If we ask ourselves finally what is then the ultimate difference between

those two elements of our pure experience, between the object and the

will-attitude, we stand before the ultimate data: we call that element

which exists merely through a reference to its opposite, the object, and

we call that element of our experience which is complete in itself, the

attitude of the will. If we experienced liking or disliking, affirming

or denying, approving or disapproving in the same way in which we

experience the red and the green, the sweet and the sour, the rock and

the tree and the moon, we should know objects only. But we do experience

them in quite a different way. The rock and the tree do not point to

anything else, but the approval has no reality if it does not point to

its opposition in disapproval, and the denial has no meaning if it is

not meant in relation to the affirmative. This doubleness of our primary

experience, this having of objects and of antagonistic attitudes must be

acknowledged wherever we speak of experience at all. We know no object

without attitude, and no attitude without object. The two are one state;

object and attitude form a unity which we resolve by the different way

in which we experience these two features of the one state: we find the

object and we live through the attitude. It is a different kind of

awareness, the having of the object and the taking of the attitude. In

real life our will is never an object which we simply perceive. The

psychologist may treat the will as such, but in the immediate experience

of real life, we are certain of our action by doing it and not by

perceiving our doing; and this our performing and rejecting is really

our self which we posit as absolute reality, not by knowing it, but by

willing it. This corner-stone of the Fichtean philosophy was forgotten

throughout the uncritical and unphilosophical decades of a mere

naturalistic age. But our time has finally come to give attention to it

again.

Our pure experience thus contains will-attitudes and objects of will,

and the different attitudes of the will give the fundamental classes of

human activity. We can easily recognize four different types of

will-relation towards the world. Our will submits itself to the world;

our will approves the world as it is; our will approves the changes in

the world; our will transcends the world. Yet we must make at once one

more most important discrimination. We have up to this point simplified

our pure experience too much. It is not true that we experience only

objects and our own will-attitudes. Our will reaches out not only to

objects, but also to other subjects. In our most immediate experience,

not reshaped at all by theoretical science, our will is in agreement or

disagreement with other wills; tries to influence them, and receives

influences and suggestions from them. The pseudo-philosophy of

naturalism must say of course that the will does not stand in any direct

relation to another will, but that the other persons are for us simply

material objects which we perceive, like other objects, and into which

we project mental phenomena like those which we find in ourselves by the

mere conclusion of analogy. But the complex reconstructions of

physiological psychology are therein substituted for the primary

experience. If we have to express the agreement or disagreement of wills

in the terms of causal science, we may indeed be obliged to transform

the real experience into such artificial constructions; but in our

immediate consciousness, and thus at the starting-point of our theory of

knowledge, we have certainly to acknowledge that we understand the other

person, accept or do not accept his suggestion, agree or disagree with

him, before we know anything of a difference between physical and mental

objects.

We cannot agree with an object. We agree directly with a will, which

does not come to us as a foreign phenomenon, but as a proposition which

we accept or decline. In our immediate experience will thus reaches

will, and we are aware of the difference between our will-attitude as

merely individual and our will-attitude as act of agreement with the

will-attitude of other individuals. We can go still further. The circle

of other individuals whose will we express in our own will-act may be

narrow or wide, may be our friends or the nation, and this relation

clearly constitutes the historical significance of our attitude. In the

one case our act is a merely personal choice for personal purposes

without any general meaning; in the other case it is the expression of

general tendencies and historical movements. Yet our will-decisions can

have connections still wider than those with our social community or our

nation, or even with all living men of to-day. It can seek a relation to

the totality of those whom we aim to acknowledge as real subjects. It

thus becomes independent of the chance experience of this or that man,

or this or that movement, which appeals to us, but involves in an

independent way the reference to every one who is to be acknowledged as

a subject at all. Such reference, which is no longer bound to any

special group of historical individuals, thus becomes strictly

over-individual. We can then discriminate three stages: our merely

individual will; secondly, our will as bound by other historical

individuals; and thirdly, our over-individual will, which is not

influenced by any special individual, but by the general demands for the

idea of a personality.

Each of those four great types of will-attitude which we insisted

on--that is, of submitting, of approving the given, of approving change,

and of transcending--can be carried out on these three stages, that is,

as individual act, as historical act, and as over-individual act. And we

may say at once that only if we submit and approve and change and

transcend in an over-individual act, do we have Truth and Beauty and

Morality and Conviction. If we approve, for instance, a given experience

in an individual will-act, we have simply personal enjoyment and its

object is simply agreeable; if we approve it in harmony with other

individuals, we reach a higher attitude, yet one which cannot claim

absolute value, as it is dependent on historical considerations and on

the tastes and desires of a special group or a school or a nation or an

age. But if we approve the given object just as it is in an

over-individual will-act, then we have before us a thing of beauty,

whose value is not dependent upon our personal enjoyment as individuals,

but is demanded as a joy forever, by every one whom we acknowledge at

all as a complete subject. In exactly the same way, we may approve a

change in the world from any individual point of view: we have then to

do with technical, practical achievements; or we may approve it in

agreement with others: we then enter into the historical interests of

our time. Or we may approve it, finally, in an over-individual way,

without any reference to any special personality: then only is it

valuable for all time, then only is it morally good. And if our will is

transcending experience in an individual way, it can again claim no more

than a subjective satisfaction furnished by any superstition or hope.

But if the transcending will is over-individual, it reaches the absolute

values of religion and metaphysics.

Exactly the same differences, finally, must occur when our will submits

itself to experience. This submission may be, again, an individual

decision for individual purposes; no absolute value belongs to it. Or it

may be again a yielding to the suggestions of other individuals; or it

may, finally, again be an over-individual submission, which seeks no

longer a personal interest. This submission is not to the authority of

others, and is without reference to any individual; we assume that every

one who is to share with us our world of experience has to share this

submission too. That alone is a submission to truth, and experience,

considered in so far as we submit ourselves to it over-individually,

constitutes our knowledge.

The system of knowledge is thus the system of experience with all that

is involved in it in so far as it demands submission from our

over-individual will, and the classification which we are seeking must

be thus a division and subdivision of our over-individual submissions.

But the submission itself can be of very different characters and these

various types must give the deepest logical principles of scientific

classification. To point at once to the fundamental differences: our

will acknowledges the demands of other wills and of objects. We cannot

live our life--and this is not meant in a biological sense, but, first

of all, in a teleological sense--our life becomes meaningless, if our

will does not respect the reality of will-demands and of objects of

will. Now we have seen that the will which demands our decision may be

either the individual will of other subjects or the over-individual

will, which belongs to every subject as such and is independent of any

individuality. We can say at once that in the same way we are led to

acknowledge that the object has partly an over-individual character,

that is, necessarily belongs to the world of objects of every possible

subject, and partly an individual character, as our personal object. We

have thus four large groups of experiences to which we submit ourselves:

over-individual will-acts, individual will-acts, over-individual

objects, individual objects. They constitute the first four large

divisions of our system.

The over-individual will-acts, which are as such teleologically binding

for every subject and therefore norms for his will, give us the

Normative Sciences. The individual will-acts in the world of historical

manifoldness give us the Historical Sciences. The objects, in so far as

they belong to every individual, make up the physical world, and thus

give us the Physical Sciences; and finally the objects, in so far as

they belong to the individual, are the contents of consciousness, and

thus give us the Mental Sciences. We have then the demarcation lines of

our first four large divisions: the Normative, the Historical, the

Physical, and the Mental Sciences. Yet their meaning and method and

difference must be characterized more fully. We must understand why we

have here to deal with four absolutely different types of scientific

systems, why the over-individual objects lead us to general laws and to

the determination of the future, while the study of the individual

will-acts, for instance, gives us the system of history, which turns

merely to the past and does not seek natural laws; and why the study of

the norms gives us another kind of system in which neither a causal nor

an historical, but a purely logical connection prevails. Yet all these

methodological differences result necessarily from the material with

which these four different groups of sciences are working.

Let us start again from the consideration of our original logical

purpose. We feel ourselves bound and limited in our will by physical

things, by psychical contents, by the demands of other subjects, and by

norms. The purpose of all our knowledge is to develop completely all

that is involved in this bondage. We want to develop in an

over-individual way all the obligations for our submission which are

necessarily included in the given objects and the given demands of

subjects. We start of course everywhere and in every direction from the

actual experience, but we expand the experience by seeking those objects

and those demands to which, as necessarily following from the

immediately given experience, we must also submit. And in thus

developing the whole system of submissions, the interpretation of the

experience itself becomes transformed: the physicist may perhaps

substitute imperceptible atoms for the physical object and the

psychologist may substitute sensations for the real idea, and the

historian may substitute combinations of influences for the real

personality, and the student of norms may substitute combinations of

conflicting demands for the one complete duty; yet in every case the

substitution is logically necessary and furnishes us what we call truth

inasmuch as it is needed to develop the concrete system of our

submissions and thus to express our confidence in the order-lines of

reality. And each of these substitutions and supplementations becomes,

as material of knowledge, itself a part of the world of experience.

3. _The Physical and the Mental Sciences_

The physicist, we said, speaks of the world of objects in so far as they

belong to every possible subject, and are material for a merely passive

spectator. Of course the pure experience does not offer us anything of

that kind. We insisted that the objects of our real life are objects of

our will and of our attitudes, and are at the same time undifferentiated

into the physical things outside of us and the psychical ideas in us. To

reach the abstraction of the physicist, we have thus to cut loose the

objects from our will and to separate the over-individual elements from

the individual elements. Both transformations are clearly demanded by

our logical aims. As to the cutting loose from our will, it means

considering the object as if it existed for itself, as if it were a mere

passively given material and not a material of our personal interests.

But just that is needed. We want to find out how far we have to submit

ourselves to the object. If we want to live our life, we must adjust our

attitudes to things, and, as we know our will, we must seek to

understand the other factor in the complex experience, the object of our

will, and we must find out what it involves in itself. But we do not

understand the object and the submission which it demands if we do not

completely understand its relation to our desires. Our total submission

to the thing thus involves our acknowledgment of all that we have to

expect from it. And although the real experience is a unity of will and

thing, we have thus the most immediate interest in considering what we

have to expect from the thing in itself, without reference to our will.

