the two cultures and renaissance humanism

DOI 10.1179/030801808X259781

© 2008 Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. Published by Maney on behalf of the Institute

INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, 2008, VOL. 33, NO. 2 121

The two cultures and Renaissance

humanism

CYNTHIA M. PYLE

New York University, NY, USA

C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ distinction between scientific and humanistic thought is peren-

nial. It may be said to correspond to empirical and metaphorical bents in human nature.

Since antiquity, attempts have been made by some to bridge the gap. The natural bridge of

scientific (in the broad sense) scholarship has been largely overlooked, but the develop-

ment in the West of philological and historical methods by fifteenth and early sixteenth

century humanists (in the technical sense) exhibits numerous criteria and examples of a

scientific approach to the world around us, as does such scholarship today.

INTRODUCTORY – THE TWO CULTURES DEBATE

Dialogue – some may call it dialectic; the ancient Greeks called it agon – is inherent tohuman experience. It exists at all levels of society, from two individuals confronting eachother, to two groups facing the threat of a strike through mediation, to two nationsattempting to deflect war by engaging in diplomacy. Human warfare could even be termeda form of dialogue, put into effect when diplomacy breaks down. Agon, as Jacquelinede Romilly has so rightly pointed out, was the basis for the original Greek democracy;1

it is also intended to be the modus operandi for Western parliamentary and congressionalgovernments. Such dialogue is obviously the basis for theatre, again from Greek agon

forward, and in the theatrical traditions of the Eastern hemisphere as well, beginning withthe dramatisation of warring scenes in the Bhagavad Gita. Agon even exists within anindividual’s mind, as that person weighs pros and cons, coming gradually to a decisionabout a life-change, a meal, a word.

C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ . . .

In his Rede Lecture of 1959, the physicist and novelist Charles Percy Snow re-opened acontroversy which, in various guises over the centuries, has perhaps been one of the mostfruitful in the history of human society. Snow entitled his lecture ‘The two cultures’, whilejoking that ‘the number 2 is a very dangerous number; that is why the dialectic is a danger-ous process’.2 He was arguing against expanding his treatment to three categories (forindeed it could be expanded to multiple areas), thereby losing what might be called itspolemical edge. His two categories, then, were the scientific and literary cultures, and hedecided to include applied science and technology with the former for the same reason.

Snow, whose own career spanned serious work in both areas, perceived in the Englandof the time strong differences impeding communication between scientists and humanists(using this term here in its current broad meaning of those concerned with the

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humanities). One might almost say that members of the two camps looked down theirnoses at each other, Escher-like, in their relations (or lack of them). Snow believed this tobe deleterious to both camps. He brings to his arguments his concern about the poverty ofmost of the world, and poverty’s real effects on humanity’s social, political and existentialcondition – problems we are only today allowing ourselves to realise are rooted in thepopulation explosion, itself enabled by the industrial revolution, another of Snow’s topics,and, he thought, a remedy for poverty.3

Snow defines the scientific culture stemming from the industrial revolution by itscommon attitudes, standards, behaviour, approaches and assumptions (‘intensive, rigor-ous, and constantly in action’; containing ‘a great deal of argumentation, . . . and almostalways at a higher conceptual level than literary persons’ arguments’; p. 12). This is ofcourse both offensive to the literary camp and yet a more satisfactory definition thanrelying on mere subject-matter, for it gets to the heart of how exactly scientists differ fromhumanists, in Snow’s opinion: to a large extent, it is the way they work, their praxis, thatdistinguishes the two camps. The division, in Snow’s discussion, is heightened by the factthat the scientists he considers are physicists, and the humanists he considers (and we shallsee this occurring in other treatments of these and similar questions) are literati, people ofletters and even simply the reading public, rather than scholars.

The ‘traditionalists’, as Snow calls the non-scientists, exhibit a superciliousness withregard to the natural sciences born, in many cases, of ignorance. Yet Snow does notattempt to define how they themselves work, what their praxis is, except to say that it isdifferent from the scientists’. The fact is that, if he is referring in the humanities to writersof fiction like himself, the praxis is indeed very different: it is, like scientific practice, acreative process, but one beholden only to itself, a process where, as in all of what wetoday call the fine arts, the principal criteria are subjective. (There are certainly subjectivefacets to scientific practice, but there the principal criteria are objective: conclusions mustrhyme with factual data or be discarded.) If, on the other hand, Snow had referred in thehumanities to scholars, for example historians, his arguments for distinguishing betweenthe two areas would not have been as clear as he managed to make them.

Snow terms the industrial revolution ‘by far the biggest transformation in society sincethe discovery of agriculture’ (pp. 22–23). Because the two transformations have nowbecome united in industrialised agriculture, we are dealing with forces that are dauntingindeed, the effects of which are in even greater need of understanding. Yet Snow’s literaryintellectuals are ‘natural Luddites’, ill-equipped to confront the sociopolitical problemsof our time. And his scientists, while more dependably trained to think critically, areill-equipped to confront these problems on their own, human, terms as well.

