December 14, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



575 



is instructive, but a large if not the greater 

 part of it appears to have been relatively 

 fruitless in comparison with the time and 

 the effort consumed. Why is this so 1 Or, 

 is it only apparently and not actually so? 

 May it not be due to the proverbially nar- 

 row, or possibly "materialistic," tenden- 

 cies sometimes attributed to administrative 

 officers? Much attention has been given 

 to these inquiries with a view to securing 

 answers free from personal bias and inde- 

 pendent of administrative or other ephem- 

 eral restrictions. Essentially correct an- 

 swers are furnished, it is believed, by the 

 voluminous correspondence referred to, 

 since it has supplied the data required for 

 application of the objective methods of ob- 

 servation and experiment as well as the 

 data for application of the subjective 

 methods of a priori reasoning and his- 

 torieo-critical congruity. 



An appeal to that correspondence shows, 

 in the first place, that there is no con- 

 sensus of opinion amongst professed human- 

 ists as to what the humanities are. It is 

 well known, of course, by those who have 

 taken the trouble to reflect a little, that 

 the words humanistic and humanist are 

 highly technical terms, more so, for ex- 

 ample, than the term "moment of iner- 

 tia," the full mechanical and historical 

 significance of which can only be under- 

 stood by consulting Euler's "Theoria 

 Motus Corporum Solidorum. " Technic- 

 ally, the humanist is not necessarily hu- 

 mane, though fortunately for the rest of 

 us he generally possesses this admirable 

 quality; he needs only to be human. The 

 distinction is well illustrated at one ex- 

 treme by what Greg called the "false mo- 

 rality of lady novelists," which could 

 doubtless be surpassed by the falser mo- 

 rality of male authors of fiction; and at 

 another extreme by the merciful role of the 

 physician in saving lives, or the equally 



merciful role of the engineer who builds 

 bridges that will not fall down and kill 

 folks, whose works, nevertheless, are often 

 relegated by the humanist to the limbo of 

 technology. 



But these finer shades of verbal distinc- 

 tion which, with more or less elaboration, 

 have come down to plague us from the 

 days of the illustrious Alcuin and Eras- 

 mus, but with no such intent on their part, 

 are less disconcerting than other revela- 

 tions supplied by this expert testimony. It 

 shows, in the second place, the surprising 

 fact that some few humanists would re- 

 strict this field of endeavor to literature 

 alone. From this minimum minimorum of 

 content the estimates of our esteemed cor- 

 respondents vary with many fluctuations 

 all the way up to a maximum maximorum 

 which would embrace all that is included 

 in the comprehensive definition of anthro- 

 pology to be found in the Standard Dic- 

 tionary. Thus some eminent authorities 

 would exclude from the humanities all of 

 the ancient classics even, except their lit- 

 eratures. To such devotees philology, lit- 

 erary or comparative, has no interest; 

 while archeology, classical or cosmopoli- 

 tan, is of no more concern to them than 

 comparative anatomy, which latter, by the 

 way, is held in certain quarters to com- 

 prise the whole of anthropology. Equally 

 confident groups of enthusiasts, on the 

 other hand, animated by visions held es- 

 sential to prevent our race from perishing, 

 would, each in its own way, have the in- 

 stitution set up boundaries to knowledge 

 within which the humanities, as always 

 hitherto, would play the dominant part 

 but whose appropriateness of fixation 

 would be immediately disputed by other 

 groups. There would be, in fact, only one 

 point of agreement between them, namely, 

 that the institution's income is none too 

 large to meet the needs of any group. It 



