BIOLOGY AND HUMAN PROBLEMS 



human faculties. With such announced intentions one 

 might assume, it seems to me, that scientific work should 

 have been promoted. Galileo and Kepler and Harvey should 

 be the pride of the order, since ability to reason is certainly 

 the distinctively human trait. But no; not even such master 

 deriders of folly as Boccaccio and Rabelais are admitted 

 to fellowship. The true humanist, as nearly as I can gather 

 from the unintelligible though voluminous definitions of 

 the modem exponent, is not he who bestows new knowl- 

 edge upon his fellow men, but rather he who believes that 

 progress ended with the decline of the classic Greek tradi- 

 tion. The announced tenets of humanism are a sense of 

 decorum and a "will to refrain"; and each humanist 

 naturally writes a book to explain what these precepts 

 mean. The resulting volumes achieve harmony on only one 

 point, and this makes the contents far from dull : there is 

 no need for restraint when attacking error. 



Out of the modern humanist doctrine there somehow 

 emerges an acute dislike for science. Professor Babbitt says 

 that science is well enough in its place, but demands for the 

 humanist the right to determine its place. The difficulty 

 with science, according to L. T. More, who has received 

 some training in the older type of physics, is that instead 

 of confining itself to the simple problems of the atom and 

 the molecule, it is also studying human attributes and 

 emotions. It does not appear that he requires the closing 

 of all medical schools, but he does urge fetters for all 

 psychologists. 



What has led to such queer and loose-jointed thinking? 

 As Walter Lippmann has so ably shown, the immediate 

 trouble with these gentlemen is that they have adopted 

 as dogma an assumption long since disproved; namely, that 

 there are determinative laws for things — and presumably 

 for the lower organisms — but none for man. Having 

 asserted this dogma, they hold it to be a demonstrated fact. 



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