The Old Humanities and the New ScienceOsler, William, Sir
Philosophy
The Old Humanities and the New Science
Osler, William, Sir
Classical education; Science
The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing.
Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves
in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of
proportion in a maze of minutiæ. Everywhere men are in small coteries
intensely absorbed in subjects of deep interest, but of very limited
scope. Chemistry, a century ago an appanage of the Chair of Medicine or
even of Divinity, has now a dozen departments, each with its laboratory
and literature, sometimes its own society. Applying themselves early to
research, young men get into backwaters far from the main stream. They
quickly lose the sense of proportion, become hypercritical, and the
smaller the field, the greater the tendency to megalocephaly. The study
for fourteen years of the variations in the colour-scheme of the
thirteen hundred species of tiger-beetles scattered over the earth may
sterilize a man into a sticker of pins and a paster of labels; on the
other hand, he may be a modern biologist whose interest is in the
experimental modification of types, and in the mysterious insulation of
hereditary characters from the environment. Only in one direction does
the modern specialist acknowledge his debt to the dead languages. Men of
science pay homage, as do no others, to the god of words whose magic
power is nowhere so manifest as in the plastic language of Greece. The
only visit many students pay to Parnassus is to get an intelligible
label for a fact or form newly discovered. Turn the pages of such a
dictionary of chemical terms as Morley and Muir, and you meet in
close-set columns countless names unknown a decade ago, and
unintelligible to the specialist in another department unless familiar
with Greek, and as meaningless as the Arabic jargon in such mediæval
collections as the "Synonyma" of Simon Januensis or the "Pandects" of
Matheas Sylvaticus. As "Punch" put it the other day in a delightful
poetical review of Professor West's volume:[14]
"Botany relies on Latin ever since Linnæus' days;
Biologic nomenclature draws on Greek in countless ways;
While in Medicine it is obvious you can never take your oath
What an ailment means exactly if you haven't studied both."
[14] _The Value of the Classics._ Princeton University Press,
1917.
Let me give a couple of examples.
Within the narrow compass of the primitive cell from which all living
beings originate, onomatomania runs riot. The process of mitosis has
developed a special literature and language. Dealing not alone with the
problems of heredity and of sex, but with the very dynamics of life, the
mitotic complex is much more than a simple physiological process, and in
the action and interaction of physical forces the cytologist hopes to
find the key to the secret of life itself. And what a Grecian he has
become! Listen to this account, which Aristotle would understand much
better than most of us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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