THE THREE DIVISIONS OF PRACTICAL SCIENCES 117 



of the lawyer or of the minister, of the diplomat or of the teacher, 

 contains elements of an art cannot be doubted. They all need not 

 only knowledge, but a certain instinct and power and skill, and their 

 schooling thus demands a training and discipline through imitation 

 which cannot be substituted by mere learning. Yet when it comes to 

 the classification of sciences, it seems very doubtful whether practical 

 sciences have to be acknowledged as special divisions, inasmuch as 

 the factor of art must have been eliminated at the moment they are 

 presented as sciences. The auscultation of the physician certainly 

 demands skill and training, yet this practical activity itself does not 

 enter into the science of medicine as presented in medical writings. 

 As soon as the physician begins to deal with it scientifically, he 

 needs, as does any scholar, not the stethoscope, but the pen. He 

 must formulate judgments; and as soon as he simply describes and 

 analyzes and explains and interprets his stethoscopic experiences, 

 his statements become a system of theoretical ideas. 



We can say in general that the science of medicine or of engineering, 

 of jurisprudence or of education, contains, as science, no element of art, 

 but merely theoretical judgments which, as such, can find their place 

 somewhere in the complete systems of the theoretical sciences. If the 

 physician describes a disease, its symptoms, the means of examining 

 them, the remedies, their therapeutical effects, and the prophylaxis, 

 in short, everything which the physician needs for his art, he does not 

 record anything which would not belong to an ideally complete de- 

 scription and explanation of the processes in the human body. In the 

 same way it can be said that if the engineer characterizes the con- 

 ditions under which an iron bridge will be safe, it is evident that he 

 cannot introduce any facts which would not find their logical place in 

 an ideally complete description of the properties of inorganic nature; 

 and finally, the same is true for the statements of the politician, the 

 jurist, the pedagogue, or the minister. Whatever is said about their 

 art is a theoretical judgment which connects facts of the ideally 

 complete system of theoretical science; in their case the facts of 

 course belong in first line to the realm of the psychological, his- 

 torical, and normative sciences. There never has been or can be 

 practical advice in the form of words which is not in principle a state- 

 ment of facts which belong to the absolute totality of theoretical 

 knowledge. Seen from this point of view, it is evident that all our 

 knowledge is fundamentally theoretical, and that the conception of 

 practical knowledge is logically unprecise. 



But the opposite point of view might also be taken. It might be 

 said that after all every kind of knowledge is practical, and our own 

 deduction of the meaning of science might be said to suggest such 

 interpretation. We acknowledged at the outset that the so-called 

 theoretical knowledge is by no means a passive mirror-picture of an 



