ABSTRACT
W H I L E the Fortnightly apologists for the "scientific method" had sought to give each new tree of knowledge its vital place in the broad landscape of ideas, the scientists themselves strove merely to cultivate their own high-walled gardens. Increasingly devoted to exclusive researches, they concentrated their energies upon specific and detailed analyses unti l they had become learned but narrow specialists, more and more remote from the larger issues of late Victorian culture. In 1886 Tennyson, who had once felt each material advance a token of spiritual growth, tempered the optimism, if not the rhetoric, of his first "Locksley Hal l " ; his imagination no longer fired by the wonders of the laboratory, he had come to see
Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space, Staled by frequence, shrun\ by usage into commonest commonplaceI
And there was indeed much of the commonplace in the mechanized world of fact that preoccupied all the new "specialists" working not only in the sciences but in trade and industry, in education, even
in art — working wi th much efficiency and little enthusiasm, weary of debate, unconcerned for the most part wi th first principles or general truths. I f the seventies had been enlivened by bold speculation, spirited controversy, and earnest pursuit of conflicting ideals, the following decade sank into that interlude of comparative quiescence which Professor Whitehead has called "one of the dullest phases of thought since the time of the First Crusade," a respite from intellection designed only to celebrate "the tr iumph of the professional man." 1 Though the "dullness" was undoubtedly offset by the emergence of many a fresh and colorful personality, the eighties as a whole made no considerable effort to achieve the synthesis of "mind and soul," the complete cultural integration, towards which the major mid-Victorians had aspired. Instead, art, politics, and sociology yielded alike to "specialized" interests; the artist retreated from society, and the social worker no more asked either aesthetic or religious support for his activities.
