THE NEED FOR NEW KNOWLEDGE 



from public understanding and discourse, giving to the common 

 life no insight, no confidence, no pleasure, no beauty. Com- 

 munication is not a luxury in our lives; it is the basis of our 

 humanity. 



New knowledge should ennoble not merely those who 

 seek and find it, nor their immediate colleagues; it should add 

 to the civility and wonder and the nobility of the common life. 

 This is no easy thing. We all know that we will go through our 

 days ignorant of much that would be good for us to learn. We 

 all accept the partialness of what we know well, and the decep- 

 tiveness and superficiality of what we know barely. Even the 

 European tradition, with its regard for high intellectual vigor, 

 long nurtured in more limited, more eclectic societies, is not 

 up to coping with today's world. It has contributed to the un- 

 even but major renascence of science in Russia. 



I do not know how much can be done to restore the bal- 

 ance between what is known to some of us, and what is a part 

 of a common culture; but it should not be by our default that we 

 leave things as they are, nor for any lack of vigor in developing 

 the manifold, difficult, partial remedies. They all rest on our 

 fulfilling, as best we can, and in one of the many different 

 senses of the word, our role as teachers — as lovers of new knowl- 

 edge, who would share with all who will, of our generation 

 and of the next, the wonders and the insights to which we have 

 been led. 



The many choices that new knowledge opens up for us 

 are, in any society, made on many different levels and by many 

 different men and institutions. Here we welcome this plural- 

 ism, and rightly see in it important safeguards from tvranny. 

 Some are made by the management of a factory, some by a 

 school board, some by a town council, some by a consumer, 

 some by a worker or director in a laboratory'. Yet all are made 

 in the light of a general common understanding of the situa- 



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