Two Wings of the Bird of Knowledge: 'Abdu'l-Bahá at Stanford

Stanford University in 1912 was twenty-one years old. Its founder, Leland Stanford, had built it in memory of his son. Its first president, David Starr Jordan, had welcomed ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to the campus on the morning of the seventh of October, and the assembly hall was full of students, faculty, and visitors from the surrounding peninsula.

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The Master spoke without notes. He took as His subject the relation between two kinds of knowledge.

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> Natural philosophy seeks knowledge of physical verities and > explains material phenomena, whereas divine philosophy deals > with ideal verities and phenomena of the spirit.

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Both, He said, are real disciplines. Both are necessary. The problem of the modern world — the problem the great research universities were already beginning to feel — was not that science had advanced too far. It was that the corresponding discipline of the spirit had not advanced with it. *Material civilization* had made remarkable progress. *Ideal virtues* — the moral refinement, the spiritual insight, the inward cultivation of the human being — had been neglected.

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The bird of human progress, in the metaphor He used elsewhere on the journey, has two wings. Science is one. Religion is the other. Cut off one and the bird does not merely fly more slowly; it falls.

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He did not deliver this as a rebuke to the university. The university was, in a real sense, the place He had come to address because the university was the institution most responsible for shaping the next generation’s relation to both kinds of knowledge. He encouraged the students to see their study of physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics as a sacred work — but to take care that their inner cultivation, the philosophy of the spirit, kept pace with what their laboratories were teaching them.

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The talk landed in a sympathetic room. Stanford’s Jordan was himself a peace advocate; he had hosted the Master with real warmth. Years later, students who had heard the address would say that the wing-and-wing image had stayed with them through careers in the laboratories and the seminaries of the next half- century.

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