Word: humanists
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...HAVE tried to show that there are both psychological and philosophical differences between undergraduate scientists and humanists. (a) The sciences and the humanities come alive in the people who study them. Scientists and humanists are, and have been, different people. They have different backgrounds and different motivations. (b) In reporting their professional activities, scientists and humanists use different kinds of concepts, different methods to picture or grasp the world. The differing ways to judge a meaningful statement, in the sciences and the humanities, reflect two deeply different orientations. These professional differences carry over to some extent into undergraduates' informal life...
Corresponding to these two dangers are two reasons for dwelling so heavily on the differences between the sciences and the humanists in the Harvard undergraduate community. The first reason is the hope that this review of differences may crystallize the vague anxieties and feelings of uneasiness in some undergraduate scientist as he circulates among the literary intellectuals. He should recognize that it is only a historical accident that he, and not the humanist, is regard one who is "different." Since the humanists created intellectual citadels of which the scientist is now a member, the humanists are naturally the better entrenched...
...second reason for emphasizing these differences is the desire to force out into the open what I believe to be a flat failure of Harvard's program of general education, namely that it does not adequately equip the undergraduate scientist or humanist for intellectual discourse with a member of the other world...
...important this failure is depends entirely upon the inclinations and biases of the undergraduate student. If he is a scientist all of whose friends are scientists, problems of communication with humanists simply do not arise. The humanist who runs at the sight of an equation need not fear that his knowledge will become catholic. And if friends who are in different fields are content to limit their intercourse to the core of experience and language shared by all members of the larger culture, again no problems arise. It is only when the student scientist and humanist want to communicate...
...obvious pious wish to make now is that the science student develop the channels of communication with humanists of the system of education. But the fact is, that without the co-operation of humanities students he cannot develop such channels; for to establish a sophisticated language shared by scientists and humanists is to educate both. Besides, it remains to be shown that our pious wish is desirable in whatever value system the scientist accepts. To implement that wish requires effort, at least, and more likely, something close to divine inspiration. The will to try, and divine inspiration, like the operational...