Word: sinnott
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Possibly people who like to read should concentrate in physics. Possibly they should read Lewis Mumford or Edmund Sinnott about whom they are not asked to have opinions, or Vardis Fisher of whom nobody has ever heard, or Norman Mailer, about whom nobody gives a damn. But most of all they should stop reading the opinions of Wilsons and Trillings, and start following their example. In award, they should treat them as artists, not connoisseurs
...Yale's Botanist Edmund Ware Sinnott, 68, who as director of the Division of Sciences and dean of the Graduate School has as much as any man led the way in eliminating narrow specialties at Yale and in making sure that all Yalemen get in common the broad "background of all human knowledge." A gentle-mannered man who signs his amateur paintings "Edmund Ware" and is an authority on old Connecticut tombstones, Scientist Sinnott has spent a lifetime trying to heal the split between science and faith. "The two roads to truth . . . the way of science, confident in reason...
...Through all the centuries," says Professor Sinnott, "one question more than any other has perplexed explorers of the realm of man-his strange double nature. The physical part of him, his body, is born, lives, grows and dies . . . But governing that body there seems to be an intangible something that can feel and think, a subtler part of him which is the essence of his being . . . Man seems to be two beings-a material one, and its immaterial counterpart . . . Are they both 'real,' or is one of them no more than an illusion...
...Goal. To find a basis common to body and spirit, Professor Sinnott goes all the way back to protoplasm, the mysterious material in living cells which is much the same in all organisms from bacteria up to man. The biologists have learned a great deal about it ... but so far they have not explained its most striking attribute: its purposefulness...
Opposing Streams. Nothing else like this touch of life, says Professor Sinnott, exists in the universe, and science so far has not explained it. "Attention has often been called to the curious contrast between organic evolution and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.* Through evolution has come a succession of living things that shows progressively higher levels of organization. The organic world has constantly moved upward. The Second Law, on the other hand, expresses the undoubted fact that lifeless matter tends to decrease in the degree of its organization, to grow more and more random in character that the universe tends...