Imagination and the University 9781442632554

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
The Imaginative Mind in Art
The Imaginative Mind in Science
Imagination in Politics
Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps
Imagination and the Curriculum: Some Harvard Impressions

Citation preview

IMAGINATION AND THE UNIVERSITY

This volume, the Frank Gerstein Lectures for 1963, is the second series of Invitation Lectures to be delivered at York University. The theme "Imagination and the University" was appropriate for, as President Murray Ross states in his Foreword, it is in its early years that a university is sufficiently flexible to utilize imagination in its structure and in its curriculum. York University was in its third year when the Lectures were given. Four distinguished scholars present their views on the importance of an imaginative approach to different academic disciplines, and to the conduct of life in contemporary society as a whole. JACOB BRONOWSKI is Director General, Process Development Department, The National Coal Board, London, England.

HENRY

STEELE

is Professor of History and Amherst College, Amherst,

COMMAGER

American Studies, Massachusetts.

GORDON W. ALLPORT is Professor of Psychology, Department of Social Relations, Harvard University.

P A U L H. B U C K

is Director, Harvard University Library.

THE FRANK GERSTEIN LECTURES January and February, 1963

Imagination AND THE University JACOB BRONOWSKI HENRY STEELE COMMAGER GORDON W. ALLPORT PAUL H. BUCK

Published for YORK UNIVERSITY by UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Copyright, Canada, 1964, by University of Toronto Press PRINTED IN CANADA

The Publishers wish to thank Chatto & Windus Ltd. and Harcourt, Brace & World Inc. for permission to reproduce the poem "To an Old Lady" from Collected Poems, by William Empson; Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., for permission to reproduce the poem "Provide, Provide," by Robert Frost; and J. M. Dent & Sons (Canada) Limited, for permission to reproduce the poem "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," by Dylan Thomas.

Contents Foreword

MURRAY G. ROSS

v

The Imaginative Mind in Art

JACOB BRONOWSKI

1

The Imaginative Mind in Science

JACOB BRONOWSKI

21

HENRY STEELE COMMAGER

39

Imagination in Politics

Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps GORDON W. ALLPORT

63

Imagination and the Curriculum: Some Harvard Impressions PAUL H. BUCK

83

This page intentionally left blank

Foreword HESE lectures, supported by a generous grant from the T Frank Gerstein Charitable Foundation, were delivered at York University during the 1962-63 academic session. At that time, York was in its third year of operation, and the theme selected, "Imagination and the University," was considered appropriate, for it is in its early years that a university is sufficiently flexible to utilize imagination in its structure and in its curriculum. All universities, however, should be challenged by imaginative ideas. It is trite to say that we in the Western world have demonstrated great initiative and creativity by pushing into an age of science, in which vast potentialities are present for sustaining and enriching life—or for terminating life. In this situation, all social institutions, if they are to be useful, must look imaginatively at their purposes and functions, and develop new means by which these purposes and functions will be fulfilled. This is as true for the university as it is for the church, the courts, the school, or the home. But the university is particularly in focus today because it is regarded as one of the primary institutions from which may flow some light on the great human problems which confront man in the contemporary world. And yet the university is perhaps the most conservative of modern institutions; it is probably the institution that has the greatest diffusion of authority; and it is perhaps the institution most resistant to change. So we need to consider

vi

Foreword

imaginatively what we should do; and we need to study imaginatively how we can do it. We need imagination in the university, also, because it is an essential aspect of teaching. Indeed, it can be said that the teacher who lacks imagination cannot be an effective teacher. The classroom is in great need of inspiration, of projection and colour, of a sense of relevance to the world in which we live. Then, too, the student must learn how to use the classroom and the library imaginatively. The antiquated pattern of note-taking, then memorization, without consideration of implications, relationships, deeper meanings, still persists in our day. Students need to break this pattern and to approach their work with a new orientation. We need imagination in the university because imagination is at the root of all fruitful research and scholarly study. It is the process which produces the hunch, the shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the ability to take the courageous leap to entirely new concepts. A university in which there is not a considerable ferment of ideas is already decadent. For these and many other reasons those who are associated with the university need imagination. York University will be a great university only if its students, staff, and faculty think and act creatively in their work. Thus we are most grateful to the distinguished scholars who delivered these lectures, for they have helped us to appreciate more completely the nature and the role of the processes of imagination. MURRAY G. Ross President

The Imaginative Mind in Art Jacob Bronowski

Jacob Bronowski Jacob Bronowski is Director General, Process Development Department, The National Coal Board, London, England. Dr. Bronowski, a graduate of the University of Cambridge, lectured for some years at the University College of Hull, England. Following a number of important appointments in the British public service, he was seconded to UNESCO as Head of Projects in 1948. Two years later he joined the National Coal Board in England. In 1953 he was Carnegie Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Bronowski has written and lectured on many subjects. His better known works include William Blake— A Man Without a Mask; The Common Sense of Science; and The Western Intellectual Tradition.

Y subject in the two lectures I shall be giving in this M series concerns the arts and the sciences, and in this first lecture I shall confine myself to the arts. The art

from which I shall draw most of my illustrations is literature, and more particularly poetry. I choose the field of literature because it has the advantage that its raw material is something that we all use and understand, for its raw material is simply words. But I ought to say at once that this raw material is no less subtle or less sophisticated than that of any other art. The human race was not given words as it was given hands and feet, as part of its inborn endowment from nature. Literature begins with language, and it is relevant to begin by saying something about the history and nature of human language. It is not certain when human beings started to speak, but it was certainly not very long ago, on the time scale of evolution. We believe that human beings became clearly differentiated from the common ape stock about a million generations ago. However, human speech is probably not much older than a hundred thousand years. The whole of human converse as we know it fits into this small fraction of our evolution. The raw material of literature is not simply words, but words as human beings use them; and human beings do not use language in the limited way that animals do. There is a cardinal difference between human language and animal languages. Let me begin, then, by comparing the two, and specifically by describing an animal language. Many species of animals have some kind of language. Some of them, for example the insects, have a language which is certainly older than our own. I shall take as my example one of these old insect languages: the language of the bees. It has been known for two hundred years that when a bee which has found a source of honey returns home, it makes

4

The Imaginative Mind in Art

a violent agitated movement which in time is taken up by the whole hive. The beekeepers who first noticed this in the eighteenth century supposed it to express a primitive emotion. They believed that the bee comes home in a state of excitement, and that it simply communicates this excitement to the other bees in the hive. However, they were wrong; the communication between bees is more precise and more remarkable than mere excitement. It has now been shown by the delicate studies of Karl von Frisch and others that the bee that comes home laden with honey talks to the other bees in the hive in quite specific symbols. The returning bee does a round dance, shaped like a flattened figure of eight, and other bees take up this dance and begin to follow the leader along its figure of eight. This figure of eight has two exact messages for the bees that follow it. The direction in which the main line of the figure points tells the bees in the hive where to go for the source of the honey that they smell on the leader. And the speed at which the figure is run tells the bees how far away the source of honey is. I apologize for telling this story so briefly and so roughly, because those who already know it will know it more fully, and those who do not know it will scarcely believe it. Yet the story is true and, in its essence, is as simple as this. The dance of the bees is a complete instruction by which one bee tells the others in what direction to fly and how far to fly. The bees that take up the dance learn the instruction by actually following the movements of the first bee in the dance—that is, by going through the same steps as if they themselves had brought the message. This is characteristic of the language of any animal, even when it utters something as simple as a cry of alarm. What the animal says is very specific: it communicates a piece of information to the other animals. The other animals do not hold a meeting about what they are told, do not discuss it

Jacob Bronowski

5

or consider it or even reflect on it. When a group of monkeys hears the cry of alarm of its sentry, it scatters. When a hive of bees observes the dance of the homecomer, it carries out his instructions without argument—at least, so long as there is only one homecomer.

II

Human beings also have a language of instruction and information. For example, my description of the behaviour of bees has been as specific as their own language. True, my description does not instruct you what to do; but that is only because you are not a bee. Essentially, I have given you (or tried to give you) an uncoloured piece of information, which in itself makes no demand from you but simple assent. This is the language of communication. But human beings also use language for quite a different purpose: for personal reflection and elaboration. When this lecture is finished, you will go away and think about it; and you will think about it in your personal language, privately. You may begin by thinking about the behaviour of bees, and then your thoughts will go off elsewhere, to subjects which have no more to do with bees than the rest of my lecture has. You will reflect, you will make analogies and draw conclusions, and all this you will do by manipulating inside your head all the ideas that are touched off by, say, the idea that bees talk. This is the ability that makes you human: the use of words or symbols, not to communicate with others, but to manipulate your own ideas inside your own head. Let me pause to underline this critical point. I began by saying that the raw material of the art of literature is words. Now I have made a distinction between two kinds of words, or rather, between two uses of words. On the one hand,

6

The Imaginative Mind in Art

there are the words of command or communication—words which are mere signals, and tell us, as it were, to stop or to go. The language of bees and monkeys and other animals is made up of these words, and does not go beyond them. On the other hand, human language goes beyond these words of communication, and uses words also in order to formulate ideas inside our minds. We reflect on our own ideas, we change them and enlarge them, they carry our personal associations for us. It is words in this sense which are the vehicles of our imagination, and the raw material of literature. How do we know that human beings use words in this way, to re-create the world inside their minds? And how do we know that animals do not? We know it by experiment —by watching the experiment which nature carries out before our eyes every day, of slowly transforming a young animal or child into an adult. We know it, that is, by watching the development of the young, and seeing whether they do or do not ever reach the stage of thinking about something which is not present in front of their eyes or other senses. We can actually watch and see the stage at which a child learns to use words for objects which are not immediately present to him. Anyone who has had a baby, and who is reasonably perceptive, has seen this moment. There comes a stage in a child's life, before he is twelve months old, when he visibly takes the great step. Before this stage, if you show a child a toy and then put it behind your back, his interest disappears: he is not aware of objects which are not in his actual field of sensation. And then one day there comes a moment when the child is aware that the toy behind your back is still a toy—it is still somewhere, it exists, and it will return. This is a huge moment of illumination, not only in your child's life, but in the whole evolution of the human race.

Jacob Bronowski

1

The ability to conceive of things which are not present to the senses is crucial to the development of man. And this ability requires the existence of a symbol somewhere inside the mind for something that is not there. Of course the young child does not know the word "toy"; but he has in his head some image which says, what was in my field of vision was a toy, it still exists, and it will return. Probably the images that we use most often in the mind are words themselves. But all our symbols have the same purpose; words are merely the symbols we use most commonly. The function of words in human thought is to stand for things which are not present to the senses, and to allow the mind to manipulate them—things, concepts, ideas, everything which does not have a physical reality in front of us now. The enlargement of experience which comes from the use of symbols is perhaps most tellingly presented as a numerical account. Consider, then, one of the relatives of man that has been studied—say, the rhesus monkey. Rhesus monkeys have a fair vocabulary. They can make about twenty sounds and about twenty gestures, so that they have a total of about forty distinct words. Of course these are all command words, such as "come here," "go away," or else words (including gestures) which convey strong emotion. Now compare the monkey's vocabulary of forty words with a reasonable human vocabulary. In round figures, a man's vocabulary is at least a hundred times as large. That is, four thousand words is a fair vocabulary that a human being can get along with, if he is not going to spend too much time in thinking. And the total store in a good dictionary is more than a hundred times larger again, for a good dictionary contains nearly a million words. This, then, is a measure of the distance from the language of command to the language of ideas. The language of ideas

8

The Imaginative Mind in Art

creates a different universe: a universe which has multiplied the monkey's vocabulary of forty words to the million words in a human dictionary. Moreover, a monkey knows all the words in the monkey dictionary; but a human being, though he knows a hundred times as many words as a monkey, still knows less than a hundredth of the words in a human dictionary.

m Let me take one more step in this description of the raw material of one of the arts, of the evolution of language or symbolism. I have described the great step which human beings take as children when they become aware of more than is in front of their senses. When the human species became able to hold absent things in the mind, it took a critical step in its evolution. Why do I think this step is so critical? The ability to hold absent things in mind gives human beings a freedom inside their environment which no animal has. Animals are environment-bound: that is, they react to outside stimuli in a tightly limited way. They have little choice of response. Much fascinating experimental work shows that an animal which has a strong stimulus in front of it is not able to resist its compulsion. Whether the stimulus is food, of is the affection of a hen for her chicks, the animal is unable to make any response but the obvious one. It rushes straight for the food or the chicks; and if there is some obstacle in the way, the animal is so much dominated by what is in front of its eyes that it cannot remember its way round the obstacle. The animal has no words, no mental images, which allow it to visualize anything but the situation in front of its senses. By contrast, the language of human beings gives us the ability to see ourselves in a thousand situations which are

Jacob Bronowski

9

not present to us, and never may be. For example: a look around this lecture hall shows that many women here went to the hairdresser today. When they did so, they thought something about this lecture—this occasion, the people they would meet, the impression they wanted to make— which no animal is capable of thinking. The whole festive air of this meeting, on the platform and off, shows a foresight which is characteristically human. Only human beings are capable of projecting themselves into imaginary situations, and considering a week ahead "If it snows I'll have to wear my galoshes, but if it doesn't snow I'll be able to wear my new shoes." And this we can do only because we have words like "snow," and "galoshes," and "new shoes," all going round inside our heads without any of these things having to be physically in front of us.

rv I have used the word Imagination in the title of this lecture and the next, because it is the right word to describe the most human gift. For the same reason, I am happy to see that York University has adopted the word Imagination throughout this series of lectures. Imagination simply means the human habit of making images inside one's head. And the ability to make these personal images is the giant step in the evolution of man and in the growth of every child. Human beings can imagine situations which are different from those in front of their eyes; and they can do so because they make and hold in their minds images for absent things. A child can remember absent things quite early, but he cannot do imaginary actions with them until much later in his development. When the child takes this second step, when he discovers his own imagination, he suddenly walks

10

The Imaginative Mind in Art

into a new life. At this moment, the child opens a door into the world beyond his immediate experience, because he is now seeing situations that do not exist. The child treats these imaginary situations in part as fantasy, and in part as a quite rational exploration of future experiences. A child's play does both: it frolics in the fantasy world, and it experiments in the rational world, which are both created by these images. This is why children love to make up fairy stories, and also love to play at marriage and hospitals and all the rituals of adult life. They project themselves into all worlds, possible and impossible, and discover for themselves the knife-edge boundary between them. The ability to make images for absent things, and to use them to experiment with imaginary situations, gives man a freedom which an animal does not possess. That freedom has two distinct parts. One part is the pleasure that human beings feel in trying out and exploring imaginary situations. A child's play is concerned with this pleasure; and so is much of art, and much of science too. At bottom, pure science itself is a form of play, in this sense. The second part of the freedom which words and images give us is that they are personal to us. All bees have exactly the same language; when one bee dances, the other bees listen simply by imitating the same dance. The bees have only one vocabulary, with the same words and the same meanings. But human beings, because they manipulate words inside their minds for themselves, change them and develop them and give them their own meanings. No two human beings, not even identical twins, speak quite the same language. This personal manipulation of language, this gift of recreating for ourselves, in a fresh way, the images which other people present to us, is the foundation of art. You all hear me speak the same words, you all will listen to the same poems, and yet each of you makes something different

Jacob Bronowski

11

and personal for himself. You pick out odd points, you hear different overtones, new analogies start up in your mind. And this is individual to you, and forms a complex amalgam which is yours and no one else's—indeed, which in the end is you. V It is time to end this analysis of the raw material of an art, and to turn to the art itself. Therefore I shall read a poem. It is by Dylan Thomas, and many of you will know it. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. The force that drives the water through the rocks Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams Turns mine to wax. And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks. The hand that whirls the water in the pool Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind Hauls my shroud sail. And I am dumb to tell the hanging man How of my clay is made the hangman's lime. The lips of time leech to the fountain head; Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores. And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind How time has ticked a heaven round the stars. And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

As in many of Dylan Thomas' beautiful poems, the central thought here is simple. It consists of the confrontation in each verse of the same two ideas.