That means finding out the effects of the given object with a subject as

the passive spectator. We eliminate artificially, therefore, the

activity of the subject and construct as presupposition for this circle

of knowledge a nowhere existing subject without activity, for which the

thing exists merely as a cause of the effects which it produces.

The first step towards natural science is, therefore, to dissolve the

real experience into thing and personality; that is, into object and

active subject, and to eliminate in an artificial abstraction the

activity of the subject, making the object material of merely passive

awareness, and related no longer to the will but merely to other

objects. It may be more difficult to understand the second step which

naturalism has to take before a natural science is possible. It must

dissolve the object of will into an over-individual and an individual

part and must eliminate the individual. That part of my objects which

belongs to me alone is their psychical side; that which belongs to all

of us and is the object of ever new experience is the physical object.

As a physicist, in the widest sense of the word, I have to ignore the

objects in so far as they are my ideas and have to consider the stones

and the stars, the inorganic and the organic objects, as they are

outside of me, material for every one. The logical purpose of this

second abstraction may be perhaps formulated in the following way.

We have seen that the purpose of the study of the objects is to find out

what we have to expect from them; that is, to what effects of the given

thing we have to submit ourselves in anticipation. The ideal aim is thus

to understand completely how present objects and future objects--that

is, how causes and effects--are connected. The first stage in such

knowledge of causal connections is, of course, the observation of

empirical consequences. Our feeling of expectation grows with the

regularity of observed succession; yet the ideal aim can never be

fulfilled in that way. The mere observation of regularities can help us

to reduce a particular case to a frequently observed type, but what we

seek to understand is the necessity of the process. Of course we have to

formulate laws, and as soon as we acknowledge a special law to be

expressive of a necessity, the subsumption of the particular case under

the law will satisfy us even if the necessity of the connection is not

recognized in the particular case. We are satisfied because the

acknowledgment of the law involved all possible cases. But we do not at

all feel that we have furnished a real explanation if the law means to

us merely a generalization of routine experiences, and if thus no

absolute validity is attached to the law. This necessity between cause

and effect must thus have its ultimate reason in our own understanding.

We must be logically obliged to connect the objects in such a way, and

wherever observation seems to contradict that which is logically

necessary, we must reshape our idea of the object till the demands of

reason are fulfilled. That is, we must substitute for the given object

an abstraction which serves the purpose of a logically necessary

connection. That demand is clearly not satisfied if we simply group the

totality of such causal judgments under the single name, Causality, and

designate thus all these judgments as results of a special disposition

of the understanding. We never understand why just this cause demands

just this effect so long as we rely on such vague and mystical power of

our reason to link the world by causality.

But the situation changes at once if we go still further back in the

categories of our understanding. While a mere demand for causality never

explains what cause is to be linked with what effect, the vagueness

disappears when we understand this demand for causality itself as the

product of a more fundamental demand for identity. That an object

remains identical with itself does not need for us any further

interpretation. That is the ultimate presupposition of our thought, and

where a complete identity is found nothing demands further explanation.

All scientific effort aims at so rethinking different experiences that

they can be regarded as partially identical, and every discovery of

necessary connection is ultimately a demonstration of identity. If we

seek connections with the final aim to understand them as necessary, we

must conceive the world of our objects in such a way that it is possible

to consider the successive experiences as parts of a self-identical

world; that is, as parts of a world in which no substance and no energy

can disappear or appear anew. To reach this end it is obviously needed

that we eliminate from the world of objects all that cannot be conceived

as identically returning in a new experience; that is, all that belongs

to the present experience only. We do eliminate this by taking it up

conceptually into the subject and calling it psychical, and thus leaving

to the object merely that which is conceived as belonging to the world

of everybody's experience, that is, of over-individual experience. The

whole history of natural science is first of all the gigantic

development of this transformation, resolution, and reconstruction. The

objects of experience are re-thought till everything is eliminated which

cannot be conceived as identical with itself in the experiences of all

individuals and thus as belonging to the over-individual world. All the

substitutions of atoms for the real thing, and of energies for the real

changes, are merely conceptional schemes to satisfy this demand.

The logically primary step is thus not the separation of the physical

and the psychical things plus the secondary demand to connect the

physical things causally; the order is exactly opposite. The primary

desire is to connect the real objects and to understand them as causes

and effects. This understanding demands not only empirical observation,

but insight into the necessary connection. Necessary connection, on the

other hand, exists merely for identical objects and identical qualities.

But in the various experiences only that is identical which is

independent of the momentary individual experiences, and therefore we

need as the ultimate aim a reconstruction of the object into the two

parts, the one perceptional, which refers to our individual experience;

and the other conceptional, which expresses that which can be conceived

as identical in every new experience. The ideal of this constructed

world is the mechanical universe in which every atom moves by causal

necessity because there is nothing in that universe, no element of

substance and no element of energy, which will not remain identical in

all changes of the universe which are possibly to be expected. It

becomes completely determinable by anticipation and the system of our

submissions to the object can be completely constructed. The totality of

intellectual efforts to reconstruct such a causally connected

over-individual world of objects clearly represents a unity of its own.

It is the system of physical sciences.

The physical universe is thus not the totality of our objects. It is a

substitution for our real objects, constructed by eliminating the

individual parts of our objects of experience. These individual parts

are the psychical aspects of our objective experience, and they clearly

awake our scientific interest too. The physical sciences need thus as

counterpart a division of mental sciences. Their aim must be the same.

We want to foresee the psychical results and to understand causally the

psychical experience. Yet it is clear that the plan of the mental

sciences must be quite different in principle from that of the sciences

of nature. The causal connection of the physical universe was ultimately

anchored in the identity of the object through various experiences;

while the object of experience was psychical for us just in so far as it

could never be conceived as identical in different phases of reality.

The psychical object is an ever new creation; my idea can never be your

idea. Their meaning may be identical, but the psychical stuff, the

content of my consciousness, can never be object for any one else, and

even in myself the idea of to-day is never the idea of yesterday or

to-morrow. But if there cannot be identity in different psychical

experiences, it is logically impossible to connect them directly by

necessity. If we yet want to master their successive appearance, we must

substitute an indirect connection for the direct one, and must describe

and explain the psychical phenomena through reference to the physical

world. It is in this way that modern psychology has substituted

elementary sensations for the real contents of consciousness and has

constructed relations between these elementary mental states on the

basis of processes in the organism, especially brain processes. Here,

again, reality is left behind and a mere conceptional construction is

put in its place. But this construction fulfills its purpose and thus

gives us truth; and if the basis is once given, the psychological

sciences can build up a causal system of the conscious processes in the

individual man and in society.

4. _The Historical and the Normative Sciences_

The two divisions of the physical and mental sciences represent our

systematized submission to objects. But we saw from the first that it is

an artificial abstraction to consider in our real experience the object

alone. We saw clearly that we, as acting personalities, in our will and

in our attitudes, do not feel ourselves in relation to objects, merely,

but to will-acts; and that these will-acts were the individual ones of

other subjects or the over-individual ones which come to us in our

consciousness of norms. The sciences which deal with our submissions to

the individual will-acts of others are the Historical Sciences. Their

starting-point is the same as that of the object sciences, the immediate

experience. But the other subjects reach our individuality from the

start in a different way from the objects. The wills of other subjects

come to us as propositions with which we have to agree or disagree; as

suggestions, which we are to imitate or to resist; and they carry in

themselves that reference to an opposite which, as we saw, characterizes

all will-activity. The rock or the tree in our surroundings may

stimulate our reactions, but does not claim to be in itself a decision

with an alternative. But the political or legal or artistic or social or

religious will of my neighbors not only demands my agreement or

disagreement, but presents itself to me in its own meaning as a free

decision which rejects the opposite, and its whole meaning is destroyed

if I consider it like the tree or the rock as a mere phenomenon, as an

object in the world of objects. Whoever has clearly understood that

politics and religion and knowledge and art and law come to me from the

first quite differently from objects, can never doubt that their

systematic connection must be most sharply separated from all the

sciences which connect impressions of objects, and is falsified if the

historical disciplines are treated simply as parts of the sciences of

phenomena--for instance, as parts of sociology, the science of society

as a psycho-physical object.

Just as natural science transcends the immediately experienced object

and works out the whole system of our necessary submissions to the world

of objects, so the historical sciences transcend the social will-acts

which approach us in our immediate experience, and again seek to find

what we are really submitting to if we accept the suggestions of our

social surroundings. And yet this similar demand has most dissimilar

consequences. We submit to an object and want to find out what we are

really submitting to. That cannot mean anything else, as we have seen,

than to seek the effects of the object and thus to look forward to what

we have to expect from the object. On the other hand, if we want to find

out what we are really submitting to if we agree with the decision of

our neighbor, the only meaning of the question can be to ask what our

neighbor really is deciding on, what is contained in his decision; and

as his decision must mean an agreement or disagreement with the will-act

of another subject, we cannot understand the suggestion which comes to

us without understanding in respect to what propositions of others it

takes a stand. Our interest is in this case thus led from those subjects

of will which enter into our immediate experience to other subjects

whose purposes stand in the relation of suggestion and demand to the

present ones. And if we try to develop the system of these relations, we

come to an endless chain of will-relations, in which one individual will

always points back in its decisions to another individual will with

which it agrees or disagrees, which it imitates or overcomes by a new

attitude of will; and the whole network of these will-relations is the

political or religious or artistic or social history of mankind. This

system of history as a system of teleologically connected will-attitudes

is elaborated from the will-propositions which reach us in immediate

experience, with the same necessity with which the mechanical universe

of natural science is worked out from the objects of our immediate

experience.

The historical system of will-connections is similar to the system of

object-connections, not only in its starting in the immediate

experience, but further in its also seeking identities. Without this

feature history would not offer to our understanding real connections.

We must link the will-attitudes of men by showing the identity of the

alternatives. Just as the physical thing is substituted by a large

number of atoms which remain identical in the causal changes, in the

same way the personality is substituted by an endless manifoldness of

decisions and becomes linked with the historical community by the

thought that each of these partial decisions refers to an alternative

which is identical with that of other persons. And yet there remains a

most essential difference between the historical and the causal

connection. In a world of things the mere identical continuity is

sufficient to determine the phenomena of any given moment. In a world of

will the identity of alternatives cannot determine beforehand the actual

decision; that belongs to the free activity of the subject. If this

factor of freedom were left out, man would be made an object and history

a mere appendix of natural science. The connection of the historian can

therefore never be a necessary one, however much we may observe

empirical regularities. If there were no identities, our reason could

not find connection in history; but if the historical connections were

necessary, like the causal ones, it would not be history. The historian

is, therefore, unable and without the ambition to look into the future

like the naturalist; his domain is the past.

