I'm John Betts with Arthur Herman, the author of many books.

Right now we're discussing chiefly the Scottish

philosophy book that I look forward to talking about at length. It was not part of my education,

though Scotland was, so I'm going to catch up how the Scots invented the modern world. But here

we come to America. The French we've left behind in Europe or over there in China. We come to

the experience in America,

three pillars, well, three legs of the stool. Unity of knowledge. What is that, Arthur?

The unity of knowledge is the idea that the role of what we would call the humanities, the liberal

arts, and the role of science as a part of education

form a whole, that we don't separate out the liberal arts of the humanities as being a separate

set of disciplines with a separate set of rules and a separate direction in terms of inquiry and knowledge versus the sciences,

the natural sciences, the physical sciences.

That's not to say that the study of history has to become a scientific discipline or

that political science, that the rules of political science have to achieve a level of

scientific certainty that we enjoy in biology or in the study of physics. But what it does mean is

that all of this understanding of the world, the human world, the world of our interaction with others,

and our interaction with the world of nature, that these are all basically form a single

whole of a way of understanding, understanding the world and need to be talked together side

by side. It was fundamental to the Scots, to the whole Scottish outlook,

was that the sciences and the liberal arts form a whole and that need to be taught as such

and need to be understood as such by teachers and by the practitioners and as part of the view

that students will arise as they come out.

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