Science and the Humanities

200 REVIEWS that the concluding volumes of the biography will be completed at the same high level of accomplishment. D. G. CREIGHTON Science and the Humanities Science and the Creative Spirit: Essays on Humanistic Aspects of Science,. by Karl W. Deutsch, F. E. L. Priestley, Harcourt Brown, and David Hawkins, under the editorship of Harcourt Brown (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958, pp. xxviii, 165, $4.50), is the outgrowth of a conference sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies on relationships. between science and the humanities. The authors of the four essays, which derive from exploratory discussions carried on by a larger committee, are all humanists "interested in the human and social bearings of scientific investigations." They undertake to illustrate the rich diversity of treatment which is possible and appropriate within the general field, and to suggest what clues may best be followed in thls complex situation. The approach has been very carefully mapped, and the contributors have avoided a hortatory or emotional tone. They assume good will on the part of both scientists and humanistic scholars, and undertake to explore the situation without making excessive claims for unity or identity of interest, or for any one point of view. "While this book results from an effort to reduce the area of disagreement between humanist and scientist, it does not seek that end by denying that conflict exists" (p. xxvii). The essays divide into two pairs. Professors Deutsch and Hawkins try to place science in the broad perspectives of the range of human experience and the growth of civilization. Professors Priestley and Brown study more particularly the impact of science on the modern literary culture of England and France. A divergence, not necessarily a deep disagreement, appears here. Professor Hawkins finds an expression or realization of humanistic values in the activities of pure science itself when fully understood. Both he and Professor Deutsch take exception to President Conant's sharp distinction between science as cumulative and therefore progressive, and art as non-cumulative and therefore non-progressive. Scientific discovery, they point out, has its moment of unique insight, its Geistesblitz; art is in some sense cumulative, and even the most original of artists cannot work as though no other artists had ever existed. These filiations are taken to mean that science and the humanities alike illustrate the course of human creativity. Professor Hawkins makes the following drastic statement: "If the creed of the humanist indeed be expressed by the maxim, Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, then the essential humanistic aspects of science are to be found, not in the method of science if there be such a thing, and not in the results of science as they appear in textbooks, f,lnd not in the external influences of science on industry or on politics or poetry or painting, but in the life of science as an expression of human capacities and limitations" (p. 131). Without putting too much emphasis on isolated phrases, we may be helped in trying to grasp some of the central issues raised in this book REVIEWS 201··u we ask ourselves whether "the life of science" can attain such expression in purely scientific terms. For the most part these essays consider science as one field alongside .others, and describe influences, interchanges, and constraints between scientific and non-scientific fields. Professor Deutsch studies scientific knowledge and humanistic knowledge as they interact and participate in the growth of civilization. The comprehensive and closely packed essays by Professors Priestley and Brown trace for the most part influences from science on literature, illustrating the different ways in which a rapidly advancing and .dominant science may affect literary artists, directly or indirectly. Since students of the humanities are likely to give an oversimplified account of an .artist's use of science, it is good to have our attention called to science as an extended and underlying influence. Only at a few points do the examples of the literary use of scientific themes given in these essays seem to me to be random and inconclusive, as in the list on page 33, which includes The Magic Mountain, Arrowsmith, and "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,'' or another sampling on...