the world needs leaders, and you have chosen yourselves to be those
leaders. Are you aware how exceptional is your condition? The last
census shows that at present hardly one per cent of our population is in
our colleges. You are of that one per cent, and you are here in order
that you may enlighten the other ninety-nine per cent. If through
ignorance you fail, you will cause others to fail and you had better
never have come to this University. To some sort of leadership you have
dedicated yourselves, and to this aim you should be true. But do not at
times doubts cross your mind? Have you not occasionally asked yourselves
whether you can attain such leadership and make the most of your lives
by shutting yourselves up to a specialty? Multitudes of interesting
things are calling; shall you turn away from them and follow a single
line? It will be worth while to-day to consider these fundamental
questions and inquire how far we are justified in specializing, what
dangers there are in it, and in what degree those dangers may be
avoided.
Let me say, then, at the start, that I regard specialization as
absolutely essential to scholarship. There is no scholarship without it,
for it is involved in the very process of knowing. When I look at this
desk I am specializing; that is, I am detaching this piece of furniture
from all else in the room. I am limiting myself, and I cannot see
without it. I can gaze without specialization, but I cannot see without
specialization. If I am to know anything by sight, that knowledge must
come through the limitation of sight. I seize this object, cast away all
others, and thus fix my attention. Or if I am carefully to observe, I
even put my eye on a single point of the desk. There is no other way.
Clear knowledge becomes possible only through precise observation. Now
specialization is nothing but this necessary limitation of attention;
and we, as specialists, are merely carrying out on a large scale what
every human being must practise in some degree whenever he knows. We
employ the process persistently, and for the sake of science are willing
to hold ourselves steadily to a single line of observation. And we
cannot do otherwise. The principles involved in the specialization of
the senses run throughout all science. If we would know, we must hold
the attention long on a given subject.
But there is an unfortunate side to specialization. It obliges us to
discard other important interests. To discard merely unimportant ones
is easy. But every evening when I sit down to devote myself to my
ethics I am aware that there are persons starving in Boston who might
be saved if I should drop my work and go to them. Yet I sit calmly
there and say, "Let them starve; I am going to study ethics." I do
not see how I could be a suitable professor of ethics unless I were
willing thus to limit myself. That is the hard part, as I understand it,
of specialization,--the cutting off of things that are worth while. I
am sure you have already found it out. Many of you have come from
places of narrow opportunity and here find a welcome abundance.
Remembering how you have longed to obtain such privileges, you will be
tempted to scatter yourselves over a wide field, gathering a little
here and a little there. At the end of the year you will have nothing,
if you do that. The only possibility of gain is to choose your
field, devote serious time to it, count yourself a specialist, and
propose to live like one. Goethe admirably announces the principle:
"Wer grosses will muss sich beschraenken koennen." You must accept
limitations if you will go on to power, for in limitation the very
process of knowledge is rooted.
Furthermore, not only is specialization forced upon us by the nature
of knowledge, but without it our own powers cannot receive appropriate
discipline. It is difficult business to fashion a sound observer.
Each province of science has its special modes of observation, its own
modes of reasoning even. So long as we are unfamiliar with these and
obliged to hold ourselves to them through conscious control, our work
is poor. It is slow, inaccurate, and exhausting. Only when we have
trained ourselves to such aptitudes that within a certain field our
observations and reasonings are instinctive do we become swift, sure,
and unfatigued in research. To train our powers then we must begin to
specialize early and hold ourselves steadily within bounds. As one
looks over the names of those who have accomplished much, one is
surprised at the number who were early specialists. Take my own
department: Berkeley writes his great work when he is twenty-five; Hume
publishes his masterpiece at twenty-seven. Or again, Keats had
brought his wonderful results to accomplishment and died at twenty-five;
Shelley at thirty; Marlowe, the greatest loss English letters ever
met, at twenty-seven. It is just the same in other fields: Alexander
dies at thirty-six, Jesus at thirty-three. Yes, let us look nearer
home: the most forcible leader American education has ever had became
president of Harvard University at thirty-five; President Hyde of
Bowdoin took his position at twenty-seven; my own wife, Alice
Freeman, was president of Wellesley at twenty-six. These are early
specialists; and because they specialized early they acquired an
aptitude, a smoothness of work, a precision of insight, and width of
power which could not have been theirs had they begun later. I would
not deny that there have been geniuses who seemed to begin late: Kant
was such; Locke was such. You will recall many within your own fields.
But I think when you search the career of those who come to power in
comparatively late years, you will find that there has usually been a
train of covert specialization running through their lives. They may
not have definitely named their field to themselves, or produced work
within that field in early years, but everything had been converging
toward that issue. I believe, therefore, you ought to respect your
specialty, because only through it can your powers be brought to
their highest accuracy and service.
