d more every year; and, as the
sum total of knowledge increases for mankind, it becomes necessary, in
order to be a master in any one line, to devote one's self almost
exclusively to that. Hence arises, for the teacher, the difficulty of
preserving the unity and wholeness which are essential to a complete
man. The principle of division of labor comes in. He who is a teacher by
profession becomes one-sided in his views; and, as teaching divides and
subdivides into specialities, this abnormal one-sideness tends more and
more to appear. Here we find a parallelism in the profession of
Medicine, with a corresponding danger of narrowness; for that, too, is
in a process of constant specialization, and the physician who treats
nervous diseases is likely to be of the opinion that all trouble arises
from that part of the organism, or, at least, that all remedies should
be applied there. This tendency to one-sideness is inseparable from the
progress of civilization and that of science and arts. It contains,
nevertheless, a danger of which no teacher should be unwarned. An
illustration is furnished by the microscope or telescope; a higher power
of the instrument implies a narrower field of view. To concentrate our
observation upon one point implies the shutting out of others. This
difficulty with the teacher creates one for the pupil.

In this view one might be inclined to judge that the life of the savage
as compared with that of civilized man, or that of a member of a rural
community as compared with that of an inhabitant of a city, were the
more to be desired. The savage has his hut, his family, his cocoa-palm,
his weapons, his passions; he fishes, hunts, amuses himself, adorns
himself, and enjoys the consciousness that he is the center of a little
world; while the denizen of a city must often acknowledge that he is, so
to speak, only one wheel of a gigantic machine. Is the life of the
savage, therefore, more favorable to human development? The
characteristic idea of modern civilization is: The development of the
individual as the end for which the State exists. The great empires of
Persia, Egypt, and India, wherein the individual was of value only as he
ministered to the strength of the State, have given way to the modern
nations, where individual freedom is pushed so far that the State seems
only an instrument for the good of the individual. From being the
supreme end of the individual, the State has become the means for his
a