![CUNY City University of New York
CUP Cambridge University Press
DL David Lowenthal
GPM George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation
IDS Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
IJCP International Journal of Cultural Property
JHI Journal of the History of Ideas
NY New York
NYRB New York Review of Books
OUP Oxford University Press
Times The Times [London]
TLS Times Literary Supplement
UP University Press
U xx P University of xx Press
Abbreviations in Endnotes](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-20-320.jpg)
![8 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge
snooty Oxbridge twaddle.11
But most admitted the gulf and traced it to a cultural
elitism that equated science with ‘stinks’ at, say, lowbrow Sheffield University.
Conversely, among American scientists the poet Auden felt “like a shabby curate
who has strayed by mistake into a drawing-room full of dukes.”12
Yet American statesmen no less than British were “ignorant of if not defi-
nitely hostile to [scientific] intellect and reason,” charged Rabi. “Our intellectual
leaders today know … only two things about the basic conceptions of modern
science: that they do not understand them, and that they are now so far separated
from them” that they may never find out what they mean, judged science histo-
rian Gerald Holton. And the separation was “steadily increasing.”13
Scientific disdain festered among American literati proudly confessing igno-
rance of the structure of the universe or one’s own body, the behavior of matter
or of one’s own mind. The irrelevance to them of empirical science made “cleav-
age between the two cultures … inevitable,” thought philosopher Jürgen Haber-
mas in 1970. It has scarcely lessened since. A Nobel laureate biologist who tells
London partygoers he is a scientist instantly detects “panic and disengagement,”
and changes the subject to literature or music.14
Snow’s Two Cultures still rouses rancor. “It might seem extraordinary that
a debate initiated nearly sixty years ago can still provoke strong views.” But,
writes science historian Frank James, such longevity shows that underlying issues
“about the place of science in culture and society … have not gone away.” With
scientific illiteracy “as prevalent as ever,” held Britain’s minister for business and
skills in 2009, Snow’s key themes “still resonate. We are still trying to bridge
the gap.”15
A Huxley−Arnold precursor, 1880–1882
The Snow–Leavis conflict had a famed Cambridge antecedent. Eighty years
earlier, biologist T. H. Huxley and poet-essayist Matthew Arnold had taken
up the same gauntlet, revealing an epistemic gulf almost as profound. Absent,
though, was the animus; Huxley and Arnold were like-minded friends. Huxley’s
1880 lecture lamented the disjunction of science from literature and the current
fashionable disdain of science. “Advocates of scientific education [are] pooh-
poohed by the men of business [and] excommunicated by the classical scholars”
convinced that physical science “touches none of the higher problems of life.”
Only a grounding in Greek and Roman antiquity would do. Hence “scholarly
and pious persons” remained ignorant of “the first principles of scientific think-
ing [and] of established scientific truths.”
Huxley claimed more for science than Snow would do. Like many late Victo-
rians, he fancied human affairs like physical matters governed by universal laws of
nature. Scientific methods would yield definite social knowledge. Anarchy and
despotism would be overcome when men “deal with political, as they now deal
with scientific questions,” in conformity with nature’s strict order. “The chief
business of mankind is to learn that order and govern themselves accordingly.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-29-320.jpg)
![Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 9
For academics’ persisting dismissal of science Huxley blamed unworldly me-
dieval Catholicism. As seen by 12th-century university founders,
Scriptures, as interpreted and supplemented by the [Papacy], contain[ed]
a complete and infallibly true body of information. Theological dicta
were [as fixed as] the axioms and definitions of Euclid. … All material
existence was but a base and insignificant blot upon the fair face of the
spiritual world.
“The only thing really worth knowing in this world was how to secure” the
promised place in a better hereafter. “The study of nature, the playground of the
devil,” had no bearing on this divine purpose of human life. And despite the sub-
sequent expansion of knowledge about nature, academic clerisy seven centuries
later still viewed the material world with contempt, the ancient classics as “the
sole avenue to culture.”16
In rebuttal, Matthew Arnold concurred that science mattered but disputed
Huxley’s contention that litterateurs ignored it. Euclid’s Elements, Newton’s
Principia, Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin were integral to scholarship; true
humanism embraced science. Nature study should be compulsory. But students
must first be “moralized” by letters, poetry, and religion. Education’s purpose
was not to gather data but to perfect humanity, knowledge prized as conducive
to “soberness, righteousness, and wisdom.” As science supplied none of this,
the classics were all the more essential. When 17th-century science banished
medieval superstition, humane letters had replaced religion as inspiration. The
“fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power” of the art and
poetry of antiquity were today’s guides to conduct and beauty.17
Unlike Snow/Leavis, the Huxley/Arnold exchange elicited broad agreement.
Empirical and experimental knowledge alone was not enough, but all knowl-
edge was one, spiritual and scientific. Aesthetic principles were as lawlike as
physics; Arnold posited the universal value of classical symmetry. His deference
to science pervaded 1920s philosophy and literary criticism. Arnold’s disciple
I. A. Richards extolled science’s objective truths against the “distortions” of
poetry’s subjective truths. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound cited Arnold to support
the transcendent merits of “serious” art. Huxley’s grandson and Arnold-admirer
Aldous Huxley infused the facts of nature into the fancies of art: knowing why
nightingales sang became indispensable material for poetry.18
Wedding art with
science unified material knowledge with spiritual awareness.
From sacred unity to secular dualism
Modern faith in science long echoed medieval faith in Scripture. Up to the 17th
century all Western learning was essentially one and divine. The book of nature
and the book of humanity were conjoined compendia of sacred truths. From Au-
gustine to Aquinas and beyond, everything in the cosmos, from bees and bears to](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-30-320.jpg)
![Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 11
and logic imparted assured sacred knowledge. Nature’s primordial antiquity be-
came a stock defense against charges of scientific sacrilege. When theologians
condemned findings of a change in the Baltic shore as contrary to Genesis,
scientists replied that “God had made both the Baltic and Genesis, [and] if there
was any contradiction between the two works, the error must lie in the copies
that we have of the book rather than in the Baltic Sea, of which we have the
original.”25
“Holy Scripture can never lie,” assured Galileo, but linguistic corruption made
it often hidden and hard to fathom. Unlike errant biblical glosses, immutable na-
ture “never transgresses the laws imposed upon her.” Hence nature yielded surer
truth than “biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath
their words.” Hobbes and Spinoza found Euclidean proofs a refreshing contrast
to “the murky ambiguities of scriptural texts.” William Gilbert dedicated his
pioneering work on magnetism to those “who look for knowledge not in books
but in things themselves.”26
Abraham Cowley praised Bacon for shifting science
“from Words, which are but Pictures of the Thought … to things, the Mind’s
right Object.” England’s Royal Society adjured scientists to adopt “primitive
purity, and shortness,” to bring all things “as near the Mathematical plainness” as
possible. French scholars likewise renounced the “metaphor, embellishment and
highly coloured expression” in the plays of Racine or Molière and the verse of
La Fontaine for plain and literal language.27
It was just this surrender of words to things that Leavis later blamed for the
science-driven dualism that dismembered the unity of knowledge. As Shake-
speare gave way to Newton and Dante to Descartes, rhetorical imagery, once the
font of inspiration, was dethroned as an impediment to prosaic abstraction. And
the primacy of objective rationality distanced observer from observed, feeling
from thought, language from life.
Knowledge based on observation and experiment challenged faith-based or-
thodoxy, which deployed sacred texts to confirm Scripture and held new dis-
covery heretical. Cardinal Bellarmine’s retort to Galileo, in science–religion’s
cause célèbre, stressed “the unchanging and marmoreal already-revealed Truth
of the faith, which requires not investigation and questioning … but submis-
sion, acceptance, obedience, worship.” A moving earth and stationary sun might
be mathematically more coherent than eccentric orbits and epicycles, but af-
firming its reality endangered “Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false.”28
That “the sun ariseth, and goeth down” (Ecclesiastes 1.5) was God’s directly
imparted wisdom.
To that view Catholicism adhered for four more centuries, the rift aggravated
by the 1870 Vatican dictum of papal infallibility proscribing conclusions based
on “false” (that is, rigidly empirical) science. Religion was a “special kind” of
science, “with its own reasoning, method, and modes of expression,” more a
conscience, argued Cardinal Newman, “so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled,
obscured, perverted,” that it must be left to authoritative experts—that is, to](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-32-320.jpg)
![12 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge
Catholic theologians. In effect, Newman accepted the distinction between the
realms of matter and of spirit consequent on the Reformation.29
Science’s cumulative advance also opposed it to artistic achievement. In the
16th- and 17th-century Ancients–Moderns debate, science attested modern
prowess, while art languished in awe of ancient greatness. Science was an ongo-
ing collective enterprise ceaselessly adding to knowledge. But artistic endeavor
was neither cumulative nor progressive; merit accrued to individual effort alone.
To the poet or painter, architect or composer, past genius seemed unsurpassable.
Enlightenment philosophes excluded the arts from the march of progress. Goethe
epitomized the difference: he made scientific but no poetic claims, for “poets
more excellent lived before me, but … in the difficult science of colors … I have
a consciousness of superiority.”30
Preeminent precursors led poets, painters, and critics to posit artistic deterio-
ration. Material advance bred aesthetic decline; impoverished spirit was the sad
price of scientific advance. Technology freed science from reliance on art; me-
chanical reproduction by the late-18th century displaced artists’ illustrations in
anatomy texts. Science flourished at poetry’s expense. Many held that reducing
nature’s mysteries to soulless analysis stifled reverence and delight. To conjure
why God so disposed the movements of the sun and moon was for Thomas
Browne “a sweeter piece of Reason, and a diviner point of Philosophy,” than
Copernican science. Kepler’s machine-driven celestial physics dismayed John
Donne as no “divine living being but … a clockwork.” Newton’s mechanics
besmirched Dante’s spiritual cosmos where human love “moved the sun and
the other stars.” Space became mere geometry, time only numbers; “a world of
quantity [and] mechanical regularity [bereft] of purposive harmony and creative
ideals,” in philosopher E. A. Burtt’s summation, “hard, cold, colorless, silent,
and dead.”31
By the late 18th century the mystique of imagination severed art from science.
As fancy ran riot in the arts, facts stiffened in the sciences, where imaginative
vision became suspect. The two realms’ aims, rationales, and personae increas-
ingly diverged. Empirical science, cumulative, collective, objective, discovered
what already existed in nature. Lone artists’ novel creations were born of im-
passioned feeling, irreducible to logic or reason. The findings of science came
from persistent collaborative effort, the wonders of art from spontaneous genius.
Lauding individualism, subjectivity, and originality as wellsprings of creativ-
ity, art rejected Enlightenment science’s orderly decorum. The artist’s quest for
beauty, cautioned the poet Baudelaire, had nothing to do with scientists’ search
for truth.32
Romantic arcadian nostalgia bemoaned intrusive mechanistic science. With
“our meddling intellect,” lamented Wordsworth, “we murder to dissect.” For
Carlyle, measuring and counting banished cultivation and compassion. New-
ton destroyed the rainbow’s poetry by expounding its prismatic colors, averred
Keats: “Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, … Unweave a rainbow.” Edgar
Allan Poe saw science as a vulture preying on the poet’s heart, William Blake as](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-33-320.jpg)
![14 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge
Science was praised for embellishing material and social progress with beauty
and morality. Scientific enthusiasm broadened schooling, natural history spear-
heading the spread of education. “All art should become science,” held the Ro-
mantic scholar Friedrich Schlegel, “and all science art.” Wordsworth hailed
“discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist” as truly poetical. Es-
teeming art the acme of creation, Darwin celebrated evolution’s “endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful.”36
Poetry graced scientific description. Naturalists invoked Wordsworth and
Tennyson; lines from Milton, Byron, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene enlivened trea-
tises on carboniferous coal and the origin of mammals. The Scottish geologist
Hugh Miller’s literary fancies of quarry fossils thrilled readers not just with ser-
mons in stones, but throughout the “ocean, the broad earth, the blue firma-
ment and all its stars.” As it needed art, so “science excites poetry, rather than
extinguishes it,” wrote the polymath Victorian Herbert Spencer. “Where the
uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty,” held the
astronomer William Herschel, the scientist tracing causes and confirming laws
“walks in the midst of wonders.”37
Poetry, painting, and gardening vitalized knowledge of nature. Alexander
von Humboldt’s compendious Cosmos (1845–1862) suffused scientific discourse
with aesthetic depiction. Humboldt’s fusion of science with art, knowing with
adoring nature, reached millions in Philip Henry Gosse’s Romance of Natural
History. Every explorer was a naturalist, every naturalist an artist. Enthralled by
the primordial landscapes sketched in Hugh Miller’s Old Red Sandstone (1841),
the American painter Asher Durand, on a wet Catskill Mountains morning in
1857, “could hardly wait for the rain to let up [to] rush down to a nearby creek,
break open some of the sandstone on its banks, and see what it might reveal of the
earth’s history.” To nature lovers nothing on God’s earth, no slimy bug beneath
the least stone, lacked intrinsic merit. All creatures, past and present, great and
small, bespoke a loving Creator’s wondrous workmanship.38
Humboldt’s American disciple George P. Marsh linked scientific to spiritual
and aesthetic advance. Knowledge ennobled cosmic splendor. “Wherever mod-
ern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or a picturesque error, she has
replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth.” Franklin chaining the
thunderbolt with his kite outshone Jupiter’s forked lightning; new weather stud-
ies surpassed the fable of Aeolus’s fickle winds. Science had “vastly increased the
wealth of imagery at the command of poetry.”39
Natural history was educative, healthful, character-building, morally edify-
ing, scripturally sanctioned—a scholarly spur to piety, fossils seemed to confirm
biblical history. That made the study of nature a pious duty, even a holy calling.
To learn geology was “to become acquainted with the ideas of God himself,”
exulted Louis Agassiz, mid-century America’s premier immigrant scientist. The
sacred appeal of natural history was strongest in the New World, where nature
was “fresher from the hand of Him who made it,” puffed the poet William
Cullen Bryant. A landscape was “great in proportion as it declares the glory of](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-35-320.jpg)
![Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 15
God,” asserted Asher Durand. In America “we behold Him face to face” at His
untrammeled best.40
Piety long suffused natural history. But by the late 19th century both religion
and art were increasingly irrelevant if not impediments to proper science. The
study of nature became truly scientific only as laboratory-based biology, rid of
both theology and imaginative art. The accelerating pace of discovery outdated
scientists’ own work within decades. Progress was precisely what distinguished
science from art, declared Max Weber. While great art is never antiquated, pro-
gressive science “cries out to be surpassed and rendered obsolete.” Only in the
pure pursuit of objective fact, stripped of imaginative fancy, could scientists take
comfort. In this climate they honed depersonalized modes of discourse—a phys-
ics, intoned Nobelist Max Planck, universally true for “all times, all places, all
peoples, all cultures.”41
By and large, however, 19th-century literati and scientists remained allied
discoverers and celebrants. Unlike today’s specialists, both were familiar with
a range of insights that embraced at least the rudiments of all knowledge. Tele-
scopic and microscopic revelations advanced hand in hand with the arts. Keats
studied medicine, Humphry Davy wrote poetry, Coleridge tested nitrous ox-
ide, Byron borrowed Herschel’s telescope. To philosophes like Hobbes, Locke,
Berkeley, Leibniz, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Kant a good grasp of
science was essential. America’s founding fathers, noted science historian Gerald
Holton, thought it “as natural to share in the current scientific world picture as in
the classics of literature.”42
Philosopher Mary Midgeley mourns the days “when
Blake and Coleridge could discuss scientific problems with Faraday and Davy,”
and Darwin wrote about Kant, T. H. Huxley on Hume. Science enthralled An-
tonia Byatt’s favorite Victorian authors, Coleridge and George Eliot. Despite
“some large blind spots and some bitter quarrels,” science and the humanities in
the 19th century were not “separated by [the] ignorance and indifference” Hol-
ton found in 1960.43
Science becomes sovereign
Instead, social and aesthetic inquiry increasingly aped scientific dictates, seeking
and confirming laws of nature. “Where there is no law,” declared chemist and
philosopher of science Emile Meyerson, “there is no science.” Endorsing Con-
dorcet’s dictum that general laws were as “necessary and constant” in human af-
fairs as in natural science, John Stuart Mill sought “Laws of the Mind” of similar
caliber. “The backward state of the moral sciences can only be remedied by ap-
plying to them the methods of physical science.” Science became a surrogate for
the Creator. All that our “aims and ideals combine in the concept God is fulfilled
by science,” concluded Nobel chemist Wilhelm Ostwald in 1911.44
Universal laws of human traits, like those of atoms and stars, must be found
by strictly objective, emotionally detached, quantitative means. T. H. Huxley
proposed a calculus of justice, for “the gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-36-320.jpg)
![Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 19
letters, and arrows replacing simple words. Jargon-free historical discourse was
ditched by Robert Fogel’s computational study of Southern slavery that won him
a Nobel Prize for economics.57
“In their anxiety to achieve respectability,” scolded anthropologist Lloyd Fall-
ers, social sciences “become either gadgety, scientistic, and hence trivial [or]
pompously anti-intellectual.” Once readable journals succumbed to tortuous
babble. Excessive jargon, multiple authorship, and absence of editing help ex-
plain why biomedical journals over the last four decades have become ever harder
to read. A prime cause of humanistic opacity was the scuttling of traditional
footnotes for the barbaric Harvard parenthetical author-date system, devised in
1881, for a treatise on the sex life of a garden slug, to secure biology’s “hard sci-
ence” status.58
Obscurity continues to make academic science ever less readable.
As scientists seek “too hard to sound like scientists,” sentences lengthen, jargon
proliferates, technical parlance defies non-specialist comprehension.59
The scientistic conquest of academe enthroned “discourse so recondite,” al-
leged historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, “that other modes of experience—history
and politics, conduct and sensibility”—were virtually drowned out. The dehu-
manization of literary criticism into semiotics, theology into semantics, history
into social science, struck her as abdicating ethics to science. “The world of
words has shrunk,” lamented Steiner; once covering “nearly the whole of ex-
perienced reality,” its domain dwindled when Newton and Leibniz endowed
mathematics with “its own rich, complex and dynamic language”:
And the history of that language is one of progressive untranslatability …
Between the mathematical symbol and the word, the bridges grow more
and more tenuous … No dictionaries relate the vocabulary and grammar
of higher mathematics to verbal [discourse]. One cannot talk of transfinite
numbers [e.g., omega, aleph-null, m] except mathematically.
Mathematical dominion over ever more realms of thought broke Western knowl-
edge into Snow’s ever less equal two cultures. Humanist impotence reflected the
growing view that numbers provided a profounder image of the cosmos than
words. And those “compelled by our ignorance of exact science to imagine the
universe through a veil of non-mathematical language” were made to feel they
“inhabit an animate fiction.”60
Disenchantment with science
Just as science soared in academic repute, however, it began to lose public cachet.
Scientific popularity peaked with Sabin’s polio vaccine in 1956, the very year of
Snow’s tirade. But by 1971 Americans’ approval of science plummeted from 80
to 37 percent. Disillusionment reflected post-Hiroshima apocalyptic fears and
concern about technology’s social costs. No foreseeable benefit mitigated the
horrific perils of the hydrogen bomb and radioactive fallout. Science repute fell](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-40-320.jpg)
![Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 21
for laws in history the American Historical Association in 2002 recanted affinity
with social science.65
Science itself reacted against determinism. Indeterminacy at quantum and
cosmic scales eroded positivism in physics. Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions fueled critiques of science as culturally contingent and
innately partial. The very language of science revealed personal bias and cultural
myopia. Increasingly, scientists saw their findings as provisional, their remit not
delivering certainty but negotiating uncertainty.66
Meanwhile, postmodern skeptics cast all knowledge in doubt as socially
constructed. “Truth” varied with perceivers’ perspective and experience. Since
everything was contextual and partisan, there could be no universal truths. The
acclaimed scientific enterprise—the progressive unfolding of objective reality—
was an Enlightenment delusion. Nature had no pre-given order. “Science stud-
ies” exposing science’s clay feet became popular in academe. English faculties
humiliated by “physics envy’’ now taught that “science is a fiction in the same
sense that a novel is a fiction.” At the century’s end, wrote a rueful Bruno Latour,
the relativist precept “that facts are made up, … that we always speak from a
particular standpoint,” dominated “entire PhD programs.”67
A popular relativist precursor, Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1890 The Sign of the
Four, showed science shot through with passion. “Detection is, or ought to
be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional
manner,” Sherlock Holmes chides Dr. Watson. “You have attempted to tinge
it with romanticism, [like] a love-story or an elopement into the fifth propo-
sition of Euclid.” “But the romance was there,” argues Watson; “I could not
tamper with the facts.” Perversely, it is the scientist Watson who insists the
facts include both geometry and romance. A century later postmodernists rel-
egated geometry to fiction. Inspired by Deleuze, Lacan, and Derrida, critical
theorists held “value-free” science a relic of sexist imperialism that privileged
force over feeling, aloofness over engagement, analysis over empathy, dissec-
tion over healing.68
Yet those who trashed science remained enthralled by its charisma and envi-
ous of its rewards. Literary studies became both cynical and “hard”, debunking
objective knowledge while demanding theoretical rigor. The humanities fol-
lowed the social sciences into jargon-laden limbo, their journals crammed with
esoteric mystique that passed for profundity. They resembled physical science
most in being remote from lay comprehension.69
The disciplines’ severest critics are their own spokesmen. “Our written prod-
uct,” scoffs a geographer anent geography’s cultural-studies chic, is “more in-
accessible than in the heyday of positivist jargon.” A professor of English blasts
literary theory’s repellent “scare quotes, bracketed prefixes, … solipsistic disre-
gard for the reader.” Of the gobbledygook in Longman’s Critical Reader on D. H.
