HERBERT SPENCER H5 



however desirable it may be, has become impossible. Science is 

 becoming vaster every day and men do not seem to grow bigger. 

 Indeed they seem smaller than they were in the past. There are 

 no more Aristotles, and if one of these giants were to come back, 

 the immensity of accumulated knowledge would make him feel 

 like a pigmy. However narrow be the held one has chosen, one 

 finds it impossible to encompass and to exhaust it. How then can 

 it be possible to know the whole of science?" Their argument 

 seems peremptory. Yet it is a fallacy based on the assumption that 

 the whole of science is greater than any one of its parts. This is 

 wrong, for when the parts and the whole are infinite, they are of 

 equal size. It is just as difficult to know the history of France, or 

 say the history of Paris, as the history of the world, because both 

 undertakings are equally endless. 



It is true that science is becoming more complex every day, but 

 it is also becoming simpler and more harmonious in proportion 

 as synthetic knowledge increases, that is, as more general rela- 

 tions are discovered. It is this very fact which makes encyclopedic 

 efforts still possible. In some respects one might even say that such 

 efforts are easier now than they were before, because the very 

 progress of science enables one to contemplate its development 

 from a higher point of view. The synthetic philosopher who has 

 taken the pains to understand the most difficult parts of science 

 and to climb, so to say, to its summit, enjoys the same advantage 

 as a traveller who can view a whole country from the top of a 

 mountain. No longer do the fantastically shaped hills, the crooked 

 valleys, the deep and mysterious forests delude him; he sees them 

 all from above in their correct relations. Of course he does not 

 know every plant of every nook as does the plant-hunter, nor 

 every insect as the zoologist, nor every stone of the rocks as the 

 prospector. His knowledge is different. This suggests another 

 reason for the possibility of encyclopedic knowledge. Such knowl- 

 edge indeed is not necessarily vaster than any specialized 

 knowledge, because he who undertakes to master it does not 

 attempt to know, or at least to store in his memory, facts of the 



