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C h a p t e r 2 2 Is the Intellectual Life an End in Itself? John U. Nef AtaboutthetimeIreceivedmyfirstfacultyassignmentatSwarthmoreCollege,an obituary notice of an old and admired professor made a deep impression on me. ThesubjectwasL.T.Hobhouse,thedistinguishedEnglishsociologistandlifelong liberal.1 He had been one of the intellectual pillars upon which the Webbs and a fewothershadconstructedtheLondonSchoolof Economics.IdidnotknowHobhousewell .ButhisobituarynoticewaswrittenbyamanImuchadmired,whowas in a way my intellectual father: R.H. Tawney. You perhaps know him as the author of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, but he was much better known then as a moral force in the British Labour party. To some of its members Tawney’sAcquisitive Society, first published in 1921,2 seemed to offer a fresh charter of liberty, giving a kind of spiritual sanction, missing in Marxian philosophy, to the struggle to overcome misery and poverty with the help of political action. Tawney is alive today and has passed the age at which Hobhouse died. When he wrote this older man’s obituary he was not much younger than I am now.3 As nearly as I can remember these were for me the words in that obituary notice which had an effect on my life: “Knowledge is such an excellent thing in itself that one has no right to ask for more. Nevertheless one’s heart goes out to a person like Hobhouse who is prodigal in the giving of it.” Thesesentencesrevealaconfidenceinthevalueof knowledgethatisnolonger as firmly held. It was then believed, as it still is to some extent, that the methods of inquiry employed increasingly in all domains of learning since the scientific revolution of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide glimpses at pieces of truth, small and partial though these pieces are. But there has been a great change since 1930, and especially since 1900, in the nature of the hopes men derive from scientific truth. From the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until the beginning of the twentieth it had been more and more widely believed, especially in the so-called 430 Is the Intellectual Life an End in Itself? 431 Anglo-Saxon countries of Europe and America, that the more we knew scienti fically the better for the characters of men and women. Something of the sort seems to be present in Tawney’s words “knowledge is . . . an excellent thing in itself .” They emerge from his own integrity as a man, which has been close to absolute . But the words also emerge (as did to some extent his integrity) from his Victorian background. For it seems to have been pretty generally assumed in the Victorian era both in Great Britain and in North America that there is a connection between knowledge and virtue. I write from my experience as an early twentieth-century child, whose father, a distinguished chemist, transmitted this idea to me. And the writings of many Victorians, both in Great Britain and in NorthAmerica,supportthisview.InhisessayonMachiavelli,writteninthemidnineteenth century, Macaulay comments on the great change in this matter of associating virtue with the life of the mind, which had come about since the Renaissance , since Machiavelli wrote his principal works at the beginning of the sixteenth century: Habits of dissimulation and falsehood, no doubt, mark a man of our age and country as utterly worthless and abandoned. But it by no means follows that a similar judgment would be just in the case of an Italian of the Middle Ages. On the contrary, we frequently find those faults, which we are accustomed to consider as certain indications of a mind altogether depraved, in company with great and good qualities. . . . The character of an Italian statesman seems, at first sight, a collection of contradictions. . . . We see a man whose thoughts and wordshavenoconnectionwitheachother,whoneverhesitatesatanoathwhen he wants to seduce, who never wants a pretext when he is inclined to betray . . . yet his aspect and language exhibit nothing but philosophic moderation.4 By Tawney’s time brilliant young Englishmen, Maynard Keynes and others of the Bloomsbury group among them, were adopting a view in which the divorce between virtue and knowledge was as complete, in new ways, as the divorce between virtue and conduct described by Macaulay in connection with the Italians of the Renaissance. But Tawney stood aside from that movement in the arts and sciences which was to lead persons in our time to take it for granted almost that a moral life and a life devoted to art and letters are separate. I was conversing recently with an...

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