12

The Imaginative Mind in Art

One is the idea of the green fuse, the power in nature that drives everything forward; we feel this, we share its activity, and it makes us feel stronger and bolder with each experience, and life and time seem to be on our side. The second idea in each verse is that we are, however, being destroyed by this very same power. We are getting older, life and time are killing us a little with each experience. I suggest reading the first verse again; it shows the contrast of the two meanings clearly—the predicament of all living and growing things. However, I did not choose this poem in order to discuss its philosophy. I chose it to illustrate the nature of human language. Here the very act of exploring the medium of his art, of exploring the language, is an excitement to the poet. The poet must take pleasure in discovering what language can do; that is his starting point. And this sense of pleasure is obvious in the poem; it is obvious that Dylan Thomas was not merely in love with poetry, he was in love with words. If we think of the poem as a formal statement, then it is rather repetitive: each verse restates the same simple thought which one could write out in two lines. The same thought is illustrated by images from different fields—in verse one they are trees, in verse two water and rocks, in verse three whirlpools and quicksand, and in verse four inevitably the images relate to love. And yet each of us is aware that when he comes to the end of the poem, my restatement of it only brushes a fringe of what the poem says to him. In some way the imagery which Dylan Thomas runs through his hands so prodigally touches each one of us at one spot or another on the raw. Whether you are the person on whom the word "hangman" in the third verse strikes like thunder, or whether to you the word "love" in the fourth verse comes like a revelation, it is you individually who has been moved. Something in

Jacob Bronowski

13

this lavish imagery reaches each of us, and has the effect of carrying a personal message to each of us. My dry prose statement of the meaning of the poem means much the same to each of us, and that much the same is very little. But the poem itself is rich in meaning because everyone makes his or her own poem out of it. What poem you make out of it depends on which of the images suddenly sets you on fire. I am captured by the word "fuse" in the first line, and its explosive urgency carries me headlong into the poem from the beginning. Ask yourself what image rises from the poem like a rocket for you, and spills a bright rain of light over your understanding. VI

Everyone of us hears the same poem, and yet each one of us makes his own poem. This is the nature of imagination: that everyone has to re-imagine, and to re-imagine for himself. Dylan Thomas certainly imagined this poem first, certainly created the poem. And yet, if you want to understand the poem, you have to re-create it for yourself. This is a strange thought, but it is fundamental. No work of art has been created with such finality that you need contribute nothing to it. You must re-create the work for yourself—it cannot be presented to you ready-made. You cannot look at a picture and find it beautiful by a merely passive act of seeing. The internal relations that make it beautiful to you have to be discovered and in some way have to be put in by you. The artist provides a skeleton; he provides guiding lines; he provided enough to engage your interest and to touch you emotionally. But there is no picture and no poem unless you yourself enter it and fill it out. I chose Dylan Thomas' poetry as the first example because it illustrates so clearly what the poet can give and what we must add. If this had been a bad and unsuccessful poem,

14

The Imaginative Mind in Art

we would all say instantly, "This poet is threshing about; each verse tries a new spurt of imagery; he is trying to blunder his way towards saying the thing right, by mere repetition." And that is true of Dylan Thomas; yet when his poem comes off, you see that it is marvellous. But it is true that this is what Dylan Thomas is trying to do: he is trying by any means to find a way into your personality so that you may re-imagine his simple thought for yourself. You must be faced with the thought in your own way, and seize it for yourself. What thought? The thought that when you are young, growing older is wonderful, but when you are old, growing older is tragic. For that is what the poem says. It does not say it in any single line or in any single image, yet that is what it says somewhere. At least (I beg your pardon) that is what the poem says to me—or better, that is what I say to myself through the poem. And even this expression is not quite right: that is one part of what the poem says to me, or of what I say to myself through the poem. VII

I have called the metaphorical figures of speech in the poem its imagery, and that is a fair reminder: it is the poet's images that set off our own imagination. The metaphorical images work in our minds, and shape our thought and are the essence of it. The fact that the metaphors in the first verse are of growing things, and in the second verse are of water and rocks—this gives the poem its quality. Each verse draws in a different field of experience, and it might seem that none is essential to the poem. "When you are young, growing older is wonderful, but when you are old, growing older is tragic"—surely it is true that none of the

Jacob Bronowski

15

metaphors by which that is conveyed is a necessary part of the statement. But it is also true, and more deeply true, that without the metaphors the statement becomes meaningless. The metaphors link the different fields of our experience and seek out the likeness between them. When Dylan Thomas says, in his first verse, that the sap which pushes through the branch to burst into leaf and flower is also the force that bursts the roots, he is not merely making my prose statement more vivid. He is joining one area of experience to another, and illuminating and enriching each with each. The images of growth in the first verse, the images of fertilizing water in the second, the mounting death images of the hangman in the third verse, and the ambivalent images of love in the last verse: these join together to make a poem exactly as a man's experiences join together to make a personality. In this sense, all art is metaphor. It takes one part of your experience, and another part of your experience, and it forces you to look at them together. And by this act of looking at them together, the work of art makes you see each experience afresh and differently. vm

Now, to close my lecture, I ought to turn to the other of the two freedoms which I said that human language gives us. One is the freedom to be personal, to enjoy the implications of the language for ourselves and to be stimulated by it. That I have displayed in detail in Dylan Thomas' poem, and in the highly personal re-creation of the poem which each of us makes for himself. The other is the freedom to imagine different courses of action, and to explore their possibilities in the mind, one against the other. The ability to foresee several different courses of action

16

The Imaginative Mind in Art

and to weigh them in the mind might be thought to be a purely logical and scientific faculty. But in fact, this is the nature of all imagination, in art and science alike. In this simple respect, there is no difference between a great theorem, like that of Pythagoras, and a great poem like Homer's Iliad. The difference lies at a deeper level: Pythagoras is deliberately trying to mean the same thing to everybody who listens to him—one thing and one thing only—and Homer is not. Homer is content to say something universal and yet to mean different things to everybody who listens to him. We know this, we have just heard it. We know that Dylan Thomas' thought, because it deals with youth and age, evokes a different poem in the youngest member of this audience from that which it evokes in the oldest member. But this is not yet deep enough; we must go deeper still to understand the full power of a work of art. A poem does not present a number of alternatives in order to invite you to come down for one or another. The poem asks you to weigh them, but not to judge them: unlike the theorem of Pythagoras, it is not a blue-print for action. On the contrary, the poem or other work of art is so arranged that it positively discourages you from deciding which of its imaginary actions (which of its possible meanings) you like best and should follow. Turn back to the poem by Dylan Thomas and the two conflicting things that it says in each verse. At the end of the to-and-fro, are you joyful at the thought that growing older is wonderful when you are young? Or are you cast down at the thought that growing older is tragic when you are old? Neither; you cannot make up your mind. And the poem, unlike the theorem of Pythagoras, is not meant to make up your mind for you. On the contrary: fundamentally and literally, the poem is deliberately arranged to prevent you from making up your mind.

Jacob Bronowski

17

DC

I shall illustrate this important point, my final point, by reading a poem by Robert Frost. It is not a lyrical poem; it has no bright and poetic imagery of evocation; and neither is it one of those milk-and-honey poems into which Frost often lapsed. It is a tough and searching and extraordinary poem, and it is called, "Provide, Provide." The witch that came (the withered hag) To wash the steps with pail and rag Was once the beauty Abishag, The picture pride of Hollywood. Too many fall from great and good For you to doubt the likelihood. Die early and avoid the fate. Or if predestined to die late, Make up your mind to die in state. Make the whole stock exchange your own! If need be occupy a throne, Where nobody can call you crone. Some have relied on what they knew; Others on being simply true. What worked for them might work for you. No memory of having starred Atones for later disregard Or keeps the end from being hard. Better to go down dignified With boughten friendship at your side Than none at all. Provide, Provide!

The imagery of this poem belongs to our own generation. It uses the verb "to star," for example, not for poetic effect, but simply to describe a Hollywood celebrity. Elsewhere it chooses equally direct phrases of today, such as the command to make the whole stock exchange your own. That is,

18

The Imaginative Mind in Art

the poem is deliberately worded to draw in fields of experience which you will feel to be relevant to your own life. The story in the poem is also clear and contemporary. The poet meets a woman who has been a great star in her past, and now she is nothing. He reflects that people have dealt with the problem of old age in various ways. You can avoid it by dying early; but if you must grow old, then you had better ensure that you keep your dignity at any price— even if you have to buy it. The moral would be (if there were a moral), Do not become a fallen star: provide for your survival, whatever its cost, by any means at all, however mercenary, flamboyant, or tawdry. But do you really think there is a moral? Do you know whose side you are on, or Robert Frost is on? Do you really believe that Frost meant to tell you that it is better to provide for your old age by buying friends, than to live with the memory of having starred? Of course not; the poet is not giving you this advice—and neither is he giving you the opposite advice. The poet is not giving you advice at all. He is not asking you to accept a moral, or even to draw one for yourself. The universe of art is one in which there is a suspension of decisions, what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a willing suspension of disbelief: a suspension of the sense of judgment. There are no morals in a poem; there are no morals in any work of art. There are no specific lessons to be learned and there is no advice to be followed. There are many implications in a poem which enrich our experience of life: but it is a many-sided experience, and we are not supposed to come down on one side or the other. Dylan Thomas confronting two issues for us in each verse, or Robert Frost with a macabre sense of humour pretending to teach a lesson which he does not want us to learn, epitomize the nature of art. Here the imagination explores the alternatives of

Jacob Bronowski

19

human action without ever deciding for one rather than another. And in this tense and happy indecision, and only in this, the work of art is profoundly different from the work of science. In the next lecture I shall consider the great likenesses between art and science which are to be set against this single difference.

This page intentionally left blank

The Imaginative Mind in Science Jacob Bronowski

This page intentionally left blank

HIS lecture is a continuation of my first: its theme is T to draw not the differences but the likenesses between the imaginative faculty in art and in science.

The art which I chose to illustrate my first lecture was the art of poetry. The raw material of this art is words— but words as human beings use them, not as animals do. The language of most animals, as I noted in this first lecture, has about forty distinct words in it, and they are all words of command or communication and nothing else. An animal can say "come" and "go" and "I am suspicious"; a flight of rooks can even say "We are going home." But only human beings can say "We hope it will be a nice day when we come back tomorrow." Only human beings have conceptual words like "tomorrow" and "nice day," by which they fix and manipulate in the mind things which are not present to their senses. The existence of words or symbols for absent things, all the way from "nice day" to "ultimate deterrent," enables human beings to think themselves into situations which do not actually exist. This gift is the imagination, and it is simple and strong, for it is no more than the human ability to make images in the mind and use them to construct imaginary situations. Science uses images, and experiments with imaginary situations, exactly as art does. That will be the starting point for the likenesses which I shall draw here. To believe otherwise, to suppose that science does not need imagination, is one of the sad fallacies of our laggard education. I shall be traversing several of these popular fallacies about science in the progress of this lecture. II

A child discovers before he is a year old that an object which he sees and which is then taken away continues to exist, and

24

The Imaginative Mind in Science

in time will return. This is the first great step of human development, when out-of-sight ceases to be out-of-mind. Several years later in his life, the child takes the second and greater step. He now makes an image of the absent thing, and is able to use the image to think himself into unknown situations. At that moment, he enters the gateway to all imaginative thought—and this includes the processes of thought which we use in reasoning. Many people believe that reasoning, and therefore science, is a different activity from imagining. But this is a fallacy, and you must root it out of your mind. The child that discovers, sometime before the age of ten, that he can make images and move them around in his head has entered the same gateway to imagination and to reason. Reasoning is constructed with movable images just as certainly as poetry is. You may have been told, you may still have the feeling, that E = me2 is not an imaginative statement. If so, you are mistaken. The symbols in that master-equation of the twentieth century—the E for energy, and m for mass, and c for the speed of light—are images for absent things or concepts, of exactly the same kind as the words "tree" or "love" in a poem. The poet John Keats was not writing anything which (for him at least) was fundamentally different from an equation when he wrote, Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. There is no difference in the use of such words as "beauty" and "truth" in the poem, and such symbols as "energy" and "mass" in the equation. We do a great harm to children in their education when we accustom them to separate reason from imagination, simply for the convenience of the school timetable. For imagination is not confined to wild bursts of fantasy. Imagination is the manipulation inside the mind of absent

Jacob Bronowski

25

things, by using in their place images or words or other symbols. in

Imagination is always an experimental process, and this whether we are experimenting with logical concepts or with the fancy-free material of art. We can see this from the beginning in the play of children. A great deal of childhood play consists of acting in imaginary situations—pretending to get married, pretending to be a doctor and nurse and patient, putting two chairs together and pretending to build a house or run a train. And all this acting is a form of experiment—experimenting with situations which are not real, but which may become real. This is why imaginative play is an activity of great importance in the child's development: because it is the basic activity by which he experiments and, as it were, tries out the shape and feel of the future. Many animals play, and in their play unconsciously experiment with the future. A kitten chasing a ball of wool is carrying out a minute and happy experiment; it is learning its way (and its own skill) into the hunting situations which it has not yet experienced. Evolution has worked to prepare kittens and puppies and bear-cubs and many higher animals for their adult actions, by this mysterious method of play, long before they enter into the adult life of action. And human beings owe much of their headlong progress in evolution to the fact that they carry out this experimental activity for a much longer time than other animals. We have a longer childhood: we play and experiment longer. We invest more of our time in our own education; and our education, formal and informal, is constantly intended to make us experiment with imaginary situations. The kitten chasing a ball of wool is learning, uncon-

26

The Imaginative Mind in Science

sciously, a physiological command over its own skill which will enable it to survive in an environment which it has not yet met. It is, as it were, feeling out and filling out its own physical muscles. The child playing a make-believe game is feeling out and filling out its intellectual muscles. And this imaginative activity gives the child confidence and freedom over his future environment. The word "experiment" is an exact description of what the child is doing. And this, the basic word in science, is also an exact description of what the adult does whenever he is doing anything original at all. A physicist experiments with material situations whose properties he does not wholly know, and a poet tries to find his way through human situations which he does not wholly understand. Both are learning by experiment. And both are experimenting with situations which they must imagine before they can create them. "What is now proved was once only imagin'd," said the poet William Blake. IV

If science is a form of imagination, if all experiment is a form of play, then science cannot be dry-as-dust. Yet many people suppose it is; this is another popular fallacy, that art is fun but science is dull. Neither art nor science is dull; no imaginative activity is dull to those who are willing to re-imagine it for themselves. Of course, many individual scientists are personally dull; but I assure you, after a lifetime of suffering both, that many artists are dull people too. But they are not dull inside their work—neither the artists nor the scientists. Inside their work they are at play, they are imagining and creating new situations, and that is the greatest fun in the world for them —and for us, if we can re-create their work. Science or art, every creative activity is fun. This is true

Jacob Bronowski

27

not only of our conscious activities, but of those creative activities for which nature has endowed us with no effort of thought. The most important creative act for which nature has designed us is the begetting of children. And it is not a mere happy chance that that is an enjoyable activity. It could not be otherwise, in art or in science or in bed. It is not possible to conceive a universe in which important creative activities are not pleasurable. Science is a pleasurable activity to the good scientist; you must believe that. It could not be otherwise. Nevertheless, many people do not find it as pleasurable to read a theorem as to read a poem. And I am speaking of people who are capable of reading and following both. They have been taught science at school, they have tried from time to time to keep up with it, but now they find that the processes of scientific reasoning do not engage their deep interest. They may still like to read about a new discovery, but they no longer follow how it was made. "They no longer follow how it was made": that clause reveals to us how it happens that people who want to be interested in science find it dull. They gape at the discovery from the outside, and they may find it strange or marvellous, but their finding is passive; they do not enter and follow and re-live the steps by which the new idea was created. But no creative work, in art or in science, truly exists for us unless we ourselves help to re-create it. That was the theme of my first lecture on the arts, and it is as valid and as important for the sciences also. It is not possible to appreciate the deep conceptions that science has created, and the beautiful discoveries which express them, unless we do something to re-create them for ourselves. This is a hard saying, but it is true. If a theorem in science seems dull to you, that is because you are not reading it with the same active sense of participation which you bring to the reading of a poem. No poem comes to you

28

The Imaginative Mind in Science

ready-made—you have to help to re-make it for yourself; and no theorem comes to you ready-made either—you have to help to re-make it for yourself. Of course, it is hard to have to tell the layman that he will not find science interesting and pleasurable unless he himself brings something to it. After all, says the layman, he is trying to understand: and if the finished discoveries are all that he can understand, is he to be blamed? Is not science to be blamed for using a technical language in which the layman cannot hope to follow either the logical or the imaginative steps? These are reasonable questions, and they engage scientists as well as laymen. Every teacher of science knows that some of his students never learn the living language, but only the techniques, so that they never re-discover and remake the theorems for themselves—they only learn them by heart. In time, these plodding students will become the journeymen of science, competent in routine but quite unimaginative. Yet to the outside world, the journeyman scientists are models of thoroughness and accuracy, the very picture of science in the popular mind. The outside world knows the difference between a journalist and a poet, but it does not know the difference between a journeyman scientist and a genius. It calls a commonplace poet just what he is, commonplace; but a commonplace scientist is called a scientist, and perhaps the very epitome of scientists. But deeper than this domestic quarrel lies the layman's problem: how can he succeed in catching and matching the imaginative content of a theorem, the creative steps in a discovery? How can he find pleasure where I have said it lies, in following these steps for himself, when he does not know the language in which they are argued? How can he, a mere layman, learn the inwardness, the overtones, the richness of the imagery of science? The answer to these questions is best displayed in a

Jacob Bronowski

29

practical example. But by way of preamble there is one general comment that I can make before I give examples; and it is this. Yes, the work of re-creating a theorem for oneself is taxing. And there are even scientists who shirk it —the journeymen of science who prefer to learn the theorem by rote. But then, there are journalists in literature too, who are too harassed or too dull to re-create a poem for themselves, even when they admire it. They too find it easier to learn the poem by heart. V I illustrated the power of language to evoke many different responses by quoting a poem by Dylan Thomas in my first lecture. So it is appropriate that I should discuss our responses to the language of science by choosing as my practical example once again a poem. The poet is William Empson. He and I were students together at Cambridge in England at the end of the 1920's, during the remarkable time when physics was transformed by new discoveries and new theories in a few years. We were both students of mathematics, but we spent our leisure in editing together a literary magazine, one of the famous little magazines of the 1920's. The magazine was called Experiment, and that title itself says something about the way that we wanted, almost without thinking, to carry the language of science into literature. William Empson's poem is called "To an Old Lady." Like the poems by Dylan Thomas and Robert Frost, it is concerned with the process of growing old, and the hardening of human habit into elderly ritual. But Empson's imagery comes neither from nature nor from Hollywood. The main metaphor that runs all through the poem pictures the old lady first as living on another planet, and then as being herself another planet.

