90 THE SCIENTIFIC PLAN OF THE CONGRESS 



technical science? Does not the biologist also prepare the achievements 

 of modern medicine, does not the mathematician play his most impor- 

 tant r61e in our mastery over stubborn nature, do we not need lan- 

 guage for our social intercourse, and law and religion for our practical 

 social improvement? Yes, is there any science which has not directly 

 or indirectly something to contribute to the practical development of 

 the modern man and his civilization? All this is true, and yet the 

 perspective of this truth, too, appears at once utterly distorted if we 

 take the standpoint of science itself. The one end of knowledge is to 

 reach the truth. The belief in the absolute value of truth gives to it 

 meaning and significance. This value remains the controlling influ- 

 ence even where the problem to be solved is itself a practical one, and 

 the spirit of science remains thus essentially theoretical even in the 

 so-called applied sciences. But incomparably more intense in that 

 respect is the spirit of all theoretical disciplines. Philosophy and 

 mathematics, history and philology, chemistry and biology, astro- 

 nomy and geology, may be and ought to be helpful to practical 

 civilization everywhere; and every step forward which they take 

 will be an advance for man's practical life too. And yet their real 

 meaning never lies in their technical by-product. It is not the 

 scholar who peers in the direction of practical use who is most loyal 

 to the deepest demand of scholarship, and every relation to prac- 

 tical achievement is more or less accidental or even artificial for 

 the real life interests of productive scholarship. 



But if the contrast between his real intention and his social tech- 

 nical successes may not appear striking to the physicist or chemist, 

 it would appear at least embarrassing to the scholars in many other 

 departments and directly bewildering to not a few. Perhaps two 

 thirds of the sciences to which the best thinkers of our time are faith- 

 fully devoted would then be grouped together and relegated to a 

 distant corner, their only practical technical function would be to 

 contribute material to the education of the cultured man. For what 

 else do we study Sanscrit or medieval history or epistemology? And 

 finally even the uniform topic of practical use would not have 

 brought the different sciences nearer to each other; the Congress 

 would still have remained a budget of disconnected records of scholar- 

 ship. If the practical side of the Exposition was to suggest anything, 

 it should then not be more than an appeal not to overlook the impor- 

 tance of the applied sciences which too often play the r61e of a mere 

 appendix to the system of knowledge. The logical one-sidedness 

 which considers practical needs as below the dignity of pure science 

 was indeed to be excluded, but to choose practical service as the one 

 controlling topic would be far more anti-scientific. 



