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, 136 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 137 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. 138 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 139 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 coördinate 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 140 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 141 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 coöperative 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 142 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 coöperation, of losing yourselves in the common service of scientific mankind, you have found the veritable glory of these happy years.
FOOTNOTES:
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]
A few years ago Matthew Arnold, after travelling in this country and revising the somewhat unfavorable opinion of us which he had formed earlier and at a distance, still wrote in his last paper on Civilization in the United States that America, in spite of its excellences, is an uninteresting land. He thought our institutions remarkable. He pointed out how close a fit exists between them and the character of the citizens, a fit so close as is hardly to be found in other countries. He saw much that is of promise in our future. But after all, he declares that no man will live here if he can live elsewhere, because America is an uninteresting land.