One more justification of specialization I will briefly mention, that it
is necessary for the organization of society. No motive is good for much
until it is socialized. If specialization only developed our individual
selves, we could hardly justify it; but it is the means of progress for
society. The field of knowledge is vast; no man can master it, and its
immensity was never so fully understood as to-day. The only way the
whole province can be conquered and brought under subjection to human
needs is by parting it out, one man being content to till his little
corner while his neighbor is engaged on something widely different. We
must part out the field of knowledge and specialize on our allotted
work, in order that there may be entirety in science. If we seek to have
entirety in ourselves, science will be fragmentary and feeble. That
division of labor which has proved efficient everywhere else is no less
needful in science.
But I suppose it is hardly necessary to justify specialization to this
audience. Most of you have staked heavily on it, putting yourselves to
serious inconvenience, many of you heavily mortgaging your future, in
order to come here and devote yourselves to some single interest. I
might confidently go through this room asking each of you what is your
subject? And you would proudly reply, "My subject is this. My subject is
this. My subject is this." I think you would feel ashamed if you had not
thus specialized. I see no occasion, therefore, to elaborate what I have
urged. As I understand it, the three roots of specialization are these:
it is grounded in the very nature of the knowing process; it is grounded
in the needs of ourselves as individuals, in order that we may attain
our maximum efficiency; it is grounded in the needs of society, because
only so can society reach that fulness of knowledge which its progress
requires.
But, after all, the beliefs which are accepted as matters of course in
this room are largely denounced outside it. We must acknowledge that our
confidence in specialization encounters many doubts in the community.
It may be well, then, to place ourselves where that community stands and
ask the general public to tell us why it doubts us, what there is in our
specialized attitude which it thinks defective, and what are the
complaints which it is disposed to bring against us? I will try to take
the position of devil's advocate and plead the cause of the objector to
specialization.
Specialization, it is said, leads to ignorance; indeed it rather aims at
ignorance than knowledge. When I attend to this desk, it is true I
secure a bit of knowledge, but how small is that bit in comparison to
all the things in this room which I might know about! It is but a
fraction. Yet I have condemned all else in the room to ignorance,
reserving only this one little object for knowledge. Now that is what we
are all of us doing on a great scale; by specializing, by limiting our
attention, we cut off what is not attended to. It is often assumed that
attention is mainly a positive affair and occupied with what we are to
know. But that is a very small portion of it; really its important part
is the negative, the removal of what we do not wish to observe. We cut
ourselves off from the great mass of knowledge which is offered. Is it
not then true that every specialist has disciplined himself to be an
ignoramus? He has drawn a fence around a little portion of the universe
and said, "Within that fence I know something." "Yes," the public
replies, "but you do not know anything outside." And is not the public
right? When we step forward and claim to be learned men, is not the
public justified in saying, "I know a great deal more than you do; I
know a thousand things and you know only one. You say you know that one
through and through, and of course I do not know my thousand things
through and through. But it is not necessary. I perceive their
relations; I can handle them; I can use them in practice; can you?"
"Well, no," we are obliged to say, "we specialists are a little fumbling
when we try to take hold of the world. We are not altogether skilful in
action, just because we are such specialists." You students here have
been devoting yourselves to some one point--I am afraid many of you are
going to have sad experience of it--you have been learning to know
something nobody else on earth does know, and then you go forth to seek
a position. But the world may have no use for you; there are only two or
three positions of that sort in the country, and those may happen to be
filled. Just because you are such an elaborate scholar you cannot earn
your daily bread. You have cut yourself off from everything but that one
species of learning, and that does not happen to be wanted. Therefore
you are not wanted. Such is the too frequent condition of the
specialist. The thousand things he does not know; it is only the one
thing he does know. And because he is so ignorant, he is helpless.
Turning then to our second justification of specialization, the case
seems equally bad. I said that specialization was needed for the
training of our powers. The training of them all? Not that, but the
training of only certain ones among them. The others hang slack. In
those regions of ourselves we count for little. We are men of weight
only within the range of the powers we have trained; and what a large
slice of us lies outside these! Accordingly the general public declares
that there is no judgment so bad as the judgment of a specialist. Few
practical situations exactly coincide with his specialty, and outside
his specialty his judgment is worse than that of the novice. He has been
training himself in reference to something precise; and the moment he
ventures beyond it, the very exactitude of his discipline limits his
worth. The man who has not been a specialist, who has dabbled in all
things and has acquired a rough and ready common sense, that man's
judgment is worth something in many different sections of life, but the
judgment of the specialist is painfully poor beyond his usual range. You
remember how, in the comic opera, the practice is satirized of
appointing a person who has never been at sea to take charge of the navy
of a great country. But that is the only sensible course to pursue. Put
a specialist there, and the navy will be wretchedly organized, because
the administration of the navy requires something more than the
specialism of seamanship. It is necessary to coordinate seamanship with
many other considerations, and the man trained in the specialty of
seamanship is little likely to have that ability. Therefore ordinarily
we use our experts best by putting them under the control of those who
are not experts. Common sense has the last word. The coordinating power
which has not been disciplined in single lines is what ultimately takes
the direction of affairs. We need the specialist within his little
field; shut him up there, and he is valuable enough; but don't let him
escape. That seems to be the view of the public. They keep the
specialist confined because they utterly distrust his judgment when he
extends himself abroad.
