Part 27 (1/2)

Yet if our work stands for the unity of knowledge, aims to consider the fundamental conceptions which bind together all the specialistic results, and seeks to inquire into the methods which are common to various fields, all this is after all merely a symptom of the whole spirit of our times. A reaction against the narrowness of mere fact-diggers has set in. A mere heaping up of disconnected, unshaped facts begins to disappoint the world; it is felt too vividly that a mere dictionary of phenomena, of events and laws, makes our knowledge larger but not deeper, makes our life more complex but not more valuable, makes our science more difficult but not more harmonious. Our time longs for a new synthesis and looks towards science no longer merely with a desire for technical prescriptions and new inventions in the interest of comfort and exchange. It waits for knowledge to fulfill its higher mission, it waits for science to satisfy our higher needs for a view of the world which shall give unity to our scattered experience. The indications of this change are visible to every one who observes the gradual turning to philosophical discussion in the most different fields of scientific life.

When after the first third of the nineteenth century the great philosophic movement which found its climax in Hegelianism came to disaster in consequence of its absurd neglect of hard solid facts, the era of naturalism began its triumph with contempt for all philosophy and for all deeper unity. Idealism and philosophy were stigmatized as the enemies of true science and natural science had its great day. The rapid progress of physics and chemistry fascinated the world and produced modern technique; the sciences of life, physiology, biology, medicine, followed; and the scientific method was carried over from body to mind, and gave us at the end of the nineteenth century modern psychology and sociology. The lifeless and the living, the physical and the mental, the individual and the social, all had been conquered by a.n.a.lytical methods.

But just when the climax was reached and all had been a.n.a.lyzed and explained, the time was ripe for disillusion, and the lack of deeper unity began to be felt with alarm in every quarter. For seventy years there had been nowhere so much philosophizing going on as suddenly sprung up among the scientists of the last decade. The physicists and the mathematicians, the chemists and the biologists, the geologists and the astronomers, and, on the other side, the historians and the economists, the psychologists and the sociologists, the jurists and the theologians--all suddenly found themselves again in the midst of discussions on fundamental principles and methods, on general categories and conditions of knowledge, in short, in the midst of the despised philosophy. And with those discussions has come the demand for correlation. Everywhere have arisen leaders who have brought unconnected sciences together and emphasized the unity of large divisions. The time seems to have come again when the wave of naturalism and realism is ebbing, and a new idealistic philosophical tide is swelling, just as they have always alternated in the civilization of two thousand years.

No one dreams, of course, that the great synthetic apperception, for which our modern time seems ripe, will come through the delivery of some hundred addresses, or the discussions of some hundred audiences. An ultimate unity demands the gigantic thought of a single genius, and the work of the many can, after all, be merely the preparation for the final work of the one. And yet history shows that the one will never come if the many have not done their share. What is needed is to fill the sciences of our time with the growing consciousness of belonging together, with the longing for fundamental principles, with the conviction that the desire for correlation is not the fancy of dreamers, but the immediate need of the leaders of thought. And in this preparatory work the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science seemed indeed called for an important part when it was committed to this topic of correlation.

To call the scholars of the world together for concerted action towards the correlation of knowledge meant, of course, first of all, to work out a detailed programme, and to select the best authorities for every special part of the whole scheme. Nothing could be left to chance methods and to casual contributions. The preparation needed the same administrative strictness which would be demanded for an encyclopedia, and the same scholarly thoroughness which would be demanded for the most scientific research. A plan was to be devised in which every possible striving for truth would find its place, and in which every section would have its definite position in the system. And such a ground-plan given, topics were to be a.s.signed to every department and sub-department, the treatment of which would bring out the fundamental principles and the inner relations in such a way that the papers would finally form a close-woven intellectual fabric. There would be plenty of room for a retrospective glance at the historical development of the sciences and plenty of room for emphasis on their practical achievements; but the central place would always belong to the effort towards unity and internal harmonization.

We thus divided human knowledge into large parts, and the parts into divisions, and the divisions into departments, and the departments into sections. As the topic of the general divisions--we proposed seven of them--it was decided to discuss the Unity of the whole field. As topic for the departments--we had twenty-four of them--the addresses were to discuss the fundamental Conceptions and Methods and the Progress during the last century; and in the sections, finally--our plan provided for one hundred and twenty-eight of them--the topics were in every one the Relation of the special branch to other branches, and those most important Present Problems which are essential for the deeper principles of the special field. In this way the ground-plan itself suggested the unity of the practically separated sciences; and, moreover, our plan provided from the first that this logical relation should express itself externally in the time order of the work. We were to begin with the meetings of the large divisions, the meetings of the departments were to follow, and the meetings of the sections and their ramifications would follow the departmental gatherings.

