Like most of our contemporaries we have become so lost among the trees of new knowledge that we can not see the forest. When we take as a measure, the ratio between the knowledge of the individual man, and the sum total of human knowledge, it appears to us that men are becoming increasingly ignorant as the years go by; the world as it is actually known to the individual has been expanding, of course, but at a far less rapid rate than the “known world” of science. That this process of expansion has been also a process of disintegration, some of us have felt only too keenly as we have watched the specialists move outward and disappear from sight along a thousand new paths of knowledge which stand to the generality of human individuals as just so many new indications of things that they can never know.

Whether the totality of existence, known and unknown, constitutes universe or multiverse, is a matter of small consequence here. The point we are trying to make is simply this: that in a lawful and orderly universe, the method of the specialists tends to reduce the known world of the individual man to chaos; while on the other hand, even in actual chaos, a broader science might help to raise the known world of the individual man into something like a universe. Such, at any rate, is our belief; and if we had the opportunity to act upon it, we should shut the ablest men of science out of their laboratories for a decade or so, and force them to sit down together, with their masses of data in front of them, and think things over. If they did not eventually produce something like “a larger synthesis,” we should turn them loose again, and begin in our blindness to pray for the coming of a wiser generation. (Geroid Tanquary Robinson)