But the objections against a generalizing plan were not confined to the mistaken fear that we sought to antagonize the productive work of the specialist. They not seldom took the form of a general aversion to the logical side of the ground-plan. It was often said that such a scheme has after all interest only for the logician, for whom science as such is an object of study, and who must thus indeed classify the sciences and determine their logical relation. The real scientist, it was said, does not care for such methodological operations, and should be suspicious from the first of such philosophical high-handedness. The scientist cannot forget how often in the history of civilization science was the loser when it trusted its problems to the metaphysical thinker who substituted his lofty speculations for the hard work of the investigator. The true scholar will thus not only object to generalizing "commonplaces" as against solid information, but he will object as well to logical demarcation lines and systematization as against the practical scientific work which does not want to be hampered by such philosophical subtleties. Yet all these fears and suspicions were still more mistaken.
Nothing was further from our intentions than a substitution of metaphysics for concrete science. It was not by chance that we took such pains to find the best specialists for every section. No one was invited to enter into logical discussions and to consider the relations of science merely from a dialectic point of view. The topic was everywhere the whole living manifoldness of actual relations, and the logician had nothing else to do than to prepare the programme. The outlines of the programme demanded, of course, a certain logical scheme. If hundreds of sciences are to take part, they have to be grouped somehow, if a merely alphabetical order is not adopted; and even if we were to proceed alphabetically, we should have to decide beforehand what part of knowledge is to be recognized as a special science. But the logical order of the ground-plan refers, of course, merely to the simple relation of coördination, subordination, and superordination, and the logician is satisfied with such a classification. But the endless variety of internal relations is no longer to be dealt with from the point of view of mere logic. We may work out the ground-plan in such a way that we understand that logically zoölogy is coördinated to botany and subordinated to mechanics and superordinated to ichthyology; but this minimum of determination gives, of course, not even a hint of that world of relations which exists from the standpoint of the biologist between the science of zoölogy and the science of botany, or between the biological and the mechanical studies. To discuss these relations of real scientific life is the work of the biologist and not at all of the logician.