The History of Science and the New Humanism

Michael Novak, George Sarton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351303743
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Wissenschaftsgeschichte

In this classic work, the foremost historian of science in our time, George Sarton, sums up his reflections on the role of science and of the humanities in our culture. Voicing his opposition to the old-fashioned humanists on the one hand, and to the 'uneducated' men of science and technicians on the other, Sarton points out to the former that the humanities without scientific are essentially incomplete. He warns the latter that without history, without philosophy, without arts and letters, without a living religion, human life on this planet would cease to be worthwhile.After outlining his 'Faith of a Humanist' in the opening section, Sarton goes on to analyze 'The History of Science and the History of Civilization,' to discuss the progress of scientific thought since ancient times in 'East and West,' and to propose the solution for the educational and cultural crisis of our time in 'The New Humanism' and in 'The History of Science and the Problems of Today.' He concludes not only that science is a source of technological development that has changed the face of the earth and has convulsed our lives for good and evil, but that it nonetheless affords the best means of understanding the world, its people, and the multitude of their relationships. 'Science is the conscience of mankind.'Included in this edition is Robert M. Merton's address before the Sarton Centennial meeting of November 1984. It is a stunning tour de force in its own right, providing insights into Sarton, teaching and research at Harvard in the 1930s, and the personal interaction between Sarton the mentor, and Merton the pupil. The essay supplements May Sarton's earlier 'Informal Portrait of George Sarton.'

Recollections & Reflections

George Sarton: Episodic Recollections by an Unruly Apprentice

By Robert K. Merlon

Half a century has raced and stumbled by since I first found myself, as a third-year graduate student in sociology at Harvard, daring to knock on the door of George Sarton’s famed workshop-cum-study, Widener 185-189. The reason for taking this daunting step was clear: having elected to try my hand at a dissertation centered on sociologically interesting aspects of the efflorescence of science in seventeenth-century England-a kind of subject not exactly central to sociology back then-it did not seem unreasonable to seek guidance from the acknowledged world dean among historians of science.

Although Emerson Hall, which housed the Department of Sociology, was only a hundred paces from Widener, this was not a short journey. Traffic to the Sarton workshop by denizens, mature or immature, of the newfangled Department of Sociology faced formidable barriers. For one thing, the few graduate students who then had any knowledge of Sarton’s scholarly existence took him to be a remote, austere, and awesome presence, so thoroughly dedicated to his scholarship as to be quite unapproachable by the likes of us. Thus do plausible but ill-founded beliefs develop into social realities through the mechanism of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Since this forbidding scholar was bound to be unapproachable, there was plainly small point in trying to approach him. And his subsequently having little to do with graduate students only went to show how inaccessible he actually was.

Buttressing this imputed barrier of personal inaccessibility were the authentic university barriers of departmental organization. The understaffed Department of Sociology, established just three years before, had enlarged its graduate program by reaching out to list research-and-reading courses in a great variety of departments: psychology and economics; government, religion, and philosophy; anthropology and social ethics amongst them. But nary a graduate course in the history of science. This for the best of reasons-Harvard had no autonomous department devoted to that undisciplined subject, nor, for that matter, had any other university. Still, in the preceding academic year, 1932-1933,1 had managed to audit the sole lecture course in the field, entitled “History of Science 1. History of the Physical and Biological Sciences.” (As you may have begun to suspect, the title HS 1 was an unredeemed promissory note; there was no HS 2 back then.)

The first semester of the course was given by the biochemist and polymath of great note, L.J. Henderson, later described by James Conant as “the first roving professor in Harvard.” And rove he did. Not only had he instituted the course in the history of science two decades before, but, in that same year of 1932, he had also instituted his unique graduate “Seminary in Sociology” entitled “Pareto and Methods of Scientific Investigation.” The plural “methods” rather than the more familiar and misleading singular, “the scientific methods,” also reflected a theme in the first semester of the history of science course as the “pink-whiskered” Henderson engaged in his typically forceful, magisterial exegesis of texts by Hippocrates, Galileo, and Harvey-thus allowing him to expound his conception of the varieties of scientific inquiry. But as Conant confirms, Henderson, like Sarton, would have hooted at the then not uncommon notion that a grounding in the history of science served to sharpen one’s capabilities as a scientific investigator.