Lawrence (1992), novelist Geoff Dyer fumes: “How could these people with no
feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it?” Critical dis-
course “kills everything it touches.”70](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-42-320.jpg)
![22 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge
Chemist Roald Hoffmann chides his own colleagues for “dry, impersonal,
dispassionate” monotony that reduces “the miracle of a living world to … the
logic of dissection.” Galison blames “tedious textbooks with terrible graphics”
for showing young naturalists that “what they once thought was fascinating …
is alien to their existence.” Citing the deliberate dullness and relentless factual-
ity of typical science research papers, Edward O. Wilson terms “poor science
education in school … probably the single most formidable barrier to any effort
to bring science and the humanities together.” No wonder “virtually no one
outside the sciences reads unpopularized science,” writes art historian James El-
kins, “and hardly anyone in the sciences reads the professional literature of the
humanities.”71
Both aping and abuse of science peaked—or flopped—with physicist Alan
Sokal’s 1996 spoof “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Sokal pretended that not just quantum
gravity but simple arithmetic was a Western imperial invention; no longer “con-
stant and universal,” π and G were now exposed “in their ineluctable historicity.”
He then revealed he had woven “the silliest quotations from the most prominent
French and American intellectuals [into] a nonsensical argument” showing that
physical “reality” was “at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” Hence “lib-
eratory science” required “a profound revision of the canon of mathematics.”72
This drivel’s acceptance for publication exposed lit-crit’s nakedness behind its
impenetrable prose. Awarded the Ig Nobel prize for literature, Social Text editors
said they knew Sokal’s piece was nonsense but published it anyway, as a “con-
veniently credentialed” relativistic cri de coeur. The hoax made cultural studies
a laughing-stock. In valuing ideology over intelligibility, said philosopher Paul
Boghossian, Social Text exemplified the “collapse in standards of scholarship and
intellectual responsibility … of the humanities and social sciences.”73
Others saw it as symptomatic. “Meaning we do not strive for these days,”
scoffed an English professor’s persona. “We have taken a leaf from the French,
and strive for theory, the better to impress you.” Latour taunted both camps. “If
scientists want to get rid of the two-culture divide for good, they will have to
get used to” more such nonsense. “After all, the humanists and the literati do not
make such a fuss about the many absurdities uttered by … scientists building the
bridge from the other end.” They always talk “about ‘bridging the two-culture
gap’,” but when non-scientists “begin to build just that bridge, they recoil in
horror.”74
But Sokal’s send-up was a bridge too far. He had simply copied the claptrap
he mocked. “The Einsteinian constant is not a constant,” Derrida had absurdly
declared. “It is the very concept of variability.” In fact, there is no Einsteinian
constant; Newton’s gravitational constant is invariably 0.000000006673. A year
after Sokal’s hoax, the satirist Malcolm Bradbury parodied Derrida as decon-
structionist “Henri Mensonge,” anticipating “the centreless centre, the present-
less present, the writerless writing, the signless sign that would draw everything
together and put it into its true lack of relation.” To be sure, professional physics](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-43-320.jpg)
![24 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge
and been repeatedly hyped by eminent psychologists “without anyone calling it
into question?” wondered Sokal. “Was everyone really so credulous?” The main
claim was “so implausible on its face that some red flags ought to have been
raised.” All emotional experiences would need to have the same magnitude and
duration to be so compared.
A moment’s thought will show how impossible it is to actually measure …
on this basis. If someone laughs at a joke on TV, eats an ice-cream, sees
their dog get run over, and watches a nice sunset, are they at a 3 to 1 ratio
of positive to negative emotions and flourishing? … In a marriage, [do a
lot] of superficial compliments together with 1 physically abusive, drunken
episode [make] a good balance leading to a happy relationship?
Such a precise “universal truth about human emotions … would, if verified, re-
quire rewriting most contemporary psychology and neuroscience; purely on that
basis” that it long went unquestioned is surprising.79
That it did so reflects the scientism of psychologists bemused by mathematical
mystique as a bona fide of expertise, along with the romantic dream of a single
impressive formula explaining human behavior. (One admirer suggested slightly
raising the 2.9013 tipping point to coincide with the mathematical constant π
at 3.1416.) This gibberish seems no mere anomaly, but endemic within and be-
yond psychology. It “reveals a cultural trap prevalent within much of mainstream
science”—widespread yearning to account for complex experience by a simple
universal and timeless quantifiable law.80
The damage done by this intellectual imposture in some respects exceeds the
Sokal hoax. The muted response of the deceived journal, commending itself
for retracting Losada’s mathematical claims, leaves the original essay, although
also shown empirically specious, far more cited and influential than its refuta-
tion. Positive psychology’s claim to “rigorous science” that avoids popularizing
nonsense appears ludicrous. The whole discipline has been shown unable to
monitor not just mathematical but empirical claims to truth (keeping the “slip-
pery baby” while draining the “somewhat murky bathwater,” in Frederickson’s
own apologia). “As a soft science,” suggests John Searles, “we have to endure
this nonsensical work. … It is sometimes embarrassing to mention that I am a
psychologist!”81
Now only soft science, however, but science as a whole loses credibility with
a public beset by fake and dubious findings and scornful of expertise. Regardng
the quest for unity in general, the critical positivity ratio makes a mockery of
unifiers’ contentions that the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowl-
edge. If “only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions
of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic,
and environmental goals,” as neuroscientist Sam Harris contends, this sorry epi-
sode suggests that he is all too right in supposing “a science of human flourishing
[is] a long way off.” 82](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-45-320.jpg)
![Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 25
The Two Cultures divide becomes a chasm
“Had Snow lived to see the science wars and the Sokal hoax,” concluded science
historian Peter Harrison, “he would have been even more confirmed about the
polarization of academic life.” Sokal himself judged the “two cultures probably
farther apart … than at any time in the past 50 years.” Crisis was voiced world-
wide: a Dutch scholar saw a “tectonic rift” becoming “a bottomless chasm”;
sociologist Frank Furedi feared “pathological” fragmentation; American anthro-
pologists decried an irreversibly isolating tectonic disaster.83
Mutual recrimination soured academic collegiality. Scientists were accused of
disregarding values, humanists assailed for privileging them. Scientists called hu-
manists charlatans and mountebanks. Nothing that historians and philosophers
of science wrote about physics “needs to be taken seriously,” stated a nuclear
physicist; “they haven’t a clue.” If humanists couldn’t recognize Sokal’s transpar-
ent scam, “can we trust anything they do?” Sokal showed “everything humanists
have done since 1970 has been bunk.” Blinkered literary sensibility blinds them
to “the scientific/mathematical outlook that is arguably the true glory of our
civilization,” scolded economist Paul Krugman. Some faulted the hoax for forti-
fying barriers. “Instead of narrowing an unfortunate breach,” feared a reviewer,
this “will harden it.”84
Cultural theorists’ simplistic inflation of quantum indeterminacy into whole-
sale relativism led some scientists to reassert positivism. “A scientific theory is in
a sense a social consensus,” allowed Weinberg, but “unlike any other sort of con-
sensus … it is culture-free and permanent.” That more women and East Asians
were now scientists had not changed the laws of physics. If there were “intelligent
creatures on some distant planet,” they will “have discovered the same laws.” Sci-
ence’s “timeless laws and selfless truths” set it apart from “the social world of cul-
ture, with its ineluctable contingency, its ramifying particularity, its dictates that
change with time.” Worse than literary scholars’ ignorance of science was their
rejection of quantitative criteria of evidence, charged biologist Joseph Carroll.
Lacking “neutral, objective” assessments, they simply cherry-pick selective ex-
amples, gleaning quotes by like-minded authors to bolster favored hypotheses.85
Conversely, relativists sneer at scientists unwilling to admit that language
makes all knowledge socially constructed. The two cultures divide was thus par-
odied as a “distinction between knowledge and the critique of knowledge,” the
former value-free, the latter value-laden. “One camp deems the sciences accurate
only when [uncontaminated] by subjectivity, politics, or passion,” in Latour’s
summary; the other camp “deems humanity, morality, subjectivity, or rights
worthwhile only when … protected from any contact with science, technology,
and objectivity.”86
Some deplore the animus but accept, even applaud, the two-cultures divide.
Harvard chemist-president James Bryant Conant’s General Education for a Free
Society (1945) termed essential both natural sciences that “describe, analyze, and
explain” and humanities that “appraise, judge, and criticize,” but he rejected](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-46-320.jpg)
![26 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge
integrative teaching as a waste of time. Echoing Conant 50 years on, zoologist
Gould felt sciences and humanities, like science and religion, should be “the
greatest of pals,” but as “nonoverlapping magisteria” ought to “keep their ine-
luctably different aims and logics separate.” An Israeli biologist believes disparate
analytic tools and approaches foretell a “deeper than ever” gulf. Since scientists
prize undistorted objectivity and humanists dwell on emotion and desire, a Dan-
ish physicist cannot imagine “the two cultures ever coming together.” Because
the arts and humanities spurn value-free science goals of progress and reliability,
trying to reunite them strikes biologist Lewis Wolpert as hopeless and pointless.87
In sum, science–humanities discourse showed many sensing a greater gulf,
seen by some as inevitable, even desirable. “Across the disciplinary map, calls for
the disunity of knowledge are being heard,” concluded historians of science Peter
Galison and Daniel Stump. The mid-century’s Grand Unified Theories gave way
by the century’s end to the “quasi-autonomy of different subcultures.”88
A few dismissed disunity as trivial academic infighting. A German biologist
called the two cultures idea a fallacy that neglected broad accord in how scientists
and humanists observe and verify. Celebrants at the British Academy (for hu-
manities and social sciences) 2002 centenary termed Snow’s two cultures a nox-
ious myth. Royal Society (for sciences) president Robert May regretted that the
RS and the BA were separate bodies. But “any notion that they represent ‘Two
Cultures’ were, are, and always will be … fundamentally mistaken,” for both af-
firm “rational, humane” Enlightenment values. British Academy president W. G.
Runciman called Snow’s “stereotypes of the foolish, reactionary man of letters
and the sensible, progressive man of science” absurd. There was no “unbridge-
able divide”; both relied alike on reasoned argument and respect for evidence.
Reaffirming Runciman 15 years later, his successor David Cannadine held the
arts−science divide “largely artificial.” But reality subverts wished-for affinity:
May regretted humanities’ exclusion from science research councils, Runciman
bemoaned hurdles that divided humanists from social scientists, Cannadine de-
plores the decline in English and history schooling.89
Many who see a widening gap fault science’s decline in education and public
trust. British schooling still forces children to choose between science and art at a
shockingly early age; few are able to opt for both. Most American colleges do not
require even a single hour of science. The bridge metaphor yields to the cafeteria,
with scientists and humanists at separate tables. Arts are remote from science at
David Lodge’s Two Cultures architectural allegory. Between environmental en-
gineers and nearby social scientists at Australia’s University of New South Wales
contact was almost nil. “Not only are the scientists not talking to the arts faculty,
but even within the arts, the[y] pooh-pooh each other.”90
That most universities are “unified in name only” seems to worry few, laments
Elkins. Embedded bias stultifies converse across the divide:
Each comes to other with a preconceived notion of what matters most,
and finds none of it. Scientists find a sea of optimism and not a fact in](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-47-320.jpg)
![Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 27
sight. [Humanists] find scientists talking as if they were the living dead—
discarnate brains with no stake in the outcome. Both go away feeling the
encounter was a complete waste of time, and both are … right.91
Rejection of science, along with “envy, resentment, and hostility because of
resource allocation and social prestige,” leaves humanists wilfully ignorant of
what science is and does, as Edward Slingerland terms his theology and sinol-
ogy colleagues. A mention of “behavioral neuroscience” sends them “regretfully
backing away.” The Social Text editors who read Sokal’s essay “didn’t understand
a thing,” observed literary scholar Franco Moretti, but they “didn’t care, because
at bottom they believe that physics has nothing to teach them.” Science-fiction
critic Roger Luckhurst admits having “no idea of or interest in scientific practice.”
Hence core humanities remain a “stagnant lagoon cut off from a great fertile
ocean of science innovation and progress,” concludes Slingerland. “Culpably
out of touch,” charged the Czech poet-physician Miroslav Holub, they defend
“eternal values” in “the casuistic jargon, the pretentious triviality” that pervades
literary theory and humanistic studies.92
Even litterateurs who are interested, as Wolpert says of Antonia Byatt, “have
hardly a clue as to what science is about.” Rare science-versed writers of fiction
like Richard Powers, who intertwines the four-note harmonics of Bach’s Gold-
berg Variations with the four-unit genetic code, dismay reviewers “unfamiliar
with, and easily intimidated by, scientific concepts.” Novelists like Powers and
playwrights like Tom Stoppard (Arcadia, 1993) and Michael Frayn (Copenhagen,
2000) may acquaint some humanists with more science than in Snow’s day, but
most remain unaware of their lack of science or blithely deny its disabling effects.
Poets, artists, and critics ignorant of science, charges E. O. Wilson, “talk exclu-
sively to one another.”93
Exclusivity is partly to blame. Scientists’ arcane culture mystifies the laity. “No-
bel laureates are our new cardinals,” said a classicist chairman of London’s Science
Museum, and when “you are part of a priesthood it would be contrary to human
nature not to have a certain contempt for those outside the pale.” But the gravest
barrier is not scientists’ hauteur, argues Slingerland; it is humanists’ ingrained
anti-science ethos. “Many of us are in the humanities because we were bad at or
turned off by science,” confesses English professor George Levine, who sees the
two cultures “incurably separated.” Confined to “the narrow barracks left to them
by more and more stingy deans,” the humanities have lost the support of former
friends, in Latour’s mea culpa. “The Zeus of Critique rules … over a desert.”94
Humanists are stunted by “a diet of poetry, philosophy and history, unleav-
ened by statistics or chromosomes,” charges journalist Nicholas Kristof. They
think it “barbaric … to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite
natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi squares.” Like Snow, Harvard presi-
dent Lawrence Summers lamented that while “none would admit proudly to not
having read any plays by Shakespeare,” it was “all too common and all too ac-
ceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome.” Scientific illiteracy is openly](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-48-320.jpg)
![30 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge
values and knowledge embraces both” modes. Since neither “speaks a language
that bridges rational and ethical traditions,” the few socialized into both can-
ons remain sidelined in either community. And “those socialized unequivocally
in one culture,” Carus concludes, “know other cultures [only] as amusement
and entertainment.” Lacking a cosmopolitan outlook, their mental lives remain
stunted, one-sided, half-baked.104
Emerging rapprochements
To bridge that breach, novel efforts to conjoin science with the arts and human-
ities have surfaced in recent decades. A prospective third culture, thought Snow,
might help bring the other two together. Snow’s third culture—social science,
medicine, and design—would combine insights from art and science. Snow’s
art−science mediation later inspired Nobelist Eric Kandel’s fruitful convergence
of neuroscience and modern art.105
The realm of design uniquely dealt with man-made milieus and artifacts.
Like medicine, it sought not abstract truths but practical solutions. Following
utopian planning failures (Corbusier’s “machine for living,” Buckminster Fuller’s
Dymaxion house), designers brought social empathy to technical know-how, ad-
dressing human needs for both the new and the familiar. In another third-culture
venture, the journal Zygon (1966) amalgamated science and religion, its scriptural
remit embracing both cosmology and conscience.106
Another self-proclaimed third culture, John Brockman’s 1988 Edge Foun-
dation, humanizes innovative science in plain language, aiming to demystify
chaos theory, fractals, teraflops, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human ge-
nome, punctuated equilibrium, and cyberspace. Luminous insights by the likes
of Richard Fortey, Oliver Sacks, James Gleick, Dava Sobel, and Martin Rees led
science chronicler Richard Holmes to hope that the notion of two divisive cul-
tures “will soon become entirely extinct”—if we don’t first extinguish ourselves
by ignoring science.107
As “science often seems now dreamlike, and art a matter of curiosity,” said
Eton School’s provost in 2009, “science becomes more like art, and art like
science.” And as science becomes bafflingly surreal even to its acolytes, art is
enlisted to clarify its insights. Artistic analogies have long inspired science. Fol-
lowing Pythagoras, Kepler showed how planetary angular velocities replicated
acoustic harmonic intervals. Herschel in the 1770s likened stellar patterns to
Bach’s and Handel’s harmonic structures, and read the stars like a musical score.
Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets (1914−1916) made their orbital sounds audible
30-odd octaves up. A musical trope describes the Bursting Pulsar, a neutron
star’s celestial eruptions. “We’ve seen some sources that play the drums, some
that crash cymbals, and a few that play the trumpet,” said astrophysicist Frederick
Lamb. “But this source is a one-man band.”108
Using laws of sight to captivate the eye, Monet, Klee, and Kandinsky spurred
brain science. Pasteur’s early work as a painter and lithographer familiarized him](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-51-320.jpg)
![J
CHAPTER XXVI.
WHO RUPERT JONES WAS.
UST before leaving New York Oliver wrote a letter to Frank
Dudley, announcing the plan he had in view.
My new guardian, Mr. Bundy, goes to Chicago on business [he wrote]
and I am to go with him. I don't know how long we shall be away. I shall
be well provided for, and expect to have a good time. I may write you
from the West. Remember me to Carrie, and believe me to be your
affectionate friend,
Oliver Conrad.
"So Oliver is going to Chicago," said Frank Dudley to Roland
Kenyon, on the afternoon of the same day.
Roland looked surprised.
"How do you know?" he asked.
Frank showed him the passage quoted above.
"He doesn't send his love to you," said Frank mischievously.
"I don't care for his love," returned Roland, tossing his head. "I'm
glad he is going to a distance."](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-75-320.jpg)
![M
CHAPTER XXVII.
A STARTLING TELEGRAM.
EANWHILE, in her Southern prison-house, Mrs. Kenyon
languished in hopeless captivity. There was only one thing to
add to her unhappiness, and that was supplied by the cruel
ingenuity of her unprincipled husband.
Tell her [wrote Mr. Kenyon to Dr. Fox] that her son Oliver is dead. He has just
died of typhoid fever, after a week's illness. We did all we could to save him, but
the disease obtained too great headway to be resisted, and he finally succumbed
to it.
"If she's not insane already that may make her so," he said to
himself cunningly. "I shall not tell even Dr. Fox that the story is false.
If he believes it he will be the more likely to persuade her of it."
Dr. Fox did believe it. Had it been an invention he supposed
Mr. Kenyon would have taken him into his confidence. So he made
haste to impart the news to his patient. Essentially a coarse-minded
man, he was not withheld, as many would have been, by a feeling of
pity or consideration, but imparted it abruptly.
"I've got bad news for you, Mrs. Kenyon," he said, entering the
room where she was confined.