30

The Imaginative Mind in Science Ripeness is all; her in her cooling planet Revere; do not presume to think her wasted. Project her no projectile, plan nor man it; Gods cool in turn, by the sun long outlasted. Our earth alone given no name of god Gives, too, no hold for such a leap to aid her; Landing, you break some palace and seem odd; Bees sting their need, the keeper's queen invader. No, to your telescope; spy out the land; Watch while her ritual is still to see, Still stand her temples emptying in the sand Whose waves o'erthrew their crumbled tracery; Still stand uncalled-on her soul's appanage; Much social detail whose successor fades, Wit used to run a house and to play Bridge, And tragic fervour, to dismiss her maids. Years her precession do not throw from gear. She reads a compass certain of her pole; Confident, finds no confines on her sphere, Whose failing crops are in her sole control. Stars how much further from me fill my night, Strange that she too should be inaccessible, Who shares my sun. He curtains her from sight, And but in darkness is she visible.

The poem describes a dignified old lady whose social life lies in a tradition which is dying. The literary echoes are evident: the first three words are quoted from King Lear, and the character and background of the old lady could come straight out of Osbert Sitwell's book Before the Bombardment, which describes just this kind of stately life in an English spa before the First World War. But the vocabulary and the metaphors of the poem could not come either out of Shakespeare or out of Osbert Sitwell. The language is that of a scientific age, and indeed of a scientific mind. The old lady is pictured as fixed on a planet which is cooling and dying. We are not told what planet,

Jacob Bronowski

31

but it is a planet with a God-like name: any planet, that is, except the earth. The old lady cannot be rescued by a rocket, and if a rocket arrived from the living earth, she would try to repel it, just as bees try to repel a new queen even when the hive needs one. So we cannot rescue the old lady by a warm leap from the earth; we can only watch her through our spy-glass. We can see her social nicety, playing Bridge and running a house. We can observe how sure she is that she is travelling on the right path, and that her life is not narrow—it is what she wants to make it. There are other solar systems, other civilizations: it is strange that the old lady, who lives in the same system of civilization as we do, should be so remote from us. But the fact is that, at most times, our vision of her is blinded by the superficial appearance of a common civilization, a common sun, that we share. In reality, what the old lady and we share hides the deep differences between us. Only when we forget what we have in common do we see her and her tradition as they really are. Stars how much further from me fill my night, Strange that she too should be inaccessible, Who shares my sun. He curtains her from sight, And but in darkness is she visible.

It is obvious that this poem does not wake in us the same swift, sensuous response that Dylan Thomas' poem wakes. Empson's poem sounds more awkward and at first leaves us cold. Yet it is also clear that, once we have walked through the reading as I have just done, if we run through the poem again we begin to grow warmer in the running. For example, the last verse grows richer and more emotive the second time round, as I have quoted it, when the prose meaning has been spelled out once. All this is certainly not explained by saying that the language of science is unpoetic. That is another fallacy—the

32

The Imaginative Mind in Science

fallacy that in a poem you cannot say "telescope" but must say "optic tube," as John Milton did in Paradise Lost. William Empson says "telescope" and "compass" and "precession," and though these words sound technical the first time round, we soon get over that. After two or three readings, we understand the words for what they are: lively images that fit into and fill out the astronomical setting of the poem, and give it fresh overtones. No, the difficulty of the poem lies not in the scientific words but in the scientific ideas. The stumbling-block is the strangeness of the thought itself in places, which does not connect with any familiar thoughts, and so raises no echoes in our imagination. Let me take one precise line: we are told of the old lady that she, Confident, finds no confines on her sphere.

There is a small verbal play here between "confident" and "confines" which we can all catch. But the heart of the metaphor comes from mathematics: it is the theorem that a surface can be finite in extent and yet have no boundaries, no confines. The surface of a sphere (of a planet, for example) is of this kind: it is finite in extent, and yet if you or the old lady walk all over it you will never meet any boundary and will seem to be going on to infinity. This is the language of science that most of us lack: not the technical words, but the simple basic ideas like the one that I have just explained. If Empson's poem fails to set us on fire, it is at these points, where we need to bring to it a grasp of the ideas from which his metaphors reach out. The wealth of a language lies not in its words, but in the metaphors and associations which they stir in our minds. And these metaphors, these associations, are of ideas. If we fail to find a created piece of science rich in associations, if we fail to re-create it for ourselves, it is because we are not at home with the basic ideas on which it stands.

Jacob Bronowski

33

VI

Many people think that the ideas of science are highly abstract, and can only be expressed in formal equations. That is yet another popular fallacy. At bottom, no fundamental ideas, in any subject, are abstract. The human mind works with images, and even its most subtle ideas have to be composed from images. We cannot form any theory to explain, say, the workings of nature without forming in our mind some pattern of movement, some arrangement and re-arrangement of the units, which derives from our experience. (That is why, for example, the reasoning of physics is always arguing about waves and about particles, which derive directly from our physical experience.) In this sense, the whole of science is shot through and through with metaphors, which transfer and link one part of our experience to another, and find likenesses between the parts. All our ideas derive from and embody such metaphorical likenesses. Once again, I shall give one example and treat it in detail. About the year 1929, when William Empson wrote the poem which I have quoted, the American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble made an unexpected observation. He was observing, as others had done, the spectrum of distant galaxies of stars, in which there can be recognized the characteristic lines that announce the presence of some of the chemical elements that we know on earth—of hydrogen, for example, and potassium. It had been observed before Hubble that these characteristic lines, however, do not occupy exactly the same places in the spectrum from distant galaxies that they occupy in the spectrum here on earth. The lines are shifted, and most often they are shifted towards the red end of the spectrum: that had already been noticed. Now Hubble looked more closely at this general quirk and at once sharpened it. First, he found that (if the exceptions are properly analysed) the lines

34

The Imaginative Mind in Science

are shifted towards the red, not in most but in fact in all distant galaxies. And second, he found that the shift towards the red end of the spectrum is greater, the more distant the galaxy (if our guesses about their distances are properly linked together). These, then, are the facts: the light from a distant galaxy looks redder, the farther away the galaxy is from us. But what do the facts mean? What cause underlies this universal shift towards the red end of the spectrum? In the first place, what can cause a characteristic line of hydrogen or of potassium to appear redder when it reaches us than (we assume) when it left the star in the distant galaxy? You notice that I have already made an assumption, namely that a characteristic line of hydrogen or of potassium is really in the same place on the spectrum in any part of the universe. We do not know this; we have nothing but our experience on earth to guide us. And seven centuries ago, in the time of Thomas Aquinas, it would not have occurred to us that our experience on earth could be a fair guide to the heavenly bodies. Now we have reversed the assumptions of Aquinas, and we take it for granted that a star is made of the same stuff as the earth—what else can we assume, we ask? Yet that gigantic metaphor between earth and heaven, which is an invention of science, breaks with every picture of the past. Very well: if the spectrum left a distant galaxy looking as it does on earth, what shifted it to the red on its journey? We cannot be certain. No theory of science is certain, for every theory is an imaginative extension of our experience into realms which we have not experienced. We shall never meet a distant star at first hand, in time or in space. But suppose that we assume, on other grounds, that light travels to us from a distant galaxy in the way in which a wave travels. Then it will follow that light will seem redder when it reaches us, that is, its wavelength will have lengthened,

Jacob Bronowski

35

for the same reason that any other wavelength lengthens: because we and the galaxy are moving away from one another. An Austrian physicist, Christian Johann Doppler, hit on this idea more than a hundred years ago, when he noticed that the whistle of a train that is moving away from us sounds lower in pitch, that is, longer in wavelength, than if the train is still. He took the leap from the world of sound to the airless world of light, a million times faster than sound; and we take the same leap, we make the same bold analogy, when we conclude that the reddening galaxy is flying away from us. On these assumptions, then, on these hazardous extensions from our experience, the galaxies are all flying away from us. But that in itself is puzzling. Can the galaxies really be flying away from usl Can we really believe that we on earth occupy the unique unpopular spot in the universe? In the days of Aquinas, we should have answered Yes! with pride. Of course we on earth occupy a unique place, we would have boasted—even if it is uniquely unpopular. But first Copernicus and Giardono Bruno, and then the theory of Relativity, changed all that. In science today, in the great vision of the universe, we no longer picture the earth to be at the centre of things. Today we say that if the galaxies seem to be flying away from us, they must be doing something more universal: they must all be flying away from one another. Yet this again is an extraordinary thought. Can we really understand, can we imagine, a universe in which every galaxy is moving away from every other? Can we conceive, that is, a universe which is expanding as a whole? What we are trying to picture here is the whole of space expanding—and yet not expanding into anything: simply expanding. A universe which is finite but unbounded, like the surface of a sphere, could do that. But it can do it in your imagination, you can re-create the thought in your

36

The Imaginative Mind in Science

mind, only if you are willing to understand what the surface of a sphere is like. Arthur Eddington and Albert Einstein took Bubble's idea on to this last splendid conception of an expanding but finite universe of Relativity. And if that fires your imagination too, then there will fall into place with a triumphant sound the line from William Empson's poem "To an Old Lady," Confident, finds no confines on her sphere.

vn I have given this full account of one modern theory in science for two reasons. First, in order to show that the ideas of science do embody a strong and strongly intertwined imagery, which can help us to re-create them for ourselves much as we re-create a poem or a painting. And second, in order that I may finally discuss one remaining question about science and art which is constantly asked. The question is this. Must not a scientific theory be true, and may not a work of art be quite untrue? The answer to this question turns, as once did the answer that Pontius Pilate gave, on the sense that we give to the word "true." In the popular mind, science is true because it counts, measures, and exactly describes the facts. But this definition of science is mistaken, and the meaning that it gives to scientific truth is a fallacy. A scientific theory, as I have just illustrated, is a much larger, more profound, and more intimately linked structure than this. Yes, the theory must conform to the facts, and must not fly in the face of the evidence of our senses—of the evidence, that is, of our own experience and the experience of people who do more delicate experiments in laboratories. But all that evidence, all those facts, are only the cage and outer surface of the truth that the theory seeks to embody. Inside the

Jacob Bronowski

37

cage of facts and evidence, the theory is a structure which we judge by its inner connections, its cohesion and coherence, and its ability to fit the facts with the most beautiful economy of ideas. A theory does not simply state the facts: it shows them to flow from an inner order and imaginative arrangement of a few deep central concepts. That is the nature of a scientific theory, and that is why I have called it a creation of the human mind. Of course a good theory has practical consequences, and forecasts true results, which go beyond the facts from which it started. But these successful forecasts do not make the theory true—they only show that it was even wider than its creator supposed. Isaac Newton's Theory of Gravitation made wonderful and unexpected forecasts for two centuries after it was conceived; yet fifty years later, Einstein's theory of Relativity showed that, in any obvious sense, Newton's theory had never been true. And fifty years from now, a new theory may show that Einstein's theory in turn had never been true. But to say this only makes it evident how foolish we would be to use the word "true" in this narrow sense about any theory. Newton and Einstein created marvellous and coherent and widely embracing visions of the natural world, which conformed to the facts as they knew them, and which threw a splendid but never a final light into the innermost structure of nature. All created works, in science and in art, are extensions of our experience into new realms. All of them must conform both to the universal experience of mankind and to the private experiences of each man. The work of science or of art moves us profoundly, in mind and in emotion, when it matches our experience and at the same time points beyond it. This is the meaning of truth that art and science share; and it is more important than the differences in factual content which divide them.

38

The Imaginative Mind in Science VIII

I closed the first of these two lectures with another poem, and I want to do that again. You will allow me, I hope, a small touch of vanity: this time, I shall quote a poem of my own. The theme of the poem is the connection between what happens to each of us individually and how the universe behaves as a whole. No one, says the poem, stands apart from the cosmic process as a whole; the great movements of the universe enter and extend into our most specific and individual acts. It happens that one of the images that runs through the poem is the shift of the spectrum of distant galaxies towards the red which I have described. And it happens also that the poem was written at Christmas, and came into my mind when, standing beside the tree, I saw the red veins in my hand like branches. Faster than light and cold as absolute, The edge of darkness races in pursuit Of this expanding leaf, this Christmas tree Of veins in which I hold the galaxy. It is my hand, from which there streams and rips The cosmic shift, red to the fingertips, And what that flying shadow hunts is me. Some astral bang, some primum mobile Rocketed both of us, the headlong Bear And me, into the incandescent air. The motion that we share entails it all: The virgin birth, the carol tune, the tall Luminous star that prophesies—although Its only secret is that children grow. Faster than night and cold as Helium II, The edge of shadow races to undo The secret of creation, the abrupt Choice of a womb or atom to erupt, And what the flying darkness hunts is you.

Imagination in Politics Henry Steele Commager

Henry Steele Commager Henry Steele Commager is Professor of History and American Studies, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts. Following graduate work at the University of Chicago, Dr. Commager continued his advanced study in Copenhagen, Oxford, and Cambridge. He taught history at New York University and Columbia University before going to Amherst College in 1956. Among Professor Commager's writings are: The Growth of the American Republic; The Heritage of America; The American Mind; Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent. Recently he has been engaged with others in the preparation of a 40-volume history on The Rise of the American Nation.

