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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
While the Germans have long recognized a Litteraturwissenschaft, we do not often speak in English of a ‘science of literature.’ Do we then lack something which the Germans have, or do they lack something which they think they have? Do we feel that the name is a misnomer? Or is it that we are satisfied to possess the thing without caring how it is called? If this last is so, it were as well perhaps to be a little less indifferent, since names gradually affect modes of thinking. A rose by any other name will smell as sweet, but a rose by the name of rose tempts people to smell of it, especially blind people. It is a fact of some import for the users of German, that they have the convenient word Wissenschaft, which they can apply freely to the serious and systematic study of any subject under the sun. On the other hand, we are not unaffected, and I think the effect is bad, by the drift of English usage toward a restricted application of the word ‘science.’ The tendency leads people to associate with that word not so much the grand ideals of carefulness and love of truth, as rather the particular methods employed, and the kind of accuracy aimed at, in the study of physics and biology. Many are also led to feel that there are spheres of thought in which science has nothing to say; and so, instead of enlarging their conception of science, they become suspicious of it. The result is that we are far from realizing that universal allegiance to the scientific spirit, which in our day we ought to have. Instead, there is a division of sentiment, many persons, intelligent persons too, feeling that for certain purposes science is a blind guide. As if there could be in the long run any better basis of life than the truth ! And as if there could be any more hopeful way of getting at the truth than to keep trying, with all our might, in the light of all the evidence!
Address of the President of the Modern Language Association of America, at its Annual Meeting, held at Cleveland, December, 1896.
page 300 note 1 I use the word ‘philologist’ to denote the type of the investigator, in distinction from the littérateur.
page 300 note 2 Les Évolutions de la Critique Française, p. 63: Jusque dans cette préoccupation de la forme trahie par la recherche de la diction—je retrouve l'esprit moderne qui a plus soin de bien dire que de bien penser.
page 303 note 1 T. S. Perry, From Opitz to Lessing, p. 58.
page 311 note 1 Grundriss der Germanischen Philologie, i, 138: So zeigt sich, z. B., die Vermischung von strenger Wissenschaft und Dilettantismus in dem seit 1880 von Ludw. Geiger herausgegebenen Goethe-Jahrbuch, welches manche willkommene Gabe gebracht hat, aber denn doch, indem es die Verehrung für die einzelne Person zum Ausgangspunkt für die Forschung nimmt, einen Standpunkt vertritt, der jetzt überwunden sein sollte.