3. _The Objections to the Plan_

It was evident that even the most modest success of that gigantic undertaking depended upon the right choice of speakers, upon the value of the ground-plan, and upon many external conditions; thus no one was in doubt as to the difficulty in realizing such a scheme. Yet there were from the scholarly side itself objections to the principles involved, objections which might hold even if those other conditions were successfully met. The most immediate reason for reluctance lies in the specializing tendencies of our time. Those who devote all their working energy as loyal sons of our a.n.a.lyzing period of science to the minute detail of research come easily into the habit of a nervous fear with regard to any wider general outlook. The man of research sees too often how ignorance hides itself behind generalities. He knows too well how much easier it is to formulate vague generalities than to contribute a new fact to human knowledge, and how often untrained youngsters succeed with popular text-books which are rightly forgotten the next day.

Methodical science must thus almost encourage this aversion to any deviation from the path of painstaking specialistic labor. Then, of course, it seems almost a scientific duty to declare war against an undertaking which explicitly asks everywhere for the wide perspectives and the last principles, and does not aim at adding at this moment to the mere treasury of information.

But such a view is utterly one-sided, and to fight against such one-sidedness and to overcome the specializing narrowness of the scattered sciences was the one central idea of the plan. If there existed no scholars who despise the philosophizing connection, there would have hardly been any need for this whole undertaking; but to yield to such philosophy-phobia means to declare the a.n.a.lytic movement of science permanent, and to postpone a synthetic movement indefinitely.

Our time has just to emphasize, and the leaders of thought daily emphasize it more, that a mere heaping up of information can be merely a preparation for knowledge, and that the final aim is a _Weltanschauung_, a unified view of the whole of reality. All that our Congress had to secure was thus merely that the generalizing discussion of principles should not be left to men who generalized because they lacked the substantial knowledge which is necessary to specialize. The thinkers we needed were those who through specialistic work were themselves led to a point where the discussion of general principles becomes unavoidable.

Our plan was by no means antagonistic to the patient labors of a.n.a.lysis; the aim was merely to overcome its one-sidedness and to stimulate the synthesis as a necessary supplement.

But the objections against a generalizing plan were not confined to the mistaken fear that we sought to antagonize the productive work of the specialist. They not seldom took the form of a general aversion to the logical side of the ground-plan. It was often said that such a scheme has after all interest only for the logician, for whom science as such is an object of study, and who must thus indeed cla.s.sify the sciences and determine their logical relation. The real scientist, it was said, does not care for such methodological operations, and should be suspicious from the first of such philosophical high-handedness. The scientist cannot forget how often in the history of civilization science was the loser when it trusted its problems to the metaphysical thinker who subst.i.tuted his lofty speculations for the hard work of the investigator. The true scholar will thus not only object to generalizing ”commonplaces” as against solid information, but he will object as well to logical demarcation lines and systematization as against the practical scientific work which does not want to be hampered by such philosophical subtleties. Yet all these fears and suspicions were still more mistaken.

Nothing was further from our intentions than a subst.i.tution of metaphysics for concrete science. It was not by chance that we took such pains to find the best specialists for every section. No one was invited to enter into logical discussions and to consider the relations of science merely from a dialectic point of view. The topic was everywhere the whole living manifoldness of actual relations, and the logician had nothing else to do than to prepare the programme. The outlines of the programme demanded, of course, a certain logical scheme. If hundreds of sciences are to take part, they have to be grouped somehow, if a merely alphabetical order is not adopted; and even if we were to proceed alphabetically, we should have to decide beforehand what part of knowledge is to be recognized as a special science. But the logical order of the ground-plan refers, of course, merely to the simple relation of coordination, subordination, and superordination, and the logician is satisfied with such a cla.s.sification. But the endless variety of internal relations is no longer to be dealt with from the point of view of mere logic. We may work out the ground-plan in such a way that we understand that logically zoology is coordinated to botany and subordinated to mechanics and superordinated to ichthyology; but this minimum of determination gives, of course, not even a hint of that world of relations which exists from the standpoint of the biologist between the science of zoology and the science of botany, or between the biological and the mechanical studies. To discuss these relations of real scientific life is the work of the biologist and not at all of the logician.

The foregoing answers also at once an objection which might seem more justified at the first glance. It has been said that we were undertaking the work of bringing about a synthesis of scientific endeavors, and that we yet had that synthesis already completed in the programme on which the work was to be based. The scholars to be invited would be bound by the programme, and would therefore have no other possibility than to say with more words what the programme had settled beforehand. The whole effort would then seem determined from the start by the arbitrariness of the proposed ground-plan. Now it cannot be denied indeed that a certain factor of arbitrariness has to enter into a programme. We have already referred to the fact that some one must decide beforehand what fraction of science is to be acknowledged as a self-dependent discipline. If a biologist were to work out the scheme, he might decide that the whole of philosophy was just one science; while the philosopher might claim a large number of sections for logic and ethics and philosophy of religion, and so on. And the philosopher, on the other hand, might treat the whole of medicine as one part in itself, while the physician might hold that even otology has to be separated from rhinology. A certain subjectivity of standpoint is unavoidable, and we know very well that instead of the one hundred and twenty-eight sections of our programme we might have been satisfied with half that number or might have indulged in double that number. And yet there was no possible plan which would have 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 sometimes also a certain adjustment to external conditions.

