The School of _Literæ Humaniores_ excites wonder in the extent and
variety of the knowledge demanded, and there is everywhere evidence of
the value placed upon the ancient models; but this wonder pales before
the gasping astonishment at what is not there. Now and again a hint, a
reference, a recognition, but the moving forces which have made the
modern world are simply ignored. Yet they are all Hellenic, all part and
parcel of the Humanities in the true sense, and all of prime importance
in modern education. Twin berries on one stem, grievous damage has been
done to both in regarding the Humanities and Science in any other light
than complemental. Perhaps the anomalous position of science in our
philosophical school is due to the necessary filtration, indeed the
preservation, of our classical knowledge, through ecclesiastical
channels. Of this the persistence of the Augustinian questions until
late in the eighteenth century is an interesting indication. The moulder
of Western Christianity had not much use for science, and the Greek
spirit was stifled in the atmosphere of the Middle Ages. "Content to be
deceived, to live in a twilight of fiction, under clouds of false
witnesses, inventing according to convenience, and glad to welcome the
forger and the cheat"--such, as Lord Acton somewhere says, were the
Middle Ages. Strange, is it not? that one man alone, Roger Bacon,
mastered his environment and had a modern outlook.[9]
[9] How modern Bacon's outlook was may be judged from the
following sentence: "Experimental science has three
great prerogatives over all other sciences--it verifies
conclusions by direct experiment, it discovers truths which
they could never reach, and it investigates the secrets of
nature and opens to us a knowledge of the past and of the
future."
The practical point for us here is that in the only school dealing with
the philosophy of human thought, the sources of the new science that has
made a new world are practically ignored. One gets even an impression of
neglect in the schools, or at any rate of scant treatment, of the Ionian
philosophers, the very fathers of your fathers. Few "Greats" men, I
fear, could tell why Hippocrates is a living force to-day, or why a
modern scientific physician would feel more at home with Erasistratus
and Herophilus at Alexandria, or with Galen at Pergamos, than at any
period in our story up to, say, Harvey. Except as a delineator of
character, what does the Oxford scholar know of Theophrastus, the
founder of modern botany, and a living force to-day in one of the two
departments of biology, and made accessible to English readers--perhaps
indeed to Greek readers!--by Sir Arthur Hort?[10] Beggarly recognition
or base indifference is meted out to the men whose minds have fertilized
science in every department. The pulse of every student should beat
faster as he reads the story of Archimedes, of Hero, of Aristarchus,
names not even mentioned in the "Greats" papers in the past decade. Yet
the methods of these men exorcised vagaries and superstitions from the
human mind and pointed to a clear knowledge of the laws of nature. It is
surprising that some wag among the examiners has never relieved the
grave monotony of the papers by such peripatetic questions as "How long
a gnat lives," "To how many fathoms' depth the sunlight penetrates the
sea," and "What an oyster's soul is like"--questions which indicate
whence the modern Lucian got his inspiration to chaff so successfully
Boyle and the professors of Gresham College.
[10] Loeb Series.
May I dwell upon two instances of shocking neglect? It really is amusing
in Oxford to assert neglect of "the measurer of all Art and Science,
whose is all that is best in the passing sublunary world," as Richard de
Bury calls "the Prince of the Schooles." In Gulliver's voyage to Laputa
he paid a visit to the little island of Glubbdubdrib, whose Governor,
you remember, had an Endorian command over the spirits, such as Sir
Oliver Lodge or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might envy. When Aristotle and
his commentators were summoned, to Gulliver's surprise they were
strangers, for the reason that having so horribly misrepresented
Aristotle's meaning to posterity, a consciousness of guilt and shame
kept them far away from him in the lower world. Such shame, I fear, will
make the shades of many classical dons of this university seek shelter
with the commentators when they realize their neglect of one of the most
fruitful of all the activities of the Master. In biology Aristotle
speaks for the first time the language of modern science, and indeed he
seems to have been first and foremost a biologist, and his natural
history studies influenced profoundly his sociology, his psychology, and
his philosophy in general. The beginner may be sent now to Professor
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Herbert Spencer Lecture, 1913, and he must
be indeed a dull and muddy-mettled rascal whose imagination is not fired
by the enthusiastic--yet true--picture of the founder of modern biology,
whose language is our language, whose methods and problems are our own,
the man who knew a thousand varied forms of life,--of plant, of bird,
and animal,--their outward structure, their metamorphosis, their early
development; who studied the problems of heredity, of sex, of nutrition,
of growth, of adaptation, and of the struggle for existence.[11] And the
senior student, if capable of appreciating a biological discovery, I
advise to study the account by Johannes Müller[12] (himself a pioneer in
anatomy) of his rediscovery of Aristotle's remarkable discovery of a
special mode of reproduction in one of the species of sharks. For two
thousand years the founder of the science of embryology had neither
rival nor worthy follower. There is no reference, I believe, to the
biological works in the _Literæ Humaniores_ papers for the past ten
years, yet they form the very foundations of discoveries that have
turned our philosophies topsy-turvy.
