98 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



ated ambitions should we have been really guilty of anticipating a 

 part of that which the specialistic scholars were to tell us. The Con- 

 gress had to leave it to the invited participants to discuss the totality 

 of relations which practically exist between their fields and others, 

 and the organizers confined themselves to that minimum of classifica- 

 tion which just indicates the pure logical relations, a minimum which 

 every editor of encyclopedic work would be asked to initiate without 

 awakening suspicions of interference with the ideas of his contributors. 



The only justified demand which could be met was that a system 

 of division and classification should be proposed which should give 

 fair play to every existing scientific tendency. The minimum of classi- 

 fication was to be combined with the maximum of freedom, and to 

 secure that a careful consideration of principles was indeed necessary. 

 To bring logical order into the sciences which stand out clearly with 

 traditional rights is not difficult; but the chances are too great that 

 certain tendencies of thought might fail to find recognition or might 

 be suppressed by scientific prejudice. Any serious omission would 

 indeed have necessarily inhibited the freedom of expression. To 

 secure thus the greatest inner fullness of the programme, seemed in- 

 deed the most important task in the elaboration of the ground-plan. 

 The fears that we might offer empty generalization instead of schol- 

 arly facts, or that we might simply heap up encyclopedic information 

 instead of gaining wide perspectives, or that we might interfere with 

 the living connections of sciences by the logical demarcation lines, or 

 that we might disturb the scholar in his freedom by determining 

 beforehand his place in the classification, all these fears and objec- 

 tions, which were repeatedly raised when the plan was first proposed, 

 seemed indeed unimportant compared with the fear that the pro- 

 gramme might be unable to include all scientific tendencies of the 

 time. 



That would have been, indeed, the one fundamental mistake, as the 

 whole Congress work was planned in the service of the great synthetic 

 movement which pervades the intellectual life of to-day. The under- 

 taking would be useless and even hindering if it were not just the newer 

 and deeper tendencies that came to most complete expression in it. 

 Everything depended, therefore, upon the fullest possible representa- 

 tion of scientific endeavors in the plan. But no one can become aware 

 of this manifoldness and of the logical relations who does not go back to 

 the ultimate principles of the human search for truth. We have, there- 

 fore, to enter now into a full discussion of the principles which have 

 controlled the classification and subdivision of the whole work. The 

 discussion is necessarily in its essence a philosophical one, as it was 

 earlier made plain that philosophy must lay out the plan, while in the 

 realization of the plan through concrete work the scientist alone, and 

 not the logician, has to speak. Yet here again it may be said that 



