From Scientific American
Edward O. Wilson's first "big book" was a slim volume, The Theory of Island Biogeography, written in collaboration with Robert H. MacArthur and published in 1967. It is one of the canonical texts of theoretical ecology. It helped to push the study of populations, communities and ecosystems from a foundation of largely descriptive studies to today's richer mixture of descriptive natural history, manipulative experiments in the field and laboratory, and mathematical analyses (often of complicated nonlinear systems). Sadly, cancer killed MacArthur a few years later. In 1973 a group of his friends and colleagues gathered in Princeton, N.J., for a memorial meeting. At that time, Wilson was about to send the manuscript of Sociobiology to his publisher. Wilson, Richard Levins and Richard C. Lewontin were staying in the overlarge house that I, recently arrived, was renting from Princeton University, and as we and others walked back to dinner there someone asked Wilson, "What is this sociobiology all about?" Dick Lewontin enthusiastically answered something like: "It is a big book, bringing a lot together, and defining sociobiology as whatever is in Ed's book." Much has happened since then. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis appeared--26 chapters on empirical and theoretical advances in understanding the evolutionary origins of the social behavior of nonhuman animals and a final speculative chapter suggesting that many aspects of human behavior and social organization might be understandable in broadly similar terms. Wilson had looked forward to an academic battle with anthropologists, psychologists and others who had little use for Darwinian interpretations of human culture. But he had (perhaps naively) not foreseen the political battle that erupted, with its epicenter at Harvard University and its apogee the infamous letter from Lewontin and others to the New York Review of Books, comparing Wilson's ideas with those of the Nazis. Wilson's subsequent books have ranged from a magisterial overview of his favorite animals (The Ants, with Bert Hölldobler, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990), through definitive statements about "biodiversity," a word that he made common coin (The Diversity of Life, 1992), to a wonderful autobiography (Naturalist, 1994). Far from backing off his sociobiological claims that evolutionary biology can illuminate aspects of human behavior and culture, Wilson's agenda has, if anything, enlarged over time. Which brings me to Consilience. The word is borrowed from William Whewell, who in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences spoke of consilience as a "jumping together" of knowledge by linking facts and theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. The book's opening chapter, aptly called "The Ionian Enchantment," sets forth Wilson's conviction that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small set of natural laws. The next two chapters take us on a quick tour through "The Great Branches of Learning" and "The Enlightenment," making clear Wilson's enthusiasm for the attitudes of the Enlightenment: "The assumptions they made of a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily into our hearts, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding through intellectual advance. The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship." Off to such a start, I approached the rest of the book with considerable trepidation. The middle part of the book, however, is an exceptionally insightful account of the sciences, including (as do the U.K. Research Councils) the social sciences. Wilson gives a good account of how our still growing understanding of the physical world has given us the power to reshape our environment, deferring to later chapters his observations on the often unintended consequences. Looking beyond today's spectacular advances in unraveling the structure and function of neural processes or in reading the molecularly coded book of life, Wilson points to a future in which this biological understanding will give us the power to reshape ourselves (again deferring the implications to his final chapters). He cuts through much polarized nonsense about nature versus nurture or genes versus culture, showing with many examples how both are as relevant to us as to other animals. These sociobiological ideas about kin selection, parental investment, mating behavior, territorial expansion and defense, status and other strategies are shown to have firm roots in evolutionary biology and clear applications to human institutions. As we move on to "The Social Sciences," "The Arts and Their Interpretation" and "Ethics and Religion," things get blurrier. Wilson continually and properly emphasizes patterns that are more or less universal: incest taboos (everything to do with inbreeding depression, and nothing to do with Freud); snakes and serpents in dreams (everything to do with real risks from snakes, and nothing to do with penises). Although I am in sympathy with Wilson's basic premise, I think these illustrative universals are more subtly textured: consanguinity rules, in all their variety, are possibly better understood in economic terms, and I am with the Freudians on serpents. The suggestion that the magically beautiful cave art of Chauvet and elsewhere was born literally of magic--prescientific attempts to explain and influence one's world--I find compelling. I would even agree that "the dominating influence that spawned the arts was the need to impose order on the confusion caused by intelligence." But to suggest this kind of explanation for contemporary art markets may be foolish: I think instead they are to be explained in largely economic terms (which themselves are ultimately, but remotely, grounded on evolution). The reason the annual turnover on paintings alone by Sotheby's, Christie's and the world's other auction houses is larger than the total annual spending on taxonomic and systematic biological research--and why we have synoptic inventories of the world's art and not of the world's living species--is not simply because we favor human handiwork over nature's. The reasons