[11] Summarized from D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.
[12] _Ueber den Glatten Hai des Aristotles._ (Berlin, 1842.)
Nothing reveals the unfortunate break in Humanities more clearly than
the treatment of the greatest nature-poet in literature, a man who had
"gazed on Nature's naked loveliness" unabashed, the man who united, as
no one else has ever done, the "functions and temper and achievement of
science and poetry" (Herford). The golden work of Lucretius is indeed
recognized, and in Honour Moderations, Books I to III and V are set as
one of seven alternatives in section D; and scattered through the
"Greats" papers are set translations and snippets here and there; but
anything like adequate consideration from the scientific side is to be
sought in vain. Unmatched among the ancients or moderns is the vision by
Lucretius of continuity in the workings of Nature--not less of _le
silence éternel de ces espaces infinis_ which so affrighted Pascal, than
of "the long, limitless age of days, the age of all time that has gone
by"--
"... longa diei
infinita ætas anteacti temporis omnis."
And it is in a Latin poet that we find up-to-date views of the origin of
the world and of the origin of man. The description of the wild
discordant storm of atoms (Book V) which led to the birth of the world
might be transferred verbatim to the accounts of Poincaré or of
Arrhenius of the growth of new celestial bodies in the Milky Way. What
an insight into primitive man and the beginnings of civilization! He
might have been a contemporary and friend, and doubtless was a tutor, of
Tylor. Book II, a manual of atomic physics with its marvellous
conception of
"... the flaring atom streams
And torrents of her myriad universe,"
can only be read appreciatively by pupils of Roentgen or of J. J.
Thomson. The ring theory of magnetism advanced in Book VI has been
reproduced of late by Parsons, whose magnetons rotating as rings at high
speed have the form and effect with which this disciple of Democritus
clothes his magnetic physics.
And may I here enter a protest? Of love-philtres that produce insanity
we may read the truth in a chapter of that most pleasant manual of
erotology, the "Anatomy of Melancholy." Of insanity of any type that
leaves a mind capable in lucid intervals of writing such verses as _"De
Rerum Natura"_ we know nothing. The sole value of the myth is its causal
association with the poem of Tennyson. Only exsuccous dons who have
never known the wiles and ways of the younger Aphrodite would take the
intensity of the feeling in Book IV as witness to anything but an
accident which may happen to the wisest of the wise, when enthralled by
Vivien or some dark lady of the Sonnets!
In the School of _Literæ Humaniores_ the studies are based on classical
literature and on history, "but a large number of students approach
philosophical study from other sides. Students of such subjects as
mathematics, natural science, history, psychology, anthropology, or
political economy become naturally interested in philosophy, and their
needs are at present very imperfectly provided for in this university."
This I quote from a Report to the Board of the Faculty of Arts made just
before the war on a proposed new Honour School, the subject of which
should be the principles of philosophy considered in their relation to
the sciences. That joint action of this kind should have been taken by
the Boards of Arts and of Science indicates a widespread conviction that
no man is cultivated up to the standard of his generation who has not an
appreciation of how the greatest achievements of the human mind have
been reached; and the practical question is how to introduce such
studies into the course of liberal education, how to give the science
school the leaven of an old philosophy, how to leaven the old
philosophical school with the thoughts of science.[13]
[13] Since I wrote this lecture, Professor J. A. Stewart has
sent me his just-published essay on _Oxford after the War
and a Liberal Education_, in which he urges with all the
weight of his learning and experience that the foundations
of liberal education in Oxford should be "No Humane Letters
without Natural Science and no Natural Science without
Humane Letters."