And when we look at the third of our grounds for justification, social
need, the public declares that the specialists are intolerably
presumptuous. Knowing their own subject, they imagine they can dictate
to anybody and do not understand how limited is their importance. Again
and again it happens that because a man does know some one thing pretty
well he sets himself up as a great man in general. My own province
suffers in this respect more than most; for as soon as a man acquires
considerable skill in chemistry or biology, he is apt to issue a
pronunciamento on philosophy. But philosophy does not suffer alone.
Everywhere the friends of the great specialist are telling him he has
proved himself a mighty man, quite competent to sit in judgment on the
universe; and he, forgetting that the universe and the particular
subject he knows something about are two different things, really
imagines that his ignorant opinions deserve consideration.
Now I suppose we must acknowledge that in all this blasphemy against our
calling, there is a good deal of truth. These certainly are dangers
which all of us specialists incur. I agree that they are inevitable
dangers. Do not, however, let us on account of them abandon
specialization and seek to acquire a mass of miscellaneous information.
Bacon said, "I take all knowledge for my province." If we say it, we
shall become not Bacons but fools. No, that is the broad road to
ignorance. But laying these profound dangers of specialization well to
heart, assured that they beset us all, let us search for remedial
measures. Let us ask how such dangers may be reduced to a minimum. Is
there a certain way in which we may engage in the specialist's research
and still save ourselves from some of the evils I have here depicted? I
think there is. To find it we will follow the same three avenues which
have been leading us thus far.
In regard to the first, the limitation of attention, I understand that,
after all, our specialty cannot fill our entire life. We do sometimes
sit down to dinner; we occasionally talk with a friend; we now and then
take a journey; we permit ourselves from time to time to read some other
book than one which refers to our subject. That is, I take it, if we are
fully alive to the great danger that in specializing we are cutting off
a large part of the universe, we shall be wise in gathering eagerly
whatever additional knowledge we may acquire outside our specialty. And
I must say that the larger number of eminent specialists whom I have
happened to know have been men pretty rich in knowledge outside their
specialties. They were men who well apprehended the extreme danger of
their limited modes of pursuit and who greedily grasped, therefore, at
every bit of knowledge they could obtain which lay beyond their
province. They appropriated all the wisdom they could; and merely
because it did not exactly fit in with their specialty, they did not
turn it away. I do not know how far it is wise to go in this effort to
repair the one-sidedness in which most of us are compelled to live. A
rather extreme case was once brought to my attention. There was a
student at Harvard who had been a high scholar with me, and I found that
he was also so specializing in the classics that when he graduated he
took classical honors. Some years later I learned that he was one of the
highest scholars in the Medical School. Meeting him a few years after
he had entered his profession, I asked, "How did it happen that you
changed your mind so markedly? You devoted yourself to classics and
philosophy in college. What made you finally decide to become a
physician?" "Finally decide!" said he. "Why, from childhood up I never
intended to be anything else." "But," I persisted, "I cannot be mistaken
in recalling that you devoted yourself in college to classics and
philosophy." "Yes," he said, "I did, because I knew I should never have
another chance at those subjects. I was going to give the rest of my
life to medicine, so I took those years for classics and philosophy." I
asked, "Wasn't that a great mistake; haven't you now found out your
blunder?" "Oh, no," said he, "I am a much better physician on that
account; I could not have done half so well if I hadn't had all that
training in philosophy and classics." Now I cannot advise such a course
for everybody. It takes a big man to do that. If you are big enough, it
is worth while laying a very broad foundation; but considering the size
on which most of us are planned, it is wiser to begin early and
specialize from the very start.
Well, then, here is one mode of making up for the defects of
specialization: we may pick up knowledge outside our subject. But it is
an imperfect mode; you never can put away your limitations altogether.
You can do a great deal. Use your odd quarter-hours wisely and do not
merely play in fragmentary times, understanding that these are precious
seasons for acquiring the knowledge which lies beyond your province.
