So we may concede to the specialist the exclusive right to have an opinion on certain subjects—subjects let us say of a size suitable for the thesis of a Doctor of Philosophy. But we are not to be shut off from the pleasure of thinking on more sizable themes. We have all equal rights on the "boatable waters."
Matthew Arnold retells the story of the Scholar-gypsy who, forsaking the university, "took to the woods,"—so far as we can learn from the poem, to his own spiritual and intellectual advantage. The combination of the scholar and gypsy has a fascination. One likes to conceive of thought as playing freely among the other forces of nature, and dealing directly with all objects and not with those especially prepared for it.
Across the border-land of the physical sciences one may meet many such scholar-gypsies. They have taken to the wilderness and yet carried into it a trained intelligence. Here may be found keen observers, who might have written text-books on ornithology had they not fallen in love with birds. They follow their friends into their haunts in the thickets, and they love to gossip about their peculiarities. Here are botanists who love the growing things in the fields and woods better than the specimens in their herbariums. They love to describe better than to analyze. Now and then one may meet a renegade who carries a geologist's hammer. It is a sheer hypocrisy, like a fishing rod in the hands of a contemplative rambler. It is merely an excuse for being out of doors and among the mountains.
The Gentle Reader finds unfailing delight in these wanderers. They open up to him a leafy world. Thanks to them there are places where he feels intimately at home: a certain English parish; a strip of woodland in Massachusetts; the vicinity of a farm on the Hudson; an enchanted country in the high Sierras.
"I verily believe," he says, "there is more Natural History to be learned in such places than in all the museums. Besides, I never liked a museum."
The fact is that he does learn a good many things in this way—and some of them he remembers.
The native African who is capable of understanding the philosophy of history may adjust his mind to the idea that his continent is intended for exploitation by a superior race. The forests in which his ancestors have hunted for generations form only a part of the Hinter-land of some colony on the coast which he has never seen. After a time, by an inevitable process of expansion, the colony will absorb and assimilate all the adjoining country. But his perplexities are not over when he has, in a general way, resigned himself to manifest destiny. He discovers that all Europeans are not alike, though they certainly look alike. There are conflicting claims. To whose sphere of influence does he belong? It is not easy to answer such questions, and mistakes are liable to bring down upon him punitive expeditions from different quarters.
A similar perplexity arises in the minds of the simple inhabitants of the scientific Hinter-lands. They are ready to admit the superior claims of the exact sciences, but they are puzzled to know to what particular sphere they belong.
In the absence of any generally received philosophy each special science pushes out as far as it can and attempts to take in the whole of existence. The specialist, forgetting his self-imposed limitations, and fired with the ambition for wide generalization, which is the infirmity of all active minds, becomes an intellectual tyrant. He is a veritable Tamerlane, and if he rears no pyramids of skulls, he leaves behind him a multitude of muddled brains.
Wilberforce tells us of the havoc wrought in his day by the new science of Political Economy. Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" was hailed as the complete solution of all social problems. Forgetting the narrow scope of the inquiry which had to do with only a single aspect of human life, the maxims of trade were elevated into the place of the moral law. Superstition magnified those useful twins, Demand and Supply, into two all-powerful Genii who were quite capable of doing the work of Providence. For any one in the spirit of brotherly kindness to interfere with their autocratic operations was looked upon as an act of rebellion against the nature of things. "A dismal science," indeed, as any science is when it becomes an unlimited despotism.