"What is it?" she asked quickly.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/28050351-250512185802-f7ef6712/85/Quest-For-The-Unity-Of-Knowledge-1st-Edition-David-Lowenthal-80-320.jpg)
Quest For The Unity Of Knowledge 1st Edition David Lowenthal
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- 6. “No surer guide to the genealogy of this complex landscape of ideas.” — David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and History, Queen’s University Belfast, UK “In this absorbing and wide-ranging book, David Lowenthal explores the centuries-old dialogue between ideas of the unity and diversity of knowledge, as expressed in debates over science and the humanities, humanity and nature, place and space, identity and difference, heritage and history. For its remarkable scope, telling insights and sheer wit, this book will be warmly welcomed by scholars across the disciplines.” — Felix Driver, Professor of Human Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK “Makes fundamental tensions in science and the humanities relevant to problems of heritage and conservation studies. The Quest for the Unity of Knowledge combines scientific understanding with voices of disenfran- chised communities.” — Glenn Wharton, Clinical Professor, Museum Studies, New York University, USA “A work of stunning erudition, lucid presentation, and judicious even- handedness. It should be of interest to anyone interested in the past - and the future - of knowledge and scholarship.” — John Torpey, Presidential Professor of Sociology and History, Director, Institute for International Studies, Graduate Center, City University of New York, USA
- 7. “David Lowenthal’s sweeping synthesis of Western thought provides strategies for addressing our grandest challenges. ‘The mutual inter- dependence of apparently unrelated knowledges’, declares Lowenthal, may be the single most important message of this book. Here is a roadmap of one of the most exciting intellectual journeys of our time.” — Marcus Hall, Professor of Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland “Brilliantly charts the history of envisioning intellectual life as a great supercontinent of ideas versus a mental tectonics of many islands. Lowenthal counsels us to welcome both modes of thought, appreciat- ing how supercontinents and islands form from each other, in our ideas no less than in geology. A graceful, learned, and sage work by one of our deepest thinkers.” — Michael Bell, Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA “An exhilarating intellectual journey across place and time, crafting a shimmering history of ideas. This masterful scholar weaves a lifetime of learning and wisdom into a timely and urgent exploration of the changing contours of knowledge itself.” — Tom Griffiths, Professor of History, Australian National University “This magisterial synthesis navigates skilfully between the totalising and universalising quests for knowledge on the one hand, and the dis- parate and particularistic accounts of understanding on the other, opt- ing instead for something more fruitful: the creative tension between the two and their dialectic interweaving, beyond any disciplinary straitjackets. Along the way, Lowenthal gathers a plethora of wonderful actors, facts, ideas, and anecdotes, from the history of science, environ- mental studies, heritage and the politics of the past.” — Yannis Hamilakis, Professor of Archaeology and Modern Greek Studies, Brown University, USA
- 8. Quest for the Unity of Knowledge Is unity of knowledge possible? Is it desirable? Two rival visions clash. One seeks a single way of explaining everything known and knowable about ourselves and the universe. The other champions diverse modes of understanding served by disparate kinds of evidence. Contrary views pit science against the arts and hu- manities. Scientists generally laud and seek convergence. Artists and humanists deplore amalgamation as a threat to humane values. These opposing perspectives flamed into hostility in the 1950s “Two Cul- tures” clash. They culminate today in new efforts to conjoin insights into phys- ical nature and human culture, and new fears lest such syntheses submerge what the arts and humanities most value. This book, stemming from David Lowenthal’s inaugural Stockholm Archipelago Lectures, explores the “Two Cultures” quarrel’s underlying ideologies. Lowenthal shows how ingrained bias toward unity or diversity shapes major issues in education, religion, genetics, race relations, heritage governance, and environmental policy. Aimed at a general academic audience, Quest for the Unity of Knowledge espe- cially targets those in conservation, ecology, history of ideas, museology, and heritage studies. David Lowenthal, Emeritus Professor of Geography and Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, was an American historian and geographer. He was a renowned authority on heritage and conservation history, who died just days after he received the proofs of this book. In 2016 he received the British Academy Medal for The Past Is a Foreign Country—Revisited. The medal honors “a landmark academic achievement which has transformed understanding in the humanities and social sciences” in a book exploring “the manifold ways in which history engages, illuminates and deceives us.” cover image: Bibliothèque de Babel - Haute galerie circulaire by Erik Desma- zieres © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018
- 9. Routledge Environmental Humanities Series editors: Iain McCalman and Libby Robin Editorial Board Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK Jodi Frawley, University of Sydney, Australia Andrea Gaynor, The University of Western Australia, Australia Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA Jennifer Newell, American Museum of Natural History, New York, US Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, US Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia International Advisory Board William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK Sarah Buie, Clark University, USA Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China Rob Nixon, Princeton University, Princeton NJ, USA Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK Deborah Bird Rose, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
- 10. Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co-Director, Rachel Carson Centre, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, USA Kirsten Wehner, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, Australia The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recognising that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, over- population, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture. The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future environmental challenges has shifted the epicenter of environmental studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences. We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of en- vironmental change.
- 12. Quest for the Unity of Knowledge David Lowenthal
- 13. First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 David Lowenthal The right of David Lowenthal to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lowenthal, David, author. Title: Quest for the unity of knowledge / David Lowenthal. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge environmental humanities | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018029798 (print) | LCCN 2018045650 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429464706 (eBook) | ISBN 9781138613157 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138625686 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Knowledge, Theory of. | Science—Philosophy. | Humanities—Philosophy. Classification: LCC BD161 (ebook) | LCC BD161 .L67 2019 (print) | DDC 001—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029798 ISBN: 978-1-138-61315-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-62568-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-46470-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra
- 14. David Lowenthal (1923–2018), Emeritus Professor of Geography and Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, was an American historian and geographer. He was a renowned authority on heritage and conservation history. In 2016 he received the British Academy Medal for The Past Is a Foreign Country— Revisited.The medal honors “a landmark academic achievement which has transformed understanding in the humanities and social sciences” in a book exploring “the manifold ways in which history engages, illuminates and deceives us.” He died in his sleep after Quest for the Unity of Knowledge was completed but before he could commence its proofreading. Following the motto on his Harvard 60th reunion cap—“still looking ahead”—he was anticipating several substantial new projects on disparate subjects.
- 16. Foreword: Environmental Humanities, the Stockholm Archipelago Lectures, and David Lowenthal. By Sverker Sörlin, Libby Robin, and Marco Armiero. xii Abbreviations in endnotes. xv Introduction 1 1 Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 5 2 Man and nature 54 3 Island polymaths 76 4 Purity and mixture 98 5 Heritage universal and divisive 136 6 Past into present 156 Conclusion 192 Index 199 Contents
- 17. In September 2012 Professor David Lowenthal delivered the inaugural Archi- pelago Lecture Series in Stockholm at the invitation of the newly formed KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory (hereafter EHL).1 He chose the “Quest for the Unity of Knowledge” as his theme. His lectures unfolded over seven sessions, including an extended conversation with graduate students and a final major public lecture. David Lowenthal has never been a “disciplinary” scholar, bounded by a sin- gle academic domain. He has at various times taught landscape architecture, environmental psychology, political science, and philosophy. As a historian and geographer, he has written on conservation, landscape, heritage, environmental ethics and the lives of eminent scholars. His work draws on sources from all the arts and sciences and is deeply engaged with policy issues in local, national, and international protocols. Indeed, for such a non-disciplinary—perhaps even undisciplined—environment as the Laboratory, he struck the perfect note. Fol- lowing this first lecture series, the EHL has hosted an annual public Stockholm Archipelago lecture by an anthropologist, two geographers, a historian, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.2 David Lowenthal’s integrated thinking in Quest for the Unity of Knowledge re- flects a lifetime of work in international history, geography, natural and cultural heritage theory and practice. His interest in island ecology inspired the idea of the “archipelago” lectures, like islands both standing alone and making up a collective archipelagic whole: the microcosm illumining the macrocosm. His conceptual strategies mirror significant insights in the careers of leading Swedish literati Linnaeus and Strindberg. Initially, contact with David was generally about his wider work. But the en- vironment itself stepped in unexpectedly, sparking a chain of events that led to his Stockholm visit. One of us (Sverker) had been invited to UC Berkeley in April Foreword Environmental Humanities, the Stockholm Archipelago Lectures, and David Lowenthal
- 18. Foreword xiii 2010 to give that year’s Sather Lecture (with the 1972 Limits to Growth co-author, economist Jørgen Randers).3 The lecture series was named after the Norwegian immigrant Peder Sather, a benefactor of the University of California who is im- mortalized on the campus’s main Sather Gate. On the same day Eyjafjallajökull, an Icelandic volcano, erupted dramatically, reminding flying humans of the 21st cen- tury of their dependence on the dynamic vagaries of nature. Stuck in California for an entire week, Sverker met regularly with David in Berkeley. This concatena- tion of the irrefutable forces of nature, global networks, and human empathy, and its ensuing serendipitous contact led to the idea of the Stockholm lecture series. Quest for the Unity of Knowledge addresses scholars and activists in many walks of life. Few authors can approach the subject of the unity of knowledge—in the environment and beyond—from such a diverse range of sources. Lowenthal’s own life history has closely followed those of polymaths who were his special Wahl- verwandtschaften.4 Carl O. Sauer, the Berkeley geographer, was one, whose biog- raphy he helped to complete and bring to publication after Michael Williams had passed away.5 Another was George Perkins Marsh, one of the great 19th-century thinkers, whose famed Man and Nature (1864) was a major precursor to the envi- ronmental humanities. Lowenthal has written Marsh’s biography twice―first in 1958, and again in 2000.6 Reexamining past quests for transdisciplinary under- standing is the hallmark of this 21st-century polymath. The chapters that follow do more than reflect on humanity and the environment. They reflect a lifetime of both questing for, and questioning the validity of, the unity of knowledge. Sverker Sörlin, Libby Robin, and Marco Armiero Stockholm May 2018 Sverker Sörlin is Professor of Environmental History in the Division of His- tory of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Stockholm. With Nina Wormbs he co-founded the KTH Environmental Humanities Lab and the two led its buildup during 2011 and 2012. Libby Robin is Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University and was Guest Professor at the KTH Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment 2011–2014, and an affiliated scholar 2014–2017. Marco Armiero is an environmental historian, Director of the KTH Environ- mental Humanities Laboratory since 2013, and curator of the Stockholm Archi- pelago Lectures. Notes 1 Thanks to a generous donation from Swedish industrialist, Carl Bennet, the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory commenced operations in 2011. David Lowenthal’s Stockholm Archipelago Lectures were the first major public event of the Laboratory. The environmental humanities aim to bridge academic understanding
- 19. xiv Foreword of, and public concern with, such topics as climate change, environmental racism, the Anthropocene, industrial contamination, and environmental injustice, all of which the KTH Lab has explored. See Sverker Sörlin, “The environmental humanities— what, when, why, and whither?” Kulturella Perspektiv 25:1 (2016): 7–18. 2 Speakers and their lectures in the following years: 2013—Kirsten Hastrup, Depart- ment of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, “The Meltdown of a High Arctic Hunting Community.” 2014—Laura Paulido, Department of Geography, Univer- sity of Southern California, “Environmental Racism as State-Sanctioned Violence.” 2015—Noel Castree, Department of Geography, University of Woollongong, “The Environmental Humanities and Global Change Research: Actualities and Possibili- ties.” 2016—Michelle Murphy, Department of History, University of Toronto, “Al- terLife in the Aftermath of Industrial Chemicals.” 2017—Dan Fagin, environmental journalist, New York Times, “Connecting Dots in Toms River and Beyond.” 3 Sverker Sörlin, “Who is climate leader?: Sweden’s Green Modernism and the defeat in Copenhagen—new lessons for Old Europe!” (The 2010 Peder Sather Lecture, University of California, Berkeley, 16 April 2010). 4 The German title of Goethe’s third novel, Kindred by Choice (1809). 5 Michael Williams with David Lowenthal and William M. Denevan, To Pass on a Good Earth: The Life and Work of Carl O. Sauer (University of Virginia Press, 2014). 6 David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (Columbia Univer- sity Press, 1958); idem, George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation (University of Washington Press, 2000).
- 20. CUNY City University of New York CUP Cambridge University Press DL David Lowenthal GPM George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation IDS Interdisciplinary Science Reviews IJCP International Journal of Cultural Property JHI Journal of the History of Ideas NY New York NYRB New York Review of Books OUP Oxford University Press Times The Times [London] TLS Times Literary Supplement UP University Press U xx P University of xx Press Abbreviations in Endnotes
- 22. Two modes of understanding dominate the history of ideas. One posits the overarching unity of knowledge, the other cherishes its multifarious diversity. Unity is the goal of those who seek a single all-encompassing explanation of everything. Diversity is lauded by those who commend difference and variety as life-enhancing. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin cites a few antitheses commonly felt to alienate the two camps: The specific and unique versus the repetitive and the universal, the con- crete versus the abstract, perpetual movement versus rest, the inner versus the outer, quality versus quantity, culture-bound versus timeless principles, mental strife and self-transformation … versus the possibility (and desir- ability) of peace, order, final harmony and the satisfaction of all rational human wishes.1 Others consider what divides “lumpers” from “splitters” a matter of mental habit or moral temperament: there are those who measure, and there are those who value. Built into the psyche is a deeply embedded dualism between mind and body, self and other, spirit and matter, transcendent consciousness and thoughtless things. The very notion of all-inclusive explanation is anathema to many, per- haps to most. Few can bear to subsume human art and aspiration within a merely mechanistic framework, or to envision art and ecstasy solely through the optics of atoms and animals, galaxies and genes. To conjoin contemplation of the inten- tional mind with analysis of the purposeless cosmos is felt to debase the meaning of life. Virtue requires unmixed purity, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas elucidated Scriptural mandates.2 So we shrink from coupling spirit and flesh, Introduction
- 23. 2 Introduction sacred and secular, mind and matter, man and nature, domestic and alien, this world and the next. How then explain recurrent efforts in the Western tradition, from ancient Greece and the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and scientific ration- alism, to find or fashion an overarching rubric for fathoming all nature and culture together? What of the Classical philosophers, the Enlightenment sages, the Victorians anticipating a Newton of the moral sciences, the Vienna Circle logicians, and the Harvard–M.I.T. systematizers who sought to find reason even in the irrational? Are these just aberrant exceptions to the common rejection of monism? Or do they reflect a no less deeply felt urge to understand humanity and the universe in toto, whether by reducing differences or by transcending them? These opposing visions—the one championing the separateness of inquiries into inviolate realms of matter and of spirit, the other bent on amalgamating them in explanatory discourse—not only coexist but are sometimes affirmed by the same individual. For each stance necessarily implies the other: unifiers ac- knowledge the existence of contrary views, diversifiers recognize the common- alities that make possible discourse between the two. Both positions are as much ethical as epistemic: unity bespeaks communal amity and consensual progress, diversity denotes freedom and individuality. Between those who seek to unify and those who cleave to diversity, the balance shifts over time in response to changing social and political circum- stance. For example, positivist scholars of the 1920s and 1930s considered unity of knowledge a vital concomitant of coherent collective purpose. Contrariwise, relativist humanists of the 1990s upheld diversity not only as empirically logical but also as socially and morally imperative, axiomatic for individual liberty and societal autonomy. In human affairs generally, unifiers reflect a basic urge to find certainty and banish doubt. Christian religion and science alike sought to retrieve the compre- hensive vision given to Adam before the Fall and again lost to humanity with the Tower of Babel. That quest became a very Swedish enterprise. In naming all the plants and animals Carl Linnaeus was widely lauded (and saw himself) as a second Adam. And by combining knowledge of all realms of nature with the history of Sweden and of the whole world, August Strindberg sought to “decipher the code of the master builder who has created the world.”3 In quantum physics, the quest for a Grand Unified Theory (and beyond that for a Theory of Everything) aims to conjoin gravity with weak, strong, and elec- tromagnetic interactive forces. But in mundane reality, charge diversifiers, the search for unity seems to generate not only single- but simple-mindedness. It re- duces the complexity of human aims and arts either to mechanistic determinism or to the meaningless number 42, the satirist Douglas Adams’s “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”4 However, diversifiers are in some respects equally reductive. Some opt for pluralism: multiple modes of reality and understanding. But the majority are dualists, given to segregating things into two opposing camps or categories. This
- 24. Introduction 3 reflects a need, as basic as the monism of unifiers, to bifurcate everything into subject or object, inside or outside, sacred or profane, domestic or foreign, native or alien, us or them. In each case the first is good, the second bad. A critical moment for both unifiers and partisans of diversity was the con- flicted Zeitgeist of the late 19th and early 20th century. Advances in technology came at a pace that seemed to assure the sway of science. A subject-matter hierar- chy, with physics and chemistry lording it over the arts and humanities, became the standard model in higher education. The Second World War’s successful integration of information systems, quantum physics, computer science, and lin- guistics inspired confidence in the imminent unification of all knowledge, the understanding of moral strictures conjoined with that of molecular structures. Yet even as they hailed the fruition of science many savants dreaded its su- premacy. That the 40-foot dynamo in the 1900 Paris Exposition had dethroned the medieval Virgin of Chartres Cathedral in public admiration appalled scholar-statesman Henry Adams. The triumph of technology bereft humanity of mystic reverence and betokened moral decay.5 Others feared a mechanistic world ruled by robotic rationality. And the soon ensuing mass slaughters of both world wars, the Holocaust, and the Bomb suggested that unifying knowledge came at a catastrophic cost. Cast as a schism between science and humanism, that conflict was made no- torious by C. P. Snow’s and F. R. Leavis’s Two Cultures fracas in the 1950s and 1960s. The breach was further polarized by fears of nuclear Armageddon, by the failure of postwar social-engineering, by environmental angst, by postmodern relativism, and by 1980s and 1990s science wars that called all objective knowl- edge into question. Ditching harmonious confluence, inquiry into nature and humanity turned stridently antagonistic. And despite interdisciplinarity’s new cult status, the two cultures continue to mistrust each other’s goals, methods, and probity. Science sees the humanities riddled with pseudoscholarly trivia and partisan agendas; the arts and humanities decry science’s imperious arrogance and reductive positivism. This book, stemming from my Stockholm Archipelago Lectures of 2012, reflects on ideas and ideologies that advocate the unity or the diversity of knowl- edge. These opposing perspectives culminate on one side in E. O. Wilson’s call for “consilience,” amalgamating insights into physical nature and human culture, and on the other side in Stephen Jay Gould’s belief that nature and culture are “nonoverlapping magisteria,” whose distinctively unlike aims are best served by disparate kinds of evidence and divergent techniques of inquiry.6 Affinity with monism on the one hand, and with dualism and pluralism on the other, underlie the pressing social and environmental concerns explored in the following chapters: Chapter 1, Unifying Knowledge—Miracle or Mirage? traces the origins and history of the “Two Cultures” conflict held to divide the natural sciences from the arts and humanities in scholarship and in public affairs. It also explores recent efforts to repair the breach.
- 25. 4 Introduction Chapter 2, Man and Nature, discusses changing views of relations between humanity and the natural world, stressing recognition of increasing human en- vironmental impacts that imperil global resources and well-being. Chapter 3, Island Polymaths, featuring the holistic insights of Linnaeus and Strindberg, suggests that insular experience in close-knit communities generates collaborative mindsets and skills that foster ecologically sustainable behavior and insights. Chapter 4, Purity and Mixing, deals with unity and diversity in humans and other species, focusing on views about ancestry, race, blood, genes, hybrids, na- tivity, and foreignness that stress purity and indigeneity as opposed to mixing and amalgamation. Chapter 5, Heritage Universal and Divisive, shows how cosmopolitan efforts to prize cultural property for global stewardship as universal goods are thwarted by competing tribal and national exclusive interests. Chapter 6, Past and Present, concerns pressures to amalgamate these different temporal realms and suggests that modern media and technology increasingly dispense with the past or dissolve it into an all-enveloping present, making its foreign differences baffling and deplorable. Notes 1 Isaiah Berlin “The divorce between the sciences and the humanities” 1974, in his Against the Current Essays in the History of Ideas (London: Pimlico, 1979), 84–85. 2 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; Routledge, 2003). 3 Peter Harrison, “Linnaeus as a second Adam? Taxonomy and the religious vocation,” Zygon 44 (2009): 879–93; August Strindberg, A Blue Book (1918), Samlade skrifter 46 (2004): 231, 403; Michael Robinson, Strindberg and Autobiography (London: Ubiquity, 2013), 44–45. 4 Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Pan Books, 1979). 5 Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” in The Education of Henry Adams (pri- vately printed, 1906), 317–26. 6 E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998); Stephen Jay Gould, “Nonoverlapping magisteria,” Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16–22.