DIRECT your attention to the role of imagination in Icreativity. politics. When we speak of imagination we mean, I think, Few things are more interesting now than the

search, almost the feverish search, for creativity in the social sciences, creativity that can match that displayed so ostentatiously in the realm of natural sciences and so delightfully in the realm of arts. Traditionally we all think of creativity in terms of science, or art, or music, rather than of politics or law, or education, and rightly so if we think of it as some single dramatic discovery or some bold stroke of genius. Creative progress in the political or legal arena is of a different order. Creativity there works in a different way; for the most part it works over a long period of years rather than in a single stroke of genius. It works anonymously and collectively. It is far more truly a social creativity than is that in the realm of art or music. Nevertheless, if we contemplate such taken-for-granted institutions—and we do take them for granted—as the nation, the state, the law, the administration, or in a different field, the university, we are lost in astonishment at the creative genius of man or of societies over the centuries. And we may, with some justice, ask if any invention in the realm of science has been more important for the progress of men than such an invention as the university. It is largely, if not exclusively, a Western European invention—we can locate it in eleventh- and twelfth-century Italy. To this day all universities are Western in fact or in model. Or we may ask whether any scientific concept has been as important as the concept of progress itself in the realm of thought, or in politics, or in society. Now, one point or consideration is relevant here and we should make it at once. It is this: that we are tempted to take for granted the virtue and value of imagination in politics. But need I remind you that not all achievements of the imagination are spiritually benevolent or socially

42

Imagination in Politics

beneficent. Diderot and Voltaire, for example, had imagination, but so too had Saint-Just and Robespierre. Karl Marx imagined a new kind of society and economy and Lenin had the imagination to see how it might be realized; we don't universally applaud either the creation or the realization of the vision. Even Hitler and the Nazis had a kind of diseased imagination. Their vision and ruthlessness combined to imagine the triumph of the Aryan race, to imagine a totalitarian regime controlled by the German people, spreading from Berlin to Tokyo in the East and to Chile in the West. These imaginations, these exercises of it, do not inescapably appeal to us. Traditionally the political imagination found expression in the construction of Utopias. Philosophers, statesmen, and reformers have been busy creating Utopias almost from the beginning of political thought. I need not rehearse this for you. All are familiar with the more famous of these— Plato's Republic, for example, or the great series of Utopias of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Sir Thomas More's "Utopia" or Andrea's "Christianapolis," or Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis" which squinted at the New World which had already come over the horizon, or Campanella's famous "City of God"—poor Campanella, tortured for twenty-eight years, surviving somehow to imagine a new and more humane order of society. You know Harrington's "Oceania," which may have influenced the Founding Fathers of the American Republic. You will recall, too, that in the eighteenth century many indulged themselves in imagining perfect societies. What all of these eighteenthcentury Utopias had in common was very simply that they were not Europe, for most of the philosophers turned from Europe with horror. The nineteenth-century Utopias were of a different character. They were more an economic and social protest against the abuses of current society than a repudiation of

Henry Steele Commager

43

society itself. In a curious way they were caricatures of the existing societies, whether we choose the Utopias of Proudhon or Fournier, or many of the Utopian communities established in the New World, or the novels imagining ideal societies. News from Nowhere, for example, or Bellamy's Looking Backward, or Howells' Traveler from Altruria, all were really tributes to the civilizations that have been created, but with the barnacles scraped off. All this is a bit tiresome. There is something deadly about most of these Utopias, but we look back on them now with a certain nostalgia when we contemplate the current crop of Utopias represented by Orwell's 1984 or by Huxley's Brave New World. What should we say about these Utopias of the centuries gone by, these exercises of the imagination, but that they are almost without exception barren. Over almost the whole of the Utopian thinking hangs an air of unreality. It was all too easy, all too glib, this imagining of the perfect society, the perfect economy, the perfect morality. It included everything but human nature. As we contemplate these Utopias from Plato to Rousseau—and I am thinking here of the Utopian education described in Emile—and down to the time of Bellamy or Howells, we come to our first lesson: that you cannot separate imagination from reality, not if the imagination is going to find expression in something more than words. This is not in any way to disparage the inspiration of a book like the Republic, it is not to ignore the tremendous force and influence of a book like Emile, it is rather to say that the value of these imaginative works is precisely in the extent to which those who read them or who have read them are inspired to make the connection between the idea and the reality. When they fail to make that connection, the books are on the whole profitless. Nothing, I think, better illustrates this than the history of the greatest single Utopian idea of modern

44

Imagination in Politics

times; I mean of course, the idea of progress. Those of you familiar with Bury's essays dealing with the history of the idea of progress know how this idea emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, how it was connected with the scientific revolution then underway and with the opening up of the New World, how it provided so much of the driving force of the Enlightenment, and worked like a ferment all through the nineteenth century, holding ever before the fascinated gaze of men the idea that by thought and by work mankind could indeed progress toward perfection. And you know, too, that this great idea faded out in the nineteenth century and wholly evaporated in the twentieth. Few of us today believe in the perfectability of mankind or of society: how many of us would be willing to settle for the mere assurance of survival! Meantime, all through these years there had been a real Utopia, a great laboratory for the application of imagination to politics, the greatest, I think, in all history. I refer, needless to say, to America herself and more particularly to the United States. It might be argued that the first settlements in Virginia and New England were Utopian. There men were provided, for almost the first time in history, with a fresh page on which they might write history, and with resources with which they might construct a new society. There is a memorable phrase from the early days of Virginia: "They had no need of ancestors, they themselves were ancestors." We take that first founding pretty much for granted, as doubtless you do here in Canada with the first foundings of Canada. But how astonishing it was really, what a prodigious exercise of the imagination! To imagine it is possible to move a whole society from the settled civilization to "howling and barren wilderness"; to imagine it is possible to create a Zion set upon a hill, a society dedicated to maintaining the moral law; to imagine it is possible to create a state, which is what

Henry Steele Commager

45

the Puritans and Pilgrims actually did; to imagine something as new as religious toleration, as Roger Williams did and William Penn did. And what is more, to put into practice, to institutionalize these ideas. That is the great achievement of the New World, the institutionalization of concepts which philosophers had heretofore imagined. It is here that imagination links up with reality in a productive fashion. That institutionalization reached its climax in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, in the greatest outburst of political creativity in modern history. Since this is the most productive and the most instructive laboratory of the political imagination in history, you will permit me to dwell upon it. You are, I think, familiar enough with the achievement of the extraordinary generation that moved onto the historical scene in the 1770's—the generation of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Tom Paine, James Madison, George Wythe, and so many others. I need not dwell upon them, or upon their memorable achievements. We in the United States are inclined to take the achievement for granted. I think we all fail to appreciate how original it was, what a spectacular flight of the imagination it represents. Need I remind you what the Founding Fathers did in the political arena? They took ideas, the product of their earlier generations—earlier imagination if you will—and translated them into institutions. What ideas, what institutions? First, they created a nation. It was the first nation in history to be made. All other nations had evolved over generations and centuries out of history and tradition. The Americans created a nation overnight, provided it with all the necessary ingredients of body and of spirit, and made it work. It was the first nation to be deliberately and even artificially created. Ever since then, the idea that men can make a nation has worked like a ferment through the

46

Imagination in Politics

world—in Latin America, in Europe, and now in Africa and in Asia. Men think they need not wait a thousand years to have a nation, they can create one, now. Second, the Founding Fathers took the ancient idea that men make governments—a very old idea that goes back to Greek philosophy—and translated it into the great institution of the constitutional convention, familiar to all of you because just such a convention created the Canadian Confederation. Heretofore, this idea had been merely a theory. Men, in fact, had not made government, they had no mechanism whereby they could alter and abolish old government and institute new, except the mechanism of violence, which was what the Americans had resort to in the Revolution. But this generation—indeed we can pretty much pin it down to John Adams and James Madison—substituted an institution for this age-old practice of violence. In the words of James Madison, they "substituted the benign magistracy of law for the awful coercion of the sword." That is a good description of the constitutional convention where men come together with authority from the people, authorized to alter or abolish government and to substitute a new one. This was the first time in history men had found out how to legalize revolution, and this process of legalizing revolution has now gone around the world. Third, the Americans of that generation institutionalized the ancient idea that government was limited, that no government had all power. This idea was familiar enough, but it had never been carried out, it had never been institutionalized. After all, who could limit the power of Catherine of Russia, of Frederick the Great, of a Louis of France, in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries? But Americans took this idea and translated it into the most elaborate system of checks and balances and limitations ever devised. You are familiar enough with them—the written constitution, bill of rights, separation of powers, bicameral legisla-

Henry Steele Commager

47

ture, judicial review—all of these devices that are now commonplaces of our politics. I know very well that there had been a bill of rights before, but there had never before been a bill of rights that had the force of a constitutional mandate, nor had there been one that guaranteed positive rights to people—rights of freedom of religion, speech, and press. Then Americans took the ancient but never effective notion of federalism and translated it into law as well, into the first effective federal system in history. All previous confederacies, those of ancient Greece, of medieval Italy, of the Low Countries, and of Switzerland, had proved either too weak to survive or too strong for the well-being of the separate parts and of the individuals. Americans worked out a federal system which distributed powers among local and national governments on a rational basis, and which provided adequate sanctions to enforce the distribution. And since then federalism has girded the globe. Americans took the ancient idea and practice of colonialism and transformed it—indeed abolished it. All through the centuries, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth, European powers had assumed that colonies existed for the "benefit" of the mother country, and that colonials were—inevitably —inferiors. That attitude, indeed, has persisted in some quarters down to the twentieth century. It was, needless to say, intolerable to Americans, and it is not surprising that they changed it. At the very beginning of their history, before they even drew up a constitution, they substituted for for colonialism the principle that colonials are citizens and colonies are states. This simple, elementary, and commonplace idea enabled the United States to expand from thirteen to fifty states with less trouble than Britain had with Ireland alone in the nineteenth century. It enabled the United States to grow with such ease and rapidity that not one out of a hundred Americans now knows that his country was

48

Imagination in Politics

the greatest colonial power of the nineteenth century. What an extraordinary achievement of the imagination! Burke himself had failed to see that you can get rid of the colonial problem in this fashion. Then Americans turned to the difficult task of making self-government work, and they invented—I think the word is not too strong—the political party. I know there are some scholars so benighted as to think that the British invented the political party. They are quite mistaken. The British invented exactly what Washington and the others warned against—they invented cliques, they invented factions, they invented gangs, they invented the small handful of men struggling for power, like the "caps" and "hats" of Sweden, for example. The political party as we know it, a vast organization built from the ground up and including a major part of the body politic, is very much an American invention. Now, what explains the political imagination, the political energy, the unprecedented social inventiveness, of the last quarter of the eighteenth century? What explains, for that matter, the presence (I cannot say the invention here) of so many great political thinkers and practitioners in eighteenth-century America? How remarkable this was: we still look back on it with wonder. Just think, a little society of less than three million white people, on the far edge of the world, without a single city of over forty thousand people, with no real university, no great academies, no newspapers to speak of, with few of the facilities of modern civilization, produced in a single generation Franklin and Washington, John and Sam Adams, Jefferson and Hamilton, Mason and Wythe, Wilson and Jay, and a dozen others almost equally distinguished. One hundred and eighty-five millions of people today; we cannot come within distance of this record! What explains this outburst of political genius? We don't

Henry Steele Commager

49

know, of course, but we can throw some light on it. It was in part that the all-absorbing task confronting men was political, so almost all of the intellectual energies of the day were poured into political channels. There were, after all, few alternatives for the expression of talent in the America of the eighteenth century; there was no army, no Church, no university, no academy, no Society, there was little finance and business. Such talent as there was went into public service. This suggests an elementary principle, that one way to find political leadership is to make public service more attractive and to make other things less attractive. It was, second, that education in the eighteenth century tended to be an education for the public service. It was education on the Plutarchian or Ciceronian model. It is customary nowadays to disparage eighteenth-century education, to equate the colleges of eighteenth-century America with the academies and high schools of our own day and to recall how few Americans were exposed to formal education. Be this as it may, almost all the public men of that generation seemed to have absorbed familiar maxims of conduct, to have studied in common famous historical texts, to have adopted a common body of philosophical principles. All of them knew Plutarch, Thucydides, Cicero, and Tacitus. All of them knew first-hand that there was common sense in John Locke and Montesquieu, almost everyone of them might have said with the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew, "having been initiated in youth in the doctrines of civil liberty as they were taught by Plato, Demosthenes, Cicero and other renowned persons among the ancients and such as Sidney and Milton, Locke and Hoadly among the moderns, I liked them, they seemed rational." Almost everyone might have provided in his will as did Josiah Quincy of Boston: "I leave to my son when he shall reach the age of fifteen, the works of Sidney, Locke, Bacon, Tacitus and

50

Imagination in Politics

Plato's letters, may the spirit of liberty rest upon him." (The age of fifteen, if I may introduce a parenthesis, is an interesting point. We have prolonged infancy to adolescence and prolonged adolescence into maturity. In the eighteenth century fifteen was widely regarded as the age of maturity. Joseph Priestley, for example, in his series of lectures on history, addressed to young Benjamin Vaughan who was then fifteen, said in the introduction that as at the age of fifteen young men have reached maturity and are prepared to take part in the great affairs of common life and the great work of statesmanship, it was time that Benjamin Vaughan and his fellow students familiarized themselves with these philosophical problems.) How familiar the maxims of civil conduct which the youthful Washington learned, or the long excerpts from Thomas Jefferson's common-place book, or the adages of Poor Richard! Almost everywhere you turn you find much the same kind of education, an education of public responsibility, an education in political virtue, if you will. That kind of education had a certain artificiality about it; nevertheless, it impressed on the young from the earliest years the significance, the dignity, and the excitement of service to the commonwealth and to society. Listen to Washington, for example: "I am clearly in sentiment with you that every man who is in the vigor of life, ought to serve his country, in whatever line it requires and he is fit for." Along with this was an awareness of history on the part of the Fathers, an awareness that they were indeed founders and builders of a nation, that they were indeed pioneers of a new world. This is another observation that is relevant to our own time, for we too must be pioneers in the new worlds opened up by science and the worlds that confront us as a result of the revolutions throughout the globe. We have it in our power, wrote Tom Paine, "To make a world happy; to teach mankind the art of being so; to exhibit on the theatre of

Henry Steele Commager

51

the universe a character hitherto unknown and to have a new creation entrusted to our hands." Or listen to Washington himself, who was far more articulate than most of us suppose, far more truly a child of enlightenment. Here is his Circular Letter of 1783: "This is the time of their political probation; this is the moment when the eyes of the world are turned upon them, this is the moment to establish or ruin their national character for ever, . . . for according to the system of policy the states shall adopt at this moment, they will stand or fall, and by the confirmation or lapse, it is yet to be decided, whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered a blessing or a curse; a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn Millions be involved." So much for some of the reasons why the eighteenth century produced political institutions and political leaders. There is one modern example of political activity, which I think compares favourably with these earlier examples. I refer to the creation of modern Israel. Israel is, with the possible exception of Pakistan, the only Utopia which crystallized into a viable state, which became a real community; in the case of Israel an ideal community. You can trace the beginnings of this idea back for two thousand years, to the prophecies of the Old Testament, to the notion of the chosen people, to the Diaspora, back to the cry that echoed down the centuries "If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem. . . ." But more to the point was the Zionist movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Zionist idea as formulated by the heroic Theodore Hertzl, founder of modern Zionism; the contributions of Zionists from every land; and the final triumph of Chaim Weizmann and of David Ben Gurion in transforming the Zionist idea into a reality. What extraordinary imagination went into all this, and what imagination has gone into the development of the new state of Israel! In many ways it submits itself as the

52

Imagination in Politics

most interesting economic and social experiment anywhere on the globe. What imagination to bypass the whole problem of citizenship, for example, and make all Jews throughout the world citizens of Israel, if they asked for citizenship. What imagination to welcome the Jews of the whole globe and incorporate them instantly into Israel, to wipe out the differences, and to wipe out along with these the diseases and the illiteracy. What imagination to use the army as an instrument for education, or to undertake the re-conquest of the Negev, or to make Israel one of the great centers of science and of education, to make it in fact a "Peace Corps" for the whole of the Middle East and for much of Africa. What is clear when we contemplate the experience of eighteenth-century America and of twentieth-century Israel, is that creativity is called forth by necessity, by opportunity, and, I think, by idealism. Yet, not every crisis, not every necessity brings out political activity. How much easier our lot would be if that were the case. No, there must be along with this a deep-rooted sense of history, a tradition of public service, and an atmosphere favourable to the exercise of the political imagination. We may ask, who in the history of America, who in modern history, may be said to have this kind of imagination, and what circumstances have stimulated it—that is an empirical way of getting at the problem. I mentioned America and twentieth-century Israel. Let us look at some individuals who displayed creative imaginations. There is Jefferson certainly, who imagined an enlightened people capable of governing themselves; Alexander Hamilton, who imagined a self-sufficient nation and the way to create one; Miranda, who imagined liberating Latin America and started a tremendous revolution which came to fruition long after his day. There is N. F. S. Grundtvig of Denmark, one of the great nationmakers of history who almost single-handed restored, formed and enlightened Denmark. There is John A. Mac-

Henry Steele Commager

53

donald who imagined and largely realized Canadian Confederation, or Fridtjof Nansen who imagined in so many different areas, science and Arctic explorations and peace amongst peoples. There is Woodrow Wilson, with his imaginative construction of a federation of nations to preserve peace. Thus we come to our own time, to three great statesmen. First and foremost, Winston Churchill: imagination suffuses every page that he writes; imagination inspires his approach to world affairs—his idea, for example, of creating a coalition of freedom against totalitarianism; his offer of British citizenship to France in the dark hours of 1940; his association of himself with Soviet Russia when Hitler invaded Russia; his realization that in the future Britain and America would be increasingly mixed up together, as he said in the Fulton speech. Second is De Gaulle, with less reach than Churchill, but with equal brilliance. Almost alone he imagined, if I may use that word, that France might somehow survive Nazi occupation, organized the Free French overseas, and fought through to the end. By a great feat of the imagination he saw that the burden of the Algerian war must be ended and Algiers given over to the African people, and he carried that decision against an overwhelming opposition and brought the emancipation of both countries. Even now, though we may not approve his present policy, his notion that the Franco-German alliance might serve as a nucleus for a united Europe and might put an end to the cold war is extraordinary and exciting. And with the great figures and imaginative statesmen of our time, we must place David Ben Gurion himself, some of whose achievements I have already mentioned in connection with Israel. Now, if we consider some of these characters and inquire into the nature and function of the imaginative quality, a moral emerges. It is this: in every instance imagination to be successful has to be harnessed to reality; in every instance