Enter a third potential culture: that of applied science and engineering. Snow termsthe ‘scientific revolution’ (apparently in ignorance of or forgetting the normal use of theterm to apply to the great seventeenth-century efflorescence of the natural sciences) that‘application of real science to industry’ (p. 29) which occurred in his own time – that is,especially, since the first industrial use of atomic particles in the 1920s. ‘I believe theindustrial society of electronics, atomic energy, automation . . . will change the world muchmore [than any previous transformation]’ (p. 30).

Snow was perhaps overly optimistic about the positive effects of both the industrialand the contemporary scientific revolutions. Although he recognised the gap between rich


The two cultures and Renaissance humanism 123

and poor as one of the three great menaces to civilisation, along with the H-bomb andoverpopulation (p. 46), he was convinced that ‘since the gap between the rich countriesand the poor can be removed, it will be.’ But we need only read on to realise that headmitted the possibility of the gap’s removal by war and starvation, if good will orenlightened self-interest did not govern policy.

For this to happen, Snow recognised the need for two things: capital, and trainedscientists and engineers. And he realised that the scientists and engineers must also betrained in human terms (p. 47), and not in paternalistic human terms, in a colonialist spirit,but in equal human terms, cognisant of the humanity, including the intelligence, of allmembers of the species. He recognised the magnitude of the problem, and the questionsthat could be posed with regard to the feasibility of the great redirections that needed totake place in order for humanity to confront and resolve the dangers of the three greatthreats. (He may not have yet realised the magnitude of our species’ threat to the veryexistence of the planet on which it depends for its own existence.) And, his time beingcharacterised by the Cold War, he felt that if the West did not confront these dangers, theSoviet Union would. But he outlined the gravity of the problem, ending with the words:‘We have very little time. So little that I dare not guess at it’ (p. 51).

. . . and the reactions to it

Sir Charles’s lecture did not go unnoticed. Numerous essays were devoted to respondingto it in the British periodical Encounter and elsewhere over the succeeding months.4 Thesewere constructive, sober contributions from various fields of endeavour, literary, socio-logical and scientific. However, some critics were more personally touched, especially byhis criticisms of the lack of scientific knowledge among those involved in the humanities.

One such critic was F. R. Leavis, whose attack on Snow in 1962 unfortunately becamethe best known of the replies.5 Whereas Snow’s lecture was directed, not at any oneindividual, but at a state of affairs he thought required debate and remedy, the tone ofLeavis’s response was defensive, vitriolic and personal, putting into question whetherthe infamous opposition of the two should be called a ‘debate’ at all. Certainly Leavis’sresponse does not show him at his critical or intellectual best; the subtlety of mind forwhich he is rightly admired is obscured by his emotional stance (though it must be addedin his defence – as Anthony West pointed out in 1962 – that in his novel The Affair, Snowhad apparently modelled an unsavoury Cambridge academic on Leavis).

But the debate, the agon, between the two camps, scientific and humanistic, had neitherbegun nor ended there. It is in fact perennial. And it is revisited with reason at varioustimes and in various terms by those deeply concerned with either the state of the humani-ties or that of the sciences, or with communications between the two – which shouldinclude all of us today. For while the question of antagonism between the humanities andthe sciences has been addressed on both sides of the Atlantic in many ways since 1959, weare now confronted with an even more contentious question, the discrepancies betweenreligious belief and scientific scepticism.

The Huxley–Arnold debate

Snow’s approach to the question of science versus letters was famously preceded by thenineteenth-century debate between the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend and


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defender of Charles Darwin, and Huxley’s other friend and later relative by marriage, thecritic, poet and playwright Matthew Arnold. Huxley’s inaugural lecture of 1880 for theMason Technical College in Birmingham6 was a call for the greater presence of sciencein the educational curriculum, though not necessarily a cross-pollination between thehumanities and the sciences. Rather, he felt that science at the time had been neglectedto the point where a technological or scientific training, without undue emphasis on theclassical languages and literatures, should be advocated as sufficient unto itself. Modernlanguages could substitute for the classics, and the emphasis, in a technical school, shouldbe on science and technology.

This of course does not address the rift between the two branches of learning – it couldinstead be said to inflame it – and Arnold’s response made that the central question of thedebate, implying that ethics and aesthetics (‘our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty’)could be taught only through the study of the humane letters, specifically including theGreek and Latin classics.7

Earlier manifestations of the debate

Precedents for both these more recent debates abound across the centuries. One needonly think of the Querelle des Anciens et Modernes of the French seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, of which J. W. Lorimer has singled out a previously overlooked strand, thedebate on the merits of ‘Science’ and ‘Erudition’.8 This debate pitted such ‘moderns’ asDescartes and Voltaire, who disdained looking to historical figures for insights into theworld or knowledge, against those ‘traditionalists’ who saw merit in the study of theclassics, even recognising their contributions to the natural sciences, if not directly, then byway of intuitions which anticipated – and might even inspire – findings of contemporaryscientists.