Yet will-attitudes and will-acts can also be brought into necessary

connection; that is, we can conceive will-acts as teleologically

identical with each other and exempt from the freedom of the individual.

That is clearly possible only if they are conceived as beyond the

freedom of individual decision and related to the over-individual

subject. The question is then no longer how this special man wills and

decides, but how far a certain will-decision binds every possible

individual who performs this act if he is to share our common world of

will and meaning. Such an over-individual connection of will-acts is

what we call the logical connection. It shares with all other

connections the dependence upon the category of identity. The logical

connection shows how far one act or combination of acts involves, and

thus is partially identical with, a new combination. This logical

connection has, in common with the causal connection, necessity; and in

common with the historical connection, teleological character. Any

individual will-act of historical life may be treated for certain

purposes as such a starting-point of over-individual relations; it would

then lead to that scientific treatment which gives us an interpretation,

for instance, of law. Such interpretative sciences belong to the system

of history in the widest sense of the word.

The chief interest, however, must belong to the logical connections of

those will-acts which themselves have over-individual character. A

merely individual proposition can lead to necessary logical connection,

but cannot claim that scientific importance which belongs to the logical

connection of those propositions which are necessary for the

constitution of every real experience: the science of chess cannot stand

on the same level with the science of geometry, the science of local

legal statutes not on the same level with the system of ethics. The

logical connections of the over-individual attitudes thus constitute the

fourth large division besides the physical, the mental, and the

historical sciences. It must thus comprise the systems of all those

propositions which are presuppositions of our common reality,

independent of the free individual decision. Here belong the acts of

approval--the ethical approval of changes and achievements, as well as

the æsthetic approval of the given world; the acts of conviction--the

religious convictions of a superstructure of the world as well as the

metaphysical convictions of a substructure; and above all, the acts of

affirmation and submission, the logical as well as the mathematical. But

to be consistent we must really demand that merely the over-individual

logical connections are treated in this division. If we deal, for

instance, with the æsthetical or ethical acts as psychological

experiences, or as historical propositions, they belong to the psychical

or historical division. Only the philosophical system of ethics or

æsthetics finds its place in this division. It is difficult to find a

suitable name for this whole system of logical connections of

over-individual attitudes. Perhaps it would be most correct to call it

the Sciences of Values, inasmuch as every one of these over-individual

decisions constitutes a value in our world which our individual will

finds as an absolute datum like the objects of experience. Seen from

another point of view, these values appear as norms which bind our

practical will inasmuch as these absolute values demand of our will to

realize them, and it may thus be permitted to designate this whole group

of sciences as a Division of Normative Sciences.

Our logical explanation of the meaning of these four divisions naturally

began with the interpretation of that science which usually takes

precedence in popular thought--with the science of nature, that is, and

passed then to those groups whose methodological situation is seen

rather vaguely by our positivistic age. But as soon as we have once

defined and worked out the boundary lines of each of these four

divisions, it would appear more logical to change their order and to

begin with that division whose material is those over-individual

will-acts on which all possible knowledge must depend, and then to turn

to those individual will-acts which determine the formulation of our

present-day knowledge, and then only to go to the objects of knowledge,

the over-individual and the individual ones. In short, we must begin

with the normative sciences, consider in the second place the historical

sciences, in the third place the physical sciences, and in the fourth

place the psychical sciences. There cannot be a scientific judgment

which must not find its place somewhere in one of these four groups. And

yet can we really say that these four great divisions complete the

totality of scientific efforts? The plan of our Congress contains three

important divisions besides these.

5. _The Three Divisions of Practical Sciences_

The three divisions which still lie before us represent Practical

Knowledge. Have we a logical right to put them on an equal level with

the four large divisions which we have considered so far? Might it not

rather be said that all that is knowledge in those practical sciences

must find its place somewhere in the theoretical field, and that

everything outside of it is not knowledge, but art? It cannot be denied

indeed that the logical position of the practical sciences presents

serious problems. That the function of the engineer or of the physician,

of the lawyer or of the minister, of the diplomat or of the teacher,

contains elements of an art cannot be doubted. They all need not only

knowledge, but a certain instinct and power and skill, and their

schooling thus demands a training and discipline through imitation which

cannot be substituted by mere learning. Yet when it comes to the

classification of sciences, it seems very doubtful whether practical

sciences have to be acknowledged as special divisions, inasmuch as the

factor of art must have been eliminated at the moment they are presented

as sciences. The auscultation of the physician certainly demands skill

and training, yet this practical activity itself does not enter into the

science of medicine as presented in medical writings. As soon as the

physician begins to deal with it scientifically, he needs, as does any

scholar, not the stethoscope, but the pen. He must formulate judgments;

and as soon as he simply describes and analyzes and explains and

interprets his stethoscopic experiences, his statements become a system

of theoretical ideas.

We can say in general that the science of medicine or of engineering, of

jurisprudence or of education, contains, as science, no element of art,

but merely theoretical judgments which, as such, can find their place

somewhere in the complete systems of the theoretical sciences. If the

physician describes a disease, its symptoms, the means of examining

them, the remedies, their therapeutical effects, and the prophylaxis, in

short, everything which the physician needs for his art, he does not

record anything which would not belong to an ideally complete

description and explanation of the processes in the human body. In the

same way it can be said that if the engineer characterizes the

conditions under which an iron bridge will be safe, it is evident that

he cannot introduce any facts which would not find their logical place

in an ideally complete description of the properties of inorganic

nature; and finally, the same is true for the statements of the

politician, the jurist, the pedagogue, or the minister. Whatever is said

about their art is a theoretical judgment which connects facts of the

ideally complete system of theoretical science; in their case the facts

of course belong in first line to the realm of the psychological,

historical, and normative sciences. There never has been or can be

practical advice in the form of words, which is not in principle a

statement of facts which belong to the absolute totality of theoretical

knowledge. Seen from this point of view, it is evident that all our

knowledge is fundamentally theoretical, and that the conception of

practical knowledge is logically unprecise.

But the opposite point of view might also be taken. It might be said

that after all every kind of knowledge is practical, and our own

deduction of the meaning of science might be said to suggest such

interpretation. We acknowledged at the outset that the so-called

theoretical knowledge is by no means a passive mirror picture of an

independent outside world; but that in every judgment real experience is

remoulded and reshaped in the service of certain purposes of will. Here

lies the true core of that growing popular philosophy of to-day which,

under the name of pragmatism, or under other titles, mingles the

purposive character of our knowledge and the evolutionary theories of

modern biology in the vague notion that men created knowledge because

the biological struggle for existence led to such views of the world;

and that we call true that correlation of our experiences which has

approved itself through its harmony with the phylogenetic development.

Certainly we must reject such circle philosophies. We must see clearly

that the whole conception of a biological development and of a struggle

of organisms is itself only a part of our construction of causal

knowledge. We must have knowledge to conceive ourselves as products of a

phylogenetic history, and thus cannot deduce from it the fact, and,

still less, the justification of knowledge. Yet one element of this

theory remains valuable: knowledge is indeed a purposive activity, a

reconstruction of the world in the service of ideals of the will. We

have thus from one side the suggestion that all knowledge is merely

theoretical, from the other side the claim that all knowledge is

practical activity. It seems as if both sides might agree that it is

superfluous and unjustified to make a demarcation line through the field

of knowledge and to separate two sorts of knowledge, theoretical and

practical. For both theories demand that all knowledge be of one kind,

and they disagree only as to whether we ought to call it all theoretical

or all practical.

Yet the true situation is not characterized by such an antithesis. If we

say that all knowledge is ultimately practical, we are speaking from an

epistemological point of view, inasmuch as we take it then as a

reconstruction of the world through the purposive activity of the

over-individual subject. On the other hand it is an empirical point of

view from which ultimately all knowledge, that of the physician and

engineer and lawyer, as well as that of the astronomer, appears

theoretical. But this antithesis can, therefore, not decide the further

empirical question, whether or not in the midst of theoretical knowledge

two kinds of sciences may be discriminated, of which the one refers to

empirical practical purposes and the other not. Such an inquiry would

have nothing to do with the epistemological problem of pragmatism; it

would be strictly non-philosophical, just as the separation of chemistry

into organic and inorganic chemistry. This empirical question is indeed

to be answered in the affirmative. If we ask what causes bring about a

certain effect, for the sake of a practical purpose of ours,--for

instance, the curing a patient of disease,--no one can state facts which

are not in principle to be included in the complete system of physical

causes and effects and thus in the system of physical sciences. And yet

it may well be that the physical sciences, as such, have not the

slightest reason to mention the effect of that special drug on that

special pathological alteration of the tissues of the organism. The

descriptions and explanations of science are not a mere heaping up of

material, but a steady selection in the interest of the special aim of

the science. No physical science describes every special pebble on the

beach; no historical science deals with the chance happenings in the

daily life of any member of the crowd. And we already well know the

point of view from which the selection is to be performed. We want to

know in the physical and psychical sciences whatever is involved in the

object of our experience, and in the historical and normative sciences

whatever is involved in the demands which reach our will. But whether we

have to do with the objects or with the demands, in both cases we have

systems before us which are determined only by the objects or demands

themselves, without any relation to our individual will and our own

practical activity. Theoretically, of course, our will, our activity,

our organism, our personality is included in the complete system; and if

we knew absolutely everything of the empirical effects of the object or

of the consequences of these demands, we should find among them their

relation to our individual interests; but that relation would be but one

chance case among innumerable others, and the sciences would not have

the slightest interest in giving any attention to that particular case.

Thus if our knowledge of chemical substances were complete, we should

certainly have to know theoretically that a few grains of antipyrine

introduced into the organism have an influence on those brain centres

which regulate the temperature of the human body. Yet if the chemist

does not share the interest of the physician who wants to fight a fever,

he would have hardly any reason for examining this particular relation,

as it hardly throws light on the chemical constitution as such. In this

way we might say in general that the relation of the world to us as

acting individuals is in principle contained in the total system of the

relations of our world of experience, but has a strictly accidental

place there and can never be in itself a centre around which the

scientific data are clustered, and science will hardly have an interest

in giving any attention to its details.