- 26. Is unity of knowledge desirable? Is it possible? “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing,” declared Blaise Pascal, against the faith in their ultimate synthesis held by many.2 Dispute is legion. Contrary views especially pit science against the arts and humanities. Scientists tend to laud the prospect of unity and seek convergence. Many in the arts and humanities decry amalgama- tion as a threat to transcendent human values. The conflict came to a head just a century ago. On 6 April 1922 at the Société française de philosophie in Paris the greatest philosopher of the time, Henri Berg- son, encountered rising star Albert Einstein, then about to receive the Nobel Prize in physics (as did Bergson in literature in 1927). The occasion’s topic was Time, long Bergson’s concern, newly revolutionized in Einstein’s theory of rel- ativity. In a 30-minute talk, Bergson lauded Einstein’s cosmic clock-time but deplored his neglect of time as lived, a durational metaphysics informed by his- tory, experience, memory, and anticipation. Einstein retorted with a dismissive rebuff: “There is no philosophical time.” There was only the physicist’s objective time, set by the speed of light, and the psychologist’s instinctual folk time. This appalled Bergson, who saw the universe in constant change, fluctuating, contin- gent, and unpredictable. And Einstein’s reductive dualism ill became the scientist who, while obsessively seeking a unified explanation of the universe’s immutable laws, averred that he took the unity of nature as an act of faith. Yet Bergson was widely felt to have lost the debate. Einstein’s temporal logic came to dominate discourse, relegating “intuitive” artistic and literary approaches to secondary, subsidiary import. No longer able to fathom science’s increasing complexity, most humanists stopped trying. “In the face of the rising influence of science,” concludes historian of science Jimena Canales, Einstein’s “time of the universe” and Bergson’s “time of our lives” traversed “dangerously con- flicting paths … , pitting scientists against humanists, expert knowledge against Chapter 1 Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage?1
- 27. 6 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge lay wisdom.” Rivalry between “science and the rest”—philosophy, metaphysics, humanities, and the arts—has embroiled scholars and statesmen and the general public ever since.3 In the mid-20th century that divergence erupted in the Two Cultures debate, a notorious Cambridge dispute between physicist C. P. Snow and literary scholar F. R. Leavis. Their quarrel revealed and inflamed deep-seated animus in and beyond academe. Stereotypes polarized the aloof mechanistic scientist against the free-spirited compassionate artist. Discordant aims, methods, parlance, and moral stances poisoned their exchanges. Enduring strife fueled mutual mistrust and ill-will: each assailed the other as ignorant, regressive, narrow-minded, rigid. This chapter traces the conflict’s history in Western culture. Medieval Chris- tian unity based on sacramental certitudes gave way to dualism unleashed by the Reformation. Early-modern empirical science and Enlightenment progress reanimated faith in universal goals, now to be won by observation and exper- iment rather than theological inquiry. But the cult of romantic individualism, together with the growing specialization of knowledge, hardened the breach between science and art. Previously marginalized in academe, physical science by the mid-20th century supplanted the humanities in public esteem, becoming the model to which the arts and social sciences aspired. When public faith in sci- ence later frayed, the arts and humanities rebutted science’s claims to objectivity. Widespread skepticism led humanists to reject empirical evidence of truth and to disparage the quest for unifying knowledge as a scientistic chimera. The new millennium brought efforts to repair the breach, fueled by converging concerns among poets, painters, and physicists. The Snow/Leavis confrontation, 1956–1962 Sixty years ago physicist-novelist C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures and the Scientific Rev- olution famously deplored the science–humanities divide. The long-standing gulf between the two cultures was deepening; riven by mutual “incomprehension and dislike” they had “almost ceased to communicate at all.” Scientists felt out- cast aliens in British academe. Despite its vital wartime role, science was mar- ginalized in the Oxbridge that supplied most government and industry leaders. To be sure, science was robustly pursued at those universities. But it was an unknown realm to most students there. In elite schools science took a back seat or was totally ignored. The cream of Britain’s youth was ignorant of elementary physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, mathematics beyond the multiplication table. Snow was often asked “what do you mean by mass, or acceleration—the scientific equivalent of saying, can you read?” In short, most of “the cleverest people in the western world” had no more insight into modern physics than their Neolithic ancestors. Snow thought the divide worse than before the First World War, when prime ministers Salisbury, Gladstone, and Balfour took serious interest in science. Trendy linguistic trivia now heightened Luddite arrogance. Literary “intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the
- 28. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 7 industrial revolution,” charged Snow. Their animus against science and technol- ogy stymied urgent social needs. The “moral component” engrained in science he thought absent from literary culture.4 Snow triggered a withering rejoinder from F. R. Leavis, doyen of literary criticism. Leavis derided Snow’s “complete ignorance of … the history of civ- ilization.” Leavis saw no moral resource in science. Science tells us how to do things, not why we should do them. Its province was means not ends. The sway of science and technology left the precious arts and humanities precariously be- leaguered; Leavis feared the demise of high culture in a science-centered world.5 Reactions were sharply skewed, but most agreed the divide was disastrous. Far from demolishing Snow’s argument, Leavis’s ad hominem polemic confirmed its “truth and timeliness,” wrote crystallographer J. D. Bernal. There was “al- most no contact between science and philosophy” in 1950s academe, “still less between science” and the arts. “We all live in our watertight compartments.”6 W. H. Auden’s wartime education segregated “the tough who measure from the tender who value.” Novelist Antonia Byatt’s 1950s schooling “predestined all thirteen-year-olds to be illiterate or innumerate (if not both),” with the bias “that to be literary is to be quick, perceptive and subtle. Whereas scientists were dull, and also—in the nuclear age—quite possibly dangerous and destructive.”7 Oxbridge scientists dismissed arts confreres as frivolous lightweights. To at- tract a literary girl, Ian McEwan’s 1960s science student steeps himself in Milton, and suspects “a monstrous bluff.” For he found “nothing on the scale of difficulty he encountered daily” in his science course. He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, at- tempting to grasp some of the hardest things ever thought. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week … There was noth- ing that they talked about … that anyone with half a brain could fail to understand. He had read four of the best essays on Milton. He knew. And yet they passed themselves off as his superiors, these lie-abeds.8 American academe was scarcely less partitioned. Harvard historian of science George Sarton had launched the journal Isis in 1912 to bridge the humanist- scientist gulf. Considering the two-cultures rupture “the most ominous conflict of our time,” he later forecast that “the intolerance of both” would worsen it. Litterateur Lionel Trilling faulted their extreme isolation. Earlier humanists had found science and mathematics “almost as readily accessible to understanding and interest as literature and history.” But by 1971 science was alien to most. “Its con- cepts do not engage emotion or challenge imagination. Our poets are indifferent to them.”9 Nobel physicist I. I. Rabi found science “no longer communicable” to the educated majority. Naturalist Loren Eiseley saw a toxic brew of “fear, pro- fessionalism, and misunderstanding” disjoining art from science.10 Some demurred: Britain’s government science minister dismissed the two cul- tures “legend” as academic politics, and American biologist Stephen Jay Gould as
- 29. 8 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge snooty Oxbridge twaddle.11 But most admitted the gulf and traced it to a cultural elitism that equated science with ‘stinks’ at, say, lowbrow Sheffield University. Conversely, among American scientists the poet Auden felt “like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing-room full of dukes.”12 Yet American statesmen no less than British were “ignorant of if not defi- nitely hostile to [scientific] intellect and reason,” charged Rabi. “Our intellectual leaders today know … only two things about the basic conceptions of modern science: that they do not understand them, and that they are now so far separated from them” that they may never find out what they mean, judged science histo- rian Gerald Holton. And the separation was “steadily increasing.”13 Scientific disdain festered among American literati proudly confessing igno- rance of the structure of the universe or one’s own body, the behavior of matter or of one’s own mind. The irrelevance to them of empirical science made “cleav- age between the two cultures … inevitable,” thought philosopher Jürgen Haber- mas in 1970. It has scarcely lessened since. A Nobel laureate biologist who tells London partygoers he is a scientist instantly detects “panic and disengagement,” and changes the subject to literature or music.14 Snow’s Two Cultures still rouses rancor. “It might seem extraordinary that a debate initiated nearly sixty years ago can still provoke strong views.” But, writes science historian Frank James, such longevity shows that underlying issues “about the place of science in culture and society … have not gone away.” With scientific illiteracy “as prevalent as ever,” held Britain’s minister for business and skills in 2009, Snow’s key themes “still resonate. We are still trying to bridge the gap.”15 A Huxley−Arnold precursor, 1880–1882 The Snow–Leavis conflict had a famed Cambridge antecedent. Eighty years earlier, biologist T. H. Huxley and poet-essayist Matthew Arnold had taken up the same gauntlet, revealing an epistemic gulf almost as profound. Absent, though, was the animus; Huxley and Arnold were like-minded friends. Huxley’s 1880 lecture lamented the disjunction of science from literature and the current fashionable disdain of science. “Advocates of scientific education [are] pooh- poohed by the men of business [and] excommunicated by the classical scholars” convinced that physical science “touches none of the higher problems of life.” Only a grounding in Greek and Roman antiquity would do. Hence “scholarly and pious persons” remained ignorant of “the first principles of scientific think- ing [and] of established scientific truths.” Huxley claimed more for science than Snow would do. Like many late Victo- rians, he fancied human affairs like physical matters governed by universal laws of nature. Scientific methods would yield definite social knowledge. Anarchy and despotism would be overcome when men “deal with political, as they now deal with scientific questions,” in conformity with nature’s strict order. “The chief business of mankind is to learn that order and govern themselves accordingly.”
- 30. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 9 For academics’ persisting dismissal of science Huxley blamed unworldly me- dieval Catholicism. As seen by 12th-century university founders, Scriptures, as interpreted and supplemented by the [Papacy], contain[ed] a complete and infallibly true body of information. Theological dicta were [as fixed as] the axioms and definitions of Euclid. … All material existence was but a base and insignificant blot upon the fair face of the spiritual world. “The only thing really worth knowing in this world was how to secure” the promised place in a better hereafter. “The study of nature, the playground of the devil,” had no bearing on this divine purpose of human life. And despite the sub- sequent expansion of knowledge about nature, academic clerisy seven centuries later still viewed the material world with contempt, the ancient classics as “the sole avenue to culture.”16 In rebuttal, Matthew Arnold concurred that science mattered but disputed Huxley’s contention that litterateurs ignored it. Euclid’s Elements, Newton’s Principia, Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin were integral to scholarship; true humanism embraced science. Nature study should be compulsory. But students must first be “moralized” by letters, poetry, and religion. Education’s purpose was not to gather data but to perfect humanity, knowledge prized as conducive to “soberness, righteousness, and wisdom.” As science supplied none of this, the classics were all the more essential. When 17th-century science banished medieval superstition, humane letters had replaced religion as inspiration. The “fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power” of the art and poetry of antiquity were today’s guides to conduct and beauty.17 Unlike Snow/Leavis, the Huxley/Arnold exchange elicited broad agreement. Empirical and experimental knowledge alone was not enough, but all knowl- edge was one, spiritual and scientific. Aesthetic principles were as lawlike as physics; Arnold posited the universal value of classical symmetry. His deference to science pervaded 1920s philosophy and literary criticism. Arnold’s disciple I. A. Richards extolled science’s objective truths against the “distortions” of poetry’s subjective truths. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound cited Arnold to support the transcendent merits of “serious” art. Huxley’s grandson and Arnold-admirer Aldous Huxley infused the facts of nature into the fancies of art: knowing why nightingales sang became indispensable material for poetry.18 Wedding art with science unified material knowledge with spiritual awareness. From sacred unity to secular dualism Modern faith in science long echoed medieval faith in Scripture. Up to the 17th century all Western learning was essentially one and divine. The book of nature and the book of humanity were conjoined compendia of sacred truths. From Au- gustine to Aquinas and beyond, everything in the cosmos, from bees and bears to
- 31. 10 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge stones and stars, gold and silver to blood and bones, accrued allegorical meaning from biblical citation. Scriptural wisdom reached the faithful through translated didactic texts like the Physiologus, precursor to countless bestiaries. “Where does the pelican fit into the scheme of things?” invited moral not biological reflection. As a symbol of filial devotion and charity, the pelican piercing its breast to revive its young signified Christ on the Cross. Just as God’s Word initiated the Creation, physical things were expressions of the words denoting them.19 Although all truth reflected scriptural exegesis, some truths were superior to others. Those concerning divinely created nature transcended human inventions. “Eternal laws” of theology and morality outranked speculative studies of nature. Subordinate sciences—astronomy, optics, mechanics—attested not laws of nature but rules of calculation. Man-made tools lay in the realm of art, not science.20 But knowledge of God from nature accorded with that from Scripture; these con- gruent modes of knowledge revealed divine truth at different levels of certainty. God’s two accordant books began to part company with the Reformation and the rise of science. Although all knowledge still expressed divine design, the ob- jective results of observation, experiment, and causal explanation gained increas- ing merit. God himself, as Newton said, was clearly “well skilled in mechanics and geometry.”21 Scholarly inquiry now looked more to things than to words. Texts were no longer read allegorically but literally and critically. Scriptural al- legory had vested religious authority in the interpreter rather than the origi- nal sacred author. To recover the pure truth of Christ’s teachings, unadorned Scripture, stripped of accumulated glosses, became reformers’ high road to God’s will. Patent errors of translation required dismantling scriptural accretions. “The profound kinship of language with the world dissolved,” in Foucault’s summa- tion. “Things and words were separated from one another.” Calvin condemned biblical allegories as “deadly corruptions,” Luther as “fictitious readings” for “weak minds”; only literal meaning was devout.22 Protestantism demoted relics and ritual, elevating the sermon over the mass, with pews facing pulpits instead of altars, and incited wholesale demolition of images. Plants and animals newly found overseas, that made no sense within Old World symbolic lexicons, further weakened the influence of biblical allegory.23 Science took over sacred terrain vacated by theology. Nature shorn of sym- bolic accretion was reordered by taxonomy and mathematics, both divinely in- spired and rationally comprehensible. For Kepler geometry was co-eternal with God, for Galileo mathematics the language of His universe. God being the au- thor both of words and works, Bacon held science and Scripture incapable of conflict. But scriptural clues to God’s salvific intent differed from scientific evi- dence of His power and will, as Bacon warned would-be unifiers who “unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together.”24 Scientists stressed the constancy of divine cosmic things against fallible hu- man texts. Coeval with the Creation, uncorrupted by Adam’s Fall, mathematics
- 32. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 11 and logic imparted assured sacred knowledge. Nature’s primordial antiquity be- came a stock defense against charges of scientific sacrilege. When theologians condemned findings of a change in the Baltic shore as contrary to Genesis, scientists replied that “God had made both the Baltic and Genesis, [and] if there was any contradiction between the two works, the error must lie in the copies that we have of the book rather than in the Baltic Sea, of which we have the original.”25 “Holy Scripture can never lie,” assured Galileo, but linguistic corruption made it often hidden and hard to fathom. Unlike errant biblical glosses, immutable na- ture “never transgresses the laws imposed upon her.” Hence nature yielded surer truth than “biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath their words.” Hobbes and Spinoza found Euclidean proofs a refreshing contrast to “the murky ambiguities of scriptural texts.” William Gilbert dedicated his pioneering work on magnetism to those “who look for knowledge not in books but in things themselves.”26 Abraham Cowley praised Bacon for shifting science “from Words, which are but Pictures of the Thought … to things, the Mind’s right Object.” England’s Royal Society adjured scientists to adopt “primitive purity, and shortness,” to bring all things “as near the Mathematical plainness” as possible. French scholars likewise renounced the “metaphor, embellishment and highly coloured expression” in the plays of Racine or Molière and the verse of La Fontaine for plain and literal language.27 It was just this surrender of words to things that Leavis later blamed for the science-driven dualism that dismembered the unity of knowledge. As Shake- speare gave way to Newton and Dante to Descartes, rhetorical imagery, once the font of inspiration, was dethroned as an impediment to prosaic abstraction. And the primacy of objective rationality distanced observer from observed, feeling from thought, language from life. Knowledge based on observation and experiment challenged faith-based or- thodoxy, which deployed sacred texts to confirm Scripture and held new dis- covery heretical. Cardinal Bellarmine’s retort to Galileo, in science–religion’s cause célèbre, stressed “the unchanging and marmoreal already-revealed Truth of the faith, which requires not investigation and questioning … but submis- sion, acceptance, obedience, worship.” A moving earth and stationary sun might be mathematically more coherent than eccentric orbits and epicycles, but af- firming its reality endangered “Holy Faith by rendering Holy Scripture false.”28 That “the sun ariseth, and goeth down” (Ecclesiastes 1.5) was God’s directly imparted wisdom. To that view Catholicism adhered for four more centuries, the rift aggravated by the 1870 Vatican dictum of papal infallibility proscribing conclusions based on “false” (that is, rigidly empirical) science. Religion was a “special kind” of science, “with its own reasoning, method, and modes of expression,” more a conscience, argued Cardinal Newman, “so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted,” that it must be left to authoritative experts—that is, to
- 33. 12 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge Catholic theologians. In effect, Newman accepted the distinction between the realms of matter and of spirit consequent on the Reformation.29 Science’s cumulative advance also opposed it to artistic achievement. In the 16th- and 17th-century Ancients–Moderns debate, science attested modern prowess, while art languished in awe of ancient greatness. Science was an ongo- ing collective enterprise ceaselessly adding to knowledge. But artistic endeavor was neither cumulative nor progressive; merit accrued to individual effort alone. To the poet or painter, architect or composer, past genius seemed unsurpassable. Enlightenment philosophes excluded the arts from the march of progress. Goethe epitomized the difference: he made scientific but no poetic claims, for “poets more excellent lived before me, but … in the difficult science of colors … I have a consciousness of superiority.”30 Preeminent precursors led poets, painters, and critics to posit artistic deterio- ration. Material advance bred aesthetic decline; impoverished spirit was the sad price of scientific advance. Technology freed science from reliance on art; me- chanical reproduction by the late-18th century displaced artists’ illustrations in anatomy texts. Science flourished at poetry’s expense. Many held that reducing nature’s mysteries to soulless analysis stifled reverence and delight. To conjure why God so disposed the movements of the sun and moon was for Thomas Browne “a sweeter piece of Reason, and a diviner point of Philosophy,” than Copernican science. Kepler’s machine-driven celestial physics dismayed John Donne as no “divine living being but … a clockwork.” Newton’s mechanics besmirched Dante’s spiritual cosmos where human love “moved the sun and the other stars.” Space became mere geometry, time only numbers; “a world of quantity [and] mechanical regularity [bereft] of purposive harmony and creative ideals,” in philosopher E. A. Burtt’s summation, “hard, cold, colorless, silent, and dead.”31 By the late 18th century the mystique of imagination severed art from science. As fancy ran riot in the arts, facts stiffened in the sciences, where imaginative vision became suspect. The two realms’ aims, rationales, and personae increas- ingly diverged. Empirical science, cumulative, collective, objective, discovered what already existed in nature. Lone artists’ novel creations were born of im- passioned feeling, irreducible to logic or reason. The findings of science came from persistent collaborative effort, the wonders of art from spontaneous genius. Lauding individualism, subjectivity, and originality as wellsprings of creativ- ity, art rejected Enlightenment science’s orderly decorum. The artist’s quest for beauty, cautioned the poet Baudelaire, had nothing to do with scientists’ search for truth.32 Romantic arcadian nostalgia bemoaned intrusive mechanistic science. With “our meddling intellect,” lamented Wordsworth, “we murder to dissect.” For Carlyle, measuring and counting banished cultivation and compassion. New- ton destroyed the rainbow’s poetry by expounding its prismatic colors, averred Keats: “Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, … Unweave a rainbow.” Edgar Allan Poe saw science as a vulture preying on the poet’s heart, William Blake as