Might we even go so far as to allude to the debate between Plato and Aristotle, or thatthroughout Western history since ancient Greece, between Platonists and Aristotelians? Isthere not a sense of the metaphorical versus the empirical inherent in these differences instyle and forms of analysis: the Socratic eliciting of knowledge through metaphor and theAristotelian process of analysis and synthesis (evident not only in his theoretical systems,but in his work as a zoologist)?

DISTINCTIONS

Apples and oranges

There is a serious oversight in most of these debates, including, in part, the French Querelle:they oppose two disparate types of work. One type of work – the ‘scientific’ – makes useof external criteria or standards of thought; the other type of work – the ‘literary’ – makesuse of internal criteria or standards of thought. While portions of these antagonismsoppose mere accumulation of knowledge to active investigation, they confuse eruditionwith appreciation (of the supercilious sort that Huxley and Snow inveighed against); otherportions of the debates oppose purely creative to scientific work. The operative categoriesare never defined.

In doing science of almost any sort, scientists must measure their conclusions bythe data or experimental findings they arrive at, as independently as possible from their



subjective judgement. (Though most agree today that the subjective element is present andeven important in scientific undertakings, at various stages of the work.) In writing literaryworks (which is what most of the debaters seem to consider working in the humanities,though some also adduce the visual arts and music), the writer must measure discoveriesby his or her own interior judgement, most often about human behaviour or thought.Little attention is paid to what can indeed be called a ‘scientific’ undertaking in the hu-manities, to wit, scholarship.

In scholarship, for example historical or philological scholarship, criteria are alsoexternal, as they are in the natural sciences. The conclusions must rhyme with the datadiscovered in the course of one’s research. When they do not, the conclusions must bealterred. Such discrepancies, of course, are not always checked, any more than they arein science – though the external controls are more rigorous in the scientific community.Scientific experiments are, theoretically at least, reproducible in other laboratories orthrough others’ analyses of the data; in history, such controls are applied less systematicallythan is healthy for the field, for they amount to re-researching an article or a book orat least checking deeply on a point or points made in such work, and historians mostoften work alone, rather than in a laboratory with assistants, rendering such controlscumbersome.

However, the signal characteristic of such work in either the sciences or the humanitiescan be termed its ‘critical’ nature: its subjection of theories and conclusions to comparisonwith data and observed phenomena. Critical work has been performed in the humanities inthe West since ancient times, beginning with the rudimentary steps of the first historian,Herodotus, and the development of logic by Aristotle.

Scholarly practice

A number of recent studies have implied that the so-called ‘social sciences’ (psychology,sociology, anthropology, political science, etc.) are the logical bridge between the humani-ties and the sciences.9 And so it might seem at first glance. But, in fact, an even morelogical bridge has existed for longer than most people of either camp today realise. Wellbefore the existence of today’s social sciences, the Western world had scholarship. I amthinking especially of scholarship of two particular kinds: textual and historical. Whiletextual and historical scholarship do not have the press or the glamour (or the financing)of the natural sciences, they continue apace, in a beleaguered sort of way, under theauspices of research universities, great libraries and dedicated individuals, often in thosetraditional fields which were attacked by the pro-science, pro-modern sides of the debateswe have just been considering, i.e. the classics and the history of literatures.

These traditional fields have recently undergone an onslaught from theoreticians in thehumanities, many of whom have applied their often brilliant minds to seeking intellectualchallenges in the very areas of criticism that Snow might have had in mind, which hadbecome somewhat soft in their approaches to their subject-matter, usually criticism ofliterary or artistic works. Some of these upstarts are philosophers, some literary critics,and some literati; some are even ‘social scientists’.10 They have devised, out of their(humankind’s) remarkable powers of intellect, complex and sometimes arcane systemsof approaching the text or other works of art, often through their understandings(and misunderstandings) of anthropological or theoretical-linguistic terms. Their ideas


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have jarred the humanities and stirred up deeply felt debates of their own. As with alliconoclasms, this one has had its effect on its targeted dogmas of thought. Some of thesetheorists’ ideas have become almost commonplace; others have been discarded outright.But even those who saw through the emperor’s new clothes were affected by thephenomenon, having to open vast areas of their fields to a new interdisciplinarity that hasbrought some surprising changes.

Among the most serious scholars, the old precision of their traditional practices hasremained, both as a buffer against nonsense and as a seriousness of intent to learn asdeeply as possible from (often scientific) fields in which they have had no previoustraining. One can look at the work, for example, of the classicist and textual scholarMichael D. Reeve, who, in addressing questions of genealogy in manuscript stemmata,found common ground with the taxonomical concept in biology of cladism (dichotomouslines of descent) – who in fact was even able to point to the philological and historicallinguistic origins of the biological use of the term.11

