.  Reflection can only occur when the person is concerned for, rather than merely “interested in,” what he is doing.  There is no way of reflecting by rote, and there is no way of reflecting perfunctorily.  (b) Scholarship: the accumulating, selecting, ordering, testing, and relating of the materials germane to the study.  These materials are never “raw” in the sense that they are unstructured or all at the same level of relevance.  Some studies deal with data; humanists, like poets, deal with données.  Recognizing and selecting – like perceiving – is itself a shaping and potentially meaningful activity and it is coloured by purpose or intention.  Some scholarship does not rise very high off the ground (though that does not prevent it from finding its way into print); but scholarship at its most perceptive is guided by an acute sense of the integrity, quality, and potential of the material it is handling, and at its best is indistinguishable from any highly developed kind of sustained and disciplined thinking.  (c) Philosophical utterance: a linking of judgments and recognitions into a clear synthesis (as distinct from an analytical schema), an act of seeing discovered in the critical activity itself and shared with the reader as an activity rather than as a conclusion, “result,” “interpretation,” or “matter of fact.”  The utterance at its best will be “philosophical” for its clarity and precision, and “poetic” for the way it finds itself in the wording of it.

In a complex process of humane inquiry none of these three activities can be separated from the others.  “Philosophical utterance” is itself a process of discovering, a way of giving substantial “outness” to the thinking.  A scholar who has a limited capacity for reflection and a comparatively uncultivated power of utterance will gravitate to some technical area in which there are few if any demands for the reflective and heuristic activity that is the distinctive mark of humane studies.  There is a fair chance that sooner or later any technical scholarly production will contribute to humane learning and inquiry.  Some work of the most humble intention has been immensely fertile, and there is no prima facie reason why a work that purports to be a “synthesizing study” will be superior to the honest work of an honest toiler.  There is no reason, however, why we should gravely regard all “contributions to knowledge’ as equally valuable, or indiscriminately encourage the haphazard accumulation of “matter of fact” on the off-chance that it may eventually be “useful.”  We can be reasonably confident that providence will eventually smile on the long-range dark-horsemanship of a George Boole; but George Boole was no honest toiler.

V

“Research” – the seeking out of certain “things” – is an essential but intermittent part of humane studies: one needs to know at least exactly what was written or said, by whom, and when, sometimes under what conditions and if possible for what reason – and in the last two phrases the chances of definitiveness begin to shade off rapidly.  “Research” as a sustained programme of systematically seeking out certain “things” is needed for some humane inquiries but not for all; and when it is needed, it is preliminary or ancillary to the proper business of humane inquiry.  There is no guarantee that a programme of research will lead to a genuine work of humane inquiry; that depends upon the quality of person doing the “research” and his reasons for doing it.  If it is desired to encourage and stimulate works of genuine scholarship and inquiry, it is to be expected that a very strong case would have to be made for supporting research in humane studies unless the research could be seen as a necessary part of a fruitful inquiry.

In as much as humanistic inquiry depends upon collecting, selecting, and arranging material as the basis of some comprehensive and incisive study, some humanists do in fact engage in research from time to time, and some serious scholars need more time and assistance to get through the research phase of a large piece of work than a university is likely to provide.  But research – even when it is necessary – is the beginning, or an intermittent subordinate process, not the end of a humanist’s work; and the “results” produced from research are intermediate and instrumental to the larger purpose the scholar will have in mind.  Some distinguished humane studies are based on research; some are not.  A granting-body, concerned to encourage genuine scholarship, is faced by the need to judge the quality of applicants rather than the plausibility of the applications.  It is easier to be “objective” about “research projects” than it is to make right judgments about scholarship, if only because it is much easier to tell whether a person is actually “doing his research” than it is to say what, if anything, will come of it.  The anxious desire to be “fair,” “liberal,” or “relevant” – especially when under hostile public scrutiny – tends to invoke “criteria” which have little bearing upon the sort of selection that is most desired, the quality of work to be encouraged, or the possible relation between the proposed work and the good health of humane studies and the pervasive though oblique influence of humane education.  The questions that have to be answered are not easy: Is this application to the point?  Is this man good enough to back?  Is this a young man of promise who only needs slight encouragement to help him realize unusual capacities, or is this a plausible enthusiast who will never write above the level of slack banality and will use a “research project” as an interminable self-paralyzing and self-justifying cocoon?  In answering such questions, an appeal to “objectivity” – or even to “Canadianism” – is not much help.  It is my impression that a good proportion of the money available for support of “the humanities” in recent years has been spent on abortive and futile “research” – research certainly, but much of it to no specific end except to gratify the vague assumption that any research, no matter how trivial, will in the end be “a contribution to knowledge.”  The question is whether it has improved the quality of knowing.  And indeed the questions are hard.  What member of “the public” would confidently have guessed that the most radical synthesis of Chinese grammar ever written would be achieved in the University of Toronto (and promptly pirated in Taiwan); or that one of the most fertile minds England has ever produced would be unfolded to the world at large by a Canadian scholar out of prolonged and rigorous scholarship on a scale that probably no Canadian “granting-body” could have sustained?

