aristotle on specialism in england

the first night the gods and heroes assembled on the heights around florence. from the magnificent town there came only a faint glimmer of artificial light, and the arno rolled its waves melodiously towards the sea. on a height full of convenient terraces, offering a view on the lily of the arno, on fiesole, and on the finely undulating outlines of the apennine mountains, the assembly sat down. from afar one could see the bold lines of the copy of michelangelo's david on the hill. the evening was lovely and balmy. zeus opened the meeting with a request directed to alexander, king of macedon, to ask his teacher aristotle to entertain them with his experiences at the seats of modern learning and study. alexander did so, and the grave stagirite, mellowed by the years, addressed the assembly as follows:

"all my mortal life i have tried, by reading, by making vast collections of natural objects and animals, and by the closest thinking on the facts furnished to me by men of all sorts of professions and crafts, to get at some unity of knowledge. i held, and still hold, that just as nature is one, so ought know[pg 2]ledge too to be. i have written a very large number of treatises, many of which, thanks to thy providence, o zeus, have escaped the smallpox called commentaries, in that the little ones never got possession of those works. but while always loving detail and single facts, i never lost sight of the connection of facts. as a coin, whether a penny or a sovereign, has no currency unless the image of the prince is cut out on it, even so has no fact scientific value unless the image of an underlying general principle is grafted thereon. this great truth i taught all my pupils, and i hoped that men would carefully observe it in all their studies. when then i went amongst the little ones, i expected them to do as i had taught their teachers to do. however, what i found was, o zeus, the funniest of all things.

"on my visit to what they call universities i happened to call, in the first place, on a professor who said he studied history. in my time i believed that history was not as suggestive of philosophical truths as is poetry. since then i have somewhat altered my view. naturally enough i was curious to know what my professor of history thought of that, and i asked him to that effect. he looked at me with a singular smile and said: 'my young friend (—i had assumed the appearance of a student—), my young friend, history is neither more nor less than a science. as such it consists of a long array of specialities.' 'and which,' i asked timidly, 'is your special period?' whereupon the professor gravely said: 'the afternoons of the year 1234 a.d.'" while everybody present in the assembly, including even st francis of assisi, laughed at this point of aristotle's narrative,[pg 3] diogenes exclaimed: "why has the good man not selected the nights of that year? it would greatly reduce his labours."

a peal of laughter rewarded the lively remark. aristotle resumed his tale, and said: "when the professor saw that i was a little amused at his statement, he frowned on me and exclaimed in a deep voice, if with frequent stammerings, which as i subsequently learnt is the chief attraction of their diction, 'my young friend, you must learn to understand that we modern historians have discovered a method so subtle, and so effective, that, with all deference be it said, we are in some respects stronger even than the gods. for the gods cannot change the past; but we modern historians can. we do it every day of our lives, and some of us have obtained a very remarkable skill at it.'"

at this point of aristotle's narrative homeric laughter seized all present, and aristophanes patted the stagirite on the back, saying: "pray, consider yourself engaged. at the next performance of my best comedy you will be my protagonist." aristotle thanked him with much grace, and continued: "i was naturally very curious to learn what my professor of history thought of the great greeks of my own time and of that of my ancestors. i mentioned homer. i had barely done so but what my professor burst into a coarse and disdainful guffaw.

"'homer?' he exclaimed; 'homer?—but of whom do you speak? homer is nothing more nor less than a multiple syndicate of street-ballad-singers who, by a belated process of throwing back the "reflex" of present and modern events to remote ages,[pg 4] and by the well-known means of literary contamination, epical syncretism, and religious, mythop?ic, and subconscious impersonation have been hashed into the appearance of one great poet.

"'our critical methods, my young friend, are so keen that, to speak by way of simile, we are able to spot, from looking at the footprints of a man walking in the sand, what sort of buttons he wore on his cuffs.

"'poor cuvier—otherwise one of my revered colleagues—used to say: "give me a tooth of an animal and i will reconstruct the rest of the animal's body." what is cuvier's feat as compared with ours? he still wanted a tooth; he still was in need of so clumsy and palpable a thing as a tooth; perhaps a molar. we, the super-cuviers of history, we do not want a tooth any more than toothache; we want nothing. no tooth, no footprint even, simply nothing. is it not divine? we form, as it were, an ex nihilo club. we have nothing, we want nothing, and yet give everything. although we have neither leg to stand on, nor tooth to bite with, we staunchly prove that homer was not homer, but a lot of homers. is that not marvellous? but even this, my young friend, is only a trifle. we have done far greater things.

