The Proper Study of Mankind

by Isaiah Berlin

  86 op. cit. (p. 272 above, note 8), p. 60.

  87 Meinecke, Prezzolini (op. cit., p. 269 above, note 1, English version, p. 432) and Ernesto Landi, ‘The Political Philosophy of Machiavelli’, trans. Maurice Cranston, History Today 14 (1964), 550–5, seem to me to approach this position most closely.

  88 Benedetto Croce, ‘Per un detto del Machiavelli’, La critica 28 (1930), 310–12.

  89 Hans Baron, ‘Machiavelli: the Republican Citizen and the Author of “The Prince”’, English Historical Review 76 (1961), 217–53, passim.

  90 Ser Lapo Mazzei, Lettere di un notaro a un mercante del secolo XIV, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence, 1880).

  91 Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi, ed. Vittore Branca (Florence, 1956).

  92 Discourses i 26.

  93 ibid.

  94 ibid. i 27.

  95 It is still not clear how much of this Frederick owed to his mentor Voltaire.

  96 ‘una repubblica e un popolo si governa altrimenti che un privato’, Legazioni all’Imperatore, quoted by Burd, op. cit. (p. 272 above, note 8), p. 298, note 17.

  97 Discourses ii 2. This echoes Francesco Patrizi’s ‘aliae sunt regis virtutes, aliae privatorum’ in De regno et regis institutione, quoted by Felix Gilbert in ‘The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of Machiavelli’, Journal of Modern History 11 (1939), 449–83 at p. 464, note 34.

  98 Hugh Trevor-Roper has drawn my attention to the irony of the fact that the heroes of this supreme realist are all, wholly or in part, mythical.

  99 This is recognised by Jacques Maritain – see his Moral Philosophy (London, 1964), p. 199 – who conceded that Machiavelli ‘never called evil good or good evil’. Machtpolitik is shown to be what it is: the party with the big battalions; it does not claim that the Lord is on its side: no Dei gesta per Francos.

  100 At the risk of exhausting the patience of the reader, I must repeat that this is a conflict not of pagan statecraft with Christian morals, but of pagan morals (indissolubly connected with social life and inconceivable without it) with Christian ethics, which, whatever its implication for politics, can be stated independently of it, as, e.g., Aristotle’s or Hegel’s ethics cannot.

  101 op. cit. (p. 280 above, note 1), p. 76.

  102 Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (London, 1960), pp. 220–4.

  103 See Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hermann Glockner (Stuttgart, 1927–51), vol. 7, p. 448.

  104 The moral of his best comedy, Mandragola, seems to me close to that of the political tracts: that the ethical doctrines professed by the characters are wholly at variance with what they do to attain their various ends. Virtually every one of them in the end obtains what he wants; if Callimaco had resisted temptation or the lady he seduces had been smitten with remorse, or Fra Timoteo attempted to practise the maxims of the Fathers and the Schoolmen with which he liberally seasons his speeches, this could not have occurred. But all turns out for the best, though not from the point of view of accepted morality. If the play castigates hypocrisy and stupidity, the standpoint is that not of virtue but of candid hedonism. The notion that Callimaco is a kind of prince in private life, successful in creating and maintaining his own world by the correct use of guile and fraud, the exercise of virtù, a bold challenge to fortuna, and so on, seems plausible. For this see Henry Paolucci, Introduction to Niccolò Machiavelli, Mandragola, trans. Anne and Henry Paolucci (New York, 1957).

  105 It has older origins (cf. p. 310 above). The familiar legal proverb ‘Necessitas non habet legem’ appears, for example, as a gloss by Accursius on Justinian’s Digest 1. 10. 1. 1 (‘De officiis consulis’, gloss on ‘expedire’): sig. c1r in his commentary on the Digestum vetus (Venice, 1477). But Publilius Syrus in the first century BC includes the same idea in one of his apophthegms, ‘Necessitas dat legem non ipsa accipit’: Sententiae 444 in Minor Latin Poets, ed. and trans. J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff (London/Cambridge, Mass., 1934). H.H.