- 34. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 13 a conspiracy against prophetic vision. Assailing Snow’s philistinism, Leavis took “Nor shall my sword sleep” from Blake’s Luddite polemic: And did these feet in ancient time Walk upon England’s mountains green * * * * * * * * * * * And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills * * * * * * * * * * * I will not cease from Mental Fight Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand, Til we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant Land.33 Novelist Antonia Byatt satirizes a Luddite teacher who tells students to ignore Einstein; what they need is Blake’s vision. Her Mickey Impey (“Don’t teach little kids science. Teach them human things, making love, painting pictures, writing poetry”) pens a Blake pastiche: The metal men in coats of white In shuttered rooms with shuttered eyes Make metal death with metal claws Block out the sunshine from the skies.34 That science strips the world of wonder and meaning remains a recurrent ro- mantic lament. Science and splendor: the glories of nature For most, however, the benefits of science outweighed fears of loss of faith or beauty. With better measurement, “the Bounds of Moral Philosophy will also be enlarged,” promised Newton. The world of learning was still a unified con- tinuum, unified now by fact as well as faith. The surety of science was held to inform all history. Understanding human society called for a science analogous to that devoted to the behavior of bees or beavers, in Condorcet’s analogy. Some coming “Newton of the moral sciences”—instanced in the philosopher David Hume—would explain human nature by nature’s laws, distancing but not de- throning God. Convinced that humanity was “governed by laws as fixed and regular as those that rule in the physical world,” H. T. Buckle in the 1850s sought to resolve “the great problem of human affairs” by uniting “into a single science all the laws of the moral and physical world.” For Goethe that unity was a secular religion, the entire universe a sentient being: when man “feels the world around him as a grand, beautiful, worthy, and precious whole,” the entire cosmos “would admire the pinnacle of its own growth and essence.”35
- 35. 14 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge Science was praised for embellishing material and social progress with beauty and morality. Scientific enthusiasm broadened schooling, natural history spear- heading the spread of education. “All art should become science,” held the Ro- mantic scholar Friedrich Schlegel, “and all science art.” Wordsworth hailed “discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist” as truly poetical. Es- teeming art the acme of creation, Darwin celebrated evolution’s “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.”36 Poetry graced scientific description. Naturalists invoked Wordsworth and Tennyson; lines from Milton, Byron, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene enlivened trea- tises on carboniferous coal and the origin of mammals. The Scottish geologist Hugh Miller’s literary fancies of quarry fossils thrilled readers not just with ser- mons in stones, but throughout the “ocean, the broad earth, the blue firma- ment and all its stars.” As it needed art, so “science excites poetry, rather than extinguishes it,” wrote the polymath Victorian Herbert Spencer. “Where the uninformed and unenquiring eye perceives neither novelty nor beauty,” held the astronomer William Herschel, the scientist tracing causes and confirming laws “walks in the midst of wonders.”37 Poetry, painting, and gardening vitalized knowledge of nature. Alexander von Humboldt’s compendious Cosmos (1845–1862) suffused scientific discourse with aesthetic depiction. Humboldt’s fusion of science with art, knowing with adoring nature, reached millions in Philip Henry Gosse’s Romance of Natural History. Every explorer was a naturalist, every naturalist an artist. Enthralled by the primordial landscapes sketched in Hugh Miller’s Old Red Sandstone (1841), the American painter Asher Durand, on a wet Catskill Mountains morning in 1857, “could hardly wait for the rain to let up [to] rush down to a nearby creek, break open some of the sandstone on its banks, and see what it might reveal of the earth’s history.” To nature lovers nothing on God’s earth, no slimy bug beneath the least stone, lacked intrinsic merit. All creatures, past and present, great and small, bespoke a loving Creator’s wondrous workmanship.38 Humboldt’s American disciple George P. Marsh linked scientific to spiritual and aesthetic advance. Knowledge ennobled cosmic splendor. “Wherever mod- ern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth.” Franklin chaining the thunderbolt with his kite outshone Jupiter’s forked lightning; new weather stud- ies surpassed the fable of Aeolus’s fickle winds. Science had “vastly increased the wealth of imagery at the command of poetry.”39 Natural history was educative, healthful, character-building, morally edify- ing, scripturally sanctioned—a scholarly spur to piety, fossils seemed to confirm biblical history. That made the study of nature a pious duty, even a holy calling. To learn geology was “to become acquainted with the ideas of God himself,” exulted Louis Agassiz, mid-century America’s premier immigrant scientist. The sacred appeal of natural history was strongest in the New World, where nature was “fresher from the hand of Him who made it,” puffed the poet William Cullen Bryant. A landscape was “great in proportion as it declares the glory of
- 36. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 15 God,” asserted Asher Durand. In America “we behold Him face to face” at His untrammeled best.40 Piety long suffused natural history. But by the late 19th century both religion and art were increasingly irrelevant if not impediments to proper science. The study of nature became truly scientific only as laboratory-based biology, rid of both theology and imaginative art. The accelerating pace of discovery outdated scientists’ own work within decades. Progress was precisely what distinguished science from art, declared Max Weber. While great art is never antiquated, pro- gressive science “cries out to be surpassed and rendered obsolete.” Only in the pure pursuit of objective fact, stripped of imaginative fancy, could scientists take comfort. In this climate they honed depersonalized modes of discourse—a phys- ics, intoned Nobelist Max Planck, universally true for “all times, all places, all peoples, all cultures.”41 By and large, however, 19th-century literati and scientists remained allied discoverers and celebrants. Unlike today’s specialists, both were familiar with a range of insights that embraced at least the rudiments of all knowledge. Tele- scopic and microscopic revelations advanced hand in hand with the arts. Keats studied medicine, Humphry Davy wrote poetry, Coleridge tested nitrous ox- ide, Byron borrowed Herschel’s telescope. To philosophes like Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Leibniz, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Kant a good grasp of science was essential. America’s founding fathers, noted science historian Gerald Holton, thought it “as natural to share in the current scientific world picture as in the classics of literature.”42 Philosopher Mary Midgeley mourns the days “when Blake and Coleridge could discuss scientific problems with Faraday and Davy,” and Darwin wrote about Kant, T. H. Huxley on Hume. Science enthralled An- tonia Byatt’s favorite Victorian authors, Coleridge and George Eliot. Despite “some large blind spots and some bitter quarrels,” science and the humanities in the 19th century were not “separated by [the] ignorance and indifference” Hol- ton found in 1960.43 Science becomes sovereign Instead, social and aesthetic inquiry increasingly aped scientific dictates, seeking and confirming laws of nature. “Where there is no law,” declared chemist and philosopher of science Emile Meyerson, “there is no science.” Endorsing Con- dorcet’s dictum that general laws were as “necessary and constant” in human af- fairs as in natural science, John Stuart Mill sought “Laws of the Mind” of similar caliber. “The backward state of the moral sciences can only be remedied by ap- plying to them the methods of physical science.” Science became a surrogate for the Creator. All that our “aims and ideals combine in the concept God is fulfilled by science,” concluded Nobel chemist Wilhelm Ostwald in 1911.44 Universal laws of human traits, like those of atoms and stars, must be found by strictly objective, emotionally detached, quantitative means. T. H. Huxley proposed a calculus of justice, for “the gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain
- 37. 16 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge as that of the earth to the sun.” Drawing on Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws (1750) and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), Condorcet replaced history’s contin- gencies with nature’s certainties, Comte with scientific sociology. Hegel, Marx, Ranke, Spengler, and Toynbee conjured up rational, measurable, foreseeable his- tories. “History is a science, no less and no more,” declared prophet of progress J. B. Bury in his 1903 Cambridge inaugural. “The future of Thought, and there- fore of History, lies in the hands of the physicists,” agreed Henry Adams; “the future historian must seek his education in … mathematical physics.”45 The positivism of fin-de-siècle German and American academe mandated objec- tive rigor. Measuring and testing data with scientific precision made all disciplines credible.“Justaswater,wind,andelectricityarecontrolled”bynaturallaws,souni- form laws must govern political science, asserted paleontologist-turned-sociologist Lester Frank Ward. Social sciences won prestige by asserting their “fundamental resemblance to natural science.”46 Worship of science peaked in 1950s America. The hybrid disciplines that helped win the Second World War—cybernetics, neutronics, psycho-acoustics, biophysics, game theory—promised not only material plenty but moral worth. Deciphering German messages and predicting pilot paths had conjoined in- sights from philosopher W. V. Quine, psychologist Edwin Boring, and computer pioneer Norbert Wiener. Now information theory and communications science would bring global welfare and harmony, while number theory and digital cir- cuitry would improve the human mind. Inspirational polymaths like Ludwig von Bertalanffy (general systems theory), Jakob von Uexküll (biosemiotics), George D. Birkhoff (mathematical aesthetics), György Kepes (art and technology), Alfred Korzbyski (general semantics), and C. A. Doxiadis (ekistics) sparked knowledge convergence. Luminaries in art, architecture, and visual perception—Le Cor- busier, Sigfried Giedion, Rudolf Arnheim, Alfred H. Barr, Adelbert Ames Jr.— furthered the mid-century quest for unity of knowledge.47 A Harvard−M.I.T. Unity of Science program wed physics with social psychol- ogy, the logical positivism of Otto Neurath and Rudolph Carnap with the systems theory of sociologist Talcott Parsons and the protean philosophic insights of F. S. C. Northrop. The program’s all-embracing canonical text, physicist Philipp Frank and political scientist Karl W. Deutsch’s “Basic Operational Dictionary” (1952), joined mass, matter, energy, space, and time to id, ego, love, god, faith, and soul. Sharing basic rationality, all these domains could be analyzed in concert. Previous unifiers in the interwar logical empiricist Vienna Circle had excluded metaphysics as obscurantist and irrational, and rejected aesthetics, ethics, and theology as un- scientific Geisteswissenschaften, humanistic spiritual musing. But for the Cambridge unifiers faith and fancy were scientific topics. Far from shunning mystique, notes science historian Peter Galison, they “took on God and Morality as soluble prob- lems.” No wonder scientists seemed to resemble high priests. “We were Scientists and Scientists were God’s Own People, if they weren’t God Himself.”48 Economics became a “crypto-historical science,” charged British historian R. G. Collingwood, evaluating “transient historical conditions under the belief it
- 38. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 17 was stating eternal truths.” Aping physicists’ concepts of energy and equilibrium, economists assessed flows of money and labor with physical formulas. The Uni- versity of Chicago’s Social Sciences Research Building bore an abridged incision of Kelvin’s 1883 quantitative dictum: “If you cannot measure, your knowledge is meagre and unsatisfactory.” A century later, economics Nobelist Robert E. Lucas made Kelvin’s faith holy writ. “Economic theory is mathematical analysis. Everything else is just pictures and talk. Theoretical economists … do not ask for words to ‘explain’ what equations mean. We ask for equations to explain what words mean.”49 But economists used the wrong equations. Dogmas of rational behavior and market efficiency mired them in simplistic bell-curve models that disregarded real-life uncertainty and social change. Unvarying laws of physics are expressible in differential equations; contingent economic behavior is not. Economists who now lay claim to the Hopeful rather than the Dismal Science are more hopeful than scientific. Some eschew the scientific label altogether, terming economics a craft telling useful stories. “Economic theory is fiction,” asserts economist Ed- ward Leamer, “and data analysis is journalism.” Yet not only economists but pol- icymakers let down by them remain addicted to quantifiable formulas, notably to measures of wealth rather than well-being. “We are so centered on metrics, those things that are not measured get left off the agenda,” worries Nobel economist Jo- seph Stiglitz. “Metrics blind us to what we might with fewer metrics have seen.”50 Economists were not the only ones thus beguiled. Prestige and promised cer- titude led all social sciences to adopt the terms and trappings of physics. The American Psychological Society became the Association for Psychological Sci- ence, political philosophy got renamed political science, geographers fancied “spatial science.” Scholarly survival depended on seeming scientific. National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation grants required social sci- entists to shift from qualitative to quantitative and statistical analysis.51 Some humanists shunned this scientistic imperium, but many succumbed. A philologist correcting a corrupt text, said Max Weber, was like a chemist struc- turing elements. Linguistics became grammatical universals, philosophy logi- cal positivism or methodological individualism. Academic English turned from concern with style and taste to abstruse literary theory. Art touted scientific opti- cal truths. Traditional humanism came to seem lightweight frivolity. To be taken seriously, humanists were adjured to “include as many numbers, mathematical symbols, and charts as possible,” remove personal pronouns, eschew the active for the passive voice, and above all “add some theory.”52 During the 1960s I too was deflected from literary-based study of landscape tastes to number-crunching analyses, by an economist’s taunt, “How would you like to prove what you’ve been saying about scenic preferences.” Resources For the Future, Inc., funded my experimental perception program. Upgrading my pilot study to a five-year behemoth, I asked a mathematician how to describe my factor analyses to my intended funders. “Just tell them it’s non-parametric statis- tics.” Duly impressed, my grantees gave me half a million dollars.53
- 39. 18 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge Even history, traditionally a bulwark against deterministic generalizing, half-surrendered to scientistic blandishments. “The success of science in under- standing nature led people to apply the scientific method” to social progress as well, Gordon Wood recounted. “If historians behaved like scientists, then history … could contribute to this progress.” Marxism, the French Annales school, and modernization theory all presaged a much-wanted scientific history that would encompass “every place on earth into one secular universal story.”54 By the 1960s many historians emulated social science, ignoring cultural and temporal differences in order to stress supposed grand regularities. Dismissed as old hat was Carl Bridenbaugh’s 1962 presidential dictum that “the finest his- torians will not succumb to the dehumanizing … social sciences. Nor will the historian worship at the shrine of that Bitch-goddess, QUANTIFICATION.” Although there were as yet no agreed universals, the psychohistorian H. Stuart Hughes argued that “if human behavior is capable of rational explanation at all, clearly there must be something lawful about it,” so historians should turn statis- ticians. The new social history dwelt on repetitive actions and events—so many births per thousand, so many dollars per bushel that underpinned uniformity. “The search for quantity,” observed medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough in 1978, was “the most powerful of the new trends in history.” And the cultural historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie warned that “history that is not quantifiable cannot claim to be scientific.”55 A few continued to champion history’s idiosyncrasy and deplored efforts to ape science. “Scientific methods are all right for stars and electrons and prime numbers, but they don’t fit men and women, for “every fresh person is a fresh fact,” chided Collingwood in 1924. Each planet was an instance of a known law, but “there aren’t any laws of human conduct,” or they had too many exceptions to be of use. Science reduced men to machines, whereas history viewed them as mindful actors on a stage of “moral ideals, political systems, scientific discoveries, hopes and fears. … The least true thing that can be said about a man is that he is a product of nature. … It is true: but it is so little of the truth that … it turns into a great bouncing lie.” Scientific thinking was indispensable but insufficient. “His- tory accepts science as a necessary element in truth, but not the whole truth,” while science dismissed historical insight as “a vain fable.”56 But Collingwood’s plaint was then little heeded. In quest of gravitas, social scientists and many humanists copied physical science in becoming impenetrable to the laity. Science was distanced by arid impersonal concision. “Artificial rules of writing … virtually guarantee the unreadability of scientific articles outside the clubhouse,” charged Stephen Jay Gould. “Inarticulateness becomes almost a virtue.” But while science grew arcane by specialist compression, social science achieved incoherence by ver- bose elaboration. Hijacking scientific terms—norms, integration, function, coordinates—sociology crafted a pretentious “jargon of vehement obscurity,” raged George Steiner. Philosophy and symbolic logic deployed an abstruse alge- bra of pleasure and pain and a calculus of moral impulse, with numerals, italic
- 40. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 19 letters, and arrows replacing simple words. Jargon-free historical discourse was ditched by Robert Fogel’s computational study of Southern slavery that won him a Nobel Prize for economics.57 “In their anxiety to achieve respectability,” scolded anthropologist Lloyd Fall- ers, social sciences “become either gadgety, scientistic, and hence trivial [or] pompously anti-intellectual.” Once readable journals succumbed to tortuous babble. Excessive jargon, multiple authorship, and absence of editing help ex- plain why biomedical journals over the last four decades have become ever harder to read. A prime cause of humanistic opacity was the scuttling of traditional footnotes for the barbaric Harvard parenthetical author-date system, devised in 1881, for a treatise on the sex life of a garden slug, to secure biology’s “hard sci- ence” status.58 Obscurity continues to make academic science ever less readable. As scientists seek “too hard to sound like scientists,” sentences lengthen, jargon proliferates, technical parlance defies non-specialist comprehension.59 The scientistic conquest of academe enthroned “discourse so recondite,” al- leged historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, “that other modes of experience—history and politics, conduct and sensibility”—were virtually drowned out. The dehu- manization of literary criticism into semiotics, theology into semantics, history into social science, struck her as abdicating ethics to science. “The world of words has shrunk,” lamented Steiner; once covering “nearly the whole of ex- perienced reality,” its domain dwindled when Newton and Leibniz endowed mathematics with “its own rich, complex and dynamic language”: And the history of that language is one of progressive untranslatability … Between the mathematical symbol and the word, the bridges grow more and more tenuous … No dictionaries relate the vocabulary and grammar of higher mathematics to verbal [discourse]. One cannot talk of transfinite numbers [e.g., omega, aleph-null, m] except mathematically. Mathematical dominion over ever more realms of thought broke Western knowl- edge into Snow’s ever less equal two cultures. Humanist impotence reflected the growing view that numbers provided a profounder image of the cosmos than words. And those “compelled by our ignorance of exact science to imagine the universe through a veil of non-mathematical language” were made to feel they “inhabit an animate fiction.”60 Disenchantment with science Just as science soared in academic repute, however, it began to lose public cachet. Scientific popularity peaked with Sabin’s polio vaccine in 1956, the very year of Snow’s tirade. But by 1971 Americans’ approval of science plummeted from 80 to 37 percent. Disillusionment reflected post-Hiroshima apocalyptic fears and concern about technology’s social costs. No foreseeable benefit mitigated the horrific perils of the hydrogen bomb and radioactive fallout. Science repute fell
- 41. 20 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge further with the failures of panaceas confidently predicted at mid-century. Nu- clear risk, pesticides, pollution, and biotic disaster dimmed scientific advance with menacing consequences. Once radiant innovations now cast dark shadows. Health and safety fears hobbled the onset of nuclear power. The public doubted or discounted claims of costly utopian schemes and lost faith that science could or government would curtail and remedy their fearsome fallouts.61 By the 1980s the “gentlemanly disdain for science” that distressed Huxley and Snow had metastasized, judged British educational reformer Robert Whelan, into “extraordinary suspicion, amounting to a hatred, of science” among eco- logical doomsters. Reflecting this despair, the U.S. exhibit at a 1993 World’s Fair featured post-industrial detritus—broken machinery and festering nuclear disposal sites. The Smithsonian Museum of American History’s 1994 “Science in American Life” highlighted scientific hazards and ensuing public dismay.62 Adding to dismay were scientists’ own newly publicized defects. In the past science had been more a selfless calling than a mundane career, pursued for love not lucre. But the stereotypical saintly authoritative paragon lost out to reve- lations that scientists like other humans could be mean and ignoble, falsifying results, betraying truth for cash or kudos. Expertise was no guarantee of moral virtue. Once a mark of disinterested altruism, aloof professionalism now beto- kened self-aggrandizement. Surveys showed science a less and less trustworthy source of truth, with scientists often demonized à la Faust or Frankenstein, as in the popular American Breaking Bad TV series (2008−2013) whose chemistry teacher protagonist becomes an outlaw meth producer—scientific hubris turned criminal. In novelist Martin Amis’s damning syllogism, “science means knowl- edge, knowledge is power, power corrupts.”63 These misgivings led social scientists to vilify science even as they mimicked it. For scientistic advocacy had cost them, too, public faith and credence. Fail- ure to cure poverty, famine, racism, and other social ills bedeviled economists, sociologists, and psychologists whose reform agendas aped scientific certitude. “Those who still wait for a Newton” of the social sciences, declared sociologist Anthony Giddens, “are not only waiting for a train that will not arrive, they are waiting in the wrong station altogether.” Despite centuries of effort, social science still lacked a corpus of general laws. Absent agreed theory, it remained in “scientific infancy,” judged Galison, mired in “primeval epistemic chaos.” Moreover, social science bore the brunt of blame for social diktats formerly fash- ionable but now damned. Environmental determinism, social engineering, racial hygiene, controlled breeding, all once promoted as progressive and rational, were consigned to lethal limbo by Nazi and apartheid advocacy. Previously a civic remedy, eugenics was now accursed as elitist and racist.64 Along with such programs, deterministic science itself was reviled as lethal to the life of spirit and socially obnoxious. Disavowing previous infatuation, the humanities shed the certitudes and techniques of physical science. Scientific auras gave way to subjective agency. Social science was renamed “social studies”; anthropology disowned its “science” moniker. Declaring an end to the search