It is important to recognize that there is nothing mysterious in the
method of science, or apart from the ordinary routine of life. Science
has been defined as the habit or faculty of observation. By such the
child grows in knowledge, and in its daily exercise an adult
lives and moves. Only a quantitative difference makes observation
scientific--accuracy; in that way alone do we discover things as they
really are. This is the essence of Plato's definition of science as "the
discovery of things as they really are," whether in the heavens above,
in the earth beneath, or in the observer himself. As a mental operation,
the scientific method is equally applicable to deciphering a bit of
Beneventan script, to the analysis of the evidence of the Commission on
Coal-Mines, a study of the mechanism of the nose-dive, or of the
colour-scheme in tiger-beetles. To observation and reasoned thought, the
Greek added experiment, but never fully used it in biology, an
instrument which has made science productive, and to which the modern
world owes its civilization. Our every-day existence depends on the
practical application of discoveries in pure science by men who had no
other motives than a search for knowledge of Nature's laws, a
disinterestedness which Burnet claims to be the distinctive gift of
Hellas to humanity. With the discovery of induced currents Faraday had
no thought of the dynamo. Crookes's tubes were a plaything until
Roentgen turned them into practical use with the X-rays. Perkin had no
thought of transforming chemical industry when he discovered aniline
dyes. Priestley would have cursed the observation that an electrical
charge produced nitrous acid had he foreseen that it would enable
Germany to prolong the war, but he would have blessed the thought that
it may make us independent of all outside sources for fertilizers.
The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing.
Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves
in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of
proportion in a maze of minutiæ. Everywhere men are in small coteries
intensely absorbed in subjects of deep interest, but of very limited
scope. Chemistry, a century ago an appanage of the Chair of Medicine or
even of Divinity, has now a dozen departments, each with its laboratory
and literature, sometimes its own society. Applying themselves early to
research, young men get into backwaters far from the main stream. They
quickly lose the sense of proportion, become hypercritical, and the
smaller the field, the greater the tendency to megalocephaly. The study
for fourteen years of the variations in the colour-scheme of the
thirteen hundred species of tiger-beetles scattered over the earth may
sterilize a man into a sticker of pins and a paster of labels; on the
other hand, he may be a modern biologist whose interest is in the
experimental modification of types, and in the mysterious insulation of
hereditary characters from the environment. Only in one direction does
the modern specialist acknowledge his debt to the dead languages. Men of
science pay homage, as do no others, to the god of words whose magic
power is nowhere so manifest as in the plastic language of Greece. The
only visit many students pay to Parnassus is to get an intelligible
label for a fact or form newly discovered. Turn the pages of such a
dictionary of chemical terms as Morley and Muir, and you meet in
close-set columns countless names unknown a decade ago, and
unintelligible to the specialist in another department unless familiar
with Greek, and as meaningless as the Arabic jargon in such mediæval
collections as the "Synonyma" of Simon Januensis or the "Pandects" of
Matheas Sylvaticus. As "Punch" put it the other day in a delightful
poetical review of Professor West's volume:[14]
"Botany relies on Latin ever since Linnæus' days;
Biologic nomenclature draws on Greek in countless ways;
While in Medicine it is obvious you can never take your oath
What an ailment means exactly if you haven't studied both."
[14] _The Value of the Classics._ Princeton University Press,
1917.
Let me give a couple of examples.
Within the narrow compass of the primitive cell from which all living
beings originate, onomatomania runs riot. The process of mitosis has
developed a special literature and language. Dealing not alone with the
problems of heredity and of sex, but with the very dynamics of life, the
mitotic complex is much more than a simple physiological process, and in
the action and interaction of physical forces the cytologist hopes to
find the key to the secret of life itself. And what a Grecian he has
become! Listen to this account, which Aristotle would understand much
better than most of us.
The karyogranulomes, not the idiogranulomes or microsomenstratum in the
protoplasm of the spermatogonia, unite into the idiosphærosome, acrosoma
of Lenhossék, a protean phase, as the idiosphærosome differentiates into
an idiocryptosome and an idiocalyptosome, both surrounded by the
idiosphærotheca, the archoplasmic vesicle; but the idioectosome
disappears in the metamorphosis of the spermatid into a sphere, the
idiophtharosome. The separation of the calyptosome from the cryptosome
antedates the transformation of the idiosphærotheca into the
spermiocalyptrotheca.[15]
[15] Of course I have made this up out of a recent number of the
_American Journal of Anatomy_, 24, I.
Or take a more practical if less Cratylean example. In our precious
cabbage-patches the holometabolous insecta are the hosts of parasitic
polyembryonic hymenoptera, upon the prevalence of which rests the
psychic and somatic stamina of our fellow countrymen; for the larvæ of
_Pieris brassicæ_, vulgarly cabbage butterfly, are parasitiased by the
_Apantales glomeratus_, which in turn has a hyperparasite, the
_Mesochorus pallidus_. It is tragic to think that the fate of a plant,
the dietetic and pharmaceutical virtues of which have been so extolled
by Cato, and upon which two of my Plinean colleagues of uncertain date,
Chrysippus and Dieuches, wrote monographs--it fills one with terror to
think that a crop so dear to Hodge (_et veris cymata!_ the Brussels
sprouts of Columella) should depend on the deposition in the ovum of the
Pieris of another polyembryonic egg. The cytoplasm or oöplasm of this
forms a trophoamnion and develops into a polygerminal mass, a spherical
morula, from which in turn develop a hundred or more larvæ, which
immediately proceed to eat up everything in and of the body of their
host. Only in this way does Nature preserve the Selenas, the Leas, and
the Crambes, so dear to Cato and so necessary for the sustenance of our
hard-working, brawny-armed Brasserii.