  106 e.g. in the passages from the Discourses cited above, or when he says, ‘I believe the greatest good to be done and the most pleasing to God is that which one does to one’s native city’: A Discourse on Remodelling the Government of Florence (Gilbert, op. cit. (p. 277 above, note 3), vol. 1, pp. 113–14). This sentiment is by no means unique in Machiavelli’s works: but, leaving aside his wish to flatter Leo X, or the liability of all authors to fall into the clichés of their own time, are we to suppose that Machiavelli means us to think that when Philip of Macedon transplanted populations in a manner that (unavoidable as it is said to have been) caused even Machiavelli a qualm, what Philip did, provided it was good for Macedon, was pleasing to God and, per contra, that Giovanpaolo Baglioni’s failure to kill the Pope and the Curia was displeasing to him? Such a notion of the Deity is, to say the least, remote from that of the New Testament. Are the needs of the patria automatically identical with the will of the Almighty? Are those who permit themselves to doubt this in danger of heresy? Machiavelli may at times have been represented as too Machiavellian; but to suppose that he believed that the claims of God and of Caesar were perfectly reconcilable reduces his central thesis to absurdity. Yet of course this does not prove that he lacked all Christian sentiment: the Esortazione alla penitenza composed in the last year of his life (if it is genuine and not a later forgery) may well be wholly sincere, as Ridolfi and Alderisio believe; Capponi may have exaggerated the extent to which he ‘drove religion from his heart’, even though ‘it was not wholly extinct in his thought’ (Gino Capponi, Storia della repubblica di Firenze (Florence, 1888), vol. 3, p. 191). The point is that there is scarcely any trace of such états d’âme in his political writings, with which alone we are concerned. There is an interesting discussion of this by Giuseppe Prezzolini in his already cited article (p. 285 above, note 1), in which this attitude is traced to Augustine, and Croce’s thesis is, by implication, controverted.

  107 Vanini is quoted by Prezzolini, op. cit. (p. 269 above, note 1), English version, pp. 222–3; Leibniz references ibid., p. 335.

  108 Quaderni della ‘Critica’ 5 No 14 (July 1949), 1–9.

  THE DIVORCE BETWEEN THE SCIENCES AND THE HUMANITIES

  I

  MY SUBJECT IS the relation of the natural sciences to the humanities: more particularly, a growing tension between them; and especially the moment when, it seems to me, the great divorce between them, which had been brewing for some time, became clear for all who had eyes to see. It was not a divorce between 'two cultures': there have been many cultures in the history of mankind, and their variety has little or nothing to do with the differences between the natural sciences and the humanities. I have tried but altogether failed to grasp what is meant by describing these two great fields of human enquiry as cultures; but they do seem to have been concerned with somewhat different issues, and those who have worked and are working in them have pursued different aims and methods – a fact which, for better or for worse, became explicit in the eighteenth century.

  I begin with a tradition in which many eminent scientists today still stand: the tradition of those who believe that it is possible to make steady progress in the entire sphere of human knowledge; that methods and goals are, or should be, ultimately identical throughout this sphere; that the path to progress has been, as often as not – or perhaps a good deal more often – blocked by ignorance, fantasy, prejudice, superstition and other forms of unreason; that we have in our day reached a stage when the achievements of the natural sciences are such that it is possible to derive their structure from a single integrated set of clear principles or rules which, if correctly applied, make possible indefinite further progress in the unravelling of the mysteries of nature.

  The approach is in line with a central tradition in Western thought which extends back at least as far as Plato. It appears to me to rest on at least three basic assumptions: (a) that every genuine question has one true answer and one only: all the others being false. Unless this is so, the question cannot be a real question – there
is a confusion in it somewhere. This position, which has been made explicit by modern empiricist philosophers, is entailed no less firmly by the views of their theological and metaphysical predecessors, against whom they have been engaged in long and uncompromising warfare. (b) The method which leads to correct solutions to all genuine problems is rational in character; and is, in essence, if not in detailed application, identical in all fields, (c) These solutions, whether or not they are discovered, are true universally, eternally and immutably: true for all times, places and men: as in the old definition of natural law, they are ‘quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est’.1

