about everything in a way altogether better than the common run of
humanity, but in their field they think and work with an intensity,
an integrity, a breadth, boldness, patience, thoroughness, and
faithfulness--excepting only a few artists--which puts their work
out of all comparison with any other human activity.... In these
particular directions the human mind has achieved a new and higher
quality of attitude and gesture, a veracity, a self-detachment,
and self-abnegating vigor of criticism that tend to spread out and
must ultimately spread out to every other human affair.

No one who is even most superficially acquainted with the achievements
of students of nature during the past few centuries can fail to see
that their thought has been astoundingly effective in constantly adding
to our knowledge of the universe, from the hugest nebula to the tiniest
atom; moreover, this knowledge has been so applied as to well-nigh
revolutionize human affairs, and both the knowledge and its applications
appear to be no more than hopeful beginnings, with indefinite revelations
ahead, if only the same kind of thought be continued in the same patient
and scrupulous manner.

But the knowledge of man, of the springs of his conduct, of his
relation to his fellow-men singly or in groups, and the felicitous
regulation of human intercourse in the interest of harmony and
fairness, have made no such advance. Aristotle's treatises on
astronomy and physics, and his notions of "generation and decay" and
of chemical processes, have long gone by the board, but his politics
and ethics are still revered. Does this mean that his penetration in
the sciences of man exceeded so greatly his grasp of natural science,
or does it mean that the progress of mankind in the scientific
knowledge and regulation of human affairs has remained almost