"'these ancient greeks (quite clever fellows, i must tell you, and some of them could write grammatical greek), these ancient greeks had, amongst other remarkable men, one called aristotle. he wrote quite a number of works; of course, not quite as many as he thought he did. for we have proved by our ex nihilo methods that much of what he thought he had written was not written by him, but[pg 5] dictated. we have gone even so far (i myself, although used to our exploits, stand sometimes agape at our sagacity), we have gone so far as to prove that in the dictation of some of his writings aristotle was repeatedly interrupted by letters or telephonic messages, which accounts for gaps and other shortcomings.

"'well, this man aristotle (for, we have not yet pluralised him, although i—but this would pass your horizon, my young friend)—this clever man has left us, amongst other works, one called "politics." it is not wanting in quality, and it is said, if with certain doubts, that there are a few things to be learnt from it. it is, of course, also said that no professor has ever learnt them. but this is mere calumny. look at their vast commentaries. of course, how can one accept some of the glaring fallacies of aristotle? imagine, that man aristotle wants us to believe that nearly all greek states were founded, equipped with a constitution, and in a word, completely fitted out by one man in each case. thus, that sparta was founded, washed, dressed, fed, and educated by one lycurgus. how ridiculous!

"'having proved, as we have, that homer's poetry, a mere book, was made by a joint stock company, unlimited, how can we admit that a big and famous state like sparta was ordered, cut out, tailored, stuffed and set on foot by one man? where would be evolution? if a state like sparta was made in the course of a few months by one man, what would evolution do with all the many, many years and ages she has to drag along? why, she would die with ennui, bored to death. can we admit that? can one let evolution die? is she not[pg 6] a nice, handy, comely evolution, and so useful in the household that we cannot be happy until we get her? to believe in a big, important state like sparta having been completely established by one man is like saying that my colleague, the professor of zoology, taking a shilling bottle of bovril, has reconstituted out of its contents a live ox walking stately into his lecture-room. hah-hah-hah! very good joke. (secretary! put it into my table-talk! voltairian joke! serious, but not grave.)

"'now, you see, my young friend, in that capital point aristotle was most childishly mistaken; and even so in many another point. we have definitely done away with all state-founders of the ancients. romulus is a myth; so is theseus; so is moses; so is samson (not to speak of delilah); so is everybody who pretended to have founded a city-state. since he never existed, how could he have founded anything? could i found a city-state? or any state, except a certain state of mind, in which i say that no single man can found a city-state? could i? of course, i could not. well then, how could lycurgus? was he a ll.d.? was he a member of the british academy? was he a professor at oxford? had he written numerous letters to the times? was he subscriber to so respectable a paper as the spectator? it is ridiculous to speak of such a thing. lycurgus founding sparta! it is too amusing for words. these are all myths. whatever we cannot understand, we call a myth; and since we do not understand many things, we get every day a richer harvest of myths. we are full of them. we are the real living mythology.'

"to this long oration," aristotle continued, "i[pg 7] retorted as calmly as i could, that we greeks had states totally different from those of the moderns, just as the latter had a church system absolutely different from our religious institutions; so that if anyone had tried to persuade an athenian of my time that a few hundred years later there would be popes, or single men claiming and obtaining the implicit obedience of all believers in all countries, the athenian would sooner have gone mad than believe such stuff. for, to him, as a greek, it must have seemed hopelessly incredible that an office such as that of the universal pope should ever be tolerated; or, in other words, that a single man should ever be given such boundless spiritual power. i said all that with much apparent deference; but my professor got more and more out of control.

"'what,' said he, 'what do you drag in popes for? we talk of lycurgus, not of popes. was lycurgus a christian? let us stick to the point. the point is that lycurgus never existed, since so many professors, who do exist beyond doubt, deny his historical existence. now, either you deny the existence of these professors, which you can't; or you deny that of lycurgus, which you must. existence cannot include non-existence. for, non-existence is, is it not?—the negation of existence. and since the professors exist, their non-existence would involve us in the most exasperating contradictions with them, with ourselves, and with the daily press. this, however, would be a disaster too awful to be seriously thought of. consequently, lycurgus did not exist; nor did any other state-founding personality in greek or roman times.

"'in fact when you come to think of it, nobody[pg 8] ever existed except ourselves. adam was not; he will be at the end of ends. the whole concept of the world is wrong as understood by the vulgar. those old greek and roman heroes, like aristomenes, coriolanus, cincinnatus, never existed for a day. nor did the doric migration, the twelve tables, and lots of other so-called events. they have been invented by schoolmasters for purposes of exams. did draco's laws ever exist? ridiculous. that man aristotle speaks of them, but it is as evident as soap that he invented them for mods. or other exams. of his.