This relation of the world, the physical, the psychical, the historical,

and the normative world, to our individual, practical purposes can,

however, indeed become the centre of scientific interest, and it is

evident that the whole inquiry receives thereupon a perfectly new

direction which demands not only a completely new grouping of facts and

relations, but also a very different shading in elaboration. As long as

the purpose was to understand the world without relation to our

individual aims, science had to gather endless details which are for us

now quite indifferent, as they do not touch our aims; and in other

respects science was satisfied with broad generalizations and

abstractions where we have now to examine the most minute details. In

short, the shifting of the centre of gravity creates perfectly new

sciences which must be distinguished; and if we call them again

theoretical and practical sciences, it is clear that this difference has

then no longer anything to do with the philosophical problems from which

we started.

The term practical may be preferable to the other term which is

sometimes used: Applied Science. If we construct the antithesis of

theoretical and applied science, the underlying idea is clearly that we

have to do on the practical side with a discipline which teaches how to

apply a science which logically exists as such beforehand. Engineering,

for instance, is an applied science because it applies the science of

physics; but this is not really our deepest meaning here. Our practical

sciences are not meant as mere applications of theoretical sciences.

They are logically somewhat degraded if they are treated in such a way.

Their real logical meaning comes out only if they are acknowledged as

self-dependent sciences whose material is differentiated from that of

the theoretical sciences by the different point of view and purpose.

They are methodologically perfectly independent, and the fact that a

large part or theoretically even everything of their teaching overlaps

the teaching of certain theoretical sciences ought not to have any

influence on their logical standing. The practical sciences could be

conceived as completely self-dependent, without the existence of any

so-called theoretical sciences; that is, the relations of the world of

experience to our individual aims might be brought into complete systems

without working out in principle the system of independent experience.

We might have a science of engineering without acknowledging an

independent science of theoretical physics besides it. To be sure, such

a science of engineering would finally develop itself into a system

which would contain very much that might just as well be called

theoretical physics; yet all would be held together by the point of view

of the engineer, and that part of theoretical physics which the engineer

applies might just as well be considered as depracticalized engineering.

If this logical self-dependence of the practical science holds true even

for such technological disciplines, it is still more evident that it

would cripple the meaning and independent character of jurisprudence and

social science, or of pedagogy and theology, to treat them simply as

applied sciences, that is, as applications of theoretical science.

This point of view determines, also, of course, the classification of

the Practical Sciences. If they were really merely applied sciences it

would be most natural to group them according to the classification of

the theoretical sciences which are to be applied. We should then have

applied physical sciences, applied psychological sciences, applied

historical sciences, and applied normative sciences. Yet even from the

standpoint of practice, we should come at once into difficulties, and

indeed much of the superficiality of practical sciences to-day results

from the hasty tendency to consider them as applied sciences only, and

thus to be determined by the points of view of the theoretical

discipline which is to be applied. Then, for instance, pedagogy becomes

simply applied psychology, and the psychological point of view is

substituted for the educational one. Pedagogy then becomes simply a

selection of those chapters in psychology which deal with the mental

functions of the child. Yet as soon as we really take the teachers'

point of view, we understand at once that it is utterly artificial to

substitute the categories of the psychologist for those of immediate

practical will-relations and to consider the child in the class-room as

a causal system of psycho-physical elements instead of a personality

which is teleologically to be interpreted, and whose aims are not to be

connected with causal effects but with over-individual attitudes. In

this way the historical relation and the normative relation have to play

at least as important a rôle in the pedagogical system as the

psycho-physical relation, and we might quite as well call education

applied history and applied ethics.

Almost every practical science can be shown in this way to apply a

number of theoretical sciences; it synthesizes them to a new unity. But

better, we ought to say, that it is a unity in itself from the start,

and that it only overlaps with a number of theoretical sciences. If we

want to classify the practical sciences, we have thus only the one

logical principle at our disposal: we must classify them in accordance

with the group of human individual aims which control those different

disciplines. If all practical sciences deal with the relation of the

world of experience to our individual practical ends, the classes of

those ends are the classes of our practical sciences, whatever

combinations of applied theoretical sciences may enter into the group.

Of course a special classification of these aims must remain somewhat

arbitrary; yet it may seem most natural to separate three large

divisions. We called them the Utilitarian Sciences, the Sciences of

Social Regulation, and the Sciences of Social Culture. Utilitarian we

may call those sciences in which our practical aim refers to the world

of things; it may be the technical mastery of nature or the treatment of

the body, or the production, distribution, and consumption of the means

of support. The second division contains everything in which our aim

does not refer to the thing, but to the other subjects; here naturally

belong the sciences which deal with the political, legal, and social

purposes. And finally the sciences of culture refer to those aims in

which not the individual relations to things or to other subjects are in

the foreground, but the purposes of the teleological development of the

subject himself; education, art, and religion here find their place. It

is, of course, evident that the material of these sciences frequently

allows the emphasis of different aspects. For instance, education, which

aims primarily at self-development, might quite well be considered also

from the point of view of social regulation; and still more naturally

could the utilitarian sciences of the economic distribution of the means

of support be considered from this point of view. Yet a classification

of sciences nowhere suggests by its boundary lines that there are no

relations and connections between the different parts; on the contrary,

it is just the manifoldness of these given connections which makes it so

desirable to become conscious of the principles involved, and thus to

emphasize logical demarcation lines, which of course must be obliterated

as soon as any material is to be treated from every possible point of

view. It may thus well be that, for instance, a certain industrial

problem could be treated in the Normative Sciences from the point of

view of ethics; in the Historical Sciences, from the point of view of

the history of economic institutions; in the Physical Sciences, from the

point of view of physics or chemistry; in the Mental Sciences, from the

point of view of sociology; in the Utilitarian Sciences, from the point

of view of medicine or of engineering, or of commerce and

transportation; and finally in the Regulative Sciences, from the point

of view of political administration, or in the Social Sciences, from the

standpoint of the urban community, and so on. The more complex the

relations are, the more necessary is it to make clean distinctions

between the different logical purposes with which the scientific

inquiries start. Practical life may demand a combination of historical,

sociological, psychological, economical, social, and ethical

considerations; but not one of these sciences can contribute its best if

the consciousness of these differences is lost and the deliberate

combination is replaced by a vague mixture of the problems.

6. _The Subdivisions_

We have now before us the ground-plan of the scheme, the four

theoretical divisions, and the three practical divisions; every

additional comment on the classification must be of secondary

importance, as it has to refer to the smaller subdivisions, which cannot

change the principles of the plan, and which have not seldom, indeed,

been a result of practical considerations. If, for instance, our

Division of Cultural Sciences shows in the final plan merely the

departments of Education and of Religion, while the originally planned

Department of Art is left out, there was no logical reason for it, but

merely the practical ground that it seemed difficult to bring such a

practical art section to a desirable scientific level; we confine art,

therefore, to the normative æsthetic and historical points of view. Or,

to choose another illustration, if it happened that the normative

sciences were finally organized without a section for the philosophy of

law, this resulted from the fact that the American jurists, in contrast

with their Continental European colleagues, showed a general lack of

appreciation for such a section. A few sections had to be left out even

for the chance reason that the leading speakers were obliged to withdraw

at a time when it was too late to ask substitutes to work up addresses.

And almost everywhere there had to be something arbitrary in the

limitation of the special sections. Though Otology and Laryngology were

brought together into one section, they might just as well have been

placed in two; and Rhinology, which was left out, might have been added

as a third in that company. As to this subtler ramification, the plan

has been changed several times during the period of the practical

preparation of the plan, and much is the result of adjustment to

questions of personalities. No one claims, thus, any special logical

value for the final formulation of the sectional details, for which our

chief aim was not to go beyond eight times sixteen, that is 128,

sections, inasmuch as it was planned to have the meetings at eight

different time-periods in sixteen different halls. If we had fulfilled

all the wishes which were expressed by specialists, the number would

have been quickly doubled.

Yet a few remarks may be devoted to the branching off within the seven

divisions, as a short discussion of some of these details may throw

additional light on the general principles of the whole plan. If we thus

begin with the Normative Sciences, we stand at once before one feature

of the plan which has been in an especially high degree a matter of both

approval and criticism: the fact that Mathematics is grouped with

Philosophy. The Division was to contain, as we have seen, the systems of

logically connected will-acts of the over-individual subject. That

Ethics or Logic or Æsthetics or Philosophy of Religion deals with such

over-individual attitudes cannot be doubted; but have we a right to

coördinate the mathematical sciences with these philosophical sciences?

Has Mathematics not a more natural place among the physical sciences

coördinated with and introductory to Mechanics, Physics, and Astronomy?

The mathematicians themselves would often be inclined to accept without

hesitation this neighborhood of the physical sciences. They would say

that the mathematical objects are independent realities whose properties

we study like those of nature, whose relations we "observe," whose

existence we "discover," and in which we are interested because they

belong to the real world. All this is true, and yet the objects of the

mathematician are objects made by the logical will only, and thus

different from all phenomena into which sensation enters. The

mathematician, of course, does not reflect on the purely logical origin

of the objects which he studies, but the system of knowledge must give

to the study of the mathematical objects its place in the group where

the functions and products of the over-individual attitudes are

classified. The mathematical object is a free creation, and a creation

not only as to the combination of elements--that would be the case with

many laboratory substances of the chemist too--but a creation as to the

elements themselves, and the value of that creation, its "mathematical

interest," is to be judged by ideals of thought; that is, by logical

purposes. No doubt this logical purpose is its application in the world

of objects and the mathematical concepts must thus fit the objective

world so absolutely that mathematics can be conceived as a description

of the world after abstracting not only from the will-relations, as

physics does, but also from the content. Mathematics would, then, be the

phenomenalistic science of the form and order of the world. In this way,

mathematics has indeed a claim to places in both divisions: among the

physical sciences if we emphasize its applicability to the world, and

among the teleological sciences if we emphasize the free creation of the

objects by the logical will. But if we really go back to epistemological

principles, our system has to prefer the latter emphasis; that is, we

must coördinate mathematics with logic and not with physics.