HISTORICAL QUESTIONS

Renaissance humanism

Up to this point, we have been using the terms ‘humanism’, ‘humanistic’ and ‘humanities’rather loosely. Turning to the Renaissance, the term ‘humanism’ takes on a particular andtechnical meaning, while retaining its relation to what we think of as the humanities.Renaissance humanism grew out of the seven liberal arts of the Middle Ages: the trivium(grammar, rhetoric and philosophy) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomyand music) – it is interesting to see in this earlier categorisation of the arts (its formalisationdating from Martianus Capella in the fifth century CE) the very division we are dealing withhere between the humanities and the sciences. In antiquity the division was not so clear,and what boundaries could be discerned were drawn along different and evolving lines.By the fifteenth century in Italy we find that these medieval pedagogical divisions haveconsiderably evolved (by which I mean changed over time, with no positive or negativeconnotation), into the studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moralphilosophy), or what we may begin to call the humanistic studies.12 The quadrivium wasabsorbed into what was termed ‘natural philosophy’, including many of what we today callthe sciences: astronomy, botany, anatomy, and that elegant tool of science, mathematics.The mechanical arts on the other hand were treated with some disdain from antiquityonward, coming into recognition only in the twelfth century systems of the scholastics.13

But what truly distinguishes the fifteenth century in Italy from immediately earlierperiods is not simply the scheme of categorisation of the various realms of knowledge.Nor is it the great body of knowledge of the classical world that was being unearthed atthe time through the discovery and study of old manuscripts, though that was indeedhappening. It is the attitude with which these manuscripts and the texts they containedwere pursued that had changed drastically, from that of teleologically seeking the expectedanswers to scholarly questions, the answers that would not disturb the status quo, to amore sceptical attitude, open to answers that might indeed disturb previous or presentconcepts. As the philosopher Eugenio Garin, the Italianist Roberto Weiss and theclassicist Ludwig Edelstein noticed decades ago, the men who were engaged in philological



activities were not merely unearthing classical texts and copying them (though they weredoing both those things); they were looking at them differently from the way men of theimmediately preceding generations had looked at them: not as authorities to be reveredand committed to memory, but as artifacts of other human minds who had lived at adifferent time in history and in a different culture.14 Beginning with Francesco Petrarca, orPetrarch (1304–74), a new understanding of history was developing, one that sought tounderstand the past as an independent, external reality, and on its own terms. In order todo so, Petrarch and his followers developed the philological methods to discern, not justwho had said what, but what exactly that person had actually written. They developedlinguistic methods, mastering a Latin that was not theirs; historical methods, under-standing a culture that was not theirs; and codicological and paleographical methods,attempting to identify the manuscripts which might take them closest to the author’soriginal text and meaning. These methods have come down to us over the intervening sixor seven centuries in a process of continual refinement; they are still in use today in theclassics and other historical literary studies and in history itself.

Science and the humanities

All this is far closer to what we today think of as a ‘scientific’ enterprise than has beenrecognised – or than is embodied in the literary and artistic culture that C. P. Snow and theother participants in the debates over several centuries between the humanities and thesciences were referring to. In particular, it is closer to what may be called the ‘historicalnatural sciences’ – by which I mean those sciences with a historical component, such asarchaeology, geology, paleontology, natural history, evolution and even astronomy. Inthese sciences, the scientist is, in a sense, at the mercy of history, being required to observenature’s experiments (as the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr put it), and to inferor reconstruct the conditions under which the experiment has taken place.15 The scientist,too, is at the mercy of whatever artefacts may have survived, often over millennia. Thepractice of history (and by extension of literary history), while by definition concerned witha far briefer period – that of recorded history – is not unlike these sciences, in that it isat the mercy of the evidence available in the historical record. Tools must be developedto investigate historical events and even ideas. And this is the very activity that the Italianhumanists of the period c. 1350–1500 were engaged in. Still in the process (often painful,as in Petrarch’s case) of being freed from dogmatic constraints on what could be known,by geopolitical, epidemiological and socio-economic events and crises – wars, epidemics,mercantile concerns – they began to develop a sense of the reality of historical people,places and events, and to construct tools – i.e. philological and historical methods –with which to critically assess the validity of historical evidence they were finding, inmanuscripts and in the ruins and artefacts of classical antiquity.

Scholars like Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) and Angelo Poliziano (1454–94), followingon Petrarch’s energetic lead, continued to develop and refine philological methods todetermine and reconstruct classical texts, on the basis of their language (both menimmersed themselves in lexicographical studies of different periods of classical Latin), andby attempting to determine how close a manuscript came to the author of its text (at thebeginning, long before chemical analysis of parchment or ink was available, this wasbeyond them, but they made the attempt, Poliziano, for example, seeking out the oldestmanuscript by noting the state of its parchment and its script).16


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These trends began to move beyond the borders of Italy as early as the mid-fifteenthcentury, with, for example, Duke Humfrey of Gloucester consulting humanists like PierCandido Decembrio on the development of his library.17 By the early sixteenth century,they had affected many currents, from the religious reform movements (Erasmian andProtestant) to the developing sciences of archaeology (Leon Battista Alberti and hiscontemporaries were engaged in archaeological investigations a full century earlier) andnatural history (the late fifteenth century botanical treatises of Mattioli, Brunfels andFuchs, stimulated by pharmaceutical needs, revived a field that had been neglected sinceTheophrastus and Dioscurides).18

The historian and expounder of metallurgy and mining, Georg Pawer (Bauer), orGeorgius Agricola (1494–1555), is an apt example of those touched by Renaissancehumanistic scholarly currents. His early humanistic education had introduced him to theintricacies of Latin and Greek grammar (his first publication was a Latin school grammar);he had then studied theology and medicine. To the many facets of his own education wasjoined the practical, technological bent of his father, probably a textile merchant who, ofnecessity, had had to know something of the technologies of the day, including the dyeingprocess and the reactions among substances, including metals, involved in it.19 It has beensuggested that this was the origin of Agricola’s interest in metallurgy; his interest wascertainly furthered by a need to study the effects and interactions of medicinal metals.