54

Imagination in Politics

a statesman who exercises his political imagination must exercise at the same time political energy and political acumen. None of these great figures were willing to leave their ideas to find their own way, all worked and fought for them. We find, too, that in every instance these statesmen dealt with reality as part of the consideration, they were not theorists, they were not doctrinaires, they were certainly not fanatics. They started with human nature and they stayed with human nature; they started with society as they knew it, not as they imagined it should be reconstructed. They imagined what might in fact be done and their imagination was broader and more penetrating than that of their contemporaries. In every instance they themselves went to work to carry out their ideas. They were prepared to compromise, to be patient, and to be magnanimous. I suspect that if we were to extend this inquiry historically, and geographically too, we would find these same principles operating everywhere. The great imaginative statesmen of the past, and of other lands and continents, were not doctrinaires, or fanatics; they were men and women prepared to work with reality. They had tenacity, they had endurance, and they had patience. They penetrated into reality and into the future and it was a realistic, not a romantic future. All of them, too, confronted one problem which we confront in our own day, and that is the problem of change— one of the most fascinating problems of history. What is it that causes change: change in styles, change in habits, change in morals? Why is it that change is so much easier and faster in science, for example, than it is in the social sciences? Why has it happened that some nations and peoples are able to change more readily than others, or change more readily at one stage in their development than at others? What, for example, brought about the profound change in style from the classical to the romantic? What brought about the change in architecture from Regency to

Henry Steele Commager

55

Victorian (one of the calamities of history!)? What brought about the change in the attitude towards such an obvious and familiar thing as child labour? One hundred years ago, virtuous Christian men and women could look upon it without a tremor but now look upon it with horror. What has brought about that astonishing change from the lawlessness of eighteenth-century England to the patient lawfulness of the twentieth century, for every Englishman is now a law official or a governess? What brought about the change, if real, from the charm, the quaintness, the cosyness that almost all observers found in early nineteenthcentury Germany to the very different qualities of the Germany of Bismarck only fifty years later? Why is change so slow in some places, so fast in others? How do we bring about change in those areas where all of us know that change is essential? Why does it take the people of the southern part of the United States so long to adapt themselves to the twentieth century where the Negroes are concerned, while they are quite ready to adapt themselves to the twentieth century where scientific agriculture is concerned? What lack of imagination afflicts South Africa, that it is unable to see the gross injustice of its way —or at least what the rest of the world thinks of as gross injustice? What lack of imagination is responsible for the inability of the average American to accept the obvious fact that Communist China is a nation, is indeed the largest nation of the globe, and may some day be the most powerful? What lack of imagination afflicts so many of us in the United States, and elsewhere on the globe, that prevents us from taking in the full consequences of nuclear warfare and guarding ourselves and our fellow men against it? The problem is old and familiar. It was analysed in one of the most provocative books of this century. Published over fifty years ago now, E. A. Ross's Sin and Society dealt with the imagination or the want of imagination in the

56

Imagination in Politics

American people. We can all imagine the "Sin," Ross observed (Sin with a capital "S"). We all know what it is: beating your wife, or stealing from the cash box, or seducing a neighbourhood girl: but what of social sin? What of the social sin that we refuse to recognize because it is committed by gentlemen in frock coats and silk hats, because so often it conforms to the letter of the law, because it operates in the vast distances of time and space, and because it is anonymous? We recognize the treason in Benedict Arnold, but what of the treason to democracy in corrupting the legislature? We recognize the sin of beating a child, but what of the sin involved in child labour? We recognize the crime of poisoning, but what of the slow poison, the adulteration of foods or impurity in drugs—or we might say now—in cigarettes? Our own failure in all this, so Ross observed, is a failure of imagination—an inability to realize that sin has taken new form and that the new form it has taken is often far more dangerous than the old and familiar form. We are now suffering from that failure in the economic and political arena and in the global arena, from failure to transfer ideas of personal wickedness into large, impersonal wickedness. We are horrified at harm to a single child, but look almost with equanimity upon the destruction of a hundred thousand infants, or we think perhaps that it is one of the minor incidents of the cold war. One thing is certain, that the need for an imaginative and creative approach to the great problem of politics is still as acute as ever, and will continue to be. Sometimes we are tempted to delude ourselves that our most urgent problems are solved, that after passing through a generation of political activity, like that of the "New Deal" era, we can settle back and enjoy the fruits of our wisdom. I think there was some tendency to think that way in the United States in the nineteenth century, that there was a complacent feeling we had solved most of the great political problems. I suspect

Henry Steele Commager

57

there was a good deal of this kind of thinking in Victorian England, a feeling that Britain had exhausted the possibilities of history. Whenever a country or an individual begins to think in this way, it is in for a very rude awakening. The great problems that confront us now, that glare upon us from all sides, and make claims upon us as exacting as at any time in history, are more urgent and more demanding than ever before because the danger that confronts us today is the danger to survival itself. This is not the place for me to spell out the great problems; we are all, alas, familiar with them: the great unfinished task of racial equality—we have not yet found a formula for that; the problem of medical care for all members of society; problems of population explosion; the problem of education for the whole of society, to take up the terrible slack created by automation. Think of the genius that has gone into automation, think of the lack of genius shown in the failure to think about what happens to the people for whom it substitutes. We have failed grievously, even in so elementary a matter as adult education; we have failed to think of any solution for the problem of leisure. We created leisure by scientific genius and because we have no comparable imagination in social sciences, we do not know what to do with this leisure. On the global scene, need I recite those great problems that crowd upon us from all sides? There is atomic warfare, and the control of atomic weapons and bacterial weapons (let us never forget the danger of bacteriological warfare); perhaps we will learn how to control them—and then do it! There are the great revolutions in underdeveloped nations which ought to have caught our imagination. There has been nothing like them since the Renaissance and the Reformation and the discovery of the New World in the sixteenth century. Here, by one convulsive leap, two-thirds of the world is determined to catch up with five hundred years of

58

Imagination in Politics

history, two-thirds of the peoples of the globe are determined to catch up with the standard of living that European and American peoples enjoy. Imagination is called upon to control nationalism, to control population, to create international organizations, to find some way to co-operation in the exploration of outer space, to allay the hatreds inspired by the cold war. You can easily add to these other problems that require the kind of thinking we give to science and technology. There are special difficulties here to be sure, the difficulty of urgency, the difficulty of complexity, the difficulty of lack of control and of communication. Contemplate the seemingly complex, although really simple operation, of one small part of an international organization, UNESCO, for example. How do you get 104 nations, all part of UNESCO, to agree to co-operate on a programme by which to keep together all the hundreds of projects that are submitted to the directorate, each asking for priority? How do you keep track of all the various interests involved in the United States alone, where one hundred different organizations are represented, each one of whom has its own programme to press on the American Representative. Multiply this a hundredfold, just for the area of foreign relations, and you see why communications are so elaborate that they are constantly breaking. We must learn to overcome obstacles here. What can we do? What is possible? First, we must try to do what the American Founding Fathers did, that is, to substitute the ideal of public enterprise for private enterprise. This is a psychological and philosophical as well as a practical problem. One of the difficulties in the United States is that the ideal of private enterprise has become almost symbolic while public enterprise is in some way subtly equated with socialism which is again equated with communism, which gives it a very bad name indeed. The Founding Fathers and

Henry Steele Commager

59

those who succeeded them addressed themselves to the great task of serving the "commonwealth"; if we can make service to the "commonwealth" as glamorous, as demanding, and as rewarding as private service, we shall be partly on our way to solving our problems. Second, I suggest that we abandon our illusion of omniscience in the realm of education, in social and cultural realms, and return to a qualitative approach to education. Nothing dismays me more as I regard our school system at the secondary level and at the higher level too, in the United States, than the notion that because there are now a hundred and four nations on the globe, our students should learn about a hundred and four nations; and because there are many many literatures in many many languages, they should learn a little bit of each one of them. This does not seem to me a proper preparation. I suggest that the world is so complex now, and the task of education so complex, that the best solution is to return to those great studies that inculcate (if indeed any studies can inculcate) lessons of sympathy, understanding, tolerance, patience, magnanimity. I don't think you learn those by studying world history or world literature, or by setting up institutes to study every part of the globe. I think you learn them merely by the careful study of great works of literature, great works of politics, great works of art, which seem to have universal qualities. I mentioned Plutarch earlier, and Thucydides. I suspect we come closer to understanding the problems presented by the cold war, or the recognition of China, through a study of Thucydides than by all the attention given to these subjects in our high schools. Third, we should, in so far as we can, emancipate ourselves from national barriers, and national preconceptions. Nationalism, which had an immense value in the past, is today the most serious barrier to the understanding of peoples. I need not remind you of the history of the change

60

Imagination in Politics

from what we call the old to the new nationalism, from the cosmopolitan nationalism that obtained in the eighteenth century and continued to operate in the United States and in Britain in much of the nineteenth century, to the chauvinistic nationalism of the twentieth century. I know there are qualifications for this; it would be hard to persuade an Irishman that British nationalism was ever benevolent. But, by comparison with the chauvinistic nationalism of nineteenth-century France, Prussia, Russia, and Japan, I think that the nationalism of Britain and America was a more benevolent one. What is tragic is that the new nations of the globe for the most part are patterning themselves and their nationalism not on the more benign nationalisms of the Scandinavian countries or Britain or the United States, but rather on Prussia, France, Russia, and Japan; that their nationalisms are militaristic and chauvinistic and tend to be increasingly so. Nationalism has become—not of necessity but out of the circumstances of history—the greatest single threat to the peace of the world. Just as a kind of bogus patriotism is driving out the real patriotism, bogus nationalism is driving out the genuine and enlightened nationalisms of the past. I think we should support or, if necessary, create, a group of men and women whose business is to think far ahead of their contemporaries, whose business is not to represent their own country, their own class, their own times, men and women who should be excused from many of the pressures and passions of their own day and permitted to imagine a different kind of world, to anticipate problems, and propose solutions to them. I don't mean that they should remove themselves out of the world; it is Justice Holmes who asserted that every man has to share some of these passions of his time at the risk of not having lived. We need a class of thinking and imagining men who are not under public

Henry Steele Commager

61

or social pressure to conform to patterns of nationalism or of racialism or any particular economy or society. Needless to say, we have at least in embryo just such a class—I refer to the university. The university is one of the supreme examples of the inventive and creative capacity of mankind. Its function has been from the beginning not to be local, or national, but to serve a larger commonwealth, the commonwealth of learning. It is to provide just that group of men and women whose business is to liberate themselves from the pressures of the immediate, of race, of faith, of class, of nation, and to transcend space. The primary loyalty of a university and the primary loyalty of the scholar is to their community. But we must ever remember that that community is not the particular and immediate community in which they find themselves, it is the great community of scholarship and of learning; it is the community of mankind. It stretches back to the beginning of arts and letters and science and philosophy; it stretches forward to whatever future may be permitted us. It is not a community of a single state or nation; it is a community of learning and of science itself. Perhaps, with these instruments—and they are not very concrete instruments to be sure, they are perhaps merely attitudes—with these encouragements, with these freedoms, we may yet discover the same imagination and creativity in politics that we now enjoy in science and the arts. The task of the statesman is more difficult than that of the scientist or the artist, and it is less rewarding. When the statesman addresses himself to problems, which in the nature of the case have no clear solution, he rarely lives to see the outcome of his work. The physicist or the biologist can have the satisfaction of carrying a problem to a conclusion; the artist knows when he has finished a painting and a musician when he has composed a sonata: the statesmen's ventures

62

Imagination in Politics

are more a matter of hope. Justice Holmes observed that, every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. How true that is in the realm of politics! We should not, therefore, expect too much, we should not expect solutions, for there is no solution; we should not expect perfection, for the notion of a perfect society is an illusion. We should expect perhaps a breathing spell, a momentary stage against confusion, in which men will be given another chance. If we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the burdens that rest so heavily upon us, or to be maddened by the incessant demands made upon us, or to be bewildered and frustrated by the complexity of life, or to be defeated by the forces of ignorance, we will all go under. Somehow, if we do summon up resources to imagine, to invent, and to create new mechanisms, new institutions, new ideas, we may yet win out against the forces of confusion that crowd upon us; we may enter into a new era of peace and of happiness.

Imagination in Psychology; Some Needed Steps Gordon W. Allport

Gordon W. Allport Gordon W. Allport is Professor of Psychology, Department of Social Relations, Harvard University. After graduation from Harvard, Professor Allport completed advanced study in Berlin, Hamburg, and Cambridge, England. Following a few years at Dartmouth College he joined the permanent teaching staff of Harvard University in 1930. A senior member of the American Psychological Association for many years, Professor Allport has been honoured by the national psychological societies of England, France, and Germany. Professor Allport is perhaps best known for the following works: Personality: A Psychological Interpretation; The Psychology of Rumour; The Individual and His Religion; The Nature of Prejudice; and Pattern and Growth in Personality.

S

OME people will shudder at the very thought that psychology may develop more imagination than it has. They will say, "Look at what you psychologists have already done. You have addled us with teaching machines, computers, and simulators; and have measured all of our quotients (IQ's, EQ's, AQ's and even PQ's—personality quotients). You have submitted us to truth drugs and lie detectors, to opinion polls and questionnaires, to mazes and other crazes; and worst of all you have mistaken us for that strange and upsetting Viennese family of Oedipuses. . . . We want no more of your imagination. What we need is a strategy by which we can resist your impertinence. Our admiration is for the poor fellow who applied for a job with the British Intelligence service. He had the reputation of hitting the bottle. So a psychologist was asked to discover whether this was his weakness. Whereupon the psychologist gave him a word association test.

Tell me what first comes to your mind when I say: HaigV 'Oh,' replied the applicant, 'Haig—you know—a famous general —First World War—North Africa, and all that.' 'GordonV 'Oh yes, another general: Chinese Gordon; Boxer rebellion.' 'Boothr 'Oh yes, another general. This time, the Salvation Army.' 'Vat 69!' 'Well . . . , could that be the Pope's telephone number?'