As to the subdivision of philosophy, it is most essential for us to

point to the negative fact that of course psychology cannot have a place

in the philosophical department, as part of the Normative Division.

There is perhaps no science whose position in the system of knowledge

offers so many methodological difficulties as psychology. Historical

tradition of course links it with philosophy; throughout a great part of

its present endeavors it is, on the other hand, linked with physiology.

Thus we find it sometimes coördinated with logic and ethics, and

sometimes, especially in the classical positivistic systems, coördinated

with the sciences of the organic functions. We have seen why a really

logical treatment has to disregard those historical and practical

relations and has to separate the psychological sciences from the

philosophical and the biological sciences. Yet even this does not

complete the list of problems which must be settled, inasmuch as modern

thinkers have frequently insisted that psychology itself allows a

twofold aspect. We can have a psychology which describes and explains

the mental life by analyzing it into its elements and by connecting

these elements through causality. But there may be another psychology

which treats inner life in that immediate unity in which we experience

it and seeks to interpret it as the free function of personality. This

latter kind of psychology has been called voluntaristic psychology as

against the phenomenalistic psychology which seeks description and

explanation. Such voluntaristic psychology would clearly belong again to

a different division. It would be a theory of individual life as a

function of will, and would thus be introductory to the historical

sciences and to the normative sciences too. Yet we left out this

teleological psychology from our programme, as such a science is as yet

a programme only. Wherever an effort is made to realize it, it becomes

an odd mixture of an inconsistent phenomenalistic psychology on the one

side, and philosophy of history, logic, ethics, and æsthetics on the

other side. The only science which really has a right to call itself

psychology is the one which seeks to describe and to explain inner life

and treats it therefore as a system of psychical objects, that is, as

contents of consciousness, that is, as phenomena. Psychology belongs,

then, in the general division of psychical sciences as over against

physical sciences, and both deal with objects as over against philosophy

and history, which deal with subjects of will.

The subdivision of the Historical Sciences offers no methodological

difficulty as soon as those epistemological arguments are acknowledged

by which we sharply distinguish history from the Physical and Mental

Sciences. If history is a system of will-relations which is in

teleological connection with the will-demands that surround us, then

political history loses its predominant rôle, and the history of law and

of literature, of language and of economy, of art and religion, become

coördinated with political development, while the mere anthropological

aspect of man is relegated to the physical sciences. The more complete

original scheme was here again finally condensed for practical reasons;

for instance, the planned departments on the History of Education, on

the History of Science, and on the History of Philosophy were

sacrificed, and the department of Economic History was joined to that of

Political History. In the same way we felt obliged to omit in the end

many important sections in the departments; we had, for instance, in the

History of Language at first a section on Slavic Languages; yet the

number of scholars interested was too small to justify its existence

beside a section on Slavic Literature. Also the History of Music was

omitted from the History of Art; and the History of Law was planned at

first with a fuller ramification.

The division of Physical Sciences naturally suggested that kind of

subdivision which the positivistic classification presents as a complete

system of sciences. Considering physics and chemistry as the two

fundamental sciences of general laws, we turn first to astronomy, then

from the science of the whole universe to the one planet, to the

sciences of the earth; thence to the living organisms on the earth; and

from biology to the still narrower circle of anthropology. The special

classification of physics offers a certain difficulty. To divide it in

text-book fashion into sound, light, electricity, etc., seems hardly in

harmony with the effort to seek logical principles in the other parts of

the classification. The three groups which we finally formed, Physics of

Matter, Physics of Ether, and Physics of Electron, may appear somewhat

too much influenced by the latest theories of to-day, yet it seemed

preferable to other principles. In the biological department, criticism

seems justified in view of the fact that we constructed a special

section, Human Anatomy. A strictly logical scheme might have

acknowledged that human anatomy is to-day not a separate science, and

that it has resolved itself into comparative anatomy. Sections of

Invertebrate and Vertebrate Anatomy might have been more satisfactory.

The final arrangement was a concession to the practical interests of the

physicians, who have naturally to emphasize the anatomy of the human

organism.

In the division of Mental Sciences, we have the Department of Sociology.

We were, of course, aware that the sociological interest includes not

only the psychological, but also the physiological life of society, and

that it thus has relations to the physical sciences too. Yet these

relations are logically not more fundamental than those of the

individual mental life to the functions of the individual organism. Much

of the physiological side was further to be handed over to the

Department of Anthropology, and thus we felt justified in grouping

sociology with psychology under the Mental Sciences, as the psychology

of the social organism. Here, too, a larger number of sections was

intended and only the two most essential ones, Social Structure and

Social Psychology, were finally admitted.

The ramifications of the practical sciences had to follow the general

principle that their character is determined by purpose and not by

material. The difficulty was here merely in the extreme specialization

of the practical disciplines, which suggests on the whole the forming of

very small units, while our plan was to provide for fifty practical

sections only. It seemed, therefore, incongruous to have the whole of

Internal Medicine or the whole of Private Law condensed into one

section. Yet as the purpose of the scheme was a theoretical and not a

practical one, even where the theory of practical sciences was in

question, we felt justified in constructing coördinated sections, even

where the practical importance was very unequal. On the other hand, some

glaring defects just here are due merely to chance circumstances. That

there were, for instance, no sections on Criminal Law or Ecclesiastical

Law in the Department of Jurisprudence, nor on Legal Procedure, resulted

from the unfortunate accident that in these cases the speakers who were

to come from Europe were withheld by illness or public duties. The

absence of the Department of Art in the Division of Social Culture, and

thus of the Sections on the theory and practice of the different arts,

has been explained before. It is evident that also in the Economical

Department the practical development has interfered with the original

symmetrical arrangement of the sections. This is not true of the

Religious Department, whose six sections express the tendencies of the

original plan. The frequently expressed criticism that the different

religions and their denominations ought to have found place there shows

a misconception of our purpose; a Parliament of Religion did not belong

to this plan.

III

THE RESULTS OF THE CONGRESS

The programme of the Congress, as outlined in the previous pages, was in

this case somewhat more than a mere programme. It not only invited to do

a piece of work, but it sought to contribute to the work itself. Yet the

chief work had to be done by others, and their part needed careful

preparation. Yet very little of the preparation showed itself to the

eyes of the larger public, and few were fully aware what a complex

organization was growing up and how many persons of mark were

coöperating.

It was essential to find for every address the best man. Specialists

only could suggest to the committees where to find him. It has been told

before how our invitations were brought to the foreigners first till the

desired number of foreign participants was secured, and how the

Americans followed. As could not be otherwise expected, interferences of

all kinds disturbed the ideal configuration of the first list of

acceptances; substitutes had sometimes to be relied on; and yet, when on

the nineteenth of September President Francis welcomed the Congress of

Arts and Science in the gigantic Festival Hall of the St. Louis

Exposition, the Committee knew that almost four hundred speakers had

completed their manuscripts, and that it was a galaxy which far

surpassed in importance that of any previous international congress. And

the list of those who stood for the success of the work was not confined

to the official speakers. Each Department and each Section had its own

honorary President, who was also chosen by the consent of leading

specialists and whose introductory remarks were to give additional

importance to the gathering. At their side stood the hundred and thirty

Secretaries, carefully chosen from among the productive scholars of the

younger generation. And a large number of informal, yet officially

invited contributors, had announced valuable discussions and addresses

for almost every Section. Invitations to membership finally had been

sent to the universities and scholarly societies of all countries.

That the turmoil of a world's fair is out of harmony with the scholar's

longing for repose and quietude is a natural presupposition, which has

not been disproved by the experience of St. Louis. When Professor

Newcomb, our President, spoke to the opening assembly on the dignity of

scholarship, the scholar's peaceful address was accentuated by the

thunder of the cannons with which Boer and British forces were playing

at war near by. The roaring of the Pike overpowered many a quiet

session, and the patient speaker had not seldom to fight heroically with

a brass band on the next lawn. The trains were delayed, trunks were

mixed up, and the sultry St. Louis weather stirred much secret longing

for the seashore and the mountains, which most had to leave too early

for that pilgrimage to the Mississippi Valley. Yet all this could have

been easily foreseen, and every one knew that all this would soon be

forgotten. These slight discomforts were many times made up for by the

overwhelming beauty of that ivory city in which the civilization of the

world was focused by the united energy of the nations, and it seemed

well worth while to cross the ocean for the delight of that enchantment

which came with every evening's myriad illumination. And every day

brought interesting festivities. No one will forget the receptions of

the foreign commissioners, or the charming hospitality of the leading

citizens of St. Louis, or the enthusiastic banquet which brought one

thousand speakers and presidents and official members of the Congress

together as guests of the master mind of the Exposition, President

Francis.

While the discomfort of external shortcomings was thus easily balanced,

it is more doubtful whether the internal shortcomings of the work can be

considered as fully compensated for. It would be impossible to overlook

these defects in the realization of our plans, even if it may be

acknowledged that they were unavoidable under the given conditions. The

principal difficulty has been that many speakers have not really treated

the topic for the discussion of which they were invited. This deviation

from the plan took various forms. There was in some cases a fundamental

attitude taken which did not harmonize with those logical principles

which had led to the classification; for instance, we had sharply

separated, for reasons fully stated above, the Division of History from

the Division of Mental Sciences, including sociology; yet some papers

for the Division of History clearly indicated sympathy with the

traditional positivistic view, according to which history becomes simply

a part of sociology. And similar variations of the general plan occur in

almost every division. But there cannot be any objection to this

secondary variety as long as the whole framework gives the primary

uniformity. Certainly no one of the contributors is to be blamed for it;

no one was pledged to the philosophy of the general plan, and probably

few would have agreed if any one had had the idea of demanding from

every contributor an identical background of general convictions. Such

monotony would have been even harmful, as the work would have become

inexpressive of the richness of tendencies in the scholarly life of our

time. This was not an occasion where educated clerks were to work up in

a secondhand way a report whose general trend was determined beforehand;

the work demanded original thinkers, with whom every word grows out of a

rich individual view of the totality. If every paper had been meant

merely as a detailed amplification of the logical principles on which

the whole plan was based, it would have been wiser to set young Doctor

candidates to work, who might have elaborated the hint of the general

scheme. To invite the leaders of knowledge meant to give them complete

freedom and to confine the demands of the plan to a most general

direction.