Agricola’s interests led him to Italy, where he studied medicine and assisted the editionof the Aldine Galen (1525) in Venice (another technological undertaking), and possiblythat of Hippocrates as well (1526). Thus was created one of the great polymath mindsof the sixteenth century, not unlike that of Agricola’s younger correspondent, thetown physician of Zurich and pivotal European naturalist, Conrad Gessner (1516–65).20

Agricola, unlike Gessner, had an entrepreneurial bent too, which seems to have served himwell, both in the publication of his works and for his own wellbeing (and which recallsC. P. Snow’s emphasis on the need for both capital and training). However, the two men– humanists and scientists both – shared the signal characteristic of the early humanistswe have already noticed: a scientific critical rigour that left no stone unturned in theirresearches into the topic at hand. Both men’s critical acumen can be seen from the factthat they withheld judgement on questions until such evidence as might confirm or denytheir resolution might be found – Gessner is quite explicit about this in a letter to JohnCaius, Agricola in his systematic investigations into even the lexicography of mining andmetallurgy and his insistence on either seeing for himself or ascertaining the reliability ofhis sources for evidence on the practices of mining and metallurgy.21 And the interests andactivities of these two scientifically oriented men can be seen to have handily bridged thegap between the sciences and the humanities through their investigation and treatment ofthe concrete reality of the world around them.

CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS

The Wilson–Gould non-debate

Many historians of science and other intellectual endeavours are loath to credit theRenaissance humanists with the full significance of their contribution to the developmentof what we today think of as natural science. As recently as 2003, in his last book, written



in response to Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience, Stephen J. Gould devotes two full chaptersto his conception of the activities of humanist encyclopedists like Conrad Gessner and hiscolleagues.22 Gould is attempting to counter what he sees as a fallacious emphasis inWilson’s thinking on simplistic dichotomy. But as we have seen, far from being simplistic,such conceptual structures may well be fundamental to human thought, though thatremains to be analysed (and if this is correct, the same obviously holds true for Easternthought, which has long since been bent on reconciling the oppositions – one thinks of yinand yang). In fact, Gould’s own book abounds in dichotomies, including that betweenerinaceid (conservative) and vulpine (flexible) thinking.

Gould, like many others, criticises the Renaissance humanists for being mere compilersof classical information. It is indeed true that these men (for the significant humanistthinkers were men, in large part due to the hazards of childbirth, preoccupations ofchildcare, and consequent lack of female education) admired the classical authors – whom,as I have said, they were now attempting to see for their own merits, rather than as bearersof good tidings (Vergil, as prophet of Christ’s – really Augustus’ – birth), or icons likeThe Philosopher (Aristotle, often in guises he would scarcely have recognised), or otherAuctoritates, as viewed in the Middle Ages. But what is seldom understood is that thefifteenth and early sixteenth-century humanists, while they respected the learning of theirancestors, were actually sitting at their feet, not in blind worship, but in a competitiveimitatio (a literary trope of both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but used differentlyin the two ages); they were learning from them, not just facts, but how to think critically,like the best students, with a healthy dose of doubt and with fewer teleological overlays totheir logic. Their imitation, in other words, was not slavish, but creative.

Gould and other critics are, in fact, seeing the humanists from our end of the telescope,rather than on the humanists’ own terms; they are engaged in what is called, after theyouthful essay of Herbert Butterfield,23 ‘whiggism’ – reading the present into the past, aform of teleological thinking engaged in during the Middle Ages, and one that is all tooeasy to fall into (but which biologists, particularly, are classically trained to avoid, especiallysince Darwin). These are just the practices that the humanists themselves deplored in theirmedieval predecessors, and were trying hard to overcome in their own work.

Lorenzo Valla, for example, had, in about 1440, exposed the medieval hoax of theso-called ‘donation of Constantine’ (of earthly territories to the Papacy) on extremely solidphilological and historical evidence.24 And Decembrio, Poliziano and Gessner themselves– in discussing points of natural history, for example – by remaining open to the possibilityof the existence of certain creatures’ characteristics (on the basis of sailors’ and othertravellers’ accounts), were actually (and explicitly) resisting the tempting illusion ofadducing negative proof, since they themselves had no empirical evidence to go on.

While Wilson does not address Renaissance humanism itself, he sees and argues formany similar qualities in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and indeed othershave noted the roots of the Enlightenment in the Renaissance and classical antiquity.These are the great Western ages of the preponderance of reason over the irrational, andthey have slowly, by fits and starts, allowed critical thought to gain the ascendancy and toexhibit its effectiveness in the quest for knowledge about our universe.