From over-specialization scientific men are in a more parlous state than
are the Humanists from neglect of classical tradition. The salvation of
science lies in a recognition of a new philosophy--the _scientia
scientiarum_ of which Plato speaks. "Now when all these studies reach
the point of intercommunion and connection with one another and come to
be considered in their mutual affinities, then, I think, and not till
then, will the pursuit of them have a value." Upon this synthetic
process I hesitate to dwell; since, like Dr. Johnson's friend, Oliver
Edwards, I have never succeeded in mastering philosophy--cheerfulness
was always breaking in.
In the proposed Honour School the principles of philosophy are to be
dealt with in relation to the sciences, and by the introduction of
literary and historical studies, which George Sarton advocates so warmly
as the new Humanism,[16] the student will gain a knowledge of the
evolution of modern scientific thought. But to limit the history to the
modern period--Kepler to the present time is suggested--would be a grave
error. The scientific student should go to the sources and in some way
be taught the connection of Democritus with Dalton, of Archimedes with
Kelvin, of Aristarchus with Newton, of Galen with John Hunter, and of
Plato and Aristotle with them all. And the glories of Greek science
should be opened in a sympathetic way to "Greats" men. Under new
regulations at the public schools, a boy of sixteen or seventeen should
have enough science to appreciate the position of Theophrastus in
botany, and perhaps himself construct Hero's fountain. Science will take
a totally different position in this country when the knowledge of its
advances is the possession of all educated men. The time, too, is ripe
for the Bodleian to become a _studium generale_, with ten or more
departments, each in charge of a special sub-librarian. When the
beautiful rooms, over the portals of which are the mocking blue and gold
inscriptions, are once more alive with students, the task of teaching
subjects on historical lines will be greatly lightened. What has been
done with the Music-Room, and with the Science-Room through the
liberality of Dr. and Mrs. Singer, should be done for classics, history,
literature, theology, etc., each section in charge of a sub-librarian
who will be _Doctor perplexorum_ alike to professor, don, and
undergraduate.
[16] _Popular Science Monthly_, September, 1918, and _Scientia_,
XXIII, 3.
I wish time had permitted me to sketch even briefly the story of the
evolution of science in this old seat of learning. A fortunate
opportunity enables you to see two phases in its evolution. Through the
kind permission of several of the colleges, particularly Christ Church,
Merton, St. John's, and Oriel, and with the coöperation of the Curators
of the Bodleian and Dr. Cowley, Mr. R. T. Gunther, of Magdalen College,
has arranged a loan exhibition of the early scientific instruments and
manuscripts. A series of quadrants and astrolabes show how Arabian
instruments, themselves retaining much of the older Greek models, have
translated Alexandrian science into the Western world. Some were
constructed for the latitude of Oxford, and one was associated with our
astronomer-poet Chaucer.
For the first time the instruments and works of the early members of the
Merton School of astronomer-physicians have been brought together. They
belong to a group of men of the fourteenth century--Reed, Aschenden,
Simon Bredon, Merle, Richard of Wallingford, and others--whose labours
made Oxford the leading scientific university of the world.
Little remains of the scientific apparatus of the early period of the
Royal Society, but through the kindness of the Dean and Governing Body
of Christ Church, the entire contents of the cabinet of philosophical
apparatus of the Earl of Orrery, who flourished some thirty years after
the foundation of the Society, is on exhibit, and the actual
astronomical model, the "Orrery," made for him and called after his
name.[17]
[17] Among other notable exhibits there are:
1. A series of astronomical volvelles in manuscripts and
printed books.
2. The printed evidence that Leonard Digges of University
College was the inventor of the telescope many years before
Galileo.
3. The mathematical work of Robert Recorde of All Souls'
College, in which he suggested the St. Andrew's Cross as the
sign of multiplication, and uses symbols +, -, =.
4. The earliest known slide-rule in a circular form,
recently discovered in St. John's College.
5. The early vellum and wooden telescopes of the Orrery
Collection.