Finley, Bush, Miller Discuss 'Humanities In Age of Science'

The Class of 1933 pushed out to "The Frontiers of Knowledge" yesterday in a colloquium called "The Humanities in the Age of Science." Three of the University's foremost humanists, Perry G. E. Miller, professor of American Literature, John H. Finley, Jr. '25, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature, and J. N. Douglas Bush, Gurney Professor of English Literature, exposed the dangers lurking in the recent onrush of the sciences.

Bush, speaking first, told the capacity gathering in Emerson D that the traditional role of the humanistic education was "to make man more like an angel than a beast." Bush said that this was a role which the scientific discipline could not fill and yet which must be filled if man is to endure.

Finley's Remarks

Master Finley spent most of his talk discussing the plot and implications of the Odyssey and regaled the members of the various reunion classes with his witty analogies between past and present. Finley called the humanities "an escape from perpetual particularity" and "the clarifier of the world."

To conclude the morning's discussion Miller described the early decades of America when the science and humanities were thought of as one and said that it was not until the 1830's that Americans began seriously to differentiate between them.