SPECIALIZATION IN SCIENCE. 27 



ed upon. It is not necessary to Lave always at hand, at every moment 

 of life, all the details of knowledge which one has once made his own, 

 any more than it is to put what one learns to immediate practical 

 use ; if it were so, we should be at a loss to determine the value of the 

 gymnasial training w^hich demands the best of the time and the best of 

 the strength of our youth. This principle, and the danger of promot- 

 ing a one-sided practical training, in specialties, as opposed to general 

 culture and more ideal views of life, were entirely lost sight of when 

 the Imperial Government a few years ago made the far-reaching step 

 in the direction — which was itself opposed from the practical side — of 

 curtailing the required preparatory scientific instruction of physicians. 



From this point of view the words receive a new prominence, which 

 State Minister Yon Gossler recently spoke in welcoming the fifty-ninth 

 meeting of the German Naturalists and Physicians to Berlin. " The 

 number of those," he said, " who have accurately mastered most of 

 the branches of science seems to be growing less, and the question 

 whether another mind will ever appear who will be able to ^Tite a 

 ' Cosmos ' for his time is becoming harder to answer. And yet the 

 conviction remains inextinguishable that there is a ' Cosmos ' and there 

 must be a ' Cosmos.' It is certainly necessary that an incessant ac- 

 cumulation of scientifically ascertained facts shall continue to go on, 

 whether by the way of logical comparison or by the aid of the imagi- 

 nation, and lead to the acquisition of new theories and new concep- 

 tions. But the other principle is just as valid, that the essential 

 nature and the law of what is can not be apprehended without a har- 

 monious intimate association of the individual sciences ; and the per- 

 ception is perhaps constantly becoming more clear that the separation 

 among the branches of knowledge has its ultimate reason in the limi- 

 tations and finitude of human power. Where we formerly thought 

 we were in the presence of a number of forces and unknown causes, 

 we now try to discern one force in different forms of manifestation ; 

 and we can not exclude the thought that the great progress that can 

 be shown in single branches of science, is in many respects a kind of 

 induction effect of that which is made in other branches." 



These are golden words, which might well be applied by the state 

 in the training of its citizens — particularly in the circle of the higher 

 schools. Is it not by specializing carried to an extreme that our gym- 

 nasial teachers have devoted themselves to the ancient languages, till 

 they are hardly competent to do any better work than to carry youth 

 through these, their specialties during nine years, without their pupils 

 giving a glance at the all-forming spirit of Nature around them? Let 

 me be permitted to add to Minister Yon Gossler's expressions a word 

 of protest against this most untimely and damaging of all specializing, 

 in favor of the sciences, which are treated by the schools in so step- 

 motherly a way. There is an impression still current that scientific 

 training is mischievous to the "peaceful citizen"; that it fits him to 



