September 28, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



395 



brought out vividly only when its history 

 is being presented, while in the midst of the 

 arduoiis struggle with a single science 

 these profound connections are quite over- 

 looked. It is a fact that science is, from an 

 important point of view, a single body of 

 knowledge, whose different parts determine 

 each other mutually, though this mutual 

 influence is often overlooked. "When the 

 historian comes forward with the picture 

 of a past age, such as Gompertz has 

 given us in his ' Grieschische Denker,' we 

 recognize these interconnections and see 

 that what has been done in one line has been 

 now advanced because of the achievement 

 of another, and now has been thwarted by 

 the backwardness in still another. The 

 Weltanshauung of any age is at once the re- 

 sult of all its scientific achievements and a 

 cause of each, by itself. We can not finally 

 understand any one without the comprehen- 

 sion of the whole, and it is the whole which 

 is more comprehensible than any single sci- 

 ence. It is a great deal easier to present the 

 problem of evolution in the world as a whole 

 than it is in the specific instance. It is 

 easier to recognize the problem of matter, 

 as it is presented in the book entitled ' The 

 New Knowledge,' than it is to present the 

 specific problem with which the physicist or 

 chemist must wrestle. It may be a Hegel- 

 ism, but it is good educational doctrine 

 that the whole is more concrete than the 

 part. A student who has first followed out 

 the results of scientific evolution through 

 the preceding centuries in their intercon- 

 nection with each other, and meets then the 

 problems of modern science as the growing 

 points of the past, who understands some- 

 what what the controlling meanings are 

 behind scientific concepts and terminology, 

 who feels that he is entering into a battle 

 that is going on, whose field he has surveyed 

 before he has lost himself in the particular 

 brigade, such a student is bound to enter 

 into his study with both a comprehension 



and an interest which his brother will lack 

 — his brother who must get the parts before 

 he can have an inkling of the whole. 



I am aware that, in the minds of a great 

 many of you, there has arisen a spirit of 

 contradiction to what has been presented, a 

 spirit of contradiction which arises out of 

 the very competency and exactness of the 

 scientist. Such a type of instruction as 

 that suggested above is felt to be superficial, 

 inexact, and bound to be misleading to the 

 person who is not scientifically trained. It 

 would be information in a word, and the 

 scientist does not hold it to be his position 

 to impart information, nor can he promise 

 any valuable educational result from a 

 course whose content is one of information. 



I wish to bring out the point because it 

 seems to me fundamental to the question 

 which has been broached. We need, in the 

 first place, a definition of what information 

 is and what knowledge is, as distinguished 

 from it. I would suggest toward such a 

 definition that nothing is information which 

 helps any one to understand better a ques- 

 tion he is trying to answer, a problem he is 

 trying to solve. Whatever bridges over a 

 gap in a student's mind, enabling him to 

 present concretely what otherwise would 

 have been an abstract symbol, is knowledge 

 and not mere information. Whatever is 

 stored up, without immediate need, for 

 some later occasion, for display or to pass 

 examinations is mere information, and has 

 no enduring place in the mind. From this 

 standpoint nothing is superficial or inexact 

 which gives concreteness and meaning to 

 the problem before the student. Truth is 

 a relative thing. We none of us have 

 exact knowledge in the sense that our 

 knowledge is exhaustive, and we none of 

 us know the full import of what we do 

 grasp. There can be no objection to the 

 young student having a broad if seem- 

 ingly superficial view of the scientific 

 world, if it helps him to approach with 



