I have had, of course, intimate friends among both scientists and writers. It was through living among these groups and much more, I think through moving regularly from one to the other and back again that I got occupied with the problem of what, long before I put it on paper, I christened to myself as the ‘two cultures’. For constantly I felt I was moving among two groups – comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common.

The only presence science has is as a matter of external reference, entailed in a show of knowledgeableness. Of qualities that one might set to the credit of scientific training there are none. As far as the internal evidence goes, the lecture was conceived and written by someone who had not had the advantage of an intellectual discipline of any kind. I was on the point of illustrating this truth from Snow's way with the term ‘culture’ – a term so important for his purposes. By way of enforcing his testimony that the scientists ‘have their own culture’, he tells us: ‘This culture contains a great deal of argument, usually much more rigorous, and almost always at a higher conceptual level, than literary persons’ arguments'. But the argument of Snow's Rede Lecture is at an immensely lower conceptual level, and incomparably more loose and inconsequent than any I myself, a literary person, should permit in a group discussion I was conducting, let alone a pupil's essay.