are essentially economic: we have created markets in art (and there is a lesson for conservationists here!). In short, I share Wilson's view that the ultimate basis for art, and even for ethics, lies in the chances and necessities of our evolutionary history. But I think these origins are often deeper and subtler than they are sketched by Wilson. This being said, I love the clear, calm and often cruel phrases that drive his lance through black knight after black knight. On schools within the social sciences: "Each of these enterprises has contributed something to understanding the human condition. The best of the insights, if pieced together, explain the broad sweep of social behavior, at least in the same elementary sense that preliterate creation myths explain the universe, that is, with conviction and a certain internal consistency. But never--I do not think that too strong a word--have social scientists been able to embed their narratives in the physical realities of human biology and psychology, even though it is surely there and not some astral plane from which culture has arisen." On religion: "For centuries the writ of empiricism has been spreading into the ancient domain of transcendentalist belief, slowly at the start but quickening in the scientific age. The spirits our ancestors knew intimately first fled the rocks and trees, then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible." Wilson, however, completes this quotation with "but we cannot live without them." Greatly to oversimplify, Wilson offers us a clear-eyed view of the wonders of our evolutionary past, shared with other living creatures, as a satisfying creed to live by. As his final chapter makes plain, acceptance of this view of life carries a call to action. This last chapter summarizes our current plight: teeming population growth; climate change; extinction rates running 100 to 1,000 times above average rates in the evolutionary record and set to accelerate. Wilson, encouraged by his vision of the emerging unity of knowledge, which he hopes will help us rise above outdated irrationalities and short-term selfishness, offers a message of hope. I would like to share his optimism, but I cannot. Insofar as much of Wilson's Consilience is grounded on evolutionary biology, it emphasizes the short term and the individual. The classic problems surrounding the "evolution of altruism" or cooperative behavior--of behavior that puts the good of the group above the interest of the individual--are, as yet, ill understood (excepting for groups of sufficiently close relatives). These questions do not loom large in Consilience, yet they are utterly crucial to humanity's future. Whether the problem is population growth, or climate change, or diminishing biological diversity, the essential difficulty is in asking individuals today to make sacrifices that benefit communities tomorrow. In essentials, I agree with Wilson's hope that we are moving toward a unification of all knowledge, based ultimately on understanding evolutionary processes. But I do not share his optimism that this unity may be our salvation. I fear that the inflexibility of social institutions, rooted in the past evolutionary history of our species, will ineluctably continue to put their emphasis on the interests of individuals and of the short term.
From The New England Journal of Medicine
Edward O. Wilson has already had three careers and has made major contributions to knowledge in all of them. First, as an entomologist, he elucidated the intricacies of behavior and organization in ant societies. Second, as a sociobiologist, he studied the biologic basis of behavior and organization in human societies. Third, as an environmental activist, he crusaded for the preservation of the natural ecologies that human societies are rapidly destroying. With this book he has launched his fourth career, as a philosopher, attempting to assemble the many issues of concern to the human species into a unified intellectual framework. To his framework he gives the name "consilience," a word invented by the 19th-century philosopher William Whewell, which is derived from a Latin word meaning "jumping together." Consilience is "a `jumping together' of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation." The book is a major contribution to philosophy, whether you agree with it or not. It brings together a rich diversity of ideas and stories, some of them arising from Wilson's professional activities in his three previous careers, others from his omnivorous reading. The 20 pages of end notes provide an annotated guide to a vast literature covering science, history, art, and philosophy. The 12 chapters of the book survey all these areas and many more. Wilson's purpose is to tie them all together into a package, with science serving as the string.
His central theme is the assertion that science can provide a firm foundation and a unified basis for ethics, religion, art, and the regulation of human society. Once we reach a scientific understanding of the biologic origins of religious and cultural quarrels, we shall be able to reconcile our differences and solidify our agreements. All men are brothers, and all women sisters, as seen through the impartial eye of science. The extension of scientific understanding to include the whole of human culture will bring with it an erosion of barriers, a unification of the human species, and a deepened respect for our natural environment.
This is a great and noble vision, portrayed with eloquence and passion. The vistas that Wilson sees lying ahead of us, if we share his faith in the all-embracing wisdom of science, are entrancing. The book, as a statement of the faith of an outstanding scientist and an outstanding human being, is exciting to read. It is full of insights gleaned from Wilson's encyclopedic knowledge of ants and humans. Everyone should read it. And yet, I have to confess that I came to the end of the book unconvinced. Although I admire the vision, I cannot share it. To me, the vision is too tidy. It has too much of the flavor of Plato's republic or More's Utopia, societies ruled by benevolent intellectuals with little tolerance for rebellious spirits.
