t10 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
—— eet —— 
professionals, with their learning practically applied to their specialty. 
For the first class the university remained ; for the use of the second there 
arose high special technical schools, separate from the universities. 
The ancient university organism has therefore become dislocated. The 
great school of the universal encyclopedia, displaced from its center of 
gravity, has become disaggregated into a multitude of special schools 
lissident and solitary. We are spectators of a double antagonism. The 
university is at war with itself, for it sees its ideal unity fall to pieces 
ander the blows of an immoderate specialism, which no longer puts any 
'imits to its advance. It is also at war with the special technical high- 
schools, which, disdaining pure science, shut themselves up, each one, in 
the idolatory of its own art specialty. In the field of thought, on the 
one hand, the analytic process has divided and subdivided knowledge 
into most minute disciplines, to so great an extent that whoever devotes 
himself to the study of one alone loses sight of the bonds that join it 
with all the others into a potent ideal unity. In the field of action the 
liberal professions are becoming specialized beyond all measure, and the 
students, treating science as a mere handmaid to their profession, obtain 
from study merely that smattering of theoretic knowledge which is 
absolutely necessary to them in the practice of their profession, and look 
ao further. Thus, on the one hand the mental exercise of the learned 
is becoming restricted to narrow and exclusive views, and lacks those 
broad intuitions, those synthetic comprehensions of thought that discover 
new horizons in the world of knowledge. On the other hand, the prac- 
tice of the professionals, no longer illumined, as it should be, by theory, 
no longer animated by the spirit of the idea, is degenerating into profession- 
alism and being side-tracked into empiricism. This condition of things, 
which threatens the future of high social culture, is a grave subject for 
thought for all who have at heart the interest of public studies. In medi- 
tating upon this most dangerous fact, in order to ward off its deplorable 
consequences it appears necessary, first of all, to reach an accord in the 
lollowing three points : 
(1) The division of university work by specialization of the scientific 
isciplines and the higher schools is a necessity called for by the increased 
levelopment of knowledge and the progress in the professions. 
(2) It is also necessary that the university should retain the unity of its 
ideal organism, so that it remain for students the universal school of 
human learning (scibile) in its harmonious and synthetic integrity. 
(3) It is likewise necessary to maintain the suitable harmony between 
theoretical study and practical application, between the science and the 
practice, in order that the disinterested and pure love of truth may 
not be suffocated by the utilitarianism of life. All three of these points 
are incontestable. But a double problem at once arises : How can the 
necessity of the division of labor be reconciled with the unity of the 
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