"'the vulgar constantly ask me whether or no history repeats itself. what, for goodness' sake, does that matter to me? it is sufficient for all purposes that historians repeat each other, for it is in that way that historical truth is established. or do not the great business-princes thus establish their reputation? they go on repeating "best furniture at staple's," "best furniture at staple's," three hundred and sixty-five times a year, in three hundred and sixty-five papers a day. by repetition of the same thing they establish truth. so do we historians. that's business. what, under the circumstances, does it matter, whether history itself does or does not repeat itself?

"'one arrogant fellow who published a wretched book on "general history," thought wonders what he did not do by saying, that "history does repeat itself in institutions, but never in events or persons." can such drivel be tolerated! why, the repetition by and through persons (read: historians) is the very soul of history. we in this country have said and written in and out of time and on every sort of[pg 9] paper, that the "decline and fall of the burmese empire" is the greatest historical work ever written by a byzantine, or a post-byzantine. we have said it so frequently, so incessantly, that at present it is an established truth. who would dare to say that it is not? why, the very daily nail would consider such a person as being beneath it.

"'we real historians go for facts only. ideas are sheer dilettantism. give us facts, nothing but single, limited, middle-class facts. in the republic of letters we do not suffer any lordly ideas, no more than the idea of lords. one fact is as good as another, and far worse. has not our greatest authority taught that the british empire was established in and by absent-mindedness, that is, without a trace of reasoned ideas? as the british empire, even so the british historians, and, cela vo sang dir, all the other historians. mind is absent. "mind" is a periodical; not a necessity. we solid researchers crawl from one fact to another for crawling's sake.'"

the gods and heroes were highly amused with the tale of aristotle, and it was with genuine delight that they saw him resume the story of his experiences at the seats of learning. "when i left the professor of history," continued aristotle, "i felt somewhat heavy and dull. i could not easily persuade myself that such utter confusion should reign in the study of history after so many centuries of endless research. i hoped that the little ones[pg 10] might have made more real advance in philosophy; and with a view to ascertain the fact, i entered a lecturing hall where a professor was even then holding forth on my treatise 'de anima.' he had just published a thick book on my little treatise, although (or perhaps because?...) another professor, a frenchman, had recently published a much thicker book on it.

"i listened very attentively, but could not understand a word of what he said. he treated me text-critically, philologically, hermeneutically,—everything, except understandingly. i felt that my treatise was not mine at all. it was his. at a given moment i could not help uttering aloud a sarcastic remark about the professor's explanations. down he came on me like thunder, and with a triumphant sneer he proved to me that what i had said i had not said at all. in that i differed entirely from a great statesman of theirs, who had said what he had said. the professor put me under a regular examination, and after twenty minutes formally ploughed me in 'de anima.'

"this was a novel experience for me. in the middle ages, it is true, i had repeatedly had the same experience, and albertus magnus and st thomas aquinas had done me the same honour. but in modern times i had not yet experienced it. the next day i called upon the professor, who lived in a beautiful house, filled with books, amongst which i saw a great number of editions of my own works.

"i asked him whether he had ever cared to study the anima, or what they call the psychology of animals. i added that aristotle had evidently done[pg 11] so, as his works explicitly prove, and that after he had surveyed all sorts of souls in the vegetable, animal and human kingdom, both normal and pathological, he wrote his treatise 'de anima,' the real sense of which must escape him who has not taken such a wide range of the question. ah—you ought to have seen the professor! he jumped from his seat, took another whisky and soda and said: 'my young friend, the first thing in science is to distinguish well. bene docet qui bene distinguit. you speak of animals. what have they to do with human psychology? their souls are studied by my colleague who goes in for comparative psychology; or rather by several of my colleagues, one of whom studies the comparative psychology of the senses; the other that of the emotions; the third that of memory; the fourth—the fifth—the sixth, etc., etc., etc.

"'i, i stick to my point. i have my speciality. you might think that my speciality is psychology, or aristotle's psychology. not at all. this is all too vague, too general. my speciality is quite special; a particularly singular speciality: the text of aristotle's psychology. and even that goes too far; for what i really call my speciality is my version of the text which is said to have been written by aristotle.

"'now at last we are on firm ground. what under those conditions need i trouble about cats and rats? the latter, the rats, have, i admit, some little importance for me. they have in their time devoured parts of aristotle's manuscripts, and i have now to reconstitute what they have swallowed. i am to them a kind of literary beecham's pill. but[pg 12] as to cats, mules or donkeys? what have they to do with me? can they influence my version of the text? hardly.

"'my young friend, if aristotle himself came to me, i should tell him: "my good man, unless you accept my version of your text, you are out of court. i am a professor, and you are only an author. worse than that—a greek author. as theologians fix the value and meaning of gospel-words; as the state makes a piece of worthless paper worth five pounds sterling by a mere declaration; even so we say what you aristotle did say. what you said or meant is indifferent; what we say you said or meant is alone of consequence." how then could even aristotle refute me regarding my view of his views? it is logically impossible.