- 42. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 21 for laws in history the American Historical Association in 2002 recanted affinity with social science.65 Science itself reacted against determinism. Indeterminacy at quantum and cosmic scales eroded positivism in physics. Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions fueled critiques of science as culturally contingent and innately partial. The very language of science revealed personal bias and cultural myopia. Increasingly, scientists saw their findings as provisional, their remit not delivering certainty but negotiating uncertainty.66 Meanwhile, postmodern skeptics cast all knowledge in doubt as socially constructed. “Truth” varied with perceivers’ perspective and experience. Since everything was contextual and partisan, there could be no universal truths. The acclaimed scientific enterprise—the progressive unfolding of objective reality— was an Enlightenment delusion. Nature had no pre-given order. “Science stud- ies” exposing science’s clay feet became popular in academe. English faculties humiliated by “physics envy’’ now taught that “science is a fiction in the same sense that a novel is a fiction.” At the century’s end, wrote a rueful Bruno Latour, the relativist precept “that facts are made up, … that we always speak from a particular standpoint,” dominated “entire PhD programs.”67 A popular relativist precursor, Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1890 The Sign of the Four, showed science shot through with passion. “Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner,” Sherlock Holmes chides Dr. Watson. “You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, [like] a love-story or an elopement into the fifth propo- sition of Euclid.” “But the romance was there,” argues Watson; “I could not tamper with the facts.” Perversely, it is the scientist Watson who insists the facts include both geometry and romance. A century later postmodernists rel- egated geometry to fiction. Inspired by Deleuze, Lacan, and Derrida, critical theorists held “value-free” science a relic of sexist imperialism that privileged force over feeling, aloofness over engagement, analysis over empathy, dissec- tion over healing.68 Yet those who trashed science remained enthralled by its charisma and envi- ous of its rewards. Literary studies became both cynical and “hard”, debunking objective knowledge while demanding theoretical rigor. The humanities fol- lowed the social sciences into jargon-laden limbo, their journals crammed with esoteric mystique that passed for profundity. They resembled physical science most in being remote from lay comprehension.69 The disciplines’ severest critics are their own spokesmen. “Our written prod- uct,” scoffs a geographer anent geography’s cultural-studies chic, is “more in- accessible than in the heyday of positivist jargon.” A professor of English blasts literary theory’s repellent “scare quotes, bracketed prefixes, … solipsistic disre- gard for the reader.” Of the gobbledygook in Longman’s Critical Reader on D. H. Lawrence (1992), novelist Geoff Dyer fumes: “How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it?” Critical dis- course “kills everything it touches.”70
- 43. 22 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge Chemist Roald Hoffmann chides his own colleagues for “dry, impersonal, dispassionate” monotony that reduces “the miracle of a living world to … the logic of dissection.” Galison blames “tedious textbooks with terrible graphics” for showing young naturalists that “what they once thought was fascinating … is alien to their existence.” Citing the deliberate dullness and relentless factual- ity of typical science research papers, Edward O. Wilson terms “poor science education in school … probably the single most formidable barrier to any effort to bring science and the humanities together.” No wonder “virtually no one outside the sciences reads unpopularized science,” writes art historian James El- kins, “and hardly anyone in the sciences reads the professional literature of the humanities.”71 Both aping and abuse of science peaked—or flopped—with physicist Alan Sokal’s 1996 spoof “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Sokal pretended that not just quantum gravity but simple arithmetic was a Western imperial invention; no longer “con- stant and universal,” π and G were now exposed “in their ineluctable historicity.” He then revealed he had woven “the silliest quotations from the most prominent French and American intellectuals [into] a nonsensical argument” showing that physical “reality” was “at bottom a social and linguistic construct.” Hence “lib- eratory science” required “a profound revision of the canon of mathematics.”72 This drivel’s acceptance for publication exposed lit-crit’s nakedness behind its impenetrable prose. Awarded the Ig Nobel prize for literature, Social Text editors said they knew Sokal’s piece was nonsense but published it anyway, as a “con- veniently credentialed” relativistic cri de coeur. The hoax made cultural studies a laughing-stock. In valuing ideology over intelligibility, said philosopher Paul Boghossian, Social Text exemplified the “collapse in standards of scholarship and intellectual responsibility … of the humanities and social sciences.”73 Others saw it as symptomatic. “Meaning we do not strive for these days,” scoffed an English professor’s persona. “We have taken a leaf from the French, and strive for theory, the better to impress you.” Latour taunted both camps. “If scientists want to get rid of the two-culture divide for good, they will have to get used to” more such nonsense. “After all, the humanists and the literati do not make such a fuss about the many absurdities uttered by … scientists building the bridge from the other end.” They always talk “about ‘bridging the two-culture gap’,” but when non-scientists “begin to build just that bridge, they recoil in horror.”74 But Sokal’s send-up was a bridge too far. He had simply copied the claptrap he mocked. “The Einsteinian constant is not a constant,” Derrida had absurdly declared. “It is the very concept of variability.” In fact, there is no Einsteinian constant; Newton’s gravitational constant is invariably 0.000000006673. A year after Sokal’s hoax, the satirist Malcolm Bradbury parodied Derrida as decon- structionist “Henri Mensonge,” anticipating “the centreless centre, the present- less present, the writerless writing, the signless sign that would draw everything together and put it into its true lack of relation.” To be sure, professional physics
- 44. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 23 is “also incomprehensible to the uninitiated,” admitted Nobelist Steven Wein- berg. But “we try to be clear, and when we fail we do not expect our readers to confuse obscurity with profundity.”75 A decade after the Sokal hoax, science suffered its own debacle with an essay in psychology’s flagship journal. Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada calcu- lated how often people experienced good feelings (amusement, awe, compassion, contentment, gratitude, hope, interest, joy, love, pride, sexual desire) as opposed to bad feelings (anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment, fear, guilt, sadness, shame). From a Lorenz differential equation in nonlinear dynamics, they found a “critical positivity ratio” between “flourishing” and “languishing,” analogous to the phase transition between liquid water and ice. This universal tipping point, precisely 2.9013, “divides those who merely get by in life from those who truly flourish,” summed up a critic. “If you’re only twice as positive as negative, you get next to nothing. Three times as positive as negative? The world’s your oys- ter.” (Above tipping point 11.6346 positives were too prevalent for good men- tal health.) Touted as a great discovery and extensively cited in the scientific literature and global popular media, 2.9013 had tremendous impact in applied psychology.76 And it made the lead author’s 2009 Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3-to-1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life a best-seller. “A prescription—indeed a precise ratio—to tip your life to the flourishing side,” ran the blurb. “World re- nowned researcher Dr. Barbara Fredrickson gives you the lab-tested tools necessary to create a healthier, more vibrant, and flourishing life … Calculate your current positivity ratio, track it, and improve it … to become the best version of yourself.” For human emotions “the poet seeks new metaphors,” wrote Fredrickson; “I seek new ways to quantify them … Love, joy, gratitude, serenity, and hope are more than literary terms. They are also scientific terms that can be … measured with precision. … As a scientist, accepting things on faith … is not in my bones.”77 Yet Frederickson took on faith what she later admitted ignorance of—her co-author Losada’s bogus and irrelevant mathematics. Just as clueless, though, were peer reviewers, journal editors, perhaps even Losada himself. It was eight years before a psychology graduate student, abetted by physicist Alan Sokal, seri- ously critiqued it. “That any aspect of human behavior or experience should be universally and reproducibly constant to five significant digits would, if proven,” revolutionize social science, they noted. But it is “completely vitiated by funda- mental conceptual and mathematical errors, and … the total absence of any jus- tification” for applying the Lorenz equations to human emotions. One can only “marvel at the astonishing coincidence that human emotions should turn out to be governed by exactly the same set of equations … as a deliberately simplified model of convection in fluids … contrived to demonstrate an imagined fit be- tween some rather limited empirical data and the scientifically impressive world of nonlinear dynamics.”78 “How could such a loony paper have passed muster with the reviewers at the most prestigious American journal of psychology, netted 350 scholarly citations,”
- 45. 24 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge and been repeatedly hyped by eminent psychologists “without anyone calling it into question?” wondered Sokal. “Was everyone really so credulous?” The main claim was “so implausible on its face that some red flags ought to have been raised.” All emotional experiences would need to have the same magnitude and duration to be so compared. A moment’s thought will show how impossible it is to actually measure … on this basis. If someone laughs at a joke on TV, eats an ice-cream, sees their dog get run over, and watches a nice sunset, are they at a 3 to 1 ratio of positive to negative emotions and flourishing? … In a marriage, [do a lot] of superficial compliments together with 1 physically abusive, drunken episode [make] a good balance leading to a happy relationship? Such a precise “universal truth about human emotions … would, if verified, re- quire rewriting most contemporary psychology and neuroscience; purely on that basis” that it long went unquestioned is surprising.79 That it did so reflects the scientism of psychologists bemused by mathematical mystique as a bona fide of expertise, along with the romantic dream of a single impressive formula explaining human behavior. (One admirer suggested slightly raising the 2.9013 tipping point to coincide with the mathematical constant π at 3.1416.) This gibberish seems no mere anomaly, but endemic within and be- yond psychology. It “reveals a cultural trap prevalent within much of mainstream science”—widespread yearning to account for complex experience by a simple universal and timeless quantifiable law.80 The damage done by this intellectual imposture in some respects exceeds the Sokal hoax. The muted response of the deceived journal, commending itself for retracting Losada’s mathematical claims, leaves the original essay, although also shown empirically specious, far more cited and influential than its refuta- tion. Positive psychology’s claim to “rigorous science” that avoids popularizing nonsense appears ludicrous. The whole discipline has been shown unable to monitor not just mathematical but empirical claims to truth (keeping the “slip- pery baby” while draining the “somewhat murky bathwater,” in Frederickson’s own apologia). “As a soft science,” suggests John Searles, “we have to endure this nonsensical work. … It is sometimes embarrassing to mention that I am a psychologist!”81 Now only soft science, however, but science as a whole loses credibility with a public beset by fake and dubious findings and scornful of expertise. Regardng the quest for unity in general, the critical positivity ratio makes a mockery of unifiers’ contentions that the scientific method is the only reliable path to knowl- edge. If “only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic, and environmental goals,” as neuroscientist Sam Harris contends, this sorry epi- sode suggests that he is all too right in supposing “a science of human flourishing [is] a long way off.” 82
- 46. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 25 The Two Cultures divide becomes a chasm “Had Snow lived to see the science wars and the Sokal hoax,” concluded science historian Peter Harrison, “he would have been even more confirmed about the polarization of academic life.” Sokal himself judged the “two cultures probably farther apart … than at any time in the past 50 years.” Crisis was voiced world- wide: a Dutch scholar saw a “tectonic rift” becoming “a bottomless chasm”; sociologist Frank Furedi feared “pathological” fragmentation; American anthro- pologists decried an irreversibly isolating tectonic disaster.83 Mutual recrimination soured academic collegiality. Scientists were accused of disregarding values, humanists assailed for privileging them. Scientists called hu- manists charlatans and mountebanks. Nothing that historians and philosophers of science wrote about physics “needs to be taken seriously,” stated a nuclear physicist; “they haven’t a clue.” If humanists couldn’t recognize Sokal’s transpar- ent scam, “can we trust anything they do?” Sokal showed “everything humanists have done since 1970 has been bunk.” Blinkered literary sensibility blinds them to “the scientific/mathematical outlook that is arguably the true glory of our civilization,” scolded economist Paul Krugman. Some faulted the hoax for forti- fying barriers. “Instead of narrowing an unfortunate breach,” feared a reviewer, this “will harden it.”84 Cultural theorists’ simplistic inflation of quantum indeterminacy into whole- sale relativism led some scientists to reassert positivism. “A scientific theory is in a sense a social consensus,” allowed Weinberg, but “unlike any other sort of con- sensus … it is culture-free and permanent.” That more women and East Asians were now scientists had not changed the laws of physics. If there were “intelligent creatures on some distant planet,” they will “have discovered the same laws.” Sci- ence’s “timeless laws and selfless truths” set it apart from “the social world of cul- ture, with its ineluctable contingency, its ramifying particularity, its dictates that change with time.” Worse than literary scholars’ ignorance of science was their rejection of quantitative criteria of evidence, charged biologist Joseph Carroll. Lacking “neutral, objective” assessments, they simply cherry-pick selective ex- amples, gleaning quotes by like-minded authors to bolster favored hypotheses.85 Conversely, relativists sneer at scientists unwilling to admit that language makes all knowledge socially constructed. The two cultures divide was thus par- odied as a “distinction between knowledge and the critique of knowledge,” the former value-free, the latter value-laden. “One camp deems the sciences accurate only when [uncontaminated] by subjectivity, politics, or passion,” in Latour’s summary; the other camp “deems humanity, morality, subjectivity, or rights worthwhile only when … protected from any contact with science, technology, and objectivity.”86 Some deplore the animus but accept, even applaud, the two-cultures divide. Harvard chemist-president James Bryant Conant’s General Education for a Free Society (1945) termed essential both natural sciences that “describe, analyze, and explain” and humanities that “appraise, judge, and criticize,” but he rejected
- 47. 26 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge integrative teaching as a waste of time. Echoing Conant 50 years on, zoologist Gould felt sciences and humanities, like science and religion, should be “the greatest of pals,” but as “nonoverlapping magisteria” ought to “keep their ine- luctably different aims and logics separate.” An Israeli biologist believes disparate analytic tools and approaches foretell a “deeper than ever” gulf. Since scientists prize undistorted objectivity and humanists dwell on emotion and desire, a Dan- ish physicist cannot imagine “the two cultures ever coming together.” Because the arts and humanities spurn value-free science goals of progress and reliability, trying to reunite them strikes biologist Lewis Wolpert as hopeless and pointless.87 In sum, science–humanities discourse showed many sensing a greater gulf, seen by some as inevitable, even desirable. “Across the disciplinary map, calls for the disunity of knowledge are being heard,” concluded historians of science Peter Galison and Daniel Stump. The mid-century’s Grand Unified Theories gave way by the century’s end to the “quasi-autonomy of different subcultures.”88 A few dismissed disunity as trivial academic infighting. A German biologist called the two cultures idea a fallacy that neglected broad accord in how scientists and humanists observe and verify. Celebrants at the British Academy (for hu- manities and social sciences) 2002 centenary termed Snow’s two cultures a nox- ious myth. Royal Society (for sciences) president Robert May regretted that the RS and the BA were separate bodies. But “any notion that they represent ‘Two Cultures’ were, are, and always will be … fundamentally mistaken,” for both af- firm “rational, humane” Enlightenment values. British Academy president W. G. Runciman called Snow’s “stereotypes of the foolish, reactionary man of letters and the sensible, progressive man of science” absurd. There was no “unbridge- able divide”; both relied alike on reasoned argument and respect for evidence. Reaffirming Runciman 15 years later, his successor David Cannadine held the arts−science divide “largely artificial.” But reality subverts wished-for affinity: May regretted humanities’ exclusion from science research councils, Runciman bemoaned hurdles that divided humanists from social scientists, Cannadine de- plores the decline in English and history schooling.89 Many who see a widening gap fault science’s decline in education and public trust. British schooling still forces children to choose between science and art at a shockingly early age; few are able to opt for both. Most American colleges do not require even a single hour of science. The bridge metaphor yields to the cafeteria, with scientists and humanists at separate tables. Arts are remote from science at David Lodge’s Two Cultures architectural allegory. Between environmental en- gineers and nearby social scientists at Australia’s University of New South Wales contact was almost nil. “Not only are the scientists not talking to the arts faculty, but even within the arts, the[y] pooh-pooh each other.”90 That most universities are “unified in name only” seems to worry few, laments Elkins. Embedded bias stultifies converse across the divide: Each comes to other with a preconceived notion of what matters most, and finds none of it. Scientists find a sea of optimism and not a fact in
- 48. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 27 sight. [Humanists] find scientists talking as if they were the living dead— discarnate brains with no stake in the outcome. Both go away feeling the encounter was a complete waste of time, and both are … right.91 Rejection of science, along with “envy, resentment, and hostility because of resource allocation and social prestige,” leaves humanists wilfully ignorant of what science is and does, as Edward Slingerland terms his theology and sinol- ogy colleagues. A mention of “behavioral neuroscience” sends them “regretfully backing away.” The Social Text editors who read Sokal’s essay “didn’t understand a thing,” observed literary scholar Franco Moretti, but they “didn’t care, because at bottom they believe that physics has nothing to teach them.” Science-fiction critic Roger Luckhurst admits having “no idea of or interest in scientific practice.” Hence core humanities remain a “stagnant lagoon cut off from a great fertile ocean of science innovation and progress,” concludes Slingerland. “Culpably out of touch,” charged the Czech poet-physician Miroslav Holub, they defend “eternal values” in “the casuistic jargon, the pretentious triviality” that pervades literary theory and humanistic studies.92 Even litterateurs who are interested, as Wolpert says of Antonia Byatt, “have hardly a clue as to what science is about.” Rare science-versed writers of fiction like Richard Powers, who intertwines the four-note harmonics of Bach’s Gold- berg Variations with the four-unit genetic code, dismay reviewers “unfamiliar with, and easily intimidated by, scientific concepts.” Novelists like Powers and playwrights like Tom Stoppard (Arcadia, 1993) and Michael Frayn (Copenhagen, 2000) may acquaint some humanists with more science than in Snow’s day, but most remain unaware of their lack of science or blithely deny its disabling effects. Poets, artists, and critics ignorant of science, charges E. O. Wilson, “talk exclu- sively to one another.”93 Exclusivity is partly to blame. Scientists’ arcane culture mystifies the laity. “No- bel laureates are our new cardinals,” said a classicist chairman of London’s Science Museum, and when “you are part of a priesthood it would be contrary to human nature not to have a certain contempt for those outside the pale.” But the gravest barrier is not scientists’ hauteur, argues Slingerland; it is humanists’ ingrained anti-science ethos. “Many of us are in the humanities because we were bad at or turned off by science,” confesses English professor George Levine, who sees the two cultures “incurably separated.” Confined to “the narrow barracks left to them by more and more stingy deans,” the humanities have lost the support of former friends, in Latour’s mea culpa. “The Zeus of Critique rules … over a desert.”94 Humanists are stunted by “a diet of poetry, philosophy and history, unleav- ened by statistics or chromosomes,” charges journalist Nicholas Kristof. They think it “barbaric … to be unfamiliar with Plato or Monet or Dickens, but quite natural to be oblivious of quarks and chi squares.” Like Snow, Harvard presi- dent Lawrence Summers lamented that while “none would admit proudly to not having read any plays by Shakespeare,” it was “all too common and all too ac- ceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome.” Scientific illiteracy is openly
- 49. 28 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge paraded. Wilful ignorance explains why many humanists not only know nothing of 21st-century science but, notes physician-poet Raymond Tallis, “have yet to catch up with” that of the 16th century. The humanities graduates who run British media, carps a medical journalist, travesty science as faddish and self- contradictory, scientists as wonky or wicked.95 Reduced schooling distances science from public comprehension. Fewer than one in ten British students study mathematics beyond age 16, fewer than one in twenty of Britain’s last parliament had a science degree. Science is put down as juvenile. Science writer Natalie Angier’s sister let her family’s Science Mu- seum membership lapse when the children turned 13. Science is for kids; adults ditch Tyrannosaurus Rex for Oedipus Rex. Adolescent science lovers are “geeks, nerds, egg-heads, pointyheads, brainiacs, lab rats,” a friend teased Angier, “a little C. P. Snow White and the Two Cultures.” Science is dismissed as “dull or dangerous, nerdy or pointless.” Hence “the average adult American today knows less about biology than the average ten-year-old living in the Amazon, or the average American of two hundred years ago,” naturalist Andrew Knoll told Angier. “Woe, woe, nobody knows anything about science. Woe, woe, nobody cares.” Scientific literacy has slumped since Snow. Back then science was ignored in Britain; now the ignorant “feel entitled to wade in,” defaming science. And America in 2017 was ruled by people “completely alienated not just from the scientific community,” held Krugman, but from any understanding of the world based on objective evidence.96 On the other hand, Byatt retorts, scientistic specialists hold “very soppy views of art,” dumbed down as technically simple and “sort of wonderful and strange.” Scientists who admire “the emotive force, entertainment value, aesthetic power of the great works of intrepretive understanding” nevertheless insist that these inspirational creations do not “constitute knowledge” because they are not “ex- planatorily significant.” Poems and paintings are cheapened as “cheesecake for the mind” by psychologist Steven Pinker. Today’s stereotypical scientist supposes “art ‘just happens’,” says science writer Philip Ball, “conjured de novo by an in- tuitive soul who ‘makes stuff up’ at the drop of a hat from an unfettered imagi- nation.”97 If humanists’ dismissive skepticism toward scientific empiricism often “prevents any kind of conversation,” many scientists seem to assume that hu- manistic scholarship requires no special training; after all, “anyone can read.”98 A century ago, the archetypal scientist was a cultivated polymath who read Greek and played the violin. Today science connotes not “high culture” but “low engineering.” Reflecting demands for instant utility and economic effi- ciency, engineering itself excludes or marginalizes the humanities. Although retired professor of surgery Michael Baum was instrumental in establishing a medical humanities curriculum at University College London, the value British medical clinicians once saw in culture generally waned after the Second World War, when liberal arts ceased to be part of medical education.99 Assuming that all educators know some science, physicist James Trefil opines that American academe has shed Snow’s complete ignoramuses. “If there was