VI

Humane studies depend least upon special circumstances or special equipment, but they cannot flourish for long if they do not have access to large collections of books, manuscripts, and documents to provide the fine-grained detail that stimulates reflection and to bring the mind into resonance with the minds and sensibilities of others, past and present.  Since humane studies concentrate upon the abiding concerns of human beings and their ways of being, knowing, and acting, good humanist libraries are typically large, cumulative, and comprehensive, recognizing no exclusion by subject, period, or language.  What is sought by a humanist in the humane tradition is not merely matters of knowledge (though he needs lots of those), but qualities of thinking, perceiving, discriminating, knowing.  Hence his willingness – and often his need – to take long leaps backward in search of some rare and peculiarly illuminating mind.  For humanists – preoccupied with the singleness and continuity of human thought – are often vividly aware of the contemporaneity of the past, even of the distant past; their concern is not so much to preserve tradition as to nourish and enrich a continuing life.

Traditionally the humane studies have been nourished by bringing together large collections of documentary material, and by providing circumstances conductive to reflection and to sustained inquiry – particularly, but not exclusively, in universities.  Universities are the life-blood of humane studies: not only do they bring together persons devoted to a life of inquiry and persons skillful in various kinds of inquiry, but they provide an opportunity for a living commerce with the developing minds and sensibilities of young persons – a wholesome reminder of what minds and sensibilities are like and what inquiry is for.  Humanists – and all kinds of scholars – need to live in a certain atmosphere of inquiry; they need time for reflection and writing and talking; they need books, and if the books are not at hand, they need to travel to read them or to meet their intellectual peers.  A good university takes care of much of this as a matter of course; and a good university sees to it that outsiders do not – out of malice or ignorant goodwill – disrupt the atmosphere or curtail the activity of inquiry.  Granting authorities could probably do more than they have done to support and secure the local ambience that stimulates humane and disinterested inquiry.  The tradition comes from ideals established by the universities when they were free of social and political constraint; and that tradition is one of the most precious in our culture.  If the universities have not yet made this point successfully with “the public,” intelligent representatives of “the public” – whether elected or appointed – could do much by endorsing it with a strong affirmation.

Few universities are so richly endowed or so advantageously located that they can provide everything a scholar needs.  Beyond sabbatical leave and the limited financial resources that a university can dispose, there is always need for funds to allow scholarship to come to fulfillment in a reasonable time and to make possible the research that some scholarship requires.  Public funds for nourishing humane studies, for developing libraries, for fostering scholarship and inquiry of the highest quality are always limited, despite the immense value these can have for our culture.  The fruitful disposition of those funds depends upon something other than “priorities” and “criteria.”  In the same way that (as Eric Ashby once put it) good university government depends upon “people of good will who know each other,” the just disposition of resources in humane studies depends upon the insight, judgment, and experience of humanists.  No scholar can be correctly judged except by his peers; and correct decisions are often daring decisions that do not easily explain themselves to the casual observer.  The appeal is neither to the expert nor to the sceptical philistine, but to the persons who are qualified and willing to make a judgment and are prepared to stand by it.  Since no means has yet been disclosed for translating quality into quantity, there is no alternative in these matters to making judgments of quality.

Increased funds for research in “the humanities” will not necessarily benefit humane studies; only the judicious fostering of humane studies altogether can do that.  Much of the fostering happens, and must happen, in the intellectual commerce among scholars themselves and between scholars and students.  The quality of knowing embodied in distinguished works of scholarship will be forever inaccessible to a person who cannot somehow match the quality of mind that produced it.  Fortunately we can sometimes “qualify” for a line of thinking that we could not have traced out for ourselves simply by being perceptively in the presence of the person who can think it out; we often play our best tennis against an opponent we could never hope to match.  But that is not what is usually meant by “learning” when it is assumed that “teaching” and “research” can be separated and cost-accounted according to the principles of management and consultancy.^[iv]  We have not yet discovered how best to spend our money in nourishing humane studies; perhaps because we have not yet cared enough.  Meanwhile, in the field of humane studies, and in the attempt to make just provision for them, it is crucial not to insist on trying to answer questions that properly should never seriously have been asked.