NEITHER GOD NOR DEVIL
225
It is time that the practice· of collective research was extended
to all fields of knowledge. I demand the forming of groups: the biol–
ogist who alreadyl needs a statistician to help him must not be afraid
to work with a painter. And as biology is henceforth inseparable from
chemistry, which cannot do without physics, in its turn the prisoner
of mathematics, I ask that these groups shall of necessity be com–
pounded of specialists of all known specialties, and of all those which
will
assert their use in the future. Tomorrow no economist will dare
to write a line or draw a curve without asking the advice of a poet.
Only thus can we avoid the oppression of man by the specialist
and of the specialist by his specialty.
Only thus can we reintegrate words into a language, a myth,
a universal desire. Even so we shall be very far from recovering wholly
the sense of life, that is, of Liberty; at the most we shall have retem–
pered one of the tools of our emancipation. .
Translated from the French by Mary Kesteven.
(Reprinted from
Horizon
with the kind permission of the editor)
