Integrate Education, Aldous Huxley

Integrate Education

As we all know, a little learning is a dangerous thing. But a great deal of highly specialized learning is also a dangerous thing and may be sometimes even more dangerous than a little learning. One of the major problems of higher education now is how to reconcile the claims of much learning, which is essentially specialized learning, with the claims of little learning, which is the wider but shallower approach to human problems in general.

This is, of course, by no means a new problem. My grandfather, T. H. Huxley, a man who was never happy unless he was doing three or four whole-time jobs at once, counted among his whole-time jobs in the 1870s the creation of modern English education. He worked a great deal on elementary and secondary education in London and he also did a lot to turn London University into a modern university, that is to say into a university with a high degree of specialization in various fields. The interesting thing is that by the early 1890s he was already deeply preoccupied with the problem of excessive specialization. About three years before he died he actually worked out a plan to co-ordinate the various specialized departments in the University of London so as to create some kind of integrated education.

I need hardly add that my grandfather’s plans were never put into effect and that the problem of integrated education remains exactly as it was—despite the fact that it is a problem which concerns everybody in the field, and despite a number of attempts that have been made to solve it. These attempts have included simply adding pieces of humanistic information to the specialized scientific information; coordinating science and the humanities by means of a historical approach, which has certain merits; and the rather closely related Hundred Great Books programmes. I don’t think any of these is altogether satisfactory.

My own feeling is that an ideal integrated education calls for an approach to the subject in terms of fundamental human problems. Who are we? What is the nature of human nature? How should we be related to the planet on which we live? How are we to live together satisfactorily? How are we to develop our individual potentialities? What is the relationship between nature and nurture? If we start with these problems and make them central, we can obviously bring together information from a great number of at present completely isolated disciplines. I think it is probably only in this way that we can create a thoroughly integrated form of education.

Meanwhile, however, this integrated education doesn’t exist. Here I think may be found the reason why a person like myself, who has what may be called a kind of encyclopaedic ignorance in many fields, may be of use in an institution of higher specialized learning like this one. A man of letters can perform a valuable function in the world at present by bringing together a great many subjects and by showing relationships between them. It is a question of building bridges.

We have an interesting word, pontifex, or bridge builder. It is the Latin name for a member of the college of priests in Rome, the head of which was called pontifex maximus. (Actually, the accepted etymology of pontifex is probably a false etymology. I am almost certain that the original word was not pontifex but puntifex, which in an old pre-Latin language, the Oscan language, means the maker of propitiatory sacrifices. The Romans translated this into their own language as pontifex, the maker of bridges.) In a religious context pontifex means builder of a bridge between Earth and Heaven, between the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. The whole idea of the pontifex, the bridge builder, is a very profitable one, and we can meditate upon and make use of it in a very productive way.

The function of the literary man in the present context, then, is precisely to build bridges between art and science, between objectively observed facts and immediate experience, between morals and scientific appraisals. There are all kinds of bridges to be built, and this is what I shall try to do in the course of these lectures.

But there is a great problem facing the man of letters who tries to build bridges. It is interesting to go back into the history of literature and to see that this problem was considered quite carefully by Wordsworth, at the end of the eighteenth century, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. He says that the remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, the mineralogist will become for the poet a subject matter no less suitable than any other on the condition that these subjects become interesting to human beings at large and can be considered in the context of what they do for men as ‘enjoying and suffering beings’. This is profoundly true. If the effects of science are to be incorporated into art they must in some way become something more than mere facts, and scientific theories must become something more than mere abstractions and generalizations: they must become facts of direct experience, facts which mean something, facts which have an emotional content.

But here we are up against a vicious circle, for while it is quite clear that the facts of science cannot become suitable material for poetry and literary art in general until they become emotionally tinged and involve us as persons, it is also clear that they are unlikely to become so emotionally tinged, and involved in the general feeling tone of humanity, until they have already been expressed in artistic form—for it is the function of the artist to make available for the rest of the community large areas of value and meaning. You can say that in a sense the emotion and value patterns of people’s lives are largely created by the artist, who finds expression and form of words suitable for making known and interesting what was previously either unknown or uninteresting.

Thus we are on the horns of this dilemma: we need to have the facts of science tinged with emotion before they can become fully valuable for us in emotional terms. I suppose the way out of this vicious circle will be through the providential arrival at some time or other of some vast genius who will break through and somehow create for us the necessary verbal apparatus through which the facts and theories of science can become the fitting material of art. Naturally we cannot foresee how and when such a genius will arise, but the wind bloweth where it listeth and possibly this mysterious bridge builder, this pontifex maximus, will someday come into existence.

Now I am certainly not a pontifex maximus, but even a pontifex minimus can do something for the time being. The question is one of finding a suitable vocabulary in which to deal with these problems. At present we have a large variety of vocabularies: we have the vocabulary of ordinary speech, we have the vocabulary of prose literature, we have the heightened vocabulary of poetry, and we have the abstract vocabulary of scientific theory. (We also have the absolutely catastrophic vocabulary of textbooks, which I find extremely painful to read. It is no wonder that, given such vocabulary, scientific facts and theories are not felt to be relevant to us as ‘suffering and enjoying beings’—or perhaps they are felt to be relevant as suffering beings, but certainly not as enjoying beings.) What we do not have at the moment is the form of words with which to express the coming together of scientific fact and scientific theory with our direct experience.

One cannot overstress this necessity for words. There is a very interesting and instructive story which concerns the great French painter, Degas, and the equally great French poet Mallarmé. Degas in his spare time used to write verses. One day he met Mallarmé and said to him, ‘It is a terrible thing, Mallarmé. I don’t know what happens. I have such wonderful ideas, but when I write them down, the verse is very bad, and it isn’t poetry’. Mallarmé answered, ‘My dear Degas, poetry is not made out of ideas, it is made with words’. It is precisely this genius for putting ideas into words which somehow have an X-ray power of penetration that marks the great men of letters.

We can say that the whole programme which we need to accomplish if we are to have an integrated viewpoint is, in a sense, summed up in an extraordinary phrase in Shakespeare, where Hotspur says:

But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool;

And time, that takes survey of all the world,

Must have a stop.

It is one of those fantastic things one finds in Shakespeare; in a line and a half he throws out an entire philosophy and then passes on to something else. ‘Thought’s the slave of life’, we cannot think abstractly without being involved as physiological beings, as members of this living community on the planet; and ‘life time’s fool’, the passing of time tends to undermine everything and produce constant change; and yet ‘time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop’, there is a religious, spiritual side to life—time must have a stop in the timeless and eternal world. It is these three worlds—the world of abstractions and concepts, the world of immediate experience and objective observation, and the world of spiritual insight—which must, in any integrated point of view, be brought together.

Needless to say, this is a pretty difficult proposition. How can we describe for example a mystical