- 50. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 29 ever a gap between the two cultures,” averred epidemiologist Philip Alcabes in 2009, public reaction to swine flu shows it is closed. “Science is now appre- ciated more deeply … than Snow ever deemed possible.” That “the jargon of science has become lingua franca” attests its integration into general culture.100 Yet quite the contrary emerges from the widening gulf between scientists and public opinion on major issues—climate change, vaccination, genetically modi- fied foods, animal research. Moreover, popular faith in “promiscuous teleology,” the belief that nature has a purpose, remains pervasive. Intuitive theism coupled with dismay at science’s seeming aloofness leaves it in public limbo: on the one hand science clearly works, on the other its often dire findings and uncertainties are deeply disconcerting.101 Yet science commands increasing academic clout and kudos. Doctorates in science and engineering rose from 58% of all American Ph.Ds in 1974 to 75% in 2015. Humanities have dropped even more steeply: in 1966 one stu- dent in five (20.7%) majored in the humanities, in 1993 it was one in eight (12.7%), in 2014 only one in sixteen (6.1%). As education budgets are slashed, and more students pursue lucrative “practical” studies, humanities with declin- ing enrolments are demoted, even discontinued. The U.S. Office of Educational Research— tellingly renamed the Institute of Education Sciences—privileges quantitative science over qualitative interpretation, paying small heed to human- ities content and methods.102 The humanities will never “satisfy the dean’s desire for accumulable knowl- edge, the parents’ desire for a marketable skill or the Congressman’s desire for … technologists,” says former English professor William Deresiewicz of humani- ties’ shrinking budgets, disappearing students, lost faculty posts, and evaporating prestige. He notes a “vague feeling afloat” that if only “these two modes of knowledge could be made to talk to each other, science would be humanized … and art made relevant to the scientific age.” But it will never happen because no one really knows how to bridge two incommensurate ways of knowing.103 The urge to unify science and art—the American liberal arts agenda—strikes philosopher A. W. Carus as doomed for lack of a mutual social home. America never had the cultivated milieu of early 19th-century Germany. Founded by Wilhelm von Humboldt and based on the Bildung (self-development) philos- ophy and examples of Kant, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller, the elite German educational system integrated science and humanism, combining Natur- with Geisteswissenschaften. Lacking such a comprehensive schooling standard, Ameri- cans took a smattering of cultures from varied sources, later “expanded to even more superficial smatterings of even more diverse cultures.” Hence the two cultures do not so much conflict as never really meet, for “scientific and humanistic canons dictate completely different and incompatible interests, different mental and emotional stances, different attitudes toward what is worth taking seriously.” Students are schooled preponderantly in one mode or in the other, fixing “the mental framework of explicit doctrines and informal attitudes” that inform their whole approach to life. “No canonical system of
- 51. 30 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge values and knowledge embraces both” modes. Since neither “speaks a language that bridges rational and ethical traditions,” the few socialized into both can- ons remain sidelined in either community. And “those socialized unequivocally in one culture,” Carus concludes, “know other cultures [only] as amusement and entertainment.” Lacking a cosmopolitan outlook, their mental lives remain stunted, one-sided, half-baked.104 Emerging rapprochements To bridge that breach, novel efforts to conjoin science with the arts and human- ities have surfaced in recent decades. A prospective third culture, thought Snow, might help bring the other two together. Snow’s third culture—social science, medicine, and design—would combine insights from art and science. Snow’s art−science mediation later inspired Nobelist Eric Kandel’s fruitful convergence of neuroscience and modern art.105 The realm of design uniquely dealt with man-made milieus and artifacts. Like medicine, it sought not abstract truths but practical solutions. Following utopian planning failures (Corbusier’s “machine for living,” Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house), designers brought social empathy to technical know-how, ad- dressing human needs for both the new and the familiar. In another third-culture venture, the journal Zygon (1966) amalgamated science and religion, its scriptural remit embracing both cosmology and conscience.106 Another self-proclaimed third culture, John Brockman’s 1988 Edge Foun- dation, humanizes innovative science in plain language, aiming to demystify chaos theory, fractals, teraflops, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human ge- nome, punctuated equilibrium, and cyberspace. Luminous insights by the likes of Richard Fortey, Oliver Sacks, James Gleick, Dava Sobel, and Martin Rees led science chronicler Richard Holmes to hope that the notion of two divisive cul- tures “will soon become entirely extinct”—if we don’t first extinguish ourselves by ignoring science.107 As “science often seems now dreamlike, and art a matter of curiosity,” said Eton School’s provost in 2009, “science becomes more like art, and art like science.” And as science becomes bafflingly surreal even to its acolytes, art is enlisted to clarify its insights. Artistic analogies have long inspired science. Fol- lowing Pythagoras, Kepler showed how planetary angular velocities replicated acoustic harmonic intervals. Herschel in the 1770s likened stellar patterns to Bach’s and Handel’s harmonic structures, and read the stars like a musical score. Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets (1914−1916) made their orbital sounds audible 30-odd octaves up. A musical trope describes the Bursting Pulsar, a neutron star’s celestial eruptions. “We’ve seen some sources that play the drums, some that crash cymbals, and a few that play the trumpet,” said astrophysicist Frederick Lamb. “But this source is a one-man band.”108 Using laws of sight to captivate the eye, Monet, Klee, and Kandinsky spurred brain science. Pasteur’s early work as a painter and lithographer familiarized him
- 52. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 31 with mirror images crucial to his microbial findings in chemistry and medicine. Given that cubism inspired Niels Bohr, and neurology prompted Proust, sci- ence publicist Jonah Lehrer proposed filling art galleries with “evocations of string theory,” and installing a resident artist in every physics department.109 Fascination with science stimulates poetic works deploying arcane terms for aesthetic effect. Maurice Riordan celebrates nature’s generative Fibonacci series and chaos theory’s Mandelbrot set. Alice Fulton’s fractal poetics (Sensual Math, 1995) and Riordan and Jon Turney’s A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (2000) led to Gary Nabhan’s Crosspollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry (2004). Film-maker Ken McMullen brought a dozen artists to physicist Maurice Jacob’s CERN lab; their “Signatures of the Invisible” went on world- wide tour. Hobnobbing with sculptors, choreographers, and acoustic artists help inspire CERN scientific creativity. “I don’t have a limited brain which is just focused on crunching numbers,” a “liberated” scientist told arts program founder Ariane Koek. Simon Barraclough ended his poet-in-residence year at the U.K. Mullard Space Science Laboratory with an anthology celebrating “the poetry of science and the science of poetry.” 110 Mark di Suvero’s 23-foot Sieve of Eratosthenes (2000) on the Stanford University campus is the prime memorial to prime numbers. Citation indexes validate these conjunctions. Online journal interactions doc- ument myriad arts–sciences overlaps, with humanities and social science sources bridging all domains. A 2006 cognitive map links chemistry and physics with several social sciences, and bonds ecology, animal behavior, and genetics with archaeology, architecture, and psychology. Transdisciplinary citations abound in frontier-straddling journals such as Behavioral Ecology, Sociobiology, Child Develop- ment, and Biogeography.111 Science turns historical, history scientific “Big History”—joining the 13.7 billion-year chronicle of the cosmos to the brief history of humanity—has become an influential stimulus to those eager to unify knowledge. Except for 19th-century geology and Darwinian evolution, physical science was long largely the study of static or cyclical processes and entities, gov- erned by fixed eternal laws. This set apart the universe and its galactic and solar systems, along with microcosmic components of energy and matter, from inde- terminate human affairs contingent on diversely unfolding trajectories. Recent decades, however, have remade astronomy, chemistry, and biology into historical sciences, whose local idiosyncrasies and contingent outcomes have much in com- mon with human societies.112 Living processes, as the physicist Erwin Schrödinger recognized in 1943, necessitated “hitherto unknown” laws of nature not reducible to physics and chemistry. Generative narratives have since refashioned biology. “Biospheres de- mand their Shakespeares as well as their Newtons,” notes biologist Stuart Kauff- man. “We cannot foretell a biosphere”; instead we “tell the stories as it unfolds.”
- 53. 32 Quest for the Unity of Knowledge He foresees “a deepening of science, a search for story and historical contingency, yet a place for natural laws,” that will ultimately unify knowledge.113 Terrestrial and cosmic processes once thought immutable progressively shed changeless uniformity for dynamic singularities. Evidence of incidental im- pingements and long-term perturbations narrow the reach of Newtonian con- stancies, just as geomorphic and fossil findings supplanted uniformitarian earth history with catastrophism’s sudden, violent, and short-lived events. The struc- ture of oxygen, the velocity of light, and electrons’ charge remain unaltered over billions of years, but genes, cells, organs, and organisms change in space and alter over time. Invariant equilibria are no longer nature’s predominant reality; episodic or evanescent phenomena increasingly call for idiographic (uniquely specific) perspectives and modes of scrutiny.114 More and more of nature—plants, animals, continents, planets, stars, galaxies— gets historicized. The episodic flows and fractures of the earth’s crust are as contin- gent as—though slower moving than—the migratory flows and fractures of human history: there are no reliable precursors and nothing ever precisely repeats. Non- recurrent unique events that have long informed geology now enliven astronomy. Self-conscious intentionality apart, biological and stellar histories rival human annals in unforeseen complexity. Nature is seen to share humanity’s turbulent, capricious career; geologists and biologists conjure like historians with time-bound devia- tions and tipping-point abruptness. Historical contingency frays long- supposed cosmic constancies. Why think the laws of physics will remain true forever? asks Lee Smolin. The cosmos is ever evolving. “It is far from clear what eternal laws of physics can mean, when the universe itself is only a few billion years old.”115 Moreover, the dynamics of nature are similar to human change. Non- equilibrium physics and earth science strikingly parallel economic and intellectual history. Magnetic transition states, collapsing grain piles, earthquakes, species extinctions, and ecosystem disturbances resemble price fluctuations, wealth dis- tribution, and scientific innovations. Similar power-law formulas dictate the timing and intensity of avalanches, neuronal responses, and stock-market crashes. Neither cyclic and regular nor totally indeterminate, these growth-and-decay processes are all historically contingent. In sum, concludes William McNeill, “cosmic history, natural history, and human history have come together into a single fabric.”116 In physics as in politics, things are precariously poised between opposing forces of friction (custom or tradition) and of stress (innovation or revolution). Earth- quakes and evolution like human history are ever altered by unforeseeable events of varying intensity. In each realm, infinitesimal changes on occasion accrete to destabilize major structures, a tiny incident at some point triggering unstoppable cascading. But though non-equilibrium physics accounts for no specific event, “the statistical pattern that emerges over many chains of events,” suggests physi- cist Mark Buchanan, “may perhaps reveal the law for things historical.”117 All-embracing complexity theory, governing the development of galaxies, stars, comets, and atoms, was initiated at Harvard by the astronomer Harlow
- 54. Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage? 33 Shapley. The growing elaboration of universal cosmic evolution seemed innate to all matter “from hydrogen to Homo.” Building on Shapley’s developmental parallels, Eric Chaisson sought similarities among emergent physical, biological, and cultural systems. Growing structural intricacy and complexity seems to re- quire environmental conditions similar at all levels and in all epochs, “spanning the origin, existence, and destiny of all things.”118 Concurrently, human history gets enfolded into a lengthening ecological saga. No longer mere prologue, natural history goes on influencing human thought and action. As the biosphere ever alters our environs, so do our own terrestrial impacts show up ever farther back, disclosing Earth in manifold ways human- ized over hundreds of thousands years. Climate, soils, flora and fauna, including billions of micro-organisms within us, ceaselessly remold and reflect human des- tiny. Increasingly seen as anthropogenic, nature continually affects everything human. Just as the interplay requires scientists to become historians, so must historians turn scientist, in order to grasp the processual insights of astronomy, geology, biology, and neurology.119 Transdisciplinary findings and faults Interdisciplinary confluence is exemplified in Daniel Lord Smail’s 2008 Deep History and the Brain and subsequent collaborative symposium at Harvard. Smail sees behavioral traits as archives of evolutionary psychology, DNA residues as geneticists’ ancient parchments, cognitive modules as fossils of prehistory. Our Paleolithic forebears morphed from Alpha-male-dominated primate bands into egalitarian hunter-gatherers, suggests Smail. Neolithic sedentary agriculture later engendered despotic social hierarchies. Psychotropic mechanisms of speech, clothing, and gesture activated genes and synapses consonant with submission to authority. Modern mass consumption of sugar, alcohol, and other narcotic stim- ulants reinforced hierarchical inequalities.120 Smail’s history remains speculative. But its fusion of pharmacy with power politics, Darwinism with dopamine, of- fers an insightful foray into neuro-historical understanding. Evolutionary science likewise promises novel insights into social and cultural behavioral norms. Jonathan Gottschall’s statistical folklore analyses confirm common stereotypes about gender and age. Using Jane Austen’s novels as the “literary equivalent of a fruit fly,” Joseph Carroll examines English mating habits through a Darwinian lens. Denis Dutton’s neuroesthetics applies brain science to artistic preferences. Physiologists probe neural mechanisms governing traits like insight, foresight, empathy, and curiosity. Behavioral neuroscientists deploy literary data to account for near-universal linguistic usages.121 The emotional impact of literature, Michael Wood’s “most precious, impres- sionistic, and enchanted form of humanistic knowledge,” shows up as a power- ful surge in EEG and MRI brain scans. Shakespearean phrases that use words in novel ways—for example, turning nouns into verbs (“wived” for married, “companion” for accompany, “lipped” for kissed, “graved” for buried)—reroute
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- 56. to my betrothed, but though she consented to this, she spurned him. "Well, my career in New York was ended. I had a little money, and, after selling my watch, I secured a cheap passage to California. I made my way direct to the mines, and at once began work. I had varying luck. At times I prospered; at times I suffered privation. I made my home away from the coast in the interior. At last, after twenty years, I found myself rich. Then I became restless. I turned my money into gold and sailed for New York. Here I am, and I have just one purpose in view—to find my old enemy and to punish him if I get the chance." "I can't blame you," said Oliver. "He spoiled your life." "Yes, he robbed me of my dearest hopes. I have suffered for his sin, for I have no doubt he took the money himself." "Do you know where he is now?" "No; he may be in this city. If he is, I will find him. This is the great object of my life, and you must help me in it." "I?" "Yes. I will take care of you. You shall not want for anything. In return, you can be my companion, my assistant, and my friend. Is it a bargain?" "Yes," said Oliver impulsively. "So be it, then. If you ever get tired of your engagement I will release you from it; but I don't think you will." "Do you know, or have you any idea, where this man is—this Rupert Jones?"
- 57. "I have heard that such a man is living on Staten Island. I saw his name in the New York Directory. That is why I wished to come here to-day." "We are at the first landing," said Oliver. "Shall we land?" "Yes." The two passed over the gang-plank upon the pier, and the boat went on its way to the second landing.
- 58. T CHAPTER XXIII. MR. BUNDY IS DISAPPOINTED, AND OLIVER MEETS SOME FRIENDS. HE village lay farther up on the hill. Oliver and his companion followed the road, looking about them enquiringly. "Suppose you find this man, what will you do?" asked Oliver curiously. He had an idea that Nicholas Bundy might pull out a revolver and lay his old enemy dead at his feet. This, in a law-abiding community, might entail uncomfortable consequences, and he might be deprived of his new friend almost as soon as the friendship had begun. "I will punish him," said Nicholas, his brow contracting into a frown. "You won't shoot him?" "No. I shall bide my time, and consider how best to ruin him. If he is rich, I will strip him of his wealth; if he is respected and honored, I
- 59. will bring a stain upon his name. I will do for him what he has done for me." The provincialisms which at times disfigured his speech were dropped as he spoke of his enemy, and his face grew hard and his expression unrelenting. "How he must hate this man!" thought Oliver. They stepped into a grocery store on the way, and here Mr. Bundy enquired for Rupert Jones. "Do you know any such man?" he asked. "Oh, yes; he trades here." Nicholas Bundy's face lighted up with joy. "Is he a friend of yours?" "No," he replied hastily. "But I want to see him; that is, if he is the man I mean. Will you describe him?" The grocer paused, and then said: "Well, he is about thirty-five years old, and――" "Only thirty-five?" repeated Nicholas in deep disappointment. "I don't think he can be any more. He has a young wife." "Is he tall or short?" "Quite tall." "Then it is not the man I mean," said Bundy. "Oliver, come." As they left the store he said:
- 60. "I thought it was too good news to be true. I must search for him longer; but I have nothing else to do. There are many Joneses in the world." "Yes, but Rupert Jones is not a common name," said Oliver. "You say right, boy, Rupert is not a common name. That is what encourages me. Well, shall we go back?" "I think as we are over here we may as well stay a while," said Oliver. "The day is pleasant and we can look upon it as an excursion." "Just as you say, Oliver. There is no more to be done to-day. Have you never been here before?" "No." "I used to come over when I was a clerk. I often engaged a boat at the Battery and rowed down here myself." "That must have been pleasant." "If you like rowing we can go back to the ferry pier and engage a boat for an hour." "I should like that very much." "I shall like it also. It is long since I did anything at rowing." They engaged a stout row-boat, and rowed out half a mile from shore. Oliver knew something about rowing, as there was a pond in his native village, where he had obtained some practice, generally with Frank Dudley. What was his surprise when bending over the oar to hear his name called. Looking up, he recognized Frank and Carrie Dudley and their father.
- 61. "Why, it's Oliver!" exclaimed Frank joyfully. "Where have you come from, Oliver?" "From the shore." "I mean, how do you happen to be here?" "Only an excursion, Frank. What brings you here? And Carrie, too. I hope you are well, Carrie." "All the better for meeting you, Oliver," said Carrie, smiling and blushing. "I have been missing you very much." Oliver was pleased to hear this. What boy would not be pleased to hear such a confession from the lips of a pretty girl? "I thought Roland would make up for my absence," he said slyly. "He told me when we met the other day what pleasant calls he had at your house." "The pleasure is all on his side, then," said Carrie, tossing her head. "I hate the sight of him." "Poor Roland! He is to be pitied!" "You needn't pity him, Oliver," said Frank. "He loses no opportunity of trying to set us against you. But he hasn't succeeded yet." "And he won't!" chimed in Carrie, with emphasis. This conversation scarcely occupied a minute, though it may seem longer. Meanwhile Dr. Dudley and Nicholas Bundy were left out of the conversation. Oliver remembered this, and introduced them."Dr. Dudley," he said, "permit me to introduce my friend, Mr. Bundy." "I am glad to make the acquaintance of any friend of yours, Oliver. We are just going in. Won't you and Mr. Bundy join us at dinner in
- 62. the hotel?" Nicholas Bundy did not in general take kindly to new friends, but he saw that Oliver wished the invitation to be accepted, and he assented with a good grace. The boat was turned, and they were soon on land again. "Who is this man, Oliver?" asked Frank in a low tone. "He is a new acquaintance, but he has been very kind to me, and I have needed friends." "Is it true that your step-father has cast you off? Roland has been spreading that report." "It is true enough." "What an outrage!" exclaimed Frank indignantly. "But, at least, he makes you an allowance out of your mother's property?" "He sent me twenty dollars, and let me understand that I was to expect no more of him." "What an old rascal!" "I hate him!" said Carrie. "I would like to pull his hair." "That's a regular girl's wish," said Frank, laughing. "Perhaps you can make it do by pulling Roland's, sis." "I will, when he next says anything against Oliver." "Look here, Oliver," said Frank, lowering his voice, "if you are in want of money, I've got five dollars at home that I can let you have as well as not. I'll send it in a letter." "I've got three dollars, Oliver," said Carrie eagerly. "You'll take that, too, won't you?"
- 63. Oliver was moved by these offers. "You are true friends, both of you," he said; "but I have been lucky, and I shall not need to accept your kindness just yet. I have nearly a hundred dollars in my pocket-book, and Mr. Bundy is paying me ten dollars a week for going around with him. But, though I don't need it, I thank you all the same." "He looks rough," said Carrie, stealing a look at the tall, slouching figure walking beside her father; "but if he is kind, I shall like him." "He has done more than I have yet told you. He has promised to provide for me as long as I will stay with him." "He's a good man," said Carrie impulsively. "I'm going to thank him." She went up to Nicholas Bundy and took his rough hand in hers. "Mr. Bundy," she said, "Oliver tells me you have been very kind to him. I want to thank you for it." "My little lady," said Nicholas, surprised and pleased, "if I'd been kind, that would pay me; but I've only been kind to myself. I'm alone in the world. I've got no wife nor child, nor a single relation, but I've got enough to keep two on, and as long as Oliver will stay with me he shall want for nothing. He's company to me, and that's what I need." "I wish you were his step-father instead of Mr. Kenyon." "What sort of a man is Mr. Kenyon?" asked Nicholas of Dr. Dudley. "He is a very unprincipled schemer, in my opinion," was the reply. "He has managed to defraud Oliver of his mother's property and cast him penniless on the world."
