18 HISTORICAL SCIENCE 



suspect all generalization of falseness, if they cannot be weaned 

 from the provincial spirit of petty farmers, the outlook is bad enough, 

 synthesis is indefinitely postponed. Synthesis is not possible without 

 specialization. The special student must always garner, sift, verify. 

 Minute circumstance must be examined along with great circum- 

 stance, all the background as well as the foreground of the picture 

 studied, every part of human endeavor held separately under 

 scrutiny until its individual qualities and particular relations with 

 the rest of the human story stand clearly revealed; and this is, of 

 necessity, the work of hundreds of minds, not of one mind. There is 

 labor enough and honor enough to go around, and the specialist 

 who puts first-rate gifts into his task, though he be less read, will not 

 in the long estimate of literature earn less distinction than the general 

 historian. It is a question of the division and cooperation of labor: 

 butMt is more; it is also a question of the spirit in which the labor is 

 done, the public spirit that animates it, the general aim and con- 

 ception that underlies and inspires it. 



As a university teacher I cannot help thinking that the govern- 

 ment of the matter is largely in the hands of the professors of history 

 in our schools of higher training. The modern crop of specialists is 

 theirs : they can plant and reap after a different kind if they choose. 

 I am convinced that the errors and narrownesses of specialization are 

 chiefly due to vicious methods and mistaken objects in the training 

 of advanced students of history in the universities. In the first place, 

 if I may speak from the experience of our American universities, 

 students are put to tasks of special investigation before they are 

 sufficiently grounded in general history and in the larger aspects of 

 the history of the age or nation of which they are set to elaborate a 

 part. They discover too many things that are already known and too 

 many things which are not true, at any rate, in the crude and dis- 

 torted shape in which they advance them. Other universities may 

 be happier than ours in their material, in the previous training of the 

 men of whom they try to make investigators; but even when the 

 earlier instruction of their pupils has 'been more nearly adequate and 

 better suited to what is to follow, the training they add is not, I take 

 the liberty of saying, that which is likely to produce history, but only 

 that which is likely to produce doctors' theses. The students in 

 their seminars are encouraged, if they are not taught, to prefer the 

 part to the whole, the detail to the spirit, like chemists who should 

 prefer the individual reactions of their experiments to the laws 

 which they illustrate. 



I should think the mischievous mistake easy enough of correction. 

 It is quite possible to habituate students to a point of view, and to 

 do so is often, I daresay, the best part of their preparation. When 

 they come to the advanced stage of their training, at which they are 