With this sort of resistance I too am in sympathy. But the present impertinence of psychology will best be cured not by depriving it of its imagination, but by endowing it with more. AN ERA IN TRANSITION

At the present moment psychology resembles a youth, awkward and arrogant perhaps, but plainly flourishing and

66

Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps

full of promise. Its situation can best be understood in the perspective of the intellectual history of the present century. Early monumental figures in psychology—shall we name Wilhelm Wundt, William James, William McDougall, and John Dewey?—moved us away from purely speculative philosophy toward a broadly empirical view of human nature. While they favoured empirical evidence from laboratory or clinic they did not have much of it available; nor did they wish to lose their synoptic view of the subjectmatter of psychology, namely, the total constitution of human nature. Their revolt against philosophy did not go far enough to please certain enthusiasts who said, in effect: We can give you a simple formula for human nature. Freud, for example, offered us a comfortable conceptual tripod: the id, ego, and superego. Watson and the behaviourist school said it was all a matter of reactions to stimuli. There developed a number of easily understood reductionist concepts, including the unconscious, conditioning, reinforcement, habit hierarchy. Reductionism is the doctrine that says that all the intricacies of human nature can be explained in principle with the aid of one mechanism or group of mechanisms favoured by a particular theorist. But the Zeitgeist of this century moved even further. Psychology was caught in the same web as were other sciences along with philosophy, art, and literary criticism. An era of extreme positivistic reductionism set in. All theories became suspect because of their verbal seductiveness and slender empirical support. Wundt and James, McDougall and even Freud were offering us essentially one man's view, a personal interpretation. This is not science, we were told, for it is based on personal meanings, and all meanings are subjective. Better, it was said, become objective; avoid introspection; eschew personal meanings. Make a clean sweep; define

Gordon W. A Upon

67

terms operationally. Whenever practicable fit all data to mathematical or computer models; employ statistics; determine probabilities. Minimize intervening variables; better still, think in terms of an "empty organism," so that all measurements and concepts may be publicly verifiable. It is important to note that this trend toward extreme positivism was not limited to psychology. It had a precise parallel in philosophy which widely repudiated metaphysics and value theory in favour of language analysis and methodology. It had a parallel in literary neo-criticism wherein a poem is shorn of its context, separated from the personality of the author, and analysed as a string of words in isolation, employing nothing more than the textual evidence itself. In art, realism and representation, dependent as they are on meaning and on tradition, went into the discard. Abstractions, reflecting only the momentary experience of the artist, were the vogue. All fields of human endeavour were saying in effect: let*s forget our traditional baggage of words, words, words. Nothing is trustworthy unless you can reduce it to physical and measurable operations. Nothing is true unless language analysts can define the concept of truth. In the case of literary and artistic creation let us stick to present definable fragments of experience and to textual evidence. This period of the recent past, which we might call the era of the "clean sweep," is by no means ended. In psychology we note the effects of reductionism all along the line. Current theorizing, in contrast to earlier synoptic theorizing, is greatly simplified. Sometimes there is a reduction to biologism—a trend we already perceive in Freud; sometimes to physicalism, as in stimulus-response psychology; sometimes to operationism, to cybernetic analogies, to computer analogies, to mathematical formulae, including of course factor-analysis and other forms of bitter-end empiricism. The products of such reductions have been, and

68

Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps

to a considerable extent still are, regarded as the psychologist's final word. This era, as I say, has not yet ended, and we hope it will not completely vanish since the lessons it teaches are too valuable to be lost. No one, excepting perhaps a few philosophic sages, would want to return to the a priori systems of psychological theory which had little or no empirical monitoring. At the same time a conspicuous reaction is already taking place. One marks the resurgence of the concept of self during the past two decades. One thinks of the existential movement which is peculiarly adroit in accepting the fragmentation of life and the dissipation of values while at the same time seeking through its concepts of "transcendence," "commitment," and the "will to meaning" to counteract the atomization of thought and the disintegration of purpose. One thinks of the upsurge of interest in the goals of therapy, and also in the goals of the nation. The revival of phenomenology as a psychological method is a prominent development. Related to this broad general movement is the turning of psychoanalysis toward so-called "ego psychology." One notes that new journals are springing up devoted to individual psychology, to existential psychology, to humanistic psychology. The trend is so marked that it has been called the "third force" in modern psychology. And so we come to the era that lies ahead. Can it maintain the critical gains of recent decades and yet escape the trivialization of outlook that accompanies extreme reduction? Is it possible to reach a new level of synoptic theory with its respect for the totality of the human mind without sacrificing the gains in critical method so recently achieved? My answer is a cautious Yes. To do so requires first of all identifying those features of human nature that have been lost to sight in the reductionist stampede. The second requirement, of course, is to keep clearly in view the methodological lessons that we so recently learned.

Gordon W. Allport

69

MORPHOGENESIS AND PERSONALITY

We can illustrate the dual need by considering a problem from the field of human personality. Everyone knows that each human neuropsychic system is unique. With unique genotypes of inheritance and neverrepeated personal environments, it could not be otherwise. And everyone knows that while there is no final unity in a given personality system, each system none the less is highly organized and patterned in a self-consistent way. Has the science of psychology up to now adequately dealt with this situation? I think not. The picture that psychology offers is principally a picture of dimensions not of persons. Individual differences (or dimensions) are freely allowed for, but personality is something more than an intersection of dimensions. That is to say, your personality is not simply your array of scores on achievement, ascendance, introversion, intelligence, neuroticism, or on Factors A, B, and C. In point of fact these general or nomothetic dimensions, which are the psychologist's present stock in trade, may not even be relevant to your personal structure. If some are relevant (in an approximate way) the question is not how do your scores on these variables differ from the scores of other people, but rather how do these qualities modify one another in your own functioning system. Imagination is needed to provide us with methods appropriate to the pattern and growth of the single person. We have considerable distance to go before we improve our assessment and understanding of the individual and our prediction and control of his behaviour. To me it is not acceptable to argue that this challenge of uniqueness lies outside the domain of science, since science, it is said, deals only with general laws and never with unique occurrences. Whatever the dogma may be in the natural sciences, I insist that psychology is assigned the problem of human

70

Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps

personality and that to handle it adequately it must focus on the morphogenesis of the single pattern as it exists. A psychologist is defined in the official ethical code of the American Psychological Association (1959) as a person "committed to increasing man's understanding of man." And man, I submit, exists only in concrete, specifiable, and unique forms. If you reply that every object in nature is unique—every stone, every tree, every bird—I remain unmoved. The fact is that the individual human system is so enormously complex and so amazingly varied in its transactions with the world, and so intricate in its self-regulation, that one cannot shrug off the challenge of uniqueness by taking refuge in analogies with inanimate nature or lower forms of life. The issue before us is not new. It has been discussed many times, for example by Meehl (1954), Sarbin, Taft and Bentley (1960), and most recently by Holt (1962). If I am not mistaken most of the discussions conclude with an elaborate defence of dimensional analysis. We are told in a variety of ways that it is not possible for science to deal with patterned uniqueness, or are assured that in the last analysis there is no difference between molecular (i.e., dimensional) study and morphogenic study. Every biologist knows the difference between molecular and morphogenic biology, but psychologists are slow to recognize the parallel distinction in their own science. As Meehl pointed out, there are two separate issues in this dispute. One concerns the process of understanding. How does the psychologist assemble into a unitary image all the fragments of information he obtains regarding a person? This question raises the troublesome matter of the roles of inferential or associational knowledge as against intuitive or configural knowledge. Unsolved epistemological issues are here raised. For psychology the question has been framed in terms of the relative predictability that

Gordon W. Allport

71

results from following the method of statistical (or actuarial) forecasting based on the behaviour of the average human being of a given class, as compared with success in predicting on the basis of clinical (individual) insights. Since we are far from reaching an acceptable solution in this dispute I call for imagination in devising more appropriate methods of submitting the matter to empirical testing. A second issue in the dimensional-morphogenic dispute concerns the type of data needed for assessing individual behaviour. Are scores derived from dimensional scales, from projective tests, or from questionnaires the only data we need? In general this is the type of evidence with which we are now working. The theoretical limitation of this prevalent approach is clear. When we assess an individual in terms of questionnaires or Rorschach scores, or anything similar, we are assuming that the basic constitution of his personality is qualitatively like that of all other people. The self-same dimensions are imposed on all subjects. They are allowed to vary quantitatively but only in respect to the dimensions imposed by the experimenter. But what if the cleavages in our own lives, our "personal dispositions," do not correspond to the slicing in terms of "common traits"? (Allport, 1961, chaps. 14, 15.) Would we not then need a new base line, a new device for finding out the nature of these unique personal dispositions? To take an example. Suppose we wish to discover a person's primary interests or values. We now have several pre-coded scales that we can administer (Kuder, Strong, Allport-Vernon-Lindzey). What we discover, of course, is precisely what we expected: quantitative variations on the dimensions prescribed by the experimenter, and not necessarily prescribed by the life we are studying. More directly morphogenic is the old-fashioned device of asking the subject point blank what he wants in life. And

72

Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps

there is still much to be said for this simple procedure. The trouble with it is that Freud has made us aware of the selfdeceptions that may creep in, and it is also true that some people may not be able to articulate their own values, some may not even know what they are. Recently Cantril and Free (1962) have approached this problem with the sort of imagination I think we need. Subjects in many different lands (including India, Nigeria, Brazil, and Poland in addition to the United States) are asked to define as well as they can the "best possible" way of life for themselves. When the subject has done he is shown the picture of a ladder and told that the top rung (of 10) represents this way of life. He is then asked on which of the 10 rungs he would locate himself today in the process of climbing toward his aspirations. Where did he stand five years ago? Where does he expect to stand five years hence? In this way interesting reflections of morale and outlook are obtained on a scale that is self-anchoring. The subject is also asked to describe the worst possible way of life that he can imagine for himself. This dreaded contingency is located at the bottom of the ladder. Interestingly enough the most dreaded way of life is seldom a logical opposite of the best possible way, even though the ladder forms some sort of psychological continuum in the subject's mind. Here is a clear instance where the logical dimensions of an experimenter may fail to represent the phenomenological dimensions of the person he is studying. You may ask, well, granted that this method establishes a unique base line for the individual, by which we can locate his intentions and measure his progress, what can be done with such a mass of solipsistic data? Doesn't it merely prove that every individual is hopelessly solitary? No, in analysing thousands of cases, Cantril finds that an elaborate code may be constructed, consisting of about 145 items, which will include in different proportions most

Gordon W. Allport

73

of the ways of life that were mentioned in all the countries studied. Ah, you may say, thus we return to a dimensional scheme. Yes, for purposes of comparisons we do, but with two marked differences from our usual dimensionalism. In the first place no individual is forced into the common code if in fact his aspirations are sui generis', and secondly, the dimensions used are derived inductively from aspirations as actually experienced and not invented in the laboratory by the experimenter. I mention this one example of an imaginative step that has been taken to draw scientific psychology closer to the study of morphogenic patterning. The example happens to deal with the field of personal values. But one can mark off other areas of patterning for study. Shapiro (1961), working with psychiatric patients, has likewise shown imagination. On the basis of a five-hour intensive interview with an incoming patient he constructs a questionnaire which from that time on is standard for this particular patient, although not directly relevant to any other patient. Used over intervals of months or years, the instrument shows the course of improvement or deterioration in health, as well as changes in attitudes and outlook. Elsewhere (Allport, 1962) I have gathered together a number of other recently devised methods which to my mind exemplify the neglected morphogenic approach to personality study. I shall not repeat the listing here, but shall say that while such methods are by no means common they show that in principle imagination is possible. Some techniques seem to blend dimensional and morphogenic procedures, such as the Q-sort and the "Rep" test, and these too are partial gains. But we still have far to go in the direction I describe. Let me say clearly: our customary dimensional methods have their merit. My point is simply that they are one-sided and need imaginative supplementation.

74

Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps OTHER NEEDED STEPS

In what other areas beside personality assessment does psychology need to stretch its imagination? I cannot, of course, write a scientific agenda for the future, but I shall venture to call attention briefly to a few particularly needy fields.

Reductionism has left us with a peculiarly threadbare account of human learning. I say this in spite of the fact that learning is probably the most worked on topic in our science. Conditioning and reinforcement take us only a short distance in understanding the mysteries of acquiring knowledge, skills, and motives. Yet conditioning and reinforcement are enormously popular concepts. With true reductionist zeal they are often offered as a universal formula. Today, I suspect, more and more psychologists realize that to predict adult learning in terms of past reinforcements is an unwarranted extrapolation of isolated and inappropriate experiments. In fact the very concept of "learning" seems inadequate. What a human being does, at least after the stage of infancy, is to absorb, master, engulf whatever is relevant to his conception of himself. And he does not do so, I submit, in order to reduce tensions, as prevalent learning theory would hold, but in order to maintain the tensions that are appropriate to his sense of self-identity. Clearly this a highly complex issue and will require imaginative reformulation in the future. Take the more specific topic of conscience. It was Freud's important insight that in children the parental mandate is interiorized in the form of a superego. The question arises whether this "must" conscience of childhood has normally any functional tie at all with the mature adult's sense of moral obligation. May it not be that the "ought" conscience of adults in normal lives is functionally autonomous of the "must" conscience of childhood?

Gordon W. Allport

75

Freud, we gratefully admit, gave us the gift of selfscrutiny, including the art of the backward glance toward childhood. But now that we are able to stand on his shoulders we can see farther than he could see—before as well as behind. Conscience we discover has a wider horizon than he knew. Religion also. According to Freud the religious sentiment is an elaboration of our childhood view of the earthly father. And so it may be to a limited degree. But a more full-bodied study of the role of the religious sentiment in normal adults will surely show how slender is Freud's reductionist formula. One could speak also of Freud's liberating treatment of sex. But whether sex is the whole of the complex sentiment of love is doubtful. It is to the credit of Fromm and others that this question is now being raised in a new psychological context. It is an odd fact that psychologists by preference conduct scores of investigations on aggression for every one on affiliation or love. They study stress but not relaxation; pain but not joy; deprivation but not fulfillment; prejudice but not friendship. Just why the seamier aspects of life have chiefly attracted psychologists up to now, I do not know. Perhaps it is for the same reason that young people like horror in their comic books. It would be choppy indeed to list in this brief way additional areas that would benefit from wider imagination. Instead of such staccato listing let us return finally to the problem of theory-building. THEORY-BUILDING

We have spoken of reductionist theories. The opposite type may properly be called pluralistic. A pluralist in psychology is a thinker who will not exclude any attribute of human nature that seems important in its own right. Like the pluralist in philosophy, he favours multiplicity and diversity

76

Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps

of interpretation. The result, of course, is a curious medley of theories. There is an analogy to the concept of "cultural pluralism." Whenever we defend cultural pluralism we are in effect advocating a nation in which each ethnic strain maintains its identity. To be sure we hope at the same time for some form of over-all national unity, but the only unity possible turns out to be rather loose and incomplete, and in some respects discordant. Those who think it better for a nation to aim at complete assimilation are analogous to reductionists. It is better, they say, to work for organic unity rather than risk the looseness and disjointedness of pluralism. So far as psychological theory-building is concerned the same dilemma exists. Everything conceivable about human nature is conceived in specific human minds and specific human minds are limited. No one type of mind is able to discern the totality of truth. On this simple fact William James constructed his own brand of pluralism. No single formula, he held, could possibly cover all that is conceivably true. The diversity of valid knowledge is such that no one theory-builder can embrace the totality. At the same time our rational ability insists on making conceptual systems—and the more closed and tight the system is, the more rational it seems to be, and the more satisfying. We are, therefore, caught in the dilemma: we want coherent systems but we are not able to include in our limited coherence all the diversity of mental functioning that we encounter. The reductionist is the person who solves the dilemma by favouring coherence over adequacy. He is willing to blind himself, permanently or temporarily, to the complexities of his subject in order to reap the rewards of rationalism. The pluralist, on the other hand, is willing to sacrifice rational coherence in order to keep alive his recognition of diversity and subtlety.

Gordon W. Allport

77

The most obvious way to be a pluralist is to be an eclectic. An eclectic chooses doctrines and principles from various systems of thought, and somehow blends them to suit his own temperament. If his temperament can tolerate contradictions he will find himself holding one theory at one moment and an opposite theory the next. If accused of illogicality he can retort, with Emerson, that "consistency is the hobgobblin of little minds." Nothing that seems true in any context can be denied, not even if these special truths fail to cohere. In the psychology of William James we encounter many paradoxes of this order (Allport, 1943). His hospitable mind was able in different contexts to give assent to determination and also freedom; to mentalism and to physicalism; to parallelism and to interactionism. He both affirmed and denied the unconscious; he expressed both hope and despair concerning the future of psychology as a science. James, of course, claimed justification for his paradoxes within the embracing doctrine of pragmatism. Pragmatism tells us that the whole purpose of thinking is to develop concepts that will guide us in practical action. If the consequences of this action are fruitful then we know that we have laid hold successfully of some aspect of truth. James knew that his position was "unsystematic and loose." But he preferred it to what he called the "terrible flavor of humbug" that marks the work of any psychologist who claims perfect consistency and adequacy for his theory. He would, therefore, not approve of modern reductionism with its claims of sufficiency for psychoanalytic, stimulusresponse, operational, or some other rationally satisfying but partial position. Pluralism has the merit of inviting imagination. Nothing need be ruled out simply because it rests on an heretical hypothesis (as does telepathy) or upon an unfashionable method (as do case studies). New frontiers are allowed and exploration encouraged.