For there is indeed a dichotomy (one of many) – an agon, a dialogue – between reasonand unreason, even when they work together, as in art and as in science (of all kinds, from


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the natural sciences to the historical). There are also continua, as we have seen, among thedifferent types of thought. Once again, both sides of this discussion would allow us toform a unified vision of the world. Gould is (theoretically) right that there need not beconflict among the many views of the world; but Wilson is (more realistically) right thatdiscovering the underlying physical unity of the world and perhaps of the universe (farfrom a simplistic vision of unity, as Gould claims, for it includes explanations of ourbehaviour and our morality) as sought by science can show us the way to this greaterunderstanding and a way of preserving both ourselves and our world.

Science, technology and the humanities in education

The resistance to the idea of mixing the two types of education – scientific and humanistic– permeates Western (dualistic) society. Among its many component elements mustbe included what we today think of as a certain snobbism, inherent in the clash betweenC. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis, both scholarship students of modest backgrounds, bothovercoming their backgrounds through education. We encounter a similar phenomenonin the resistance (now perhaps weakening) among scholars to the idea that technology ofnecessity persisted through the Middle Ages, even though it was not recognised as havingintellectual content.25

A technological sense can in fact be seen as fundamental to the development ofRenaissance humanist scholarship: the methods developed by Petrarch, by Valla, byPoliziano for determining the validity of a manuscript or for reconstructing a text areindeed technical skills and tools, akin to the mechanical crafts. Indeed, a good portion ofscience as we know it today is precisely that sort of mechanical work – bricolage is essentialto science. But what still seems to be hard for many to admit is that even such mechanicalwork represents intellectual input and development. Our image of the inventor, embodiedin such figures as Thomas Newcomen, Benjamin Franklin, James Watt and ThomasEdison, when analysed, yields a goodly portion of craftsmanship and mechanical skill,alongside the intellectual. Just so, our image of the creative artist (literary, visual orauditory) encompasses both the mechanical and the intellectual. Our image of the scientistand scholar, past and present, might benefit from such a perception.

In the final analysis, the bridging of these fairly pernicious gaps could be (and in somecases is being) effected in many young minds of our own times with a restoration orinstitution of parallel humanistic and scientific (in the broadest sense) training in ourschools – a matter of marked concern to all those engaged in these debates over time.As is slowly being realised today – and in some countries has entered the consciousnessof those who are charged with education (leading the young out of ignorance intounderstanding) – the dichotomy between the sciences and the humanities need not –indeed must not – stand.

NOTES

1. J. de Romilly: Pourquoi la Grèce?; 1992, Paris, Ed. de Fallois.2. See The Two Cultures: And a Second Look. An Expanded Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,

p. 9; 1965, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; this book was reissued with an excellent and sub-stantial introductory study and review of the literature by Stefan Collini in 1993. Citations here are fromthe 1965 edition (whose pagination is kept in the Collini edition). I review it here because, while it is muchcited, it is seldom read with care, and to bring out points germane to this essay.



3. Snow does mention population growth as a result of the industrial revolution (p. 27) and even as a menace(p. 46); however in 1959 and 1965 he had great hope for humanity’s ability to overcome the dire situationsit often creates, though see Collini, p. lxxi (Note 2). For the effects of overpopulation, as they now can berecognised, see the telling final chapter of E. O. Wilson: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge; 1998, NewYork, NY, Alfred A. Knopf. Some of both Snow’s and Wilson’s arguments are discussed in S. J. Gould:The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities; 2003, NewYork, NY, Three Rivers Press, written rapidly at the end of his life. Gould would not have agreed with myemphasis on agon; Wilson, I believe, would: see the final sections of this essay.

4. These were collected in a little cited volume, P. Padhye (ed.): Two Cultures: A Discussion; 1960, New Delhi,Congress for Cultural Freedom. See also J. H. Plumb (ed.): Crisis in the Humanities; 1964, Baltimore, MD,Penguin, and, for a far broader historical context of the tradition than the title implies, D. K. Corneliusand E. St Vincent (ed.): Cultures in Conflict: Perspectives on the Snow–Leavis Controversy; 1964, Chicago, IL,Scott, Foresman & Co. (including, at pp. 24–27, the article by Anthony West cited below). For furtherbibliography (to 1999) see the website http://academics.vmi.edu/gen_ed/two_cultures.html.

5. F. R. Leavis: ‘Two cultures? The significance of Lord Snow’, in Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism,

Compassion and Social Hope, pp. 39–74; 1972, London, Chatto & Windus (first published in the Spectator,9 March 1962). Lionel Trilling’s assessment of the two sides appeared in the University Quarterly, 1962, (17)and in that same year in Commentary as ‘A comment on the Leavis-Snow controversy’ (not seen); a versionalso appears in L. Trilling: Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, pp. 126–154; 1965, New York,NY/London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

6. T. H. Huxley: ‘Science and culture’, in his Science and Education: Essays, pp. 134–159; 1910, New York, NY,Appleton. In the same year, 1880, Huxley was developing his theories of monophylism and polyphylism,regarding the necessity or not for descent of related species from one species: see G. G. Simpson:Principles of Animal Taxonomy, pp. 120–125; 1961, New York, NY, Columbia University Press. Over twentyyears earlier, he had hypothesised the existence of an intermediate form between reptiles and birds,confirmed in 1861 with the discovery of a fossilised Archaeopteryx: E. Mayr: What Evolution Is, pp. 25, 69;2001, New York, NY, Basic Books.