The same freedom, which every one was to have as to the general

standpoint, was intended also for all with regard to the arrangement and

limitation of the topic. All the sectional addresses were supposed to

deal either with relations or with fundamental problems of to-day. It

would have been absurd to demand that in every case the totality of

relations or of problems should be covered or even touched. The result

would have become perfunctory and insignificant. No one intended to

produce a cyclopedia. It was essential everywhere to select that which

was most characteristic of the tendencies of the age and most promising

for the science of the twentieth century. Those problems were to be

emphasized whose solution is most demanded for the immediate progress of

knowledge, and those relations had to be selected through which new

connections, new synthetic thoughts prepare themselves to-day. That this

selection had to be left to the speaker was a matter of course.

Yet it may be said that in all these directions, with reference to the

general standpoint and with reference to problems and relations, the

Organizing Committee had somewhat prepared the choice through the

selection of the speakers themselves. As the standpoints of the leading

speakers were well known, it was not difficult to invite as far as

possible for every place a scholar whose general views would be least

out of harmony with the principles of the plan. For instance, when we

had the task before us of selecting the divisional speakers for the

Normative and for the Mental Sciences, it was only natural to invite for

the first a philosopher of idealistic type and for the latter a

philosopher of positivistic stamp, inasmuch as the whole scheme gave to

the mental sciences the same place which they would have had in a

positivistic scheme, while the normative sciences would have lost the

meaning which they had in our plan if a positivist had simply

psychologized them. In the same way we gave preference as far as

possible, for the addresses on relations, to those scholars whose

previous work was concerned with new synthetic movements, and as

speakers on problems those were invited who were in any case engaged in

the solution of those problems which seemed central in the present state

of science. Thus it was that on the whole the expectation was justified

that the most characteristic relations and the most characteristic

problems would be selected if every invited speaker spoke essentially on

those relations and on those problems with which his own special work

was engaged.

Yet there is no doubt that this expectation was sometimes fulfilled

beyond our anticipation, in an amount of specialization which was no

longer entirely in harmony with the general character of the

undertaking. The general problem has become sometimes only the

starting-point or almost the pretext for speaking on some relation or

problem so detailed that it can hardly stand as a representative symbol

of the whole movement in that sectional field. Especially in the

practical sciences more room was sometimes taken for particular hobbies

and chance aspects than in the eyes of the originators the occasion may

have called for. Yet on the whole this was the exception. The

overwhelming majority of the addresses fulfilled nobly the high hopes of

the Boards, and even in those exceptional cases where the speaker went

his own way, it was usually such an original and stimulating expression

of a strong personality that no one would care to miss this tone in the

symphony of science.

Even now of course, though the Congress days have passed, and only

typewritten manuscripts are left from all those September meetings, it

would be easy to provide, by editorial efforts, for a greater uniformity

and a smoother harmonization. Most of the authors would have been quite

willing to retouch their addresses in the interest of greater objective

uniformity and to accept the hint of an editorial committee in

elaborating more fully some points and in condensing or eliminating

others. Much was written in the desire to bring a certain thought for

discussion before such an eminent audience, while the speaker would be

ready to substitute other features of the subject for the permanent form

of the printed volume. Yet such editorial supervision and transformation

would be not only immodest but dangerous. We might risk gaining some

external uniformity, but only to lose much of the freshness and

immediacy and brilliancy of the first presentation. And who would dare

to play the critical judge when the international contributors are the

leaders of thought? There was therefore not the slightest effort made to

suggest revision of the manuscripts, for which the whole responsibility

must thus fall to the particular author. The reduction to a uniform

language seemed, on the other hand, most natural, and those who had

delivered their addresses in French, German, or Italian themselves

welcomed the idea that their papers should be translated into English by

competent specialists. The short bibliographies, selected mostly through

the chairman of the departments, and the very full index with references

may add to the general usefulness of the eight volumes in which the work

is to be presented.

But the significance of the Congress of Arts and Science ought not to be

measured and valued only by reference to this printed result. Its less

visible side-effects seem in no way less important for scholarship, and

they are fourfold. There was, first, the personal contact between the

scholarly public and the leaders of thought; there was, secondly, the

first academic alliance between the United States and Europe; there was,

thirdly, the first demonstration of a world congress crystallized about

one problem; there was, fourthly, the unique accentuation of the thought

of unity in all human science; and each of these four movements will be

continued and reinforced by the publication of these proceedings.

The first of these four features, the contact of the scholarly public

with the best thinkers of our time, had, to be sure, its limitations. It

was not sought to create a really popular congress. Neither the level of

the addresses, nor the size of the halls, nor the number of invitations

sent out, nor the general conditions of a world's fair at which the

expense of living is high and the distractions thousandfold, favored the

attendance of crowds. It was planned from the first that on the whole

scholars and specialists should attend and that the army should be made

up essentially of officers. If in an astronomical section perhaps thirty

men were present, among whom practically every one was among the best

known directors of observatories or professors of mathematics,

astronomy, or physics, from all countries of the globe, much more was

gained than if three thousand had been in the audience, brought together

by an interest of curiosity in moon and stars. For the most part there

must have been between a hundred and two hundred in each of the 128

sectional meetings, and that was more than the organizers expected. This

direct influence on the interested public is now to be expanded a

thousandfold by the mission work of these volumes. The concentration of

these hundreds of addresses into a few days made it in any case

impossible to listen to more than to a small fraction; these volumes

will bring at last all speakers to coördinated effectiveness; and while

one hall suffered from bad acoustics, another from bad ventilation, and

a third from the passing of the intermural trains, here at least is an

audience in which nothing will disturb the sensitive nerves of the

willing follower.

But much more emphasis is due to the second feature. The Congress was an

epoch-making event for the international world of scholarship from the

fact that it was the first great undertaking in which the Old and the

New Worlds stood on equal levels and in which Europe really became

acquainted with the scientific life of these United States. The contact

of scholarship between America and Europe has, indeed, grown in

importance through many decades. Many American students had studied in

European and especially in German universities and had come back to fill

the professorial chairs of the leading academic institutions. The spirit

of the Graduate School and the work towards the Doctor's degree, yes,

the whole productive scholarship of recent decades had been influenced

by European ideals, and the results were no longer ignored at the seats

of learning throughout the whole world. European scholars had here and

there come as visiting lecturers or as assimilated instructors, and a

few American scholars belonged to the leading European Academies. Yet,

whoever knew the real development of American post-graduate university

life, the rapid advance of genuine American scholarship, the

incomparable progress of the scientific institutions of the New World,

of their libraries and laboratories, museums and associations, was well

aware that Europe had hardly noticed and certainly not fully understood

the gigantic strides of the country which seemed a rival only on

commercial and industrial ground. Europe was satisfied with the

traditional ideas of America's scientific standing which reflected the

situation of thirty years ago, and did not understand that the changes

of a few lustres mean in the New World more than under the firmer

traditions of Europe. American scientific literature was still

neglected; American universities treated in a condescending and

patronizing spirit and with hardly any awareness of the fundamental

differences in the institutions of the two sides. Those European

scholars who crossed the ocean did it with missionary, or perhaps with

less unselfish, intentions, and the Americans who attended European

congresses were mostly treated with the friendliness which the

self-satisfied teacher shows to a promising pupil. The time had really

come when the contrast between the real situation and the traditional

construction became a danger for the scientific life of the time. Both

sides had to suffer from it. The Americans felt that their serious and

important achievements did not come to their fullest effectiveness

through the insistent neglect of those who by the tradition of centuries

had become the habitual guardians of scientific thought. A kind of

feeling of dependency as it usually develops in weak colonies too often

depressed the conscientious scholarship on American soil as the result

of this undue condescension. Yet the greater harm was to the other side.

Once before Europe had had the experience of surprise when American

successes presented themselves where nothing of that kind was

anticipated in the Old World. It was in the field of economic life that

Europe looked down patronizingly on America's industrial efforts, and

yet before she was fully aware how the change resulted, suddenly the

warning signal of the "American danger" was heard everywhere. The

surprise in the intellectual field will not be less. The unpreparedness

was certainly the same. Of course, there cannot be any danger of rivalry

in the scientific field, inasmuch as science knows no competition but

only coöperation. And yet it cannot be without danger for European

science if it willfully neglects and recklessly ignores this eager

working of the modern America. For both sides a change in the situation

was thus not only desirable, but necessary; and to prepare this change,

to substitute knowledge for ignorance, nothing could have been more

effective than this Congress of Arts and Science.

Even if we abstract from the not inconsiderable number of those European

scholars who followed naturally in the path of the invited guests, and

if we consider merely the function of these invited participants, the

importance of the procedure is evident. More than a hundred leading

scholars from all European countries came under conditions where

academic fellowship on an equal footing was a necessary part of the

work. There was not the slightest premium held out which might have

attracted them had not real inter-academic interest brought them over

the ocean, and no missionary spirit was appealed to, as everything was

equally divided between American and foreign contributors. It was a real

feast of international scholarship, in which the importance and the

number of foreigners stamped it as the first significant alliance of the

spirit of learning in the New and the Old Worlds. And it was essentially

for this purpose that the week of personal intermingling in St. Louis

itself was preceded and followed by happy weeks of visits to leading

universities. Almost every one of those one hundred European scholars

visited Harvard and Yale, Chicago and Johns Hopkins, Columbia and

Pennsylvania, saw the treasures of Washington and examined the

exhibitions of American scholarship in the World's Fair itself. The

change of opinion, the disappearance of prejudice, the growth of

confidence, the personal intercollegiate ties which resulted from all

that, have been evident since those days all over Europe. And it is not

surprising that it is just the most famous and most important of the

visitors, famous and important through their width and depth of view,

whose expression of appreciation and admiration for the new achievements

has been loudest.

