THE OBJECTIONS TO THE PLAN 95 



reluctance lies in the specializing tendencies of our time. Those 

 who devote all their working energy as loyal sons of our analyzing 

 period of science to the minute detail of research come easily into the 

 habit of a nervous fear with regard to any wider general outlook. The 

 man of research sees too often how ignorance hides itself behind gen- 

 eralities. He knows too well how much easier it is to formulate vague 

 generalities than to contribute a new fact to human knowledge, and 

 how often untrained youngsters succeed with popular text-books 

 which are rightly forgotten the next day. Methodical science must 

 thus almost encourage this aversion to any deviation from the path 

 of painstaking specialistic labor. Then, of course, it seems almost 

 a scientific duty to declare war against an undertaking which ex- 

 plicitly asks everywhere for the wide perspectives and the last prin- 

 ciples, and does not aim at adding at this moment to the mere treasury 

 of information. 



But such a view is utterly one-sided, and to fight against such one- 

 sidedness and to overcome the specializing narrowness of the scat- 

 tered sciences was the one central idea of the plan. If there existed 

 no scholars who despise the philosophizing connection, there would 

 have hardly been any need for this whole undertaking; but to yield 

 to such philosophy-phobia means to declare the analytic movement 

 of science permanent, and to postpone a synthetic movement in- 

 definitely. Our time has just to emphasize, and the leaders of thought 

 daily emphasize it more, that a mere heaping up of information can 

 be merely a preparation for knowledge, and that the final aim is 

 a Weltanschauung, a unified view of the whole of reality. All that 

 our Congress had to secure was thus merely that the generalizing dis- 

 cussion of principles should not be left to men who generalized be- 

 cause they lacked the substantial knowledge which is necessary to 

 specialize. The thinkers we needed were those who through special- 

 istic work were themselves led to a point where the discussion of gen- 

 eral principles becomes unavoidable. Our plan was by no means 

 antagonistic to the patient labors of analysis; the aim was merely to 

 overcome its one-sidedness and to stimulate the synthesis as a neces- 

 sary supplement. 



But the objections against a generalizing plan were not confined to 

 the mistaken fear that we sought to antagonize the productive work 

 of the specialist. They not seldom took the form of a general aver- 

 sion to the logical side of the ground-plan. It was often said that such 

 a scheme has after all interest only for the logician, for whom science 

 as such is an object of study, and who must thus indeed classify the 

 sciences and determine their logical relation. The real scientist, it 

 was said, does not care for such methodological operations, and should 

 be suspicious from the first of such philosophical high-handedness. 

 The scientist cannot forget how often in the history of civilization 



