Clearyly the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science is to be a philosophical enterprise, not a scientific one: scientia scientiarum. The editor of a literary journal follows it principally with this concern: will it include also scientia artium?
The editors seem to think it will, if perhaps somewhat incidentally. To me their theory means that the arts may be taken as quasi-sciences. In the terms of the Encyclopedia (or at least in Professor Morris’ terms), the arts present us like the sciences with all the “dimensions” of meaning. Thus: with semantical (or objective) content which may be less systematic but is of the same sort as the semantical content of science; with syntactical relations which are ordinarily of a passing degree of rigor where the sciences require them to be perfectly rigorous; and especially, characteristically, with a great deal of unashamed pragmatical content, that is, free, direct, and frequent expression of personal interest, such as the pure sciences try their hardest to rule out. But I would suggest that to read the arts this way is to misread them, and that a much more radical approach is needed. Probably nowhere can there be a case where the “unification” of different sciences will seem so violent as the attempt to unify the arts under the same rule with the sciences.
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