5. The vocation of the lawyer and the judge.
The vocation of the statesman.
The vocation of the religious teacher.
The three last mentioned are classed together as educational vocations, that is, as vocations which, in respect to their highest significance, are branches of the pedagogy of mankind, having for their object to educate the human race; the ethical object of the lawyer being to educate society in the idea of justice; of the statesman to educate society in the idea of the state; of the religious teacher to educate society in the idea of the spiritual universe.
This conception of the lawyer, the politician, etc., as primarily educators, is a point to which particular attention is directed. The significance of it will appear further on. I shall now indicate in bare outline what I conceive to be the specific contribution of the vocations mentioned to the formation of a spiritual personality.
Science
Conspicuously important in this connection is the question whether and by what means the pursuit of the physical sciences can be linked up to the supreme spiritual end of man. The scientist may develop into a great thinker in the course of comprehensive and intricate investigations, but he does not thereby necessarily develop into a personality. His mind will become in this way a mirror of the orderly procession of nature’s phenomena. He will be the accurate recorder of what happens, the knowing spectator of the play, whose eye recognizes the actors, the forces, beneath their disguises. The pursuit of knowledge of this kind for the sake of knowledge, or it may be for the sake of exercising the faculty of cognition, represents the purely scientific conception of the aim of science. Whatever moral qualities are exacted of the scientist, such as accuracy or intellectual veracity, self-abnegation, scorn of mere vulgar pecuniary reward or celebrity, and at least a provisional disregard of the practical benefits to be derived by mankind from scientific discovery—all these fine traits of character are prized as subordinate to the strictly scientific object. The ethical character of the man himself is not regarded as the supreme end to be fostered by his scientific occupation, but as instrumental to his occupation the aims of which are said to be purely impersonal.
There is thus a scientific conception of the aim of science; on the other hand, there is an ethical conception of it. The former points in the direction of the indefinite extension of knowledge which never embraces a totality of the knowable, never reaches a limit, even in idea. The latter points to the infinite, not to the indefinite, sets up an ideal of the infinite as the goal, takes the man out of the flux, centralizes his individuality into a personality by relating him to the infinite, not as the mere spectator and scribe of nature, but through his action or other potential spiritual beings like himself.
The scientist, in brief, like every one else, becomes a personality by eliciting the potential spiritual nature in other human beings. But be it noted that he is to perform this task as a scientist. His particular occupation is to be the means of producing a particular spiritual result in others as well as in himself, and by this means his occupation is to be converted into a vocation.
How? Through partial success and frustration. Partial success in the case of a scientist means for one thing, increased mental grasp, the power to hold before the mind ever more and more complex relations,—a faculty supremely serviceable in mastering complexities of relation in the economic, in the political spheres, in the sphere of international intercourse, in the sphere of the social relations in general, and wherever the ethical principle has to be applied. The scientific occupation trains powers which are to be exercised so as to illuminate obscurities in the ethical field.
The frustration which the scientist meets with when he reflects in thoroughgoing fashion on the business he has in hand is the inevitable realization that Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss, that the sphere of the finite in which he labors, though capable of indefinite extension, is forever incapable of being rounded out to a true infinity, and hence that the complete unification of the manifold (in which alone the reality-producing functions of the mind can find repose and ultimate satisfaction), can never be carried out in the manifold of juxtaposition and sequence with which, as a physical scientist, he deals. He will thus be led to face in thought the limits of what is finitely attainable, not only by him as an individual scientist, but by physical science in general. And in proportion as his spiritual nature is energetic it will then assert itself all the more resiliently after this defeat, and turn in a new direction, and towards another kind of truth, the truth which is discovered in the realm of will, in the sphere of intercourse with fellow human beings. The propædeutic result of science with respect to ethical personality is the training of the more complex mental faculties. The positive result following the frustration is the new turn toward the spiritual, the escape from the spell wherewith the physical world enchains the mind, the dissipating of the widespread illusion that the truths of physical science are the only kind of truth, the more determined setting of the face towards a different kind of truth. The scientist, in brief, is to travel along the paths of the finite in order to arrive and stand at the gate of the infinite.
I have said that the boon of personality is gained in intercourse with others, through the influence which we exert on others. How does the scientist as a scientist spiritually affect others? The great specific service, as I have just said, which he is to render is to destroy the illusion that the material world is a finality. And it is just he, the scientist, who works most successfully in the field of physical truth who must assist the rest of us in escaping from the spell to which we are all subject. He is the one, he who more than others succeeds in unifying the manifold of juxtaposition and sequence, to whom we look to liberate others as well as himself from the deceptive belief that the reality-producing functions of the human mind can be satisfied in the temporal and spatial manifold. Not from the tyro, not from the purveyor of “popular science” can we hope to learn the profoundest lessons as to the incapacity of physical nature to appease the spirit of man. It is from the familiar friend of nature, from one more deeply read than we are in her secrets, that we are to obtain this great instruction, to receive this boon.