Literature and Science [antikvár]

I SNOW or Leavis? The jDland^scientism of The Two Cultures or^ violent and ill-mannered, the one-track, moralistic literarism of the Richmond Lecture? If there were no other choice, we should indeed be badly off. But happily there are middle roads, there is a more realistic approach to the subject than was made by either of the two champions. And the two champions, let us remember, are not the only combatants in the field; they are merely, at this moment, the most notorious. The field has known a long succession of fighters for this cause or for that, a long succession, too, of earnest compromisers anxiously trying to negotiate a fruitful peace between the opposing forces, or at least a not too hostile symbiosis. One thinks of T. H. Huxley, with his advocacy of a primarily scientific education tempered (as Caltech, for example, and M.LT. now temper it) with plenty of history, sociology, EngHsh literature and foreign languages. One thinks of Matthew Arnold, pleading for a primarily humanistic and specifically classical education, tempered by enough science to make its recipients understand the singularly un-Hellenic world in which they find themselves living. Huxley would most certainly have agreed with Arnold in thinking that man, and even man's remote ancestor, 'the hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits . . . carried hidden in his nature something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters'. He refused, however, to accept 'the further conclusion that our hairy ancestor carried in his nature, also, a necessity for Greek', and would have 5