Quite similar was the question of cla.s.sification. 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 haphazard results. The principles which are sufficient for a mere directory would never allow the shaping of a programme which can be the basis for synthetic work. Even a university catalogue begins with a certain cla.s.sification, and yet no one fancies that such catalogue grouping inhibits the freedom of the university lecturer. It is easy to say, as has been said, that the essential trait of the scientific life of to-day is its live-and-let-live character. Certainly it is. In the regular work in our libraries and laboratories the year round, everything depends upon this democratic freedom in which every one goes his own way, hardly 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 unrelated specialization with its discouraging lack of unity; this heaping up of information without an outer harmonious view of the world; and if we were really at least once to satisfy the desire for unity, then we had not the right to yield fully to this live-and-let-live tendency. Therefore some principle of grouping had to be accepted, and whatever principle had been chosen, it would certainly have been open to the criticism that it was a product of arbitrary decision, inasmuch as other principles might have been possible.

A cla.s.sification which in itself expresses all the practical relations in which sciences stand to each other is, of course, absolutely impossible. A programme which should try to arrange the place of a special discipline in such a way that it would become the neighbor of all those other sciences with which it has internal relation is unthinkable. On the other hand, only if we had tried to construct a scheme of such exaggerated ambitions should we have been really guilty of antic.i.p.ating a part of that which the specialistic scholars were to tell us. The Congress had to leave it to the invited partic.i.p.ants to discuss the totality of relations which practically exist between their fields and others, and the organizers confined themselves to that minimum of cla.s.sification which just indicates the pure logical relations, a minimum which every editor of encyclopedic work would be asked to initiate without awakening suspicions of interference with the ideas of his contributors.

The only justified demand which could be met was that a system of division and cla.s.sification should be proposed which should give fair play to every existing scientific tendency. The minimum of cla.s.sification was to be combined with the maximum of freedom, and to secure that a careful consideration of principles was indeed necessary.

To bring logical order into the sciences which stand out clearly with traditional rights is not difficult; but the chances are too great that certain tendencies of thought might fail to find recognition or might be suppressed by scientific prejudice. Any serious omission would indeed have necessarily inhibited the freedom of expression. To secure thus the greatest inner fullness of the programme, seemed indeed the most important task in the elaboration of the ground-plan. The fears that we might offer empty generalization instead of scholarly facts, or that we might simply heap up encyclopedic information instead of gaining wide perspectives, or that we might interfere with the living connections of sciences by the logical demarcation lines, or that we might disturb the scholar in his freedom by determining beforehand his place in the cla.s.sification,--all these fears and objections, which were repeatedly raised when the plan was first proposed, seemed indeed unimportant compared with the fear that the programme might be unable to include all scientific tendencies of the time.

That would have been, indeed, the one fundamental mistake, as the whole Congress work was planned in the service of the great synthetic movement which pervades the intellectual life of to-day. The undertaking would be useless and even hindering if it were not just the newer and deeper tendencies that came to most complete expression in it. Everything depended, therefore, upon the fullest possible representation of scientific endeavors in the plan. But no one can become aware of this manifoldness and of the logical relations who does not go back to the ultimate principles of the human search for truth. We have, therefore, to enter now into a full discussion of the principles which have controlled the cla.s.sification and subdivision of the whole work. The discussion is necessarily in its essence a philosophical one, as it was earlier made plain that philosophy must lay out the plan, while in the realization of the plan through concrete work the scientist alone, and not the logician, has to speak. Yet here again it may be said that while our discussion of principles in its essence is logical, in another respect it is a merely historical account. The question is not what principles of cla.s.sification are to be acknowledged as valuable now that the work of the Congress lies behind us, but what principles were accepted and really led to the organization of the work in that form in which it presents itself in the records of the following volumes.

