第28章 CHAPTER I(6)

But a good rule works both ways. If scholarly and scientific training, such as may without shame be included under the caption of the higher learning, unfits men for business efficiency, then the training that comes of experience in business must also be held to unfit men for scholarly and scientific pursuits, and even more pronouncedly for the surveillance of such pursuits. The circumstantial evidence for the latter proposition is neither less abundant nor less unequivocal than for the former. If the higher learning is incompatible with business shrewdness, business enterprise is, by the same token, incompatible with the spirit of the higher learning. Indeed, within the ordinary range of lawful occupations these two lines of endeavour, and the animus that belongs to each, are as widely out of touch as may be. They are the two extreme terms of the modern cultural scheme;although at the same time each is intrinsic and indispensable to the scheme of modern civilization as it runs. With the excision or serious crippling of either, Western Civilization would suffer a dislocation amounting to a revolutionary change.

On the other hand, the higher learning and the spirit of scientific inquiry have much in common with modern industry and its technological discipline. More particularly is there a close bond of sympathy and relationship between the spirit of scientific inquiry and the habit of mind enforced by the mechanical industries of the modern kind. In both of these lines of activity men are occupied with impersonal facts and deal with them in a matter-of-fact way. In both, as far as may be, the personal equation is sought to be eliminated, discounted and avoided, so as to leave no chance for discrepancies due to personal infirmity or predilection. But it is only on its mechanical side that the industrial organization so comes in touch with modern science and the pursuit of matter-of-fact knowledge; and it is only in so far as their habits of thought are shaped by the discipline of the mechanical industries that there is induced in the industrial population the same bent as goes to further or to appreciate the work of modern science. But it would be quite nugatory to suggest that the governing boards of the universities should be made up of, or should comprise, impecunious technologists and engineers.

There is no similar bond of consanguinity between the business occupations and the scientific spirit; except so far as regards those clerical and subaltern employments that lie wholly within the mechanical routine of business traffic; and even as regards these employments and the persons so occupied it is, at the most, doubtful whether their training does not after all partake more of that astute and invidious character of cunning that belongs to the conduct of business affairs than of the dispassionate animus of scientific inquiry.

These extenuating considerations do not touch the case of that body of businessmen, in the proper sense of the term, from which the membership of the governing boards is drawn. The principles that rule business enterprise of that larger and pecuniarily effectual sort are a matter of usage, appraisement, contractual arrangement and strategic manoeuvres. They are the principles of a game of competitive guessing and pecuniary coercion, a game carried on wholly within the limits of the personal equation, and depending for its movement and effect on personal discrepancies of judgment. Science has to do with the opaquely veracious sequence of cause and effect, and it deals with the facts of this sequence without mental reservation or ulterior purposes of expediency. Business enterprise proceeds on ulterior purposes and calculations of expediency; it depends on shrewd expedients and lives on the margin of error, on the fluctuating margin of human miscalculation. The training given by these two lines of endeavour -- science and business -- is wholly divergent; with the notorious result that for the purposes of business enterprise the scientists are the most ignorant, gullible and incompetent class in the community. They are not only passively out of touch with the business spirit, out of training by neglect, but they are also positively trained out of the habit of mind indispensable to business enterprise. The converse is true of the men of business affairs.(6*)Plato's classic scheme of folly, which would have the philosophers take over the management of affairs, has been turned on its head; the men of affairs have taken over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge. To any one who will take a dispassionate look at this modern arrangement it looks foolish, of course, -- ingeniously foolish; but, also, of course, there is no help for it and no prospect of its abatement in the calculable future.