"'don't you see, this is why we have invented our beautiful system of excessive specialisation. where each of us studies only one very small thing, there he need not fear much competition, but may hope for exclusive authority. we shall soon establish chairs for professors of philosophy, who will study, each of them, just a mere splinter of a twig of one branch of the tree of philosophy; or better still, just one leaf of such a twig of such a branch; and finally, just a dewdrop on such a leaf of such a twig of such a branch. then we shall have completed our network of authority.

"'our contemptible enemies say that our talk about aristotle and plato is like the gossip of lackeys in the pot-house about their noble masters. we know better. you are a young man. i will give you a bit of profound advice. if you want to make your way in the literary world rapidly and[pg 13] with ease, hitch on your name to some universally acknowledged celebrity. do not write on obscure, if great authors or heroes; but pick out homer, plato, dante, shakespeare, goethe, or napoleon. write constantly on some speciality of these men; thus, on the adjectives in homer; on the neutral article in plato; on the conjunctions in dante; on the plant-lore in shakespeare; on the names of women in goethe; or on the hats of napoleon.

"'your name will then incessantly be before the public together with that of homer or shakespeare or napoleon. after a time, by a natural association of ideas, something of the lustre of the immortal will fall on you. note how the most elaborate writers on, say shakespeare, are almost invariably men of the most sincere mediocrity. they are, nevertheless, exceedingly clever tacticians. they become "authorities." we are not authorities because we are specialists; we have, on the contrary, introduced the system of specialities in order to pass for authorities. to use plato's terms: our whole business spells effectology, and nothing else. take this to heart and be successful.'

"on leaving the professor," aristotle said, "i felt that i had made several steps forward in the comprehension of that system of specialisation which i heard praised and admired in all the universities. i need not tell you, my friends, how utterly wrong that system is. as humans do not think in words, but in whole[pg 14] sentences, so nature does not act in particulars, but in wholes. the particulars are ours, not nature's. in making them we act arbitrarily. why should dentistry be one speciality? why should there not be thirty-two different specialist dentists for our thirty-two teeth? all specialisation in the realm of knowledge is rank arbitrariness. without exception, the great leading ideas in all organised thought have invariably been made by wholesale thinkers like pythagoras, plato, i venture to add: myself, lionardo da vinci, kepler, newton, pascal, leibniz, darwin. that is precisely where humans differ from animals. all animals are the most conceited specialists."

here diogenes interrupted: "does the converse hold good, o aristotle?"

"i will leave," aristotle replied with a smile, "the consideration of this case to your own discretion. i do repeat it, that each animal is an out-and-out specialist. it troubles about nothing else than the two or three things it takes a professional interest in. it eats, sleeps, and propagates; occasionally it adds a tightly circumscribed activity of some kind. that's why animals do not talk. it is not part of their speciality. they do not talk for the same reason that the english do not produce fine music, nor the prussians tactful behaviour. in all these cases the interest of the specialist lies elsewhere.

"does a modern specialist in heart-diseases study the kidneys? does a specialist in surgery care to study the nerves? even so an animal does not care to speak. it is a specialist; it restricts itself to its 'business,' to 'the point.' the little ones say that animals have no general ideas, and that[pg 15] is why they cannot speak. but have human specialists any general ideas of anything, and yet—do they not speak? the argument is too foolish for words.

"why, nature created men in order to have a few generalists, if i may say so, amongst all the specialists called animals or plants; just as amongst men she created homers and platos and galileos and leibnizes, in order to save the rest of humans from their evil tendency to over-specialisation. it is a plan as plain as transparent glass.

"thousands of years ago nature found out that, with all these endless vegetal and animal specialists on hand, she would soon have to declare herself bankrupt. one specialist ignored the other; or hampered, hurt, and paralysed the other; they could not understand one another, because they had no common interest. in her predicament, nature created human beings for the same reason that men invented the locomotive or the telegraph. she could no longer be without him. man was, by his very needs, obliged to drop over-specialisation. he interested himself, for a variety of ends and reasons, in stones as much as in plants and animals. by exterminating some of the most damaging species of animals, he saved the life of millions of specimens of other animals that would otherwise have been killed out by ferocious specialists, such as the tiger, the leopard, and the wolf. the same he did to plants, and partly to rivers and lakes. he brought a little order into this pandemonium of specialists in nature.

