iktober ;io, i'Jo;{.] 



SCIENCE. 



561 



harmuii.v with this essential part of the under- 

 taking. 



The aspect which he dislikes is this : If we 

 are to invite the leaders of all special sciences, 

 each to consider the relations of his science 

 to the other departments of knowledge, then 

 we must clearly chop the one totality of 

 knowledge into many special parts. That in- 

 volves at once certain principles of division 

 about which different opinions may exist. 

 We have agreed to recognize 25 different de- 

 partments with 134 sections, and such de- 

 cision involves, of course, at once a certain 

 groui)ing. The sections of the same depart- 

 ment stand nearer together than the sections 

 of different departments, and some of those 

 departments again stand in close relations 

 and thus form larger units. We grouped our 

 25 departments into 7 such chief divisions. 

 Now Professor Dewey says we had no right 

 to do all this, because our classification partly 

 anticipates the work which is to be done by 

 those who are to give the addresses. If each 

 department has from the beginning a definite 

 place on the program, its relations to all 

 other sciences are determined beforehand and 

 it has become superfluous to call in the 

 scholars of the world simply to concur in 

 the committee's ideas concerning the system 

 of knowledge. 



But I might ask, what else ought we to have 

 done { I know very well that instead of the 

 134 sections, we might have been satisfied with 

 half that number or might have indulged in 

 double that number. But whatever number 

 we might have agreed on, it would have re- 

 mained open to the reproach that our decision 

 was arbitrary, and yet we did not see a plan 

 which allowed us to invite the speakers without 

 defining beforehand the sectional field which 

 each was to represent. A certain courage of 

 opinion was then necessary and a certain ad- 

 justment to external conditions was unavoid- 

 able; in every case we consulted a large 

 number of specialists. Quite similar is the 

 question of classification. Just as we had 

 to take the responsibility for the staking out 

 of every section, we had also to decide in 

 favor of a certain grouping if we desired to 

 organize the congress and not simply to bring 



out a helter-skelter performance. Professor 

 Dewey says : " The essential trait of the sci- 

 entific life of to-day is its live-and-let-live 

 character." I agree with that fully. In the 

 regular work in our libraries and laboratories 

 the year round everything depends upon this 

 tlemocratic freedom in which every one goes 

 his own way, never asking what his neighbor 

 is doing. It is that which has made the 

 specialistic sciences of our day as strong as 

 they are. But it has brought about at the 

 same time this extreme tendency to discon- 

 nected specialization with its discouraging 

 lack of unity; this heaping up of informa- 

 tion without an ordered and harmonious view 

 of the world; and if we are going to do what 

 wc aim at, if we want really to satisfy, at 

 least once, the desire for unity, the longing 

 for coordinations, then the hour has come in 

 which we must not yield to this live-and-let- 

 live tendency. It would mean to give up this 

 ideal if we were to start at once without any 

 principle of organization, ordering the sci- 

 ences according to the alphabet, perhaps, in- 

 stead of according to logic. The principles 

 which are sufficient for a directory would un- 

 dermine from the first the monument of sci- 

 entific thought which we hope to see erected 

 through the cooperation of the leaders of 

 science. Therefore, some principle had to be 

 accepted. And just as with number of sec- 

 tions, it may be said here too, that whatever 

 lirinciple could have been chosen would prob- 

 ably have had its defects and would certainly 

 have been open to the criticism that it was a 

 product of individual arbitrary decision. 



A classification which in itself expresses all 

 the practical relations in which sciences stand 

 to each other is of course absolutely impos- 

 sible. Professor Dewey's own science, psy- 

 diology, has relations to philosophy, relations 

 to physiology, and thus to medicine, relations 

 to education and sociology, relations to his- 

 tory and language, relations to religion and 

 law. A program which should try to ar- 

 range the place of psychology- in the classified 

 list in a way that psychology should become 

 the neighbor of all these other sciences is 

 unthinkable. On the other hand, only if we 

 had tried to construct a scheme of such ex- 