Then every time you talk with anybody, lead him neatly to what he knows
best, keeping an attentive ear, becoming a first-class listener, and
seeking to get beyond yourself. By doing so you will undoubtedly much
enlarge the narrow bounds to which you have pledged yourself. Yet this
policy will not be enough. It will require to be supplemented by
something more. Therefore I should say in the second place, that in
disciplining our powers we must be careful to conceive our specialty
broadly enough. In taking it too narrowly lies our chief danger. There
are two types of specialist. There is the man who regards his specialty
as a door into which he goes and by which he shuts the world out, hiding
himself with his own little interests. That is the petty, poor
specialist, the specialist who never becomes a man of power, however
much he may be a man of learning. But there is an entirely different
sort of specialist from that; it is the man who regards his specialty as
a window out of which he may peer upon all the world. His specialty is
merely a point of view from which everything is regarded. Consequently
without departing from our specialty each of us may escape narrowness.
Instead of running over all the earth and contemplating it in a
multitude of different aspects, the wise specialist chooses some single
point of view and examines the universe as it is related to this.
Everything therefore has a meaning for him, everything contributes
something to his specialty. Narrowing himself while he is getting his
powers disciplined, as those powers become trained he slacks them off
and gives them a wider range; for he knows very well that while the
world is cut up into little parcels it never can be viewed rightly. It
will always be distorted. For, after all, things are what they are
through their relations, and if you snap those relations you never truly
conceive anything. Accordingly, as soon as we have got our specialty, we
should begin to coordinate that specialty with everything else. At first
we may fix our attention on some single problem within a given field,
but soon we discover that we cannot master that problem without knowing
the rest of the field also. As we go on to know the rest of the field
and make ourself a fair master of that science, we discover that that
science depends on other sciences. Never was there an age of the world
in which this interlocking of the sciences was so clearly perceived as
in our day. Formerly we seemed able to isolate a particular topic and
know something of it, but in our evolutionary time nothing of that kind
is possible. Each thing is an epitome of the whole. Have you been
training your eye to see a world in a grain of sand? Can you look
through your specialty out upon the total universe and say: "I am a
specialist merely because I do not want to be a narrow man. My specialty
is my telescope. Everything belongs to me. I cannot, it is true, turn to
it all at once. Being a feeble person I must advance from point to
point, accepting limitations; but just as fast as I can, having mastered
those limitations, I shall cast them aside and press on into ever
broader regions."
But I said specialization was fundamentally justified through the
organization of society, because by its division of toil we contribute
our share to the total of human knowledge; and yet the popular objector
declares that we are presumptuous, and because we have mastered our own
specialty we are apt to assume ourselves capable of pronouncing judgment
over the whole field. Undoubtedly there is this danger; but such a
result is not inevitable. The danger is one which we are perfectly
capable of setting aside. The temper of our mind decides the matter, and
this is entirely within our control. What is the use of our going forth
presumptuous persons? We certainly shall be unserviceable if we are
persons of that type. That is not the type of Charles Darwin in biology,
of William James in psychology, of Horace Howard Furness in Shakespeare
criticism, of Albert Michelson in physics. These are men as remarkable
for modesty and simplicity as for scholarly insight. The true
characteristic of a learned specialist is humility. What we want to be
training ourselves in is respect for other people and a sense of
solidarity with them. Our work would be of little use if there were not
somebody at our side who cared nothing for that work of ours and cared
immensely for his own. It is our business to respect that other man,
whether he respects us or not. We must learn to look upon every
specialist as a fellow worker. Without him we cannot be perfect. Let us
make ourselves as large as possible, in order that we may contribute our
little something to that to which all others are contributing. It is
this cooperative spirit which it should be ours to acquire. And it seems
to me that you are under peculiarly fortunate circumstances for
acquiring it. What strikes me as fatal is to have a group of young
specialists taken and trained by themselves, detachedly, shut off from
others. Nothing of that sort occurs here. Every day you are rubbing
shoulders with persons who have other interests than yours. When you
walk to dinner, you fall in with a comrade who has been spending his day
over something widely unlike that which has concerned you. Possibly you
have been able to lead him to talk about it; possibly you have gained an
insight into what he was seeking, and seen how his work largely
supplements your own. If you have had proper respect for him and proper
humility in regard to yourself, this great society of specialists has
filled out your work for you day after day; and in that sense of
cooperation, of losing yourselves in the common service of scientific
mankind, you have found the veritable glory of these happy years.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] On the morning of June 9, 1908, a chime of bells was dedicated at
the University of Chicago in honor of Alice Freeman Palmer. At
the Convocation Exercises in the afternoon the following address
was delivered.
VII
THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT[3]