"look at the sea. there man was unable to exert his power for order by general ideas. look at the indescribable disorder and chaos and mon[pg 16]strosity of life and living beings in the sea. they are hideous, like an octopus; short-lived, nay, of a few minutes' duration, like the jelly-fish; fearful and yet cowardly like a shark; abominably under-sized or over-sized; incapable of any real passion, except that of eating and drinking. this liquid mass of fanatic and unsystematised specialists render the sea as inferior to the land as is thibet to holy athens. people travelling in that ocean of specialists are exasperated by foul sea-sickness; and empires built on it have repeatedly been destroyed in a single week; ay, in one day.

"the dread of being swamped by specialists has driven nature into creating the most grotesque compositions of beings half plant and half animal, or half stone and half plant; or again half male and half female; or half land-animal, half fish. another way adopted by nature in her attempt to obviate the ravages of specialists was by giving them exceedingly short shrift, and just a mere speck of existence; or again by forcing them to form big corporations and societies, such as forests, prairies, meadows, swarms, troupes.

"in fact nature is a free lance fighting incessantly the evil done by the specialists. ask poseidon what trouble the sea gives him; ask ?olus how his life is made a misery through the mad freaks of the various specialists in winds. and what is the deep, underlying reason of all this insane race for specialism? i will tell you that in one word. it is envy and jealousy. in certain countries envy and jealousy are the inextinguishable and ubiquitous hydra of life.

"take england. she is a democracy, if a masked[pg 17] one. hence jealousy is the dominating trait of her citizens. jealousy has, thousands of years ago, invented railways, telegraphs, wired and wireless ones, telephones and r?ntgen-rays, and all the rest of the infernal machines whereby space, time, and work is shortened, curtailed, annihilated. jealousy has at all times sent wireless messages over and through all the houses of a town or an entire country. it has r?ntgenised the most hidden interiors; and its poison runs more quickly through all the veins and nerves of men than does the electric spark.

"look at the customs, social prejudices, or views of that nation. over one half of them was introduced to disarm the ever-present demon of jealousy. why is a man a specialist? because in that way he disarms jealousy more quickly and more surely than by any other expedient. it gives him an air both of modesty and of strength by concentration. in reality it does neither. it is only an air. the so-called reality consists of nothing but unrealities, of shams, and masks. a specialist is not a master of his subject; he is a master of the art than which there is no greater, the art of making other people believe that you are not what you are, but what they want you to be.

"nature has a horror of specialists; and she will reveal her secrets to an insane poet rather than to a specialist. most great inventions were made either by 'outsiders,' or by young men who had not yet had the time to harden into specialists. in specialisation there is nothing but a total misunderstanding of nature.

"nature acts by instantaneous correlation and co-operation of different parts to one end; and to[pg 18] specialise is tantamount to taking a clock to pieces, putting them separately in a row on the table, and then expecting them to give you the exact time.

"in nature there is no evolution, but only co-evolution; there is no differentiation but only co-differentiation. the little ones have quite overlooked all that; and that is why so many of the statements of co-differentiation in my zoology can be neither confirmed nor refuted by them. who dare say which is a 'part' in nature? is the hand a 'part,' that is, something that might legitimately be told off as a speciality? or must it be studied in connection with the arm, or with its homologies in the nether part of the body?

"in the same way: what constitutes a 'period' in history? any division of a hundred or a thousand years by two, three, or four? or by a division of twenty-five or thirty only? who can tell? a man who says he is a specialist in the thirteenth century, is he not like a man who pretends that he is a specialist in respiration in the evening?

"nature does specialise; witness her innumerable specialists. but do we know, do we possess the slightest idea as to how she does it? can we prove why a goose has its peculiar head and not that of a stork? evidently not, because we do not know what nature calls a part, a speciality. she abhors specialists, just because they know so little of her way of specialising."

[pg 19]

at this point of aristotle's speech, aristophanes asked for leave to protest. having obtained it from zeus, he commenced forthwith: "o father of nature and man, i can no longer stand the invective of the stagirite. in his time he was prudent enough to postpone his birth till after my mortal days; otherwise i should have treated him as i did meton and socrates, and other philosophers. but here he shall not escape me. just imagine, this man wants to deprive creation of the best fun that is offered to the thinking beings amongst animals and humans.

"i wish he had overheard, as i have, when the other night i passed through an old forest near darlington, a conversation between an old owl, a black woodpecker, and a badger. the owl sat, somewhat lower than usual on a birch-tree, while the woodpecker stopped his work at the bark of the groaning tree, and the badger had left his hole in order to enjoy the cool breath of the night. the owl said: 'good-evening, mr woodpecker, how is business? many worms beneath the bark?' the woodpecker replied: 'thanks, madam, there is a slump, but one must put up with what one can get.'