Wilson's view of human nature is narrow, and his view of science is hierarchical. He has little to say about medicine and law, the two professions that lie on the border between scientific rigor and practical wisdom. He writes with undisguised contempt for the many practitioners of the social sciences -- psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics -- who try to understand human behavior without reducing it to biology. He wishes to squeeze the whole of human knowledge into a reductionist mold, reducing ethics and religion to biology, biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics. Being a physicist myself, I know how poorly physics is suited to be the root of the tree of knowledge.
It may well be that Wilson is right and I am wrong. The questions that the book raises are important, whether Wilson's answers turn out to be right or not. I hope his answers are wrong, because I value the diversity of culture more highly than the unity of science, the rebelliousness of people more highly than the consilience of ideas. To me, science is only one of many ways of exploring the human landscape, without any overriding authority over the others. In the end, the future will decide who is right. Meanwhile, you should read this book and make up your own minds.
Reviewed by Freeman Dyson
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.
Thanks to the rampant success of Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time (1988), a great many are familiar with the project to formulate a grand unified theory linking together all the basic physical forces. In a book that is truly a magnum opus, Wilson is concerned with an even bigger project, the unification of all knowledge by the means of science, so that the explanations of differing kinds of phenomena are seen to be connected and consistent with one another--that is, to be consilient. Consilience is the summum bonum of science as a way of knowledge, a philosophy; discovering it across all fields of knowledge--the arts and humanities, not excluding religion, as well as the physical and social sciences--would complete the work of the Enlightenment to demonstrate that creation is intrinsically orderly and even predictable. Wilson sympathetically reinterprets the Enlightenment, especially the work and attitude of Condorcet, sadly allowing that its termination in the French revolutionary reign of terror justifiably accounts for some of its subsequent bad press, then proceeds to show that the consilience of the natural sciences has been conclusively established and to argue that discoveries in brain science and genetics, in particular, should be applied to the problems of social science, aesthetics, ethics, and religion in order to bring them into the single web of cause and effect that encompasses everything. Wilson is confident that such applications will eventually be made, but he also feels it is urgent that they be made. As human population burgeons and its environment deteriorates, continued human success depends on making the wise choices that sound knowledge makes possible. Wilson dazzlingly reaffirms the cogency and the power of scientific materialism. Ray Olson
From Kirkus Reviews
A tour de force from a scholar for whom such tours are par for the course. Wilson, who sowed the seeds of sociobiology decades ago, expands his agenda to the whole of human learning and behavior. All, in both the realms of art and science, can be reduced to a common set of unifying principles, or consilience. All can be subsumed under the basic laws of physics and their offspring in chemistry and biology. For instance, the reductionist new genetics and molecular biology have revolutionized our understanding of biology in terms of evolution, human development, and the brain as the vehicle of human behavior. Further, Wilson restates his notion of the co-evolution of genes and culture, but it is here that his argument is weakest, based on the premise that we are genetically programmed toward certain archetypal forms and themes which he finds in primitive and ancient art but which are dubiously applicable in the modern world. Wilsons arguments on achieving consilience in the h umanities will no doubt rile many of the faithful in these fields. For example, he rails against economists for their arid mathematical models that pay no heed to the irrational ways humans behave and he pretty well damns anyone who espouses cultural relativism; and he has very little good to say about philosophers in general. On the other hand, he writes knowledgeably about mind, making it clear that emotion is inextricably tied to reason, and his distinction between religion and ethics is well argued. In the end, Wilson invites scholars to explore the gaps in knowledge, as well as move toward synthesis: We are drowning in information, he says, while starving for wisdom. :He also pulls out all the stops on the future of the biosphere, noting the potential for changing our genet ic make- up. No doubt many scholars will accuse Wilson of simplistic arguments, errors, and distortions. But how many have the guts to venture beyond the boundaries of their specialty to make a case for unity? For that reason alone, Wilsons proposal merits the attention and debate of the broad community of scholars. (First printing of 125,000) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"An original work of synthesis...a program of unrivalled ambition: to unify all the major branches of knowledge--sociology, economics, the arts and religion--under the banner of science." --The New York Times
"As elegant in its prose as it is rich in its ideas...a book of immense importance." --Atlanta Journal & Constitution
"Edward O. Wilson is a hero. . . he has made landmark scientific discoveries and has a writing style to die for. . . . A complex and nuanced argument." --Boston Globe
"One of the clearest and most dedicated popularizers of science since T. H. Huxley ...Mr. Wilson can do the science and the prose." --Time
"An excellent book. Wilson provides superb overviews of Western intellectual history and the current state of understanding in many academic disciplines." Slate
"The Renaissance scholar still lives.... A sensitive, wide-ranging mind discoursing beautifully.... Wilson's buoyant intellectual courage is bracing." --Seattle Weekly
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
An enormous intellectual adventure. In this groundbreaking new book, the American biologist Edward O. Wilson, considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for consilience--the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning. Professor Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, now once again breaks out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how and why our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos and the human species--a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. Drawing on the physical sciences and biology, anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy, and the arts, Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are surging back to life, why they are reappearing on the very frontiers of science and humanistic scholarship, and how they are beginning to sketch themselves as the blueprint of our world as it most profoundly, elegantly, and excitingly is.
