120 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE 



improvement of fisheries as an application of 

 this. The only hope of getting towards an under- 

 standing of such a subject is through the com- 

 bined efforts of chemist and physicist, botanist 

 and zoologist, meteorologist and geographer. 



Worthy of note in this connection is the 

 unthought-out objection which some ultra-con- 

 servative educationists bring against geography, 

 that it is not a well-defined single science, but a 

 combination of many sciences for a particular 

 purpose. The description is correct that Geog- 

 raphy is a circle cutting many other circles, but 

 this is precisely its peculiar scientific merit and 

 virtue, that it expresses a unification or synthesis 

 of complementary disciplines. 



Our intellectual outlook on the world depends 

 on our scientific culture, and its value must vary 

 with the all-roundness and with the correlation 

 of different scientific disciplines. Just as it takes 

 many different rays of light to make sunshine, so 

 it takes many different sciences to give that 

 synthetic view which we call sanity. Thus we 

 stand in unwearying admiration before Goethe 

 because his outlook was at once physical and 

 biological, geographic and psychic. 



It is idle to pretend that the outlook on the 

 order of nature which becomes habitual to the 

 student of mechanics has nothing to gain from, 

 let us say, the very different impressions that 



