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natural sciences and the educational ideals that were associated with
the practice of science.
These developments were taking place at the same time as there
emerged into consciousness the spiritual crisis of the later nineteenth
century, and were connected at various points with that crisis. In the
progressive, irreversible loss among the educated classes of religious
belief, substitutes for religion were sought. And someone like Arnold
believed that in the humanities-in the idea of Culture and in the
study of literature, particularly the study of poetry-certain things
could be found that would act to support us and help us live in ways
that resembled the religious ways that were being lost. In short, the
humanities became a repository of "values," a resourCe that one could
as it were tap in time of need when certain decisions and guides to
decisions were required. This questionable notion in popularized and
even more questionable forms has come down to us today and is still
to be met with frequently.
In America, where the literary culture never achieved the ascend–
ancy that it did in England, the situation developed in a slightly
different form. Here the term itself, "the humanities," did not come
into active use until after World War
1.
1
When it was used thereafter it
tended to refer rather narrowly and restrictively
to
the study of those
subjects which took as their object the activities of the past. In America
the study of history-and everything with a historical perspective
-had displaced the study of the classics as the central mode of train–
ing in the humanities. Yet the presuppositions of the history thus
studied and taught were themselves inadequate and questionable. It
was a history that tended to be without self-consciousness of itself as
an activity of the present, and without self-consciousness of its own
subjective biases, inclinations, and interests. It simultaneously could in–
sist upon continuity and tradition and yet see the past as utterly dis–
tinct from the present, as radically disjoined from it.
It
tended to be
genteel and provincial, and the model of the present that it uncon–
sciously projected back upon the past was a present that had indeed
existed fifty years earlier. The study of literature was
in
this connec–
tion particularly scandalous. The literature that was officially sanc-
1. John Higham, "The Schism in American Scholarship,"
American Historical Review,
LXII (October, 1966), 1-21.
