Excerpt from The Fellowship of Learning: Presidential Address

It is to such a period of reconstruction, of alliance, of co-operation, that we seem now to have arrived or at least to a stage at which the necessity for them is becoming obvious and paramount. On all sides we hear the demand for union, or at least for federation. We have learnt the value of comradeship in war, and the need to sink minor differences in order to defeat the common enemy. The same ideal inspires the conception of a League of Nations and the hopeful movement towards reunion among the Churches. Even Industry is finding out, though with many throes and through much tribulation, the need of union: that neither Capital nor Labour can stand by itself, and that their antagonism is the destruction of both. Whitley Councils, Arbitration Boards, conferences of masters and men, all are symptoms of the same need - the need for co-operation and common effort to overcome the evils that confront us.

The same tendencies are, I think and hope, visible in the field of learning, with which we in our present capacity are more immediately concerned. The fight between Science and Theology has died down; Science is no longer so sure that it knows everything, and Theology realizes that in its own sphere Science must be respected. The fight between Science and the Humanities, or more particularly between Science and the Classics, has also, I think and hope, lost its bitterness. The advocates of each are more willing to recognize the value of the other, and to acknowledge that the free development of both is essential to the intellectual culture of the nation. The war has taught us how greatly we need both, the knowledge of nature which comes from science and the knowledge of man which comes from the humanities. Neither can afford to despise the other. For our defence in war, for our progress in peace, we need to cultivate science, both with the disinterested research which we call pure science, and in its practical applications to industry and commerce. And the problems of government, of economics, of international and internal relations, which bewilder us to-day, impress us with the vital need of the knowledge of man's thought and the history of nations, and of the cultivation of high ideals, which come through the study of the humanities.

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