We insisted that the effectiveness of the Congress showed itself in two

other directions still: on the one side, there was at last a congress

with a unified programme, a congress which stood for a definite thought,

and which brought all its efforts to bear on the solution of one

problem. There seemed a far-reaching agreement of opinion that this new

principle of congress administration had successfully withstood the test

of practical realization. Mere conglomerations of unconnected meetings

with casual programmes and unrelated papers cannot claim any longer to

represent the only possible form of international gatherings of

scholars. More than that, their superfluous and disheartening character

will be felt in future more strongly than before. No congress will

appear fully justified whose printed proceedings do not show a real plan

in its programme. And the consciousness of this mission of the Congress

will certainly be again reinforced by the publication of these volumes,

inasmuch as it is evident that they represent a substantial contribution

to the knowledge of our time which would not have been made without the

special stimulating occasion of the Congress.

And, finally, whether such a congress is held again or not, the impulse

of this one cannot be lost on account of the special end to which all

its efforts have been directed: the unity of scientific knowledge. We

had emphasized from the first that here was the centre of our purposes

in a time whose scientific specialization necessarily involves a

scattering of scholarly work and which yet in its deepest meaning

strives for a new synthesis, for a new unity, which is to give to all

this scattered labor a real dignity and significance; truly nothing was

more needed than an intense accentuation of the internal harmony of all

human knowledge. But for that it is not enough that the masses feel

instinctively the deep need of such unifying movements, nor is it enough

that the philosophers point with logical arguments towards the new

synthesis. The philosopher can only stand by and point the way; the

specialists themselves must go the way. And here at last they have done

so. Leaders of thought have interrupted their specialistic work and have

left their detailed inquiries to seek the fundamental conceptions and

methods and principles which bind all knowledge together, and thus to

work towards that unity from which all special work derives its meaning.

Whether or not their coöperation has produced anything which is final is

a question almost insignificant compared with the fundamental fact that

they coöperated at all for this ideal synthetic purpose. This fact can

never lose its influence on the scholarly effort of our age, and will

certainly find its strongest reinforcement in this unified publication.

It has fulfilled its noblest purpose if it adds strength to the deepest

movement of our time, the movement towards unity of meaning in the

scattered manifoldness of scientific endeavor with which the twentieth

century has opened.

[Illustration: _Simon Newcomb, Ph.D., LL.D._

Dr. Newcomb, the famous Astronomer, is conceded to be the Dean of

American scientists. His eminent services to the Government of the

United States, and his recognized position in foreign and domestic

scientific circles, made him peculiarly fitted to deliver the

introductory address, and to officiate as President of an International

Congress of the leading scientists of the world.

He has been the recipient of honorary degrees from six American and ten

European Universities, and he is a member of almost every important

Academy of Science in Europe and America. He is an officer of the Legion

of Honour, and is the only native American besides Benjamin Franklin who

has been elected an Associate of the Institute de France. From 1861 to

1897 he was Professor of Mathematics in the United States Navy. He also

lectured on Mathematics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins, and is now a

Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Arts of that university. Dr.

Newcomb is the author of numerous works on Astronomy and other

scientific subjects.]

PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONGRESS

INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT THE OPENING EXERCISES AT FESTIVAL HALL BY PROFESSOR SIMON

NEWCOMB, PRESIDENT OF THE CONGRESS

THE EVOLUTION OF THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATOR

As we look at the assemblage gathered in this hall, comprising so many

names of widest renown in every branch of learning,--we might almost say

in every field of human endeavor,--the first inquiry suggested must be

after the object of our meeting. The answer is, that our purpose

corresponds to the eminence of the assemblage. We aim at nothing less

than a survey of the realm of knowledge, as comprehensive as is

permitted by the limitations of time and space. The organizers of our

Congress have honored me with the charge of presenting such preliminary

view of its field as may make clear the spirit of our undertaking.

Certain tendencies characteristic of the science of our day clearly

suggest the direction of our thoughts most appropriate to the occasion.

Among the strongest of these is one toward laying greater stress on

questions of the beginning of things, and regarding a knowledge of the

laws of development of any object of study as necessary to the

understanding of its present form. It may be conceded that the principle

here involved is as applicable in the broad field before us as in a

special research into the properties of the minutest organism. It

therefore seems meet that we should begin by inquiring what agency has

brought about the remarkable development of science to which the world

of to-day bears witness. This view is recognized in the plan of our

proceedings, by providing for each great department of knowledge a

review of its progress during the century that has elapsed since the

great event commemorated by the scenes outside this hall. But such

reviews do not make up that general survey of science at large which is

necessary to the development of our theme, and which must include the

action of causes that had their origin long before our time. The

movement which culminated in making the nineteenth century ever

memorable in history is the outcome of a long series of causes, acting

through many centuries, which are worthy of especial attention on such

an occasion as this. In setting them forth we should avoid laying stress

on those visible manifestations which, striking the eye of every

beholder, are in no danger of being overlooked, and search rather for

those agencies whose activities underlie the whole visible scene, but

which are liable to be blotted out of sight by the very brilliancy of

the results to which they have given rise. It is easy to draw attention

to the wonderful qualities of the oak; but from that very fact, it may

be needful to point out that the real wonder lies concealed in the acorn

from which it grew.

Our inquiry into the logical order of the causes which have made our

civilization what it is to-day will be facilitated by bringing to mind

certain elementary considerations--ideas so familiar that setting them

forth may seem like citing a body of truisms--and yet so frequently

overlooked, not only individually, but in their relation to each other,

that the conclusion to which they lead may be lost to sight. One of

these propositions is that psychical rather than material causes are

those which we should regard as fundamental in directing the development

of the social organism. The human intellect is the really active agent

in every branch of endeavor,--the _primum mobile_ of civilization,--and

all those material manifestations to which our attention is so often

directed are to be regarded as secondary to this first agency. If it be

true that "in the world is nothing great but man; in man is nothing

great but mind," then should the keynote of our discourse be the

recognition of this first and greatest of powers.

Another well-known fact is that those applications of the forces of

nature to the promotion of human welfare which have made our age what it

is, are of such comparatively recent origin that we need go back only a

single century to antedate their most important features, and scarcely

more than four centuries to find their beginning. It follows that the

subject of our inquiry should be the commencement, not many centuries

ago, of a certain new form of intellectual activity.

Having gained this point of view, our next inquiry will be into the

nature of that activity, and its relation to the stages of progress

which preceded and followed its beginning. The superficial observer, who

sees the oak but forgets the acorn, might tell us that the special

qualities which have brought out such great results are expert

scientific knowledge and rare ingenuity, directed to the application of

the powers of steam and electricity. From this point of view the great

inventors and the great captains of industry were the first agents in

bringing about the modern era. But the more careful inquirer will see

that the work of these men was possible only through a knowledge of the

laws of nature, which had been gained by men whose work took precedence

of theirs in logical order, and that success in invention has been

measured by completeness in such knowledge. While giving all due honor

to the great inventors, let us remember that the first place is that of

the great investigators, whose forceful intellects opened the way to

secrets previously hidden from men. Let it be an honor and not a

reproach to these men, that they were not actuated by the love of gain,

and did not keep utilitarian ends in view in the pursuit of their

researches. If it seems that in neglecting such ends they were leaving

undone the most important part of their work, let us remember that

nature turns a forbidding face to those who pay her court with the hope

of gain, and is responsive only to those suitors whose love for her is

pure and undefiled. Not only is the special genius required in the

investigator not that generally best adapted to applying the discoveries

which he makes, but the result of his having sordid ends in view would

be to narrow the field of his efforts, and exercise a depressing effect

upon his activities. The true man of science has no such expression in

his vocabulary as "useful knowledge." His domain is as wide as nature

itself, and he best fulfills his mission when he leaves to others the

task of applying the knowledge he gives to the world.

We have here the explanation of the well-known fact that the functions

of the investigator of the laws of nature, and of the inventor who

applies these laws to utilitarian purposes, are rarely united in the

same person. If the one conspicuous exception which the past century

presents to this rule is not unique, we should probably have to go back

to Watt to find another.

From this viewpoint it is clear that the primary agent in the movement

which has elevated man to the masterful position he now occupies, is the

scientific investigator. He it is whose work has deprived plague and

pestilence of their terrors, alleviated human suffering, girdled the

earth with the electric wire, bound the continent with the iron way, and

made neighbors of the most distant nations. As the first agent which has

made possible this meeting of his representatives, let his evolution be

this day our worthy theme. As we follow the evolution of an organism by

studying the stages of its growth, so we have to show how the work of

the scientific investigator is related to the ineffectual efforts of his

predecessors.

In our time we think of the process of development in nature as one

going continuously forward through the combination of the opposite

processes of evolution and dissolution. The tendency of our thought has

been in the direction of banishing cataclysms to the theological limbo,

and viewing nature as a sleepless plodder, endowed with infinite

patience, waiting through long ages for results. I do not contest the

truth of the principle of continuity on which this view is based. But it

fails to make known to us the whole truth. The building of a ship from

the time that her keel is laid until she is making her way across the

ocean is a slow and gradual process; yet there is a cataclysmic epoch

opening up a new era in her history. It is the moment when, after lying

for months or years a dead, inert, immovable mass, she is suddenly

endowed with the power of motion, and, as if imbued with life, glides

into the stream, eager to begin the career for which she was designed.

I think it is thus in the development of humanity. Long ages may pass

during which a race, to all external observation, appears to be making

no real progress. Additions may be made to learning, and the records of

history may constantly grow, but there is nothing in its sphere of

thought, or in the features of its life, that can be called essentially

new. Yet, nature may have been all along slowly working in a way which

evades our scrutiny until the result of her operations suddenly appears

in a new and revolutionary movement, carrying the race to a higher plane

of civilization.

It is not difficult to point out such epochs in human progress. The

greatest of all, because it was the first, is one of which we find no

record either in written or geological history. It was the epoch when

our progenitors first took conscious thought of the morrow, first used

the crude weapons which nature had placed within their reach to kill

their prey, first built a fire to warm their bodies and cook their food.

I love to fancy that there was some one first man, the Adam of

evolution, who did all this, and who used the power thus acquired to

show his fellows how they might profit by his example. When the members

of the tribe or community which he gathered around him began to conceive

of life as a whole,--to include yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow in the

same mental grasp--to think how they might apply the gifts of nature to

their own uses,--a movement was begun which should ultimately lead to

civilization.