7. Arnold’s original Rede Lecture, ‘Literature and science’, was published in The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly

Review in August 1882, pp. 216–230; the version he gave numerous times in the United States appears inR. H. Super (ed.): The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Vol. 10, pp. 53–73, with notes at pp. 462–471and 546–554; 1974, Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press.

8. J. W. Lorimer: ‘A neglected aspect of the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes”’, Modern Language

Review, 1956, 51, 179–185.9. For example, E. S. Shaffer (ed.): The Third Culture: Literature and Science; 1998, Berlin/New York, NY,

Walter de Gruyter; R. E. Lee and I. Wallerstein (ed.): Overcoming the Two Cultures: Science versus the Humanities

in the World System; 2004, Boulder, CO/London, Paradigm. The online publication Edge: The Third Culture

(www.edge.org), edited by John Brockman, postulates articulate scientists as bridging the gap betweenhumanists and scientists, with some reason.

10. One thinks immediately of course of the work of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and others, and ofthe Sokal hoax in which a nonsensical article was accepted by a journal in the social sciences (see http://physics.nyu.edu/~as2/). On such matters, see E. O. Wilson’s lucid, wise analysis in Consilience, pp. 44–48 (Note 3); Stephen Jay Gould also broaches the subject in The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox

at pp. 99–102 (Note 3). It can be argued that such intellectual tendencies opened the door to today’scontentions over faith and scepticism already mentioned.

11. See Reeve’s ‘Conclusion’ in O. Pecere and M. D. Reeve (ed.): Formative Stages of Classical Traditions: Latin

Texts from Antiquity to the Renaissance (proceedings of a conference held at Erice, 16–22 October 1993, asthe 6th Course of the International School for the Study of Written Records), pp. 497–511, at p. 499;1995, Spoleto, Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo. On cladism in biological taxonomy, seeE. Mayr: ‘Biological classification: toward a synthesis of opposing methodologies’, Science, 1981, 214,510–516, reprinted in E. Sober (ed.): Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology: An Anthology, pp. 646–662;1984, Cambridge, MA/London, MIT Press; E. Mayr: What Evolution Is, pp. 55, 133, 167, 284 (Note 6); andG. G. Simpson: Principles, p. 201 and passim (Note 6).

12. On Renaissance humanism, see P. O. Kristeller: Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic and Humanistic

Strains; 1961, New York, NY, Harper Torchbooks; and Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the


132 Cynthia M. Pyle

Arts (esp. chapter IX, ‘The modern system of the arts’, pp. 163–227); 1965, New York, NY, HarperTorchbooks; these essays have been published in various loci, both before and since these two books.

13. See J. A. Weisheipl: ‘Classification of the sciences in medieval thought’, in Nature and Motion in the Middle

Ages, (ed. W. Carroll), pp. 203–237; 1985, Washington, DC, Catholic University of America.14. See E. Garin: ‘Introduction’, in Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, (trans. P. Munz),

pp. 1–17 and passim; 1965, New York, NY, Harper & Row (based on the second Italian edition of 1958);R. Weiss: The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 2nd edn (with new bibliography and index), (ed.R. Olitsky Rubinstein), pp. 203–207 and passim; 1988, Oxford, Blackwell; and L. Edelstein: ‘AndreasVesalius, the Humanist’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1943, 14, 547–561.

15. E. Mayr: The Growth of Biological Thought, pp. 30–32; 1982, Cambridge, MA, Belknap. On these questions,see my ‘The Renaissance rediscovery of the Classical approaches to the world: reflections on history andscience, then and now’, in Building the Past / Konstruktion der eigenen Vergangenheit, (ed. R. Suntrup and J. R.Veenstra), pp. 3–31 and references therein; 2006, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin/New York, NY, Peter Lang.

16. See C. M. Pyle: ‘Renaissance humanism and science’, Res publica litterarum, 1991, XIV, 197–202 (publishedsimultaneously in Italy in Studi umanistici piceni, 1991, XI, 197–202); ‘Historical and philological method inAngelo Poliziano and method in science: practice and theory’, in Poliziano nel suo tempo, pp. 371–386; 1996,Florence, Cesati; ‘History as science? The question revisited with reference to the life sciences andRenaissance humanism’, forthcoming in Intellectual News, 2008, 16.

