700 THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE IN 1894. 



our colleagues laid before us, with admirable clearness, liis manifold 

 investigations of a curious question in history. 



This, then, is the time when, more than ever before, we must yield 

 to the exigericy of participating in the general productions of intellec- 

 tual activity, to the need of universal cultivation of the mind. 



But, on the other hand, the inevitable eflect of this condition of things 

 is that at no time was so desirable a requirement so difficult to till. 

 We are no longer living in a period when eminent minds might believe 

 it iiossible to embrace the whole of human knowledge. Neither do I go 

 so far back as tlie century in which Leonardo da Viuci was at once the 

 representative of poetry, fine arts, mathematical and natural sciences. 

 I merely refer to the times of Cuvier, of Arago, and of Humboldt, when 

 a poet could, without being charged with temerity, have pretensions to 

 scientific attainments and even make a lasting record, as Goethe did, 

 in natural history. 



At the present time the repeated and prodigious conquests of science 

 and the general advance of ideas have imposed entirely novel condi- 

 tions of labor on the human mind. 



The grandeur, variety, and number of the discoveries that have been 

 achieved in the latter half of this century suggest the statement that 

 it offsets all that was done in preceding ages. 



Innumerable ways are now laid open before intellectual activity. On 

 the one hand it will henceforth be impossible to ascribe any limits to 

 the fields of investigation in the sciences of the past, and on the other 

 hand we are now supplied with methods of wonderful accuracy and 

 power for observing and analyzing the most impressive phenomena as 

 well as the most minute manifestations of nature, whose secrets we are 

 thus more and more enabled to penetrate. 



But each discovery evokes further and manifold revelations, and iudi 

 vidua! investigators are overwhelmed in the presence of new horizons 

 that spread out before them. However extensive the faculties may be, 

 the efforts must be confined and action concentrated on a limited field of 

 study, as are those of the plowman working a fertile fallow land of Vast 

 exi)anse. 



How many of the scientific men of our day could fairly assert that 

 they have been able to master in all its recesses the science that they 

 l^ursue? 



We are then confronted by a condition which is apparently bound to 

 grow unavoidably worse and seriously to hamper the soaring of human 

 exertion. 



Should we conclude, as some interpreters of Buffon's saying have 

 done, that genius in the future will be nothing else than long patience? 

 We do not believe it. 



Our common life helps us out of the dilemma, as far as it is possible. 

 It enables us to acquaint ourselves at once with all new attainments 

 and to turn them to advantage. It draws every mind out of the par- 