78

Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps

Let me repeat: pluralism would not deny the insights yielded by reductionism. It would admit the evidence for reinforcement along with the evidence for cognitive and ego-relevant theories of learning. It would preserve the merits of dimensional analysis while seeking out morphogenic procedures to round out the patterns of individuality. It would admit the truth that lies in theories of ego defence while giving scope to the conflict-free propriate structure of the self. It would allow for infantile remnants in the superego but also for the adult sense of moral obligation. It would admit the role of stimulus, but also the role of challenge which is considerably more than stimulus. We have not yet answered the question whether such pluralism is doomed to the illogic of temperamental eclecticism; or whether pragmatism is the only available conceptual cement. My own answer would be that, given imagination, the psychology of the future can evolve a stronger theoretical position—one that might be called systematic pluralism. SYSTEMATIC PLURALISM

The goal of systematic pluralism is to fashion a conception of the human person that will exclude nothing that is valid, and yet at the same time preserve our ideal of rational consistency. It will allow for what is neural and what is mental; for what is conscious and what is unconscious; for what is determined and what is free; for what is stable and what is variable; for what is normal and what is abnormal; for what is general and what is unique. All these, and many other, paradoxes are actually resident in the human frame. All represent verifiable capacities and none can be ruled out of consideration in our theory-building. It is not possible at this time, of course, to formulate an embracing theory of the human person in terms of systema-

Gordon W. Allport

79

tic pluralism. Such a formulation requires imagination and is, therefore, assigned to our agenda of the future. Elsewhere (1960) I have suggested a possible line of approach. The starting point, I believe, should be the admission that the human person is himself the primary system (unique, yes, but still a system); and he is a system of amazingly diverse potentialities. We are already familiar with many kinds of natural systems, ranging in type from the atom to the solar system, from an amoeba to a man, from an idiot to an Aristotle. But systems, we know, vary in their degree of openness. An inanimate system (a stone or a bridge) obeys chiefly the second law of thermodynamics. An animate system (a plant or a bird) is self-maintaining according to the principle of homeostasis. A human system is still more open. While it, like lower forms of life, maintains itself through homeostasis it has the capacity for vastly greater differentiation, and tries restlessly to become something more than it is through its foresight, imagination, and ideals. And it has infinitely more complex encounters with the environment and with other human systems. The ingredients of the personal system comprise automatisms, reflexes and habits, operations of the unconscious, and of biological impulse, as well as the deposits of culture and social class. Exclusive stress on these particular aspects of human nature has led to the reductionist image of man as a simple reactive mechanism. While his system surely contains all these reactive features it also contains proactive, productive, propriate features that elude most of the current reductionist views. In defining each man as a system, therefore, we should include all (and not simply a few) of the features intrinsic to this system. In doing so we shall neither rest content with reductionist theory nor deny the truth that lies therein. We shall not have to settle for arbitrary eclecticism, or for pragmatic pluralism, for we shall have defined our subject-

80

Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps

matter in such a "way that any and all valid data and all verified processes can be woven into our central conception of man as an open system. Even though no single psychologist will be able to discern the totality he will fit his own specialty into a larger and more hospitable theoretical edifice. In this way we shall, I hope, reconstruct psychology so that it will be a more open-minded and also a more coherent science than it is at present. IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIETY

I have proposed these various imaginative steps not simply in the interests of fashioning a more adequate science of psychology, but likewise in order to improve its usefulness. It is commonly said that the Free World needs above all else to clarify its goals. We are up against dictators who know what they want, and since what they want enslaves the free spirit of man, we rightly resist their desires. But do citizens of our open society know what they want? Do our colleges and universities know? It appears that they concern themselves more with the scientific know-how than with the philosophic know-why of our existence. They talk about what more than about what for. As I see it, an open system conception of the human person within the science of psychology could lead to a clearer definition of the root motives of mankind. It could do so through improved cross-cultural and cross-national research. Up to now such research has not focused on the central problem of the universal root desires and goals of mankind. Rather it has compared selected cultures in respect to their practices in child training, in their images of other peoples, in their responses to modern technology. All these studies are good so far as they go. But they originate in limited views of human nature, or sometimes in no view at all. I can imagine a study that will aim to discover the root

Gordon W. Allport

81

motives and also the universal modes of thought that may enable international policy-makers to improve upon their present opportunistic statecraft, and perhaps discover new formulas for peaceful living. Essential to such a study would be the drawing of a distinction between people's demands (which are nothing more than preconceived solutions to problems) and root desires which lie behind the demands. The needs of mankind are probably universal; the solutions proposed up to now are all parochial. As yet we lack sufficient knowledge of mankind to offset local particularistic political demands. Such knowledge is needed as a basis for novel solutions to present conflict. Admittedly it will be difficult to change the habits of politicians, but if psychology offers an imaginative lead perhaps it can be done. You may object that we already know of mankind's desire for peace, and that even so we have made little progress toward implementing this desire. The hitch, I suspect, lies in the inability of policy-makers up to now to consider the whole pattern of concurrent desires, including the need for self-respect, for freedom from fear, for raising standards of living even while disarming, and for some cause to devote oneself to above national aggrandizement. It is the whole system of the person that must be taken into account, not a single segment. And knowledge of the person-system must of course be supplemented by knowledge of the social system. Apart from its importance for social policy, a systematic pluralism would give to students of the future a broader basis for exploring and testing their own individual values. As a teacher I have noticed that students tend to see their own lives in terms of whatever fashionable reductionist frame they are currently taught. It has been said of Freud, that compared with most psychologists he delves deeper into the unconscious, stays down longer, and comes up dirtier. I hope that the psychology of the future will delve

82

Imagination in Psychology: Some Needed Steps

still deeper, stay still longer, explore more widely, and emerge with a truer image of the totality of human nature. This nature has marked limitations, but also rich potentiality. If it harbours evil it also harbours good. My vision is of a psychology that will know the best along with the worst; that will enable us to make the good better, and when necessary make the best of the worst. It is understandable that up to now our youthful science has taken delight in iconoclasm, and has tested its rationality by inventing all sorts of engaging reductionist models, and has admired its own aseptic methods. But it has paid a price. It has grown remote from its assigned subject-matter, and is often compulsive about its own rituals. But a youth outgrows his adolescence, and intellectual manhood comes at last. REFERENCES ALLPORT, G. W., 1943. "The Productive Paradoxes of William James," Psychological Review, 50, 95-120. ,1960. "The Open System in Personality Theory," chap. 3 in Personality and Social Encounter (Beacon, 1960). , 1961. Pattern and Growth in Personality (Holt, Rinehart & Winston). -, 1962. "The Unique and the General in Psychological Science," Journal of Personality, 30, 405-422. AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, 1959. "Ethical Standards of Psychologists," American Psychologists, 14, 279-282. CANTTUL, H. and FREE, L. A., 1962. "Hopes and Fears for Self and Country," American Behavioral Scientist, 6, Supplement. HOLT, R. R., 1962. "Individuality and Generalization in the Psychology of Personality," Journal of Personality, 30, 377-404. MEEHL, P. E., 1954. Clinical versus Statistical Prediction (University of Minnesota Press). SARBIN, T. R., TAFT, R., and BAILEY, D. E., 1960. Clinical Inference and Cognitive Theory (Holt, Rinehart & Winston). SHAPIRO, M. B., 1961. "The Single Case in Fundamental Clinical Psychological Research," British Journal of Medical Psychology, 34, 255-262.

Imagination and the Curriculum: Some Harvard Impressions of General Education Paul H. Buck

Paul H. Buck Paul H. Buck is Director of the Harvard University Library. Professor Buck was educated at Ohio State University and Harvard University. During the last thirty-five years he has served Harvard in a variety of capacities: from 1942 until 1953 as Dean of the Faculty, and as Provost from 1945 until 1953. Since 1955 Professor Buck has been responsible for the Harvard Library, one of the great university collections in the world, numbering some seven million volumes. The recipient of a number of prizes and honours, including the Pulitzer Prize in history, Professor Buck is a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour of France. His writings include General Education in a Free Society, of which he was coauthor, and The Nature and Needs of Higher Education.

HE basic dilemma which engages a university profesT sor arises from the concept that education must embrace both specialism and generalism. Here also is the source of the most pervasive conflict. The concept stems from a tradition as ancient as the creation of the university itself—the advancement of learning and its transmission to youth. A university has always been a place where exploration of the unknown has been stressed, where new data have been discovered, and new understandings achieved. So vast has been the accumulation of the centuries, and so accelerated the process in recent decades that first professions had to be created and then specialties and even sub-specialties within the separate groupings. The advancement of learning and the training of specialists to continue the process and to apply it to the needs of society became the major aim of higher education. Powerful forces operate in its behalf. The inescapable fact is that professional competencies are indispensable to the operation of modern society. No activity of our political, economic, and social life can be carried on with present efficiency without these competencies. It requires some effort to realize how completely we depend upon the expertness of our doctors, lawyers, engineers, economists, and scientists—to name only the obvious. The resourcefulness of our professional personnel has enabled us to profit by a technological advancement which has brought a possibility of wealth and freedom from want hitherto undreamt of. In the process the professional man has become the key figure in our social system. The very life of the modern citizen depends upon the reliability of the expert judgments that manage the machinery, both social and mechanical, which surrounds him. Without a continuous supply of such judgment based upon special knowledge, the gears would no longer mesh. (This theme has been developed at length in Paul Buck et al.9 The Nature and Needs of Higher Educa-

86 Imagination and the Curriculum: Harvard Impressions

tion.) And it is obvious that society gives its highest rewards and greatest recognition to the man who makes a new discovery or successful application. It is equally true that the specialty commands the first loyalty, the dedication, and the preoccupation of the academic profession. Whatever is said about the aims of education, most students enter college to become in time scientists, business men, lawyers, engineers, journalists, doctors, historians, etc., through the long range of modern specialties. So strong has been this drive towards special professional and technical education that even the specialist has been prone to utter grave doubts as to its adequacy in producing an educated man. Because it is evident that the machinery of modern society is operated by specialists who understand only a small part of the totality, it is open to misuse. We need the understanding and guidance by laymen of what the experts are doing. The same man is both expert and layman. He needs to know his own job and to possess the means of explaining it to others. He must also be a layman with capacity developed to understand the other experts. Higher education should supply both the experts and the laymen. In this endeavour of supplying the student on his way to becoming an expert with the capacity to serve as a layman, the educator reaches back to another ancient and revered tradition—that which is usually described as "liberal education." Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle not only mastered the whole range of the learning of their times— something which is utterly impossible for the modern scholar or scientist to aspire towards—but they also bequeathed to us a concept that at least lives on in our conscience to taunt us with our failures in practice: the concept that the basic aim of education is so to educate the whole man that he becomes capable of living honourably in society and of contributing effectively to its functioning and

Paul H. Buck

87

governance. Medieval Oxford added what is known as "a collegiate way of life" in which emphasis was placed on how one lived in attitude, speech, and conduct as well as learning. Italy produced the "Renaissance Man," and his image spread to all Europe in such individuals as Sir Philip Sidney who ornamented Queen Elizabeth's court. But one doubts whether liberal education ever competed successfully, even in the most favourable times, with the drive for specialism. It is comparatively easy to understand what is necessary to produce an orthopaedist, a nuclear physicist, a journalist, or an engineer, and how to do it. But only in periods when the structure of society was relatively stable and simple, and only when a small upper stratum of the population was to be "liberally" educated, could there be much agreement on what my colleague, H. A. Martin, characterizes as the logos, the ethos, and the telos of education. As early as the 1890's one heard voices pessimistic about the face of "liberal" education in the face of the expanding numbers to be educated, the enormous growth of specialism, and the resultant splintering of the curriculum, the lack of agreement on basic aims, the triumph everywhere of divisiveness. The mood was well expressed by a young professor at Princeton named Woodrow Wilson, who wrote in an article published in Forum Magazine for September, 1894: The graduates of our University no longer go forth with a common training which will enable them to hold together in a community of thought. Some of them are trained in science, some in letters, some well and broadly trained, many ill and narrowly, with a hard technicality and mean contraction of view. Scarcely one of them has been fully inducted in the learning which deals with common experience, the common thoughts and struggles, the old triumphs and defeats of the men of his race in the past, their dreams and awakenings, their ambitions, humors, confidences, liberties and follies, the

88 Imagination and the Curriculum: Harvard Impressions intimate stuff of their minds and lives in past generations, when others were in like manner graduated from college and brought face to face with life and the unthinking mass of men.

For a contemporary piece of pessimism, let me quote from Time Magazine, February 15, 1963: The Displaced Pedagogue of U.S. education is the liberal arts college. Good high schools have improved so much that they turn out graduates who already know what they once would have learned as college freshmen. At the same time many more college students go on to graduate schools—80 per cent of all B.A.'s at many a prestige campus—and they want specialized preparation for advanced work. The task of the liberal arts college, traditionally the common core of humane and scientific training that befits an educated man, is being undermined at both ends of the college time span.

The article goes on to quote Dean David B. Truman of Columbia College as declaring that "the specialist who is trained but uneducated, technically skilled but culturally incompetent, is a menace." Thus the situation Wilson described did not improve. In fact it deteriorated to a point where it seemed that the college as a way of life would disappear and become instead a sort of advanced preparatory school for the professional, graduate, and technical schools where specialism would reach the ultimate triumph. Among those who deplored this development were some who turned their backs (in the college years at least) to all specialism and taught a core curriculum common to all students. There were others, however, who recognized the vital importance of special and professional education to modern life. Rather than pull it down, they sought to bring a pattern of general education to the point where it could stand equal in vigour and in the respect of students. The topic was widely discussed in the period from 1930 to 1950. Numerous schemes have been put in practice and several decades of experience with programmes in practice are now available for appraisal.

Paul H. Buck

89

I wish to review this story and to hazard several guesses as to what will remain in the years ahead. The history of the college curriculum during the past century is a record of accelerating change and of bewildering variety. The decorous, restricted, and required programme of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which had continued with little change from medieval and Renaissance times served both England and America well so long as the colleges were asked only to train in small numbers gentlemen who could serve as clergy, statesmen, merchants, and the custodians of good taste in manners and in morals. But the nineteenth century wanted a good deal more, far more, from its colleges: something revolutionary in design, and wanted for far greater numbers. The industrial revolution meant, in time, that business men needed to know about the technology upon which their enterprises rested; and, as markets widened, they needed to know more about the intricacies of finance and trade. Schools for the training of engineers arose and asked for membership in the university family. The older professions of law and medicine—integral parts of the medieval university, but whose practitioners in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were trained mostly in personal study with an established attorney or doctor—now returned to the university in newly created schools of law and medicine. The multiplication of professional schools had begun. But even more fundamental in explaining the transformation of the basic arts and sciences was the appearance within the university of separate graduate schools. The older concept of truth was static—a body of knowledge contained in tests to be drilled into the minds of students. The newer concept was truth as a process—through research ever to be pursued, never quite reached, but approximated step by step. Each step resulted in applications of surprising achievement and all involved a constant process of remaking.

90

Imagination and the Curriculum: Harvard Impressions

In this development the unity of the older college was shattered. The student body, which once entered as a unit called a class and studied each subject together for four years, was broken up into unrelated classes. The curriculum became a multitude of courses, grouped into departments. Professors taught only a specialty. The various departments, faculties, schools, museums, research institutes had little in common. There was little to hold the parts together except perhaps a president and a board of trustees, a football team, and, in a few favoured instances, a common system of plumbing. It was the liberal arts college, the core from which all else developed, which suffered most. The low repute in which it was held is exemplified by the attention given to Johns Hopkins University when it was established on the concept that an undergraduate college was outmoded and unnecessary. Likewise the great university in Chicago which began in 1892 gave far less thought until the advent of Hutchins to the problems of liberal, undergraduate education than it did to building its distinguished advanced work in English, history, sociology, physics, and other such departments, its outstanding medical school, research libraries, and laboratories. Columbia College did not hold its own in Columbia University and lost relative significance to the advanced professional and graduate schools. There, too, in the rise of Teachers' College, with its widespreading influence, the liberal arts college lost its previous task of training teachers for the elementary and the high schools. The teaching of teachers had ceased to be in the liberal tradition. It had become "professional" and it stressed technique more than content. At Harvard the innovations which President Eliot had made with such great eclat had altered the nature of the College to such an extent that Eliot's successor in the presidency, Mr. Lowell, conceived that his primary task

Paul H. Buck

91

was to formulate measures which would save the College. The reformers of that day, and their successors of the forties and of today, had no easy task before them. To begin with, it made no sense and it was tactically unwise to assail the new university. Most professors and most graduates liked what had happened. For the professors there was an exhilarating sense of achievement. Not only were the sciences emancipated to begin the remarkable advance in discovering the hidden secrets of nature and giving man an undreamt of mastery of his environment. Even the older subjects were rejuvenated when professors of Greek and Latin and Hebrew were freed from acting as drill sergeants and were permitted to lecture on the thought and form of ancient authors. Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Moliere, the works of sculptors, painters, architects, the mysteries of languages found a place hitherto unknown in the curriculum and the humanities had a rebirth in academic circles. So likewise the social sciences—history, economics, politics, psychology, sociology, and anthropology—achieved new vigour. It was a challenge, exciting and rewarding, in all these subjects to lead the brighter collegians into the advanced work of the Ph.D. Likewise, decade by decade, the professions—law and medicine and engineering, especially—could point to the unquestioned fact that, by basing instruction on active and continuous research, vastly improved service was being rendered to the public. How and why should so vital an activity be cut down or even challenged? It had a sense of mission, a grasp of method, a recognized behaviour, and an understood objective. In contrast, liberal education (which was to be common to all and bring some degree of unity out of the fragmentation of learning) had no common basis upon which to found its programme. It had no logos (that is, an actively expressed, creative, and revelatory thought and will com-

92

Imagination and the Curriculum: Harvard Impressions

monly agreed upon). It had no ethos (a recognized and agreed upon body of concepts or moral attitudes, ideals, and behaviour). It had no telos (an agreement on the ultimate end or object). The proponents of liberal education had nothing much more than a conviction (partly nostalgic memories from a distant past) that the divisive tendencies of specialism must be checked. In its own area it must not descend to mere technical training, but must keep an alert eye open to the interrelations of learning even at its most advanced level. But especially, efforts must be made to teach commonly to all students the meaning of the great areas of learning (science, the humanities, and the social sciences) so that a degree of mutual understanding would result. What eventuated was a vast amount of experimentation over the past half-century, with variant results, and with no sign that the era of experimentation both in tinkering with details and in broad assaults along wide fronts will cease. It is marvellous indeed to observe the degree of diversity. There are seemingly as many variant programmes of liberal education as there are types of specializations, and as yet no brain has been comprehensive enough to bring order out of this new type of apparent chaos. What predominates is a debate over the aims and methods of education. Perhaps this in itself is most important of all. It is well to face a problem, bravely and continuously, even though the solution remains undiscovered. The Harvard report, General Education in a Free Society, was built on experience both at Harvard and in other colleges. Hence it is essentially an eclectic document and that perhaps explains its somewhat over-kind reception. People wanted to read its clearly articulated explanation and defence of the liberal education and its importance to contemporary society. Perhaps also the solutions seemed more adequate than they turned out to be.

