workings.

The opinion sometimes advanced that it is a derogation from the
"purity" of science to study it in its active incarnation, instead of
in theoretical abstraction, rests upon a misunderstanding. AS matter of
fact, any subject is cultural in the degree in which it is apprehended
in its widest possible range of meanings. Perception of meanings depends
upon perception of connections, of context. To see a scientific fact or
law in its human as well as in its physical and technical context is
to enlarge its significance and give it increased cultural value. Its
direct economic application, if by economic is meant something having
money worth, is incidental and secondary, but a part of its actual
connections. The important thing is that the fact be grasped in its
social connections--its function in life.

On the other hand, "humanism" means at bottom being imbued with an
intelligent sense of human interests. The social interest, identical in
its deepest meaning with a moral interest, is necessarily supreme with
man. Knowledge about man, information as to his past, familiarity with
his documented records of literature, may be as technical a possession
as the accumulation of physical details. Men may keep busy in a variety
of ways, making money, acquiring facility in laboratory manipulation, or
in amassing a store of facts about linguistic matters, or the chronology
of literary productions. Unless such activity reacts to enlarge the
imaginative vision of life, it is on a level with the busy work of
children. It has the letter without the spirit of activity. It readily
degenerates itself into a miser's accumulation, and a man prides himself
on what he has, and not on the meaning he finds in the affairs of life.
Any study so pursued that it increases concern for the values of life,
any study producing greater sensitiveness to social well-being and
greater ability to promote that well-being is humane study. The
humanistic spirit of the Greeks was native and intense but it was narrow
in scope. Everybody outside the Hellenic circle was a barbarian,
and negligible save as a possible enemy. Acute as were the social
observations and speculations of Greek thinkers, there is not a word in
their writings to indicate that Greek civilization was not self-inclosed
and self-sufficient. There was, apparently, no suspicion that its future
was at the mercy of the despised outsider. Within the Greek community,
the intense social spirit