developed, while the others are suffering from atrophy. If the "special aptitude" of the student lies in the field of natural sciences or technics, he is liable to neglect altogether literature, history and philosophy, branches which are indispensable for the real culture of the mind. He becomes a narrow specialist, he swells the host of those men who even now afflict the community, men who are incapable of forming a sane opinion on any question which cannot be decided by a laboratory experiment. Such men have no perceptions of the relations and interrelations of the various branches of knowledge; they lack all appreciation of what is noble and sublime; above all they are most liable to ignore, or even to deny, that beyond the narrow limits of natural science lie truths of the utmost importance, unattainable by any process of synthetic reasoning. It is such warped specialists that Goethe ridicules in the famous passage in Faust (part 2, act 1):
What you touch not, miles distant from you lies;
What you grasp not, is naught in sooth to you;
What you count not, cannot you deem be true;
What you weigh not, that hath for you no weight;
What you coin not, you're sure is counterfeit."
There is always a danger that science leads to pride, particularly to that kind of pride which the Germans call Gelehrtenstolz and Professorendünkel. This danger is especially great in the case of specialists. Professor Paulsen quotes a passage from Kant, in which the philosopher of Königsberg speaks of "Cyclopses of science," who carry an immense weight of learning, a "load of a hundred camels," but who have only one eye, namely that of their own specialty.[1] They lack
- ↑ Die deutschen Universitäten, Berlin 1902, p. 219.