The second semester of this lone course in the history of science was given by the lecturer, Dr. Sarton-decidedly not yet Professor Sarton; that title was only to come seven years later, when Sarton was fifty-six, and Conant, as Harvard’s president, finally intervened to bring it about. Sarton differed greatly from Henderson in both the style and substance of his teaching. Warmly enthusiastic rather than coldly analytical-in a fashion that plainly irritated Henderson from time to time¹-Sarton traced expanses of scientific development chiefly through the lives and accomplishments of what he took as prototypal figures in that development. (I gather from I. Bernard Cohen’s recent account of that course as it was a few years later that all this remained much the same.² Looking back, one is inclined to say that if Henderson still dressed in Edwardian style, Sarton still thought in Edwardian style. Both were thoroughly engaging in their fashion; neither is now readily reproducible.

As a mere graduate student, I knew nothing, of course, about the grim vicissitudes Sarton was experiencing in the determined effort to supplement his own scholarship with institutional arrangements designed to advance the cause of the historiography of science. But here is Conant’s retrospection on Sarton’s incessant efforts at this time (when Conant was president of the university and a self-declared amateur in the history of science):

This is not the time or place to summarize the history of Professor Sarton’s long years at Harvard, his prodigious scholarship, his editorship of īsis and Osiris, and his vain attempt during the depression years to persuade Harvard or any other university to endow what he considered a minimal department of the history of science. That we are meeting here tonight with a teaching staff in the history of science at Harvard in active service, that a nourishing undergraduate and graduate field of study in history and science has long been characteristic of this University are some of the fruits of George Sarton’s long uphill struggle to make the history of science an important part of the American scene.³

But this public statement does not fully reflect Conant’s complex image of Sarton back in the 1930s, which evidently was, and long remained, ambivalent. That ambivalence was expressed in a letter written almost forty years later regarding the first biographical piece. Arnold Thackray and I published about Sarton: “You are quite right in giving Henderson a key place in your story. I talked to him more than once about Sarton and he reported on his difficulties with this stubborn genius. Henderson often served as an intermediary. He understood how exorbitant were Sarton’s demands. Your footnotes 29 and 30 are quite correct. My viewpoint was greatly influenced by Henderson.”⁴

But enough about those hard times for George Sarton. In an obviously Tristram Shandy mode, where it takes more time to record life than to live it, I have left my youthful self in the fall of 1933 knocking on the door of that austere scholar’s study in Widener, quite determined yet rather fearful of this first face-to-face audience with his august presence. (I say “august presence,” for so it seemed to me at the time, although he was then still in his forties, just as I say “first audience” since I had not before had a private session with him, having attended his course only when I could escape from duties as a teaching-and-research assistant to the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin.) On that initial well-remembered occasion, the reputedly unapproachable scholar did not merely invite me into his “tiny book lined study”; he positively ushered me in. Thus began my short, incompleat, and sometimes unruled apprenticeship, followed by an intermittent epistolary friendship that continued until his death in 1956.1 began that first audition by telling of my plans for a dissertation already begun. I cannot say that he greeted those plans with conspicuous enthusiasm; instead he mildly suggested that so large a canvas as seventeenth-century English science might be a bit excessive for a novice. But he did not veto the idea. I should describe his response as, at best, ambivalent. Having registered his doubts, he then proceeded to tailor a research course to the needs of the first graduate student to have come to him from the social sciences since his arrival at Harvard some seventeen years before.

I now suspect that the unheralded appearance of a young sociologist-in-the making may have reactivated his own youthful ecumenical vision of transcending disciplinary boundaries. Recall only his vision, full of innocence and hope, of the about-to-be-launched Isis as “at once the philosophical journal of the scientists and the scientific journal of the philosophers, the historical journal of the scientists and the scientific journal of the historians, the sociological journal of the scientists and the scientific journal of the sociologists.”⁵ As one notes, that daunting aspiration called not alone for a philosophy, history, and sociology of science but also for the sciences of philosophy, history, and sociology, all to find suitable expression in this variously ecumenical journal. That aspiration, it might be observed, was not much diminished by the circumstance that two years after its founding in 1912, Isis had acquired a world total of 125 subscribers. Of all that I had not the remotest idea when I venturously crossed the threshold of Widener 185, where worked the founder-editor of Isis and the author of the newly published monumental two volumes of an Introduction to the History of Science, which had managed to make its way from Homer through the thirteenth century in some 2,000 closely printed pages. Since, not quite incidentally, he was also a Harvard lecturer, I was there to ask that this composite personage break through all bureaucratic barriers to establish a research course for a neophyte sociologist.