Long indeed must have been the ages required for the development of this

rudest primitive community into the civilization revealed to us by the

most ancient tablets of Egypt and Assyria. After spoken language was

developed, and after the rude representation of ideas by visible marks

drawn to resemble them had long been practiced, some Cadmus must have

invented an alphabet. When the use of written language was thus

introduced, the word of command ceased to be confined to the range of

the human voice, and it became possible for master minds to extend their

influence as far as a written message could be carried. Then were

communities gathered into provinces; provinces into kingdoms; kingdoms

into the great empires of antiquity. Then arose a stage of civilization

which we find pictured in the most ancient records,--a stage in which

men were governed by laws that were perhaps as wisely adapted to their

conditions as our laws are to ours,--in which the phenomena of nature

were rudely observed, and striking occurrences in the earth or in the

heavens recorded in the annals of the nation.

Vast was the progress of knowledge during the interval between these

empires and the century in which modern science began. Yet, if I am

right in making a distinction between the slow and regular steps of

progress, each growing naturally out of that which preceded it, and the

entrance of the mind at some fairly definite epoch into an entirely new

sphere of activity, it would appear that there was only one such epoch

during the entire interval. This was when abstract geometrical reasoning

commenced, and astronomical observations aiming at precision were

recorded, compared, and discussed. Closely associated with it must have

been the construction of the forms of logic. The radical difference

between the demonstration of a theorem of geometry and the reasoning of

every-day life which the masses of men must have practiced from the

beginning, and which few even to-day ever get beyond, is so evident at a

glance that I need not dwell upon it. The principal feature of this

advance is that, by one of those antinomies of the human intellect of

which examples are not wanting even in our own time, the development of

abstract ideas preceded the concrete knowledge of natural phenomena.

When we reflect that in the geometry of Euclid the science of space was

brought to such logical perfection that even to-day its teachers are not

agreed as to the practicability of any great improvement upon it, we

cannot avoid the feeling that a very slight change in the direction of

the intellectual activity of the Greeks would have led to the beginning

of natural science. But it would seem that the very purity and

perfection which was aimed at in their system of geometry stood in the

way of any extension or application of its methods and spirit to the

field of nature. One example of this is worthy of attention. In modern

teaching the idea of magnitude as generated by motion is freely

introduced. A line is described by a moving point; a plane by a moving

line; a solid by a moving plane. It may, at first sight, seem singular

that this conception finds no place in the Euclidian system. But we may

regard the omission as a mark of logical purity and rigor. Had the real

or supposed advantages of introducing motion into geometrical

conceptions been suggested to Euclid, we may suppose him to have replied

that the theorems of space are independent of time; that the idea of

motion necessarily implies time, and that, in consequence, to avail

ourselves of it would be to introduce an extraneous element into

geometry.

It is quite possible that the contempt of the ancient philosophers for

the practical application of their science, which has continued in some

form to our own time, and which is not altogether unwholesome, was a

powerful factor in the same direction. The result was that, in keeping

geometry pure from ideas which did not belong to it, it failed to form

what might otherwise have been the basis of physical science. Its

founders missed the discovery that methods similar to those of geometric

demonstration could be extended into other and wider fields than that of

space. Thus not only the development of applied geometry, but the

reduction of other conceptions to a rigorous mathematical form was

indefinitely postponed.

Astronomy is necessarily a science of observation pure and simple, in

which experiment can have no place except as an auxiliary. The vague

accounts of striking celestial phenomena handed down by the priests and

astrologers of antiquity were followed in the time of the Greeks by

observations having, in form at least, a rude approach to precision,

though nothing like the degree of precision that the astronomer of

to-day would reach with the naked eye, aided by such instruments as he

could fashion from the tools at the command of the ancients.

The rude observations commenced by the Babylonians were continued with

gradually improving instruments,--first by the Greeks and afterward by

the Arabs,--but the results failed to afford any insight into the true

relation of the earth to the heavens. What was most remarkable in this

failure is that, to take a first step forward which would have led on to

success, no more was necessary than a course of abstract thinking vastly

easier than that required for working out the problems of geometry. That

space is infinite is an unexpressed axiom, tacitly assumed by Euclid and

his successors. Combining this with the most elementary consideration of

the properties of the triangle, it would be seen that a body of any

given size could be placed at such a distance in space as to appear to

us like a point. Hence a body as large as our earth, which was known to

be a globe from the time that the ancient Phoenicians navigated the

Mediterranean, if placed in the heavens at a sufficient distance, would

look like a star. The obvious conclusion that the stars might be bodies

like our globe, shining either by their own light or by that of the sun,

would have been a first step to the understanding of the true system of

the world.

There is historic evidence that this deduction did not wholly escape the

Greek thinkers. It is true that the critical student will assign little

weight to the current belief that the vague theory of Pythagoras--that

fire was at the centre of all things--implies a conception of the

heliocentric theory of the solar system. But the testimony of

Archimedes, confused though it is in form, leaves no serious doubt that

Aristarchus of Samos not only propounded the view that the earth

revolves both on its own axis and around the sun, but that he correctly

removed the great stumbling-block in the way of this theory by adding

that the distance of the fixed stars was infinitely greater than the

dimensions of the earth's orbit. Even the world of philosophy was not

yet ready for this conception, and, so far from seeing the

reasonableness of the explanation, we find Ptolemy arguing against the

rotation of the earth on grounds which careful observations of the

phenomena around him would have shown to be ill-founded.

Physical science, if we can apply that term to an uncoördinated body of

facts, was successfully cultivated from the earliest times. Something

must have been known of the properties of metals, and the art of

extracting them from their ores must have been practiced, from the time

that coins and medals were first stamped. The properties of the most

common compounds were discovered by alchemists in their vain search for

the philosopher's stone, but no actual progress worthy of the name

rewarded the practitioners of the black art.

Perhaps the first approach to a correct method was that of Archimedes,

who by much thinking worked out the law of the lever, reached the

conception of the centre of gravity, and demonstrated the first

principles of hydrostatics. It is remarkable that he did not extend his

researches into the phenomena of motion, whether spontaneous or produced

by force. The stationary condition of the human intellect is most

strikingly illustrated by the fact that not until the time of Leonardo

was any substantial advance made on his discovery. To sum up in one

sentence the most characteristic feature of ancient and medieval

science, we see a notable contrast between the precision of thought

implied in the construction and demonstration of geometrical theorems

and the vague indefinite character of the ideas of natural phenomena

generally, a contrast which did not disappear until the foundations of

modern science began to be laid.

We should miss the most essential point of the difference between

medieval and modern learning if we looked upon it as mainly a difference

either in the precision or the amount of knowledge. The development of

both of these qualities would, under any circumstances, have been slow

and gradual, but sure. We can hardly suppose that any one generation, or

even any one century, would have seen the complete substitution of exact

for inexact ideas. Slowness of growth is as inevitable in the case of

knowledge as in that of a growing organism. The most essential point of

difference is one of those seemingly slight ones, the importance of

which we are too apt to overlook. It was like the drop of blood in the

wrong place, which some one has told us makes all the difference between

a philosopher and a maniac. It was all the difference between a living

tree and a dead one, between an inert mass and a growing organism. The

transition of knowledge from the dead to the living form must, in any

complete review of the subject, be looked upon as the really great event

of modern times. Before this event the intellect was bound down by a

scholasticism which regarded knowledge as a rounded whole, the parts of

which were written in books and carried in the minds of learned men. The

student was taught from the beginning of his work to look upon authority

as the foundation of his beliefs. The older the authority the greater

the weight it carried. So effective was this teaching that it seems

never to have occurred to individual men that they had all the

opportunities ever enjoyed by Aristotle of discovering truth, with the

added advantage of all his knowledge to begin with. Advanced as was the

development of formal logic, that practical logic was wanting which

could see that the last of a series of authorities, every one of which

rested on those which preceded it, could never form a surer foundation

for any doctrine than that supplied by its original propounder.

The result of this view of knowledge was that, although during the

fifteen centuries following the death of the geometer of Syracuse great

universities were founded at which generations of professors expounded

all the learning of their time, neither professor nor student ever

suspected what latent possibilities of good were concealed in the most

familiar operations of nature. Every one felt the wind blow, saw water

boil, and heard the thunder crash, but never thought of investigating

the forces here at play. Up to the middle of the fifteenth century the

most acute observer could scarcely have seen the dawn of a new era.

In view of this state of things, it must be regarded as one of the most

remarkable facts in evolutionary history that four or five men, whose

mental constitution was either typical of the new order of things or who

were powerful agents in bringing it about, were all born during the

fifteenth century, four of them at least at so nearly the same time as

to be contemporaries.

Leonardo da Vinci, whose artistic genius has charmed succeeding

generations, was also the first practical engineer of his time, and the

first man after Archimedes to make a substantial advance in developing

the laws of motion. That the world was not prepared to make use of his

scientific discoveries does not detract from the significance which must

attach to the period of his birth.

Shortly after him was born the great navigator whose bold spirit was to

make known a new world, thus giving to commercial enterprise that

impetus which was so powerful an agent in bringing about a revolution in

the thoughts of men.

The birth of Columbus was soon followed by that of Copernicus, the first

after Aristarchus to demonstrate the true system of the world. In him

more than in any of his contemporaries do we see the struggle between

the old forms of thought and the new. It seems almost pathetic and is

certainly most suggestive of the general view of knowledge taken at that

time that, instead of claiming credit for bringing to light great truths

before unknown, he made a labored attempt to show that, after all, there

was nothing really new in his system, which he claimed to date from

Pythagoras and Philolaus. In this connection it is curious that he makes

no mention of Aristarchus, who I think will be regarded by conservative

historians as his only demonstrated predecessor. To the hold of the

older ideas upon his mind we must attribute the fact that in

constructing his system he took great pains to make as little change as

possible in ancient conceptions.

Luther, the greatest thought-stirrer of them all, practically of the

same generation with Copernicus, Leonardo, and Columbus, does not come

in as a scientific investigator, but as the great loosener of chains

which had so fettered the intellect of men that they dared not think

otherwise than as the authorities thought.

Almost coeval with the advent of these intellects was the invention of

printing with movable type. Gutenberg was born during the first decade

of the century, and his associates and others credited with the

invention not many years afterward. If we accept the principle on which

I am basing my argument, that we should assign the first place to the

birth of those psychic agencies which started men on new lines of

thought, then surely was the fifteenth the wonderful century.