Paul H. Buck

93

The salvation of Harvard College as a bastion of liberal education rested upon a foundation of three equal elements. First was a frank recognition of the importance of specialization in a modern conception of education. In so far as the free elective system permitted a student to put together any number of unrelated and elementary courses it failed to educate that student. The mastery of a subject was essential to a liberally educated man. He must probe into the depths of a subject to understand its methodology, its intricacies, its relationships, and its significance. So each department formulated a programme of course instruction. Tutors were added to course lecturers so as to give more intimate contact with an individual's effort to grasp a subject. Comprehensive examinations were added, upon the successful passing of which depended a student's degree. Honours programmes were introduced. It became fashionable to enter upon these programmes and the preparation of the so-called distinction thesis more often than not became the best-remembered experience of an undergraduate's college life. Year by year, the percentage of honours candidates increased, until at present in the largest field of undergraduate concentration—history—more than three-quarters of the students seek and achieve honours. At its best, and especially when the emphasis is on the humane aspect of the subject rather than the merely technical, this is indeed about as successful an operation as one can hope for in education. But it is also the way in which the education of the graduate school enters into the college and professionalizes it. Much of what the concentrator does in his special field during the junior and senior years is indistinguishable from what he continues to do when he moves into the graduate and professional schools. The programme operates as a two-way street. If on the one hand through concentration the aims and pressures of graduate instruction encroach upon the college programme, so also

94

Imagination and the Curriculum: Harvard Impressions

the rigorous and exacting standards of professionalism and specialism can be kept humane and liberal by intimate contact with the college. The second component of the Harvard programme was the institution in the early thirties of a House Plan. So far had the divisive tendencies developed by the twenties that little remained of the older concept of a collegiate way of life. Socially as well as physically, life was fragmented, and as a result there was a minimum of educational exchange between students outside the classroom. Then, quickly and rapidly through the largesse of Mr. Harkness, President Lowell revolutionized undergraduate life at Harvard. His House Plan was an American adaptation of the OxfordCambridge organization by colleges. Instruction remained the prerogative of the faculty organized through departments. But all else that affected student affairs was transferred to seven (now nine) Houses. The large, unwieldy student population could now associate in smaller, intimate units. Each House had its master, its associates from the faculty, and a group of tutors. The students ate in common dining halls which restored some of the graciousness of earlier days. Each House had a library of its own (part of the University Library) and thus facilities for study were unobtrusively a part of normal living. Equally significant, and quite gratifyingly, more and more of student activities, outside the formal curriculum (drama groups, sculpture clubs, house athletics, discussion groups) came to have a House basis. The old distinction between curricular and extracurricular activities has virtually faded from the Harvard scene. Through the Houses, all that pertains to an undergraduate's life becomes, as it should be, a process of education. The Houses have not succeeded in their efforts to enter the formal curriculum by experiments in various types of tutorial courses and House seminars. But nevertheless, the

Paul H. Buck

95

Houses have contributed mightily to the education and especially to the general education of the undergraduate. The association in one House of undergraduates representing a wide range of specialties is in itself a means for developing common understanding. The association of these students on intimate terms with tutors and professors breeds a respect for learning among the former and a better awareness of undergraduate problems among the latter. There remains a third component and herewith lies our major problem. Before 1946, it was called distribution. Today it is called General Education. It is a problem which must be faced, but its solution still eludes us. Certainly the distribution scheme which prevailed before 1946 was inadequate—a fact amply testified to by incessant faculty efforts to legislate sense into a system that had no rationale. Starting from the innocuous premise that a student should have an acquaintance with subjects outside his field of concentration, the faculty (already divided into departments) was now divided into areas (each area comprising a group of departments). The student was required to take a number of courses in areas other than that of his field of concentration. At best, this gave him a smattering of information, but little understanding of the aims and methods of disciplines foreign to his own. Since the courses open to him were always departmentally constructed with the concern of specialism paramount, and since most were introductory, they failed both to command the student's interest and to meet his need for a balanced choice of subject. Similar situations prevailed in other colleges, and created an abundance of reports and a variety of programmes. Among universities, Columbia and Chicago were outstanding as pioneers, and among colleges, Amherst, Dartmouth, and St. John's made notable contributions. The general education movement was accelerated and

96

Imagination and the Curriculum: Harvard Impressions

conditioned by the experience of World War II and its grim aftermath, the Cold War. The aims, institutions, and very existence of free society, now challenged by totalitarian regimes, could not be taken for granted. The future wellbeing of Western life required not only the contributions of science and technology, but also a citizenry who understood its aims and functioning. The theory of general education rested upon certain premises. Of these the premises of major importance were: 1. The student should be given a feeling of commitment and of allegiance to his heritage of freedom, and yet combine this with a tone of tough-mindedness and curiosity and a readiness for change which accompanies this pragmatic attitude. Critics charged that this involved a degree of indoctrination and thus violated the university ideal of unrestricted search for truth. Unquestionably there was some basis for the charge. We were designing a general education for a free society. Had we been designing one for a totalitarian society, the design would have been radically different. We proceeded from the conviction that free society was what we wanted to preserve and was worth preserving. Hence we believed that the virtues upon which it rested (among which, free inquiry played a major role) could not be taken for granted but must be taught. 2. Also inherent in the theory was a premise that there should be a common core in the curriculum, an experience shared by all. This presented a series of rugged difficulties. It had early been learned that synthetic courses which in capsule encyclopaedia form sought to cover all science, or all literature, or all social sciences were a medley of indigestible fact and glittering generalities which could not be grasped. Selection of certain classics and emphasis on them alone also proved in experience to have more weaknesses than strength. The fashion of the era was to argue that "General Education must be conceived less as a specific set

Paul H. Buck

97

of books to be read or courses to be given, than as a concern for certain goals of knowledge and outlook and an insistence that these goals be sought after by many means as intently as are those of specialism" (A quotation from the original report, General Education in a Free Society). Easier said than done. Debate, complex in nature and endless in time, was the inevitable consequence of such a position. Were all subjects of equal validity to the aims of education? Who was to decide? To a veteran of the conflict, the thought sometimes occurs that the major advantage of the issue was that the debate did take place, and that faculties at long last gave thought to the basic problems of education. The efforts to solve the dilemma were, as has been mentioned, varied and many. But so far as they displayed any similarity in pattern they seemed to group around the three great areas of learning with a major aim to achieve in each. The humanities were to emphasize heritage; science, the process of change; the social sciences, the action and interaction in society of heritage and change. But few colleges indeed achieved a solution acceptable to their faculties whereby all students took the same general education course. The aspiration ran head on with collision force and shattering effect into another type of diversity. People were not alike. They did not possess identical mental processes, interests, or background. Some could use the language of mathematics and some could not. Some were prone to think abstractly and others concretely. Even before the Harvard programme went into effect, it was radically amended. The original proposal that all students take the same three elementary courses was dropped. In its place, it became permissible to have as many as four different introductory courses in each area, so as to meet the diversity of student aptitude. An alert committee of the faculty was to guaran-

98 Imagination and the Curriculum: Harvard Impressions

tee that each of the diverse approaches reached common goals. But from that time on, there has been less and less said or achieved in the matter of a common core and a shared experience. 3. In the theory of the time, much emphasis was placed on the concept that general education should not merely occupy itself with information but should develop traits of mind. The traits of mind needed, in the opinion of the Harvard Committee, were: to think effectively, to communicate thought, to make relevant judgments, to discriminate among values. Such language seems obvious and commonplace today. But it was relevant and much needed in 1946. The earlier curriculum gave much attention to rhetoric, grammar, and logic. After its disappearance, there was progressive decline in the emphasis given by school and college alike to rigorous method of analysis and synthesis, to hard thinking, and to expressing one's reasoned thought to others through both the written page and oral speech. Possibly it was naive on the part of the enthusiasts for general education to assume that their approach had a monopoly on developing these traits of mind. But the attempt certainly recalled to an errant faculty that the neglect had taken place and should be remedied. In this respect a valued service was performed. 4. A final aspect of the theory was the assumption that general education should undertake the arduous task of teaching the layman to understand and even to judge the specialist. It seems unnecessary to argue this point in a nuclear age when the existence of the world itself depends upon proper, intelligent, and conditioned response to the situations created by specialists. The only question is whether the task is achievable. If not, the concept of a free society, where ultimately all decisions must rest upon the understanding and acceptance of the governed, cannot sur-

Paul H. Buck

99

vive. Education hence must do more than train specialists. It must, concomitantly, keep in mind that each specialist is also and primarily a layman and must be taught to assume this role as well. What have been the successes of general education at Harvard during the past two decades? 1. First and fundamentally, although this was not entirely anticipated, it raised issues on the basic aims of education. Many of the questions were relatively insoluble, but they needed airing. The airing aroused sharp differences. The discussion proved highly educational to the faculty, and sharpened the entire range of educational performance. 2. The challenge produced a far better set of introductory courses: more exacting, more mature, more penetrating, and hence more rewarding. 3. The challenge also introduced for many faculty members a new educational experience. One of the most interesting was that of President Conant, who became Professor Conant again to teach a general education course in the sciences. In his earlier, pre-presidential days, he had been a great lecturer in organic chemistry, giving a key course taken by people going on to specialize in organic chemistry and also into the medical school. And here he was teaching a course which implied—in one year, one course—to nonscientists what science is about. What is the strategy of science, what are its tactics, what is possible, what is impossible? When he sat down to write his first examination to test what he had taught, he suddenly realized what he was up against. It is very easy to write up an examination in a specialist course. There is only one question to answer: does the student know enough in content and in methodology to go on to the next advanced course?—this is clear, precise, easy. But on what are you going to test a person

100 Imagination and the Curriculum: Harvard Impressions

whom you are trying to influence in his attitude, to whom you are trying to give a different horizon? The amount of learning he has acquired is not as significant as whether a change in his perspective is made. How do you test that? This is an illustration, I think, of how the teacher again becomes a teacher when he faces problems in general education such as he never does in a special course. Or take a biologist: what does he tell the non-biologist, the non-scientist, about the nature of life? The philosopher has to be able to shed the technological language in which he talks to fellow philosophers who only understand each other and no one else. This was something true about Plato and his academy—he could talk to citizens. It was also true of Socrates' plan to explain why he drank the hemlock, and so on. In this new programme, then, the teacher has found new experience and rewarding experience. Now general education by no means commands the best or all the best of teaching at Harvard University, but I have yet to find a poor teacher of general education and I have been at this faculty for fifteen years, and have found a lot of bad teaching among specialists. The teaching improved, and it improved partly because the teacher of general education was finding far more time to try to understand the student himself as he approached the field of learning. 4. The student's response was good. As a whole, he graduated with a better education than that which preceded the advance of general education. We had our failures, too, in every college we had some of the failures. Once the enthusiasm of the first few years passed away, most of us relaxed, ideals softened, watering down judgments as to whether a course belonged in this field or not. Escape devices were found by students to allow them to break away

Paul H. Buck

101

from their requirements. And a certain growing rigidity began to creep in, which hindered response to changes in the world at large and in the world of education: (a) improved programmes in secondary schools which made the college courses not so novel or so needed as when first introduced; (b) continually increasing demands from the graduate and professional schools for better preparation for specialism; (c) a higher level of undergraduates, more dedicated in purpose, making greater demands upon the teacher, and seeking advanced standing, bypassing the introductory work. So a new period of reassessment is necessary, a rededication is needed. It is taking place now, and it ought to be taking place, I think; a re-examination periodically will improve standards. It is no longer an issue whether or not the colleges are to remain intact or become merely superpreparatory schools for the graduate and professional schools—and again, this is an effort of the generalist to make things of dramatically wider grasp. The basic fact that confronts us, today, is that most students are not ending their formal education with the college but contemplate continuing on to graduate and professional work. It is a tendency which is increasing. It is less than wisdom to neglect this fact and downright foolish to stress the difference. The true issue is whether we can preserve the best of two great traditions and fuse them into a harmonious programme. Both are needed, but each will need adaptation to present and future conditions. In my opinion, most of the basic premises of general education discussed earlier remain valid but require rephrasing in view of experience and new demands. I, for one, would not give up commitment and I certainly would seek allegiance to a way of life in this Western world,

102 Imagination and the Curriculum: Harvard Impressions

which I firmly believe in as good. But I would broaden the sense of commitment. The greatness of the Western tradition is not lessened by suggesting today that we should give greater attention to other traditions such as the Arab, Chinese, and Indian, and to the experience of emerging nations. The concept of the core curriculum has been shattered. Even Chicago has recently announced that there must be a variety of approaches. But even so, I feel that much remains to suggest a shared experience. In the first place, courses in general education focus on problems of moment to every human being simply as he is, a human being; what these courses have in common might be phrased as a certain magnitude and intimacy of concern. In the second place, these courses introduce students to the outlook and typical problems within each area of knowledge, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Or at least courses will do this so long as they are seated in the disciplines central to each area. For example, students in the humanities will not have read the same authors in different courses, but they will all have a sense of the kinds of experience and knowledge open to them in works of literature. Also, I believe that the emphasis general education placed on developing certain traits of mind as a goal of education has justified itself by common acceptance. I see no relaxation in the necessity of educating a student to become both layman and specialist, with each individual performing the dual role contemporary citizenship demands. Finally, I believe that a truly liberal education for today and tomorrow will continue to combine a programme of general education, a programme of specialism, and a collegiate way of living. So that the last, the collegiate way of living, be not lost sight of, let me conclude by reading a

Paul H. Buck

103

parable from the Chinese Philosopher, Mencius, a parable which is also included in the concluding pages of the Harvard report, General Education in a Free Society: The trees of Niu hill were once beautiful. Being in the suburbs of a great city, however, they were hewn down with axes and bills. Could they retain their beauty? Still, through the growth from vegetative life day and night and the nourishing influence of the rain and the dew, they were not without buds and sprouts springing out. But then came the cattle and the goats, and browsed upon them. Thence came the bare and stripped appearance of the hill. People seeing this think it was never finely wooded. But is this the nature of the hill? Even so, of what properly belongs to man. Is what is left of any man's mind ever without love and justice, without courtesy and knowledge of right and wrong? The way in which man loses his proper goodness of mind is like the way in which the trees were denuded by hatchers. Hewn down day after day, can it retain its excellence? But there is some growth of its life, night and day, and in the calm air of the morning just between night and day, the mind feels in a degree these desires and aversions which are proper to humanity; but then it is fettered and destroyed by what man does during the day. This happens again and again, the night breath is not enough to preserve the proper goodness, and he becomes not far different from the birds and the beasts. When people see this, they think his mind never had these endowments. But is this man's propensity? If it gets its nourishment, there is nothing which will not grow. If it loses its nourishment, there is nothing which will not perish. The essential role of an educational institution is to provide adequate nourishment so that the mind and spirit and character of men will grow in truth and beauty, and not atrophy unto death from lack of food. I think the founders of York University exercised wisdom in providing that this University will also through its plan for colleges continue a collegiate way of life.