"the badger then complained that he passed tedious hours in the ground, and he wished he could again see the exciting times of a few hundred thousand years ago when earthquakes and other catastrophes made existence more entertaining. 'quite so,' said the owl, 'the forest is getting too civilised, and too calm. but you see, my friends, i have provided for much solid amusement for my old days. i used to visit a human's room, who read a great number of books. i asked him to teach me that art. i found it easy enough, only that[pg 20] these humans will read in a straight line from left to right, and i am accustomed to circular looks all round.

"'when i had quite acquired the art, i read some of his books. they were all about us folk in the forest. once i chanced upon a chapter on owls. you may easily imagine how interested i was. i had not yet read a few pages, when i was seized with such a laughter that the professor became very indignant and told me to leave him. this i did; but whenever he read his books, i read them too, perched on a tree not far from his study. i cannot tell you how amusing it was.

"'these humans tell stories about us owls, and about you, mr woodpecker, and mr badger, that would cause a sloth to dance with joy. they imagine they know how we see, how we fly, how we get our food, and how we make our abodes. as a matter of fact they have hopelessly wrong notions about all these things. they want, as my venerated father used to say, to tap the lightning off into nice little flasks, in order to study it conveniently. this they call evolution.

"'the idea was mostly developed in england, in a country where they are proud of thinking that they always "muddle through somehow." these three words they apply to nature, and call it evolution. once upon a time, they say—it does not matter whether 200,000 or 300,000 years, or perchance 645,789 years ago—there was my ancestor who, by mere accident, had an eye that enabled him to see more clearly at night than other birds did. this eye enabled him to catch more prey, thus to live longer, and to transmit his nocturne of an eye[pg 21] to his progeny. and so by degrees we muddled into owlship.

"'is that not charming? my father used to laugh at that idea until all the cuckoos came to inquire what illness had befallen him. he told me, that an owl's eye was in strict correlation with definite and strongly individual formations of the ears, of the neck, of the feet, and of the intestines, and that accordingly a mere accidental change in the supposed ancestor's eye was totally insufficient to account for the corresponding and correlative formations just mentioned.

"'such correlative and simultaneous changes in various organs can be the consequences only of a violent and, as it were, fulgurous shock to the whole system of a bird. such shocks are not a matter of slow growth. as all individual animal life at present is called into existence by one shock of fulgurant forces, even so it arose originally.

"'but the english think that nature is by birth an englishman who adopts new organisms as englishmen adopt new systems of measures, calendars, inventions, or laws,—i.e. hundreds of years after someone else has fulgurated them out.

"'they imagine nature to be, by rank and profession, a middle-class man and muddler; by religion, a nonconformist; and by politics, a liberal. however, we know better. nature is, by rank and profession, a free lance and a genius; by religion, a roman catholic; and by politics, a tory of the tories. now this being so, you may imagine, mr woodpecker and mr badger, what capital fun it is to read these learned lucubrations about birds and other animals as written by humans.

[pg 22]

"'the other day i called on master fox in the neighbourhood. he was ill and, in order to amuse him, i told him what they say of him in human books. he fairly burst with laughter. he told me later on, that by narrating all the don quixote stories told of him by man, to a big brown bear, he became the court-favourite of that dreaded king of the place.

"'i have sent the swiftest bat, to whom i gave a safe conduct, to all the birds and animals of this country, to meet at a given time on one of the peaks of the hartz mountains, where i mean to entertain them with the stories told by specialists on each of them, on their structure, functions, and mode of life. it will be the greatest fun we have had these two thousand years. i charged the nightingales, the larks, and the mocking birds of america to open the meeting with the most wonderful chorus that they have ever sung, and i am sure that i will deserve well of the whole community of birds and other animals by offering them this the most exhilarating amusement imaginable.'

"so spake the owl. and now, o zeus, can you really brook aristotle's attempt to demolish and to remove men who furnish pleasure and intense amusement to so many animals holy to men and even to the gods? i cannot believe it. you know how necessary it is to provide carefully for the amusement of people. to neglect dionysus is to court hideous punishment. if the specialists in nature should disappear, you will, o zeus, have endless anarchy on all sides. birds, insects, snakes, and reptiles, lions, felines, and bears—they will all rise in bored discontent, in the waters, on land, in the[pg 23] air. you will never have a free moment for calm repose.

"they will worry all the gods incessantly. they will make the most annoying conspiracies and plots and intrigues against all of us. let us not take aristotle seriously. he means well, and is no doubt quite right, as far as reason goes. but does reason go very far? can he now deny the eternal rights of unreason? to remove the specialists in biology and natural history is to remove the comedy from athens. the athenians, in order to be ruled, must be entertained. but for me and the like of me, the athenians could never have held out as long as they did hold out. it is even so with animals. they want their aristophanes. they must have their specialists. pray, artemis, you who in your hunts over dales and mountains have heard and observed everything that concerns animals, join me in protesting against the onslaught of aristotle on men so necessary for the well-being of animated nature."

artemis diana laughed melodiously and nodded consent. the other gods, amidst great hilarity, passed a vote against aristotle, and the sage smilingly bowed acceptance of the censure.

