It was evident that even the most modest success of that gigantic undertaking depended upon the right choice of speakers, upon the value of the ground-plan, and upon many external conditions; thus no one was in doubt as to the difficulty in realizing such a scheme. Yet there were from the scholarly side itself objections to the principles involved, objections which might hold even if those other conditions were successfully met. The most immediate reason for reluctance lies in the specializing tendencies of our time. Those who devote all their working energy as loyal sons of our analyzing period of science to the minute detail of research come easily into the habit of a nervous fear with regard to any wider general outlook. The man of research sees too often how ignorance hides itself behind generalities. He knows too well how much easier it is to formulate vague generalities than to contribute a new fact to human knowledge, and how often untrained youngsters succeed with popular text-books which are rightly forgotten the next day. Methodical science must thus almost encourage this aversion to any deviation from the path of painstaking specialistic labor. Then, of course, it seems almost a scientific duty to declare war against an undertaking which explicitly asks everywhere for the wide perspectives and the last principles, and does not aim at adding at this moment to the mere treasury of information. But such a view is utterly one-sided, and to fight against such one-sidedness and to overcome the specializing narrowness of the scattered sciences was the one central idea of the plan. If there existed no scholars who despise the philosophizing connection, there would have hardly been any need for this whole undertaking; but to yield to such philosophy-phobia means to declare the analytic movement of science permanent, and to postpone a synthetic movement indefinitely. Our time has just to emphasize, and the leaders of thought daily emphasize it more, that a mere heaping up of information can be merely a preparation for knowledge, and that the final aim is a _Weltanschauung_, a unified view of the whole of reality. All that our Congress had to secure was thus merely that the generalizing discussion of principles should not be left to men who generalized because they lacked the substantial knowledge which is necessary to specialize. The thinkers we needed were those who through specialistic work were themselves led to a point where the discussion of general principles becomes unavoidable. Our plan was by no means antagonistic to the patient labors of analysis; the aim was merely to overcome its one-sidedness and to stimulate the synthesis as a necessary supplement.