DR. OSLER
“In seventy or eighty years” (said Thomas Browne, M. D.) “a man may have a deep Gust of the World, know what it is, what it can afford, and what ’tis to have been a Man. Such a latitude of years may hold a considerable corner in the general Map of Time.”
Surely no modern thinker has taken a deeper gust of life or pondered more charitably over the difficult problems of the race than Sir William Osler, a true follower and kinsprit of the wise physician of Norwich. “The Old Humanities and the New Science,” his last public address (given in Oxford, May 16, 1919), was the capsheaf of that long series of writings and speakings in which Dr. Osler unlocked his generous, humane heart and gave inspiring counsel to his fellows.
It was an occasion that even the most severe brevity must describe as of happy import. Osler, a physician and a man of science, had been honoured by the presidency of the Classical Association, Great Britain’s most distinguished gathering of the men who have made the culture of the antique world their touchstone in life. And Dr. Osler, himself a keen classical student, did not permit himself merely gracious and suave messages. Pleading for a new bridal of science and the classics, in that delightful and urbane chaff which he knew so well to administer, he pointed out the barrenness of the tradition that has made the famous “More Humane Letters” of Oxford entirely neglect the workings and winnings of the science that has transformed the world. Dr. Osler, in his great career, perhaps never spoke with more convincing persuasion than when he pointed out that even in their own province of the classical tongues the modern humanists have passed over the scientific work of the ancients, as for instance in Aristotle and Lucretius.
Among men who err and are baffled, but still blunder eagerly and hopefully in the magnificent richness of the natural world, there arise ever and again such figures as Osler’s, a pride and a consolation to their comrades. Men, alas! are slow in finding the treasures that lie close about them. Dr. Osler’s essays are too little known among general readers. His all-embracing humanity, his mind packed with wisdom and beauty, his humour and his sagacious and persistent method in the conduct of a crowded life, make him a figure exceptionally helpful to contemplate. This last of his essays needs to be read not only by all educators, but by all who have any rational ideals of life, and who need, every now and then, to surmount the troubled stream of quotidian affairs and focus their visions more clearly.
No sensible man doubts that, if haste and confusion and greed do not overcome us, the world should stand to-day on the sill of a new Renaissance, a new empire of the mind, in which the old foolish antagonism of science and the so-called “humanities” will be only a vain and dusty rumour. What are “liberal” studies, one may ask? Why, surely, studies that liberate—that set the spirit free from the oppression of sordid and small motives, that stir and urge it toward generous achievement and the assistance of misfortune. When did letters arrogate to themselves the heavenly adjective belles? Are there not the belles sciences also? And is the biplane now soaring over the olive-shining Hudson any less lovely than the most precious sonnet ever anchored and flattened in persisting ink?
This essay of Dr. Osler’s shows one the pulse and heartbeat of modern science, the tender spirit of idealism that urges so much of the technical investigation of our time. In Dr. Osler, as in hundreds of other scientists less known and perhaps less gifted in public utterance, there is the union of the two Hippocratic ideals which the great Canadian physician laid before himself as his guides in life—the union of philanthropia and philotechnia—a love of humanity joined to a love of his craft.
To infect the average man with the spirit of the humanities, Dr. Osler said, is the highest aim of education. And this brilliant address of his is a crowning instance of the way in which, in his mind, the practical service of science was beautified by the liberal and imperishable spirit of classical thought.
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