“In seventy or eighty years” (said Thomas Browne, M. D.) “a man may
have a deep Gust of the World, know what it is, what it can afford,
and what ’tis to have been a Man. Such a latitude of years may hold a
considerable corner in the general Map of Time.”
Surely no modern thinker has taken a deeper gust of life or pondered
more charitably over the difficult problems of the race than Sir
William Osler, a true follower and kinsprit of the wise physician of
Norwich. “The Old Humanities and the New Science,” his last public
address (given in Oxford, May 16, 1919), was the capsheaf of that
long series of writings and speakings in which Dr. Osler unlocked his
generous, humane heart and gave inspiring counsel to his fellows.
It was an occasion that even the most severe brevity must describe
as of happy import. Osler, a physician and a man of science, had
been honoured by the presidency of the Classical Association, Great
Britain’s most distinguished gathering of the men who have made the
culture of the antique world their touchstone in life. And Dr. Osler,
himself a keen classical student, did not permit himself merely
gracious and suave messages. Pleading for a new bridal of science and
the classics, in that delightful and urbane chaff which he knew so well
to administer, he pointed out the barrenness of the tradition that
has made the famous “More Humane Letters” of Oxford entirely neglect
the workings and winnings of the science that has transformed the
world. Dr. Osler, in his great career, perhaps never spoke with more
convincing persuasion than when he pointed out that even in their own
province of the classical tongues the modern humanists have passed over
the scientific work of the ancients, as for instance in Aristotle and
Lucretius.
Among men who err and are baffled, but still blunder eagerly and
hopefully in the magnificent richness of the natural world, there arise
ever and again such figures as Osler’s, a pride and a consolation to
their comrades. Men, alas! are slow in finding the treasures that lie
close about them. Dr. Osler’s essays are too little known among general
readers. His all-embracing humanity, his mind packed with wisdom and
beauty, his humour and his sagacious and persistent method in the
conduct of a crowded life, make him a figure exceptionally helpful to
contemplate. This last of his essays needs to be read not only by all
educators, but by all who have any rational ideals of life, and who
need, every now and then, to surmount the troubled stream of quotidian
affairs and focus their visions more clearly.
No sensible man doubts that, if haste and confusion and greed do
not overcome us, the world should stand to-day on the sill of a new
Renaissance, a new empire of the mind, in which the old foolish
antagonism of science and the so-called “humanities” will be only a
vain and dusty rumour. What are “liberal” studies, one may ask? Why,
surely, studies that _liberate_--that set the spirit free from the
oppression of sordid and small motives, that stir and urge it toward
generous achievement and the assistance of misfortune. When did letters
arrogate to themselves the heavenly adjective _belles?_ Are there not
the _belles sciences_ also? And is the biplane now soaring over the
olive-shining Hudson any less lovely than the most precious sonnet ever
anchored and flattened in persisting ink?
This essay of Dr. Osler’s shows one the pulse and heartbeat of modern
science, the tender spirit of idealism that urges so much of the
technical investigation of our time. In Dr. Osler, as in hundreds
of other scientists less known and perhaps less gifted in public
utterance, there is the union of the two Hippocratic ideals which the
great Canadian physician laid before himself as his guides in life--the
union of _philanthropia_ and _philotechnia_--a love of humanity joined
to a love of his craft.
To infect the average man with the spirit of the humanities, Dr. Osler
said, is the highest aim of education. And this brilliant address
of his is a crowning instance of the way in which, in his mind,
the practical service of science was beautified by the liberal and
imperishable spirit of classical thought.
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