"i will abide," he exclaimed, "by your decision. but, pray, let me make just one more remark which, i have no doubt, the master-minds of the unique city, over which we are hovering at present, will gladly approve. i call upon you lionardo, michel[pg 24]angelo, machiavelli, and you magnificent lorenzo, whether i am exceeding the limits of truth. i do maintain that while the little ones have, in religion, gone from polytheism to monotheism, they pretend that in matters of knowledge time is constantly increasing the number of gods to be worshipped.

"at present they affect to believe no longer in the numerous gods and goddesses of the olympus, but only in one god. in point of knowledge, on the other hand, they declare that each little department thereof is endless, requiring the study and devotion of a whole lifetime, and controlled, each of them, by a god whom they call an authority. now, nothing can be more evident than the fact that knowledge, real knowledge, becomes increasingly more stenographic in expression, and sensibly easier of acquisition. the chinese write encyclop?dias in 6000 volumes; the modern europeans do so in twenty-four or thirty-six volumes."

here diogenes interrupted the stagirite and said: "i am afraid, o aristotle, that your argument has little real force to boast of. it does not prove at all that the chinese have only crude, empirical, and unorganised knowledge, while the little ones in europe have a reasoned and systematised, and hence a less cumbrous one. this is owing to quite a different cause.

"the little ones have of late invented a method of publishing encyclop?dias in a manner so well adapted to tempt, threaten, bully, or wire each member of the general public into the purchase of an entire copy, that if their encyclop?dias consisted of 6000 or 10,000 volumes each, the people of england, for instance, would have to conquer norway, sweden,[pg 25] and iceland first. norway they would be obliged to conquer, in order to possess themselves of sufficient wood for the cases; sweden, in order to appoint all swedish gymnasts for the acrobatic feat of fetching a volume from the fiftieth row of a bookcase; and iceland, in order to place excited readers of the encyclop?dia in a cool place. but for this circumstance, i am sure the little ones in europe would fain publish an encyclop?dia in 15,000 volumes."

when the laughter of the assembly had subsided, aristotle continued: "nothing has struck me more forcibly in my visit to their seats of learning than this universal belief in the infinitude of each tiny department or speciality. they do most gravely assert that 'nowadays' it is impossible to embrace more than one speciality; and they look upon me or leibniz with a certain knowing smile as if in our times all knowledge would have consisted of a few jugs full of water, whereas now it is no less than an ocean. but when you ask them the simplest questions, they are at a loss how to answer them.

"i asked one of their most famous specialists why the eyebrows of men are shorter than the moustaches. he did not know it. how could he? it takes the knowledge of at least five so-called specialities to answer such a question. i asked their most learned specialist in their language, why the english have dropped the use of 'thou,' although no other european nation has done so. he did not know it.

[pg 26]

"they study a given subject when death has driven out all life from it. they do not trouble about language as a living organism, full of fight, of movement, of ruses, of intrigues, of sins and graces; but only of language when it lies motionless, a veritable corpse, on the table of the anatomical dissector and dictionary-fiend. they do not study a butterfly when it is in full life, flirting, pilfering, gossiping, merrymaking; but only when it is motionless, lifeless, pierced by a pin. this is how they get their specialities.

"death indeed is the greatest of all specialisers. as soon as a man is dead, each hair or bone on or in his body takes up a separate line of decay, caring nothing for the other, full of scorn for its immediate neighbour, sulking by itself, wandering to the styx alone and sullen.

"in england they have pushed that belief in specialities to a funereal degree. i wonder they allow a man to play one of their instruments, called the piano, with both his hands at a time. i wonder they do not insist that a given piece by chopin be played by two men, one of whom should first play the part for the right hand, and afterwards the other man the part for the left hand. to play both parts at a time, and to have that done by one single man too,—what presumption! how superficial!

"in law they have long acted in this sense. there is one man, called the solicitor (—a very good name—), who plays the bass, or left-hand part with a vengeance, for several weeks. when that is done; when the 'hearer' or client lies prostrate on the ground from the infernal noise made by the solicitor's[pg 27] music, the solicitor hands over the whole case to the other man, the barrister, who plays the most tortuous treble, in a manner likely to madden pan himself.

"the idea, accepted by all the other nations of europe, that the whole prejudicial business of a legal contention might very well be left to one man, to a lawyer proper,—what presumption! how superficial!