From the Back Cover
"This masterfully written book is nothing less than a daring challenge to the prevailing world view. It proposes in its place a grand, coherent conception encompassing the sciences, the arts, ethics, and religion. The reader feels lifted up to a high peak from which today's fragmented intellectual landscape below can be seen, and understood, in an entirely new way."
--Gerald Holton, author of Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought
"E. O. Wilson gives us his informed, sensitive, and flat-out brilliantly balanced reflections on the prospects for human inquiry. Consilience may be just another impressive achievement for Wilson, but for the rest of us it is a bright light on a darkened path."
--Loyal D. Rue, author of By the Grace of Guile
About the Author
Edward O. Wilson was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1929. He received his B.S. and M.S. in biology from the University of Alabama and, in 1955, his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, where he has since taught, and where he has received both of its college-wide teaching awards. He is currently Research Professor and Honorary Curator in Entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He is the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, OOn Human Nature (1978) and The Ants(1990, with Bert Hölldobler), as well as the recipient of many fellowships, honors, and awards, including the 1977 National Medal of Science, the Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1990), the International Prize for Biology from Japan (1993), and, for his conservation efforts, the Gold Medal of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (1990) and the Audubon Medal of the National Audubon Society (1995). He is on the Board of Directors of The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and the American Museum of Natural History, and gives many lectures throughout the world. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts with his wife, Irene.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
chapter 1
The Ionian Enchantment
I remember very well the time I was captured by the dream of unified learning. It was in the early fall of 1947, when at eighteen I came up from Mobile to Tuscaloosa to enter my sophomore year at the University of Alabama. A beginning biologist, fired by adolescent enthusiasm but short on theory and vision, I had schooled myself in natural history with field guides carried in a satchel during solitary excursions into the woodlands and along the freshwater streams of my native state. I saw science, by which I meant (and in my heart I still mean) the study of ants, frogs, and snakes, as a wonderful way to stay outdoors.
My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological classification. The Linnaean system is deceptively easy. You start by separating specimens of plants and animals into species. Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the genera. Examples of such groups are all the crows and all the oaks. Next you label each species with a two-part Latinized name, such as Corvus ossifragus for the fish crow, where Corvus stands for the genus--all the species of crows--and ossifragus for the fish crow in particular. Then on to higher classification, where similar genera are grouped into families, families into orders, and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six kingdoms--plants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and archaea. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into squads, squads into platoons, platoons into companies, and in the final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of staff. It is, in other words, a conceptual world made for the mind of an eighteen-year-old.
I had reached the level of the Carolus Linnaeus of 1735 or, more accurately (since at that time I knew little of the Swedish master), the Roger Tory Peterson of 1934, when the great naturalist published the first edition of A Field Guide to the Birds. My Linnaean period was nonetheless a good start for a scientific career. The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say, is getting things by their right names.
Then I discovered evolution. Suddenly--that is not too strong a word--I saw the world in a wholly new way. This epiphany I owed to my mentor Ralph Chermock, an intense, chain-smoking young assistant professor newly arrived in the provinces with a Ph.D. in entomology from Cornell University. After listening to me natter for a while about my lofty goal of classifying all the ants of Alabama, he handed me a copy of Ernst Mayr's 1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species. Read it, he said, if you want to become a real biologist.
The thin volume in the plain blue cover was one of the New Synthesis works, uniting the nineteenth-century Darwinian theory of evolution and modern genetics. By giving a theoretical structure to natural history, it vastly expanded the Linnaean enterprise. A tumbler fell somewhere in my mind, and a door opened to a new world. I was enthralled, couldn't stop thinking about the implications evolution has for classification and for the rest of biology. And for philosophy. And for just about everything. Static pattern slid into fluid process. My thoughts, embryonically those of a modern biologist, traveled along a chain of causal events, from mutations that alter genes to evolution that multiplies species, to species that assemble into faunas and floras. Scale expanded, and turned continuous. By inwardly manipulating time and space, I found I could climb the steps in biological organization from microscopic particles in cells to the forests that clothe mountain slopes. A new enthusiasm surged through me. The animals and plants I loved so dearly reentered the stage as lead players in a grand drama. Natural history was validated as a real science.
