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Updated: June 4, 2025
At this point he will break out and say, "But what are we to do? There is modern commerce and its clerks; there is the modern family with its unmarried daughters; specialism is expected everywhere; female thrift and conscientiousness are demanded and supplied. What does it matter whether we should in the abstract prefer the old human and housekeeping woman; we might prefer the Garden of Eden.
Nevertheless, we will not say that this separation and specialism is entirely useless or inexcusable. But I do not think the most austere upholder of specialism will deny that there is in these old, many-sided institutions an element of unity and universality which may well be preserved in its due proportion and place.
The fact is, we are living in an age of division of labor and specialism; and those who, like Robert Franz and Richard Wagner, devote themselves to a single branch of music have a better chance of reaching the summit of Parnassus than those who dissipate their energies in too many directions.
The days of specialism have added to the sum-total of human knowledge; but they have diminished intercourse, they have made men more inaccessible to one another, they have promoted new groupings, new atmospheres, new officialdoms, new barriers and water-tight compartments.
Balzac further comments upon what he terms this gift of Specialism, which is cosmic consciousness or illumination, thus: "The specialist is necessarily the loftiest expression of man the link which connects the visible to the superior worlds. He acts, he sees, he feels through his inner being. The abstractive thinks. The instinctive simply acts. Hence three degrees for man.
It is the glory and the scourge of the earth: its glory because it has created social life; its scourge because it allows man to evade entering into Specialism, which is one of the paths to the Infinite. Man measures everything by Abstractions: Good and Evil, Virtue and Crime. Its formula of equity is a pair of scales, its justice is blind. God's justice sees: there is all the difference.
Johnson who could not make up his mind which leg of his breeches he would put his foot into first. Meanwhile, said the Doctor, with a directness of speech which requires to be palliated, the process of investiture is suspended. But the practical result of the dilemma is the rise of specialism. The savant is dead and the specialist rules.
Every one is a "specialist" of some sort or other; specialism means "private work," and if private work enables the gifted few to escape into self-education from the hampering attentions of the form master, it gives the rest a terrible training in the habits of time-wasting and evasion.
As an instinctive he is below the level; as an abstractive he attains it; as a specialist he rises above it. Specialism opens to man his true career; the Infinite dawns upon him he catches a glimpse of his destiny."
It is plain, for one thing, that under the new state of things specialism, in the future, must more and more abound. But specialism means subdivision of labor; and with subdivision labor ought to be more completely, more exactly, performed. Let us bow our heads to the inevitable; the day of encyclopaedic learning has gone by. It may perhaps be said that that sun set with Leibnitz.
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