"but when you tell them that they browbeat their own principle of specialisation by taking their judges from amongst late barristers, then they wax into an august anger. yet no other nation does that. the function of a judge is radically different from that of a barrister. after a man has been a barrister for twenty years; after all his mind has taken the creases and folds of barristerdom; after he has quite specialised himself in that particular line, he is unlikely to have the best qualities of a judge. if a barrister cannot be a solicitor; why should he be at once, and suddenly able to become judge?

"their arguments to that effect are most amusing. they dance a real war-dance round the truth that they mean to scalp.

"the truth of course is that all the three have one and the same speciality: that of running england. that country is lawyer-ridden, as egypt was priest-ridden, or babylonia scribe-ridden. the english being too proud to be stingy or petty in money matters, do not mind their rulers, the solicitors-barristers-judges, because these deprive them eventually only of what the english do not hold in great esteem, small sums of money. in france, where people cling fanatically to a penny, the barristers have not been allowed to become judges.[pg 28] in france specialisation in law has triumphed, where in england it has failed.

"does that not show that specialisation is done, not in obedience to the behests of truth, but to those of interests?

"we hellenes specialised on small city-states; we did not want to widen out indefinitely into huge states; just because we wanted to give each citizen a chance of coining out all his human capital, and not to become, like our slaves, a limited specialist. in a huge state specialisation becomes inevitable. in such states they must, more or less, sterilise the human capital of millions of citizens, just as we hellenes sterilised the political capital of thousands of slaves.

"specialisation is enslaving, if not downright slavery. it furthers truth very little; it cripples man.

"just as a man who talks several languages well, will write his own idiom better than do his less accomplished compatriots; even so the man who keeps his mind open to more than one aspect of things, to more than one 'speciality' will be by far more efficient than his less broad-minded colleagues. man may and shall invent, as i have long predicted it, highly specialised machines doing the work of the weaver, or the baker. but he himself must not become a machine. this is what happens 'now,' as the little ones say all over europe and america.

"not only have they formed states with many, many millions of people each. worse than that, they have agglomerated the majority of these millions into a few towns of unwieldy size. in those towns specialisation is carried into every fibre of men and women. this desiccates them, disemotions them,[pg 29] sterilises them. we hellenes gladly admit that the europeans of the last four centuries have excelled us in one art: in music. but their period for this exceeding excellence is now gone.

"by over-specialisation of thought and heart, caused chiefly by over-urbanisation, the very wells of music begin to dry up. the music of the day is hysterical, neurasthenic, and false. it is the cry, not of an aching heart, but of an aching tooth, of a gouty toe, or a rheumatic nerve. it does not weep; it coughs phthisically. it does not sigh; it sneezes. it is a blend of what we used to call phrygian and corybantic rhapsodies.

"and as in music, even so in character. where each individual distorts himself or herself into a narrow speciality, there people must needs become as angular, lop-sided, and grotesque as possible. they are, when together in a room, like the words on a page of a dictionary: they have nothing to communicate to one another. there they stand, each in his cage, uncommunicative, sulky, and forbidding. one thinks in f major; the other in f sharp minor. harmony amongst them is impossible. every one of them is hopelessly right in every one of his ideas; and of all mental processes, that of doubt or hesitation in judgment is the last they practise.

"a specialist does not doubt. why should he? to him the most complicated things human appear as mere specialities, that is, as mere fragments. a woman is only a specialist in parturition. a physician is only a specialist in writing latin words on small slips of paper. a barrister is only a man who wears neither moustache nor beard. a clergyman is practically a collar buttoning behind, and supported by[pg 30] a sort of man inside it. in that way everything is so simplified that no difficulty of comprehending it remains.

"all this clearly proves, o empedocles, how right and, at the same time, how wrong you were in your view of the origin of things. perhaps you were right in saying that the parts or organs of our bodies arose singly, or, as it were, as specialists. in times long before us there arose, as you taught, heads without necks; arms wandering alone in space; eyes, without foreheads, roaming about by themselves. but when you say that all this happened only at the beginning of things, you are, i take it, sorely mistaken. indeed it is still going on in countries where specialism reigns supreme; at anyrate it is going on in the moral world. in such countries you still see arms wandering alone in space, or eyes roaming about without foreheads, as well as heads without brains flying about in space. not literally, of course. but what else is a character-specialist cultivating exclusively one quality of the human soul than an arm wandering about alone? the little ones must come back to the hellenic idea of seeing things as a whole, and not, as do wretched flies, as mere chips of things."

the divine assembly had listened deferentially to the great sage. zeus now charged hermes to fetch some of the masterpieces from the room called the tribuna at the uffizi in florence. hermes, aided by[pg 31] a number of nymphs, fetched them and, placing them in the midst of the assembly, exhibited their perfect beauty to the gods and heroes. this refreshed their souls sickened with the story of the serfdom of modern over-specialism.