And Now, With Life Behind Me, How Should I Advise Another In
Such A Plight?
When a young lady, thus embarrassed, wrote to
Carlyle for counsel, he sympathetically bade her 'put her
drawers in order.'
Here is the truth to be faced at the outset: 'Man has but
the choice to go a little way in many paths, or a great way
in only one.' 'Tis thus John Mill puts it. Which will he,
which should he, choose? Both courses lead alike to
incompleteness. The universal man is no specialist, and has
to generalise without his details. The specialist sees only
through his microscope, and knows about as much of cosmology
as does his microbe. Goethe, the most comprehensive of
Seers, must needs expose his incompleteness by futile
attempts to disprove Newton's theory of colour. Newton must
needs expose his, by a still more lamentable attempt to prove
the Apocalypse as true as his own discovery of the laws of
gravitation. All science nowadays is necessarily confined to
experts. Without illustrating the fact by invidious hints, I
invite anyone to consider the intellectual cost to the world
which such limitation entails; nor is the loss merely
negative; the specialist is unfortunately too often a bigot,
when beyond his contracted sphere.
This, you will say, is arguing in a circle. The universal
must be given up for the detail, the detail for the
universal; we leave off where we began. Yes, that is the
dilemma. Still, the gain to science through a devotion of a
whole life to a mere group of facts, in a single branch of a
single science, may be an incalculable acquisition to human
knowledge, to the intellectual capital of the race - a gain
that sometimes far outweighs the loss.
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