17. A. Sammut: Unfredo duca di Gloucester e gli umanisti italiani; 1980, Padua, Antenore; C. M. Pyle: ‘The art andscience of Renaissance natural history: Thomas of Cantimpré, Pier Candido Decembrio, Conrad Gessner,and Teodoro Ghisi in Vatican Library MS Urb. lat. 276’, Viator, 1996, 27, 265–321; also ‘Pier CandidoDecembrio and Rome: his hand and the Vatican manuscript of his treatise on natural history (MS Urb. lat.276)’, in Milan and Lombardy in the Renaissance: Essays in Cultural History, pp. 31–44; 1997, Rome, La Fenice.

18. And the revival was, again, through comparison with the findings in the classical works. See A. Arber:Herbals, their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470–1670, 3rd edn, (intro. and annot.W. T. Stearn); 1986, Cambridge/New York, NY, Cambridge University Press, 1986; K. M. Reeds: Botany

in Medieval and Renaissance Universities; 1991, New York, NY, Garland.19. See the interesting and detailed recent study by Marie-Claude Déprez-Masson, Technique, mot et image.

Le De re metallica d’Agricola; 2006, Turnhout, Brepols, and the literature cited. See also G. Viertel,U. Bemmann, S. Pfalzer and U. Sacher (ed.): Georgius Agricola und seine Familie. Dokumente, mit einem

biografischen Aufsatz von Hans Prescher; 1994, Chemnitz: for the father Gregor, p. 7 (citing F. Resch in Neues

Jahrbuch der Mineralogie, Geologie u. Paläontologie, Mh. Abt. A, 1944, 114–128, not seen); F. Naumann (ed.):Georgius Agricola 500 Jahre; 1994, Basel/Boston, MA/Berlin, Birkhäuser; H. Prescher: Georgius Agricola

Persönlichkeit und Wirken für den Bergbau und das Hüttenwesen des 16. Jahrhunderts. Kommentarband zum

Faksimiledruck ‘Vom Bergkwerck XII Bücher, Basel 1557’; 1985, Leipzig; and (in eleven volumes) H. Prescherand G. Mathé (ed.): Georgius Agricola. Ausgewählte Werke; 1955–92, Berlin. [An article by my late friend,Nicoletta Morello, found after consigning this text, bears out my arguments: ‘Agricola and the birth of themineralogical sciences in Italy in the sixteenth century’, in The Origins of Geology in Italy, (ed. G. B. Vai andW. G. E. Caldwell), pp. 23–30; 2006 Boulder, CO, Geological Society of America.]

20. C. M. Pyle: ‘Conrad Gessner on the spelling of his name’, Archives of Natural History, 2000, 27, 175–186;further bibliography in H. Wellisch: Conrad Gessner: A Bio-Bibliography; 1984, Zug, InterdocumentationCompany.

21. C. M. Pyle: ‘Some late sixteenth-century depictions of the Aurochs (Bos primigenius Bojanus, extinct 1627):new evidence from Vatican MS Urb. lat. 276’, Archives of Natural History, 1994, 21, 275–288; here, p. 284,with reference to Gessner, Historia Animalium, Liber II, Zürich, Froschauer, 1554, Appendix, p. 6. OnAgricola, see M. C. Déprez-Masson: Technique, mot et image, pp. 26–27 (Note 19).

22. S. J. Gould: The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox, chapters 3 and 4 (Note 3). I discuss these questionsin detail in a forthcoming book on the development of scientific methodologies in the fifteenth and earlysixteenth centuries; for now see the articles cited, passim, above.

23. H. Butterfield: The Whig Interpretation of History; 1965, New York, NY, 1965 (first published 1931). Thispractice is found even in the work of prominent students of Renaissance humanism.

24. See C. B. Coleman: ‘Introduction’, in The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine; 1993,Toronto, University of Toronto Press; L. Valla: La donation de Constantin (sur la donation de Constantin, à lui

faussement attribuée et mensongère), (ed. and trans. J.-B. Giard); 1993, Paris, Belles Lettres (also the interesting



preface by Carlo Ginzburg); L. Valla: On the Donation of Constantine, (trans. G. W. Bowersock); 2007,Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

25. See J. A. Weisheipl: ‘Classification of the sciences’ (Note 13); P. O. Long: Openness, Secrecy, Authorship:

Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance; 2001, Baltimore, MD, JohnsHopkins University Press; T. B. Settle: La Storia e la Filosofia della Scienza, della Tecnologia e della Medicina: Una

Selezione di Siti Web e di altre Fonti – The History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine: A Selection of

Web and other Sources, www.imss.firenze.it/~tsettle, 1994–2007.

Before she turned to the intellectual and cultural history of the Renaissance (PhD, Columbia University),Cynthia M. Pyle’s first degree and early professional experience were in biology (Communications BiophysicsLaboratory of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and Department of Biology, MIT). Since receivingher doctorate she has been successively a researcher in the CNRS, Paris, the commissioned author of thebook-length study accompanying the facsimile edition of Vatican MS Urb. lat. 276, and an Associate of theDepartment of the History of Science, Harvard University; from Harvard, she went on to found the Renais-sance Studies Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is a Fellow of theAmerican Academy in Rome, and has held residential fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in theVisual Arts and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, as well as an individual grant from the NationalScience Foundation. She is currently a Research Affiliate of New York University ([email protected]).

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