The Hedgehog, The Fox And The Magister's Pox

Stephen Jay Gould is in full and eloquent posthumous voice as he laments a false dichotomy that has pitted science against the humanities since the seventeenth century. To illustrate the dichotomy he cites a Greek proverb which has a clever fox (read: humanities scholars) employing many cunning behavioural strategies, while the hedgehog (read: scientist) plods along with a single, albeit very effective strategy (curling up in a motionless ball with only its spiny backside showing). To make his case the author uses his beloved collection of early natural-history texts, including one that inspired the present volume, a sixteenth century piece on terrestrial mammals. It is this work that bears the mark of the Magister's pox: the Church censor left the text alone, but suppressed the names of the author and of Erasmus as iconoclasts who were not shining models of Catholic orthodoxy. Gould uses his textual evidence both to illustrate the fusion of science and the humanities as well as to show how they have always stood in opposition. He argues that in fact each of them should borrow from each other and thereby improve their own given disciplines and writes of the absolute necessity of both domains to any life deemed intellectually and spiritually full. Gould, who lived and died exemplifying that sort of consilience has the last word. (Kirkus UK)