Happily, Harvard was not in the hands of bureaucratic virtuosos and manifestly that special course was soon arranged; else I would not be thinking back on the devices this early master of the art and craft of the history of science invented to bring that maverick sociologist across academic boundaries into the then hardly institutionalized discipline of the history of science.

And now I undermine credibility by reporting that, during those many years-first as student and apprentice, then as journeyman and junior colleague, and finally as a properly certified scholar in my own right-I do not recall having been seriously irritated by this deeply committed, often impatient, and sometimes difficult scholar. Considering that he has been declared variously exasperating and downright abrasive by early colleagues and later students-I again need instance only his ambivalent advocates L.J. Henderson and James Conant and his student LB. Cohen-it appears either that I simply lacked the same sensibility or the same range of close, continued interaction, or perhaps, that I have managed to repress, beyond all hope of retrieval except through the deployment of drastic psychoanalytic techniques, a deep underlying irritation that would evoke an intolerable conscious sense of guilt were it allowed to surface. I reject that last plausible hypothesis (be it noted without a betraying excess of protest). It simply doesn’t wash.

There is yet another evident hypothesis: that in truth, George Sarton happened to treat me with friendly care, even with solicitude. This is somewhat more plausible. It has the further merit of being in accord not merely with possibly undependable memory traces but with personal documents. From them, the plain fact emerges that I liked and appreciated Sarton even when he was having at me for departures from the Comtean faith, or quite rightly, was reminding me of defections from norms governing the several roles of the scholar, such as my not getting reviews of books or referee reports in on time. Nor is it surprising that I should have remained attached to him, early and late in our evolving relationship. For as I have discovered only now in reliving the history of that relationship for this centenary moment, he had bound me to him-not with any such intent, I believe-by a flow of gifts, freely bestowed, which in their cumulative outcome may have affected my life and work in ways that have little or nothing to do with substantive doctrine or method of inquiry but much to do with discovering the pleasures and joys, as well as the nuisances and pains, of life as a scholar. I now see that he provided an accumulation of advantage,⁶ thus leading me to incur a debt that called for a life of continuing work long after the insidious temptations of an easy retirement have been painlessly resisted.

Only now, decades after the events, have I come to recognize the patterned flow of the gifts, material and symbolic, which this ostensibly peripheral mentor bestowed upon me. And should I be exaggerating their import and consequences, as I may be doing in the first flush of their composite discovery, they remain nevertheless as I describe them. But if that large claim of the Sartonian largess is to persuade me, let alone you, they must not rest on vagrant memories-that is, memories without visible means of documentary support. For that reason, I shall draw upon fragments of the correspondence between us, as a basis for the rest of this episodic glimpse into George Sarton’s memorial style.

The Gifts

The first gift was his accepting a graduate student drawn from a department of learning in which he took no part. By intimation rather than in so many words, this was on condition that I did not threaten his “disciplined routine” of scholarship or require him to abate “the fury with which he set himself to work.”⁷ Having made that evident, he went on to provide me with a place in the large workshop adjacent to his small study, which I shared, to a degree, with his secretary, Frances Siegel, and his research associates, the formidable Dr. Alexander Pogo in the field of astronomy and the accommodating Dr. Mary Catherine Welborn in medieval studies. That microenvironment itself constituted a second-order gift, for I learned many now-indeterminate things from that variegated pair of talented associates, albeit through a kind of cognitive osmosis rather than through formal training.

From the beginning, George Sarton did much to help set me on the path of scholarship. He proceeded methodi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Recollections and Reflections
• Preface
• The Faith of a Humanist
• I The History of Science and the History of Civilization
• II East and West
• III The New Humanism
• IV The History of Science and the Problems of To-Day
• Index