"'Our contemptible enemies say that our talk about Aristotle and Plato is like the gossip of lackeys in the pot-house about their noble masters. We know better. You are a young man. I will give you a bit of profound advice. If you want to make your way in the literary world rapidly and with ease, hitch on your name to some universally acknowledged celebrity. Do not write on obscure, if great authors or heroes; but pick out Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, or Napoleon. Write constantly on some speciality of these men; thus, on the adjectives in Homer; on the neutral article in Plato; on the conjunctions in Dante; on the plant-lore in Shakespeare; on the names of women in Goethe; or on the hats of Napoleon.
"'Your name will then incessantly be before the public together with that of Homer or Shakespeare or Napoleon. After a time, by a natural association of ideas, something of the lustre of the immortal will fall on you. Note how the most elaborate writers on, say Shakespeare, are almost invariably men of the most sincere mediocrity. They are, nevertheless, exceedingly clever tacticians. They become "authorities." We are not authorities because we are specialists; we have, on the contrary, introduced the system of specialities in order to pass for authorities. To use Plato's terms: our whole business spells effectology, and nothing else. Take this to heart and be successful.'
"On leaving the professor," Aristotle said, "I felt that I had made several steps forward in the comprehension of that system of specialisation which I heard praised and admired in all the Universities. I need not tell you, my friends, how utterly wrong that system is. As humans do not think in words, but in whole sentences, so Nature does not act in particulars, but in wholes. The particulars are ours, not Nature's. In making them we act arbitrarily. Why should dentistry be one speciality? Why should there not be thirty-two different specialist dentists for our thirty-two teeth? All specialisation in the realm of knowledge is rank arbitrariness. Without exception, the great leading ideas in all organised thought have invariably been made by wholesale thinkers like Pythagoras, Plato, I venture to add: myself, Lionardo da Vinci, Kepler, Newton, Pascal, Leibniz, Darwin. That is precisely where humans differ from animals. All animals are the most conceited specialists."
Here Diogenes interrupted: "Does the converse hold good, O Aristotle?"
"I will leave," Aristotle replied with a smile, "the consideration of this case to your own discretion. I do repeat it, that each animal is an out-and-out specialist. It troubles about nothing else than the two or three things it takes a professional interest in. It eats, sleeps, and propagates; occasionally it adds a tightly circumscribed activity of some kind. That's why animals do not talk. It is not part of their speciality. They do not talk for the same reason that the English do not produce fine music, nor the Prussians tactful behaviour. In all these cases the interest of the specialist lies elsewhere.
"Does a modern specialist in heart-diseases study the kidneys? Does a specialist in surgery care to study the nerves? Even so an animal does not care to speak. It is a specialist; it restricts itself to its 'business,' to 'the point.' The little ones say that animals have no general ideas, and that is why they cannot speak. But have human specialists any general ideas of anything, and yet—do they not speak? The argument is too foolish for words.
"Why, Nature created men in order to have a few generalists, if I may say so, amongst all the specialists called animals or plants; just as amongst men she created Homers and Platos and Galileos and Leibnizes, in order to save the rest of humans from their evil tendency to over-specialisation. It is a plan as plain as transparent glass.
"Thousands of years ago Nature found out that, with all these endless vegetal and animal specialists on hand, she would soon have to declare herself bankrupt. One specialist ignored the other; or hampered, hurt, and paralysed the other; they could not understand one another, because they had no common interest. In her predicament, Nature created human beings for the same reason that men invented the locomotive or the telegraph. She could no longer be without him. Man was, by his very needs, obliged to drop over-specialisation. He interested himself, for a variety of ends and reasons, in stones as much as in plants and animals. By exterminating some of the most damaging species of animals, he saved the life of millions of specimens of other animals that would otherwise have been killed out by ferocious specialists, such as the tiger, the leopard, and the wolf. The same he did to plants, and partly to rivers and lakes. He brought a little order into this pandemonium of specialists in Nature.
"Look at the sea. There man was unable to exert his power for order by general ideas. Look at the indescribable disorder and chaos and monstrosity of life and living beings in the sea. They are hideous, like an octopus; short-lived, nay, of a few minutes' duration, like the jelly-fish; fearful and yet cowardly like a shark; abominably under-sized or over-sized; incapable of any real passion, except that of eating and drinking. This liquid mass of fanatic and unsystematised specialists render the sea as inferior to the land as is Thibet to Holy Athens. People travelling in that ocean of specialists are exasperated by foul sea-sickness; and empires built on it have repeatedly been destroyed in a single week; ay, in one day.