The view I took was that, if at school, you learned Ancient Greek, the best you can possibly do is to be as good as other people who already learned it. You’re merely going back; at best, you stay where we are. There’s nothing new about that at all. And that would be true of many subjects. So I think there’s a total fascination in advancing human knowledge and seeing what can be done with it.
So I’ve always taken that — I would take it now. I would say, people who choose to study Greek languages or any other kind of languages, already people know how to speak those languages — nothing new. Whatever language you learn, there are people who speak it perfectly, so you’re just trying to do as well as they do — nothing novel or challenging, except they’re just memory.
And many subjects in the arts field are a bit like that — even law. Mainly, what you do in law is to learn the principles that previous lawyers have established. They say, “Under these circumstances, this is the judgment that should be made.” So you learn from them to try and make these decisions which they know how to make. There’s nothing novel, nothing challenging, in my view, really, about that. So I’m rather a diehard at science in that sense.