cugini@ICST-ECF.ARPA ("CUGINI, JOHN") (06/15/88)
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 88 07:25 EDT
From: "CUGINI, JOHN" <cugini@icst-ecf.arpa>
Subject: scope of ailist
To: ailist <ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu>
Reply-To: "CUGINI, JOHN" <cugini@icst-ecf.arpa>
As a somewhat belated response to the complaints about endless
philosophizing, I offer the following quote from H.G. Wells, "The
Future in America", written in 1906, after Wells had toured the
states. He was writing specifically about Washington, providing some
additional poignancy for those of us who work in the DC area, but
perhaps it has wider pertinence:
It is perhaps near the truth to say that this dearth of any
general and comprehensive intellectual activity is due to
intellectual specialization. The four thousand scientific
men in Washington are all too energetically busy with
ethnographic details, electrical computations or herbaria,
to talk about common and universal things. They ought not to
be so busy, and a science so specialized sinks halfway down
the scale of sciences. Science is one of those things that
cannot hustle; if it does it loses its connexions. In
Washington some men, I gathered, hustle, others play bridge,
and general questions are left a little comtemptuously, as
being of the nature of "gas," to the newspapers and
magazines. Philosophy, which correlates the sciences and
keeps them subservient to the universals of life, has no
seat there. My anticipated synthesis of ten thousand minds
refused, under examination, to synthesize at all; it
remained disintegrated, a mob, individually active and
collectively futile, of specialists and politicians.
John Cugini <Cugini@ecf.icst.nbs.gov>
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