  Opinions within this tradition have, of course, differed about where the answers were to be sought: some thought they could be discovered only by specialists trained in, let us say, Plato’s dialectical method, or Aristotle’s more empirical types of investigation; or in the methods of various schools of Sophists, or of the thinkers who trace their descent from Socrates. Others held that such truths were more accessible to men of pure and innocent soul, whose understanding had not been corrupted by philosophic subtleties or the sophistication of civilisation or destructive social institutions, as, for example, Rousseau and Tolstoy at times maintained. There were those, especially in the seventeenth century, who believed that the only true path was that of systems based on rational insight (of which mathematical reasoning offered the perfect example), which yielded a priori truths; others put their faith in hypotheses confirmed or falsified by controlled observation and experiment; still others preferred to rely on what seemed to them plain common sense – le bon sens – reinforced by careful observation, experiment, scientific method, but not replaceable by the sciences; and men have pointed to other roads to truth. What is common to all thinkers of this type is the belief that there is only one true method or combination of methods: and that what cannot be answered by it, cannot be answered at all. The implication of this position is that the world is a single system which can be described and explained by the use of rational methods; with the practical corollary that if man’s life is to be organised at all, and not left to chaos and the play of uncontrolled nature and chance, then it can be organised only in the light of such principles and laws.

  It is not surprising that this view was most strongly held and most influential in the hour of the greatest triumph of the natural sciences – surely a major, if not the major, achievement of the human mind: and especially, therefore, in the seventeenth century in Western Europe. From Descartes and Bacon and the followers of Galileo and Newton, from Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists to Saint-Simon and Comte and Buckle, and, in our own century, H. G. Wells and Bernal and Skinner and the Viennese positivists, with their ideal of a unified system of all the sciences, natural and humane, this has been the programme of the modern Enlightenment; and it has played a decisive role in the social, legal and technological organisation of our world. This was perhaps bound sooner or later to provoke a reaction from those who felt that constructions of reason and science, of a single all-embracing system, whether it claimed to explain the nature of things, or to go further and dictate, in the light of this, what one should do and be and believe, were in some way constricting – an obstacle to their own vision of the world, chains on their imagination or feeling or will, a barrier to spiritual or political liberty.

  This is not the first occasion on which this phenomenon occurred: the domination of the philosophical schools of Athens in the Hellenistic period was attended by a noticeable increase in mystery cults and other forms of occultism and emotionalism in which non-rational elements in the human spirit sought an outlet. There was the great Christian revolt against the great organised legal systems, whether of the Jews or the Romans; there were medieval antinomian rebellions against the scholastic establishment and the authority of the Church – movements of this kind from the Cathars to the anabaptists are evidence enough of this; the Reformation was preceded and followed by the rise of powerful mystical and irrationalist currents. I will not dwell on more recent manifestations of this – in the German Sturm und Drang, in the romanticism of the early nineteenth century, in Carlyle and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and the vast spectrum of modern irrationalism both on the right and on the left.

  It is not, however, with this that I intend to deal, but with the critical attack upon the total claim of the new scientific method to dominate the entire field of human knowledge, whether in its metaphysical – a priori – or empirical-probabilistic forms. This attack, whether its causes were psychological or social (and I am inclined to think that they were, at least in part, due to a reaction on the part of humanists, especially the inward-looking, anti-materialistic Christians among them, against the all-conquering advance of the physical sciences), was itself based on rational argument, and in due course led to the great divorce between the natural sciences and the humanities – Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft – a divorce the validity of which has been challenged ever since and remains a central and highly controversial issue to this day.