- 64. "He is a scoundrel, no doubt; but I am not sorry for what he has done," replied Mr. Bundy. "But for him I should be a solitary man. Now I have a young friend to keep me company. Let the boy's inheritance go? I will provide for him!" They dined together, and then Dr. Dudley and his family were obliged to return. "Shall I give your love to Roland?" asked Frank. "I think you had better keep it yourself, Frank," and Oliver pressed his hand warmly. "You needn't tell Roland that I am prospering, nor his father, either. I prefer, at present, that they should not know it." They parted, with mutual promises to write at regular intervals.
- 66. N CHAPTER XXIV. ANOTHER CLUE. ICHOLAS BUNDY was disappointed by his first failure, but by no means discouraged. "There are many Joneses in the world," he said, "but Rupert is an uncommon name. I didn't think there'd be more than one with that handle to his name. If he's alive I'll find him." "Why don't you enquire of somebody that knew him?" asked Oliver. "The thing is to find such a one," said Bundy. "There's been many changes in twenty years." "Don't you know of some tradesman that he used to patronize, Mr. Bundy?" "The very thing!" exclaimed the miner, for so I shall sometimes designate Mr. Bundy. "There's one man that may tell me about him." "Who is that?" "He kept a drinking-place down near Fulton Ferry. He may be living yet. I'll go and see him."
- 67. So one morning Nicholas Bundy, accompanied by Oliver, took the Third Avenue cars and went downtown. They got out near the Astor House, and made their way to the old place, which Bundy remembered well. To his great joy he found it—a little shabbier, a little dirtier, but in other respects the same. They entered. Behind the bar stood a man of nearly sixty, whose bloated figure and dull red face indicated that he appreciated what he sold to others. "What will you have, gentlemen?" he asked briskly. Nicholas Bundy surveyed his countenance attentively. "Are you Jacob Spratt?" he asked. "Yes," answered the bartender. "Do you know me?" "I knew you twenty years ago," answered the miner. "I don't remember you." "You once knew me well." "I have seen many faces in my time. I can't remember so many years back." "Do you recall the name of Nicholas Bundy?" "Ay, that I do. You used to come here with a man named Jones." "Yes—Rupert Jones. Can you tell me where he is now?" Jacob shook his head. "He left New York not long after you did," he answered. "He went to Chicago."
- 68. "Are you sure of that?" "Yes, and I'll tell you why. He came here one evening and says: 'Jacob, I'm going away. You won't see me for a long time—I'm going to Chicago.'" "Did he tell you why he was going there?" "He said he was going there as an agent for a New York house— that he had a good chance." "You have never seen him since?" "No," said Jacob. Then he added meditatively: "Once I thought I saw him. There was a man I met in the street looking as like him as two peas, makin' allowance for the years he was older. I went up to him and called him by name, but he colored up and looked annoyed, and told me I was quite mistaken; that his name wasn't Jones, but something else—I don't remember what now. Of course I axed his pardon and walked on, but he was the very picture of Rupert Jones." "Then you feel sure that he went to Chicago?" "Yes, he told me so, and that was the last time I saw him. If he had stayed in the city he would have kept on comin' to my place, or I should have met him somewhere." Nicholas Bundy thanked the old man for his information, and ordered glasses of lemonade for himself and Oliver. "Won't you have something stronger, Mr. Bundy?" asked the barkeeper insinuatingly. Bundy shook his head. "I've given up liquor," he said. "I'm better off without it, and so will the boy be. What do you say, Oliver?"
- 69. "I agree with you, sir," said Oliver promptly. "Lucky for me all don't think so," said Spratt. "It 'ould ruin my business." When they left the bar-room Nicholas Bundy turned to his young companion. "Oliver," he said, "will you go with me to Chicago?" "I shall be glad to go," said Oliver promptly. "Then we will start in two or three days, as soon as I have made some business arrangements." "Mr. Bundy," said Oliver honestly, "it will cost you considerable to pay my expenses. I should like very much to go, but do you think it will pay you to take me?" "You're considerate, boy, but don't trouble yourself about that. You are company to me, and I'm willing to pay your expenses for that, let alone the help you may give me." "Thank you, Mr. Bundy. Then I will say no more. What day do you think you will start?" "To-day is Tuesday. We will start on Saturday. Can you be ready?" Oliver laughed. "There won't be much getting ready for me," he said. "All my business arrangements can be made in half an hour." Bundy smiled. Our hero's good spirits seemed to enliven his own. He was not only getting used to Oliver's company, but sincerely attached to him.
- 71. N CHAPTER XXV. MAKING ARRANGEMENTS. ICHOLAS BUNDY went downtown the next morning. Contrary to his usual custom, he did not invite Oliver to accompany him. "Perhaps you have some places to visit," he said. "If so, take the day to yourself. I shall not need you." He proceeded to the office of a well-known broker in the vicinity of Wall Street, and, entering, looked around him. His rusty appearance did not promise a profitable customer, and he had to wait some time before any attention was paid him. Finally a young clerk came to him and enquired carelessly: "Can we do anything for you this morning?" "Are you one of the proprietors?" asked Nicholas. "No," answered the young man, smiling. "I should like to see your employer, then." "I can attend to any little commission you may have," said the young man pertly. "Who told you my commission was a little one, young man?"
- 72. "It seems large to him, I suppose," thought the clerk, again smiling. "If it's only a few hundred dollars――" he commenced. "I want to consult your employer about the investment of fifty thousand dollars in gold," said Nicholas deliberately. "Oh, I beg your pardon, sir," said the young man, his manner entirely altered. "I will speak to Mr. Hamlin at once." Though the broker was engaged with another person he waited upon Nicholas without delay, inviting him to take a seat in his private office. "Are you desirous of obtaining large interest, Mr. Bundy?" he asked. "No, sir; I want something solid, that won't fly away. I've worked for my money and don't want to lose it." "Precisely. Then I can recommend you nothing better than Government bonds. They pay a fair interest and the security is unquestionable." "Government bonds will suit me," said the miner. "You may buy them." The purchase was made and Nicholas enquired: "What shall I do with them? I don't want to carry them around with me. Is there any place of safety where I can leave them while I am absent on a journey?" "Yes, sir; you want to place them with a safe deposit company. I will give you a note to one that I can recommend." This advice seemed good to Mr. Bundy. He presented himself at the office of the company and deposited the bonds, receiving a
- 73. suitable certificate. "One thing more," he said to himself, "and my arrangements will be made." He visited the office of a lawyer and dictated his will. It was very brief, scarcely ten lines in length. This also he deposited with the safe deposit company. "Oliver," he said, in the evening, "I've got through my business sooner than I expected. Can you start to-morrow?" "Yes, sir." "Then we'll go. We'll pay our landlady to the end of the month, so that she can't complain. One thing more, Oliver, I want to tell you. I've left the bulk of my property, in bonds, and my will with the Safe Deposit Company, No. ―― Broadway. If anything happens to me you are to go there and call for the will. Whatever there is in it I want you to see carried out." "All right, sir." The next day they started for Chicago.
- 75. J CHAPTER XXVI. WHO RUPERT JONES WAS. UST before leaving New York Oliver wrote a letter to Frank Dudley, announcing the plan he had in view. My new guardian, Mr. Bundy, goes to Chicago on business [he wrote] and I am to go with him. I don't know how long we shall be away. I shall be well provided for, and expect to have a good time. I may write you from the West. Remember me to Carrie, and believe me to be your affectionate friend, Oliver Conrad. "So Oliver is going to Chicago," said Frank Dudley to Roland Kenyon, on the afternoon of the same day. Roland looked surprised. "How do you know?" he asked. Frank showed him the passage quoted above. "He doesn't send his love to you," said Frank mischievously. "I don't care for his love," returned Roland, tossing his head. "I'm glad he is going to a distance."
- 76. "Why?" "So he needn't disgrace the family." "Are you really afraid of that?" asked Frank, in rather a sarcastic tone. "Yes; he's a bad fellow, and you'll find it out sooner or later." "I don't agree with you; I think Oliver a fine, manly fellow." "Oh, I know you have always stuck up for him!" said Roland, annoyed. "You are deceived—that is all." "Carrie is deceived, too, then," said Frank, knowing that this would tease Roland. "She has just as high an opinion of Oliver as I have." "She'll find him out sometime," said Roland, and walked moodily away. Reaching home, he told his father the news. "Oliver gone to Chicago!" repeated Mr. Kenyon, with evident pleasure. "I am glad of it. I hope he'll never come back to annoy us." "I hope so, too." "But I am afraid he will get out of money and write for help." "He's found some flat who has taken a fancy to him, and is paying his expenses. Very likely he'll get tired of him, though." "Who is it?" asked Mr. Kenyon, with some curiosity. "It's a rough sort of a man. Frank Dudley met him one day at Staten Island. An old miner from California, I believe, named Bundy."
- 77. "What!" exclaimed his father hastily and in visible agitation. "What is the man's name?" "Bundy." "What is his first name?" "Nicholas, I believe." "Is it possible?" exclaimed Mr. Kenyon, moved in some unaccountable manner. "How strange the boy should have fallen in with him!" "Why, do you know him, father?" asked Roland, whose turn it was now to be surprised. "I have heard of him," answered Mr. Kenyon, in an embarrassed voice; "not lately—years ago." "What sort of a man is he?" asked Roland, who was endowed with a full share of curiosity. "His character was bad," answered his father briefly. "He was discharged from his place for dishonesty. I knew very little of him." "Then he's good company for Oliver," said Roland, shrugging his shoulders. "They are well matched. I'll tell Frank Dudley what sort of a guardian his dear friend has chosen." "I desire you will do nothing of the kind," said his father hastily. "Why not?" asked Roland, in surprise. "I don't care to have it known that I ever heard of the man. Frank Dudley might write to Oliver what I have said, and then it would get to the ears of this man Bundy. I have nothing against him, remember. In fact I am grateful to him for taking the boy off my hands. If we are wise, we shall say nothing to separate them."
- 78. "I see," said Roland. "I guess you're right, father. I'd like to tell Frank, but I won't." "How strange things turn out in this world!" said Kenyon to himself, when Roland had left him. "Of all men in the world Oliver has drifted into the care of the man who hates me most. It is fortunate that I have changed my name. He will never suspect that the step-father of the boy he is befriending is the man he once knew as—Rupert Jones."
- 80. M CHAPTER XXVII. A STARTLING TELEGRAM. EANWHILE, in her Southern prison-house, Mrs. Kenyon languished in hopeless captivity. There was only one thing to add to her unhappiness, and that was supplied by the cruel ingenuity of her unprincipled husband. Tell her [wrote Mr. Kenyon to Dr. Fox] that her son Oliver is dead. He has just died of typhoid fever, after a week's illness. We did all we could to save him, but the disease obtained too great headway to be resisted, and he finally succumbed to it. "If she's not insane already that may make her so," he said to himself cunningly. "I shall not tell even Dr. Fox that the story is false. If he believes it he will be the more likely to persuade her of it." Dr. Fox did believe it. Had it been an invention he supposed Mr. Kenyon would have taken him into his confidence. So he made haste to impart the news to his patient. Essentially a coarse-minded man, he was not withheld, as many would have been, by a feeling of pity or consideration, but imparted it abruptly. "I've got bad news for you, Mrs. Kenyon," he said, entering the room where she was confined. "What is it?" she asked quickly.
- 81. "Your son Oliver is dead!" She uttered one cry of deep suffering, then fixed her eyes upon the doctor's face. "You say this to torment me," she said. "It is not true." "On my honor, it is true," he answered; and he believed what he said. "When did you learn it? Tell me all you know, in Heaven's name! Would you drive me mad?" Dr. Fox shrugged his shoulders. "I only got the letter this morning," he said. "It was from Mr. Kenyon." "May I see the letter?" Reflecting that it contained nothing of a private nature, Dr. Fox consented, and put the letter into her hands. It carried conviction to the grief-stricken woman. "I have nothing to live for now," she said mournfully. "My poor Oliver! So young to die!" "Who's dead?" enquired Cleopatra, advancing to where they stood. "My boy Oliver." "Is that all? I thought it might be Mark Antony. Dr. Fox, have you received a letter from Antony lately?" "No, your Majesty. If I had I would immediately have informed you."
- 82. The effect of this news was, for a time, to plunge Mrs. Kenyon into a fit of despondency. Freedom no longer had for her the old attractions. What was life to her now that her boy was dead? Mr. Kenyon heard with pleasure of the effect produced by his cruel message. "Why don't she die, or grow mad?" he said to himself. "I shall never feel safe while she is still alive. What would the world say if it should discover that my wife is not dead, but confined in a mad- house?" Still, he felt moderately secure. All his plans thus far had succeeded. He had won the hand of a wealthy widow, he had put her out of the way; he had cast off her son, appropriated her property, and there seemed to lie before him years of luxury and self-indulgence. In the midst of this pleasant day-dream there came a rude awakening. One day, as he was sitting in dressing-gown and slippers, complacently scanning a schedule of bonds and bank shares, a servant entered. "Please, sir; here's a telegram. Will you sign the book? The boy is waiting." He took the book and signed it calmly. He was expecting a telegram from his broker, and this was doubtless the message looked for. He tore open the envelope and read: Your wife has escaped. We have no clue yet to her whereabouts. Fox.
- 83. He turned actually livid. "What's the matter, sir?" asked the servant, alarmed by his appearance. "Is it bad news?" He had his wits about him, and realized the importance of assigning a reason for his emotion. "Yes, Betty, I have lost five thousand dollars!" "Shure the master must care a sight about his money!" thought Betty. "He looked just like a ghost." Mr. Kenyon sent a message to Dr. Fox, exhorting him to spare no pains to capture the fugitive. Not content with this, he followed the telegram, taking the next train southward.
- 85. M CHAPTER XXVIII. OLD NANCY'S HUT. RS. KENYON'S depression and apparent submission to her fate had relaxed the vigilance of her keepers. Still, it is doubtful if she would have escaped but for the help of her insane room-mate. Late one evening Cleopatra, with a cunning expression, showed her a key. "Do you know what this is?" she asked. "It is a key." "It is the key of this door." "How did you get it?" Upon this point the queen would give no information. But she lowered her voice and whispered: "Mark Antony is waiting for me outside. He is going to carry me away." It was useless to question her delusion, and Mrs. Kenyon contented herself with asking:
- 86. "Do you mean to leave this house?" "Yes," said Cleopatra. "Antony expects me. Will you go with me? I will make you one of my maids of honor." "Do you think we can get out?" asked Mrs. Kenyon dubiously. "The outer door is locked." "I know where to find the key. Time presses. Will you go?" Believing in the death of her son, Mrs. Kenyon had supposed herself indifferent to liberty, but now that the hope of escape was presented a wild desire to throw off the shackles of confinement came to her. What her future life might be she did not care to ask; but once to breathe the free air, a free woman, excited and exhilarated her. "Yes; I will go," she said quickly. "Come!" The two women dressed themselves hurriedly, softly they opened the door of their room, went downstairs, and from under the mat in the unlighted hall Cleopatra stooped down and drew out the key of the outer door. "See!" she said exultantly. "Quick! Open the door!" exclaimed Mrs. Kenyon nervously. The key turned in the lock with a grating sound which she feared might lead to discovery, but fortunately it did not. A moment and they stood on the outside of their prison-house. Now Mrs. Kenyon assumed the lead. "Come," she said. "Do you know where to find Mark Antony?" asked Cleopatra.
- 87. "Yes; follow me." They did not venture to take the highway. The chances of discovery were too great. Neither knew much about the country, but Mrs. Kenyon remembered that a colored woman, sometimes employed at the asylum, lived in a lonely hut a mile back from the road. This woman—old Nancy—she had specially employed by permission of Dr. Fox, and to her hut she resolved to go. Cleopatra, no longer self-reliant, followed her confidingly. Just on the verge of a wood, with no other dwelling near at hand, dwelt the old black woman. It was a rude cabin, dark and unpainted. Cleopatra looked doubtfully at it. "Where are you going?" she asked, standing still. "Antony is not here." It was not a time to reason, nor was the assumed queen a person to reason with. There was no choice but to be positive and peremptory. "No," she answered, "Antony is not here, but here he will meet you. It is a poor place, but his enemies lie in wait for him, and he wishes to see you in secret." This explanation suited Cleopatra's humor. She nodded her head in a satisfied way and said: "I know it. Augustus would murder my Antony if he could." "Then you must not expose him to danger. Come with me." Mrs. Kenyon advanced, not without some misgivings, since Nancy was unaware of her visit. She could hear the old woman snoring, and was compelled to knock loudly. At last old Nancy heard, and awoke in a great fright.
- 88. "Who's there?" she called out, in a quavering voice. "It's I, Nancy. It's Mrs. Kenyon." This only seemed to alarm the old woman the more. She was superstitious, like most of her race, and straightway fancied that it was some evil spirit who had assumed Mrs. Kenyon's voice. "Go away, you debbil!" she answered, in tremulous accents. "I know you. You's an evil sperrit. Go away, and leave old Nancy alone." Had her situation been less critical, Mrs. Kenyon would have been amused at the old woman's alarm, but in the dead of night, a fugitive from the confinement of a mad-house, she was in no mood for amusement. "Don't be frightened, Nancy," she said, "I have escaped from the asylum with Cleopatra, and we want you to hide us for to-night. I will give you ten dollars if you will open your door and help us." Now, avarice was a besetting weakness in old Nancy's character, and though Mrs. Kenyon did not know it, she had unwittingly made the right appeal to the old woman. Ten dollars was an immense sum to Nancy, who counted her savings by the smallest sums. She drew back the bolt, and opened her door, not wholly without fear that her first suspicions might be correct, and her nocturnal visitors turn out to be emissaries of Satan. "Are you sure you aint bad sperrits?" she asked, through a narrow crevice. "Don't be foolish, Nancy. You know me well enough, and Cleopatra, too. Open the door wider, and let us in." Reassured in a degree by the testimony of her eyes, Nancy complied and the two entered.
- 89. "Laws, missus, it's you shure nuff," she said, "and Clopatry, too." (This was as near as she ever got to the name of the royal Egyptian.) "Who'd a thought to see you this time o' night?" "We've run away, Nancy. You won't let Dr. Fox know?" "I reckon not, missus. He's a drefful mean man, the old doctor is. I won't give you up to him nohow." Luckily for Mrs. Kenyon old Nancy had some months before had a quarrel with Dr. Fox about some money matter in which she felt he had cheated her. So she was glad of this opportunity to do him an ill turn. "Is Antony here, Nancy?" asked Cleopatra, looking about her with an air of expectation. Nancy was about to reply in the negative, when she caught a significant look from Mrs. Kenyon, and altered her intended answer. "He aint here yet, missus, but I expect him in the morning sure." "Likely he's her man," thought Nancy, who was entirely unacquainted with that episode in Roman history in which Cleopatra figured. "Likely he's her man, though she do look old to have one." The cabin consisted of one room on the ground floor, but overhead was a loft covered with straw, and used partly as a lumber-room by the old woman. A pallet filled with straw lay in one corner of the lower room, this being old Nancy's bed, from which she had hastily risen when she heard the knocking at the outer door. "Lie down there, honeys," she said with generous hospitality, proposing to resign her own bed to her unexpected guests. But the position was too exposed for Mrs. Kenyon.
- 90. Looking up she espied the loft and said: "No, Nancy, we would rather go up there. Then if Dr. Fox comes for us he won't discover us." To this arrangement both Nancy and Cleopatra assented, and a rude ladder was brought into requisition. When they had reached the loft Cleopatra looked around her with discontent. "Am I to lie here?" she asked. "Yes; we will lie down together." "But this is no fit couch for a great queen," she complained. "What will Mark Antony—what will my courtiers say?" "They will praise you for sacrificing your royal state for your lover," answered Mrs. Kenyon, who was quick-witted, and readily understood the warped mind she had to deal with. "Then I will be content," said Cleopatra, evidently pleased with the suggestion, "if you think Antony will approve." "There is no doubt of it. He will love you better than ever." Cleopatra reclined upon the straw, and was soon in a profound slumber. Mrs. Kenyon was longer awake. She was anxious and troubled, but at length she, too, yielded to sleep. She awoke to find old Nancy bending over her. "Don't be frightened, honey," she said; "but the old doctor is ridin' straight to the door. Don't you move or say a word, and I'll send him off as wise as he came." Nancy had scarcely got downstairs and drawn the ladder after her, when the smart tap of a riding-whip was heard on the outer door.
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