92 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



equal in dignity to the best efforts of the exhibiting countries in all 

 other departments. In this way such a plan had the advantage of 

 justifying through its topic the administrative desire to bring all 

 sciences to the same spot, and at the same time of excluding all par- 

 ticipants but the best scholars: with isolated gatherings or with 

 second-rate men, this subject would have been simply impossible. 



Yet all these halfway external advantages count little compared 

 with the significance and importance of the topic for the inner life of 

 scientific thought of our time. We all felt it was the one topic which 

 the beginning of the twentieth century demanded and which could 

 not be dealt with otherwise than by the combined labors of all nations 

 and of all sciences. The World's Fair was the one great opportunity 

 to make a first effort in this direction; we had no right to miss this 

 opportunity. Thus it was decided to have a congress with the definite 

 purpose of working towards the unity of human knowledge, and with 

 the one mission, in this time of scattered specializing work, of bringing 

 to the consciousness of the world the too-much neglected idea of the 

 unity of truth. To quote from our first tentative programme: " Let 

 the rush of the world's work stop for one moment for us to consider 

 what are the underlying principles, what are their relations to one 

 another and to the whole, what are their values and purposes; in 

 short, let us for once give to the world's sciences a holiday. The work- 

 aday functions are much better fulfilled in separation, when each 

 scholar works in his own laboratory or in his library; but this holiday 

 task of bringing out the underlying unity, this synthetic work, this 

 demands really the cooperation of all, this demands that once at least 

 all sciences come together in one place at one time." 



Yet if our work stands for the unity of knowledge, aims to consider 

 the fundamental conceptions which bind together all the specialistic 

 results, and seeks to inquire into the methods which are common to 

 various fields, all this is after all merely a symptom of the whole spirit 

 of our times. A reaction against the narrowness of mere fact-diggers 

 has set in. A mere heaping up of disconnected, unshaped facts begins 

 to disappoint the world; it is felt too vividly that a mere dictionary of 

 phenomena, of events and laws, makes our knowledge larger but not 

 deeper, makes our life more complex but not more valuable, makes 

 our science more difficult but not more harmonious. Our time longs 

 for a new synthesis and looks towards science no longer merely with 

 a desire for technical prescriptions and new inventions in the interest 

 of comfort and exchange. It waits for knowledge to fulfill its higher 

 mission, it waits for science to satisfy our higher needs for a view 

 of the world which shall give unity to our scattered experience. The 

 indications of this change are visible to every one who observes the 

 gradual turning to philosophical discussion in the most different 

 fields of scientific life. 



