I have experienced two emotions in the course of our various conferences. One-the predominant one-is excitement at the discovery that colleagues in other subjects and in other Universities have been troubled by the same disquiet as myself about the way in which academic work is understood and practised, and are formulating their problems in much the same way as I have been trying to do; the other is bewilderment at the complexity of the problems as soon as one tries to get them clear. Perhaps, then, it will help if I start from a very simple position which I should have regarded as a gross caricature, if I had not heard it enunciated by more than one eminent scientist at a conference I recently attended. According to this view the academic should aim at objectivity, and objectivity is attainable only in science. Outside science there is only the realm of subjective opinion, characterized dismissively as 'poetry'. Prima facie this position excludes from the academic community all those who practise arts subjects, but room may be found for those who practise them in a scientific way. What precisely this involves is not usually specified but characteristically the use of symbolic notations, operational definitions and precise measurement is regarded as indicative of a scientific approach. The task of delimiting the boundaries of science has proved enormously difficult and it would be a bold philosopher who claimed that it had been satisfactorily accomplished. Nevertheless the attempt to do so has for some time put the humanities on the defensive, and this is one reason why one encounters very often in arts faculties a tendency to accord greater prestige to those aspects of a subject which are 'tough' and 'rigorous', such as, in the study of languages, linguistics, in philosophy, formal logic, in theology, gospel criticism. Whether or not these can be regarded as strictly scientific they resemble science in being susceptible of comparatively precise formulation and, given certain assumptions, an agreed decision-procedure. Maurice Broady hits it off well when he refers to operations of a fairly technical kind by which we come to a decision. This tendency deserves to be examined with some care, for it extends far beyond the naive dogmatism of certain natural scientists philosophizing outside their own subject. We are all to some extent affected by it, when we warn our pupils against 'soft options' or endeavour to keep them out of the syllabus altogether, when we advise on suitable thesis topics, or establish priorities for chairs. A tendency so widespread is unlikely to be altogether mistaken and we need to do justice to its merits before we stress its limitations. Its chief merit, I suggest, is this. We are by nature intellectually lazy. Left to ourselves, we find it comfortable to be ruled by prejudice or by prevailing fashions. To be an academic at all is to think it possible that one may be mistaken, and the easiest way to be mistaken is not to take the trouble to think, or to think only in a manner that offers the