Classification and books are but a faulty means
of getting a clear insight into nature and human life or society.
Knowledge should not only be mastered in its scientific classifications
but also constantly referred back to things as seen in practical life
and closely traced out and fixed in those connections. The vital
connections of different studies with each other are best known and
realized by the study of nature and society.
In later life we are convinced at every turn of the need of being able
to recognize and use knowledge _outside of its scientific connections_.
A lawyer finds many subjects closely mingled and causally related in
his daily business which were never mentioned together in textbooks.
The ordinary run of cases will lead him through a kaleidoscope of
natural science, human life, commerce, history, mathematics,
literature, and law, not to speak of less agreeable things. But the
same is true of a physician, merchant, or farmer, in different ways.
Shall we answer to all this that schools were never designed to teach
such things? They belong to professions or to the school of life, etc.
But it is not simply in professions and trades that we find this close
mingling and dependence of the most divergent sorts of knowledge, this
unscientific mixing of the sciences.
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