Unity at Cambridge

Otto Neurath is a bald, booming, energy-oozing sociologist and scientific philosopher who used to live and work in Vienna, now lives and works in The Netherlands. Some years ago he invented the "pictograph" or "isotype" method of conveying sociological statistics by quantitative symbols (a convenient and striking dodge that for rows of dead numbers substitutes conventionalized pictures of men, machines, factories, whatever, each picture-unit representing any number the statistician states). He now heads the International Foundation for Visual Education. Out of his feeling, and that of his group in Vienna, that science should be a unified endeavor with a unified language, there grew a series of unification congresses and an International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (TiME, Aug. 1, 1938). The first two volumes were to comprise 20 monographs. Seven of these have now been published by the University of Chicago Press.

Last week the fifth international congress for the Unity of Science was held in the U. S. at Harvard University. Despite the war, delegates from nine nations were on hand.

If the speakers were using a unified language, it was so technical that newshawks tore their hair trying to get plain-talk stories out of the meeting. One reporter sourly observed that the only semblance of unity he saw was a gathering of the delegates around a radio to hear war bulletins.

Dr. Horace Kallen of New York's New School for Social Research accused some scientists of using "professional expressions" to mystify rather than to clarify, and opposed the unified language movement by declaring: "Common sense advises that a common language guarantees neither common peace nor common understanding." Difficulty in the way of a common language is that chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy and dozens of other sciences and subdivisions each need a battery of precise terms for precise communication, so that if a common language is to take the place of special technical vocabularies, it would have to be a mon ster vocabulary requiring a lifetime to master. Dr. Neurath feels that this Tower of Babel can be overstepped by developing a common grammar of science--a unified manner of scientific exposition--so that one savant can understand another if he looks up the unfamiliar words.

Timed to coincide with the Harvard meeting was the publication of Dr. Neurath's new book for laymen, Modern Man in the Making,* which is written in plain and simple style, copiously illustrated with pictographs. Dr. Neurath discusses such aspects of "modernity" as urbanization, lower death rates, lower birth rates, higher literacy rates, higher suicide rates, mechanization, shows the relations between them.

Urbanization, for example, generally brings both longer life and fewer births; in all three respects modern Chile is about where England was a century ago. Literate people commit suicide oftener than illiterates.

Russia in 1925 under Stalin had three times as many suicides as in 1900 under the Tsar.

*Knopf ($2.95).

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