II

THE CLa.s.sIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES

1. _The Development of Cla.s.sification_

The problem of dividing and subdividing the whole of human knowledge and of thus bringing order into the manifoldness of scientific efforts has fascinated the leading thinkers of all ages. It may often be difficult to say how far the new principles of cla.s.sification themselves open the way for new scientific progress and how far the great forward movements of thought in the special sciences have in turn influenced the principles of cla.s.sification. In any case every productive age has demanded the expression of its deepest energy in a new ordering of human science. The history of these efforts leads from Plato and Aristotle to Bacon and Locke, to Bentham and Ampere, to Kant and Hegel, to Comte and Spencer, to Wundt and Windelband. And yet we can hardly speak of a real historical continuity. In a certain way every period took up the problem anew, and the new aspects resulted not only from the development of the sciences themselves which were to be cla.s.sified, but still more from the differences of logical interest. Sometimes the cla.s.sification referred to the material, sometimes to the method of treatment, sometimes to the mental energies involved, and sometimes to the ends to be reached. The reference to the mental faculties was certainly the earliest method of bringing order into human knowledge, for the distinction of the Platonic philosophy between dialectics, physics, and ethics pointed to the threefold character of the mind, to reason, perception, and desire; and it was on the threshold of the modern time, again, when Bacon divided the intellectual globe into three large parts according to three fundamental psychical faculties: memory, imagination, and reason. The memory gives us history; the imagination, poetry; the reason, philosophy, or the sciences. History was further divided into natural and civil history; natural history into normal, abnormal, and artificial phenomena; civil history into political, literary, and ecclesiastical history. The field of reason was subdivided into man, nature, and G.o.d; the domain of man gives, first, civil philosophy, parted off into intercourse, business, and government, and secondly, the philosophy of humanity, divided into that of body and of soul, wherein medicine and athletics belong to the body, logic and ethics to the soul. Nature, on the other hand, was divided into speculative and applied science,--the speculative containing both physics and metaphysics; the applied, mechanics and magic. All this was full of artificial constructions, and yet still more marked by deep insight into the needs of Bacon's time, and not every modification of later cla.s.sifiers was logically a step forward.

Yet modern efforts had to seek quite different methods, and the energies which have been most effective for the ordering of knowledge in the last decades spring unquestionably from the system of Comte and his successors. He did not aim at a system of ramifications; his problem was to show how the fundamental sciences depend on each other. A series was to be constructed in which each member should presuppose the foregoing.

The result was a simplicity which is certainly tempting, but this simplicity was reached only by an artificial emphasis which corresponded completely to the one-sidedness of naturalistic thought. It was a philosophy of positivism, the background for the gigantic work of natural science and technique in the last two thirds of the nineteenth century. Comte's fundamental thought is that the science of Morals, in which we study human nature for the government of human life, is dependent on sociology. Sociology, however, depends on biology; this on chemistry; this on physics; this on astronomy; and this finally on mathematics. In this way, all mental and moral sciences, history and philology, jurisprudence and theology, economics and politics, are considered as sociological phenomena, as dealing with functions of the human being. But as man is a living organism, and thus certainly falls under biology, all the branches of knowledge from history to ethics, from jurisprudence to aesthetics, can be nothing but subdivisions of biology. The living organism, on the other hand, is merely one type of the physical bodies on earth, and biology is thus itself merely a department of physics. But as the earthly bodies are merely a part of the cosmic totality, physics is thus a part of astronomy; and as the whole universe is controlled by mathematical laws, mathematics must be superordinated to all sciences.

But there followed a time which overcame this thinly disguised example of materialism. It was a time when the categories of the physiologist lost slightly in credit and the categories of the psychologist won repute. This newer movement held that it is artificial to consider ethical and logical life, historic and legal action, literary and religious emotions, merely as physiological functions of the living organism. The mental life, however necessarily connected with brain processes, has a positive reality of its own. The psychical facts represent a world of phenomena which in its nature is absolutely different from that of material phenomena, and, while it is true that every ethical action and every logical thought can, from the standpoint of the biologist, be considered as a property of matter, it is not less true that the sciences of mental phenomena, considered impartially, form a sphere of knowledge closed in itself, and must thus be coordinated, not subordinated, to the knowledge of the physical world. We should say thus: all knowledge falls into two cla.s.ses, the physical sciences and the mental sciences. In the circle of physical sciences we have the general sciences, like physics and chemistry, the particular sciences of special objects, like astronomy, geology, mineralogy, biology, and the formal sciences, like mathematics. In the circle of mental sciences we have correspondingly, as a general science, psychology, and as the particular sciences all those special mental and moral sciences which deal with man's inner life, like history or jurisprudence, logic or ethics, and all the rest. Such a cla.s.sification, which had its philosophical defenders about twenty years ago, penetrated the popular thought as fully as the positivism of the foregoing generation, and was certainly superior to its materialistic forerunner.

Of course it was not the first time in the history of civilization that materialism was replaced by dualism, that biologism was replaced by psychologism; and it was also not the first time that the development of civilization led again beyond this point: that is, led beyond the psychologizing period. There is no doubt that our time presses on, with all its powerful internal energies, away from this _Weltanschauung_ of yesterday. The materialism was anti-philosophic, the psychological dualism was unphilosophic. To-day the philosophical movement has set in.