The humanities
is 1
a form of knowledge. Like other knowledge, this deals with
a 2
man"s life in nature and society, but it is
required 3
through the study of man"s spiritual creations—language, art, history, philosophy,
or 4
religion. This filtering of the subject, man, through the medium of mind
have 5
the effect of keeping always in the foreground the element of
novelness 6
, of uniqueness, of astonishing unpredictability. Whereas the study of nature assumes and finds of its
uniforms 7
, and whereas the scientific study of society tries
too 8
to grasp what is regular and inevitable, the study of nature and man
through 9
humanities dwells on what is individual and
alike 10
and anarchic. It finds what does not conform
with 11
rule, what has no counterpart, what does not "behave",
and 12
simply is or acts—this is the splendid and
refreshed 13
spectacle of the humanities. It is the Antigone of Sophocles,
who 14
describes the unique woman and is no other drama; the Athenian plague in Thucydides, which is at once unknown, vividly present, and
forever 15
past. (Excerpt from
Science vs. the Humanities
)