Specialization, it is said, leads to ignorance; indeed it rather aims at ignorance than knowledge. When I attend to this desk, it is true I secure a bit of knowledge, but how small is that bit in comparison to all the things in this room which I might know about! It is but a fraction. Yet I have condemned all else in the room to ignorance, reserving only this one little object for knowledge. Now that is what we are all of us doing on a great scale; by specializing, by limiting our attention, we cut off what is not attended to. It is often assumed that attention is mainly a positive affair and occupied with what we are to know. But that is a very small portion of it; really its important part is the negative, the removal of what we do not wish to observe. We cut ourselves off from the great mass of knowledge which is offered. Is it not then true that every specialist has disciplined himself to be an ignoramus? He has drawn a fence around a little portion of the universe and said, "Within that fence I know something." "Yes," the public replies, "but you do not know anything outside." And is not the public right? When we step forward and claim to be learned men, is not the public justified in saying, "I know a great deal more than you do; I know a thousand things and you know only one. You say you know that one through and through, and of course I do not know my thousand things through and through. But it is not necessary. I perceive their relations; I can handle them; I can use them in practice; can you?" "Well, no," we are obliged to say, "we specialists are a little fumbling when we try to take hold of the world. We are not altogether skilful in action, just because we are such specialists." You students here have been devoting yourselves to some one point--I am afraid many of you are going to have sad experience of it--you have been learning to know something nobody else on earth does know, and then you go forth to seek a position. But the world may have no use for you; there are only two or three positions of that sort in the country, and those may happen to be filled. Just because you are such an elaborate scholar you cannot earn your daily bread. You have cut yourself off from everything but that one species of learning, and that does not happen to be wanted. Therefore you are not wanted. Such is the too frequent condition of the specialist. The thousand things he does not know; it is only the one thing he does know. And because he is so ignorant, he is helpless.