  As everyone knows, the great triumphs of natural science in the seventeenth century gave the proponents of the scientific method immense prestige. The great liberators of the age were Descartes and Bacon, who carried opposition to the authority of tradition, faith, dogma or prescription into every realm of knowledge and opinion, armed with weapons used during the Renaissance and, indeed, earlier. Although there was much cautious avoidance of open defiance of Christian belief, the general thrust of the new movement was to bring everything before the bar of reason: the cruder forgeries and misinterpretations of texts, on which lawyers and clerics had rested their claims, had been exposed by humanists in Italy and Protestant reformers in France; appeals to the authority of the Bible, or Aristotle, or Roman law, had met with a good deal of acutely argued resistance based both on learning and on critical methods. Descartes made an epoch with his attempt to systematise these methods – notably in his Discourse on Method and its application in his Meditations – his two most popular and influential philosophical treatises. Spinoza’s Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding, his quasi-geometrical method in the Ethics, and the severely rationalist assumptions and rigorous logic in his political works and his criticisms of the Old Testament, had carried the war further into the enemy’s camp. Bacon and Spinoza, in their different ways, sought to remove obstacles to clear, rational thinking. Bacon exposed what he considered the chief sources of delusion: ‘idols’ of ‘the tribe’, ‘the cave’, ‘the market-place’ and ‘the theatre’2 – effects, in his view, of the uncritical acceptance of the evidence of the senses, of one’s own predilections, of misunderstanding of words, of confusions bred by the speculative fantasies of philosophers, and the like. Spinoza stressed the degree to which emotions clouded reason, and led to groundless fears and hatreds which led to destructive practice; from Valla to Locke and Berkeley there were frequent warnings and examples of fallacies and confusions due to the misuse of language.

  The general, if not the universal, tendency of the new philosophy was to declare that if the human mind can be cleared of dogma, prejudice and cant, of the organised obscurities and Aristotelian patter of the schoolmen, then nature will at last be seen in the full symmetry and harmony of its elements, which can be described, analysed and represented by a logically appropriate language – the language of the mathematical and physical sciences. Leibniz seems to have believed not only in the possibility of constructing a logically perfect language, which would reflect the structure of reality, but in something not unlike a general science of discovery. His views spread far beyond philosophical or scientific circles – indeed, theoretical knowledge was still conceived as one undivided realm; the frontiers between philosophy, science, criticism, theology were not sharply drawn. There were invasions and counter-invasions; grammar, rhetoric, jurisprudence, philosophy made forays into the fields of historical learning and natural knowledge, and were attacked by them in turn. The new rationalism spread into the creative a
rts. Just as the Royal Society in England formally set itself against the use of metaphor and other forms of rhetorical speech, and demanded language that was plain and literal and precise, so there was in France at this time a corresponding avoidance of metaphor, embellishment and highly coloured expression in, for example, the plays of Racine or Molière, in the verse of La Fontaine and Boileau, writers who dominated the European scene; and because such luxuriance was held to flourish in Italy, Italian literature was duly denounced in France for the impurity of its style. The new method sought to eliminate everything that could not be justified by the systematic use of rational methods, above all the fictions of the metaphysicians, the mystics, the poets; what were myth and legend but falsehoods with which primitive and barbarous societies were gulled during their early, helpless childhood? At best, they were fanciful or distorted accounts of real events or persons. Even the Catholic Church was influenced by the prevailing scientific temper, and the great archival labours of the Bollandists and Maurists were conducted in a semi-scientific spirit3.

  It was natural enough that history was one of the earliest victims of what might be called the positivist character of the new scientific movement. Scepticism about historical veracity was no new thing: ignorance and fantasy, as well as malicious invention, had been attributed to Herodotus by Plutarch; and these charges against narrative history had been repeated at intervals by those who preferred certainty to conjecture. The sixteenth century in particular, perhaps as a result of the mobilisation of history in the religious wars by the various factions, saw a rise of scepticism and doubt: Cornelius Agrippa, in 1531, dwells on the carelessness and contradictions of historians, and their shameless inventions to cover up their ignorance or fill gaps in knowledge where there is no available evidence; on the absurdity of idealising the characters of the main actors in the story; he speaks of the distortion of facts as being due to the historians’ passions – wishes, hatreds and fears, desire to please a patron, patriotic motives, national pride – Plutarch glorified the Greeks in comparison with the Romans, and in his own day polemical writers extolled the virtues of Gauls over Franks, and vice versa. How can truth emerge in these conditions? In the same vein Patrizi, at the turn of the century, declares that all history ultimately rests on eye-witness evidence: and argues that those who are present are likely to be involved in the issues, and are therefore liable to be partisan; while those who can afford to be objective because they are neutral and uninvolved are unlikely to see the evidence jealously preserved by the partisans, and have to depend upon the biased accounts of the interested parties.