LEARNED SOCIETIES AND THE DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

A NUMBER of papers contributed to symposia on “Science and the Modern Crisis” and “The Unity of Knowledge”, arranged by the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, have since been reprinted under the title “Science, the Universities and the Modern Crisis” ; and through these papers runs a line of thought which is related to the topic of the presidential address delivered by Dr. Harlow Shapley in 1944 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Proc. Amer. Acad. Arts and Sci., 75, No. 6, 131-139 ; 1944). Dr. Shapley was discussing the future of the Academy, and said that the problems of such a learned society are in large measure the result of history. One of the principal issues leading to the creation of scientific societies was the necessity of finding or creating a language common to the new dispensation, more accurate than literary language, and better shaped for the purpose than the technical vocabulary of scholasticism. Assuming that all parts of knowledge were equally accessible to any educated person and that the reporting of experiment and discovery in simple, rational and perspicuous words would render the results intelligible to all who participated in the style, the founders of the academies sought an instrument of language at once definite and clear in meaning, uncoloured by personal emotion, and unperplexed by rhetorical adornment. To this was added in the eighteenth century, when the American Philosophical Society was founded, the ideal of research for social ends, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences was created in accordance with the view that public diffusion of knowledge was a virtue.