I had experienced the Ionian Enchantment. That recently coined expression I borrow from the physicist and historian Gerald Holton. It means a belief in the unity of the sciences--a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws. Its roots go back to Thales of Miletus, in Ionia, in the sixth century b.c. The legendary philosopher was considered by Aristotle two centuries later to be the founder of the physical sciences. He is of course remembered more concretely for his belief that all matter consists ultimately of water. Although the notion is often cited as an example of how far astray early Greek speculation could wander, its real significance is the metaphysics it expressed about the material basis of the world and the unity of nature.
The Enchantment, growing steadily more sophisticated, has dominated scientific thought ever since. In modern physics its focus has been the unification of all the forces of nature--electroweak, strong, and gravitation--the hoped-for consolidation of theory so tight as to turn the science into a "perfect" system of thought, which by sheer weight of evidence and logic is made resistant to revision. But the spell of the Enchantment extends to other fields of science as well, and in the minds of a few it reaches beyond into the social sciences, and still further, as I will explain later, to touch the humanities. The idea of the unity of science is not idle. It has been tested in acid baths of experiment and logic and enjoyed repeated vindication. It has suffered no decisive defeats. At least not yet, even though at its center, by the very nature of the scientific method, it must be thought always vulnerable. On this weakness I will also expand in due course.
Einstein, the architect of grand unification in physics, was Ionian to the core. That vision was perhaps his greatest strength. In an early letter to his friend Marcel Grossmann he said, "It is a wonderful feeling to recognize the unity of a complex of phenomena that to direct observation appear to be quite separate things." He was referring to his successful alignment of the microscopic physics of capillaries with the macroscopic, universe-wide physics of gravity. In later life he aimed to weld everything else into a single parsimonious system, space with time and motion, gravity with electromagnetism and cosmology. He approached but never captured that grail. All scientists, Einstein not excepted, are children of Tantalus, frustrated by the failure to grasp that which seems within reach. They are typified by those thermodynamicists who for decades have drawn ever closer to the temperature of absolute zero, when atoms cease all motion. In 1995, pushing down to within a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero, they created a Bose-Einstein condensate, a fundamental form of matter beyond the familiar gases, liquids, and solids, in which many atoms act as a single atom in one quantum
state. As temperature drops and pressure is increased, a gas condenses into a liquid, then a solid; then appears the Bose-Einstein condensate. But absolute, entirely absolute zero, a temperature that exists in imagination, has still not been attained.
On a far more modest scale, I found it a wonderful feeling not just to taste the unification metaphysics but also to be released from the confinement of fundamentalist religion. I had been raised a Southern Baptist, laid backward under the water on the sturdy arm of a pastor, been born again. I knew the healing power of redemption. Faith, hope, and charity were in my bones, and with millions of others I knew that my savior Jesus Christ would grant me eternal life. More pious than the average teenager, I read the Bible cover to cover, twice. But now at college, steroid-driven into moods of adolescent rebellion, I chose to doubt. I found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago. I suffered cognitive dissonance between the cheerfully reported genocidal wars of these people and Christian civilization in 1940s Alabama. It seemed to me that the Book of Revelation might be black magic hallucinated by an ancient primitive. And I thought, surely a loving personal God, if He is paying attention, will not abandon those who reject the literal interpretation of the biblical cosmology. It is only fair to award points for intellectual courage. Better damned with Plato and Bacon, Shelley said, than go to heaven with Paley and Malthus. But most of all, Baptist theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? Might the pastors of my childhood, good and loving men though they were, be mistaken? It was all too much, and freedom was ever so sweet. I drifted away from the church, not definitively agnostic or atheistic, just Baptist no more.
Still, I had no desire to purge religious feelings. They were bred in me; they suffused the wellsprings of my creative life. I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here. Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it? Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and writ large.
Such, I believe, is the source of the Ionian Enchantment: Preferring a search for objective reality over revelation is another way of satisfying religious hunger. It is an endeavor almost as old as civilization and intertwined with traditional religion, but it follows a very different course--a stoic's creed, an acquired taste, a guidebook to adventure plotted across rough terrain. It aims to save the spirit, not by surrender but by liberation of the human mind. I...
