342 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tions sharply divided into grinds and drones; we have our professions 

 filled with men who can do much within the little cell of their spe- 

 ciality, but who are wholly ineffectual in the great world of human 

 interests; we have a rich and powerful civilization that is breeding 

 pitifully few great leaders of human thought. 



There are only two kinds of simon-pure specialists allowable: the 

 genius who has such a volume of treasure to bestow that every minute 

 of his life should be devoted to dispensing it; and the man who is 

 given the power of concentrated digging and who is vouchsafed no 

 other ability. The latter will grub out the absolutely essential minutiae 

 without which learning can not advance. The former will call down 

 from heaven those divine fires which are to keep civilization aflame. 

 The number of these specialists, however, is, in comparison with the 

 university population, infinitesimal; and the great mass of educated 

 men need, not concentration, but expansion, an intellectual highway, not 

 a groove. Of course, every man who hopes to amount to anything must 

 specialize in some degree. He must have a vocation and must strive 

 towards the highest achievement in that specialty. But he must have, 

 in addition, avocations to broaden and harmonize and sweeten him ; and 

 even his vocation must be founded upon such a knowledge of men and 

 of life that — at least before his fortieth year — he could take up any 

 other vocation and succeed in that. 



We specialize our grammar-school children in bank discount and 

 leave them to life-long ignorance of what mathematics really means. 

 We specialize our high-school youth in battles and sieges and permit 

 them to remain ignorant of the great historic development, through 

 industry and commerce, of mankind. We specialize our college youth 

 in haphazard electives, each taught by a specialist and most of them 

 unrelated to all the others, and turn that youth out of college a 

 veritable ignoramus in regard to himself and to those other selves with 

 whom his whole subsequent life will be concerned. We send out from 

 our schools of applied science many a man competent to put up a 

 bridge, but not competent to put up a good front among his equals, 

 wise in the handling of formulae, but ignorant in the handling of men, 

 full of little knacks and methods of calculation, but empty of that 

 tact and that intellectual skill which are absolutely essential to pro- 

 fessional success. 



The college teaching of literature, for example, is being dried and 

 mummified by specialists until the study of human thought has become 

 a sort of subterranean, philological treadmill, with never a glimpse 

 into the wide, high, lasting things to which literature should lead. 

 College philosophy is, as a rule, but a comparative anatomy of dead 

 and gone systems, never, as it should be, an inspiration to wisdom, 

 leading to the love of and search for truth. And how seldom is the 



