Science and the Classics1

Abstract

IT has been the rule from time immemorial, not the exception, for science and the humanities to go hand in hand. Aristotle the naturalist wrote of poetry; Plato was a lover of astronomy; Theo-phrastus the botanist was a master of rhetoric, whom even Cicero admired; Celsus the physician was an encyclopaedic scholar after the taste and fashion of his age. When the humanistic tradition was at its height in the ‘revival of learning,’ Galen and Hippocrates were read by all. Linacre the physician helped to bring Greek into England, and was one of the great scholars of his time. Moreover our physicians have never lost but have richly inherited and enjoyed the classical tradition; Payne and Greenhill, Osier and Clifford Allbutt in our own time, were scholars after the manner of Haller and Boerhaave and Richard Mead and Sir Thomas Browne. Cuvier, busiest of men, wrote a commentary on the natural-history books of Pliny. Linnaeus himself could write of Nature with a scholar's pen and look upon her with a poet's eyes: the severe “Systema Naturae” was the work of one who fell on his knees when he beheld the sunlit gorse at Hampstead, and apostrophised mother Nature in words which sound like the echo of an Orphic hymn: “Natura, Filia Dei, rerum omnium Magistra, autodidactos, indesinenter laborans, nunquam festinans,” etc.