IN his final book and his first full-length original title since Full House in 1996, the eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould offers a surprising and nuanced study of the complex relationship between our two great ways of knowing: science and the humanities, twin realms of knowledge that have been divided against each other for far too long. In building his case, Gould shows why the common assumption of an inescapable conflict between science and the humanities is false, mounts a spirited rebuttal to the ideas that his intellectual rival E. O. Wilson set forth inhis book Consilience, and explains why the pursuit of knowledge must always operate upon the bedrock of nature's randomness. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox is a controversial "discourse, rich with facts and observations gathered by one of the most erudite minds of our time.

 A Note to the Reader

 Preface: Introducing the Protagonists

 I. THE RITE AND RIGHTS OF A SEPARATING

 SPRING

 1. Newton's Light

 2. Scientific "World-Making" and Critical Braking

 3. So Noble an Hecatombe: The Weight of Humanism

 4. The Mandate of Magister Medice: The Threat of

 Suppression

II. FROM PARADOXICAL AGES OF BACON TO

 SWIFT SWEETNESS AND LIGHT

 5. The Dynasty of Dichotomy

 6. Reintegration in Triumphant Maturity

 7. Sweetness and Light as Tough and Healing Truth

III. A SAGA OF PLLIRIBHS AND UNUM:

The Power and Meaning of True Consilience

 8. The Fusions of Unum and the Benefits of Pluribus

 9. The False Path of Reductionism and the Consilience of

Equal Regard

Epilog: A Closing Tale of Addition to Adagia by Erasure

of Erasmus

Index